What About Eli Whitney Day?

As I sit here at home today, free of class due to a holiday, I begin to think about the man credited for this day off.  Cesar Chavez was a farm worker as well as a civil rights activist.  Chavez was a co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, a civil rights group that focuses on supporting farm labor workers.  

         My family has been farming in Kern County for almost 80 years, my great grandpa growing his first cotton crop in 1930.  I’m the oldest male of the fourth generation and am too young to realize the full affects that Cesar Chavez has had on my family over the years.  Chavez has no doubt cost my family tons of money and twice as many headaches with his constant complaining and his many demands from farm owners.  I am well aware that I do not know as much as I should about the movement that Chavez headed, that being said I have been influenced by the bias opinion that my family has formed due to our way of life.  I have grown to know Chavez as a bad man, now I do not believe that Chavez was an evil man, just a man that negatively affected my family's way of life.  I believe that Cesar was a man that felt that the farm owners might have owed him something more than pay and in some cases a home.  I find it interesting how these workers will complain about the conditions they work in, the hear for example, then a regulation is put out forcing all farm owners to supply a shaded area for workers to rest at, and it seems every time I ever drive by one of my family's field the resting workers are nowhere near the provided shade, resting instead in the shade of their cars or trucks.  When it comes down to it I do believe that Chaves has no doubt improved the overall moral of the average farm worker, but I believe that his actions were unnecessary and that most of the things he pushed for seemed to me to be more like privileges of the job, not so much rights.  I believe that Chavez' actions have no doubt added value to the dinner salad at everyone's table, the more farm owners pay farm workers the more they are going to have to make in other words, its not always the farm owners who suffer by having to pay these outrageous wages ($8.00 for minimum wage!), sometimes it comes strait from the consumer by way of a rise in a commodity's price.  Why not give us a day off for Eli Whitney or something, I'm sure that his cotton gin has helped more Americans in a positive way then Chavez.

         In retrospect I definitely do not believe that Cesar Chavez is someone worth a holiday.  The fact that we get school off because of him leaves a bad taste in my mouth as I sit here on my free Monday afternoon and waste a perfectly good day away for a man who has caused so much grief to my family.  I never thought I'd say this, but I'd rather be in class.