Hidden America?

NPR recently interviewed author Jeanne Marie Laskas regarding her new book, Hidden America.  The apparent thesis of the book is to explore the hidden employments that keep the nation running, noting that the author explores such hidden jobs as coal miner and cowboy.

Hidden, really?

Perhaps its just because I'm from Wyoming, but I know coal miners and lots of cowboys, photographs of some of which appear on this blog.  I'm even a sort of cowboy myself.  I didn't know I was hiding. 

It isn't that the gist of the book doesn't have some relevance. I've often been amazed about all sorts of occupations that never would have occurred to me when I was young, and thinking about what to do for work.  There are, indeed, many such jobs that I really don't know how people even think to get into.  Court Reporter, for example, is one such occupation.  I've known many court reporters due to my work as a lawyer, but when I was a teenager, in school, that occupation wouldn't have even crossed my radar screen.  I didn't know any then, and I didn't know anybody thinking of becoming one.  Indeed, I don't know of anyone who was amongst my school associates back then who in fact became one.  I don't know why that is, but even thinking of it is something that I don't think most of us could have done, as there wasn't any real way to know about the occupation.  I suppose there are many other such occupations, many such as court reporting, that require a special education, but which we generally just don't think about.

So, to a degree, I'd have to confess there is a certain "hidden" set of occupations, in that they're hidden from us unless we become exposed to them somehow.

But the focus of this radio interview had less to do with that, it seems to me, than it did with agricultural, industrial and manual labor.  It really seemed the author was amazed to learn that not everyone works in a cubicle in a large city.

For example, there was the reference to coal miners.  They seemed amazed that there are coal miners.  Are we that far removed from reality in some parts of the country that we don't know that?  They even seemed surprised the US mines coal. And the U.S. mines a lot of coal.  Huge amounts.  To be ignorant of the existence of coal miners is to be ignorant of one of the major U.S. extractive industries and energy sources. Simply stunning.

Migrant farm workers was another.  Are people really not aware that there are migrant farm workers?  Or farm workers in general?

Which brings me to cowboys.  They seemed stunned there are cowboys with horses.  Here, I have to admit that reaction seems common.  Horse mounted cowboys remain a feature of stock raising in a major way, and not just on the range, but at the stockyard as well.  Indeed, the horse has survived repeated predictions of its demise, and outlasted numerous mechanical attempts to supplant it.  The current form of horse use we now have basically dates back to the late 1940s, when stock raising was heavily impacted by the introduction of the 4x4 vehicle, but in its pattern of use from about 1945 forward it continues on (supplanting the use that dated from around 1920 to 1945).  But, for whatever reason, it always surprises me that people are surprised that the occupation still exists.  I'm not sure how people figure steak or lamb get into the meat display at Safeway.

Perhaps, in thinking on it, what this really serves to illustrate is that the often cited divide between the rural and the urban is bigger than I imagine.  The jobs that tend to catch me off guard are jobs that are largely metropolitan in nature, in the sense that they're jobs that occur in town.  Not one of the jobs mentioned on the NPR interview surprised me in the least.  I was aware of them all.  I guess that they were "hidden" to the author and interviewer as they were city oriented.  That may mean that there's not one, but two, hidden Americans, depending upon where a person lives.