The Hero, I do.

Yeah, everybody.

Welcome to a new edition of Ten Gently Speaking.

I'm your host, Christopher Ryan, and today is May Day.

That's right, workers of the world unite.

May Day, as I was interested to learn when I lived in Spain,

is celebrated everywhere in the world except the United States.

And that is because in the United States,

there's anything that smacks of egalitarianism

and workers' rights immediately gets tarnished with the brush.

Is that a mixed metaphor?

It gets shouted down as a socialist bullshit,

socialist, egalitarian nonsense.

But in this, as in many other things,

the United States is the outlier.

In fact, the notion that working people have inalienable rights

to a certain amount of dignity and material sufficiency

is not considered controversial in most of the world.

So anyway, coincidentally, this morning, May 1, 2014,

I read an essay I'd had sitting around here on my desk for quite a while,

called In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell,

the great British philosopher.

...