Happy Labour Day! In honour of the day, have a listen to Propagandhi’s “Letter Of Resignation”, a song not so much about work but about quitting you job and more importantly, about reimagining the way we do things and how we see the idea of “work” itself. While John K. Samson rerecorded the track on The Weakerthans’ first album Fallow, his original version recorded back when he was a member of Propagandhi drives the point home a little further with its spoken word coda:
It’s like being sick all the time, I think, coming home from work, sick in that low-grade continuous way that makes you forget what it’s like to be well. We have never in our lives known what it is to be well. What if I were coming home, I think, from doing work that I loved and that was for us all. What if I looked at the houses and the air and the streets, knowing they were in accord, not set against us. What if we knew the powers of this country moved to provide for us and for all people. How would that be, how would we feel and think and what would we create?