In honor of Labor Day, I want to share a quote from James Michaels, who was born around the same time as my aunt:
“When you are my age you don’t have to ask: Are Americans really materially better off than they were in the recent past? Those of us born in the 1920s and with vivid memories of the Depression simply know how much better things are today… If he was fortunate enough to have central heating (less than one-third of the population did in 1920), the middle-class dad had to pull himself from bed at 4:00 A.M. on cold winter mornings to unbank the furnace and shovel coal; if he overslept, the pipes froze. But he usually didn’t have to rake leaves or shovel snow. Not in the 1930s. That was done by shabby, humble men who knocked at the back door in the mornings asking for a warm meal in return for doing chores.”*
Do you think your workweek is too long? Michaels went on to remind us that in your grandparents’ day, the typical workweek was at least sixty hours. And that was for men. Women worked far more hours at home without receiving a paycheck. The leisure industry didn’t exist because no one had any leisure. For half of the country, the family toilet was in the backyard. Life expectancy was about fifty-four years.
Let me add a personal family story. More than 80 years ago, my dad’s parents packed up and headed west to California. It wasn’t The Grapes of Wrath, but it was tough. They had been sharecroppers who lost their work in East Texas, so they moved to another state to pick crops. After that, they moved to North Dakota before finally returning to their home area in the 1950s, where they built the first house they ever owned. That’s right, they built it themselves with help from their children. (It’s funny—what was surely a source of embarrassment to them is a source of pride to me.)
When I was a boy, we did not have central heat or air until I turned six. That was okay. I did not know anyone else who did, so I had no one to envy.
When I was 22 and overseas, my dad wrote me a handwritten letter and mailed it. He forgot to write the words “air mail” on the envelope. It arrived six months later, and by then he had unexpectedly passed away. It would have been nice to have had access to email or even fax, but they did not exist yet.
It sounds like a cliché, but it’s true: the phone in your pocket has more computing power than NASA had when they sent astronauts to the moon. And get this—just last month, I heard someone on TV say that AI is pushing medicine so fast, most cancers could be cured or treatable in the next decade.
And if you think you have it bad in the U.S., consider this. A podcaster recently noted that you can travel in a time machine. You can travel to virtually any country in the world and see what life used to be like before the marvelous progress we take for granted. Having traveled and lived in other countries, I readily agree. I dare say none of you would trade your present life for the lifestyle of the richest person in the world fifty years ago. You would miss out on too much and feel too uncomfortable.
Labor and hard work made all of this possible, but let me wave the red, white, and blue for a moment. Living in the United States made this possible, too. Okay, I know it is not the Fourth of July, but I am so grateful to live where I live and enjoy the freedom to create, build, and chase opportunity. What we enjoy requires many things: God’s blessings, virtue, freedom, and productive work. We relish that which we received from those who have gone before us. I say, let’s keep that going and pay it forward. We want those who come after us to bless our name, not curse it.
Happy Labor Day!
Mark
Dr. Mark Edge
The WorkEdge Company
Telephone: 903-245-7851
Email: workedgetexas@gmail.com
Website: www.workedgetexas.com
Author of Holy Chaos. To purchase the book, click here:
*Source: Hustling God by M. Craig Barnes, p. 90
WorkEdge leverages AI as a resource. While this material was not written or generated by AI, some editing was informed by AI tools.