Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

There's never a Labor Day that passes that I don't think of miners. Coal miners. Southwestern Virginia coal miners.

In 1941, my great-grandparents moved from the little coal-mining hamlet of Pardee in Wise County to Lynchburg. Most all of my old relatives from way back then - may God rest their souls - worked in the mines. My great-grandparents and their five kids left the mines where my great-grandfather had worked for some 30 years for other, different, and safer work in Virginia's Piedmont.

About every other year or so, my mom takes my grandmother back down to Norton and Big Stone Gap, where there is a reunion of sorts for all those who lived in Pardee back in its "glory days," in the early years of the last century. Pardee was then a broken-down company town defined mostly by hard-working families living in barely inhabitable houses. The reunions, I'm told, are a little smaller each year. I have an old snapshot of my knobby-kneed, pre-teen grandmother standing in front of her very humble wood-frame house, in its dirt front yard, hanging on to a donkey by the rope to his bridle. She laughs a little when she sees that picture today. I can tell she's a bit embarrassed by it, but I'm not.

When I was first elected to the House of Delegates, the Democratic Speaker of the House appointed me to the Mining and Mineral Resources Committee. It was a panel whose workload was the least of any. I was put on the do-little committee precisely because I was a freshman, a Republican freshman. It was supposed to be a place for me to twiddle my thumbs. But I didn't mind. I was happy to serve on the mining committee. For a couple years, I kept the snapshot of my grandmother in my desk's top drawer. That committee appointment held a special meaning known only to me.

Once, when so many of us were new to the committee, we were sent for a few days to the Great Southwest for a bit of orientation. Among my greatest thrills early in my House career was the opportunity to go down into a coal mine. I went down more than a thousand feet and then traversed a mile-and-a-half laterally into the Earth.

It was dark and dirty. I loved it. Others didn't. But I did. The experience had a special meaning known only to me.

But what I learned more than anything on that trip - more than the rules and regulations of mining and how the equipment worked and why using canaries is no longer necessary - I learned about the grit of the coal miner.

The miners are tough and strong, many seemingly in a quarrel with the sun. They rise in the morning's dark hours. They drive to work with their coffee steaming against the beams of their headlights. They gear up and sink into the Earth's core, usually still before the sun comes up, for long shifts that probably seem even longer. They work all day in dusty darkness. And at the end of their shift when they return to the surface, sometimes the sun will already have fallen behind the mountains. Then their headlights guide them home again.

Those who do that kind of work today - in their ventilated, electrified, high-ceilinged mines with heavy machines clawing against long walls of coal that's conveyed to railcars and carried out so easily - are especially respectful, almost worshipful, of those who labored before them, folks like my great-grandfather and his brothers and cousins, who went to work with pickaxes and shovels and came home with broken backs and retired from work with lungs that no longer did.

No, today's coal miners don't forget those who paved the road for them, those who fought for better and safer working conditions. And I don't forget them either.

So, yes, it is on Labor Day that my thoughts often will turn to today's coal miners. The hard life they lead. The even harder life that was led by so many generations before them.

I, too, think on Labor Day of what my service in the House means, or should mean, to those who are the salt of the earth, who sweat all day for an honest day's pay.

I think of how I, with my one vote out of 100, can do good things for them. I think of my brand of politics and philosophy of government - how I prefer behind-the-scenes, out-of-the-headlines work to whatever the opposite kind might be called, and how I favor policies, fiscal and social, that make tight-knit families, like those who lived in Pardee way back when, even tighter.

It's these thoughts on Labor Day that reaffirm the very reasons I'm a Republican.

I believe in a tax code that ensures families who have little money get to keep as much of it as they can while at the same time pays for the basic services they need. So I necessarily believe in a lean and efficient state government.

I believe in a system where regulations are unburdensome and few, so that companies can make a better profit, reinvest their capital, expand their operations, create more jobs, hire more people, pay better wages, do more training, and provide better health coverage.

I believe in a government that, for the most part, leaves people alone.

And most of all, I believe in a free enterprise system that gives us the freedom to choose. Freedom to choose whether to live in Southwestern Virginia and work nobly in a coal mine or in our Piedmont as a protect-and-serve state trooper, like my dad, who retired from the road after 31 years, or as a hospital worker, like my mom.

Labor Day is, or should be, a time for reaffirming the values of our capitalist system and our faith in the workers who make it the world's envy. This system that makes us free has been built with pickaxes and shovels and the like. It's been built on the backs of people like those from Pardee.

It's incumbent upon the many of us who serve the public to preserve - to strengthen, to complement - the work done by those who have gone before us. We should do nothing to undo it.

In this respect, every day should be Labor Day.

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