Today is May Day, a re-invigoration of focus for international workers, but America moves to September to be separate from the world, to intentionally disconnect our humanity and interconnection with ideas like socialism or workers rights on a human basis. Forty-hour work-week. Eight-hour work-day. Safer working conditions. Let the workers have a one hand count of days off a year, but let those days be soaked in religion, nationalism, and stories of gods to cover up the old gods. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July, New Years Day, Veterans Day… May Day in America. Ignore. Move to September 1 instead of May 1. Dislodge.
Why does America have a weekend: strikers in packing and steel plants, rail and ship yards. Docks paid blood for social justice. Die in fires for safer working conditions. Unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, populists were jailed, threatened, deported and held shards of a crimson lens against factory orders. No founding father or boss granted, blood on the factory floor is the only trickle-down economics. Why, because human self-hatred is inculcated to make us believe in a zero sum game. If our sister or brother is paid fairly there is less for us rather than dollars sleeping in a bank account of a faceless internationally traded corporation. We cannot see international workers keep any marginal differences in the profit of how Ayn Rand's engine of the world revs. Power is in empathy, love, and our interconnection that hot sweat in the undergarments of any woman or man laboring to put the food on the shelf in a grocery store, a shingle on a roof, move a digit in a computer is of equal temperature and that heart is as infinitely deep in common membership in this universe. We do not get equal pay, nor should we, but living wages, equitable health benefit, taxes on capital as functional maximum wage laws, and working conditions matter. There are no unimportant people.
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