Honest Fight

Beating a bully, meeting badasses, and deciding to fight

PAST

I’ve always been small. If you believe that adversity builds character, then I’m a capital C Character, as I’ve encountered my share of bullies. But sometimes they bit off more than they could chew.

This story can be told today because we have exceeded the statute of limitations, and ultimately nobody was hurt. If it happened today, I probably would have gone straight to the juvenile detention center and never made it to college. Or the bully’s parents would have sued mine and I’d have been expelled from school. It was one of those forks in the road of life and a choice had to be made.

I think his name was Brandon. He was dumber than a box of rocks, and got it into his mind that he was going to make me his punching bag. Each day after school he would be on my tail as soon as the final bell rang. In those days we could walk or bike to school. Uphill, through freezing sleet, in subzero Connecticut temperatures. There were no buses for us local kids. The buses were for the kids being trucked in from Hartford as part of court-ordered racial desegregation.

Just like in a bad movie (think Bad Santa) there would be a flock of boys behind Brandon as he towered over me; belittling me, shoving me, which usually ended up with me landing hard on the sidewalk. I didn’t think to ask for help. Both of my parents worked, and I didn’t see trustworthy allies among the teachers or school staff who only wished I took more Ritalin.

But I had an idea and a plan! In the junk drawer at home there was this knife. It wasn’t a switchblade exactly, but the knife retracted, a cheap plastic and metal freebee from some hardware store. The plan was to skip the sidewalk and instead ride my bike to school, and when the bell let out, fly out of there as fast as I could pedal. This part worked. But instead of going home though, I biked to Brandon’s house, tossed my bike in some bushes, and crouched under the branches of an evergreen tree. A little while later, Brandon showed up—alone. Just as he passed by I leapt out and jumped him. It may have all been very comical to an outsider, but it was serious as death to me.

We fell over together, and rolled around for a bit. Mind you, I was half his size, but I had the element of surprise in my favor. While we were still on the ground, I pulled out my knife, and slid the blade out for dramatic effect. I held it under his chin and basically said, “If you every mess with me again, I’m going to cut off your family jewels and jam them down your throat. Understand?” His eyes and very subtle nod indicated that yes, indeed, he understood.

End of story. Brandon never bothered me again. I never pulled a knife on anyone again. In fact, none of those boys ever seriously bothered me for the remainder of elementary school.

RECENT PAST

When I first started working at SUNY Upstate in the Emergency Department, I laid low and said nothing about my recent unionizing efforts at my previous place of employment. At Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, NY, I was one of two nurses who lead a failed attempt to unionize, and was one of the first to go. Somehow the schedule no longer had room on it for me. SUNY is unionized from top to bottom. The managers and professors are affiliated with UUP, nurses with the Public Employees Federation (PEF), and everyone else is with CSEA.

It was three years into my time at SUNY Upstate that I was pulled into the fray by Llamara Padro Milano. I’m a sucker for a courageous woman struggling against the odds. She was the besieged Council President for more than 2,000 Registered Nurses represented by PEF at SUNY Upstate. The Regional Representative had talked me up and persuaded me to go to the annual PEF convention, where I was introduced to Llamara.

Llamara is smart, courageous, hard-working and integrity-filled. It’s no wonder that she ran afoul of both the management at SUNY Upstate and the leadership of PEF. As Kermit the frog sings, “It ain’t easy being green.” Let’s distinguish between business unions and rank-and-file unions: business unions are mostly what we have in the US. You pay your dues and you get services from professional staff. They have paid organizers, and their idea of organizing is to get out the vote in elections for public office, or to coordinate a letter writing campaign. Generally speaking, the ideas and actions are top-down and these unions pose little threat to the seats of power. A rank-and-file union, which is what Llamara and I wanted to cultivate, will have workers who communicate with each other about the day-to-day conditions of their workplace and steps they can take to make it better. This typically involves overcoming their fear of being targeted and agreement to take action together. Historically, it is rank-and-file unions which have changed the course of history, when workers exercise their power, and management can sense that they are indeed outnumbered.

I would rather have a business union than no union, but if you are in a business union and you want to move it towards a rank-and-file union, you will get a quick and dirty lesson in who has power and what they will do protect it. I’m not even saying that the leadership of PEF was dishonest or power-hungry, although there were some stinkers embedded in the structure. It’s just a very different take on how things should go, and they don’t want meddlesome upstarts making their life complicated.

Me and Ellen in Malmo, Sweden

In February of 2019, I traveled to Sweden and Norway on a two week trip with my (rank-and-file) union mentor Ellen David Friedman. Ellen worked as a labor organizer in American education for forty years, and is an international leader for Labor Notes. She had been invited to present and conference with a wide range of unionists in both countries. We started our trip in Malmo, Sweden at a joint labor film festival and conference of SAC Syndikalisterna. Unlike other Swedish unions, SAC organizes people from all occupations and industries in one single federation, including the unemployed, students, and the retired.

Ellen strategizing with the Secretary and President of SAC

Just so you appreciate what a bunch of badasses the SAC are, during WWII it was the SAC that was publishing a newspaper openly criticizing the Nazis. Theoretically Sweden was neutral during the war, but Sweden traded considerable goods with Germany, particularly iron, iron products, ball bearings, and trucks. Lumber from Swedish forests was used to build barracks in the concentration camps. It was complicated. Depending on whose narrative you read, many Swedes wanted SAC to shut its collective trap rather than provoke the Nazi bear.

I learned a lot on that trip. My illusions about the Swedish social experiment fell into disrepair as I learned that the Neoconservatives had persistently, successfully, undermined the social supports and collective bargaining agreements for which Sweden had become famous decades earlier. No stones were left unturned, in education, in healthcare, and in industry.

Meeting with the badasses of SDU

There was another group of badasses who we met during our trip. It was the proud women and men of the Swedish Dockworkers Union (SDU). When we conferenced, Ellen shared the powerful narrative of the American teachers who organized in West Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma, as captured in Eric Blanc’s book Red State Revolt. Then the SDU leaders told us about shutting down the ports across Sweden and bringing industry to its knees in their 2016-2017.

I’ll tell you that reading the United Nations Resilient Maritime Logistics report on that strike makes me nauseous, but their visual tells the story. The globalist perspective of the UN leads to subversion of any and all efforts by people to excercise their collective power and engage in self-determination. The report encapsulates how global government (controlled by corporations) should decentralize transportation hubs and utilize a diverse and adjustable range of methods to transport goods. They make recommendations about how to go around these pesky workers fighting for their jobs, wages and safe working conditions. Legal protections and the right to strike which took more than a hundred years to establish, are subverted within a matter of years. And so the fight continues.

The 2016-2017 SDU strike had deep implications. As reported in Jacobin, 2.27.2019, nearly three years later, “The union is currently engaged in an existential struggle with employers from the entire sector. What began as an industrial dispute with APM Terminals at the Port of Gothenburg has become a national dispute that has included significant changes to the right to strike along the way, backed by the Social Democratic Party. In response to employer lockouts, the SDU has announced plans for indefinite strike action. The future of independent, left-wing, rank-and-file trade unionism in Sweden hangs in the balance.”

PRESENT

From “Honest Fight” by Charley Crocket

I know folks got their ways of doing things
Live where the low fruit hangs
That's how it is
I can still see my mother's hard-earned tears
Across the years in my mind

What have I done?
'Cept stand up for myself
When I didn't have anybody else
What have I seen?
Of an honest fight
I'm just doing what I think is right

In our post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injury support group last night, I asked everyone to spend some time working on our relationship to fighting. Our families of origin profoundly shape how we fight, or don’t. How did this play out with our parents and siblings? Did we fight with words? Did we fight dirty? What was our experience in school, with friends, and with strangers?

The collective responses were very rich. It may have been one of the most meaningful meetings so far, in part because we have all come a long way in showing ourselves to each other. What was very clear is that almost every person in that group is a fighter. There are variations, which include fighting through resistance, silent (listening and observing) and deadly, guerilla, take-no-prisoners, the spitfire, and team fighter. We also agreed that we are all tired, and can notice that we don’t feel the level of fight in ourselves that we have embodied prior to being injured by the spike protein.

Regular readers may be scratching their heads and wondering how it is that I identify as a Quaker, yet am writing about fighting. This reminds me of one of my favorite Pop pop stories. We lived about an hour away from Lancaster, PA, Amish (and all-you-can-eat buffet) capital of the US as far as I’m concerned. So, an English (what the Amish call us non-Amish) tourist walked up to an Amishman who was purposefully avoiding eye contact and going about his business in town. Blocking the Amishman’s path, the aggressive and macho Englishman asks him, “Say old man, I heard that you Amish don’t fight. What kind of man are you?” The Amishman looks the Englishman up and down, weighs his response, and then says, “Brother, I may not hit thee, but I may hold thee most uncomforably.”

None of us in the support group consider ourselves fighters of aggression. Our collective life experience has been that someone, or some thing, brought the fight to us, not the other way around. Then we had a choice. In most cases we instinctively knew that to give in to a bully or injustice would invite more of the same, and so we stood our ground. We took our share of hits, and were ready to face the consequences of defending ourselves, because we have an internal moral compass which guides us regarding right and wrong, and the difference between the two.

A newer participant in our group made the profound observation that our burden is made heavier, because in effect we have a political malady. This reminds me of the politicization of AIDS in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. If you tell somebody that you have asthma for example, they would have a good idea what you meant, and that is was a real medical condition. Manifestation of injury following the COVID shots is extremely inconvenient to the safe and effective narrative which is almost universally endorsed by our healthcare system, and the powerful economic interests it serves. The McSick system is weighted towards marginalizing us with diagnoses of functional neurological or generalized anxiety disorder, because the rubric of its diagnostic codes and tests can’t identiify or explain the pathology we are carrying.

One among us is a veteran of multiple combat tours in the military. You haven’t seen nuthin’ till you witness a plucky twenty-something country girl from Montana giving what-for and a motivational pep talk to someone who used to command 800 men. It brings tears to my eyes. She was fighting for him, when he wasn’t clear about how to fight for himself, feeling indecisive, when he has always been a person of strategic decisions of tremdous consequence.

Which raises the questions…who or what are we fighting against? What are we fighting for? Who are we fighting alongside? And how are we to fight?

As individuals harmed by the virus and the shots, trying to heal, we have been forced to look squarely at the evil before us. Only in this way have we been able to survive this long, against the odds. We are clear that none of this was an accident. This pandemic was planned for years; see the details of Event 201 hosted by Johns Hopkins University, and you will see the script for the last four years. Event 201 was a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The bioweapons were waiting to be launched. The media response was and is coordinated. The evil geniuses are coming for us and our families. They won’t stop until they get what they want, a dramatically reduced global population. It’s unbelievable, yet true. This is not a drill. This is not 1944. This is 2024, and there is a global genocide in progress.

They aren’t hiding their agenda. It’s out in the open if a person is willing and able to see and listen. Although, it is stunning how many URLs for the World Economic Forum result in a message telling me that I can’t access that information with my server. Queue to minute sixteen of this interview with Yuval Noah Harari, one of the top advisors of the World Economic Forum, who asserts that we are moving towards a world where we will not need most of the people who are currently alive. I put the whole link here so that you know I’m not cherry-picking from the dystopian future he portends, in which AI reigns supreme, and humans are an afterthought. I listened to the entire interview and found Yuval to be quite thoughtful, guiding us to get to know ourselves better than those who would hack our minds.

As people with PASC and COVID vaccine injury, we carry these truths with us every day, in the face of the denial and disbelief of most people around us. This, despite the mounting numbers of injuries and deaths, the ever outwards expanding circle of turbo cancers which spring up suddenly and silence victims in mere weeks and months. We still have our autobiographical memory, curiosity, critical thinking and capacity to fight, even as the hippocampi of millions is rendered feeble and obedient by the lab-made spike protein.

The fight has been brought to us. It is on our doorsteps, in our homes, in our bedrooms. We are fighting for our health, our humaness, and for all of humanity. We are the bedraggled, overwhelmed and disabled, fighting side-by-side, back-to-back. We are slowly healing, sharing our stories, and gathering ourselves up. The forces of evil, in the characteristic hubris of the worst of archetypal villains, has woefully underestimated the persistence and badassedness of humankind.