Hard work ahead of us
Average citizens crucial to fixing divided country
Labor Day has always been one of America’s greatest holidays — a day when we pay tribute to American workers and their families.
While serving as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, an organization of Americans living in Europe invited me to Poland to deliver a key human rights speech about the historic importance of the labor movement in the United States and throughout the world. The event coincided with Labor Day, Sept. 1 that year, which is also the anniversary of the beginning of World War II, when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.
I talked about Poland’s courageous Solidarity movement, and dockworkers in Boston and New York organized economic boycotts of communist freight ships in the ’70s and ’80s, which caused financial and political havoc for the Kremlin.
Well, I have been thinking a lot about these past historic events this Labor Day, because of the fact that the unity in our country and the division among countries is once again in serious threat. North Korea is a danger to America, which also faces pressure from China, Russia and the Middle East. The president and his credibility is openly challenged, and the popularity of the media is almost as low as that of the U.S. Congress. Yes, we may have some outstanding leaders, but unfortunately it’s the American political system that is divided and broken.
The big difference between those difficult days and now is that our political leaders had the bipartisan confidence and support of the people. They even had our religious leaders helping unite our country.
We keep waiting and hoping for decisive leaders to come along, get us out of this mess and lead us to a more stable and happy future. But if this is to happen, I am convinced that it will take the active political and moral leadership of average, decent and concerned people to get involved in the civic life of our community and country — like our labor movement once did in fighting for economic equality, as our longshoremen did in helping defeat communism.
Recently, at Roza Lyons Restaurant in South Boston, hundreds of concerned women brought clothes, baby products, canned food and money for the hurricane victims in Texas, just like we did in Boston for striking and persecuted shipyard workers and their families in Gdansk, Poland, in the 1970s when they stood up to the brutality of communism.
I personally saw this courage in Poland, Bosnia and Rwanda, and I also witnessed the generosity of the American people. We can be that country once again. But we have to stand up, speak out for our cherished values and traditions — whether it’s here in Boston, America or across the world. Isn’t that what made America great — patriotism, family and hard work, isn’t that what Labor Day is all about?