[Guest blogger: JM]
“Diffusion” is a hip term in marketing and business these days. It refers to how and how quickly a new idea or product is accepted by the market. Or maybe the term was hip but is no longer. That I don’t know is my point. Because when it comes to most new ideas and products, I fall into (at best) the category of the early majority or (at worst) the late majority—those deliberate, skeptical, traditional sorts of consumers who lag well behind the “innovators” and “early adopters” much-beloved and sought after by marketers and cool-hunters. These innovators and early adopters are the trendsetters, the venturesome people who listened to R.E.M. while they were still on IRS; the people who were willing to use cell phones when they were still the size of a loaf of bread; the first twenty-something hipster who covered his greasy, disheveled hair with a greasy, disheveled trucker’s hat. But unless and until an idea or product makes its way into the New York Times Arts and Leisure or Style sections, I haven’t heard of it; and, of course, once that idea or product has made its way to the New York Times, it is, by definition, no longer new. And if I were then to adopt those ideas or products I breathlessly read about, I would look like that hopelessly unhip boy in middle school who showed up one day wearing a calculator wristwatch long after they ceased to be cool. “Oh yeah,” someone would taunt him, “my mom has one like that.”
And so it goes with this new trend I have heard a lot about recently called a “web log”—or “blog,” for short. Intrigued, I did a Google search—if you haven’t heard of Google, it is a “search engine” available on the “Internet”—only to discover that, like sports coats with blue jeans, I’m about fifteen years behind the times. But it turns out that my spouse has a “web log” called blogos and has had one (not surprisingly, early adopter that she is) for some time. So if I have something to “blog”—which is the verb as well as the noun form—then I can use hers, especially if, desperate for a comment on Labor Day, she invites me to say something.
So here are my thoughts on Labor Day. Since I am both resolutely irreligious and a card-carrying member of The Hate America Left (est. 2001), Labor Day is the only real holiday (except for Martin Luther King Day) that I can celebrate of my own accord and not just because some part of my family or country considers it a “tradition” and so I go along with it just in order to not cause trouble. (I’m thinking of you two, in particular, Christmas and Thanksgiving.) I happily celebrate Labor Day, though, because in addition to being a labor scholar, I grew up in a union part of the country (Northeastern Ohio), in a union family, full of union dogs and cats, union furniture, union everything. So a Labor Day seems right and just, and I give myself over to the holiday, blasting Woody Guthrie songs and searing hamburgers with a United Steel Workers logo.
The problem, however, is that unlike people from every other nation in the world, Americans have to choose between two possible Labor Days. Is Labor Day the first Monday of September? Or is it the 1st of May? The official holiday falls, of course, tomorrow, and dates back to a Knights of Labor parade in New York in the early 1880s. But the rest of the world celebrates May 1st (May Day) in order to commemorate the movement for the eight-hour work day in Chicago in 1886 and the just or unjust—it depends on whom you ask, though the consensus seems to be unjust—execution of the Chicago anarchists and labor activists who were blamed for a bomb that went off at a rally in Haymarket Square and killed eight policemen.
May Day looms large in this part of the country (for me and others, at least) because of our proximity to Chicago, but also because you cannot walk around the University of Illinois quadrangle without passing Altgeld Hall, named after John Peter Altgeld, the governor of Illinois from 1893 to 1897 who fairly ruined his political career by pardoning the remaining three Haymarket martyrs. But there are other reasons to prefer May Day to Labor Day, not least of which is that compared to May Day, Labor Day seems rather quaint. On Labor Day, workers paraded. Whereas on May Day, workers marched! They demanded!! They fought!!! They rallied!!!! Moreover, May Day is an international holiday, celebrated everywhere, unlike Labor Day, which is only celebrated in the U.S., a fact which just seems to confirm the view of Americans as in a perpetual state of provincial ignorance regarding the rest of the world. And unlike most of our other contributions to the world over the last half-decade—leave alone the last century—May Day is one of the few exports we do not have to hope the rest of the world quickly forgets about. Finally, we might prefer May Day because the right people hated it: one of the reasons we have Labor Day (that is, the first Monday of September) as our “Labor” Day is because politicos at the time—notably then-president Grover Cleveland—feared enshrining a day about which there remained so much controversy.
All that said, though, Labor Day is what we have, and most likely what we will have, so I make the best of it. So let me leave you with a poem, since that is what I do. The poem is called “Freedom,” by Martha Stevenson, a garment worker in Manhattan in the 1930s. Stevenson published the poem in the March 1, 1935 edition of Justice, the newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. As far as I have been able to tell, it is the only poem she ever published. But it is an apt poem for today’s holiday.
Freedom
So out
into the street I run,
Out from
darkness into the sun,
Like a
child at school released for a day,
Free as
the winds that blow over the sea,
Gay as a
peasant’s dancing tune,
My whole
being astir
With my
unexpected liberty.
A day for
myself to come and go
And do as
I will; bask in sunlight,
Walk the
wooded trails, think the thoughts
Welling
up in me, be alive
As I can
never be when chained
To my
machine inside four ugly walls.
And count
the little money that is there,
And a
fear grips me—
A fear
that lingers and grows.
What of
the morrow?
Will I be
free again?
Oh call
it not freedom
To be out
upon the streets
Without
bread.
And I
hope and I pray for work
On the
coming day. I pray, oh sin,
To be a
slave once more.
Foreboding
gnaws at my heart,
Consuming
my joy.
This
shadow is over my head
Like a
fog
When it
holds down the dense black smoke
And
darkens and chokes all that breathes,
It makes
the sun to shine less brightly.
And soon
I wonder—
Is this a
holiday at all,
Or would
I not rather be chained
To my
machine.
And then
my spirit rallies
To pour
down a thousand curses
Upon the
poverty that crushes
The joy I
felt at being free,
That
robbed me of my holiday
And cast
a black storm cloud
Over the
morning sunshine.
