May Day.

An international workers' holiday? I slept in this morning, thus ensuring myself no more than an eight-hour work day. It's hard to get up with a warm body next to you that also doesn't want to (and doesn't have to) get up.

May day is a commemoration of the the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, which led to the eight hour work day. Fine. Sounds good. All I remember from childhood is making flower baskets out of construction paper. I didn't really like construction paper and didn't really understand why this was considered a holiday. In fact, I would say that May Day played a major part in confusing me as a child about what holidays are supposed to mean. A time to gather. To break from routine. To reflect, etc. All it was was making some bullshit crafts project at school and then go home and watch cartoons, just like any other day. That's the best we could do as a society in coping with and learning from history. And it only gets worse as we get older.

I feel like being in the city, in a progressive neighborhood, we lose sight of what it's like out there. Out in the suburbs where all the little kids have is TV and their parents are afraid to pass on information about the world. And you better believe the teachers are afraid. The teachers afraid of offending the parents, the parents afraid of offending the other parents. Afraid their kids will turn out like the bad kids on TV. So the kids end up being afraid of everything.

The TV that unifies us. In 1886, there were a lot of folks in this country who weren't getting along very well and they probably felt pretty alienated from the people with money. Class division and all that. This unified them. Their common goal was a better life, whatever that meant. 130 years later, we've still got the division of wealth, but we're all closer socially. We see the same media at the same time, in real time. Consume the same goods. We're unified by wars and iPods. In effect, this gives the people at the bottom less power. They're made to feel like it's wrong to complain. They've gotta fit in, right? They feel ashamed at their mistakes, ashamed at their status.

I love what the immigrants are doing. They're making their voice heard in the tradition of American Labor. They understand better than anyone that this isn't about American anymore. It's too late for that. So much of what we do affects the whole world, national governments aren't enough. How can US government policy, protecting our own narrow self-interests, result in a just outcome for people elsewhere? (let alone at home) When it comes down to it, politicians in Washington will always place profits before people.