Garbage Men & Plumbers are More Important than Doctors

If the United States had no doctors, the country would still survive. If it had no garbage men, it wouldn’t survive as the same country. So which is more important?

With no doctors whatsoever some people would live longer, since quite a few people die from prescription medication errors. Others would die sooner, from needing operations or from not getting treatment for accidents. But overall, what would happen to the death rate with no doctors? I don’t know, but I suspect it wouldn’t change all that much.

My father, for example, got five extra years because he had a quintuple bypass surgery, successful treatment for prostate cancer, and for diabetes. Yet all of those are basically nutritional deficiencies, and he spent most of his life eating at McDonalds. My mother got ten extra years, because she broke the same hip twice (the surgeon said the first break was the worst he had ever seen). She also smoked for 60 years, since she was 15, and also didn't watch her diet.

If both of them had taken better care of themselves they would not have had the problems they did. But they didn't know, because the believed what they were told by doctors and the media - which, by the way, makes TV shows about doctors but not garbage men.

Now without garbage men, what would you do with your garbage? Put it in your car and sit in line to dump it in a garbage dump? Do you really want to do that?

If you look at the statistics, you'll find that overall vaccinations had a miniscule effect on the death rate. But sanitation had a huge effect. This doesn't mean I'm against vaccinations; one of my old girlfriend's aunts died of tetanus at two. And I got the DPT when I was a kid (and that's all I ever got, except for the smallpox scar on my left bicep).

Imagine if we had no sanitation system - no treatment plants. One of my friends visited one of those Caribbean countries (can't remember which one) and told me their toilets were a toilet over a hole in the ground. Plumber Thomas Crapper, who didn't invent the flush toilet but promoted its use and improved the design, is a hero.

When I was a kid we burned garbage in a fifty-gallon steel can. Everyone did. I have no memory of what we did with the ashes. Did we burn everything? Probably not. I’m sure we still had garbage men, but I was so little I just don’t remember.

Garbage men make life so much easier. You put your garbage in your garbage can, put it out front or in back, and it disappears! Then you bring the can back inside. There are even garbage bags to keep the can clean. If you think about it, it’s actually an impressive feat.