Thursday, August 7, 2025
D+272/200/1261
1957 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
1964 US Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
In bed by 10, up at 6. 68°, high of 84°, sunny.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 3:15 p.m. I think I forgot to take my meds yesterday.
The most disheartening headline of the morning: Trump Administration Begins to Strip Federal Workers of Union Protections: The Department of Veterans Affairs appeared to be the first agency to begin terminating union contracts, affecting more than 400,000 workers.
The Trump administration has moved forward with a plan to end collective bargaining with federal unions across a swath of government agencies, even after arguing in federal court that it would not do so until a legal battle over an order President Trump signed was over.
The Department of Veterans Affairs said on Wednesday that it had moved to strip labor protections for more than 400,000 of its workers — most of whom are represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union for federal employees.
The department’s announcement included attacks on union activities and leadership, and Doug Collins, the head of the agency, argued in a statement that the “unions that represent V.A. employees fight against the best interests of veterans while protecting and rewarding bad workers.”
Here is another Republican dream coming true: destroying labor unions and collective bargaining. Scott Walker made this his highest priority when he became governor of Wisconsin in 2011 and immediately proposed and later signed into law Act 10, which terminated collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin's public employees, most notably the state's public school teachers who had been represented by the politically powerful WEAC, the Wisconsin Education Association Council. Act 10 made Walker a hero in the Republican Party and a presidential candidate in 2016.
Donald Trump always pretends to be a supporter of America's working people. He claims that his revolutionary tariff policies are designed in part to protect American workers from unfair competition from underpaid foreign workers. His selection of J. D. Vance as his vice president was said to signal an easing of Republican hostility towards unions. In his acceptance speech at the 2024 convention in Milwaukee, Vance said, "We need a leader who's not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike." (We should remember that the AFL-CIO gave Vance a 0% rating on its scorecard ranking elected officials' voting record on union-related issues.) The party approved a platform that vowed "to protect American workers" and to "return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Workers." All of the feigned concern over the welfare of American workers is blather, 'happy horseshit,' designed to secure workers' votes while stripping them of real protection in their workplaces. I wonder how many worker safety regulations issued by OSHA and other regulatory agencies have been rescinded or proposed for rescission. The Republicans have not always been hostile to unions. The Republican platform of 1960 reflected on the need “to enhance and not impede the processes of free collective bargaining” and declared: “Republican policy firmly supports the right of employers and unions freely to enter into agreements providing for the union shop and other forms of union security.” That support ended in 1981with Ronald Reagan and the firing of more than 11,000 striking air controllers. Anti-union animus among the Republicans has only increased over the following years, culminating in Trump and Trumpism.
I read this story and think of my father who was a member of the United Steelworkers union during his working years, as was my mother when, late in life, she worked at a manufacturing plant for General Foods. Mostly, though, I think of my mother during the many years when my father was disabled and she worked as a waitress to support our small family. She started at a neighborhood cafe but worked her way up to waiting on customers at a high-end supper club in suburban Chicago. Waitressing at busy eateries is hard work, both the physical labor and the need to be warm, welcoming, and charming to your customers. At the supper club, she worked for tips and zero dollars per hour. She received no paycheck. If customers were dissatisfied with their dining experience for any reason, including problems in the kitchen with the food or at the bar with drink service, and left no tip, she worked for nothing. The restaurant owner/manager treated the wait staff (all women) as "independent contractors" rather than as employees. This is an old management/capital/Republican trick to avoid minimum wage and other labor laws intended to protect employees from employers who are always interested in minimizing labor costs.
With my family history, it is not surprising that I am a believer in labor unions. With my personal history as a veteran gratefully enrolled for the last 8 years in the Veterans Administration's health service, I am also a supporter of the countless VA employees who have helped me whenever I needed it, from the day I was enrolled through yesterday when I had some outpatient surgery. The statement by Doug Collins, a former right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia and current secretary of the VA, that "unions that represent V.A. employees fight against the best interests of veterans while protecting and rewarding bad workers" is untrue, unfair, and grossly offensive. Trump and his apparatchiks have almost three and a half more years to destroy what so many Americans have built up over the last 250 years. I can only pray that we find some way to stop and reverse their depredations.
Annual Volvo maintenance visit. $587.56. To be done: replace coil springs (one is broken, both need replacement), cost $1,069 and rearview video camera stabilizing harness - cost $702.45. Total when all is done = $2359.01.
While waiting for the work to be completed on the car, I looked at the new cars on the dealership showroom floor. The cost of the XC60 on the floor was more than $60,000. I recalled that the cost of our first house on Newberry Boulevard, 4 bedrooms, 2 and 1/2 bathrooms, tile roof, on a lot and a half was $41,000.
Pat Gorence has died at age 82. She was a remarkable, wonderful human being. She was one of my students at the law school. She gave birth to her second child just as her first year of studies began. I remember her coming to me, telling me that she had to stay home with her baby for awhile, and that her husband, John Bach, would come to the law school to pick up assignments, learn where we were in my Property class, and Legal Writing class, and drop off written assignments. She and John Bach were among the group of us who traveled in 1997 to a Jesuit community center in the Dominican Republic with Janine Geske, Howard Eisenberg, E. Michael McCann, Paul Dedinsky, Mike Guerin, Elsa Lamelas, Diane Sykes, Hannah Dugan, Father Andy Alexander, pastor of Gesu Parish, and a Wisconsin assistant attorney general whose names I can't recall today, for a spiritual retreat. She served as an assistant U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, then as Deputy U. S. Attorney, and for a time, as Acting U.S. Attoney. It was in the latter role that I had some dealings with her on behalf of Milwaukee County Executive Bill O'Donnell. As best I can recall, I asked her to delay some action (I can't recall what it was) until after an upcoming election and she refused, but as with everything she did in office, she did so fairly and graciously. She was the first woman to be appointed a United States Magistrate Judge in Wisconsin, where she served with professionalism, dignity, fairness, integrity, honor, and faithfulness to the Constitution and laws of the U.S. which she had sworn to uphold. She and John lived for decades in their old home at 3028 N. Hackett Avenue, 5 bedrooms and1 and 1/2 bathrooms, where they lived and raised their 3 children. In her last years, she suffered from Lewy body dementia. Her funeral will be held on Thursday, August 14th, at 3 p.m. at Sts. Peter and Paul church on Cramer Street, Peter and Anh's parish and the church where Andy was baptized on a record-breaking cold day in January, 1973.
Sisters and brothers, a story in this morning's The Atlantic online that tugged at my heart. From "My Brother and the Relationship That Could Have Been" by Liz Krieger. Excerpts:
The day my brother died, the dogwoods were in bloom. I sat by my bedroom windowsill, painting my nails. Junior prom was just hours away. I was 16. My brother, Alex, was 18—just 22 months older than me. . . .
Sibling relationships represent our longest shared bonds—extending from earliest childhood, beyond parents’ deaths, and preceding any adult partnerships. Siblings are the ones who help us carry on our family memories after our parents pass. They remember why all of our dogs were so badly behaved or how we ended up at that vacation rental overrun with mice. They are “interstitial: lodged between your cells. They are the invisible glue that holds your interior architecture together,” Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn writes in her 2004 book, The Empty Room. “You’re born into this world with a sibling, and you expect this to outlast every other relationship,” Angela Dean, a psychotherapist, a thanatologist (a person who studies death and dying), and the host of the podcast The Broken Pack, told me. Losing that is “a loss of the past, the present, and the future.” . . .
Despite this profound absence, sibling grief remains under-recognized and often overlooked. In the late 1980s, Kenneth Doka, now a professor emeritus at the College of New Rochelle and a senior vice president for grief programs at the Hospice Foundation of America, described the experience as “disenfranchised grief,” a term for losses that aren’t properly acknowledged or supported. One manifestation of that is self-disenfranchisement, where a person (intentionally or unintentionally) minimizes their own grief—something I relate to keenly.
Psychologists know that siblings can be crucial to identity formation. We define ourselves both in relation to and opposition from them—what researchers call “sibling de-identification,” or differentiation. In the journalist Susan Dominus’s book, The Family Dynamic, she concludes that differentiation from our siblings is one of the key factors in our personal development and in many cases sets the course for some of the most important choices in our lives. When that reference point vanishes, surviving siblings can feel unmoored. In 2013, the writer David Sedaris, reflecting on the loss of his sister Tiffany, wrote: “A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968” (the year his sisterwas born).
Have I 'recovered' from losing Kitty? I'm not sure what 'recovery' means in the circumstances of her death. I suppose one 'recovers' from the shock of a sudden, unexpected death, or one like my mother's, at a young age and from a hitherto unknown cause. In those cases, it's the shock one recovers from, rather than from the death. Kitty's death was protracted. I think she was in home hospice care for well over a year. She was connected to an oxygen tank or a 'concentrator' for a few years. She knew and we all knew that, unless some other cause took her, she would die from her COPD. We grieved, or should I say pre-grieved, for her for a long time before she died. When she died, I felt numb and I've stayed numb to the fact of her death since then, but that is not to say that I haven't profoundly grieved losing her for all the reasons mentioned by Liz Krieger in her article in The Atlantic. Kitty was indeed "“interstitial: lodged between [my] cells. [She was] the invisible glue that holds [my] interior architecture together." Losing her was “a loss of the past, the present, and the future” and, in that respect, I surely have not and will never "recover" from losing her, my little sister who was so much bigger than me in all the ways that count.
No comments:
Post a Comment