If one strolls Washington Square in Manhattan on a quiet spring day, one can all but hear the screams of
the young women burning to death inside the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The owners had the doors on the
upper floors locked. Some did get out, and threw themselves to the ground on that day in 1911. The
owners were found innocent of any wrongdoing. After all, it was mostly poor immigrant girls who
perished.
The book "Breaker Boys" is about the Pottsville Maroons, one of the first NFL teams! The team
was named after the men and young boys who went into the Pennsylvania anthracite mines and hacked coal
from the coal face. They lived a hard life – and often died in mine accidents. They were expendable,
interchangeable. Men who died in the mines were often dumped in a heap in their front yard. If the widow
had no other means of support, the company would evict the family, unless she sent the oldest boy into
the mines. Small boys were useful, as they could get into lower places.
At about that time, many poor girls worked in cotton mills, breathing the humid, lint-filled air. They
often died in their teens.
Then along came the unions. They interfered with the unfettered business of making money. Safety laws
were passed, and fewer men died in the mines. Workers got shorter hours and, God forbid, pensions. Some
union demands have gone too far, but, unless human nature has changed, without unions we’d still have
owners locking fire escape doors and sending boys into mines and girls into factories.
The radical right claims that the left is engaged in "class warfare." That "war" has
long since been lost. Who are the winners? The richest 400 people in the United States have more wealth
than the bottom 50% of the population. Yes, 400 people have more of the wealth in this country than
200,000,000 of the rest of us. Politicians protect that wealth by keeping tax rates for millionaires and
billionaires low. We desperately need someone to represent the 200,000,000.
Powerful forces drove this country into a recession that has caused people hardship and misery beyond
belief, and cost the national treasury billions. Yet they and their masters of deceit in the media seem
to be succeeding in blaming teachers, policemen and firemen.
How sad for this great nation.
Michael Doherty
Bowling Green
