Sixteen Tons — Tennessee Ernie Ford
Some days, I’m not sure the world has moved on much in the last couple of hundred years.
Sure, we have toys and gadgets now we didn’t have back then. Motor vehicles, computers in our pockets and indoor plumbing would seem like unimaginable luxuries to our compatriots of 200 years ago. But scratch the surface and the world doesn’t look that different under its modern, glossier, exterior.
Take just one of the more famous lines from “Sixteen Tons”…
Another day older and deeper in debt
Sure life today is great if you’re a billionaire who can fund their own trips to space.
But for a single mother in a minimum wage job…a steelworker in a one-company town whose expertise has been outsourced to the other side of the world…even teachers who help raise the next generation of citizens and healthcare workers who look after a generation of citizens whose time on earth has moved into the final chapter…
For those folks, and many others, even working three jobs and doing everything they know how keeps them on the breadline. They have no stake in the present and little hope for the future.
Coal miners in Kentucky 200 years ago knew what that felt like too. The exhaustion of the soul-sapping, body-straining daily grind, with so little to show for…
