Europeans: “I don’t understand you Americans, if your working conditions, wages, and social safety net are so bad, why do you not simply unionize or strike?”
Americans:
Also there’s literally so many restrictions on unions and strikes at this point that striking on any significant scale is nearly de facto illegal
WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD ABOUT THE LUDLOW MASSACRE, WHY WASN’T I TAUGHT THIS IN CLASS
Ya’ll literally forgot The Battle of Blair Mountain and the eastern strikes that happened before it, tho. It’s a huge part of Union history in which the US military got involved and possibly the origin of the word redneck (for the red scarves on the unionists’ necks, though a good chunk of the exploited miners were not white or Scotch-Irish: see the movie Matewan with James Earl Jones and Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina) and nobody fucking remembers it, hence I literally got a fucking tattoo of one of the miners on my arm.
Short version: Coal companies bought land out from beneath citizens’ feet and forced them to live on that very land subsisting on company credits to buy things from company stores on homes or in literal camps that belonged to the companies. They hired a Pinkerton-like folks called the Baldwin-Felts to muscle them around. This included a tactic called the Bull Moose Special, wherein they’d load a gatling gun onto a moving train and opened fire as they passed. Mother Jones, the namesake of the leftist periodical ya’ll might’ve heard about, was a major figure who showed up to help the miners protest. It all pretty much ended with the fights escalating into a small war, and the military intervening by sending federal troops. This all happened in Mingo and Logan Counties, WV, btw, though the preceding coal conflicts like Paint Creek-Cabin Creek happened in PA and the coal part of Appalachia.
And no one fucking tells you about this shit, but that’s none of my goddamn business.
This is not my story. This was told to me by a woman I knew from work several years ago; she’s a very sweet nurse.
Nurse graduated from nursing school and decided with her friend to
move to one of the cities that was listed as having “the most eligible
bachelors” from some publication. She moves and starts dating her future
husband.
Future Husband’s mother is a viper and decides Nurse is not good
enough for her family. The happy couple eventually get engaged and
future mother-in-law is having none of it. Tries for several months to
break them up; tries to convince Nurse to go back where she came from
and simultaneously tries to gently convince her precious son that Nurse
may not be good for him.
To add some more context to this situation, this MIL is pretty nasty
to Nurse but hides it well to other people, always making sure she’s
super (fake) sweet to everyone when others are around.
Finally wedding plans are set so MIL gets desperate. She gets Nurse
alone with a “generous” offer: leave fiance and never come back in
exchange for $10,000 (note: this was almost 30 years ago so I guess it
was kind of a shitload of money for most).
Nurse is so sick of this woman’s shit and is incredibly insulted.
However, she’s intelligent and maintains her composure. Nurse accepts
the offer.
Nurse takes the money, does not leave, and gets married anyway. Nobody else knows about this.
MIL cannot say or do anything about it without exposing herself to her family as a horrible person.
Nurse and husband are still happily married; their kids are grown; husband still has no idea this went down.
MIL has suffered silently for almost 30 years.
I reblog this every time I see it, because it’s a Machiavellian power move AND I LOVE IT!
Getting older and then looking at all these teenagers who have to save the world…..why did I ever think that was acceptable……..they’re so young….let Katniss sleep…….let Harry Potter have a normal school year……..Aang is literally 12, I’m twice his age and incapable of 1 percent of his plot duties, these poor children, these poor acne encrusted puberty enduring babies
ok but did you forget what being a kid and reading/watching these stories was like? because actual real children do not live lives devoid of violence or responsibility or darkness.
kids have abusive families like Harry and live in poverty like Ron, they live in poverty as part of specific systems designed to keep them keep them there like Katniss, they live in situations that ask way too much of them like Aang and Harry and all of them.
My little sister’s graduating class had a lot of dead parents. There were all kinds of reasons, drug overdose and sudden illness and motorcycle accident and long battle with illness and ’….ehhh probably heart disease? they didn’t do a real autopsy…’. For the long battle with an illness category, Sarah’s mother got cancer not long after giving birth to her much younger sister. Not only did Sarah have to watch her mother slowly lose that battle over the last years of Sarah’s childhood but she had to basically raise that baby because her father was busy trying work and care for their mother. Sarah didn’t have to save the world but you don’t think it didn’t feel like it some times?
It’s like JKR has said, kids don’t hear these stories and suddenly realize monsters are real. They already know. These stories tell you monsters can be defeated. That you can survive. That it might get worse some times but you can win. And yeah it would be nice if in the real world kids never had to do it themselves but that’s just not true.
Harry Potter didn’t make me feel like it was fair or reasonable for teens to save the world, it made me feel less alone in my struggles. Reading about kids fighting the world made me feel like I could make it through too. One of the reasons these stories are so popular is that they give you hope, they give you characters to fight along side during the dark and hard moments in your own life–whether that’s imagining your math test as a Hungarian Horntail you have to get past, or struggling to leave your own abusive family like Harry having to go back to the Dursleys every year, or watching violence and drugs take your friends like the Battle of Hogwarts killed so many.
These stories don’t normalize kids saving the world, they tell kids who already have to that they can survive it.
This response is beautiful and I don’t think I have anything to add.
