Saturday at noon I attended the Rally to Save the American Dream with two of my friends at the Connecticut capital in Hartford that was run by MoveOn.org. We were protesting in solidarity with union workers in Wisconsin who are under attack by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican members of the House. There were about 500 protesters in attendance.
Speakers included Chris Donovan, the Democratic current Speaker of the State House of Connecticut, Laura Donnelly, Ed Vargas, the former President of the AFL-CIO for Hartford, and Bob Kingsley, UE Director. Other speakers not pictured were Debra Emmelman, David Berg, Ed Masterson, and Olia Yelner.
The protest was well-organized but could have been better publicized. I got a tremendous feeling of solidarity from being there and from hearing the speakers and chanting. Especially since my single parent mother was a teacher and raised three of us kids and put us through college, all on her salary. We did need to take out loans. But at that time, college loans were very available. All three of us grew up to have successful careers, my brother in computer science, my sister as a biomedical engineer, and me in the pharmaceutical industry. She was able to do that because she was a Union member. That is the American Dream, and what the protest was all about trying to protect. That is what Gov. Scott Walker is trying to crush in Wisconsin.
But the speakers told stories of a more global nature such as how the states’ and country’s deficits and money woes were not of labor or the Unions’ doing. How the greedy large corporations were responsible instead. How the rich and large corporations needed to be taxed more to fix the problem. It is not the workers who are responsible. Yet, workers are ready to make sacrifices to help out. But workers will not give up collective bargaining; which is the backbone of the unions.
