Let Justice Roll Like A River

Let Justice Roll Down Like A River

Tomorrow will make the second time in my life that I have joined a protest.  The first was in the 1980’s when Oliver North and the Iran/Contra scandal was ongoing.  North came to a city about an hour and a half from where we live, and a friend talked us into going down to protest.  There were quite a few people there, much to my relief, so the three of us held up a banner that read, “Support the US Constitution”.  We thought that was safe enough.  We hadn’t counted on the fact that this particular city is pretty conservative, which is probably why North had been invited there to speak.  Anyway, we were standing there, all three sporting gray hair, when a kid in a pickup went by and yelled at us, “Get a job, you hippies”.  To which my very proper friend yelled back, “Who bought your pickup?  Your Grandma?”  That was the most exciting thing that happened that day, so I expect the same tomorrow.

OccupySLO is being organized by SLO Grassroots.  For those of you who don’t recognize the SLO, it stands for San Luis Obispo, CA.  SLO City is the government center for the county (SLO Co), so the protest will be held on the courthouse steps.  It is traditional to have protests there, so the location is not an indication of being upset over SLO Co government.

I agreed to go down for many reasons.  One personal one is my long-standing antipathy toward big corporations.  My father worked for an oil company during WWII, and for a time after.  He worked on rigs; not in an office.  After the war, AFL/CIO came into the fields to organize the workers.  We constantly had his fellow workers in our yard, away from my mother and me (my brother was in college by then), but I got some of the drift that it was about union organizing.  The company came to my Dad and asked him to form a company union instead of going with AFL/CIO, so he did as a way to prevent any union arguments and/or violence.  The company union was formed, most of the workers joined and it looked like things would be OK.  As soon as AFL/CIO left with their organizers, and after a few months, the company just up and dissolved the union.  My father was devastated, and he was never quite the same after.

Before the war, I remember hearing and reading about the labor unrest in California for a really funny reason.  The labor organizer who was targeted for much vilification was someone named Harry Bridges.  I had not seen his name in print before I heard it, so heard it as “Hairy” Bridges.  I can still remember wondering how hairy bridges could affect people’s lives.  After all, I was only about five or six!  And I really remembered as an adult being horrified when I saw pictures of the Hudson River burning.  I ardently supported the environmental legislation that was passed as a result.  Now these corporate radical right-wingers want to do away with those regulations.

Another reason I’m going down is in the 1980’s when I heard Ronald Reagan constantly say that we had to get government off the backs of business, because of my history of corporations relative to unions, the environment, financial  regulations, etc., the thought immediately popped into my head, “Who is going to get corporations off the backs of the people?”

Well – now we know.  Only the 99% acting in concert, and on the streets.  If anyone asks me down there what I really want, the answer is very clear in my mind – for everyone, let justice roll down like a river.