Old Buddys, family and the Wildcat Strike

My buddy swung by the house today to see if I was working. We’re both union carpenters and it turns out he’s #179 on the out of work list and I’m #178. I asked if he came over to bump me off so he could get my place on the list, he said he had thought about it.
Rudy’s wife is a school lunch lady and she can’t increase her hours, so being unemployed is really stressing him. He only just made his last mortgage check. He hasn’t been this unemployed since the early 90s. We shot the bull about the state of the nation, the bailouts, Obama and got onto family. Rudy also lost a family member this month.
Rudy and his siblings went through a childhood that couldn’t be considered anything short of hell. Drugs and prostitution was how most of them dealt with it as adults. “I was just saying, well at least the six of us are still alive” he told me. Then last month his sister was found dead next to a garbage dumpster, probable cause an overdose. One of his other sisters and him had picked her up a week earlier from a half way house, she complained that she had to wait till Monday before she could get into a proper shelter but that she knew a safe house she could go to.
Rudy described his sister as humorous, helpful, caring, but she could not resist getting high. Her pain was too much to handle. The sister that dropped her off in what was to be the rough neighborhood she was to die in has since been unconsolable. She had spent her childhood protecting her younger sister, lying in front of the door, putting herself up for abuse by their step-father to save her sister.
The part of society capitalism prefers to segregate and scapegoat, where homicide, suicide, drugs and violence are more open, is not society’s exception but its underlined rule. As the crisis deepens and the extremities widen and become more commonplace, more people will conclude that the very foundations of this sick, individualistic society are absolutely rotten.
We live in a world where so many children’s memories are not their rock in life, but their constant undoing.
As old friends often do, we ended our chat by reminiscing some of our own adventures. Ten years ago this month we were involved in leading a wildcat strike of union carpenters that exploded to include 5,000 workers. One of the first steps was taken by Rudy, when we decided to break up a conference of our so called union leaders, accompanied by 150 rank and file workers. We busted through the doors, beat back the security and stopped our union officials who were meeting to vote on a contract they wouldn’t let the members vote on. Five days later we closed down all the biggest construction sites in Northern California. That spirit of resistance keeps us all going.