Liberated Office Monkey

(That's me over to the side)

Well, this job is going okay, most of the time I just feel like an office monkey developing materials behind a screen of a computer. If this is what organizing is all about, maybe I won't be one for as long as I thought. However, I don't think that this is the case when I get off the ground with this project.

Yesterday, I had my first opportunity to attend a union organizing meeting. This is where the joys of activism that I have been looking for happen. Don, a middle aged white hard nosed tough guy union organizer stood in the basement of a congregation here in Milwaukee. His face showed the signs of wear that fighting for justice may cause, but still remained full of energy and resilient in front of a crowd of black listeners. The people who had came were tired of being treated like animals with no sense of dignity at the workplace. There job consists of handling old drugs, logging them and disposing of them properly. Many of these drugs were not safe to be handling and workers at the plant are being sucepted to needless degrees of dangers at the workplace. They were angry about the positions that they were being put in and for justifiable reasons.

The passion of these workers was unlike anything I had seen. These people, who were beat up and kicked around like trash by their employers knew and collectively realized that they had a voice and if used correctly, they could really bring about change in their lives! People have the power if united together to bring about real social change in their lives! Although much of the time it won't be easy, the fruits of their exploited labor will at some point be realized if they keep their voice up.

As I rode home through the degraded neighborhoods that surrounded the church, I passed over and through the crippling poverty that many of these workers lived in. Something that people in more privileged positions like to call "the ghetto" which are actually neighborhoods where people live. For many of us, it is easy to pass over this "ghetto" on the modern highways and interstates that individuals who have more important things to do use so consistently. But underneath those massive concrete bridges that serve as the veins of our "efficient" capitalist state, there is another reality that exists for a population that is invisible to those of us with Internet connections, a population segregated physically from where we live and segregated from our sights and minds.

This is the reality of the working poor, witnessing empowerment that is already organic to these lively church halls against all the forces of oppression exists something special.