Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

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For readers in the United States, this Monday is Labor Day. Since its establishment in 1884 by the Central Labor Union, Labor Day has been a day to honor the dignity of work for citizens all over the nation. So in this vein, I’d like to comment on what such dignity might entail and what Labor Day means to me in general.

For many people, Labor Day dictates that barbecue feasts, baseball games and family road trips rule their being on this day. For others, it’s just another reason not to go to work. To my thinking however, Labor Day ultimately is a solemn day of reflection on the reality that every job, regardless of status or title holds equal value and importance to every other; it would not be a job if it did not. This fact is clear when a person doing a given job recognizes his or her job has a particular requirement and logistical reason behind it without which the other systems, wheels and cogs would inevitably fail. This philosophical truth has not been lost among the wisest minds in history and was most eloquently and elegantly conveyed by Hindu scholar Sai Baba when he advised, “Remember the whole thing is just a play and the Lord has assigned you a part. Act your part well; there all your duty ends. He has designed the play and he enjoys it.”

Often, a person might feel his or her job superior or inferior to another based the duties of each position. A medical doctor may for example think she is superior to a street sweeper or the janitorial staff at a hospital due in part to the doctor’s higher pay and further education in her field. Yet in making such an assumption, she wrongly neglects that without the cleanly work of the “lowly” janitors, washers and nurses’ aids, the doctor’s working environment would become slovenly and dirt infested and in turn, cause more sickness, death and an overall, overwhelming lack of sterility. In this way, the collective non-existence of something as seemingly irrelevant as a cleaning staff can have disastrous consequences.

The same cycle of duty occurs in walks of life. A person’s car certainly does not come into existence without those who help make it -from the dealer who sold it to the miners who dug up the metals to construct one bumper. Nothing happens by magic. The teenager who works the drive-thru at MacDonald’s provides a meal (however unhealthy it may be) to someone who needs it at a particular moment in time.

There is an intrinsic honor in all work. Work always serves some function which satisfies a need, want or purpose in something or someone. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said so beautifully,“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” If I’ve made even one reader realize this today, then I’ve done my job! Happy Labor Day to all!

Wax laboriously!