September 3, 2013, - 8:56 am
Diana Nyad, Age, and the Real Labor Day
The only real newsworthy labor, yesterday, was the tremendous accomplishment of swimmer Diana Nyad–becoming the first person to swim from Cuba to America without a shark cage.
As overpaid union leaders marched in urban downtowns all over the country, the real laborers were and are those across America for whom every day is Labor Day because we work and aren’t protected into laziness and certain wages and job conditions by greedy organized far-left labor hacks. Their marches and other Labor Day parades and displays were a joke, as they’ve “protected” many Americans out of a job to the point that we long ago stopped being a manufacturing society and transformed into an unsustainable consumer and service society. Yes, we are now Mexico and China. And then there was Nyad.
Nyad, despite her leftist politics (she is a feminist, who was a trustee of the Women’s Sports Foundation–the Title IX baloney anti-male organization that seeks to have women dominate all sports and coaching), showed a youth-obsessed American culture, what an old lady can do. At age 64–which is like 80 in the sports world, Nyad yesterday accomplished what she (and everyone else) could not do in her twenties. (Kardashians, eat your hearts out.) And, in the American can-do/”don’t let ’em beat you” spirit (something sorely missing in today’s unions and union leaders especially), she tried five times, four of them failures.
Most humans, no matter how fit, could never achieve this task, and nobody else has. Or have they? There are the differences that modern technology makes that are just like having swum that distance with a shark cage, which has been done before. Nyad, this time around, had a special mask and a special ointment rubbed all over her exposed parts to ward off poisonous jellyfish. Did those also ward off the sharks? And aren’t those things akin to swimming in a cage that keeps sharks away?
It’s an argument for the ages, just as I’ve frequently argued on this site that–steroids or not–today’s Major League Baseball players cannot compare what they hit out of the ballpark to those in decades past. Today, they have better technology, better exercise routines and vitamins, and many other things that make it easier for them compared to the ballplayers of the ’50s and ’60s.
In any event, regardless of technology and newly-developed masks and ointments to ward away dangers, the swimming part is the part that cannot really be changed, and what Nyad did was tremendous and amazing, even without regard to her age.
Her days-long non-stop swimming in salty, shark-infested, jellyfish-wrought waters was Labor Day’s real labor. The fatcat union suits sound comical when they speak about “labor” and “work.”
Tags: Cuba, Diana Nyad, Florida Keys, jellyfish, Labor, Labor Day, shark cage, swimmers, Women's Sports Foundation
My husband and I were saying (as we drove to work) Labor Day should be changed to “the last day of summer” or ” Really Big Sale Day. It seems more fitting.
pete on September 3, 2013 at 9:02 am