Dying for a Living

It pains me to see the bomb-suited and helmetted on a beautifully warm spring day like this. Construction workers have a hard time of it dressed in all that gear driving their little tonka trucks. I say this as I cycle past the idyllic little village of Brookfield where they are finally tearing down a dilapidated old garage. I see fat men in orange jump suits, fat men in helmets, fat men in tonka trucks. Fat men, moreover, whose almost blue skin suggests they have been raised in a dungeon and have never actually seen the light of day except through the filter of the bombsuit, the helmet, and the truck windscreen. I think to myself if that's what their bodies look like God help their minds. As I cycle onwards into the fresh bucolic countryside, I am aware that I am working too, pumping these pedals, propelling forwards under my own steam. Yet, my work and their work could not be more different. On the one hand you have the self-renewing self-cleansing power of the natural and aboriginal - the locomotive kinetic body - whilst on the other you have the self-depleting power of the outsourced body relying on power tools (that defile the environment) and a spurious 'technology' that weakens the body and renders it progressively unclean. So, whilst both activities may be seen as work, only one of them really is. Work, that is, as a natural self-cleansing activity that edifies and grows, and demands your attention, your muscles, and your presence. In the natural indigenous locomotive realm, it is better to work naturally and aboriginally for nothing than to toil at a task that depletes you, for millions.