He Ain’t Never Caught a Rabbit.
I think I’m over the dog thing. My parents are away this weekend, at a family reunion that I am boycotting, so I volunteered to dog-sit Alfred. I drove by my folks’ place in the late afternoon to pay the neurotic pup a visit and then take him to my apartment. I took him for a quick run around the backyard in order in order to expend some of his pent up energy from being cooped up in the house alone for the previous ten hours, and then for a nice long walk around the neighborhood in order to answer the call of nature.
Now, Alfred can be rather clever when it comes to sneaking food or prying open doors, but he can be a bit of a dummy when it comes to basic doggies duties. Still, it was a new one on me when I caught Alfie absent-mindedly peeing on his own front leg, and an even more disappointing surprise when I had to point out to him that he was missing his targeted tree by a good six inches.
I took the opportunity to hose him off in my folks’ backyard before we finally drove to Kew Gardens. Back at my place, Alfie took awhile to get comfortable in less familiar surroundings, but amused himself by barking and whimpering at the neighborhood dogs out my second floor window.
During dinner (mine), the excitement became too much for him and he started throwing up in the corner of my living room – on my stereo speaker! I needn’t have worried too much about that particular part of my home entertainment system as Alfred, always busy, set about a brief tour of my living room, pausing occasionally to spew a little more.
Both of our meals now dispensed with, and Alfred sitting contentedly with that same look on his face that we all get after a violent protein spill, I’m taking the opportunity to jot down this note to myself: Do not get a dog while you still live in an apartment.
Alfred is now nudging my arm. He wants a walk. Don’t forget to spay or neuter your pets, folks, and if you have a backyard, please consider adopting one of the adorable mongrels at the North Shore Animal League.
Jackie Robinson Park vs. Snapple Apple Stadium
The recent, long-awaited announcement of plans for a successor to the Mets’ Shea Stadium opens the chilling possibility that New York City will be stuck with one of those stupid corporate-sponsorship name venues. From the Staples Center in Los Angeles to the MCI Arena in Washington, DC and, in between, those poor bastards in Houston who were stuck with Enron Field, corporate-sponsored naming rights have blighted our nation’s sporting venues.
This frustrating trend has reached as close as New Jersey where the naming rights to the Brendan Byrne Arena were sold to Continental Airlines (while the poor old man was still alive to see it), and…well, what the hell was the PNC Bank Center before it became a corporate ho? (How the hell is one supposed to find the stadium if the name keeps changing?)
With the impending demise of Shea Stadium – which is owned by the city – and it’s replacement with a privately funded stadium, there is a real risk that fans will be saddled with the “Snapple Apple Stadium” or the “Always Tampons Arena.”
The current stadium was named for William Shea, a lawyer and civic booster who attracted the expansion National League franchise to Queens in 1962. That precedent leaves fans with the unfortunate alternative of riding the 7 train to the “Doctoroff Dome.”
There’s really only one true alternative name for the Mets’ new home: Jackie Robinson Park. Jackie Robinson was, of course, the first black player in the major leagues, a superstar who led the old Brooklyn Dodgers to six National League pennants and one World Series Championship. Fifty years after Robinson broke the color barrier, all the teams in the major leagues retired his jersey number. New York went a step further and gave him the dubious honor of renaming the Interboro Parkway, the two lane death trap that runs from my beloved Kew Gardens to East New York (past Robinson’s grave in Cypress Hills), the Jackie Robinson Parkway.
A true honor would be naming the new home of Da Bums’ spiritual successors, the New York Mets, after one of our proudest heroes. Mets fans had better jump on the campaign to name our new mecca Jackie Robinson Park before the Citibank Coliseum makes us ashamed to be New Yorkers.
Ghosts of Mississippi Demand Action for Today
The wheels of civil rights justice sure do turn slowly in America. With a curious vigor, authorities are seeking convictions for two of the most famous lynchings of the mid-twentieth century, while the U.S. Senate has recently apologized for not reacting to all those lynchings in a timely matter.
Better late than never? “You’re still doing what you did in 1964,” protests Rita Schwerner Bender. Back in that Freedom Summer, Schwerner Bender and her then-husband, Michael Schwerner moved to Mississippi in order to register blacks to vote. They worked with a Queens College student named Andrew Goodman, and a local black activist named James Earl Chaney. These nosy Jews from New York and their uppity Negro friend drew the ire of the local Ku Klux Klan, whose support went all the way up to the local sheriff, who, on June 21, arrested the three men for speeding and allowed them to be carried off from the jail. Their bodies were found days later, beaten, shot up and burnt to a crisp in their car. The good old boys arrested for the crime were acquitted. Recently, local authorities arrested Edgar Ray Killen, a former preacher they argue was the ringleader of the long-ago crime. “You’re treating this trial as the most important trial of the civil rights movement because two of the three victims are white,” Rita Schwerner Bender complained to the press, after testifying yesterday.
Although famous for galvanizing the Freedom Summer activists in the North (and later inspiring a lame Hollywood movie), Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner’s lynching was by no means the first lynching in Jim Crow South, which dated back to the efforts to establish equal rights in the South right after the Civil War. Congress resisted taking action for 105 years, but their apology doesn’t make all those poor souls who were whipped, hanged, shot, stabbed or beaten any less dead.
Likewise, avenging the lynching that sparked the modern civil rights movement, the murder of Emmitt Till, will not put an end to the struggle for civil rights and equality that it inspired. But that hasn’t stopped the authorities from digging up poor Emmitt’s bones for a new autopsy. That boy’s dead body has already done its service to the movement. It does not deserve to be used as a prop once again.
Back in 1995, 14-year-old Till was visiting his uncle in bloody Mississippi when the brash Chicago youth had the audacity to whistle at a white woman. For his bad behavior, the kid was dragged from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night. He was dredged from the Mississippi River three days later, his bloated corpse riddled with bullets and stab wounds, missing an eye. When his body returned to Chicago, his mother insisted on an open casket to show the world what southern racists do to little black boys. The pictures from his wake sparked a movement. One month later, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for resisting racial segregation on the city’s buses, and Dr. King started the famous boycott.
Needless to say, those accused of Emmitt Till’s murder were acquitted (That could have been any little boy’s body, the all-white jury concluded). Now local authorities may prosecute surviving members of the mob that pulled young Emmitt from his uncle’s home half a century ago.
Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner and Till are martyrs. Their families long ago gave up hope that their killers (most of whom are dead, some of whom are merely old and infirmed) would go to jail. What their families, and those of us who are their children in the movement, need to see is not narrow justice for their specific cases, but, ultimately, “justice for all.”
We live in a country where, 140 years after the Civil War, 50 years after Emmitt Till’s murder and 41 years after the “Mississippi Burning” lynchings, only one out of 100 Senators is black, only one out of nine Supreme Court Justices is black, and none of the 100 state governors are black; cops still regularly pull people over for “driving while black;” blacks are twice as likely as whites to be without health insurance, blacks are twice as likely as whites to suffer from poverty. I could go on and on, but the obvious fact is that we do not have racial equality and justice in this country, and, in fact, we are moving farther and farther away from that goal. These prosecutions of ancient crimes are meant to distract us from continuing the work that was begun by Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner and Till. The ghosts of Mississippi demand action for today, not retribution for yesterday.
Change to Win
I just got an e-mail from Joe Hansen, International President of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Okay, it was a mass e-mail sent out over the union’s “Union Voice” list. The meat of it is significant, but not surprising. UFCW’s Executive Board has authorized Hansen to withdraw from the AFL-CIO. This makes UFCW the second union, after SEIU, to authorize its president to pull out of the AFL-CIO if the July convention proves dissatisfactory.
The five international unions that make up the Change to Win Coalition – SEIU and UFCW, Unite Here, the Teamsters and the Laborers – held a coming out party today in Washington. They voted on a constitution, by-laws and guiding principles, and then held a press conference.
That sounds like a rival labor federation to me.
It’s tempting to make comparisons to the old CIO. Of course, the political climate and times are very different from the 1930’s, and I don’t think there’s a real John L. Lewis or Walter Reuther in this bunch. However, the playbook is similar. The CIO started out as a coalition/federation within the AFL, and operated as such for a number of years before finally breaking with the AFL and competing. However, where the CIO was much smaller than the AFL when it split, and was still relatively smaller by the time they merged in 1955 (the AFL actually organized like the dickens during those twenty years, too), this Change to Win Coalition is actually a huge chunk representing between 35 and 40 percent of the AFL-CIO’s total members. If they did split, and were joined by the Carpenters and the NEA, the two competing federations would be roughly even.
I don’t believe they will split…this year. The disaffiliation votes are similar to strike authorization votes. Nobody’s going to undercut their lead negotiators by taking away their strongest threat. Expect the other three unions in Change to Win to likewise authorize a split, but don’t put too much stock in it. Do realize, however, that Change to Win now represents something more more real and fundamental than a personality clash among various union presidents. This is now very much a process or uniting and coordinating unions that are serious about new member organizing. It wasn’t just five international presidents who voted on Change to Win’s constitution today, but also 50 influential local leaders, including some (like Peter Ward) who are often seen as having their own agendas that are distinct from their IU’s.
I believe that Change to Win will act as a federation within the federation for at least the next few years. This is to avoid the raiding campaigns that would surely come with a split, but also to lead by example. They’re betting that their program (fewer, larger unions; strategic, coordinated campaigns) will result in major organizing successes for them, and a huge influx of new members, that other international unions will sign on. Or else, they’re cynically betting that if they spend the next five years growing, while other unions decline, then they will dominate the next AFL-CIO convention and can finally ram their agenda through.