Standoff between militia and strikers during the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_Lawrence_textile_strike
I've always sort of viewed society as a machine that is on some level – fair and equitable.
But the more I get older, the more I realize that is deeply corrupt, on a level that is frankly unsettling to my worldview. The idea that workers organizing and bringing exploitative organs of trade and governance to task can be so easily met by militia posses armed with loaded rifles and bayonets.
That people can be extrajudicially murdered by the police during protests, and be used as a token in the false incrimination of those leading the protests. That trials involving those leaders can be dragged on for months following the protests.
110 years ago – little more than a handful of generations, a textile company was willing to idly bribe a man with a tidy sum, to endanger the lives of the people of his own town by planting dynamite – simply to frame the strikers as terrorists.
For what? Profits?
And in the aftermath of the strike, it was all erased. Starvation. Hardship. Death. Imprisonment. The companies simply clawed everything back, state officials were allowed to retain their positions, and the workers were exploited again by increments.
No one was held accountable except for those who campaigned for fair treatment.
I find it hard to process.