Labour Day

Happy Labour Day! Especially to all who labour. Americans celebrate this holiday as marking the formal end of summer and the return to work, school etc. In reality of course many people have never stopped working or, as the economy of the moment demands, searching for work. The sight of people standing at the edge of highways or in shopping mall car parks holding up placards asking for money to support families produces a combination of wariness and sorrow. Whether real or fraudulent these pleas say something about the fragilities of human life when it is pushed to the edges of society. Not principally what I'm here to think about but there are obvious parallels with the experience of disability, criminality and penology. With this in mind my own modest act of labour/love today was to begin reading Dostoevsky and already his insights into the illusions of all that is deemed 'success' and 'achievement' are providing a basis for examining the effectiveness of what we sometimes glibly call 'support'.