Ross: Exercising my Labor muscles this Labor Day

Labor Day was founded to celebrate the labor movement, I’ll leave you to look up the history.

But what I think about when I see the word “labor” is people using their skill and strength to do physical work.

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I don’t consider what I do for a living to be physical work. I stand up for long periods of time, and I push a button here and there and do some typing, and sometimes walk over to the latte machine, but when I leave here, there is really nothing I can point to and say, see that? That’s what I built today.

By my definition, laborers are people who can point to something that physically exists in the world, “See that? I made that!”

One of the problems with all the technology we have is that so many jobs involve twiddling fingers to manipulate insubstantial pixels. Yes, it requires concentration; it’s definitely work, but the result is invisible and untouchable.

I think that’s why I putter. I like to fix things, reclaim something old, and build something new, my project for the past two weeks was to build a deck with reclaimed wood and pieces of an old garage door – even using reclaimed nails from old projects. Yes – I save old nails. You might ask, who goes around straightening old nails anymore? Me, that’s who, because of a self-imposed rule for this project, was that no money could be spent.

Why would I make up such a rule? I don’t really know.

There are probably deep psychological reasons for this, but I don’t care what they are. All I know is that, for whatever reason, I feel like I have to build something once in a while.

And I mention this just to show some respect for the people who make their living doing the physical stuff: the digging, pouring, paving, painting, lifting, building, planting – people who can point to anything from a new skyscraper to a new freeway lane, to a light rail system, to a re-forested mountain and say, that’s there because of me.

This day’s for you.

I’d throw a party for you on my new deck, but it would have to be at your own risk.

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