Solidarity

I am a misanthrope. I like the idea of humanity. It's just that humans keep letting me down. Team work is not my strong point. In fantasy land I'd be the self-reliant frontiersman of the American myth.

Tied in closely with that misanthropy is my cynicism. I want to hope for the best from folks, but I expect that the base, low, and ignoble usually prevail.

I detest haggling. I particularly detest haggling for haggling's sake. If the price is $10 for an item, I presume the seller wants $10 and ask myself if that's what I am willing to spend. I have little interest in making a pitch for $8, hoping to settle for $9. Heck, my first new car was a Saturn. No haggling. I made a half-hearted effort to at least get floor mats with the deal, to no avail. I liked that - the transaction was rather forthright, all in all.

Given my misanthropic, individualist, cynical, anti-haggling biases, it makes perfect sense that I work with labor unions and am a true believer in the labor movement, doesn't it? Well, I do. I can and do reconcile my seemingly inconsistent beliefs, but that's a whole other posting and then some. The anecdote may work better than the philosophical musing or exposition.

This past Saturday I had the chance to attend a breakfast event sponsored by the South Florida AFL-CIO that epitomized why I believe so wholeheartedly in organized labor.

Anyone who has spent any length of time in South Florida with eyes and ears open observing the surreality of this place knows that "melting pot" is as far from the truth as one can get.

Class conflict? We've got Fisher Island - I don't know that my yearly income gets me fare for the ferry there - and we've got Miami, among the poorest cities in the nation.

Color? Ask the folks of Overtown and Liberty City about opportunities for African-Americans here. I am painting with a bit of a broad brush here, but far too many folks of Cuban descent - themselves brown folks, not white, if you were to ask anyone from up north - have a strong anti-black racist streak. I pick on them a bit because they are the dominant group. The non-hispanic whites that run most of the rest of the country for the most part ran like hell for Broward and points farther north rather than live among folks who, while of a darker skin tone, merely wanted to live the American dream free from Castro's hateful regime.

And that ties into culture. Don't dare lump a Puerto Rican in with the Cubans or the Dominicans, and if you want to see fireworks on the cheap, call any one of them a Mexican. Among folks that I would have labeled "black" at one point in my life, I've learned that former Jamaicans, Haitians, and Mississippians are as varied as any bloc of individuals can be. Even your so-called white folks run the gamut from former New Yorkers who are Jewish to the Pentacostalist bubbas of the Panhandle to bemused former Midwesterners of the agnostic persuasion.

Color, class, culture, conflict - we've got them in abundance.

Unless you are at a South Florida AFL-CIO shindig. There in one room on a sunny and pleasant Saturday morning were bus drivers, longshoremen, teachers, UPS drivers, school system mechanics, firefighters - I could go on, but there were folks from all walks of life, from GEDs to PhDs and all points in between. Black, white, brown - folks of all colors. Men and women. Native born and newly-arrived. And all there for a common goal - to make South Florida a better place for working people and their families.

The labor movement here is the only community that I have witnessed firsthand that transcends those boundaries of color, class, and culture that so divide our everyday lives in South Florida. I come away from meetings like Saturday's seeing our diversity working in harmony for a change, and that misanthropy, that cynicism, that sense of isolation that comes from seeing one's self as an individual in isolation rather than in community, all recede a bit. Hope takes their place.

I prefer that feeling, frankly.