I work in an office where we aren’t allowed to wear jeans.

The norm is Dockers or dress pants, even though there is rarely a visitor to our engineering area, and I’ve destroyed countless pairs of pants going out onto the shop floor wearing them.

I wear jeans. I’ve worn jeans since the diapers came off. I wore them because they were tough and lasted a long time, and I outgrew them before they wore out.

Oh, sure, at school we wore uniforms, at mass we wore the best we had. It was the 60’s, and our small town culture was still stuck in the 40’s. Men wore hats, women dresses, always.

Still, I wore jeans. I wore jeans to work, i wore jeans to play, I wore jeans to school whenever we had a uniform free day (Once a year!!) All through seminary I had to wear a suit, and tie, every day, all year, for six years. I RAN home to put on jeans. Oh, it wasn’t allways that they were more comfortable- shit, Gramma made jeans for me until I was ten or twelve, and the denim she used would have been at home as the cord in radial tires. I often chafed so much that I had to grease myself.

Then, denim became the uniform of the hippie, and frankly, that sucked. The moment people started associating hippies with denim, I was pissed.

Men in denim built America. People sitting in offices may have financed everything, planned everything, whatever, but when the rubber met the road, there was a guy there wearing jeans tightening the lugnuts.

Denim is the uniform of the common man. Denim is the uniform of the common American. I do not completely trust anyone who doesn’t prefer denim over any other clothing. When I began my machinist’s apprenticeship, 25 years ago, I wore denim shirts and denim pants, each day began with them clean and each day ended with them filthy. The shower at the end of the day cleaned the stiffness out of my muscles and the job out of my head, I went home as clean and innocent as a newborn. The only connection from home to work was the jeans I wore; each day, I’d get out of the shower and put on clean jeans which I’d wear to work in on the following day.

Now I sit in an office and do engineering and cad all day. My midsection has grown heavy and I get winded easily. I have begun to long for the days I’d work hard enough to get sore and I could eat like two men, and never gain a pound. I don’t know what the answers are for me, but I do know this: the factory worker, the ironworker, the common laborer, they are America, more than anyone else, and without them America collapses. Empty out a building full of executives, not much really changes. In many cases, the executives secretaries are already doing most of the work. Empy a factory and see what happens. Chase all the guys off a construction site and see what happens.

We need to et back to a nation of denim clad non hippies. We need to go back to work. The Indigo Girls have a great song, which brings all this to mind:

“Gonna get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail;
Gonna learn how to use my hands.
Not just my head-I’ll think myself into jail
Now I know a refuge never grows
From a chin in a hand and a thoughtful pose
Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose”

Too much thinking. Not enough doing. Do something, willya?