I had a surprise knock on my door yesterday. Cindy Denby is our MI House State Representative, and she is running for re-election. Truth be told? When I heard the car door, and saw her plodding up my walk, I thought, someone lost a dog or something. She handed me her doorknocker sized pamphlet, and started to introduce herself. I glanced down at the picture and the bright red “Conservative Republican” and said, “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, never going to happen, I’m a wild liberal!” She actually laughed. “Wild?” I wished her a nice day anyway. I suppose on a better day, a day I was remotely in the mood for people, I would have taken that chance to ask her in for coffee and debated with her. She seemed pleasant enough. I have to give her credit for going door to door herself. I must be growing soft, I didn’t even have the remote desire to rip her spine out through her mouth. I totally blew off the chance to get on my soapbox and ask if supporting the Rich really was good for the People.
Other than hunkering down with our immediates and stockpiling toilet paper, what is it we can do? That’s the question the far-left keeps asking. Communes are a pretty pipe dream, but post-oil Armageddon? We could suggest the survivors all do the pilgrimage back to the Georgia Guidestones, and renew the World with our new angelic ways. But Georgia has Georgians, and they know the lie of the Land. Ever seen Deliverance? I’m pretty sure the area is tropical swamp. It has lots of fresh water, 887 thousand kinds of poisonous snakes, and the mosquitoes have gunner pilots on board. Besides, most of us are old fucks and couldn’t survive the 3 year walk it would take to get there.
( map wouldn’t work here…)
So what now, Diane? You blow off change from within, and you won’t let us think we have special powers to survive, find one another and live happily ever after. Hell, you won’t even let us hunker down and wallow in self-gratification as the Empire burns. Just when you thought your porn collection and stockpiled heirloom weed seed would come in handy!
Don’t despair. I have an angle. I always have an angle. You did read the Title, yes?
I had been thinking about the ridiculous sham of celebrating Labor Day; when Labor has been defeated in it’s entire as a substantive movement. I grew up in the belly of the Teamsters/CIO land, and like many others, imagined Jimmy Hoffa in every piece of newly paved road.
I remember hating scabs, and everyone fiercely supporting Union made products. I remember too, the sadness of my Father, with his cottage industry job, unionized, seeing how much better paid and rewarded his peers were. There were no Unions for his special trade of Diamond Truing. He set up Diamond Wheels, placing each chip; then used a predecessor for what became CNC machines to grind them to the millionth of an inch. He used to do the long calculus equations in his head, faster than when the other guys started buying those things called “calculators.” It didn’t matter if he was brilliant, there was no room to move into the Big Three for his skill, and no protections for small business employees.
You see, the Unions didn’t happen in a vacuum. Labor, when my Dad grew up was non-existent. It took motivation, it took hardship, it took realizing that they had the Power to stop the Wealth from flowing upward. Unions grew from the pain of the People, put there by the Elites. It took the realization that the Wealth came only from and by their own Power.
Labor became the enemy with the coronation of Ronald Reagan… simply because it had Power, the Power to lessen the profits of the Elites.
It was hard to fight the demonization, simply because People were doing so well as a result of a Unionized society, that they all imagined they were on the path to Wealth. They managed, in our best of times to convince us not that the Unions had corruption in them, they were corruption itself. They stole our identity, and made us in their own greedy image. That is not who and what we are. It is a phase, a growing pain.
We cannot move the People yet. It will take hardship, realizing their Power has been taken from them.
You see, it will take things to get worse before they get better. We do have the history on which to draw when they do. We have a history of Union. We have a history of Labor.We have a history of revolt. Eventually as the worst Depression ever imagined takes place, and the jobless are in every family, and those working face ever-increasing abuse, we shall rise together.
As they privatize every social safety net, making our blood their profit, we shall rise.
Right now is not the time yet. There have always been scabs, and most of the workforce is now in that category. Not because they are mean or evil, it is because they are desperate. They set us up that the only way, for the moment, to not be swept out to sea with the jobless wretches means doing the job by any means necessary.
For the moment.
They have us fearful, in this land of shoot-first, ask later. They have us terrified of their brutal weaponry, against which baseball bats and clubs will no longer work. But we are many, and we are armed, and we too know the lie of the land.
But eventually, there will come the perfect storm…. the Elites themselves will be weakened by the lack of consumer class, or the people that will just stop paying. They cannot empty every home, and leave them vacant with Bank sale signs. They will set upon one another instead, trying to destroy one another and steal their wealth.
The People themselves will become aware that they are being oppressed in every way, and the stories of horrors will pass family to family, relative to relative, stranger to stranger in the markets and byways.
We will remember who we are. We the People. Labor, without which nothing is created and society itself collapses.
We shall rise United, and remember our roots of Labor, and our roots of oppression.
The era will not be called The Depression, more likely something akin to The Catastrophe.
We are capable of learning, we have done so in the past. Greater Harm calls for Greater Protections, and this time around we might just provide the safeguards that make “Never Again” set in stone.
The Oil Empire is in its Death Throes. The Earth herself is rejecting it. The new way will safeguard cleaner Energy as a national non-profit service for all. We will organize as we did in our Father’s time, only this time leaving no one out. No loophole for the greedy to disenfranchise any member of our society again. Pendulums of time swing, and the more extreme the rightward swing, the further it returns Left. Perhaps this will be the time we take the leap of faith, and jump off at it’s penultimate arc, landing soundly in the land of a sane, equatable society.
Timing is everything. We cannot jump off too soon.
The groundwork is the words.
Its just a matter of waiting for the timing. It may be sooner than you think.
Labor Day is a joke now, but it wasn’t always, and it won’t always be.
We shall rise again.
I’d still stock up on toilet paper, ganga seeds and porn though.
It may be an ugly wait.
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