Labor Day and Dorothy Day

As I sit and ponder Labor Day, lots of things come to mind. As always, and especially in this time of a pandemic, I think of those many, many folks who will work this weekend, as they do every holiday and holiday weekend. Usually they're the people who keep us safe to some degree - nurses and other healthcare workers, firefighters, police. But there are others - grocery workers, food service workers, transit workers, people who help make sure the rest of us can enjoy the holiday, usually at low pay. Then there are the people who support and protect specific populations in places that always operate, 24 hours, 7 days a week. Employees in nursing homes and people who support people with disabilities in residential homes in communities all over the country.

These are the people who this holiday was meant to celebrate. Yet we tend to forget them as we make our plans for cookouts, times at the beach or the lake or camping in the woods. We also tend to forget their battles for fair wages and halfway decent working conditions. Battles that began over a hundred years ago. Battles where people were jailed and sometimes killed fighting for some level of fairness.

I also think about Dorothy Day, a woman I knew as a young man. Dorothy, like so many others, experienced the struggles of working men and women in the Depression. She saw young men, usually poor men, being sent to wars in Europe and Southeast Asia. She fought battles in the streets and told the stories of the poor with paper and pen. She traveled the country and spoke out about trying to find better ways of dealing with problems and each other. She understood the basics. The need for community, food and shelter, companionship and support. A House of Hospitality could be as simple as a guest room or as complex as an apartment building for people who needed it.

I was young (20) and she considered herself old (65) when I knew Dorothy. I wish I knew then what I know now. I would have spent different time with her, learning more from her or at least trying. Sadly, many of the battles of today are the same as yesterday. There are also new challenges. Things like technology, an even smaller wealth class, the speed of information and misinformation, 24 hour news cycles, a rise in hate speech and actions. Either the pendulum has swung or the underbelly of who we really are has been exposed. Somehow the basics become more appealing, at least to me, in times like these.

So what are the basics today on this Labor Day weekend? The same as they've been for ages - community, justice, freedom, working for peace, supporting people, relationships. This quote from Dorothy Day helps bring me back to all of those things:

“What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as ourselves.”