He Had a Dream

I know I'm not going to have the time to continue doing these blogs as often as I have but today is a special day for me. Not because it's Income Tax Day or the day of the ridiculous tea bag dunking charade, but because it's the anniversary of the birth of A. Philip Randolph on April 15, 1889.

He was the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the principal organizer of the Civil Rights March made famous by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech. "You could look it up."

The personal note for me was because I merged the Sleeping Car Porters in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks and while I was at the AFL-CIO was in charge of commissioning a bust be done of him at Union Station in Washington. You can see it across from the waiting room seats near the entrances. The powers that be at AMTRAK wanted to hide it someplace "so it wouldn't be vandalized." I told them "we want it to be where people can see it and Phil won't let his bust be vandalized." As you can see when you're in Union Station, I won the argument.

The Pitch

Do not despair Nats fans. They play 162 games each year, these days. (In my youth it was only 154.)

The everyday players are showing that they are competitive. The problem is pitching and, as in sales, it is always about pitching. A great mathematician, Lawrence Peter Berra, once said "Pitching is ninety percent of the game and the other half is hitting, catching and fielding."

Yogi was right,as usual, though the numbers don't add up correctly. What is also right is that this company and its products have to be pitched by all of us or we might as well be sitting "on the bench." You've got to be in the game to accomplish anything.

As the man says "not a sermon, just a thought."

We Shall Overcome

I'm old. I thought I’d say that right off. With my background I know more about bogs (peat) than blogs but here goes:

I think I know a lot about (a) the Labor Movement (b) politics and (c) baseball, so that’s all I will ever blog about. Let’s stick to (a) today.

In my opinion, the main reason this country did not become a communist nation in the nineteen-thirties was the labor movement and Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition of its important role in our society. The Great Depression was the last time the unrestricted greed of the free enterprise system almost wrecked the American economy as I see it. Among other measures, President Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress permitted unions to grow and give workers the opportunity to release their frustrations through the collective bargaining process. Without that opportunity I believe American workers would have overthrown our government. Things were that bad. Millions were starving and hope was gone. Fear particularly, as FDR so eloquently put it, was pervasive among the vast majority of our citizens.

Today, without Obama, we’d be in the same mess. Yes, things today are different and not as bad. But just go outside the Beltway and they’re close to it. We are on the road back to normalcy, not where we were a year ago, but the light is visible at the end of the tunnel. We will survive. Or as someone much wiser than I once said about another issue "We shall overcome." Yes, I was there standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial when he said it. However, I remind us of the next words from the spiritual he quoted from are SOMEDAY and SOME WAY. Maybe not this week. Arrivederci