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"Hope Against Hope"
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"Hope Against Hope"
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| SFway |
Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 2:41 am
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
I hope the UNCHARTED family will indulge me in something a little unorthodox, seeing how we are all a little unorthdox ourselves. 
I would like to introduce a compatriot to UNCHARTED, an individual whose voice needs to be heard. Her name is Nadezhda (which means "Hope" in Russian) and she was the wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam. The poet (M. as she refers to him, was arrested and jailed in 1934, exiled from 1934-1937, and was rearrested in 1937, to die shortly thereafter in a Kolyma transit camp near Vladivostok. "Hope" survived, a lifetime of revolution, purges, collectivization, "the great terror", war and cold war, through a lifetime of oppression and poverty, to one end: to save and resurrect the poetry of M. He was lost - his voice and hers prevailed, against all odds and against a vast bureaucracy dedicated only to its own survival against every positive human value. Nadezhda was not a "union" person - her union was a union of two, her poet and herself. She might be considered a member of another "union" - the millions upon millions of those oppressed in life and to death in those times. But what she has to say speaks to us, to what we see evolving in our lives, our union, our jobs and our countries. With, as I said, your indulgence, I would like to add her voice to ours... To begin: "M., on the other hand, was rather afriad of the Old Testament God and his awesome, totalitarian power. He used to say (and I later found the same idea in Berdiayev) that, with its doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity had overcome the undivided power of the Jewish God. Undivided power was, of course, something of which we were very afraid." Divided power is part of the bedrock of any democracy. The voice of individuals is divided power; institutions that were created with this division of power purposefully in mind are another aspect. What we have experienced is its opposite - the creation of increasingly undivided power, within corporations and government, within our union(s), merger after merger. Do the ends justify the means and the risk? |
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| SharynS |
Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 4:21 am
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Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 2940 Location: the 'puter |
Quote: Divided power is part of the bedrock of any democracy _________________ Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. - Salman Rushdie |
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| SFway |
Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2007 8:44 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Nadezhda:
"Later I often wondered whether it is right to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isn't it better to face one's tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with contemptuous silence? I decided that it was better to scream...It is a man's way of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams he asserts his right to live, sends a message to the outside world demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity." |
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| Pearson |
Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:50 pm
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Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 1417 Location: Sun City AZ |
Quote: Silence is the real crime against humanity." I've been trying to ween myself off all of this reformer stuff, but this thread is why we can't. As we have seen in the thread on Stern's Brave New World Order, we know the master plan is to minimize workers while enhancing the role of the "union." The sad fact is, as this thread points out, silence is and has become the way it works. It's been bred into us. Since the outbursts and upheaval of the Viet Nam war era, Americans have been taught to have a great day, don't worry be happy. We've been pounded into believing we are just fine...even if we aren't. It's exactly why Stern's concept will work, at least temporarily. Eventually though it will collapse and the workers will be the ones who will pay...and sadly they will be paying for their long held silence. _________________ If we don't do it, who will? |
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| workerpower |
Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 8:48 pm
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Joined: 29 Mar 2007 Posts: 101 |
To quote Curtis Mayfield:
"Don't Worry, If there's Hell below, we're all gonna go" The question I have been interested in is what it takes for people to start to question and to stand up. What makes people shake off the indoctrination, the brainwashing, the "education" that tells us to shut up, do what the boss-man says, and buy what the ad-man is selling? I was not around for the radicalization of the 60's and 70's. Recently I have been reading and watching lots of stuff, especially regarding the more radical strands of the Black Rights struggle, and I am starting to get some ideas. I heard a quote from someone, I believe in the Wattstax documentary, who said something along the lines of "I've been down so long, I never thought of standing up." Sounds like that would apply to alot of folks in the US and Canada these days. Most of us never even think of standing up. I can't find it online anywhere, but Huey Newton wrote, (or it could have been a trasncription from an interview) about how they started to build the Black Panther Party. He talked about how most people in the ghetto didn't read, so they couldn't lead people by writing manifestos. (Although they did run a newspaper.) They had to lead by example and by action. People learned from Huey, and Bobby Seales and other of the folks involved at the beginning, that they could DO something. The Panthers stood up to the cops. The Panthers stood up to the city when the city refused to put a stop sign up at an intesrection where lots of kids were getting hit. The Panthers taught people that they could STAND UP! And they did it. He even talked about how they learned bad lessons from example. How the 1967 revolt in Detroit taught people to loot and burn buildings, and that was the wrong way to stand up, but they learned, by example, that they could stand up and do something. Seems like a good example to me. If we can even organize small groups of workers to STAND UP, that is the strting point. And even better, if instead of complaing about the union boss, we STAND UP to the REAL boss. We can criticize the union boss, when he does not support us. We can share, with other workers who see our example and want to stand up too, that we can't rely on the union misleaders, and that they are wrong about the approach to win better conditions. And that the union misleaders are not the real enemy. The BOSSES are the enemy. The union misleaders are leading us down a path that will end with our being destroyed by the real enemy, but only the real enemy will destroy us. And the enemy will destroy the union misleaders too! (OK, well maybe a few of them will get nice jobs and government posts, but most will eventually be in the same boat as the rest of us, working too hard for too little money.) Having never read much of the Black Panthers writings and speeches, I was very impressed with the sophistication of their politics, and their ability to translate it into everyday words. Very different from what most people think the Panthers were about. |
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| atuuschaaw |
Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 9:50 pm
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Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 781 Location: an ahwangan |
Quote: I've been trying to ween myself off all of this reformer stuff, but this thread is why we can't. Et tu BP? I certainly don't intend to detract from Nadezhda and her husband's oppression and injustice, and thanks SFway for this wonderful post! But yesterday was the 63rd birthday of an imprisoned man who has spent 31 years in some of the cruelest prisons in the U.S. and I also would like to add his voice to ours if nobody minds. I have followed his case for almost 25 of those 31 years. I just read one of his recent poems and it just seemed pertinent to this thread...It's entitled Silence Screams. Quote: Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams. Silence is a message, just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out & resonate in every word & every deed. Yes, become who you are. There's no sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you are. You are your own comeuppance. You become your own message. You are the message. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Leonard Peltier _________________ "Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." George Orwell |
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| SharynS |
Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 12:22 am
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Joined: 28 Jan 2006 Posts: 2940 Location: the 'puter |
Quote: Silence is a message, This is the kind of stuff that makes you just want to listen. That's what I was doing - just listening. _________________ Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. - Salman Rushdie |
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| SFway |
Posted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 3:41 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Nadezhda...
"People living under a dictatorship are soon filled with a sense of their helplessness, in which they find an excuse for their own passivity. 'How can I stop executions by speaking up? It's beyond my control. Who will listen to me?' Such things were said by the best of us...No wonder it was so easy for the Goliaths to destroy the last of the Davids. We all took the easy way out by keeping silent in the hope that not we but our neighbors would be killed." |
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| SFway |
Posted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 3:56 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Thank you, UNCHARTED folks, for your responses. This is a dialogue I'd hoped to begin.
A couple of footnotes: I also put "Hope Against Hope" material on the YOUR UNION part of UNCHARTED, but since the dialogue has started here, by all means let's continue.!! The poetry of Osip Mandelstam was, after decades, published in Russia and is available in English translation. Nadezhda won her war. Her own memoirs are also available in English: "Hope Against Hope" and "Hope Abandoned". The extraordinary poetry of Anna Ahkmatova, who is along with Mandelstam the finest and most powerful voice of the 20th century, is also available in English. |
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| SFway |
Posted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:26 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Part of what we are considering is "apathy", "lethargy", the passivity of the majority, working people, union members, in the face of reality.
Is this state of mind a natural human reaction, a choice, is it induced, or all of these things? People occupy their minds, their lives, with nonsense ("Fantasy Football", the National Enquirer, etc.) while the wolfpack draws near. A line from Osip Mandelstam, the poet whose voice Nadezhda fought to preserve, comes to mind: "The crowds come out dead, as though they had been chloroformed from the continuously overcrowded cinema." |
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| Laboryes |
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 1:56 pm
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Joined: 29 Jan 2006 Posts: 1967 |
Pearson wrote: Quote: Silence is the real crime against humanity." I've been trying to ween myself off all of this reformer stuff, but this thread is why we can't. Ahh Pearson! How many times when I was frustraited and wanted to walk away did you tell me I "couldn't quit just yet"? People like you have brought people like me this far so I would think there is no turning back now! Besides if you walk away won't that just be one more person silenced? SFway I love this thread! It's the worker silence and their ability to buy into the boss mans brain washing that all workers are worth less(except them of coarse) that frustraits me the most and drives me at times to just want to say "fuck it" and walk away! But then of coarse that's just what the boss wants isn't it for all of us to shut up and walk away? One damn big reason to keep standing and screaming as loud as possible! That's how I see it anyway. _________________ "When people refuse to obey, then democracy comes alive." Howard Zinn |
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| SFway |
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 9:54 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
LY...truly, I'm glad you are enjoying the voice of Nadezhda and the dialogue of this thread. Nadezhda seems to me a kindred spirit of Siggy and Girl's Rule - tough, unrelenting, intelligent voices, voices that, come hell or high water, will be heard.
One of the central problems we confront is the "apathy", the "lethargy" of union members - and the US public in general. I do not understand it nor have a met anyone who understands it. But if we can define the phenomenon, get a handle on it, we can overcome this obstacle. Hence, my notion that Nadezhd'a voice and those of a few others, perhaps, need be heard in addition to our own. Nadezhda: "That evening...I had lost everything, even despair. There is a moment of truth when you are overcome by sheer astonishment: 'So that's where I'm living and the sort of people I'm living with! So this is what they're capable of! So this is the world I live in!' We are so stupefied that we even lose the power to scream. It was this sort of stupefaction, with the consequent loss of all criteria, standards and values, that came over people when they first landed in prison and suddenly realized the nature of the world they lived in and what the 'new era' really meant. All this was only possible at the 'moment of truth', during the madness which afflicted people when...the world had come to an end and everything was lost forever. The collapse of all familiar notions is, after all, the end of the world. .... Now that I have regained my sense of despair and am capable once more of screaming..." |
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| SFway |
Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 10:20 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Nadezhda:
"I must admit to being an incorrigible optimist. Like those who believed at the beginning of this century that life had to be better than in the nineteenth century, I am now convinced that we will soon witness a complete resurgence of humane values. I mean this not only in respect to social justice, but also in cultural life and everything else... I am encouraged to believe that all we have been through will have served to turn people against the idea, so tempting at first site, that the end justifies the means and 'everything is permitted'... We have tested the ways of evil. Will any of us want to revert to them... I feel that we are at the threshold of new days, and I think I detect signs of a new attitude. They are few and far between - indeed, almost imperceptible - but they are nevertheless there. This, after a lifetime of oppression, misery, exile and death...Nadezhda earned the right to optimism - and we have the right to work towards its realization. |
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| John A. Joslin |
Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 1:20 am
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Joined: 02 Apr 2006 Posts: 83 Location: Detroit, Michigan U.S.A. IBEW #58 |
Quote: People occupy their minds, their lives, with nonsense ("Fantasy Football", the National Enquirer, etc.) Isn't it another kind of nonsense to take a big risk when you're likely to get whacked or lose your job as a result? I think lots of people mull this kind of stuff over from time to time. It's not just labour activists who are looking at this situation & trying to figure out what the possibilities are. It's easy to exaggerate the apathy factor. People have a lot of sense. Maybe it ebbs & flows , I've had more than my share of dumb-ass moments , but I think the majority of people are at least as smart as most activists . They just don't talk as much. If we're lucky maybe we can inspire some of the people we take to be inexcusably silent & passive at the moment . When it works it will turn out to be a two-way street anyway , I think. |
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| Pearson |
Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 2:12 pm
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Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 1417 Location: Sun City AZ |
Quote: Ah Pearson! How many times when I was frustrated and wanted to walk away did you tell me I "couldn't quit just yet?" Lots Ly, and for some of you guys stuck in the middle of it, i still think you have to push. In my opinion, it is your only hope. That's why this thread, hope against hope is so appropriately labeled. Let's be blunt here: This crap the CTW has leveled against workers has been going on for the last 6 or 7 years. Doug McCarron and the Carpenters started stripping locals of their power years ago. He created massive district councils that allowed him total control. Stern didn't have the structure to do what Mac did, so he began the push for local union mergers and trusteeships. The whole thing looked good to Hansen and the boys and the buy-in is now resulting in the merger mania that is hitting the ufcw. Hell, by convention time in 08, look for anywhere between 10 to 50 more locals being consolidated. Worse yet, the sales job and spin doctored contracts we saw sold over the last year has been vintage Stern. Manufactured from above, locals have acted like they did the deal and won huge concessions from employers because of the solidarity. Absolute and total bullshit; but it worked. We told members long before, there would be no strikes. We told them there would be the gnashing of teeth and the apparent battles to force the employers and damned if in every situation, it didn't play out exactly that way. We told them mergers would be shoved down their throats or up their ass, and watch as that one comes to fruition as well. Crane may be the only inside guy on the planet who told the members the truth on the package being crappola, and watch what it gets him. Fired, and he'll stay that way...unless he takes the bastards to court and then they'll buy him off. Members wanna believe their union leaders are there for them. We are virtual heretics when we say bad things about guys who are supposed to be good for the members. For whatever reasons, members don't seem to care if the boys at the top are getting fat at their expense. They sit in silence. Are they trained to blindly believe? Are they stupid? Are we wrong? Is it all too big and overwhelming? Maybe just no one gives a shit...maybe fantasy football and Survivor are what matters to them. It's their life, their right to pick and choose whats important. Let's face it, no amount of pushing, pulling, kicking or screaming has made much of a difference to date. We are on a collision course with a very ugly outcome. Here's Stern's master plan: Win these manufactured settlements with his "partners," increase membership through attraction of these settlements and when you get to critical masse, kick some ass. One little problem, the throngs are lining up to be a part of this brave new world type movement. There is no attraction for workers who see starting rates lowered, employer health care devastated and pensions converted to 401k's. There's no excitement about watching the hogs feed while the workers bust their asses for the remaining crumbs. You ain't seen nothing yet brother. The biggest paydays for these guys are yet to come. Mergers will continue with buyouts that choke the horse, and those that remain will want theirs. They'll hold up these settlements as justification for increases, but don't be looking for anything like what the members got; it will be the hog heaven...and the members will stand by in total silence. I'm going to buy a plaque today, it says something to the effect: Silence isn't the absence of noise, but the stillness in your heart." Finding that place is something each of us need do. For the past forty years i felt i could make a difference for workers. While inside i worked within boundaries; once i got out, i was better able to speak out (though i still find restraints from how i lived). Suffice to say, each of us in our own way must speak out, fight for what we believe is right or do as we see necessary. Some choose to get excited about Monday night football; for me, i'm heading off to a yoga class and get lost in a good stretch and a mental holiday from all that is going on around me. You guys are the hope against hope, just be sure to make your lives more than chasing that windmill. _________________ If we don't do it, who will? |
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