On Labor Day

Happy Labor Day. Have you noticed we live in times when change means jobs are being lost to automation and/or Artificial Intelligence. Will the unemployment rate and labor force participation rate soon become meaningless statistics? Care providers are suffering burnout due to COVID and resistance among many to common sense. Service jobs are going begging. School Board members are resigning rather than cope with hysteria over masks.

solar farm: growing  electricity?

Photo by J. Harrington

Meanwhile, honest laborers earn far less than hedge fund managers. The number of those with secure food supplies and/or housing or access to affordable, honest medical care (surprise bills anyone?) diminishes each year it seems. Concurrently, more and more farms are becoming investments owned by investors who farm them for subsidies while they're operated by former family farmers to produce commodities for industrial feedstock and/or export. Those with money and power (often the same .01% to 10% of the population) have the rest of US at each other’s throats, distracted from storming the castles with torches and pitchforks (if we don’t count January 6, 2021).

Seamus Heaney raises a question, at least in my reading, of whether digging with a pen is a labor as honest as digging sod or potatoes. Looked at another way, what’s a fair exchange rate between poems and potatoes?

Digging

By Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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