"The day will come . . ."
"when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."--inscription on the base of a memorial to those executed for the Haymarket Riot in 1887.
Today I ran across an old DVD set I had (how it survived the move from Terre Haute in late 2011, when I pitched things left and right, I don't know). It is called "Chicago: City of the Century." It's about the history of the city up through the World's Fair in 1893. I hadn't watched it in years. The second disc is a riveting account of the labor unrest in the latter part of the nineteenth century. That, of course, is because of the miserable living and working conditions the immigrants endured. To me, the takeaway is simple: Sooner or later, people just get tired of getting crapped on. Now, well over a century later, are things really all that different?
