What is our city but a collection of buildings and open spaces? The Dudley tower. The Landmark. The Great Dane. The Red Eye. The 400 block. We know these places around the city. The coffee shops and diners, the movie rental stores and the markets. The hotels and the movie theaters. There are places to visit, but there is no real organized communication. Nothing is discussed. We don’t really know our neighbors.

What troubles me is, we the people have no place to truly unite. There is no building in the center of the city where all the members of the community can really come together, really get to know each other, and band together. We’ve been conditioned to pop a red flag at the mere mention of a labor union; We had tended to associate such thoughts with false ideas related to real words like “communism” or “socialism.” These are terms often used in late 70s and early 80s propaganda campaigns.

The wealthy Capitalist class needs checks and balances, and those were once labor unions. The mainstream media did much to discredit Labor Unions during the period from the 1970s to today, as noted in a book by Michael Zweig titled “The Working Class Majority.” Labor unions were labeled as ‘swindlers’ and ‘commies’ just because working class people wanted to come together to fight for the better wages they deserve, as the supposed ‘trickle down effect’ seems to be quite dry.

The mainstream media will continue to portray labor unions as thieves and commies, and untrustworthy. It’s all part of their game. The media corporations are as much privately owned and profiteering powers, as companies like ExxonMobil and Lockheed-Martin.

If workers can find common ground in similar occupations, they can stand together, form unions and provide checks against the greed and tyranny of the capitalist class, who are so very happy to keep all the profits to themselves.