After spending my afternoon moving wheelbarrows full of concrete and pouring them into a ditch to make a retaining wall I realized several things.
- That I can only move about four wheelbarrows before dehydration sets in and I feel like I am going to pass out.
- That though it may seem like an easier job, leveling the concrete is just as exhausting.
- That my uncle is a well designed machine for wheelbarrow pushery.
- That it is an oddball day when you are a webmaster and you spend your afternoon getting paid for construction work.
- And finally, that maybe there was a reason why the North went through an industrial revolution while the South struggled to keep up.
Think about it. Modern technology makes manual labor a heck-of-a lot easier than it was during the time of the industrial revolution. Now we can pave roads and build structures with the help of motorized equipment that will do the heavy lifting so to speak. Before people had to do it by hand. People don't work so well when it is ninety-eight degrees at ninety percent humidity. Production grinds to a standstill. While the North had mild summers in which to lay railroad tracks and build factories, the South had a scorching summer thats kind of like an Energizer battery; it just keeps going and going and going. Any sane Southerner would rather sit in the shade with a glass of sweet tea than shovel concrete all day.
Of course it is not that simple. There are probably hundreds of reasons why the South didn't develop as quickly as the North. The outdated economic model of the Antebellum South in which a small aristocracy relied on forced labor for agriculture didn't make industrial development all that appealing. The money was in the soil. Raw goods like cotton and tobacco could be sold to Europe or the North for massive profits. Why bother pouring resources into the production of materials from these goods?
Well, we all know how that story played out, and I have no problem saying that the South is a wonderful place to live. Scorching heat aside, work gets done and where I live there is construction happening everywhere. Construction means that there are people coming to the area. Northerners are moving down here in droves because there are jobs; a scarcity in Upstate New York where I am from. In fact, North Carolina and New York State have had the largest trade in citizens of any two states in the union over the last couple of years. Something like 300,000 moving to NC, and 30,000 moving to New York. And I'd imagine that some of those 30,000 are New Yorkers that moved here and then back. Maybe they couldn't handle the heat.