By Joseph Carvalko | 31 August 2025
Church and State
Heh you, Mr. President, sitting behind the Resolute Desk, sheltered from the heat and hum of laboring life, bathed in the coolness of conditioned air, your words thunder across the nation, branding us laborers, “illegals” and “unauthorized.” Yet here we are, poised to “celebrate” Labor Day. How ironic it feels, you—removed, gilded in your fortress of gold—while the heart of America beats louder than ever under strain. Do you not feel it? Do you not hear it? The crisis spreading through the land? A crisis not of war, plague or scarcity—but a crisis of conscience, of humanity, one you have set into motion with the sweep of your pen.
It is us, Mr. President—we who sweat under the unrelenting sun, who bleed over machines that churn without mercy, who scavenge dreams from calloused hands. We jackhammer the roadbeds you drive, breathe in the asphalt that burns your rubber. The nameless—White, Black, Brown, immigrant, native-born—we gather, a collective humanity forged in labor. We come as Portuguese, Italian greenhorns, Haitians, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Asians, Africans, Irish, Brazilians—we come with tools that scrape and thunder and groan. From morning till night, against machines that beat the rhythm of industry, we toil so that America can continue its insistent march forward.
Come closer. Not to hear the roar of rhetoric, but hear the roar of our toil. We stand tall on the shop floors, the packing houses, running dozers, claptraps, we’re treadmills of blood-filled batteries, powering the presses, cold-working and stamping, steel on steel, bone on bone, behemoth presses, pounding sheets into cylinders, kerchunk! Arms shackled, jerked back, brass folding dough, splitting into slippery barrels, jammed! Chains, kerchunk! Fingers, fattened flat, blood, blue…forged. We fill your alleyways with skids to feed the consuming appetite, measured by pieces, timekeeper’s logs, breaths spent in a shift sounded by the whistle, measured by the will, one day to the next, interminable race to make the rate, to escape a pink slip or a four fingered glove. The heartbeat of industry may sound distant in your world, but here it vibrates through flesh and bone.
The sun, relentless and piercing, bares down on we pickers. Our fingers, crack and ache. We don’t hesitate. We power through rows of ripened plenty, pulling food from earth’s womb. And we sweat—the kind of sweat that cuts rivers beneath us, channels into the dirt as though the land itself drinks us whole. And yet for all our sacrifice, for all our offerings, we remain but shadows in your gaze—unseen and unwelcome.
We labor with the season’s grief, knowing that the soil bears more than crops—it bears dreams, losses, legacies. Hands calloused by the land’s hymn; each furrow engraved in terra firma’s skin. We, the undocumented that turn the soil, slowly disappear into oblivion like seeds cast to the wind, swept away—not by weathered storms, but by blackshirts armed with careless assumptions and cold authority. Today, your masked enforcers storm neighborhoods, breaking families into pieces, as if each member was an inconsequential life. You shout-out slogans of “greatness” without lifting a hand, but the worker from time immemorial knows greatness is built by hands that nurture, that feed, hands that plough—hands that build—those same hands you deem unworthy to sit at your table.
La Migra labels us unauthorized, we who make up most of the workers on your farms, our hands clutching not only crops but the threads of an economy. Yet the refrain rises: imprison them, deport them, to gulags if you must—all while you set tables with food picked by hands deemed unfit to sit at the same table, by backs unfit to rest in this land at day’s end.
Labor Day reminder: Trump thinks workers have too much time off. pic.twitter.com/S5BCrkreCB
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 30, 2025
I speak as one who has seen these faces—faces pressed under perpetual strain. Faces of the immigrant, the native-born, the ignored. They speak in whispers because they fear a system too cruel to hear them. But I will not remain silent, Mr. President. We cannot. If “greatness” is to exist at all, it will emerge only from truth—the truth of those who labor not for glory but for survival.
The men and women laborers that I have met through life, especially those whose ancestry in this country goes back centuries, often have no voice in a bureaucratic authoritarian world, such as yours. We must be our own voice in a system that tightens its grip around those
simply eking out an existence. We cannot stand mute while government officials buckle in silence. And if America still has a soul to save, our words must dig through the soil of callousness, until it is rediscovered.
Heh you, Mr. President, sitting behind your gilded walls, perhaps you will wash your hands clean today. Perhaps you will shrug off the weight of these lives you cast aside. But I will not let your slogans drown out the builders, the dreamers who echo through the nation they
helped shape. America is faltering—but its laborers remain steadfast on this Labor Day. May their voices rise until you cannot silence them. May their sacrifice build a nation worth saving. Know, that we cannot let your tyrannical slogans drown out the song of the common man and woman—the builders, the dreamers who shaped America before it lost its way.
Between Two Eternities: Inscriptions Buried in an Awakened Heart by Joseph Carvalko. https://t.co/4X5oPVFFz5
— Church and State (@ChurchAndStateN) October 9, 2024
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