Underwater Welding Can Be an Excellent Career Option

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True or false? You make the call:

It’s telling that, in today’s America, more parents would be likely to accept their five-year-old son’s declaration that he identifies as a girl than would accept their 18-year-old’s proclamation that he wants to be an underwater welder, even though the pay for that particular vocation ranges from $54,000 to well over $100,000.

I’m guessing this is false by at least a factor of 10 or 20. Maybe more. But aside from the peculiar culture war grievance-mongering, which pops up out of nowhere (in an essay about the value of vocational training), it highlights the odd propensity of verbal, well-educated types to assume that all of America shares their views. It’s something that happens among both liberals and conservatives. For all their talk of understanding their working-class brethren, an awful lot of them sure don’t seem to.

Anyway, I have no real reason to post this. For some reason it was briefly popular in my Twitter feed last night, so I eventually clicked and read it. Aside from that one sentence, it seems fairly unobjectionable. And for the record, as long as my daughter promised to wait half an hour after eating, I’d have no problem with her being an underwater welder.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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