Labor Day – And Unions

It’s not e=mc², but certainly lends color to the concept of  relativity.

May we all have jobs — including jobs in retirement, like doting on the grandkids and spreading wisdom through letters to the editor — and may they be jobs doing something we love.

In that regard I always love to quote the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: ““If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

And I offer this video, wherein Arthur Woods explains the progression from JOB to CAREER to CALLING . . . and suggests that if you frame your work right . . . he gives the example of a hospital janitor instead of a street sweeper . . . it can be a calling that gives extra meaning to your life.

UNIONS

You may have seen this Upworthy post on the Ludlow Massacre.  I’m one of those who thinks union power grew too great in the 1950’s, but that the pendulum has swung back too far.  Try to imagine yourself in 1913 watching this unfold on CNN — if there had been a CNN.  Would you have been on the side of the Rockefellers?  (The Kochs?)  We’ve come a long way, with far more enlightened regulation and corporate management.  But I think the forces trying to keep the minimum wage as low as possible, and unions as weak as possible, are diminishing the middle class that is so fundamental to our economic engine — and, ironically, the wealth of the very people trying to keep our least advantaged fellow citizens from voting, organizing, and receiving higher pay.

Wednesday: Shiva Responds and More Than Three New Words in Turkish