Word: toiled
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...relax and reflect upon the hard-won rights gained by workers in decades past: the 40-hour week, paid vacations and sick leave, to name a few. But while millions pause next Monday to enjoy backyard barbecues or walks on the beach, a silent, almost invisible labor force will toil on without a break. In steamy sweatshops, scorched fields and cramped kitchens across the U.S., these underground workers will labor long hours for low pay under conditions that seem out of the pages of Charles Dickens...
...matched his own stern definition of a hero: someone willing "to live in toil, suffering, pain and sacrifice for years." Yet he was neither a political rabble-rouser nor a Christian martyr. Violence was abhorrent to him; indeed, his personal intercession helped prevent bloody clashes at more than one critical juncture in his nation's history. But no army of freedom fighters could have done more than Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski to wear down the all-embracing authority of Poland's atheistic Communist regime...
When God foreclosed on Eden, he condemned Adam and Eve to go to work. Work has never recovered from that humiliation. From the beginning, the Lord's word said that work was something bad: a punishment, the great stone of mortality and toil laid upon a human spirit that might otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace...
...idea of work-work as an ethic, an abstraction-arrived rather late in the history of toil. Whatever edifying and pietistic things may have been said about work over the centuries (Kahlil Gibran called work "love made visible," and the Benedictines say, "To work is to pray"), humankind has always tried to avoid it whenever possible. The philosophical swells of ancient Greece thought work was degrading; they kept an underclass to see to the laundry and other details of basic social maintenance. That prejudice against work persisted down the centuries in other aristocracies. It is supposed, however, to be inherently...
...generations of immigrants, work was ultimately availing; the numb toil of an illiterate grandfather got the father a foothold and a high school education, and the son wound up in college or even law school. A woman who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in lower Manhattan had a niece who made it to the halcyon Bronx, and another generation on, the family went to Westchester County. So for millions of Americans, as they labored through the complexities of generations, work worked, and the immigrant work ethic came at last to merge with the Protestant work ethic...