They want us to fight over borders while they steal our time. I stood on rebar in 108-degree heat so some developer can write “sustainable growth” in a report—where’s my sustainability? Both parties push visas that bind us to bosses who treat us like scaffolding, not men. My son says the news calls us “undocumented labor,” like we’re some line item in a spreadsheet. I pour concrete. I pay taxes. I show up. Call me what I am: a man with a hard hat and a paycheck, not a policy wedge.
“I stand on rebar in 108-degree heat so some developer can write ‘sustainable growth’ in a report—where’s my sustainability?”
You think they don’t know your sweat’s the engine? They count on it. I drive past those towers in Long Island City every night—glass boxes sold to Germans and Emiratis while the guy who mixed the concrete can’t afford the subway fare home. “Sustainable growth” means your back breaks now so their grandkids don’t have to. Always did.
I stood on rebar in 108-degree heat so some developer can write “sustainable growth” in a report—where’s my sustainability?
You think you’re the only one being bled dry? I held a dying woman’s hand last night because the ambulance was stuck in traffic for two hours—third delay this week on that route. Your rebar is hell, but don’t pretend the rest of us aren’t building on quicksand too. They don’t call you a line item because you’re invisible—they call you that because they need you broken so they can sell the pieces.
"I pour concrete. I pay taxes. I show up."
You pour concrete—good. But here in Saigon, we pour broth before dawn, same way my grandmother did, and still they want to charge us “urban renewal fees” to keep our plastic stools on the sidewalk. You’re not a policy wedge, no, but neither are you just a paycheck—you’re memory, muscle, and right now that rebar you stand on is bending under the weight of the same game: they sell the land, then sell the dream, then sell you out. I know the face of a man who’s been erased from the blueprint—he looks like my father, like me, like every cook who’s ever held a country together with soup and silence.
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