OPINION: Needing work, marking death, remembering tragedy

Three thoughts …

If you’re keeping score at home, this year’s U.S. Senate campaign in Nebraska may require you to learn a new set of symbols to gauge progress, or, more to the point, the lack thereof. That’s because to date the best we can seem to muster are charges between incumbent Pete Ricketts and presumptive challenger Dan Osborn that the other is a “fake,” a word now so bereft of meaning that it beggars belief in any usage. (See “fake news” et. al. for details.)

Add to that fussiness a folderol over exactly who was going to be on the primary ballot and who paid filing fees for whom. After the state Supreme Court weighed in, we seem to have a slate of candidates. At this rate, however, hope is fading that the race for the Senate will be about issues and ideas. (Insert heavy sigh here.)

We could use the work. Last I checked Nebraskans were paying close to $4 a gallon at the pump. They are mourning the loss of a native son who died by Iranian missile fire and wondering as their own military sons and daughters are being outfitted for war. Surely some are shuddering as they watch a masked “domestic army” enter the homes of non-criminal immigrants, dragging them away for detention or deportation without due process. 

They are trying to find affordable housing, fast becoming a quaint notion. They are hoping their vote counts this November as the election is in danger of being compromised by proposed federal interference.

So, yes, please, let’s talk about more than who is on the ballot or a fakery rating.

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After activist Charlie Kirk was killed, those who chose to disparage him in death were greeted with an avalanche of derision, ridicule and threats. Politicians, including some who represent Nebraskans, were quick to scold those they believed did not properly respond to Kirk’s horrific murder on a college campus in Utah. 

Media behemoth Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel from late night after pressure from FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr about Kimmel’s continued chiding of the president, not because of what he said about Charlie Kirk’s death. Which, by the way, was neither dismissive nor disparaging.  Disney reinstated Kimmel shortly after thousands of subscribers left the company’s streaming service in protest.

Curiously, little has been said in high places — in Nebraska and elsewhere — about the president’s recent public celebration over the death of former FBI director, Robert Mueller, a life-long Republican civil servant and Purple Heart recipient. Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led to several convictions and the claim that had he not been in office at the time, the president could have been indicted.

With the crickets underscoring the contrast between the two situations, perhaps we now have an updated corollary to the admonition that we must avoid “speaking ill of the dead.” Something along the lines of “except when the political winds are favorable” or “how many subscriptions can we afford to lose.”

SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE

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If you carry unemployment and health insurance, work a 40-hour week, support the idea of a minimum wage and see a factory as no place for children, an important anniversary in your value structure came and went last week.

March 25 was the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, which killed 146 workers in 1911, almost all of them young, immigrant women and girls who did not speak English. They were unable to get out of the building because owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, to curtail what they claimed was theft and extended work breaks, had locked the exits to the top three floors of the 10-story Asch Building, home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. 

Some workers escaped before the fire spread, but among the dead were those who were trapped in fiery stairwells whose exits were locked and those who leaped from the building to their deaths below. One account said that the bodies of the deceased covered fire hoses, making the NYFD’s job more difficult. 

Among the horrified onlookers that day was Francis Perkins, a young social worker who became part of the effort to unravel what happened that day. She, along with nearly 100,000 others, took to the NYC streets shortly after the fire to demand better working conditions. Perkins eventually became President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, the first woman in U.S history to hold a cabinet position. Her relentless drive brought about changes that led to the safety and security measures mentioned above.

Blanck and Harris were tried for manslaughter but found not guilty. Their insurance company paid the pair $400 per worker death. The building’s owner paid $75 to some victims’ families. Otherwise, no one was compensated or held responsible for 146 deaths.

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