Déjà vu—May Day, m'aider, mayday

For all of the reasons we will march today

May Day, the May Pole dance, little May baskets left on doorsteps, these are the ways we remembered May Day when I was a girl. Colorful ribbons hung down from a tall pole and each child grabbed one. The dance was simple—over, under, over, under, until the pole was tightly wrapped in spring colors.

We don’t know how far back in recorded and unrecorded history these celebrations were part of spring. One spring in 1965 my friend Carolyn and I took a short driving tour. She wanted to show me the countryside that Thomas Hardy set his novels in since I had just finished reading all of them as part of my Exeter University studies.

And there he was, not Thomas Hardy, but the Cerne Abbas giant in all of his erect glory. A fertility symbol etched in chalk rock on the side of a hill in Dorset, the giant (180 feet tall) seems to renew himself every decade or so, even during the prudish Victorian era of Thomas Hardy. Villagers told us, with a shrug, we don’t know how it happens. We just wake up every ten years or so and he is fresh scrubbed, all of the grass pulled off of him. It's been there since about the 9^th century. However this renewal happens, the Cerne Abbas giant is worthy of Thomas Hardy. And every May 1^st there are dances and celebrations of spring on the hill above the giant.

Then there is the May Day of worker’s history. In the U.S. in 1889 on May 1^st, International Socialist Workers declared May 1^st a labor holiday. Which it was for a few years in the U.S. until the demonstrations turned violent with hungry and underpaid workers rioting for a change in their working lives and conditions. Five years after its inception, Congress in its wisdom, declared the first Monday in September as Labor Day, separating the holiday from socialism (and communism).

May 1^st is still International Worker’s Day, no matter how the politicians want to try and change it.

Finally, there is m'aider, which means “help me" in French. England and France adopted mayday, m'aider, as a distress call in 1923 as airline traffic began to cross the Channel.

We are in distress. What would be a good analogy? A bird was sucked into the jet engine of our government? Maybe a hole opened in the fuselage, threatening us all? Think Elon Musk and his chainsaw.

But make no mistake, this plane is not going down. We march to ensure that. We march to celebrate spring and workers and ourselves in all of our diversity. We march for all of these.