| The dream of prosperity and success does not belong only to the richest and most powerful. I have seen the dream in the eyes of the lowliest laborer and some of our loftiest thinkers. I have seen the dream in my own eyes. The dream of something better for our children and security for our old age isn't something that should be stolen from the bargaining table and decided by political ideologues and corporate lapdogs. The dream exists in our right to bargain and negotiate for a fair share of our labors fruits.
When a politician tells you that you don't need nor deserve a seat at the table where your working conditions, pay or benefits are decided, that politician can't be trusted and has no respect for history or blood shed by greater men and women.
Many of us spent last week remembering one of the men who paid the ultimate price for the rights and privileges so many of us have known for only four and a half decades and as we listen to people like Chris Christie favor the richest in the state over the suffering and daily struggles of the poor and middle class, I have to wonder if the clock has been turned back on us.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fire-hosed, beaten and bled for the most basic rights and freedoms of black men and women throughout the country and, when that battle was finally won, he focused on the rights and freedoms of laborers, regardless of race, and died in that battle. Now we have a "New Conservative" movement seeking to erase his sacrifice.
It is no small thing to steal a person's freedom and the attacks on the working class in both the public and private sector can't be mistaken for anything but a theft of hard fought and earned rights and hard earned freedom. The freedom to be fairly compensated and treated in the workplace is a basic American value that can't be understated.
It was 43 years ago that public workers throughout the country were finally winning the right to collective bargaining and 43 years ago, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis where he was standing to support sanitation workers striking for the right to collective bargaining. After 43 years, the Dream is under renewed attack and the GOP darlings like Chris Christie (with the help of some disingenuous small "d" democrats like Stephen Sweeney) are leading the charge.
The same people that have fought against workers' rights in favor of corporate oppression for most of the 20th century are upping the ante in the 21st and stepping into fascist territory with draconian attacks and laws targeting basic workers' rights and freedoms and the full-fledged intent to destroy union representation in its last stronghold; the public sector.
What is sadder and, honestly, more pathetic in all of this is the middle-class, private-sector tax-payers cheering it on. They have been convinced that they are somehow separate and apart from their friends, neighbors and relatives who work in the public sector. That they will somehow benefit from the degradation of living and working conditions of the public workers. They completely miss the conventional wisdom on how reducing salaries and access to affordable benefits in fair negotiations will negatively impact fiscal conditions in their neighborhoods, negatively impact the tax base and reduce the incomes of small businesses. They are cheering their own eventual failure that will result from the attacks on collective bargaining.
When the Chris Christie's and Scott Walker's of the world finally succeed in smothering the dreams of the poor and middle class for the benefit and profit of only the richest, what will we have left? Will there be another Dr. King to take us to the mountaintop and share with us his dream or will he be another wage slave, working three jobs in sweatshop conditions just to survive, too tired to care and too oppressed to stand up? Will that be the final victory of the Republican agenda, to kill the dream, once and for all? |
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