Friday, September 21, 2012

Hidden America?

A comment I posted on Hidden America?:

I won't repost this in its entirely there, but tapping into the theme of this blog, and noting my surprise on how the NPR interview focused on jobs that are very common and open here, but which tend to catch, apparently, a lot of  (urban) people off-guard, this once again taps into the topic of evolving trends in the time frame this blog focuses on.

All the jobs referenced in the NPR interview, which the author regarded as "hidden", were either rural occupations or manual ones, to some degree.  To anyone living here, in Wyoming, they'd all be quite familiar and far from hidden. But perhaps it is the case that to the author and interviewer they were.  They certainly seemed sincere.

If so, another interesting element of it, in addition to what I noted about it in the original post, is that it shows a real evolution in employment over the past century, or even the past half century.  Being a farm worker, or working with animals, like a cow hand, would hardly have been regarded as novel in the mid 20th Century, let alone shocking.  Likewise, having men engaged in heavy industry or industrial labor wouldn't be surprising either, as it apparently is to some.  It obviously isn't as unusual now as people might suppose, but at the same time, employment has moved into the cities and offices to such an extent, apparently many people no longer recognize that.

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