Monday, September 3, 2012

Labor of Love

I spent the weekend at Mo-Ranch, a Presbyterian camp on the Guadalupe River near Kerrville, Texas. I watched hundreds of kids splashing in the water, playing tennis, tossing a football and promoting mayhem wherever they went. They were doing something my mother did not know too often in her childhood: Play.

She picked cotton from the time she was three until her father lost his sharecropping livelihood and the family moved to town. If she'd been an urban kid and born just twenty years before, she would have worked at any number of places -- sewing warehouses, factories, coal mines or mills. If she'd been a boy, she might have been a newsboy hawking papers along street corners.

Unions put an end to most of this outrage and gave our children a real childhood. On this Labor Day, send a prayer of thanks to all the workers, organizers and pickers who fought and died for a living wage, a 40 hour work week, and a childhood for our children. Say a prayer of thanksgiving for the unions of today who continue to protect these rights and organize for more such as adequate paid time off, meaningful family leave, and healthcare for all.  They endure being called communists, socialists, leeches and all because they fight for the working and middle class.  Enjoy the video. It features a kid going down the water slide at Mo-Ranch.

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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human one.
Teilhard deChardin