Fostering Connection

2004-03-10T21:41:00.000-05:00

I don't feel like I know enough about the situation in Haiti right now to offer any wise discussion points related to it. But I have read that the same forces that helped bring down Aristide were called in soon after his departure to help break a union in a Haitian free trade zone. Some people trying to unionize were fired, and then some other workers starting acting in support of them. The company was afraid of trouble, and called the 'rebel' forces to come in and threaten. It appears to have been successful. (Source: labornet.org).

That scares me. Back in Minnesota, my dad is on strike. He is a bus mechanic for the public bus system there, and is very involved in the union. My dad doesn't have work and people in the Twin Cities don't have transportation. But the state administration is not budging. Not at all. Before the strike, the union even offered to go to binding arbitration, but the state said no. The state thinks they can win this one, apparently. My dad was also on strike in 1995. Then the administration threatened (perhaps not very seriously) to call out the national guard to drive the buses, essentially using government resources to bust the union's chance at getting a decent contract. This scared lots of unionists, and the Teamsters in the area threatened strikes in all sorts of unrelated industries. The national guard wasn't called out. The strike ended. I got to stop eating frozen pizza every night. But what if the state had forces to come in, to hold guns up to the strikers, to send them back to work or punish them instead? Is this what the U.S. is helping to support in Haiti? Is this what the U.S. wants around the world? Perhaps.

I think that the labor-related things scare me a lot because I have perspective on them. I can relate to those threatened workers to an extent because I know the real life consequences of workers getting pushed around. Or I can sympathize, if nothing else. I think that is one of the biggest things lacking in attempts to organize people around our progressive causes. It is hard for people to come to believe that something so far away matters. It is even hard to get them to believe that something close by matters. I don't know how to mend this, to try to give people some sort of basis for believing that there is a human side to these events, emotions to them, not just words buried in the Times front page.

So I guess that is one of the political things I am thinking about right now. How can we get people to relate, to have a feeling about something they aren't directly involved in? I suppose I didn't have to write this much to ask that. Oh well.

Haiti?

2004-02-27T11:52:00.000-05:00

it's really interesting because I first read about it/saw a story from a mainstream news source that paints a completely different picture of events than that ANSWER email I just sent out. Mainstream idea seems to be that the current president, though democratically elected, is completely out of control, tyrannical, etc. Also that the United States isn't doing anything one way or another. I briefly talked to Ayinde about this yesterday and got a differnet picture...I'm not sure if I trust the ANSWER version of events, though I obviously don't trust the mainstream news account either...

2004-02-27T11:36:00.000-05:00

hey, i'm just posting the first thingie on the weblog. you should post too!

Northwestern Opposing War and Racism

Fostering Connection

Haiti?