By Jason Diamond
Today I went to go buy a coffee around one in the afternoon, and I realized that both myself and the person I was buying my caffeine fix from had been working on Labor Day. In fact, the voice of the DJ on Power 96 booming out of the tricked-out Honda, the guy at the bodega, the bartender at Commonwealth, the hot dog seller, and God–who I am told is American–have all been all working.
I wouldn’t exactly call it rebelling, me typing away on my laptop, drinking wine from the night before, and enjoying pretty much every moment of it, but I guess the fact that I am getting some sort of work done does go against this annual capitalist Sabbath. I guess I should be relaxing by buying products made in the USA, and grilling up some shit, but I’m not. And now I worry that the specter of one of my dead Trotskyite relatives from the old country is gonna haunt me, or possibly celebrate up in heaven by doing a ghostly Cossack dance because they believe their living ancestor (me) to be saying “fuck you capitalist swine”, by laboring on that strange, electronic typing machine of his.
Whatever the case, I began to think about labor, my own middle-class background, and the reality that, compared to the folks who this holiday was instituted for back in the late 1800′s, I hardly even know what work is, and what a dick I was for sitting here even comparing myself to people who used to (and in many unfortunate cases still do) work 13 hours a day for bupkus.
Sitting here in my room, overlooking kids in a swimming pool, I began to get reflective. I remember going out and buying a copy of Rose Cohen’s book Out of The Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, and being moved by Ms. Cohen’s reflections on leaving the shtetl of Tsarist Russia, to a New York whose working class was comprised a great deal of Ms. Cohen and her fellow Eastern European immigrants working in inhuman conditions. I picked out my copy and started rummaging through it. I thumbed to the part where the heroine of the book talks of her experience finding a copy of David Copperfield, and the joy it brought her. It made me think back to reading about Dostoevsky’s joy in reading the same book while a prisoner in a Siberian work camp, something that I could only believe was a few notches below the harsh conditions some of the people like Cohen and her associates had to deal with.
After putting the book down, I thought that, while this break from the normal routine is a nice idea in theory, it is somewhat of a stake in the body of summer fun. I’m guessing, though, that all those who worked for these things that seem so simple and routine to us would have felt differently. Earlier in the day I read “Happy Labor Day: An Oxymoron,” from The Rumpus. Will Durtz sort of helped cement my idea that the day is indeed a sort of mindfuck by being the holiday that is most associated with the dying days of the summer Equinox. But it was the last paragraph of Mr. Durtz’s piece that struck me most, when he says: “Labor Day. A calendaric conundrum. A day we celebrate what it is we do for a living by taking the day off from work. Paying tribute not to fancy movie stars or stodgy founding fathers or rich and bloated athletes, but us. The real American heroes. You and me.” That sounds right, and maybe working on this day that is supposedly given to us as some sort of gift from our loving Government is just an excuse to wear white one last time; to get ourselves ready for the NFL season; or to get drunk on a Sunday evening with no regrets and no responsibilities come Monday morning, but somehow, I think this holiday speaks a great deal about us as Americans. How we define ourselves by our work, and can hardly allot ourselves the time to back away from the shovel, the lever, the production line or in my case, the laptop might be what makes this country what it is (take that however you want it), but in many cases, it is what makes us forget what is really important.