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The Work of the World When I was in South America in August, someone said to me, “You’ve been to so many places. What do you think is the most amazing thing you’ve seen?” It’s a good question. Niagara Falls, Mount Denali, Stonehenge, the Grand Canyon . I’ve been to Kaieteur Falls in Guyana . At 872 feet it’s the longest single-drop waterfall in the world. Amazing. And of course there are so many places I haven’t been: Tibet, China, India, Antarctica . So it’s not as if I’ve seen everything there is to see. But I have seen many amazing things. I had to stop and think. Of all the places I’ve been, it was the Pyramids that were at the top of my list of “amazing” places. The Pyramids. They’re made of 2-ton blocks of stone quarried from local rock. It’s estimated that 5,000 years ago stonecutters cut out 34 blocks a day for 20 years. Those 2-ton blocks were moved and stacked into the classic pyramid shape by a labor force of about 30,000. The blocks were cut so exactly that once they were set in place, it would have been hard to insert a razor blade between them. We know the story of Moses and his demand that the Pharaoh free the Jewish slaves working in Egypt . Modern archeologists think that the labor force included Egyptians and work crews from outside Egypt as well. Some of the workers may have been there to pay a “labor tax” owed to the Pharaoh by every able-bodied worker. Others may have been paid stonecrafters. Others may have been volunteers. And, of course, many were slaves. Somehow, these merely human workers put stone upon stone to create towering monuments. They did not have bulldozers or cranes. They did not have iron tools. They did not even have the wheel. This is the power of labor. From the days of the Pyramids to feudal times in Western Europe , great monuments and great cathedrals were built using human labor and little else. If a Pharaoh or a King or a Pope wanted a thing done, the workers of the world did it. Whether people were technically slaves or merely serfs; whether they rejoiced in the work or abhorred it; they worked at the command of a leader who typically claimed divine authority. If people believe that a leader is “anointed by God” to rule them, how difficult it must be for them to insist on self-rule, self-determination. Yet, over time, there has been growing acceptance worldwide of the idea that the individual human being has an inherent worth and dignity that must not be violated. Since the end of World War II, there has been international agreement that every person is entitled to basic human rights. The language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights echoes that of our own Unitarian Universalist principles: we “covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” The Universal Declaration, adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, affirms “t he inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” The idea that individuals have a right to be self-determining is hard-won. Four hundred years ago, the first Unitarians were burned out of their homes because their religious ideas included the notion that laborers—the peasants, the serfs—had as much right to participate in the decisionmaking processes of the church and village as the landowners and priests. The idea was frightening because it suggested that the “natural order” of king, lords, serfs, slaves might not be natural at all. If serfs and slaves had human rights, what would happen to society? It would have to change, wouldn’t it? People feared the change that might come about if common laborers were acknowledged to have the right of self-determination—the right to vote on social policy decisions. Some of the fear was surely economic, and yet it seems to me that a large part was simply the fear that life would change beyond recognition. The growth of this nation’s labor unions and our laws protecting workers from abusive and unfair working conditions began a hundred years ago. The first reaction of society was to smite the workers: bash them, break them, revile them, stop them. It took years of talk and strikes and education and advocacy before there were laws protecting labor, and the right of workers to bargain collectively. Change that threatens economic power—change that defies engrained ideas of the role of the common laborer—has been slow and difficult. Even today, the minimum wage is only $5.15 an hour: not a living wage in any part of the nation. When I turned on the faucet this morning and filled my glass with clean Nantucket water, I thought about the hurricane victims wading through the increasingly polluted floodwaters. I thought of the children and the sick and the elderly who are still trapped in a ruined city and who must be longing for a simple glass of clean water. It is not possible to think about the tragedy in New Orleans without thinking about who got out and who was left behind. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that every person has the “ the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” The “right to work” includes pay at a rate that allows the worker’s family to have “an existence worthy of human dignity.” The Declaration says that, if necessary, a worker’s pay should be supplemented “by other means of social protection.” When people can’t afford to own a car or buy gasoline; when they can’t find a job that pays enough to set aside a little cash for emergencies; when they can’t find any job, what are they to do when a hurricane threatens their city? How can they evacuate? Do they have an existence worthy of human dignity? Were there “other means of social protection” available to help them? We cannot turn back the clock and right the wrongs of the past. All we can do is move forward. We can send money to shelter and feed and clothe the refugees, we can go down to help clean up and re-build. And we can, perhaps, see with new eyes the ways in which our society might renew itself. This hurricane that has swept away the essential structures that held the floodwaters at bay has also revealed the underlying social structures that kept 30 percent of the population of New Orleans trapped in the Superdome and elsewhere in the city center as winds tore through roofs and water lapped at doors. We join together in compassion and love to help the refugees of this terrible storm. As we do, may we not stop seeing the structural injustice that has made evacuation so slow and so difficult for so many. Each time we turn on our faucets to get a glass of clean Nantucket water, let us vow to change the way America treats the poorest of the poor in this country. The pyramids were built by common laborers piling one stone on top of another. It is a great achievement. It came about only through the vision of the architect combined with the labor of ordinary people, one stone at a time. Let us bring the vision, let us bring the labor, let us bring the persistence and dedication. The work of the world is not a monument to a king, or a cathedral to a deity. For us, the work of the world is transformation, renewal, change, hope.
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