Serving the Towns of Wawarsing, Crawford, Mamakating, Rochester and Shawangunk, and everything in between
(none)   
SJ FB page   

Gutter Gutter
Editorial
On Education & Labor's Benefits

All around the area our young'uns are readying for school. Some cousins in other states have already started, while those starting or returning to college have headed afar to move into dorms, nervously sharing their last dinners with family before striking out "on their own;" or begun navigating the strange ways of community college campuses, hoping they can find the maturity to match risen expectations for their scholarship... and ambitions.

I keep thinking of the quiet revelations in the current film out, "Boyhood," that tracks a young man in Texas, and his family, from the age of six to eighteen by using the same actors over a similar span of time. It's heartbreaking watching the ways our faces and bodies change, reflecting the ways our minds and behaviors change over time. The boy at the center of the work watches parents fail and retain strength; he himself falters into occasional drinking, drug use, sex and the heartbreak of young love. Yet we don't ever question the choices in front of us because we can recognize them from our own memories.

You don't judge reality; you acknowledge it and deal with it. Or at least this film suggests, along with much of the literature and lessons our kids will be learning as they return to school this year.

Because yes, the "liberal arts" still play as large a role in shaping who we become as any STEM bits and pieces of knowledge (as in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). One track feeds the way we deal with physical things, including the career paths so many want us on henceforth; the other feeds the "soul" as much as any religious instruction. It's about using our culture to make strong decisions.

My own son is entering third grade and has been jittery about the transition, as he usually is this time of year. But then, as we went shopping for a new lunch box (with lit up eyes!), school materials, and clothes — and as his new bus assignments and letters from new teachers have come in addressed directly to him, he's started perking up. Yes, he'll read the books he spent all summer avoiding. He'll do the chores we've asked him to do. He'll show us, again, that he can "act right" and be a little man.

Ah, how we love this time of year and its innate sense of promise, it's bittersweet reminding us all of our own remaining ambitions and dreams. And how we can all do better through education, both jointly and individually accomplished.

Meanwhile, we want to also direct you to our back page collage and apologize for not being able to run all the dozens of fine images we were able to bring together for this ode to hard work, the labor movement, and how both have shaped our region and nation. Not included were great pics of local zinc and cement mines, and images of the boys and men who worked in such places; pictures of small and large farming operations, the Borden milk works, the many factories of Ellenville. The canals and railroads were there, along with pictures of union marches around the nation, as well as the many Labor candidates that used to run for political offices out of the American Midwest for decades.

The idea of all this was simple — to remind ourselves, over the Labor Day weekend, that workers asking for rights was not always seen as a bad or unpatriotic thing. That it was wrong to employ kids, pay women and minorities less, and insist on working people twelve hours a day for six and sometimes seven day weeks. Unions came together not as a plot to undermine others' profits, but as a means of making all of our nation better... which is why they were gradually upheld by many in our governing classes for years. Because the union effort ended up instilling a greater sense of working pride, and consumer spending habits, across America.

Recently, we covered new labor efforts to unionize adjunct professors and temp workers. The reasoning, we were told, had as much to do with protecting areas of the culture that were being eroded by profit concerns over other factors.

For that, and all we've gained through the labor movement, we ask for all to salute our union histories this Labor Day.

Then get back to school!



Gutter Gutter






Gutter