You have to hand it to black pro athletes. They get it. They understand political stakes, and they play for keeps.
They could teach a lesson to the rest of us.
For three days in August they peacefully shut down the NBA finals and most of the sports world to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, the black man hit seven times in the back by police bullets in Kenosha, Wis.
If dozens of athletes can shut down the world of professional sports, what happens when the rest of us join in protest by also staying home? General strikes are a tactic not much known in this country, but they may be needed for the majority of Americans to get the attention of the criminal minority who’ve seized control of the nation and may not relinquish it.
Such as by trying to steal a national election.
The idea is simple enough: People stay home. Everyone stays home who can stay home without immediately jeopardizing the lives of others. Nurses, doctors and firefighters stay on the job. The idea is to shut down the nation’s economic machine. Money-making grinds to a halt.
That’s the wooden stake to the black heart of the blood-sucking Republican Party.
Bus drivers and teachers and truckers and construction workers stay home. Factory hands, shopkeepers, cashiers and fast-food workers stay home. Airline pilots and bank cashiers and landscapers and engineers stay home.
Then the wealthy see what the world is without the rest of us – the ones they have held down for so long, including their own secretaries and cooks and housekeepers and chauffers and plumbers and pool boys. See how long they last.
History is a cycle of wealthy, influential individuals rising to the status of kings, until the peasants rise up in revolt.
General strikes have been used effectively since the Roman Empire for the simple reason that the rest of us outnumbers all the king’s men, exponentially. A general strike of 20,000 workers in Philadelphia in 1835 resulted in granting all the strikers’ demands, including a 10-hour workday and increased wages. The 1968 general strike in France nearly toppled the federal government.
Is such a strike possible in the far-flung United States? Social media would make it quick and easy to organize. And it’s easy to participate. To those who’ve never done such things, marching in protests, speaking out at public meetings or writing letters to Congress can seem daunting. So few people are that active that most others consider them radicals or crackpots.
A general strike requires less and could accomplish more. All that people must do is stay home from work, and we’ve had good experience at that for the past six months. In fact, remember who became most agitated by the prolonged COVID closures last spring? And who pushed for “re-opening” schools and businesses at the urging of industry and against the advice of scientists?
Republicans who owed their offices to moneyed interests.
In our little town in Alaska, officials reported Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said he wanted to keep people safe, but he wasn’t willing to shut down industries to do it. That is, he wanted to diet but wasn’t willing to give up potato chips. So he exempted from quarantine seafood workers, and the industry quickly became our COVID hotspot.
Trump, Dunleavy and other Republicans weren’t concerned about “essential workers” on the frontlines of exposure to corona. From gutting workplace safety regulations to using poor boys as cannon fodder in unnecessary wars, Republicans have never given a damn about working people.
Trump is the epitome of that, screwing over the contractors who built his own hotels.
As Trump no longer represents most citizens but wields power by use of lies, trickery, connivance as well as by outdated, undemocratic institutions like the Electoral College, he must go.
If he refuses, a nationwide, general strike could send an irrefutable message that he does not represent a majority of Americans.