A discussion with One Who Was Once a Worker in America
I talked to a man today who remembers when unions represented the workers of this country. He has variously voted Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, and Green. Now he sits broken and frustrated as the workers of this country lose everything their mothers and fathers worked so hard to gain. We have outsourced our self respect to some twelfth world country on the edge of Nowhere and the only way to get it back is to do what we do best – work. Work on a new job for a new world. The new job is removing the reins of power from the hands of those who do not deserve either the power, the wealth or the respect that they have stolen from the people of this world who actually do the work that lines their pockets. This worker in his dirty jeans encrusted with the hard soil of his labor, hands grimed with the sweat and dirt of his labor, sat alongside me today and talked about the direction this country needs to go. Here's what he had to say: We're tired. They told us if we tried hard and if we behaved, the world would be good, we'd 'make it'. Well, they lied. They lied to us from the get-go and maybe we don't want to behave any more.
Maybe we're tired of behaving. If I ran for office on this issue, I could band together every red neck son of a b*tch and his mother, everybody making a hundred grand who thought their pension was going to be there when they retired, every member of all the dead unions who knew what it was like when America worked. The powers that be don't know what power is until somebody pulls that plug.
I'll tell you, babe, they just don't know.
Maybe it's time, babe. Maybe it's time we took to the streets because workin just ain't workin any more. Behaving ain't getting us anywhere...................
Read the rest of the article in the current issue of We!
Norla Antinoro is a life long Democrat. Born in California she spent most of the last 45 years in and around Tucson, Arizona; Guelph, Ontario; Buffalo, New York and currently resides in Oregon. She is an editor and writer for We! Magazine - a (
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