Okay, now that We-moved-it-from-May-To-September-hoping-you-wouldn't-spend-all-summer-shoving-wooden-shoes-in-the-gears* Day is over (and the Wobblies have, once again, not succeeded in inciting a general strike -- it's like they don't even care anymore), it's right back into the eternal battle with sloth and entropy!
The older I get, the better sloth looks, but it doesn't pay well and the benefits are, face it, lousy.
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* Most of the world celebrates labor on 1 May, and events in the U.S. are at least part of the reason why: the 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago, a terrible, bloody mess that began over workers demand for an eight-hour day. Somehow, commemorating a labor rally that ended when a bomb was thrown at police followed by police firing into the crowd was not a notion Congress could get behind. All the more so when socialists, communists and that era's anarchists adopted May Day as their own -- so we got the first of September. It's a better day for picnics anyway.
As a resident of Florida, I vote to move it back to May. After all, Labor Day is the only holiday (to the best of my knowledge) that's given its name to a hurricane. Besides, even without hurricanes, September is part of the rainy season. (We have two seasons here. The other one is tourist season.)
ReplyDeleteThere have been at least three tornado outbreaks that came to be known as the Palm Sunday Tornado outbreak; the worst was in 1965.
ReplyDeleteLabor Day has never been on 1 May in the United States.
Shoving wooden shoes in the gears? What? Sounds like Dutch anarchists sabotaging windmills. Could it be?
ReplyDelete"Sabot" is French for wooden shoes. The plausible-but-false origin of the word "sabotage" was that it came from shoving a wooden shoe into the works as a worker's protest. The actual origin? Stomping off to a strike or labor rally in your noisy wooden shoes! Yeah, that'll teach 'em not to install those punchcard looms....
ReplyDelete