Is everyone alright?

(photo of Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez during Chavez’s 1968 hunger strike)

When I lived in Chicago, I once tried to unionize the restaurant where I worked. I called the Service Employees International Union, and was really surprised when they set up a meeting between me and the head of the local chapter. I remember that he worked in a very posh, if somewhat old-timey office, with a large wooden desk that looked like it weighed about a thousand pounds. It was polished to a mirror finish. I remember he was impeccably suited in a navy chalk stripe, with his red hair slicked back and wearing a gold pinkie ring. I remember wondering if the ring might be new, as he frequently appeared to be admiring it as he turned a cut glass tumbler of water around and around in his hand. I could tell he lost interest in my cause once I told him how small the restaurant was, but he continued through the rest of his spiel for my benefit.

Some weeks later, I was killing time in that same restaurant, waiting at the end of the evening for the last diners to trickle through. I was standing in the waiter’s station and reading a beautiful and heartbreaking memoir/history written by a labor lawyer in Chicago, called Which Side Are You On? The hostess walked by and told me she had seated my section, and when I looked up, I saw a single man sitting at a two-top. He looked to be in his mid-30s, with blue eyes, blond hair, and that unmistakable simultaneously pale & ruddy Chicago Irish complexion. His face looked familiar to me. I turned over my book, and god damn if it wasn’t his face on the back cover.

I approached him while holding his book behind my back and asked him if he was who I thought he was. When he said yes, I said “I’m reading your book right now. It’s wonderful.” He thanked me. He seemed really flattered. I pulled the book out from behind my back and asked him if he wouldn’t mind signing my copy. He said “You weren’t kidding about reading it right now, were you?”

Later, after he had paid his bill, he walked into the bar area where I was watching television while waiting to close down the dining room. I was watching a PBS documentary about Robert Kennedy. He stood next to me and commented that he was taping the show so he could watch it later. I told him that one of my prized possessions is a photo I have of my mother at a rally for Bobby in my home town in Indiana. He said “Oh, yeah?”, and so I described the photo to him. The photo was taken right before the state primary, when my mom was working his campaign. In the photo, Bobby is standing on the back seat of an open convertible, speaking and gesturing toward the thousands of people filling the city square, and my mother stands right beside the left rear door, with her arms outstretched as if to hold back the crowd. Her face is uplifted toward Bobby, with an exhilarated smile and an adoring look in her eyes.

Bobby Kennedy went on to win the Indiana primary. He would be dead in less than a month.

At that moment, the documentary on television turned to Bobby’s assassination in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. They showed that famous photo of him lying on the floor as a uniformed kitchen employee kneels beside him. Kennedy’s last words before he succumbed were “Is everyone alright?”

I couldn’t help it. Tears sprang to my eyes. I grabbed a bevnap off the bar and tried to dab them dry as nonchalantly as I could. I could feel him, the author, staring at me, and I turned to look at him and rolled my eyes in an “I’m a dope” kind of way.

He said “Can I have your phone number?”

We saw each other a few times, but there was not really any kind of spark there. I wish, however, I had stayed in touch, because sometimes I really need to talk to someone like him.

Someone who is as sad as I am for what our dreams have become.

Unions have made millions of lives better, but it’s hard to defend the unions that have become as corrupt and as evil as the industries in which they operate. It’s hard to imagine that we are headed for anything other than a union-less future, where workers will be about as protected and well-cared for as the serfs in Russia under the tsars.

When I was growing up, a friend's father was in the UAW, and if he hadn’t been in the union, he would’ve been fired after his first heart attack, and without his job and his insurance, he wouldn’t have survived the second one. He would be dead now, if not for his union. Of that I am sure.

And it’s hard to listen to the stories of those miners trapped in Utah without wondering if they wouldn’t be alive if they had worked in a union mine. The UMWA opposes retreat mining, and perhaps they could’ve prevented it from being hastily approved for the Crandall Canyon mine by BushCo’s industry crony-run Mine Health and Safety Administration. Would those six men be alive right now if they’d been union, I wonder?

I dunno. I guess I’m a little depressed this week, listening to the news stories of people in New Orleans still struggling two years after Katrina. We could’ve used that opportunity to mobilize a government workforce, like FDR did in the depression, and given the residents a good job and decent paycheck for rebuilding their own city. But no, that kind of massive operation is reserved only for people outside the United States of America, people who live in countries with large oil reserves. If we had spent 500 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast instead of Iraq, think what we could have done.

The slogan for Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign was “These are not ordinary times.”

No, they were not, and as tiresome as our times are now, they are not ordinary either. And just for the record, I do try, I really do, to resist the urge to wonder where we would be if we had chosen our leaders a little more wisely. We can make things better, I think to myself. We can. I don’t know how, though. I just don’t know how. And right now, I’m a little tired of trying.