On This Day of Work

Hurray, hurray, the First of May
And just what shall we do this day?
We'll labor not, for labor's sake
We'll touch no plow, no wrench, no rake
The irony of Labor Day

I find myself bemused to the point of bad poetry by this day, on which so many governments of the world honor Labor by refusing us the right to do any. And here in Germany, they really do refuse it, wacky though that concept is to my American brain. I come from a country where most holidays are a kind of 24-hour deflationary spike, small windows of opportunity for consumers to get more stuff for less money. Here, though, there are laws making holidays actually holidays, and most businesses are required to be closed. Similar rules apply to Sundays and limit evening operating hours, leaving Germany with a tiny fraction of America's shopping hours and completely bereft of Seven Elevens. You only have to look at the resulting difference in per-capita shoe and Slurpy consumption to recognize the dangers of runaway European socialism.

I continue to follow the politics of my native land, and I have been shocked to learn from serious members of the American political establishment just how miserable my life here in "socialist Europe" really is. It's been made clear that a three-percent tax increase on everything above your first quarter million dollars is sufficient to plunge America into the horrors of socialism, but just what "socialism" means hasn't been much explained. I hope that a brief description of my own horrors might give you all strength in resisting liberal efforts to turn America red. Yoked to the European socialist machine, I struggle under the weight of my 39-hour work week. My only escape from this unending drudgery is found in my meager six weeks of annual vacation, sick leave, and the year of paid leave my wife and I will be forced to split after the births of each of our children. I dream each day of finally returning home, where I can be free of the oppression of universal health care and world-class mass transit. So fight for your freedom, comr-- I mean, friends!

The contemplation of Germany's deranged socialist plot to keep people at home with their families on national holidays started me thinking about other differences between America and Germany that serve as further evidence of this nation's utter preposterousness. The food alone is proof positive: At any supermarket in the country you have your pick of fifty kinds of sausage, but try finding saltine crackers, cheddar cheese, or root beer. This last item, by the way, is basically the American shibboleth; Europeans at least all seem to think the stuff tastes like cough medicine, which left me very excited to catch my first German sniffle. I was disappointed, though - German cough medicine tastes like American cough medicine, which tastes nothing like root beer. I think that, similar to how Japanese who grow up without a distinction between "r" and "l" sounds cannot hear the difference, Germans who grow up without a distinction between food and things like pig intestines packed with clotted blood, or something called "liver cheese," end up unable to distinguish between "yucky" and "delicious."

We shouldn't let these little differences - freedom vs good health care, yummy cheese made from milk vs icky cheese made from liver - distract us from our commonalities. We share our amazement that unattractive women can sing. We share our fear of a pig and bird disease that in the last week has killed roughly the same number of people as have crazy drivers attempting to assassinate Dutch royalty. And today we share our celebration of a day of work on which much of the world's population won't do any. Happy May Day.