Sunday, November 20, 2011

South Side Story

Until Friday, we hadn’t heard much new about “Occupy Wall Street.” There had been the inevitable confrontations between demonstrators and authorities. We’ve been shown a TV clip of a bleeding demonstrator being hauled away after having been bludgeoned by police. This was clearly an overreaction by a policeman for having his hat knocked off. I also believe the initial act was counter to the intent of a substantial majority of the movement.
 
But New York’s Mayor Bloomberg’s claim was that labor unions are the backbone of OWS, was newsworthy, also revealing a faulty sense of proportion. It clarified the way the lines have been drawn. There’s a lot of anti union sentiment out there and now we now know where it’s headed. I suppose this was obvious when this whole movement first made news. Hizzoner just confirmed it.
 
Certainly union people have committed acts ranging from unethical to criminal. As a member of a union most of my life I can attest that mine has worked with something less than perfection. So should we abolish them? If the answer is yes then by that reasoning the same can be said of police, to which I’d add among others, public educators and the military. We should consider that these people are paid to represent all citizens equally and should therefore be held to a somewhat stricter standard than union officials who, like the Chamber of Commerce, are openly paid to represent a particular group.
 
It seems obvious who will eventually win this battle, the only question being when. However it develops, things are bound to get messy. It’s in the interest of the nation to keep them from getting too messy. The longer this battle takes the greater the chance of losing a semblance of Constitutional order. We have two directly opposing forces, one of which will have to give in. The spirit behind OWS involves too many people for it to be stopped. If the opposing side recognizes the inevitable, the conflict can be settled by relatively few people, say roughly one percent.

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