"Although I see Donald Trump as a forest fire...Forest fires allow things to grow that couldn't grow before." James Comey

"Although I see Donald Trump as a forest fire. He will do great damage to our norm. Forest fires allow things to grow that couldn't grow before. I see kids getting energized. It's inspiring to see kids in the wake of Parkland, out there getting involved. I see all parts of civil society the media the courts, even Congress, starting to get off it's rear end."

FROM:
FULL UNCUT INTERVIEW LATE SHOW stephen colbert

If Not Now, When? 

Punishing and demoralizing as this regime has been, the teachers stood up. Though the urge to write “finally stood up” is there, no one should underestimate the courage and desperation it takes to do just that. Moreover, this moment of resistance to an American world of austerity overseen by plutocrats is not as surprising as it might seem. 

We live in the era of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In their starkly different ways each of them is symptomatic of our moment -- in Trump’s case of a pathological condition, in Sanders’s of the possibility of recovery from the disease of acquiescence and austerity. In both, you can see the established order losing its grip. Even before the Sanders campaign, there were signs that the winds were shifting, most dramatically in the Occupy Wall Street uprising (however short-lived that was). Today, thanks in part to the Sanders phenomenon, millennials who were especially drawn to the Vermont senator make up the most pro-union part of the general population. 

Atmospheric change of this sort was abetted by elements closer to the ground. Irate teachers in the red states were generally either not in unions at all or only in union-like institutions with little power or influence. So they had to rely on themselves to mold a fighting force, an act of social creativity which happens rarely. When it does, however, it’s both captivating and inspiring, as the West Virginia uprising clearly proved to be in a surprising number of other red states. 

Class matters as does its history. West Virginia wasn’t the only place where striking or protesting teachers entered the fray well aware and proud of their state’s long history of working class resistance to the predatory behavior of employers. In the case of West Virginia, it was the coal barons. Many of the strikers had families where memories of the mine wars were still archived. 

Kentucky, most memorably “bloody Harlan County,” where strikes, bombings, and other forms of civil war between mine owners and workers went on for nearly a decade in the 1930s (requiring multiple interventions by state and federal troops), can say the same. Oklahoma, even when it was still a territory, had a vibrant populist movement and later a militant labor movement that included robust representation from the Industrial Workers of the World (the legendary “Wobblies”), a tradition of resistance that flared up again during the Great Depression.

Arizona was once similarly home to a militant labor tradition in its metal mining industries. Its grim history was most infamously acted out in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917. At that time, copper miners striking against Phelps Dodge and other mining companies were rounded up by deputized vigilantes, hauled out to the New Mexican desert in fetid railroad boxcars, and left there to fend for themselves. Those mine wars against Phelps Dodge and other corporate goliaths continued well into the 1980s.

Memories like these helped stoke the will to resist and to envision a world beyond acquiescence and austerity. Under normal circumstances to be proletarian is to be without power. Before capital is an economic category, it’s a political one. If you have it, you’re obviously so much freer to do as you please; if you don’t, you’re dependent on those who do. Hiding in plain sight, however, is a contrary fact: without the collective work of those ostensibly powerless workers, nothing moves.

 This is emphatically the case with skilled workers, which after all is what teachers are. Discovering this “fact” and acting on it requires a leap of moral imagination. That this happened to the beleaguered teachers of so many red states is reflected in the esprit de corps that numerous accounts of these rebellions have reported, including the likening of the strikes to an “Arab Spring for teachers.”

And keep in mind that many other parts of the modern labor force suffer from precarious conditions not so dissimilar from those of the public school teachers, including highly skilled “professionals” like computer techies, college teachers, journalists, and even growing numbers of engineers. So the recent strikes may portend similar recognitions of latent power in equally improbable zones where professionals are undergoing a process of proletarianization.

An imaginative leap of the sort those teachers have taken bears other fruit that nourishes victory. Instead of depicting their struggles as confined to their own “profession,” for instance, the teachers today are fashioning their movement to echo broader desires. In Oklahoma and West Virginia, for example, they have insisted on improvements not just in their own working lives, but in those of all school staff members. Oklahoma teachers refused to go back to school even after the legislature granted them a raise, insisting that the state adequately fund the education system as well. And everywhere these insurgencies have deliberately made common cause with the whole community that uses the schools -- parents and students alike -- while repeatedly expressing the desire that children not be sacrificed on the altar of austerity.

Nothing could be more at odds with the emotional logic of austerity and acquiescence, with a society that has learned to salute “winners” and give the back of the hand to “losers,” than the widening social sympathy that has been sweeping through the schoolhouses of red state America. 

Class dismissed? It doesn’t look like it.

SEE:  

Class Dismissed Class Conflict in Red State America 

By Steve Fraser