There's no doubt that honest work was disparaged by obama by his relentless attacks on Joe the Plumber back in 2008.
A self-made man who rose through the ranks of a blue collar job working tirelessly to provide for his family, Mr. Wurzelbacher was ridiculed endlessly by obama, whose only "job" was that of a community organizer.
I think quite a bit of this is due to K-12 education being taken over almost completely by women.
Most women don’t want anything to do with getting dirty, working outdoors or breaking a sweat. Most women see the BA/MA/PhD track as the road to success, and they look down their nose at the trades because lots of what it takes to succeed in the trades is stuff that women see as being “beneath them.” They certainly look down their noses at working men - being in the company of women with degreed letters after their name (but no income) around men with a AAS or certificate (or lessons from the School of Hard Knocks) who do have tidy incomes is funny as hell to watch. You see the women realize “Hey, this guy is making good money...” and then they realize “Ooooo... but he doesn’t have a degree, so he’s not husband material... he won’t have read any of the books I’ve had to read.”
But then, to cap it off, it is even more amusing to listen to young women bitch, piss, whine and moan how they can’t find a man who can “fix stuff around the house.” Well, ladies, you got what you wanted when you turned men into drug-addled zombies in the K-12 system to get them to pay attention to endless droning about book learning: guys who don’t know a screwdriver from a chisel, and could (*&K-up an anvil without a hammer.
I think what has to happen to change this is to get a handle on the high schools and have vocational tracks.
When kids ask me for advice or a perspective on what they should study, increasingly I’m telling them to look very hard at the trades, welding, machining, diesel wrenching, etc. The money is there. More money is going to be there pretty quickly as the Boomers retire.
When kids ask “why can’t I get a better paying job with some BA degree?” I ask them: “Is there any situation where you can imagine you being called into the office at 3:00 AM on an emergency, and getting someone to pay you handsomely for going in?”
Usually, the answer is “no.” No one needs post-modernist trans-sexual, multi-cultural poetry analyzed, much less written, on an emergency basis. No one.
Then I point out: “Plumbers get calls at nights, on weekends, on holidays, even Thanksgiving and Christmas... and they charge appropriately, and people are willing to pay these plumbers, because they want that messy problem fixed RIGHT NOW.”
Every now and then, I’m rewarded with a light bulb going on...