A few weeks ago I found out that I "offended" a blood relative because I am the Coordinator of the Tri-Cities Tea Party. I was accused of being against everything my father and uncles worked for and accused of being anti-union! The more we talked, the more agitated he became and I could see there was no reasoning with him at that point so I ended the conversation.
When somebody becomes that agitated, they start spewing things they probably don’t even believe themselves; either that or he has been drinking too much of the Obama Kool-Aid! The ‘progressives’ have been pouring their Kool-Aid for a long time and we have many union members who have been sipping the stuff; the Kool-Aid dulls the senses and allows you to believe their lies and, pretty soon, you stop thinking for yourself and you have become another socialist zombie!
Do I think that is what happened to this relative? I hope not; I am hoping he will think it out for himself and realize I have always been the same ~ I have always believed in individual Liberty and American exceptionalism! My father and his father were strong advocates of this; that is probably the biggest factor in my libertarian approach to life!
My father was a quiet man but a natural leader and the family patriarch; his younger brothers followed him from job to job during the Depression. The 3 of them tried to enlist in the Army; my uncles were accepted but my father was rejected due to a double hernia. My uncles were taken prisoner at Corregidor, Phillipines, and spent most of the war in a P.O.W. camp in Manchuria, China. I had a third uncle who fought in WWII: My mother’s brother fought in Europe and was taken prison by the Germans. Luckily, all 3 of my uncles survived their imprisonment and were liberated by the end of the war.
But, suffice to say, my uncles fought socialism in WWII and my father and my uncles continued the fight against socialism and communism by working at Hanford, supplying plutonium for the nation's nuclear defense and I honor them every day by fighting for Liberty!
I worked with one of my uncles at Hanford; we belonged to the Teamsters union and my uncle was our Shop Steward; he always concerned himself with defending individual Teamsters and making certain they were treated fairly by management. My father, my uncle, and I went on-strike in 1966, for higher wages (a very dumb thing to do!). After 6 weeks, the same union officials who convinced us to go on strike, recommended that we settle for the same contract language we had been rejecting for 5 weeks! We were livid and it left a bad taste in our mouth! My uncle and I went to Seattle to find work so we wouldn’t have to return to Hanford and the Teamsters union. We couldn’t find any jobs at that time so we returned to work with the Teamsters but my uncle and I said we would leave as soon as we had another job; we had families to support so we didn’t allow our pride to harm our families financially. My uncle opened his own business within a year after that and I went to work for another business.
When I went to work at Energy Northwest, a union was trying to organize the security force, of which I was a member; I fought the union coming into our work place but we lost the battle by one vote! I refused to be my squad’s Steward because of the hard feelings between me and the union. But 4 years later, I was approached again to be steward; this time I accepted and served as Shop Steward for 4 years before I resigned from the task (it is a thankless job). I was approached several times after that to be steward again and I kept refusing because it takes so much time from your family but I always consulted with the steward with ideas to make the task easier. I was approached the year I retired to be steward to help secure a new contract with the company (we had been working without a contract for 4 years) and the new security management was violating every established contract guideline, trying to break the union ~ I accepted the task, much to my wife’s chagrin, and we began filing new grievances to re-establish the labor rules the company had been violating ~ We were busy! But we were successful and we were offered a reasonable contract, which the security force accepted. My wife and I went to another security officer’s retirement party several weeks ago and several of my former work mates greeted me with statements like: “It’s changed since you left and we need you back!”
I’m not telling you this to “blow my own horn” but to explain my support of unions because there’s a line I have defined in my work career that also explains my “line” in this fight with our government. I believe in the union locals; not in the national or international unions! The old adage: “All politics are local!” applies to unions as well! If you are a member of a union, make certain your union local is free of corruption and support your local by volunteering and running for offices there; become a steward, learn how to represent your fellow union employees to the company and never be afraid to confront abuse or corruption in your union local or the company you work for! The toughest thing to remember is the union local works for you; not the other way around! Do not let them dictate what you want in your contract, you, the union members, dictate to them what you want in your contract! Above all: Always think for yourself! You study the issues; you research the facts; and you decide what is best for you, your family, and the nation! The International will not like you ~ They hated my guts because I would call them on their propaganda they tried to push off on us as “fact”! Was I always right? I like to think I was always right and true to me and my principles. I didn’t concern myself with what the big union bosses thought of me because I don’t answer to them; I answer to myself, my wife and family, and I will answer to the Lord, Jesus Christ!
The corruption in the national and international unions is monumental and to clean them up will be just as difficult as cleaning up Washington, D.C. (“District of Criminals”) ~ That is the revolution we are embroiled in and it is our fault it has come to this: Our apathy and “party loyalty” brought us this far down into the political slime we find in the nation’s capital today! The same is true for the corruption we see in the international and national unions ~ That’s a fight I do not have time for ~ That’s a fight union members must wage for themselves, their families, and the nation if they are to survive!
We won the Cold War! We defeated communism/socialism and now we have elected officials trying to turn us into a communist/socialist state and I will die before I let that happen!
We won at the Ballot Box on November 2nd; by “we” I mean the American People and specifically the Liberty groups: The Tea Party movement, The 9-12 Projects, Campaign for Liberty, and Independence Caucus. But that is just the first battle in this Second Revolution to save American exceptionalism and re-establish God in our nation! We will throw off the yoke of oppression we have allowed our servants to place on us once and for all! We must re-establish our history in the school books, lest we forget why we established a Representative Republic and not a democracy!
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