Fury & Grace

Fury & Grace is a memoir written when I was quite fresh out of the union. I’ll wager mortgage money that the ‘Fury’ part comes shining through. The ‘Grace,’ well….that’s aspirational for us all, I think. The stories seem to change into different stories as I change into a different man, but am always still the same man.

I sometimes think I might just re-write that book every five years. Keep the chapter divisions, but make new epigrams and tell the same events through the lens of whatever psyche I have in my head at that moment.

Finding the Pearl in the Storm

Finding the Pearl in the Storm was my Covid project. I’d been away from the union for a few years at that point. Union organizing was so compelling to me and so different from everyday life that when I encountered organizers and organizing I couldn’t look away. I had to dive in.

Something that made it compelling to me might be interesting to you. Union organizing is human politics, full stop. It seemed to me just like the politics in the Ancient Greek and Roman world that I spent a lot of time in college learning about as an ancient philosophy major. I find the classical world bursting with vitality and the beauty of humans searching and striving and revelling in the humanity they share with us. They were fresh and young in their humanity. As a professor put it, “We are the Ancient ones. They were the young ones” Yes! They looked at all of it with new eyes. They made our rookie mistakes for us.

Politics to them occurred on a very human scale. We’ve come quite a long way since their stance that basically property-owning men were the ones who could vote. That’s a wild generalization, but it gets the point across. It meant that even in a city like Athens maybe only 30,000 citizens could vote. Of them, there’s no way mote than 3,000 of them really mattered in electoral terms. I have little doubt that it would be just like today - certain blocks of voters would just be taken for granted by candidates and advocates, and so candidates who wanted to win would focus on finding leaders and building caucuses among their influential supporters. Now you’d be talking about a few hundred people to wrangle, and that’s a very human number. One person can develop functional political relationships with a hundred people or so, something in that ballpark, I’d say.

That’s starting to sound like politics on the scale I’ve seen it in organizing campaigns. That’s why I stuck around them for so long, I think. They seem like something real and human to me. I loved that. I worked very hard to try and develop my own understanding of how people act in this odd conflict-laden little slice of life that’s been my very weird experience to have lived in for most of my adult working life. I hope you find something interesting in it.