It’s been a decade since 9/11, with its terrible rumblings shaking the foundations of our free and open society. That is reason enough to pause, but there is another anniversary that is coming up as well. This is the third anniversary of the meltdown on Wall Street that has defined our economy ever since. As the kids go back to school and the northern hemisphere starts to tilt toward the chill of fall, this is a reflective time. Knowing how we got where we are may not be a great predictor of where we will be in the future, but the straight line between then and now is all we have as a guide
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Defined by Work
Today is Labor Day in the USofA and Canada. You may be off at the State Fair or taking one last long summer day up at the cabin on the lake. Few people will read this in the middle of the last day of summer routine.
But that’s fine. This might be better on the Tuesday after Labor Day.
Today we celebrate the workers of this continent and celebrate work itself. We do this largely by loafing, by taking a day off to not work. It’s not that everyone needs a break. The idea is that we should all spend a day contemplating how much we are defined by what we do and how important the efforts are innovations of millions of people are to each other’s lives.
Labor Creates All Weath
Labor Day is a celebration of American work. It sometimes seems like an anachronism, a holdover from a day long gone when people worked in factories and churned out widgets with mechanical precision. That image often comes to people in dirty sepia tones like a faded old photograph of grandpa at his bench. Yet those days were more than grime and hard work, they were times when the US was at the height of its power around the world. No matter how you want to look at what we celebrate on Labor Day, scorn or longing, hard work went strong arm and arm with the power of this nation.
The accelerated decline of manufacturing in the last decade shows how our current unemployment problem has a lot to do with the simple fact that we stopped making stuff. It’s not a big leap to see that our power and prestige has gone away with those jobs.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 