For the past two decades, Brits and other Western Europeans have mocked the big dumb Polish Plumber who migrated to the more prosperous countries in Europe once Poland joined the EU. While there was some resentment about the Poles taking jobs by working cheaper, they were jobs most Westerners would rather not have because no one wants to work with toilets and underground pipes. Those putting plumbers down pursued college degrees.
In parts of the the US, our blue collar workers more and more are speaking Spanish or heavily Spanish accented English. Besides having a work ethic, they are much more religious than our tampon selling girly-men and global warming zealot communist-intellectuals.
I can only hope we don’t fall into a fifty or more year period of darkness like Eastern Europe and we start reversing the slide with the 2024 election.
"I doubt Przadak returned because he seems to realize how much nouveaux communists need capitalists to keep their water flowing and their toilets flushing."
That right there is the most telling statement of this generation. What will it take for Europeans (and Americans) to learn that Marxism is not a paradise? That liberty -- real liberty, not the liberté promised by Marxists world-wide -- is the fount of wealth? That Communism kills? That its failure is not because "it hasn't been tried properly", but because it. does. not. work. Communism, and it's more rarified form -- Marxism -- is a death machine, not a wealth machine.
France's month-long August vacation and two-hour lunches vie with California's talk of reparations as stupid, wasteful luxuries that the respective governments cannot afford. And Poland is showing us how we should be living.
Mr. Suber, I hope your point in penning such an article was to point out the vast differences between The United States and Poland. If someone in Poland can learn a trade AND a serious college degree, the sky is the limit as it was here in The United States not 40 years ago. Now you have college students HERE earning two of the most useless degrees of all time, journalism and gender studies with NO other real life experience,, except for video games. Guess which country and its workers are going to succeed in the real world now !?
May 15, 2023·edited May 15, 2023Liked by Don Surber
Ah... Skills other than typing... Praying to my retired neighbor who took a single mother's kid into his garage and opened a whole other world while mom was at work(nurse) and couldn't afford a babysitter.
I have repeated the practice to local kids looking for help. God bless you Irv Meyer.
History shows Capitalism will beat communism every time.
My question for current day is HOW do 'we' (non-leftists / non-insane people) ever compete with the MSM lies that the stupid leftists believe because they're heard it so many times they assume it MUST be true??
Even my dr - who I have gone to for 30 years and who I really like because (unlike most leftists he has a sense of humor) but I have made no secret to him of my support for Trump and so he asked me after the appointment was done if I still supported Trump. (I told him I do)
And I asked him if he thinks Biden has made anything better than it was 4 years ago and he THINKS THINGS ARE BETTER! How does one overcome that!??!! 🤷♀️ 😱
May 15, 2023·edited May 15, 2023Liked by Don Surber
My daughter lives in a building on the Upper West Side of NYC that is run entirely by Poles. I love them all. They are hardworking and seemingly well-intentioned and honest. I get a good vibe from them. I have been bringing rhubarb from my country home into the city to give to one of the Polish receptionists. She loves it. She introduced us to our fabulous house cleaner. Just recently, I was chatting with her after I dropped off a few things for my daughter. She has been observing my daughter go in and out of the building for years. I said to her, “We have to get Susie married- she needs to find a nice guy”. And the Polish receptionist look at me a bit slyly and said she didn’t care for the guy she was recently dating but has since dropped. She confirmed my own suspicions about this dude. She’s got a good nose for integrity in addition to being a good worker. We should welcome truly hardworking and honest people like the Poles into the USA.
When you mention work ethic, you hit the nail on the head. Public schools push too many students into colleges and universities to learn some useless degree because it is easy or they aren't capable of mastering a meaningful one. Our culture has been programmed to believe we don't have to work since we're entitled to everything.
Henry VIII’s palace Hampton Court had 1500 rooms. None of those rooms was a bathroom. There were plenty of servants to bring water and empty the chamber pots so Henry and his friends lived well without plumbing . London’s Great Stink of 1858 is a distant memory. Americans live in a manner that would astonish our ancestors. I don’t have servants to bring my water or empty my chamber pot, but because of plumbers I live better than a king in the 16th century and my risk of cholera is very, very low. Tomorrow we may compare Royal musicians with the music available ion my iPad
It's not so much about ideologies, it's more about cats vs mice.
Poland has been invaded by Germany and Russia and France dozens of times, often dissolved as a nation. Its people had to learn how to survive under occupying forces.
Empires forget how to survive because there are always colonies, and migrants from the colonies, to do the mining and farming and plumbing for us.
May 15, 2023·edited May 15, 2023Liked by Don Surber
Either option is correct - kudos to the feline Surber! I opted for the first, because the Britons may have stopped learning trades, but the Poles had to recognize that and sieze the opportunity, which they did!
"...but brains as well as brawn made it so because the story also said, 'The country has become a hotbed for future-facing industries such as battery manufacturing and tech.'"
As long as the nation's society keeps in check the elites who would look down their noses, and regard the plumbers and other tradesmen as ones to be tolerated, Poland and its economy ought to continue to hum, and withstand the vicissitudes of globalist financiers' designs.
"Still, the work ethic of the Poles is to be admired."
Indeed - especially when paired with persistence and peseverance, it ought to be the envy of every up-and-coming nation that hasn't already fallen victim to the World Bank, and the WEF.
"...as the Telegraph applied the chain-letter argument to international politics."
Good column, Don, and totally true. If I go back to Europe, Poland is at the top of my list displacing perennial favorite France.
The trades are simply not valued enough, but without them society stops functioning. A sociology degree and a call centre job will not fix the toilet, rewire your house, or get you a new roof. Not all kids are cut out for college. Let's encourage the trades and make them sought after. That starts at home and at school. For a brief time, my son wanted to be an electrician and I encouraged him. (He enrolled and found out that he had no aptitude for it and chose another path.) The guidance counsellors seem to still want all of the kids to go to uni, which isn't producing any skills. A journalist friend of mine has two sons who are electricians. These kids are very well off.
It proves out time and time again, yet the so-called elites never seem to learn. Poland pursued a capitalist economy while western Europe pursued socialism/Marxism/communism. Poland thrived..
The short version… take up a trade. If you are not STEM interested, ditch the Uni model and hype and plan to work and then work the plan!
No student loan and therefore no soul sucking student debt!
No classes with activists who come disguised as co-eds (or whatever)
High Job Satisfaction
Probs a Trad Wife and Family
Win, Win , Win…
And Win!
Did I miss anything?
In parts of the the US, our blue collar workers more and more are speaking Spanish or heavily Spanish accented English. Besides having a work ethic, they are much more religious than our tampon selling girly-men and global warming zealot communist-intellectuals.
I can only hope we don’t fall into a fifty or more year period of darkness like Eastern Europe and we start reversing the slide with the 2024 election.
"I doubt Przadak returned because he seems to realize how much nouveaux communists need capitalists to keep their water flowing and their toilets flushing."
That right there is the most telling statement of this generation. What will it take for Europeans (and Americans) to learn that Marxism is not a paradise? That liberty -- real liberty, not the liberté promised by Marxists world-wide -- is the fount of wealth? That Communism kills? That its failure is not because "it hasn't been tried properly", but because it. does. not. work. Communism, and it's more rarified form -- Marxism -- is a death machine, not a wealth machine.
France's month-long August vacation and two-hour lunches vie with California's talk of reparations as stupid, wasteful luxuries that the respective governments cannot afford. And Poland is showing us how we should be living.
Mr. Suber, I hope your point in penning such an article was to point out the vast differences between The United States and Poland. If someone in Poland can learn a trade AND a serious college degree, the sky is the limit as it was here in The United States not 40 years ago. Now you have college students HERE earning two of the most useless degrees of all time, journalism and gender studies with NO other real life experience,, except for video games. Guess which country and its workers are going to succeed in the real world now !?
Ah... Skills other than typing... Praying to my retired neighbor who took a single mother's kid into his garage and opened a whole other world while mom was at work(nurse) and couldn't afford a babysitter.
I have repeated the practice to local kids looking for help. God bless you Irv Meyer.
History shows Capitalism will beat communism every time.
My question for current day is HOW do 'we' (non-leftists / non-insane people) ever compete with the MSM lies that the stupid leftists believe because they're heard it so many times they assume it MUST be true??
Even my dr - who I have gone to for 30 years and who I really like because (unlike most leftists he has a sense of humor) but I have made no secret to him of my support for Trump and so he asked me after the appointment was done if I still supported Trump. (I told him I do)
And I asked him if he thinks Biden has made anything better than it was 4 years ago and he THINKS THINGS ARE BETTER! How does one overcome that!??!! 🤷♀️ 😱
My daughter lives in a building on the Upper West Side of NYC that is run entirely by Poles. I love them all. They are hardworking and seemingly well-intentioned and honest. I get a good vibe from them. I have been bringing rhubarb from my country home into the city to give to one of the Polish receptionists. She loves it. She introduced us to our fabulous house cleaner. Just recently, I was chatting with her after I dropped off a few things for my daughter. She has been observing my daughter go in and out of the building for years. I said to her, “We have to get Susie married- she needs to find a nice guy”. And the Polish receptionist look at me a bit slyly and said she didn’t care for the guy she was recently dating but has since dropped. She confirmed my own suspicions about this dude. She’s got a good nose for integrity in addition to being a good worker. We should welcome truly hardworking and honest people like the Poles into the USA.
When you mention work ethic, you hit the nail on the head. Public schools push too many students into colleges and universities to learn some useless degree because it is easy or they aren't capable of mastering a meaningful one. Our culture has been programmed to believe we don't have to work since we're entitled to everything.
Henry VIII’s palace Hampton Court had 1500 rooms. None of those rooms was a bathroom. There were plenty of servants to bring water and empty the chamber pots so Henry and his friends lived well without plumbing . London’s Great Stink of 1858 is a distant memory. Americans live in a manner that would astonish our ancestors. I don’t have servants to bring my water or empty my chamber pot, but because of plumbers I live better than a king in the 16th century and my risk of cholera is very, very low. Tomorrow we may compare Royal musicians with the music available ion my iPad
It's not so much about ideologies, it's more about cats vs mice.
Poland has been invaded by Germany and Russia and France dozens of times, often dissolved as a nation. Its people had to learn how to survive under occupying forces.
Empires forget how to survive because there are always colonies, and migrants from the colonies, to do the mining and farming and plumbing for us.
Brits stopped learning the trades and so did Americans!
Either option is correct - kudos to the feline Surber! I opted for the first, because the Britons may have stopped learning trades, but the Poles had to recognize that and sieze the opportunity, which they did!
"...but brains as well as brawn made it so because the story also said, 'The country has become a hotbed for future-facing industries such as battery manufacturing and tech.'"
As long as the nation's society keeps in check the elites who would look down their noses, and regard the plumbers and other tradesmen as ones to be tolerated, Poland and its economy ought to continue to hum, and withstand the vicissitudes of globalist financiers' designs.
"Still, the work ethic of the Poles is to be admired."
Indeed - especially when paired with persistence and peseverance, it ought to be the envy of every up-and-coming nation that hasn't already fallen victim to the World Bank, and the WEF.
"...as the Telegraph applied the chain-letter argument to international politics."
Perfect and brilliant.
If you make fun of the Poles you won't have gifts under the tree at Christmas. Santa is North Poleish
Good column, Don, and totally true. If I go back to Europe, Poland is at the top of my list displacing perennial favorite France.
The trades are simply not valued enough, but without them society stops functioning. A sociology degree and a call centre job will not fix the toilet, rewire your house, or get you a new roof. Not all kids are cut out for college. Let's encourage the trades and make them sought after. That starts at home and at school. For a brief time, my son wanted to be an electrician and I encouraged him. (He enrolled and found out that he had no aptitude for it and chose another path.) The guidance counsellors seem to still want all of the kids to go to uni, which isn't producing any skills. A journalist friend of mine has two sons who are electricians. These kids are very well off.
Just look at the communistic "equality" (DEI) in South Africa: it has destroyed a once economic powerhouse.
And it is the coming attraction here.
It proves out time and time again, yet the so-called elites never seem to learn. Poland pursued a capitalist economy while western Europe pursued socialism/Marxism/communism. Poland thrived..