Just what is “Labor Day"

I slept in today as did probably many other Americans who got the day off today. Once again, the hard working man got to sit back, relax and unwind for an extra day, a holiday with pay (so cool) and some of us hop in boats and cruise the waterways. Cookouts, BBQ’s, ice cold beer, oh the good life of celebrating one of several holidays we get throughout the year. A great day to be an American!


Then it dawned on me. Just what is “Labor Day” and why is there even a labor day. I understand having Memorial Day, Independence Day, Christmas and so forth, but what was the deal behind this particular holiday. So I did what every other person does, I turned to wikipedia and found out.

Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September.

The first Labor Day in the United States was observed on September 5, 1882 in New York City, by the Central Labor Union of New York, the nation's first integrated major trade union. It became a federal holiday in 1894, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with the labor movement as a top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike.

Wow, Labor Day sounds more like a surrender treatise war concession than a turkey day.

Look at happenings today. Instead of making my comment a global issue, a national issue of sort, I’ll comment upon an area that I can help influence. Me, myself and I still make up one person, one vote. But a few more of us then we can change city elections, county elections and so on. Billy Ray Patton and a few others can attest to that. We collectively can change things, maybe not the world, the country or the state, but by hell we can shuffle things up on a county level. Imagine, if we stood up and took notice to such thing as “helping implement a change”, then maybe Tennessee would be the greatest state. In a way, who cares about the other states so long as MY state (your state) is bountiful. Let people move here but leave their trash at the state-line.

But back to my subject, we have young men dying in two wars as we speak, we have increasingly growing amounts of poverty, our economy has yet to actually hit bottom, we know family and friends that are suffering NOW as we speak, we have government from tiny local governments right on up to the mighty Uncle Sam (not Uncle Frank this time)that is in the impossible process of trying to keep this giant herd of over 320 million ostriches (myself included) from following each other into oblivion, but even they have seen the cause is far beyond "lost" and are scampering to some safe zone for them, to hell with the rest of us. The ones that created this mess are yelling to the others that allowed them to screw everything up (US) that its every "man's hole in the sand to themselves".

Most of you know this, even realize this, but ignore it. We know times are harder than we remember. I am almost 50 so maybe it's just me. Maybe it is me who is out of touch and fail to accept the reality. Then again, my head hasn't been in a hole, nor is it ever going into a whole, well, unless it's like something involving me playing an extra in the movie "Casino" with Joe Peschi and some cornfield out in Nevada somewhere ;)

By an ostrich seeing a lion gazing at him from a distance, slowly walking toward him, by the ostrich saying oh shit!!! and sticking his head in a hole and if no hole is available, expend tremendous amounts of nervous, scared energy into pecking the sand and dig some sort of hole, and then ramming his head down in there and think happy thoughts which will somehow magically make the lion go "poof", gone... all safe and sound now.

The holes we dig will NOT protect us. Our heads we willingly shove down inside those holes will not protect us. Our closing of the eyes, or changing the thought process to the "out of sight, out of mind" will prove in the end to be a tragic lesson learned …perhaps that why the smart birds chose the "fight or flight" way of thinking, or "reacting".

But from what little I even bother to read here is like me being some sort of big bird and I am waltzing around seeing a whole bunch of butts in the air with everybody's head stuck in a hole, blabbering and thinking about who the biggest scank is in the county. But as for me, when the lions come, and they will come, my big bird butt will have long since been gone. And when the lion eventually bites YOU personally on your butt, while that head is stuck in a hole think mindless "wizard of oz" fantasies, then you will wish at that time you would have at least "listened" to the big birds that were remotely smart about it and skedaddled on down the road.