From Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America:

As (Eugene) Debs, (Carolyn) Chute & (Mother) Jones understood, the ennobling work we do is seldom renumerated in greenbacks. Bearing and raising a child, cultivating a garden, just being there for a sibling or friend to lean on: this “work” is compensated in a currency far more valuable than Uncle Sam’s paper. This, in fact, is the work that should be honored on Labor Day. The work we do for “nothing.” (For everything, really.) The work that enriches us as human beings; that binds us to our families and our neighbors; that shrouds even the most commonplace of lives in glory. This is work whose coin, whose only coin, is love.

Posted on 20 May 2006