Once in a while I offer one of my poems to ease the droning on about Philosophy that I know I do. I grew up working class. My dad was a coal miner, a plasterer, and then a steam engineer in a number of different factories around Edmonton. My mom was a nurse. They both had little room or time for pretentions or nonsense. Kids' stuff. 

I grew up already knowing as an axiom that there is no respect for people who will not work. Of course, in some circles of society, the idle welfare and the idle rich, work is seen as a chump's way of life. But I think it is worthwhile to say once on this blog that I grew up working class, and I knew almost nothing but work in a whole bunch of different fields, as I tried to build a better life for myself and my family, for about forty years.  

Anyway, one of my earlier jobs as I saved to go to university in the late '60's and early '70's was at a fiberglass insulation plant. I couldn't find a photo in the "labeled for reuse" category of a fiberglass insulation plant, but I found a lot of others that depict accurately enough what it was to have lived working class over the last 150 years or so. 

Here's my poem on a day of work in the fiberglass insulation plant. 

Insulation Education

Up in the rafters of the Fiberglas of Canada plant

I clean from every crevice, fine, pink, snowdrifted particles of

the product

Below ... figures in green coveralls and lemon hard hats

Stagger through shallow swirls of this snow

The line is in trouble

The green robots serve the line in this, their temple.

Frenetically.

Batten-waste scattered everywhere.

Always hot. Always itching, an unnatural itch like no other ever felt.

What God drives foremen's supervisors' managers' board's shareholders ... 

or ...

What am I doing here?

What are humans doing here,

under multiple blue fluorescent suns,

shuffling through the fine drifts of fine preter-dust 

... silica boiled, jetted, and spun?

Humans forbidden to touch any skin but their rashitching own.

One hour and forty seven minutes 

... will I head for beer?

Is the pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the forest?

Was beer invented for working men?