Since you brought up the PATCO strike Kevin, I thought I'd tell my story of my early impressions of politics that were first developed in 1981 when I was 11 years old.
My dad was one of the 13,000 PATCO air traffic controllers who were unceremoniously fired by Ronald Reagan that year. During the strike, I walked the picket lines in Dallas along with my whole family. It was my first real experience in such activism, and it taught me some lessons about politics and the media. The strikers had some very legitimate gripes, the best example of which was their outdated, unreliable computer equipment. Their radar was subject to crashing. For most people, getting the blue screen of death while working on something might amount to a bad day, but to ATCs when they can't see radar lives are at stake. We found that the media didn't really cover that angle or many other of the strikers' grievances. I even heard about strikers who pulled aside a TV reporter and asked him why they didn't air the truth on these matters.. I learned then that the media is not as free as we might like it to be. Then there was the day a police officer walked along the picket line, writing down the cars' license plate numbers. Why? No particular reason.. the drivers weren't being charged with anything. Just good old fashioned intimidation. Welcome to America.. land of the free, home of the brave.
Brave when it came to the strikers, certainly. They knew by breaking their no-strike oath that their jobs were on the line, even moreso than your garden variety picketing. One would think that by taking such an unprecedented step, it would get attention and their grievances would be seriously considered. But no, instead Reagan used this preoccupation with the oath as the main excuse to fire the strikers. That and making an example of them to show in his first year of office that he'd be tough on labor unions, which ran counter to his election platform, but that's another issue. But I see a similar parallel here in Texas with our state congress debacle where the democrats fled to avoid a quorum and delay legislation on questionable redistricting. Again, you would think that such a dramatic move would at least give people pause to listen to what they had to say. But their opponents can't seem to stop the hand-wringing about the "unfair" tactics of the democrats.
Anyway, a final lesson I learned from the PATCO strike was that sometimes our president certainly is interested in "keeping the little guy down" as you put it... in this case, 13,000 of them, made powerless since they could not use the normal channels to have their grievances addressed. Ever since then, no republican politician or platform has changed my mind from considering myself a lifelong democrat.. a political affiliation I began in 1981.
Ken
