This is not an essay about the superiority of white men. It is a defense against the ridiculous characterizations of white men and the liability they supposedly represent to progress as progressives define it. It could have been quite long, but I’m saving words and time by using a lot of pictures and severely restricting the sample population necessary for a robust defense.

I implore everyone who reads this to forward it to all friends, family, and acquaintances on both sides of the aisle. An absurd libel has been promoted in recent months of political campaigning, and it also happens to be an incredibly self-destructive libel for those perpetuating it.

Our sample population is large, but not a majority. It consists of men who tend to get lumped in with the similarly slandered vultures of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and quite suddenly the so-called “Tech Gods” of Silicon Valley. I’m talking about some of the hardest working, most creative and productive members of society, the engineers in myriad disciplines who design all the working machines in our lives, as well as the machines that build them.

Over the last half century engineers been almost exclusively white men; until very recently, others did not apply. They have college degrees, they have a variety of lifestyle benefits, careers and promotions, and they are well compensated for the most part, but the overwhelming majority of them are not rich or trying to be. They are in every sense of the term “working people” with the same characteristics politicians praise in skilled and semi-skilled blue collar jobs. But they are routinely slighted by politicians who proclaim “You did not build that!” because they wear ties and usually don’t have dirt under their fingernails.

What else are they not? They are not the power brokers who seek to decide for us what we want and who should have it. They are not the “social engineering” despots who would invade people’s everyday lives ostensibly to make them better or — if it is deemed a good for someone more deserving — make them worse for a fancied privileged minority. They are not the lecturers, sermonizers, scolds, legal crusaders, and provocateurs who build nothing but incite various kinds of destruction, cultural, physical, and human. They are not the deciders who usually levy blame for what they themselves have wrought.

What are they? They are the builders. The ones who, more than anyone else in the nation, really have built that nation, not just assembled the steel and concrete skeletons of buildings, the wooden beams, the pipe fittings, the phone lines, the home you live in with its roof and windows and toilets, and the new SUV in your driveway. That is invaluable, indispensable work, understood to be so by most. But it is the rarely acknowledged engineers who have BUILT it all in the deepest sense of that word, the skyscrapers from blueprints to floor layouts and HVAC designs, the private, affordable homes that don’t blow away in a storm, the millions of miles of highways, the bridges and dams of every size, the power plants, the hospitals and their lifesaving medical equipment, commercial airliners and container ships, the grids of wire and plumbing and air traffic control and emergency machines (not to mention the light bars on top and the fireman’s helmet), and the vast military umbrella that has overarched all these grids and protected this greatest of all nation’s people from August 1945 to right now.

Wherever you are right now, you can reach out and touch any ‘thing’ and its physical design and the manner of its construction will be the brainchild of an engineer. They went to work after the 15 years of the Great Depression and built the safest, most prosperous, and healthiest nation the world had ever seen. They didn’t get princely salaries or homes. Many lived in the new cookie cutter developments required to fill a deficit in residential housing. Communities pioneered in places like Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Huber Heights, Ohio.

They worked under business managements that knew how to make money from the honest asset of well designed, reliable, safe, and affordable products, from the smallest sewing needle to the biggest cars and trucks. Which poured into the United States like a mechanical flood.

They worked for government managements too, inventing the new technologies and methods needed to build an interconnected state highway system, an international air travel network, and astounding new bridges, dams, and power generation systems to serve the needs of diverse regions and resource requirements.

Everyone alive today can’t help but take most of this for granted. The easiest way to take a private measure of what they built for us is to consider life without it or even life without the same degree of safety and convenience. An international air traffic network could have been made operational, profitable, and well accepted if there were — in today’s population — one major air crash a day. Passenger miles flown every day are in the millions in this country. A death rate of 200 per day would be less than 75,000 per year, roughly twice what we lose in automobile accidents, except that without contemporary technologies like seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, collision-optimized chassis, and tires more than twice as sticky as 1945 levels, death by 350HP V-8 automobiles would probably be higher than 150,000 per annum.

The engineers working for both business and government weren’t satisfied with making cars more powerful and airplanes more long-legged. They developed new kinds of engineering to prevent crashes and, when they occurred, show up with their tools and brains to find out why and make sure it couldn’t happen again.

You don’t lose electrical power two, three, or five times a week, do you? Take a look at the countries of the Middle East. When the storms cause street filling floods, you don’t die by the thousands in your neighborhood, do you, because you’ve got warnings and Coast Guard helicopters. They still lose thousands in China and other countries, and hundreds sometimes even in Europe. When you do have a catastrophic accident like loss of a limb, you don’t have to become a homebody or a dependent, do you? Falling ill isn’t something you face with little on your side but hope and fatalism, is it?

You may think that the new age of advanced computer technology makes a lot of these older accomplishments obsolete. Smartphones replace old fashioned radios, televisions, telephones, and even arithmetic and basic handwriting skills. The software and its constant flow of new apps is in the capable hands of tattooed young software writers who don’t need mechanical drawing or design easels.

Here’s a very dirty secret. The hardware is mostly fine, but this whole 21st century generation of software is junk. If your car operated like a laptop computer, you’d be spending a lot of time getting your hands greasy in the garage. You don’t get a new operator’s manual for your car dropped on the driver’s seat overnight every month or two, do you, a vague list of changes without an explanation of consequences. You don’t get telegrams telling you to change your oil from 10W30 to 10W50 because a leak has been discovered in the oilpan design and can’t be fixed until the new point-release crankshaft is out of beta test. You don’t find the rules of the road changing on you suddenly, with Yield signs now to be taken as Stop signs and speed limits reduced by a third or else no more driver’s license. You don’t discover that your car radio no longer works because your smartphone blacktooth is incompatible with Blaupunkt. Or any number of other things that could cause the sudden appearance of the blue screen of death.

You don’t get a warning buzzer when you turn in a direction not indicated by your GPS, which if ignored will either proceed to stop the car on its own or make you back up two times to reset the GPS before you can turn right into your driveway, not left into the river.

Software writers, uh the software “engineers” writing your everyday code, are nothing of the sort. The ones outside the exacting engineering world of the military are illiterate doodlers in a subset of Engrish that attempts to imitate logic in “algorithms” without resting on any foundation of mathematical knowledge or basic syllogisms. They are fakers working for Barnums who believe their grandiloquent boasts. They are not making you safer any more than the business versions of their lame code are not costing big and small businesses and their customers untold billions with outdated data security measures hacked by someone smart last night. Here and there and a little or a lot everywhere they are getting some of you killed. There are no safety standards, no engineering specs for preventing loss of life, limb, health, family, and happiness in this dumb new smartworld we’re desperate to trade the old evil white men in on.

And of course it isn’t only white men who can be the builders and the solid practical brains that measure what they create and correct it before it kills again. More and more women and minorities are joining the ranks of engineers now. But are they still acquiring the craft of old? The discipline, the sense of duty, the reliability, the willingness to wait patiently before book knowledge becomes real world expertise? Are they humble enough to accept that their job is to work the task at hand to the best of their ability without getting distracted by the desire to tell others what to want, what to do with their lives, and why they better do it or else? Is it really a good idea to demonize the ones who made so many things work so well for so long?

I have my doubts about that. At the very least, we owe them the respect of withdrawing and apologizing for the libel.

I’m going to leave you with three videos. If you’ve followed me till now, you’ll know why they’re worth your while.

There are two more parts to this next one, accessible from the end screen, detailing how the engineers and contractors fixed an architectural disaster of epic proportions.

How long can we fake the future with illiterates and Barnums? Do you really want to find out?

P.S. If you’re having a hard time imagining your life without all the conveniences and labor-saving devices designed and built in the the last 50 years of the 20th century, try this: