CSotD: Why is the post office closed?

Gil is one of the very, very few strips acknowledging Labor Day as more than a last chance to grill burgers. The other I found was Non Sequitur.

Mike Thompson took a wack at it, too, but made it into a partisan attack, which seems a bit off-topic even in an election cycle, given the general trends.

 

I think tying the trend to one specific company seems to minimize the overall impact. It really has been a frog-in-the-pot tendency over a couple of decades.

Or maybe a Mad Barber thing: A snip here, a bit of a trim there, a little more taken off over there, and then you realize they've gone from cutting hair to cutting throats, only you got so used to the straight razor waving around your face that you didn't think twice.

There are crazies in the unions, of course. I never felt as intimidated in my reporting days as I did trying to talk to strikers on a picket line at a plastics factory, and I've hung around criminals and ex-cons and bikers. But think about it: Of course the crazies are over-represented on picket lines. Who's most likely to volunteer to stand out there and yell slogans?

(For that matter, get involved in a political campaign and watch how quickly you get surrounded by loonies. Hey, they're willing to stuff envelopes for hours, to go hang posters all over town, to staff phone banks … and their payoff is that they get to go to the convention and run around in stupid hats for a couple of days. Who did you think those goof balls were?)

Just because there are some extremists among the foot soldiers, that's no reason to condemn the idea that working people deserve a place at the table. Of course they do. And most working people have a pretty good sense of decency and perspective, if anyone wants to listen.

In 1894, Nellie Bly went out to the model town of Pullman, Illinois, intending to write articles that would unmask the strikers as ingrates, as anarchists, as bloodthirsty maniacs.

But in talking to them, she discovered, for instance, that they were being required to take pay cuts for the good of the company, but the rents on their company housing remained the same, and, if they moved out of the model community, they lost their jobs.

She became a fierce supporter of their cause.

Reporters don't show up and make those sorts of judgments often enough; Anderson Cooper got far too much credit for departing from the received wisdom in his Hurricane Katrina reporting. That is, his independence of thought and willingness to look around should not have stood out so much.

Neither should Bly's. But there you have it.

Somehow, the worker's voice has been lost, and not entirely because the bosses own the media, though that's not a small factor.

But I've seen an attempt to organize go astray because a large national union was unable to explain what they could do for local workers. And I've seen small, local unions fall apart because their officers were amateurs and not experienced in dealing with union-busting management. Somewhere in the middle, there's got to be somebody who remembers how to play this game.

If nothing else, keep the day.

When they tried to downgrade November 11, to make Veteran's Day just another three-day weekend, the vets stood up and insisted that the actual date had meaning, and Veteran's Day today is still November 11, and it still is about saluting veterans. 

And Memorial Day, though it has certainly become a festival of picnics and mattress sales, retains its core meaning and still is marked with parades, trips to cemeteries and a certain solemnity.

Maybe what happened to Labor Day is that we're all so eager to become instant millionaires, to join the exalted 1 percent, that we're like Maggie in "Bringing Up Father," denying our roots, proudly going out to the opera with Count Uptoten and trying desperately to distance ourselves from Jiggs and his corned beef and cabbage.

Anyway, it's nice that at least a couple of people remember why the banks and the post office are closed.

Because this isn't just about history. It's about current events, too.