What Shall We Do With Our Hands?
Write On by Peter S. Ferrara "What Shall We Do With Our Hands?"
I was thinking recently about the human hand. I had just finished playing my guitar and had turned to C-SPAN on television to watch a politician make a speech to a large audience. Off to the politician's side, an interpreter for the deaf and hearing impaired was signing with their hands what the politician was saying. Using my TV remote, I adjusted the volume. After the speech I helped my wife prepare dinner. We ate and then, when my fingers told me the water was hot, I washed the dishes and Phyllis dried them. Later, I used the computer to do some writing and answer emails. Before going to bed I flossed my teeth and then brushed them.
I got undressed, changed into my pajamas, hit the sack, and pulled up the covers to keep warm. My hands did all of this and more and I never gave it a thought.
The human hand is one of the great marvels of Mother Nature's bio-engineering. It is capable of the most delicate work, such as sewing together veins and arteries during surgery. Anyone who has ever threaded a needle knows how precise hand movement can be. Yet the same hands can grab a shovel and remove snow from a driveway or drive a nail into a plank.
In a recent feat of medical innovation, doctors have successfully transplanted a hand from a dead person onto a living one. A physician can feel your neck and know if you have swollen glands. A karate expert can break bricks with their bare hands. Athletes can swing a baseball bat, catch a football pass, slam dunk a basketball, deliver a left jab, hit a delicate golf shot, grasp a pole for vaulting, hurl a javelin, cast for fish, or do a thousand other complex maneuvers requiring hand strength, skill, dexterity and hand-eye coordination.
Humans use expressions everyday which include the hand. All hands on deck! Give that person a big hand! Please hand me that glass. Hands up-- this is a stick-up! Play the hand you're dealt. The poor fellow was living hand to mouth. The big hand was on the twelve and the little hand was on the six. Some of my clothes were hand-me-down's. The hand is quicker than the eye. See if that device came with a hand book. I'm an old cow hand. You get the idea.
As another factory closes here in our little corner of Appalachia, I wonder what the less well-educated folks who depend on their hands for their livelihoods are going to do. Will they need a hand-out? How can they rely on an employer who is looking for hands overseas which will do the same job for next to no pay? The so-called global economy is really an economic flight to the bottom where the cheapest labor, including slaves, gets the jobs that union workers used to do here. United Airlines cancels its retirees' pensions, and General Motors and many other corporate giants are trying to do the same. The once-growing American middle class is now shrinking rapidly, a direct result of policies like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement). These disasters have crippled our domestic manufacturing base and continue to outsource one category of job after another. We can't get China and Japan to play fair because they own so much of our enormous national debt-- now estimated at $27,000 per American-- that our hands are tied. Yet our leaders have failed to veto a single spending bill even as taxes for the rich have been reduced during a time of war-- something that never happened before in our history. It's enough to make you throw up your hands in despair.
A walk through Wal-Mart reveals just how few things are made in America anymore. The same is true for the food we eat. While huge agribusinesses like ADM run ads praising the small American family farmer, the truth is that the small family farmers are precisely the folks who are being shut out of the global economy. Take a look at where the fruits and vegetables you eat are coming from. It is more likely to be Mexico, Chile, and South Africa than California, Florida, or Washington state. I had a dream the other night where I couldn't find anything in a giant retail store that was made in the USA. I asked the store manager about this and he told me the only domestic product they carried was bags of topsoil. I woke up worried.
When we get to a place where we no longer make things or grow things and have to rely on other nations to supply what we use and eat, this country is in big trouble. The economy which our leaders keep telling us is doing so well isn't on a roll where you and I live. The folks who have for centuries relied on their hands to put food on the table and pay the bills are the losers in this new world of international big business. If NAFTA and CAFTA are so hot and are lifting the economic status of our neighbors to the south, why are nearly fifteen million of them in this country illegally?
At the rate at which our manufacturing base continues to shrink, there soon will be almost no jobs at all which the "unskilled" American worker can do. When that time comes, the only thing they will be able to do with their hands is put them together and pray. May the next year bring with it more wisdom and sanity than we have seen from our leaders in the recent past.
