The Foxes in Our Hen House?

I started working at a most propitious time for social bonding -- after WW2 when the veterans had returned to enjoy the GI Bill which for the first time gave wide access for blue collar workers to a higher education. The social exchanges were many and two way. We students with privileged educations (I was one on scholarships) interacted with workers in summer jobs -- in construction, factories, the oil fields of Texas, wherever. The Civil rights era was just beginning, too, with Eisenhower's directive for "affirmative action" in our military where minorities had more than proved themselves.

Working with buddies in this way one learned how hard physical work can be on one's body. I was most fortunate not to be killed once by a heavy barrel from a crane which just missed two of us. During a day taken off from a factory job to apply for a fellowship, the guy who replaced me was killed by a fork truck. Just after I left my job as a heavy freight porter at the Oxford station (the Brits had not yet broken down their class barriers so that a university student was an oddity at such a job) two of my mates were blown away by the midnight express.

But another hazard of such jobs was injury. I lost track of mine along the way -- painful but minor, but I saw and heard of others who were badly crippled by physical injuries or simply the wear and tear on bodies. Several of our hard working building staff here in Morningside Heights -- one a college grad -- have developed bad backs in their 50s. Backs seem to be the first things to give way with even relatively mild physical labor.

All of this is written to support the NYC transit workers now on strike who are trying to protect their next generation of workers from exploitation by our super rich now living in their multiple homes with lowered taxes and a supercilious attitude towards their 'hired help'. We have been rushing back into the PAST when taxes for the wealthy were nil and the worker who did not come in Sunday was advised not to bother to come in Monday and thereafter. Can you believe Bloomberg seeking a $25,000 penalty with each day doubling for each striker? Peanuts, I guess, for him.

I saw the remnants of these attitudes when I encountered the lingering generation of super wealthy in several of my summer jobs -- one tutoring Rebecca Harkness's two lovely young daughters in Watch Hill, RI, where I watched (not Mrs. Harkness's) some of the pretentious folks' scorn for their Republican President and our war hero, Eisenhower. I see the same scorn for those giving their lives in Iraq emanating from Washington which has ordered those returning coffins to be kept out of sight. I wish the Iraqis the best, but it for them to get themselves together without our continuing interference and for us to redirect some of our more than half a trillion dollars a year military budget back to people who actually work for a living.

The transit workers deserve respect. They have kept our systems running in the face of the total lack of security either for our subways or busses which are prime terrorist targets. They go deaf from the noise -- this is what a hearing expert explained was a cause of my hearing loss back when the subways were breaking down and we passengers were riding with the windows open. He advised ear plugs which I still wear regularly when I enter the system. And I smelled the burning bodies at the World Trade Center each time we rode past Chambers Street for the next 6 weeks after 9/11. Imagine how they felt with such constant reminders of the losses to so many families of working New Yorkers -- now scorned?

I find our multi billionaires -- "Mike" Bloomberg and his attacks on the transit workers -- morally obscene. And Pataki obviously could not care less about NYC.

Hopefully this transit strike will wake up Americans to the fact that we are facing hard and harder times ahead and had better clean out of our political offices the greedies who are manipulating our economic system in their own corrupt interest. Such types are always going to be with us, but it is time that we got such foxes out of the hen house!
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
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Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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