Come fly with me we'll fly we'll fly away. . .

As I started to make plans to get us all (spouse and cat, bag and baggage) to Florida, I kept hitting bump after bump. Our house to Lansing, Michigan, then Lansing to Orlando (one of the world's busiest airports) then rental car to Venice, a 3 hour drive. And only 2 days a week, so if one day was snowed out we would have to wait three days. OR bus to Detroit, then to Sarasota, then drive to Venice, about an hour. OR fly to Detroit. And airplanes are not too thrilled about animals on board; we had a hard time booking any cheap seats. Plus car rentals are up to $250 a month more expensive when you pick them up at airports. Cats have to have vet certificates and must be under the seat. And even more hassles I will not bore you with. I was not going to drag a sick husband and freaked-out cat and luggage through strange and chaotic airports with the chance of getting stuck somewhere due to snow.

On a hunch I called this guy that operates a small charter service and sure enough lots of people fly from Michigan to Florida and he flies them. In a group it is not much more expensive than commercial, plus no groping airport inspectors, the ability to hold Honey on our laps (as long as she is leashed), and right from a small town near here straight to Venice. Talked to the pilot just today. All systems are go. The plane is bigger than the one above, by the way. If it snows, we just take off when the weather is good. This outfit flies all over and has a good reputation.

OMG I hope this works out.

Pukaskwa

They say the wind screams here in the winter and the First People thus named it Old Woman Bay. It's lovely and remote, 200 miles north into Canada along Hwy 17 on Lake Superior. We used to go here every 2 or 3 years and stayed in old campgrounds or cabins that no longer exist. 

There are many walking trails one can take; my favorite leads straight up, looking down at the lake and the river that leads into it. There are deer and black bear but they are shy and I only saw evidence of their scats. 

Delicate lady slipper orchids are common and remind me of a story I read as a child of a fairy-type being, she had a hickory nut as a head, and she tied these flowers on for shoes. One day a squirrel ate her head and she, being an apple twig, found a nook in an old tree and gave it new growth.

It's a relatively easy 3 miles through dense pine forest with ferns and mossy rocks. Little squirrels would squawk at me from the trees and when I stopped I could at first hear nothing, not even the big logging trucks on the Trans-Can. If I kept silent I could hear insects buzzing, rustles in the undergrowth, tiny streams trickling and, occasionally, something bigger. The sense of peace was so complete I did not feel afraid.

After about 3 miles I would come to an ancient river bed, lined with stones. Here the Ojibwa people dug shallow pits in the dry bed and replaced the stones. They are called pukaskwas. These are about 1-2 thousand years old and are sacred places, places to sit and meditate, to go on vision quests. With reverence I removed my backpack and camera and carefully sat in one.

There are two versions to what happened next. In one version I was quickly beset by swarms of mosquitos as big as sparrows and my tender backside was gouged by the hard rocks and stones. I jumped up, slathered more bug spray on, and galloped back down the trail. Actually that is the true version of my first experience.

But the second time I was more ready. More open. A friendly breeze kept the bugs off me and the stones seemed to cushion rather than poke me. After awhile I was just there. There was no me that was separate from the forest, the sun, the lake. I breathed without realizing it. I was liquid. I was in the most profound peace I have ever experienced. I might never have left.

I know what distracted me and brought me out of my trance; it was seeing a piece of plastic left behind by a careless hiker. I was annoyed at that and it broke the spell. I got up and left. I did not have a vision or any great insight. I did not see my future. I just went somewhere else in those moments. But it was good. And I carried the plastic out.

This sort of experience has happened to me a very few times, the last being one time in Florida a year or two ago. I should practice meditation more often; I do sometimes but not on a regular basis. It's not the place that matters, it is the openness.

But still, it was a beautiful place. 

Movie review: Lincoln

The joke is that Lincoln didn't do well in theaters...

A friend of mine has as part of his profile that he stayed awake in class. By and large, I spent my time doodling or writing notes to my friends.  So I found suspense in this movie where there should not have been. I thought Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation. But as he and everyone else knew (except me) this was a largely symbolic gesture and had little, if any, effect on the slaves being held in the "nation" of the Confederacy. 

Lincoln is a movie on several levels. It is the story of the 13th Amendment which did free the slaves in 1865 and it is also the story of Lincoln, the man, husband, father, national icon and master manipulator. And on a third level it is also the story of how white America regarded black America with implications for how race relations might be today.

To get the usual stuff out of the way, the acting was great, the direction great (with one exception I will get to), the writing fabulous.  Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a Lincoln beset by two goals: to end the bloody Civil war and to end slavery. The South has sent emissaries to sue for peace, but they want to keep their slaves.

Pushing for an end to slavery will prolong a war no one wants. Pushing for an end to the war will leave black Americans in slavery. Accomplishing both goals: an end to the war and an end to slavery will take an amendment to the Constitution, and to get this amendment through Congress will take negotiating, manipulating, horse-trading, and politicking on a grand and inglorious, even criminal, level.  The players in this fascinating drama, particularly Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook and James Spader, give bright sharp performances, finely nuanced, of real people struggling with complex issues and strong passions.

As well as family life. The thread of Lincoln the family man, with a loyal but over-wrought wife and 2 sons, is nicely woven through the political intrigues. As a father, Lincoln is stern, tender, autocratic, indulgent. The scenes of him waiting with his young son Tad for the result of the congressional vote on the amendment are among the movies most poignant. And of course, for me, who didn't know how the vote turned out, suspenseful.

So we all know how the war ends, how Lincoln meets his end, the triumph and tragedy of that era in US history.  My one quibble with Steven Spielberg, the director, is that he throws in a couple of sentimental scenes that are not needed and that detract from the ultimate true character of the man. Yes, he was noble, but he was also Blagojevichian. That's what makes him, and the movie, interesting.

There is another subtle theme woven through the movie. It is made clear that, except for the black Union soldiers, the war was not fought to free the slaves. The Republicans (republic-ans) were fighting for the Union, for the United States of America. While many were also Abolitionists, not all were. Many, if not most white Northerners, did not believe in the equality of the races, neither Democrat nor Republican. Racism ran deep and one of the major obstacles Lincoln faced in getting the anti-slavery amendment passed was the fears of white Northerners that, once freed, black Americans would want to vote. "In a hundred years" someone hollers. Knowing the history of the Civil Rights movement of the nineteen sixties, that seems a prophetic statement.

There were more casualties in the three days of fighting at Gettysburg than deaths in Vietnam. More men were killed in the Civil War than in all our other wars combined. This is a movie about a facet of this time and it is well worth seeing. 

Bread and Roses

 That's me, in the strong arms of my grandmothers.

Bread and Roses: The 1912 Lawrence textile Strike
By Joyce Kornbluh, edited for length and clarity

With some words by me in blue.

Early in January 1912 a dramatic ten-week strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts became a widely publicized conflict, acquainting the nation with the plight of the unskilled, foreign-born worker. [Previous to this time, it was thought that unskilled, foreign workers, many of them young, could not be organized.]

My grandmothers grew up in the same small Italian village, played together as children, and probably listened as their fathers made plans to come to the new world to make a better life. 

Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 was a great textile center; its principal mills were those of the American Woolen Company, a consolidation of thirty-four factories whose yearly output was valued at $45,000,000. The mills employed over 40,000 persons, about half of Lawrence's population. Most of them were unskilled workers of many nationalities, who had come from Europe and the middle east after 1900. 

The I.W.W. (International Workers of the World or "Wobblies") had been organizing among the foreign born in Lawrence since 1907 and claimed over a thousand members, but it had only about 300 paid up members on its rolls. 

Despite a heavy, government tariff protection of the woolen industry, the wages and living standards of textile operatives had declined steadily since 1905. Just like today, the companies were making money but the workers weren't. The introduction of the two-loom system in the woolen mills and a speed-up in the cotton industry had resulted in lay-offs, unemployment, and a drop in wages. For the week ending November 25, 1911, textile employees averaged about $8.76 for a full week's work.

In addition, the cost of living was high in Lawrence. Rents ranged from $1.00 to $6.00 a week for small tenement apartments in frame buildings which the Neil Report found "extra hazardous" in construction and potential firetraps.

My grandmothers, still girls about 14, went to work in the mills in Lawrence as soon as they arrived in America. Their families lived together and the girls shared a bed with their sisters. In addition, my grandmother Teresa, on the left, took her younger siblings to the railroad yards after work and they brought home coal that had fallen off the cars.

Bread, pasta, molasses, and beans were the staple diet of most mill workers. "When we eat meat it seems like a holiday, especially for the children," testified one weaver before the March 1912 congressional hearings.

Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a Lawrence physician, wrote: "A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work . . . thirty-six out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before or by the time they are twenty-five years of age. 

Responding in a small way to public pressure over the working conditions of textile employees, the Massachusetts state legislature passed a law, effective January 1, 1912, which reduced the weekly hours from fifty-six to fifty-four for working women and children. Workers feared that this would mean a corresponding wage cut; and they realized that a reduction of two-hours pay would mean three loaves of bread less each week.

Polish women weavers in the Everett Cotton Mills were the first to notice a shortage of thirty two cents in their pay envelopes on January 11. They stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short pay, short pay!" Other such outbursts took place throughout Lawrence. The next morning workers at the Washington and Wood mills joined the walkout. For the first time in the city's history, the bells of the Lawrence city ball rang the general riot alarm.

That afternoon a mass meeting was held at the Franco-Belgian Hall, and a telegram was sent to Joseph Ettor, an I.W.W. union board member, asking that he come from New York to assist and organize the strike. He was well known in the Italian community, could speak English, Italian, and Polish fluently and could understand Hungarian and Yiddish.

Mass picketing and arrests started the first week of the strike. It was the first time there had ever been mass picketing in any New England town. When crowds of workers demonstrated in front of the Atlantic and Pacific mills, they were drenched by water from fire hoses on adjoining roofs. The strikers retaliated by throwing chunks of ice. Thirty-six were arrested and most of them sentenced to a year in prison. As the judge stated, "The only way we can teach them is to deal out the severest sentences." 

The governor ordered out the state militia and state police. One officer remarked, "Our company of militia rather enjoyed going down there to have a fling at those people." Harry Emerson Fosdick quoted a Boston lawyer: "The strike should have been stopped in the first twenty-four hours. The militia should have been instructed to shoot. That is the way Napoleon did it."

My grandmothers marched arm-in-arm, singing or carrying banners with the rest of the girls. The banners said "We want bread and roses too." One day they heard screaming behind them and, looking, saw men on horseback, swinging clubs or poles. The men rode through the teenagers, swinging and hitting virtually everyone.  They were hurt but not badly. 

Lawrence was a new kind of strike, the first time such large numbers of unskilled, unorganized foreign-born workers had followed the leadership of the I.W.W.

"It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous," wrote labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse. "They are always marching and singing. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their months to sing." American Magazine reported:

It is not short of amazing, the power of a great idea to weld men and women together. . . . There was in it a peculiar, intense, vital spirit, a religious spirit if you will, that I have never felt before in any strike. . . . At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to bold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence [on the part of the strikers].

One of the largest demonstrations of the strike took place on January 29 when Ettor addressed a mass meeting on the Lawrence Common, urged the strikers to be peaceful and orderly, and led them on a march through the business district. At one of the mills, a company of militiamen refused to let them pass. Ettor averted a conflict by waving the paraders up a side street. They followed, and cheered him for his good sense.

Two of the strike leaders were arrested and martial law was enforced. City officials declared all public meetings illegal, and Lawrence authorities called out more militia companies.

The arrests were aimed at disrupting the strike. However, the I.W.W. sent Bill Haywood to Lawrence. More than 15,000 strikers met Haywood at the railroad station and carried him down Essex Street to the Lawrence Common, where he addressed a group of 25,000.  Looking down from the speaker's stand and seeing the young strikers in the crowd, Haywood roared: "Those kids should be in school instead of slaving in the mills." Throughout the strike, Haywood urged strikers to maintain an attitude of passive resistance.

By far the most dramatic episode of the strike involved sending the strikers' children to sympathetic families in other cities. About 120 children left Lawrence on February 10. Margaret Sanger, later famous for her work in birth control, was one of the nurses who accompanied the children. She testified before a congressional committee in March: "Out of the 119 children, only four had underwear on ... their outerwear was almost in rags . . . their coats were simply torn to shreds ... and it was the bitterest weather we have had this winter."

When the time came to depart, the children, arranged in a long line, two by two in an orderly procession with the parents near at hand, were about to make their way to the train when the police . . . closed in on us with their clubs, beating right and left with no thought of the children who then were in desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and the children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the panic-stricken mothers and children. We can scarcely find words with which to describe this display of brutality.

This clash between the children and the police was the turning point of the Lawrence strike. Protests from every part of the country reached Congress as newspaper and magazine articles focused attention on the strike. Congressmen Victor Berger and William Wilson from Pennsylvania called for an investigation.

In early March, the House Committee on Rules heard testimony from a group of teenage Lawrence strikers. "As soon as I came home I had to go to sleep, I was so tired," the congressmen were told by a fifteen-year-old girl. The young workers testified that the textile companies held back a week of their wages, that they were often required to do unpaid clean-up work on Saturdays, and that in order to get decent drinking water in the mills some of them had to pay five or ten cents a week.

Concerned over the public reaction to the hearings, and the possible threat to their own tariff protection, the American Woolen Company acceded to the strikers' demands on March 12, 1912. By the end of March, the rest of the Lawrence textile companies fell in line. Wages were raised for textile workers throughout all of New England, an average of $1.30 more a week.

But the immediate effect of the Lawrence strike was to hearten textile workers in other Eastern areas. The strike also made a profound impression on the public and the rest of the labor movement by dramatizing the living and working conditions of unorganized, foreign-born workers in crowded industrial areas, and communicating the spirit of their rebellion.

Literary critic Kenneth McGowan wrote in Forum Magazine:

Whatever its future, the I.W.W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing, a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags [they were supposedly communists] and violence and sabotage, and that is the individual awakening of "illiterates" and "scum" to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class consciousness; they have learned consciousness of Self . . . .

Most of this family history was reported to me by my parents. The two girls, who shared childhood games and terrible poverty, who were beaten by men on horseback, remained lifelong friends. They both married; one had a boy, one had a girl and these children became my father and mother. Respect for unions was a family tradition and early on I was not only taught to respect the part that my grandmothers played in unionism, but also the place that unionism played in making this country what it is.  

Right now in my state of Michigan, there is a move to weaken unions and I fear it will take hold. That is what is impelling me to write this.

I took my first union job when I was 20, and from 1978 to 2008 I was a member of the National Education Association as a school social worker. I am proud of my grandmothers (and great-aunts and uncles) for what they went through to earn a living in a new country, and what they went through to be paid enough not just for bread but also for roses: a little left-over to have some dignity and joy in life. 

The Twilight Zone

Kurt Vonnegut, I am told, said that every writer writes for one person; in his case it was his sister. I don't know who I write for, I suspect that it is a group of people pretty close to my Multiply contacts list. Some of you are here and I am grateful.

I am humbled by some of the writers I encounter on Blogger; I wonder if I have the discipline to write often enough, and edit myself, so that I reach that level. Probably not, I can't even stop using semi-colons, which Vonnegut said were worse than useless.

So I will tell you a story. Until I was about 8 and my brother was 6 we shared a room in a tiny apartment that unbelievably still exists. We moved when my father got a job teaching and landed in a house, still not large, but with 3 bedrooms. My mother was pregnant at the time so the larger bedroom with crib would go to me, if the baby was a girl, and to my brother if the baby was a boy. 

But having spent so long together, we often ended up in the same room, a practice my mother tried to discourage but failed. Our usual excuse was "bad dream" which my mother accepted, figuring the alternative was a crying child outside the master bedroom. The baby, a girl, was born and the big bedroom with the crib went to me and the sleeping infant was enough to quiet my fears in the night. 

All was well until "Twilight Zone". We were told not to watch "Twilight Zone", we were forbidden to watch "Twilight Zone", and every opportunity we got we watched "Twilight Zone". By that time we were 10 and 8 or 11 and 9 and my parents socialized with people across the street or next door and, times being what they were, they did not hire a sitter, but simply told us to go to bed at 8 and come get them if need be. They might not even have locked the door.

Clutching each other in an ecstasy of terror we watched the episode with the guy with 3 eyes, the episode with the bulging headed spacemen whose mission was To Serve Man, and the little girl who fell out of her bed into the 4th dimension. And so on. Afterwards, we turned off the TV so it wouldn't be warm when my parents came home, and went to bed.

To dream. In the end that ratted us out. Bad dreams every Thursday (I think) night. Or every Thursday night that my parents were playing bridge with the neighborhood group. So this time they meant it, really meant it, and Rod Serling was banished from our house for some time.

Funny thing is, the show is still scary. I've watched it on old time TV channels and those episodes, some of them, are scary. Rod Serling all by himself is scary. There are lots of scary things in the world, war, disease, loss, guilt, but they are scary in a different way. Or, in the alternative, maybe "The Twilight Zone" was scary because it captured the essence of human fears, real fears, in the form of stories that could be dismissed as "science fiction" except that the dark side of human nature that Serling exposed is still around. And still fairly terrifying.  

Ex-Catholic schoolgirl that I am, I want to make a happy ending. Hard to do with what is on the news. The only comfort I can offer is this: cherish the good dreams, let go of the bad dreams and hold each other tight.

Talking back to Thomas Peterffy

who should have stayed in Hungary

As many of you throughout the world have noticed, we are having an election in the US next week. And I am sure you are sick of hearing of it. I know I am. But here's a pernicious little twist: an immigrant from Hungary, a nice looking gray-haired little man, is spending millions to tell how how he is voting and why.

When he came here at age 12, he dreamt of being rich. That's ok, I dreamt of being a ballerina at that age. And Soviet oppression was - oppressive. So yay, he comes here and somehow, in about 20 years he's made enough money to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and now he has between 5 and 7 billion dollars, all gotten on the up-and-up I am sure.

He has made 2 commercials which you can find on YouTube, or in the US by watching CNN. He looks into the camera and speaks softly and earnestly, telling the story of his life and imploring us to avoid socialism, which he has seen first hand. Accompanied by grim black and white photos, he tells of the freedoms of the US capitalist system and how, if we discourage people who make money, we will become like his native Hungary, poorer and poorer. The wealthy, he tells us, take care of the needy, unless we discourage them, presumably by taxing or regulating them.

And Hungary is such a bleak place. It was socialist and became poorer and poorer. The pictures he shows prove it.

He doesn't mention a candidate, but tells us he is voting Republican. So rich people won't feel discouraged. As  they did in Hungary. Against another grainy b/w photo of people out of a refugee movie he says we must learn from the past. (One of my contacts on another site, a Danish woman, is puzzled. You don't have socialists running for office in the US, she said. I told her many people think Obama is a socialist. She was dumbfounded.)

So here is my rebuttal. I'll acknowledge that Hungary in the 50's was poor and under the thumb of Soviet Russia. But by the mid-1960's, it had begun to move toward a more open society. The years between the late 60's and early 90's saw a loosening of totalitarian shackles and the forming of a country that was able to balance commerce and social welfare.

A woman I know quite well went to visit Hungary in 1981 with her sister, both fluent in Magyar or Hungarian. They found and enjoyed an open, vibrant society, quite unlike the gray misery shown in Peterffy's ad. They were free to travel, speak with the people and even enjoy some nightlife. I am including three pictures she gave me to contrast with Thomas Peterffy's b/w pictures of poor discouraged hopeless Hungary.

What impressed her more was the fabric of society. Here was a modern nation which had an ethic of taking care of its people. Most women worked, but were given 2 years of paid child care leave and their job back at the end. Education, healthcare, care for the elderly and the infants were all part of society. The Hungarians were quite proud of themselves.

But the nation was still unhappy with Soviet influence, so in the early 90's, when the Russians withdrew, they rushed to do a U-turn and voted in many capitalists. They got a few Hungarian millionaires, but the standard of living fell under the capitalist system. Oops. In the elections of May 1994, the people voted the socialists back in. They remain a potent political force to this day.

So I say this to Thomas Peterffy: socialism works. Given a choice, the Hungarians voted socialists back in. In free elections. They liked it. Taking care of each other works. Totalitarian communism doesn't work, but there is a difference and you know it. You should have stuck around your native Hungary. Maybe you wouldn't be a billionaire, but really, how much money do you need? Why don't you just shut up, pay taxes, and let us find our own way without lying to the American people.

One last thing you cheapskate. You spent millions on this ad campaign, but you only gave $61,000 to the Republican party. Wanted control over the dough, didn't you? That's what it's all about, isn't it? Power and control. And you are trying to tell me the wealthy will take care of the needy? Pfft.

A place in the sun

If I wonder where my cat is, I don't need to look any farther than the nearest pool of sunlight. And there she is.

I am putting my house back together after the great bedbug massacre; mostly I was able to keep stuff that I really liked. I don't know where I got this crystal, it may have been a gift from a child. I caught it in the sun from the window. 

Another item I was able to keep is this sampler I made when I was five. I remember making it and not minding although it is not something I would have a five-year-old do. It's a puzzle to me and yet I treasure it. I was afraid it would have to be washed, which would have destroyed it, but all I had to do was put it by itself in an empty drawer when they heated the house. 

How I managed to hang on to it for 57 years is also a mystery. It probably was in my parents' house until my 30's when I took many of my old belongings to my own house. It would have been my mother who would have kept it when so many of my childhood things were thrown out.

The leaf rakers are here to get the leaves off the lawn, or at least some of the leaves off some of the lawn. They have their work cut out for them. They really need supervision so I guess I will go and see how they are carrying on.