Today, in a facebook comment thread concerning the present demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, a friend of a friend, (I'll call her Ms. Mary) stated:
Ive had to take massive cuts left and right but u dont see me bitching. I stay and do my job. Why? Because im happy as hell to still have one.
That got my goat.
No, not that goat!
I spent this morning in the Capitol rotunda banging a cowbell and trying to keep up the spirits of my brothers and sisters. We had a snowy, tense, 75-mile bus ride home, passing by 7 cars in the ditch and two more in a collision.
Sorry Ms. Mary, but I gotta bitch and bleat like a billygoat with a belly full of tin cans.
I'm happy as hell to have a job too. I'm sure a sharecropper is happy to chop cotton and dig peanuts for the landlord. I'm happy that I'm not starving to death or living under a bridge. But that doesn't make our community a place where the dignity of working people is upheld and justice for all is preserved.
If we want to live in a banana republic where the money and power of a tiny minority of wealthy people and corporate weasels crush the hopes of free people, then yes, a mouthful of bread and a warm place to defecate is all you need. But that isn't the land of the free & home of the brave I grew up in. I'm too damn proud of my country and my state to cower in fear every time the Koch brothers snap their fingers.
I signed on to work as a prison guard 30 years ago because I believe in justice for all. Governor Walker's ultimate goal is to crush the unions and turn the state prisons over to a private, for profit, corporation. If that happens, then the security and safety of people on both sides of the prison bars will take a back seat to shareholder profits.
Ms. Mary, I mean you no disrespect but I can't be silent when my fellow citizens convice themselves that they are powerless and alone. If you believe that there is hope, then there is hope. I'm pushing for a just and fair society in which you and every other working person is free to raise their eyes above the gutter. A nation where all the people can participate in building world that is just, peaceful and prosperous.
Ok, that's my rant. I don't know if Ms. Mary was convinced or just thinks I'm an asshole union thug. Either way, I had to get it off my chest.
Solidarity forever,
ruleoflaw