Steve the Owl's Blog

A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.- Irving Blitzer, played by John Candy in Cool Runnings (1993)

Hi, everyone. This weekend, I was checking the listings on TV, and I saw that one of the local channels was rerunning Cool Runnings, the 1993 movie based somewhat loosely on the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team, the Caribbean country’s first entry in the Winter Olympics, this one in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. While it is true that some of the events are fictionalized (such as the tension between the Jamaicans and the other countries in the competition, having Olympic-caliber sprinters rather than members of the army track team, and the role of the coach as a single individual rather than a team), there is a lot that this movie can teach about determination and what it means to truly compete with honor.

Training for Winter without Snow?

One thing that the movie did get right is the fact that before they began to prepare for the Olympic bobsled, none of the members of the team had ever seen snow before, and they were getting ready to ride at 70 or 80 mph down a hill in a sport where, “Bones don’t break, they shatter.” (I’ve heard of luge participants who say that the real question of the sport isn’t if your bones will be broken, but how many will be broken.) Needless to say, it is very difficult to find people who are willing to go through this when they were in a warm climate. The movie solves this problem for the purposes of the story by having one of the future bobsledders trip and fall during the finals of the 100-meter Olympic trials and taking out two other runners, including the team captain and driver, the son of an Olympic gold medalist. In the movie, the lead character, Derice Bannick, refuses to give up on his Olympic dream, and knowing that four years is an eternity for a sprinter, he decides to focus his efforts on the Winter Olympics instead, and he seeks out his father’s friend, Irv Blitzer, who was disqualified from the 1972 Olympics and wants to get away from the sport.

In the movie, the four finally come together, battling the elements, each other (one of the bobsledders has not yet forgiven the one who tripped him), and the doubters, to finally qualify for the Olympics. Along the way, there are three very important lessons learned. One of the bobsledders, named Yul Brenner (remember, this is a fictionalized account; the character probably got his name from the shaved head of the actor as a reference and tribute to the actor) decries the attitude of people who seem content for a life of poverty where they are “going nowhere and you’re thrilled to death about it.” He then takes out a picture and says that this is where he wants to live, revealing a picture of Buckingham Palace. Here is the scene, which is one that moves me:

Another comes in the form of the actual races. At first, Derice sees the Swiss team, ranked #1 in the world, and decides to emulate them. However, this does not work for the team, and they struggle in the first run down the hill in the competition. For the next one, they decide to be livelier and find their own style. The result is that they become contenders in the race.

The most important lesson, and the one at the heart of the movie, is about what it truly means to be a great person. Even though the character is fictitious, in the movie, John Candy (in one of his final roles before dying of a heart attack at the age of 43) plays a down-and-out two-time gold medalist who decides to add excessive weight to his sled in an effort to get an edge over the competition. He was discovered and had to give up his gold medals. His young protege dreams of Olympic glory, but Blitzer had the hard-earned life lesson at the bottom of the quote at the top of this entry. The instant that you only start to think about winning, you lose all perspective in life. I have seen this with people in network marketing who get so obsessed with getting that close or getting that sale that all of their friends stop coming around for fear that they will be pitched. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want success, but I am saying that if you end up alienating everyone along the way to trying to earn a fortune, you’ll probably end up with neither friends nor money.

To me, that is the heart of the movie. It is about the desire not only to be the best, but to be the best person as well, and the pride that comes with earning a place at the top of your field, no matter how you finish when you get there.

In what ways do you seek to become a better person, even when the rest of the world thinks you are crazy?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you are having a good day today. Over the past few days, I have been thinking about the legacy of co-founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, who died of complications from cancer at the age of 56. There are a lot of people who have talked about his brilliant work with the products that begin with the letter “i” (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) since his return to the company in the mid-1990′s. However, I thought about the nature of foresight and how it made Apple’s success possible to build his legacy.

Finding Smarter People

Steve Jobs was so admired at one point that plenty of people have referred to Apple fanatics as the “cult of Jobs.” However, those who may have fallen victim to this thought process seem not to realize that Apple would’ve never existed without the other co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. The man affectionately known as The Woz was part of a computer club that started based on learning signals that made it possible to make free long distance phone calls in the early 1970′s (the Phone Phreaks). Eventually, the two (with Wozniak taking the lead) built the Apple I for their friends at the club, and they worked on a product that could be marketed to the masses, the Apple II, which is considered by many to be the world’s first personal computer.

Finding Opportunity

Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985. He sold his stock (ironically, if he had simply kept all of the stock he owned in 1985, he would’ve been the fifth-richest man in the world, rather than 110) and started Next Computers. However, his true resurrection in the world of business came when he bought the computer arm of LucasFilms, which he renamed Pixar, in 1986. Eventually, Pixar began to work on the first full-length computer animated movie, Toy Story. This was an idea that many thought was impossible, but we have now reached a point where hand-drawn animation is so rare that one of the working titles for The Simpsons Movie was The Simpsons in 2-D, to demonstrate its insistence on staying true to the show’s roots.

However, before Toy Story, the rap on computer animation was that it could not match the feeling of the world of hand-drawn animation. A scene from my favorite Pixar movie, WALL-E, puts that to rest in my opinion, as evidenced by this scene where WALL-E and EVE dance in space with the help of a fire extinguisher:

Steve Jobs ultimately had his biggest financial success through Pixar, and its subsequent sale to Disney. However, his legacy is mainly based on his journey from a 20-year-old working out of his parents’ basement with a friend that changed the way we communicate. So, as I write this on an Apple, I salute Steve Jobs for everything his work has meant to the world over the last 40 years.

How do you work to build your legacy?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed your Labor Day today. Earlier, I posted about my job as a graduate student teacher at Temple University. Last year, while examining the movie The Wrestler, I looked at the ways that this shows the need for unions for a group of people who are often derided as greedy for making a lot of money, even though their work makes even more money for owners. I think of this as I hear one of the common complaints about unions being that they “were once necessary, but we don’t need them any more.” Do these people have a point?

My Union

As I mentioned in my post earlier today, the student teachers at Temple University, who formed the TUGSA (a member union of the American Federation of Teachers, which is itself a member of the AFL-CIO), fought a four-year battle with the administration who pulled delay after delay to postpone a vote for certification. When the adjuncts (both graduate students who aren’t in the union and those who already have their Ph.D.) tried to unionize, Temple did everything in its power to fight this, including prohibiting any efforts to organize on campus. (In one particularly insulting move, the administration argued that the union gave everyone the same pay, whereas non-union teachers could negotiate for even more than the union gets, even though they aren’t even close.)

Well, what were the results of this union for the student teachers? Before the unionization, health care costs were prohibitive, and student teachers received less than $2750 per course with very little fringe benefits other than tuition payment. The union won its right to exist in 2001, and the next year, the first contract was finalized, and the pay increased to $3500 per course with annual cost of living adjustments, full tuition and health care for those who teach two courses per semester, and a limit to the number of hours required per course, thus ensuring that student teachers will be able to prepare for their courses and research for dissertations.

A Matter of Life or Death

One of the worst tragedies in the workplace in recent memory was the Upper Big Branch Coal Mine, run by Massey Energy, with its then-CEO, the almost cartoonishly villainous Don Blankenship, who made a huge effort to bust unions when he took over the company, and he ordered his miners to stop inspecting for safety and start digging for coal. This came to a head at Upper Big Branch in 2010, with 29 workers dead, and Massey insisting that it really did run a safe shop.

However, everyone who I know who worked in coal mines both union and non-union told me that something like this would never happen at a union coal mine, because the union will fight for workers’ safety, and if conditions are that unsafe, they will make sure that the mine gets shut down until the gas level makes conditions safe.

We have come a long way thanks to unions, but before unions were legal (and even after), non-union shops were little more than slaveowners, forcing miners to pay for their own equipment, and refusing to pay miners in cash, paying them instead with company scrip (a process that continued in many non-union mines well into the 1950′s, which Homer Hickham describes in his memoir, October Sky) and owning all of the houses. When miners tried to fight for their rights, they were kicked out of their homes and their property was seized.

I do not write this to say that unions are perfect, but to point out that they have done a lot of good. Thanks to unions fighting for working people, we have 40-hour workweeks, minimum wage laws, overtime, and worker safety laws. Unfortunately, many of these laws that were literally won by blood are now under fire. As a member of a teachers’ union, I know that I couldn’t be a part of a union if not for those who fought and died for the right to organize, so I stand with all unions that are trying to make things better for their workers.

Probably the movie that best explains this is Matewan, a story based on one of the key events in the Coal Wars in West Virginia in the 1920′s, where workers who wanted to unionize were met with violence. Here is a scene from the movie that shows Chris Cooper as union organizer demonstrating a union at its best (his speech begins at the 2:08 mark; NOTE: this scene has some language that may be NSFW, including racial slurs):

How do you remember the people who have paved the way for you?

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This is the West. When the legend becomes fact, you print the legend.- from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Hi, everyone. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the question of authenticity in life. One of the popular sentences in the world of network marketing is, “Fake it until you make it.” However, I think that Jim Rohn is far more on base whenever he says that it is better to live an authentic life, and that whatever you affirm should be the truth. However, I’ve wondered about what happens when some of the people who actually live an inauthentic life seem to have success in the world where they travel. This made me think about the Great American Male, John Wayne, and how his life did not match the one in his movies.

This is a Tough Guy?

I will be the first to admit that I do not fit the stereotypical image veteran. I stand 5’5 and I have a small frame. (However, this does put me at roughly the same size as Army Airborne veteran who served during World War II, Rod Serling, of later fame as the creator of The Twilight Zone.) So, needless to say, I can understand that someone with my size and build would not be a major figure in movies as a war hero. John Wayne, who was 6’4, and wore lifts to look even taller, became known for his work in Westerns and war movies playing the tough guy. He was 34 years old at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, younger or of a similar age to many Hollywood stars who left for war (Clark Gable was 41 when he enlisted in the Army and volunteered for combat), but this tough guy never served a day in the military.

The Consequences of an Inauthentic Life

So, why does John Wayne have this image as the Great American Male? It is clearly because of the roles he played in movies. Ironically, the man who was a frequent director of movies with John Wayne as the leading man, John Ford, filmed documentaries during World War II (many including actual scenes of battle) for the precursor of the CIA. As you could imagine, John Ford was not happy about this, and he frequently berated Wayne for, among other things, not knowing how to salute. During World War II, when Wayne did USO shows, he was often greeted with silence by actual servicemembers, and he got into frequent fistfights with actual military members who questioned him for refusing to enlist.

What is the even sadder consequence of someone like John Wayne is the real-world consequences of the stereotypical tough guy whose only experience being a hero was on celluloid who later became known as a “superpatriot.” The image of Wayne as a hero was used to rally military engagement in movies such as The Green Berets, which even the Army wanted toned town because they saw it as nothing more than a cheap propaganda piece. Wayne was an ardent supporter of wars and he regularly called into question the courage and the masculinity of anyone who opposed sending others to war, even those who had actually been to war. Because of his past, almost everyone around him knew (and said that he probably would’ve admitted in rare moments of honesty) that he was wracked with guilt over his avoidance of military service. However, if that is the case, wouldn’t his penance have been to not try to send others to something he wasn’t willing to do himself, especially considering that World War II is still considered the most justified war ever entered into by the United States (anyone whose ever gone to seminary can tell you that this is the war that is most commonly cited by defenders of the just war theory) was one that he was too busy making movies to serve in?

Ironically, the most decorated Hollywood actor (not including Audie Murphy, who was a highly-decorated veteran who became an actor later) was not the stereotypical hero. Jimmy Stewart, who stood 6’3 and weighed all of 138 lbs. (five pounds under the limit, he convinced the doctor to ignore his low weight) enlisted at the age of 32, a year before Pearl Harbor, because he saw the war coming, and he eventually earned the rank of colonel in the Army Air Force during the war and brigadier (one-star) general in the Air Force Reserve, flying in 23 combat missions. He was not the kind to brag about his service, although some noticed the darker tinge to some of his later roles. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stewart entered into a role reversal with Wayne’s real life personality, getting to great fame as a pretend hero. However, even though he saw some horrible things and didn’t want to talk about it, he had no need to prove himself because he did when he had the chance. I mention this not as a political argument (both were conservative Republicans), but as a defense of authenticity.

What things do you do to make sure that you live an authentic life?

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Hi, everyone. One of the things that I have been thinking about lately is the nature of setting priorities. This was reinforced to me as I watched the movie Click on the Fourth of July. For those of you who haven’t seen this movie, it came out six years ago and stars Adam Sandler as a workaholic who can’t seem to find his way to have enough time for everything in life. When going to a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, he meets a mysterious man named Morty who offers him “a universal remote control to control your universe.” There are a few requisite jokes once he figures out what he has, such as pausing his boss to slap him around after he orders him to work over the Fourth of July weekend, and hitting the slow-motion button when a woman is running. However, if you think of this movie only in terms of the joke, you will miss the larger point.

What Are Your Priorities?

The lead character has a family that wasn’t rich, but one that was full of love growing up. Seeing other kids enjoy the material things in life, he decides to try to work to make for a better life for his kids. This takes the form of hitting the “skip” button to avoid dinner with his parents so he can focus on designing his next project. Later, he has a fight with his wife, and he fast-forwards through the whole thing.

*SPOILER ALERT* Ultimately, when he gets passed over for a promotion, and gets frustrated after having to take his kids’ bicycles back, he decides to skip to his promotion. He finds out that it takes him forward one year. *END SPOILER ALERT*

One of the key elements of the story is that, eventually, the remote starts to program itself based on the preferences of the user. Thinking that he was getting the life he wanted, he realizes how much he misses along the way, but he learns this lesson at a huge cost.

Hollow Success

This reminds me of the concept of hollow success. No matter how much people think that financial success is the end-all, be-all of existence, it is something that must take its place in a well-rounded life. After all, what good is having all of the money in the world if there is no one to share your life with? As Jim Rohn reminds us, when we neglect one area of our life, it tends to show itself in other areas of our life. So, rather than focus on only one thing in life, it is important to become a well-rounded individual. Rather than focusing on only one thing, be sure to spend time with the people who love you, and improving as a person.

What things do you do to make sure that you aren’t fast-forwarding your way through life?

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Hi, everyone. Today marks a very special day for Steve the Owl’s Blog. With two humble posts exactly one year ago: one shortly after midnight, and one at 10 pm that quiet Sunday evening, I entered the world of content-driven blogging. My first post talked about some experiences that I’d had earlier that year with people insisting on “their” parking space during a blizzard, and how this only led to fewer parking spaces available for everyone. My second, fitting for something that was written on a Sunday inspired by thinking through some things on the way home from church, got to the very core of why people want to build a business, and how some have gone to a message of prosperity gospel that, in my opinion, misses the entire point of the Bible and turns God into a genie.

With these humble beginnings, I began my blog, which has to this day operated under the idea of “life, business, and so much more.” While some may argue for a more narrow niche, I’ve found that my niche has been about the everyday experiences I have had (including the books I’ve read, the music I’ve heard, and the TV and movies I’ve seen) that teach so much about our personal development and business.

There has been a lot of trial and error along the way, but I thank each and every person who has been there with my as I have worked on this labor of love for the past year. With that in mind, I would like to thank the five most frequent commenters on my blog over the last twelve months, in order from 1-5.

Coach Freddie Coach Freddie has done some wonderful work in the world of video blogging, including a lengthy and excellent series on each of the 64 success principles presented by jack Canfield. He is truly a great mind in the world of personal development. We are at the top of each other’s commenter list, and it has been a great honor getting to know Coach Freddie. Keep your eyes out for a blog exchange between the two of us coming soon.

Oliver Tausend Oliver held the number-one spot among my commenters for a pretty long time. Like me, his interests are pretty varied, with a large focus on personal development and business with a lot of stories based on his personal experiences. He has done a lot of work in several different syndication groups, so if you’ve seen him around but haven’t stopped by this blog, be sure to do so.

Karen Marrow Karen is someone who focuses primarily on personal development, with some emphasis on business. I have found a lot of great value on her blog, and I had the honor of guest-posting on her blog earlier this spring after winning a contest for a great book on personal development, Happy for No Reason.

Jayne Kopp I met Jayne this winter on the Clever Marketer Prove It Challenge, and both of us crossed the finish line together on the same day. Considering that she was pretty far behind the pace for the challenge toward the end, this shows her dedication to her blog and to her readers. Be sure to read about her experiences with personal and business development, and how she weaves them into a life narrative.

Vicki Berry Vicki is someone who has several blogs, and the blog where I know her the best is the one that I linked to. She offers some great advice on business and blogging, with an emphasis on SEO and copywriting. If you want to learn about how to build a business and how to learn the rules of the road for creating a great blog, I can think of no better place to start.

Thank you to everyone who has read my blog and commented. I will never forget you. I hope to provide even more value in the second year of this blog than the first.

Hi, everyone. I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to watch The King’s Speech, but I finally saw it tonight, and I must say that I was blown away. If you haven’t seen it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the movie about the future King George VI and his efforts to overcome a stammer and inspire the British people during World War II, as they prepare for a fight against a charismatic leader from Germany, Adolf Hitler, as he tried to take over Europe.

The Accidental King

Born in 1895 as Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York, he was the second heir to the throne of England as the younger brother of Edward, the son of King George V, which meant that his chances of becoming king were relatively remote. If Edward had any children, Albert would fall farther and farther down the line of succession. However, in 1936, just a few months after becoming king, Edward VIII fell in love with twice-divorced Wallis Simpson and decided he wanted to marry her. In order to marry her, however, as the head of the Church of England, he was not allowed to marry a divorcee because the church’s teachings on divorce, so he gave up the throne instead, forcing his younger brother into the position.

Overcoming Difficulties

Of course, in the radio age, the new king, who adopted his father’s name (because of concerns about the name Albert at the time), King George VI had to overcome his stammer to be an effective king and rally the people of England. As a left-handed child who was switched to right-handed, he had to completely rethink his approach to speaking. It was not a perfect transformation (Toward the end of his life, his speeches had to be pre-recorded.), but title event of the movie, the speech announcing the British effort in World War II in 1939, will really get you going. If you would like to hear the real King George VI delivering a speech, here is one that I found online:

What efforts to overcome obstacles have you accomplished in the name of duty?

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Over the weekend, I watched the movie Young Einstein with my wife. If you have never seen the movie, or it sounds like something you may have heard of, but can’t quite place it, Young Einstein was the first movie by Australian filmmaker Yahoo Serious and it re-imagined the life of Albert Einstein as he formulated his most famous theories (as well as inventing rock and roll). I will admit that there are parts of the movie that are obviously dated (the movie was made in 1988, and released internationally the next year), but I think that there are some elements of the movie that not only stand the test of time, but they teach us something about life and the power of imagination today.

An Imaginative Movie for an Imaginative Man

Albert Einstein was born in Germany and lived most of his early life in Germany and Switzerland. Einstein was a late bloomer, failing math as a young man, not learning to speak until the age of three or tie his shoes until the age of twelve. However, once he got working, he really caught on quickly. Inspired by a daydream where he rode a beam of light toward the end of the universe at the age of 26 (while working at a patent office), Einstein began working on the special theory of relativity, the work that would make his name synonymous with “genius” for the next century, even though his ideas were seen as ridiculous when he first proposed them.

Einstein never took himself too seriously, and Young Einstein, while intentionally getting a lot of facts wrong (For example, I’m pretty sure that E=mc2 was not a result of “splitting a beer atom.”) definitely got the rebellious spirit of Einstein right. The movie shows how people thought he was crazy (even getting locked up in a mental asylum with other scientists) and how he just couldn’t get the hang of the doldrums of working at the patent office. However, when the time came, he truly changed the world, and he did so in a generous spirit.

In some ways, I think that an iconoclast like Yahoo Serious was perfect for this role. With his wild hair and joie de vivre, Yahoo Serious plays someone who gets bored on his parents’ apple farm (where he never quite fits in), and he starts using his spare time to think about the universe, as evidenced by falling on a seesaw with a crate of apples on the other side. When the crate hits him on his head, he exclaims, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction!” As someone from the world of academia, I really appreciate the wonder at which Serious shows Einstein’s joy at discovering his theories.

In addition, this movie took advantage of the media of its time, experimenting with the format of the music video, as evidenced by this clip of the movie, a three-and-a-half minute montage set to “Great Southern Land” by Icehouse, turning the song and the movie into a love song to his native Australia. As you can see below, it holds up well 23 years later:

How has imagination powered you to success?

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Recently, I went to the Temple Library, and I saw a copy of the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Because of the movie’s reputation, I decided to pick it up for rent. I haven’t watched the movie yet, but I have seen the famous scene where Alec Baldwin’s character gives his memorable speech to the people of Premiere Properties. I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, but one of the most famous lines comes from the acronym ABC, or Always Be Closing.

Is It ABC?

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this movie and how it really inspired them at work. (One of my friends who worked in high-dollar sales ventures said that everything about Alec Baldwin’s monologue, even going as far as “first place, you win a car; second place, you win a steak knife; third place, you win ‘you’re fired’” is very accurate.) However, the more I thought about it, the more that I realized that there is something that people fundamentally misunderstand about this way of thinking. While I personally prefer more of an attraction marketing/natural selling type of approach, I know that there are people who try to do everything that they can to force people to make their final decision and push towards the sale, because of Baldwin’s character’s $970,000 income and the motto “Always Be Closing.”

However, this just does not work in the world of online marketing. After all, if all we did was pitch a product or a business opportunity, no one would want to come to our website, and no one would talk to us. (Personally, on Facebook, I never directly mention my business opportunity on my profile. I will do it on a fan page, but that is different to me because those are people who went to it specifically for that reason, and the of the 750+ friends I have on facebook, over 90% are not from the business community.) I think that in this way, we cannot Always Be Closing.

It Can’t Be NBC, Either

However (and I realize that I am guilty of this as well), it can’t be Never Be Closing, either. While those of us in the Internet marketing world are trying to many things, such as education, or simply sharing our views, if you have a primary and/or affiliate programs, you are here because you are trying to make money. If you don’t tell people what you are doing, and why you are doing it, you will never get anyone to buy. My answer to the famous Zen metaphor is that, of course, a tree falling in the woods makes a sound even if no one is there to hear it. However, if no one knows that we are doing business, no one will ever buy our products or services, or join our business.

Then again, I realize that some people feel uneasy with direct pitches. For this reason, I wonder if there is another way to do things to seek balance? For those of you who feel that you have found your balance (and I know about the 90/10 rule and full disclosure), what things do you do to help people find the services you wish to provide?

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Here in the United States, today marks Labor Day, often called “the unofficial end of summer.” It has turned into a day of parties and barbecues, but we really miss the point of Labor Day, and a movie that I saw the other day reminded me of the lessons of Labor Day.

Struggling to Build a Life

The movie that brought the point home about the lessons of Labor Day was The Wrestler, a 2008 movie starring Mickey Rourke as a washed-up professional wrestler who is trying to put his life together after he suffers a heart attack. The ultimate thrust of the movie involves questions of fame and people who try to find success outside of their chosen field.

However, there was something else that struck me as one of the undercurrents of the movie. In the making-of special, the director, Darren Aronofsky, explains that the movie is somewhat based on a subculture of wrestlers who never make it to the top levels of the field, and several who were once big stars who still wrestle at the lower levels today, such as King Kong Bundy. The money really isn’t good at that level at all, so there is a good chance that some of them continue to wrestle because they have to do so financially.

The Importance of Labor Unions

Most professional athletes are represented by labor unions, and despite arguments about greedy athletes, I think that this is one of the examples of the success of fighting for the long-term interests of the athletes. In a field where people are past their prime at an early age, there is a need to provide for people once their earning potential is gone or significantly reduced. However, the WWE is not unionized, and despite the billions it makes every year, most athletes do not make enough money to develop a secure retirement or any sort of pension program to take care of them once their days in the square circle are done.

The question of the importance of labor unions is one that is also very important to me on a personal level. When I was 11 years old, my mom had a gangrenous gall bladder that was removed only after an eight-month delay because my dad’s non-union job at the time did not have enough employees to afford to get a group rate for health insurance. A few years later, he got a union job, and within three months, we knew that we never had to worry about anything like that again. For this reason, you will never hear me complain about any group that wants to make sure that hard-working people earn more money and receive benefits for their work.

Why Today is Labor Day

In most industrialized nations, workers are celebrated on May 1, rather than the first Monday in September. However, in 1893, there was a railroad workers’ strike that ended violently. Rather than give workers rights, President Grover Cleveland decided to create a holiday instead. As someone who comes from central Appalachia, I know the history of our region in terms of the fight for workers’ rights, including the the battles in Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920, and Harlan County, Kentucky, known as “Bloody Harlan.” In the 1930′s, workers finally won the right to organize. So, as we think of time off, we should take this time to remember the people who made it possible.