OPINION:
In 1953, former plumber Martin P. Durkin was appointed labor secretary to President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Cabinet. The Cabinet was known thereafter as “Nine Millionaires and a Plumber.”
We unfairly stereotype plumbers, assigning them class and academic boundaries. What are we to think, then, regarding Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin?
I met Mr. Mullin weeks after he was elected in late 2012 at a town hall meeting in a farming community in eastern Oklahoma. His successful plumbing company served his community’s water and sanitation needs. Mr. Mullin had earned its confidence and respect.
As the son of a Baltimore plumber, I was able to relate.
We rightly recognize the medical community for its contributions to public health and the common good. We benefit greatly from doctors, research and health care systems.
Yet adequate sanitation, along with good hygiene and safe water, is fundamental to health as well. Clean water and sanitation act as passive protection against disease, reducing the spread of pathogens that cause illnesses such as diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, polio and hepatitis A.
This, in turn, reduces the burden on health care systems.
Plumbers make safe drinking water possible and manage waste in millions of homes, schools and offices. One could argue that the plumber’s contribution to community health rivals that of health care providers. The plumber contributes to the common good.
Sen. James Lankford shared a story during Mr. Mullin’s confirmation hearing: As a freshman member of Congress in 2013, Mr. Mullin visited a Federal Emergency Management Agency site at Briarwood Elementary School in Oklahoma after a devastating tornado.
Mr. Mullin was nowhere to be seen — until he was found digging through debris, searching for the source of water gushing from a broken pipe. As Mr. Lankford said in recounting the anecdote: “His plumber instinct said, ‘I’ve got to go find that and figure out how to solve that.’”
Leading 260,000 men and women at the Department of Homeland Security will demand a heart for the common good. Durkin served less than eight months in Eisenhower’s Cabinet. I pray and expect that Mr. Mullin will serve longer and call upon his plumber’s humility and concern for fellow human beings to do so.
CHARLES M. GARRIOTT
Washington
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