//

By Anne LamottSeptember 5,
2011

I love unions. I love them in the same way I love libraries and redwood groves. They are like churches: sacred. They are what make
this country great. So, besides taking my 2-year-old grandson, Jax, to a library
or to a park with redwoods almost every day, I have also helped him to get to
know a community of union workers. A year ago, I got a huge box of medium-size
Lego blocks and figurines, and we have been holding rallies ever since. Power to the People.
And while we’re at it, Solidarity Forever.

I don’t have the time or space
to introduce you to each of these union workers, but let me just mention a
few.

There’s Mavis, a blond Molly Ivins type and the leader of the
International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, and Al, a longshoreman. There are
two matching zookeepers who are older, and brothers, born to the same green
plastic mother (at a hospital where the nurses
are proud union members). There is Phil, the sailor, of Seafarers International;
Libby, who belongs to the California Federation of Teachers; and her wife,
Deirdre, who is a Teamster. Sydney, who dresses like a jungle explorer in a
safari jacket and helmet, is a union rep, working on behalf of all workers to
keep unions strong.

Everyone loves Sydney: He is one of those exquisitely
decent, old-fashioned working-class guys who made this country great. Jax and I
often build him a low platform and podium of Lego blocks from which he talks to
other workers about the fight for workers’ rights, telling them to never give
up, and reminding them that the pendulum always swings back toward fairness and
equality.

I have taught Jax all the old union songs that my parents
taught me — “Joe Hill,” “We Shall
Not Be Moved,” “John Henry,” “Bread and Roses.” So sometimes as we play, we also
sing: “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us
roses.”

For good measure, I sometimes play him “La Marseillaise” on the
kazoo, and he plays along on a bongo drum.

Why do I do this? Because I
believe that if you don’t love and support the working men and women of this
country, you are in deep trouble. You are going to get a terrible seat in
heaven. Probably a patio chair, with plastic lattice bands, the kind that leave
fat welts on the back of your thighs when you stand up.

Are you hearing
that, politicians? I wasn’t going to name names, but I’m still not over being
appalled with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attacks on unions. Remember his compulsive
trash-talking about nurses and teachers? Nurses and teachers, for God’s sake!
Could he possibly think that God shares his bad opinion of them? Of course not.
It was almost funny to watch him bullying them and their unions. It made me ask
myself something I used to wonder constantly about Dick
Cheney: Hasn’t this guy ever heard the word “karma”?

I guess it is a
plank of the Christian right to be anti-union now. But remember, there are still
a lot of us in the Christian left, and we don’t feel that way. When I was
growing up, everyone I knew was pro-union, just like everyone used public
libraries and everyone in California was proud of the public education system
and loved the state’s natural beauty. People would fight and rally and protest
and donate to help preserve it.

Then Ronald
Reagan came along, and having seen one redwood, he had seen them all, and it
was pretty much a straight line from there to Arnold’s shaking his mighty broom
at us as he trash-talked the nurses and teachers.

I understand why
politicians want to see labor as the cause of most of our societal and economic
problems. It takes the focus off the banks, the corporations, the
military-industrial complex. But public school teachers? I guess they really are
sort of greedy and grabby — not to mention rich. Especially those greedy-grabby
public school special ed teachers. My younger brother is one of them, and boy,
is he raking it in. Talk about take, take, take.

My grandson and I just
about went crazy watching the unions protest in Wisconsin in the spring. “Those
are our people!” I shouted to the television, although neither of us actually
has a job. He joined the chorus, in his native Latvian. We clapped, and ate
Cheetos, and danced and put all the workers together on the green Lego base
plate. Our pride was contagious: My two union dogs milled around, licking us
enthusiastically and levitating Cheetos right out of the baby’s
fists.

The whole world will be bombarding my grandson with messages about
individual and personal success aimed at teaching him to love the almighty buck,
but I want my grandchild to grow up in a family that loves labor, as I did. And
I want him to know that when workers’ rights or libraries or redwood groves are
threatened, it’s incumbent on us to show up with our kazoos and
bongos.

Otherwise, I tell him, this country is doomed. And then I add,
“But not on our watch, right, dude?” and he claps and cheers.

Anne
Lamott’s latest book is the novel “Imperfect Birds.”

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times