May Day’s New Meaning

Mexico’s Newest Holiday?


It’s funny how life’s experiences constantly change the meaning of things.

For instance, when I first started my own engineering business back in 1990, the first thing that I lost was the traditional meaning of Fridays, holidays, and vacation.

As most everyone knows, when you are an employee somewhere and you don’t own or manage the operation, most of the time you can count on running out the door on Friday afternoon and not coming back until Monday morning. Likewise, you can declare your two weeks vacation time and also run out of the office at Thanksgiving and Christmas and never look back.

Not so once you take your employment into your own hands and go into business for yourself. Customers generally could care less if you’ve planned on spending the third week in September at the beach for six months previously, they want their proposal or drawings or material delivered, dang it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dragged around a briefcase, a fax machine and a computer while on “holiday” or “vacation” in the past 16 years.

Being like many Americans and enjoying a good excuse to celebrate, I’ve often waded into the masses of revelers enjoying ethnic holidays like the Irish’s St. Patrick’s Day and Mexico’s Cinco de Mayo. I’m neither Irish nor Mexican, but I’ve drank my fair share of green beer and Margaritas in my day on these two holidays.

Unfortunately for me, Cinco de Mayo lost its celebratory appeal ten years ago because my father passed away on May 5th, 1996.

It’s taken ten years for me to get back around to even thinking about celebrating on Cinco de Mayo, but I did want to do it this year and darn it if the illegal Mexicans haven’t gone and spoiled it for me again.

Now they’ve all decided to do some kind of strike or walkout or something today, May Day.

Imagine that--Illegal (and generally non-unionized) Mexican “immigrants” celebrating what has traditionally been an organized labor union & communist holiday here in America—the capital of freedom and democracy.

Did someone forget to send me the memo explaining the rational of this maneuver?

What an entirely inept public relations move, in my opinion.

After all, with Cinco de Mayo falling on Friday of this week, it seems to me that IF these invaders and their sympathizers absolutely had to make some kind of warped political statement, it would have made much more sense for them to do it on Mexican Independence Day rather than on May Day.

Then again, I hope that they just keep on thrashing around demanding “rights” and pissing off middle America so that the legal residents of this country will pressure the professional and elected denizens of Washington DC to get off of their collective asses and do something about our borders.

Meanwhile, I'm making my own political statement this week by having a Cinco de Mayo party a day late, on May 6th. In an even more politically incorrect maneuver, I'm buying the ingredients and cooking all of the food (tamales and tacos and salsa and guacamole) for our thirty guests myself.

Maybe I'll start a tradition and call the annual event Redneck de Mayo.

Yeah, that's the ticket...take that Mexico...