The State of the Union

That paladin of liberty Thomas Jefferson once famously informed his friend James Madison, "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical... It is a medicine necessary to the sound health of government." From wherever he is watching us now, our Third President can rest in peace knowing that the human race still remembers to take its medicine, for the flame lit in Egypt a week ago has spread like a wildfire throughout the Middle East, and has now arrived back in the country that originally lit it 235 years ago, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin- where teachers, police officers, firefighters, and countless others are banding together to defend one of the most precious rights to a modern, industrialized society- the right to form a union and bargain collectively.

It is far too easy for 21st Century Americans, complacent in our middle class lifestyles and all the luxuries that come with them, to forget what sacrifices earlier generations of Americans had to make to create the society of freedom and general affluence that we live in today. The aforementioned Mr. Jefferson and his comrades surely sacrificed a great deal to give us our Independence from Great Britain and, in their drafting of the Constitution, to forever protect us from suffering under the same sort of abuses at the hands of tyrannical government that they suffered under, and which the Egyptian people had likewise, until recently, suffered under. However, even the freedom passed down to us from the Founding Fathers was an incomplete one- for they did not and could not have foreseen the rise of a tyranny every bit as pernicious, autocratic, and hostile to human liberty as the monarchies of Old Europe- the tyranny of big business in Gilded Age America.

Within fifty years of Thomas Jefferson's death in 1826, his dream of an America in which every citizen could be a self-sufficient farmer dependant on no one, died with him. The nation was changing, business was booming, and sons of farmers were moving to the city to take jobs as meat packers, automobile manufacturers, construction workers, and yes- teachers, police officers, and firefighters. The allure of the city was hardly exclusive to Anglo-Americans however- it also attracted droves of immigrants, including my ancestors, to move to this country from places like Germany, Italy, and Ireland. History has remembered this era of the rise of industry and the exodus to the city as "The Gilded Age"- a reference to the process of gilding, by which a thin layer of gold is applied to an object in the desire of making it appear more regal and majestic-looking. The newly arrived immigrants' and industrial workers' dreams of cities paved in gold were elusive however, and were soon replaced by the reality of an overpopulated dystopia where men who were once free were now forced to choose between allowing their children to starve, or continuing to suffer the odious indignities of the 80+ hour workweek with no days off and at wages just high enough to keep them alive so that they may come in the next week to put in another 80 hours, all the while making the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, and the Rockefellers, richer. It was a disgrace to the name of freedom, and could not have been

further from what men like Jefferson envisioned for the country they helped create.

Luckily for us, the worst of that society has long been dead, slain by that conglomeration of regulations, government agencies, and tax codes that conservatives today derisively refer to as "big government", as well as the ultimate, albeit long-overdue, endorsement of the union movement by the Federal Government in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, one of the crowning achievements of the New Deal. Today however, those institutions which remain the only barrier between us and a replay of the dark realities of Gilded Age America, are under attack in a way they have not been since the Great Depression. In Wisconsin, the same state that served as the genesis for many of the programs that today protect us from a return to the dark days of Gilded Age America- including unemployment insurance, workers compensation, progressive taxation, the eight-hour workday, and the forty-hour workweek- the State Teacher's Union is under attack by the newly elected Republican Governor under the pretext of lowering the state deficit. Nevermind that the Wisconsin Teachers' Union has already stated a willingness for its members to pay more for their job benefits, as was originally the Governor's stated reason for attacking the union, Governor Walker continues to insist that the union not only be weakened, but busted- and legislation pending approval in the Wisconsin State Legislature will do just that. In brave defiance of the Governor's draconian powerplay, 14 Democratic Wisconsin State Senators fled their home state yesterday so as to prevent the Republican-controlled legislature from obtaining the quorum necessary to pass the Governor's bill into law, and bust the state's Teachers Union.

This is a critical time not just for Wisconsin, but for our nation as a whole, where we must decide whether our way out of the Great Recession and our current budget crisis will be to a future where we continue to build on the progress made by American generations prior towards a society where the fruits of industrialization and global capitalism are shared by the many, or a return to the era where they were horded exclusively by the wealthy few. If we choose the former course, we must recognize that unions, progressive taxation, and government regulation were solutions to a problem that still haunts us (though nowhere near to the extent that it will in the event of their dismantling), and reject outright the notion that any mechanism designed to protect workers from abuse by management is a form of "class warfare"- quite the contrary, the resistance to such mechanisms, I would argue, is class warfare. If we wish to stay true to the promise Thomas Jefferson saw in us, we will embrace both the legacy of and the continued presence in our society of unions, for the right to life doesn't mean much if you are forced to spend your life working 80-hour weeks, the right to liberty doesn't mean much if losing your job means starvation for you and your family, and the right to pursue happiness does not mean much when there is no escape from the social class you are born into.