Ira Grupper irag@iglou.com

LABOR PAEANS— November 2011

Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )

All Good Things Must Come to an End

This will be the last Labor Paeans, at least for a while........

When I first began writing the newspaper column, I think it was in 1998, I was distressed that the US labor movement got such little coverage, and that what was covered was from a mostly-big-business angle.

Our local Louisville newspaper, the Courier-Journal, was relatively liberal at that time (it is now owned by the Gannett conglomerate, with a different perspective). But even back then, there had long since ceased to be a Labor section of the paper. To get labor news you had to go to the Business section. It is the same today.

And so I think about the old labor song, later adapted by the Civil Rights Movement: “Which Side Are You On?” And the Yiddish quote I learned so many decades ago from my father: "Mit ein tochess tanzt men nit oif tsvei chaseness" (With one behind you can’t dance at two weddings). In 1969 I worked in the print shop of a wonderful organization headed by the legendary Carl and Anne Braden. I affixed a sign to one of the printing presses: “Freedom of the press is for those who own one.” The same today.

I spent six months in Israel, from November 1999 thru the very end of April 2000. I lived in Jerusalem, but traveled throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories extensively, from its northern border with Lebanon to its southern border with Egypt, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. I spent a lot of time in the West Bank, and some time in the Gaza Strip, and in Amman, Jordan. Travel from Israel to the West Bank was difficult, to Gaza very difficult. I feared for my life on a number of occasions, but my American passport (friends called it the “golden passport”) got me thru.

I was truly blessed to be able to convey my observations, thru Labor Paeans, of my meetings with leaders and members of Histadrut (the Israeli labor federation), with various Palestinian labor groups, and with many other organizations and individuals struggling for a just world, free from Occupation.

Labor Paeans carried my observations from trips to Canada, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Vietnam, Greece, Egypt, other trips I made to Israel—and various places in the U.S.

Once Labor Paeans is published in our FORsooth newspaper, the previous editor, and now the current one, gave consent for me to send it wherever I wished. So it regularly gets placed on listservs of the National Lawyers Guild, SNCC (veterans of the 1960s civil rights group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)—and on many other listservs as well as many individuals. In fact, the numbers of these readers now far exceed those from the newspaper.

I particularly appreciate the emails and letters I have received from labor leaders, ordinary working folk, and many others. I sometimes have disagreed with what they had to say, but I felt honored that they were reading my column and reacting to it.

It is so distressing to see how poor and working people are systematically getting screwed all over the world, all in the name of production-for-profit. But it is heartening to view the fight back, the movements by wage slaves, the so-called middle class, and others against avarice and greed. The recent demonstrations at Wall Street in New York have now spread to right here in Louisville and elsewhere around the nation.

I am privileged to have been able to comment on the struggles of national minorities (an old-fashioned term that needs reintroduction), women, the disabled, older people (that’s me!), and lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

I have always loved the quote from Santayana, the Spanish American philosopher: “Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” And the quote from Robert Burns: “Here’s freedom to them that would read/ Here’s freedom to them that would write/ There’s none ever feared that the truth should be heard/ But they whom the truth would indict.”

FORsooth, and its parent, the Louisville chapter of FOR, are pacifist organizations. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a pacifist. I did adhere to nonviolent tactics when I lived in the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I carefully explained all this to my editor before I began the column, and both he and FOR still opened their publishing arms (not military arms!) to me. For this I will always be grateful.

I have told my editor that I would love to train a young person to take over this column. So far, no takers, but let us hope that will change.

And so, as I ride off, or more accurately, hobble off, into the sunset, and since Kentucky is a Commonwealth, I leave you with the chorus of a wonderful labor song, written in the early twentieth century, and which I will make gender-neutral:

“For we have a glowing dream/ Of how fair the world would seem/ When (men and women)/ Live their lives/ Secure and free./ When the earth is owned by labor/ And there’s joy and peace for all/ In that Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.

Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com