Vox Populi:

The first time I took a turn on a jackhammer, on a sewer-repair crew, the foreman told me to strap steel toe guards onto my boots.  My boots already had toes hardened with some sort of composite, but the foreman did not want to chance it.  The other men at the worksite, on Daggett Avenue in south St. Louis, looked away, as I remember.  Those men normally ran the jackhammer and did not bother with toe guards, which had to be dug out of a rarely disturbed compartment in the crew trailer.  My response to the foreman’s order was to resist—I’ll be fine, I heard myself say.  Rather be a fool than look like one. 

What men on a sewer-repair crew bothered with has become expansive in my mind since the Covid-19 pandemic.  Some people bother with face masks and some did not, with varying degrees of intensity.  I understood the virtue of those toe guards, especially for a rookie; I valued the foreman’s virtue, as he was looking out for me.  I was not without sense; but I was ready to sacrifice virtue’s propriety for reasons fuzzy at the time.

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