I’ll start with a confession, because I think it helps my case. I’m writing this at the kitchen table with the air conditioning set where my wife likes it and a glass of iced tea sweating onto a coaster. I have never framed a house in August, and I don’t intend to. I believe that gives me a kind of clarity the men on the roof don’t have. You can’t judge the heat fairly while you’re standing in it.
A few years back the Legislature passed a law that lets the state override a great many local ordinances, including the water-break rules some of our cities had written for construction workers. I was glad of it. Not because I have anything against water. Because I have something against a city telling a grown man when he’s thirsty.
An old man at my church picked cotton as a boy. He likes to say nobody ever told him to take a break, and he turned out fine. I’ve repeated that story many times, and I’ll admit I have never asked him about the boys who worked beside him and didn’t turn out fine. It never seemed like the point. A story about toughness is a story about the ones who were tough.
There’s a deeper principle, too. A rule that requires a break is a rule that assumes a man can’t look after himself. I’d rather assume he can. If a worker needs water, he can ask his foreman. If the foreman says not yet, that’s between two grown men and a schedule, and I don’t see why a city council needs to stand in the middle of it. I trust a foreman more than a council. A foreman has a job to finish.
People will say a man on a crew doesn’t really feel free to ask, or that he might not know he’s in trouble until he’s already in it. Maybe so. I wouldn’t know. That’s what I mean about clarity. I’m not thirsty, so I can think about it calmly.
Our pastor sometimes reads the verse about giving a cup of cold water to one of these little ones, and how that person will not lose his reward. I have always loved that verse. I take it to be about personal kindness, the kind a man chooses for himself. The cup means more when nobody requires you to hand it over, and a law that hands it over for you takes the meaning right out of it. That is part of why I’ll vote for the Republican for Senate this fall. My impression is that the other side would like to bring the water-break rules back, and I would rather the cup stay a matter of choice.
When I drive past the crew working on the new subdivision near us, I keep my eyes on the road. A man ought to be able to do hard work without somebody in a cool truck watching him do it.
I’ve always found that a kindness, and I’ve never had to get out of the truck to give it.
D. M.