Dark times coming...

History isn't just about pointing of fingers and making laudatory statements about long-passed characters and events - it is much more vital when considered as a study in "gee, that was a good idea, we should keep doing that" and "good lord, no matter what kind of crack they were smoking, that was a HORRIBLE notion and we want to be on guard against even the precursors of such horror!!"

With that in mind, why does the "Union Fisting" logo being distributed by thuggish union sorts in Wisconsin make me think of a sort of reverse Kristallnacht? A sort of warm-up by way of a heavy-handed protection racket to a purge of the "not-pc"?

Or from our own nations history, the less-dramatic coercive Blue Eagle of the National Recovery Administration, that emblem of a misbegotten national program to coerce cooperation with Roosevelts ill-concieved New Deal programs - by coordinating a national and local boycott of businesses that did not play along.

The tool of the tyrant is to con the masses into some group action against a designated goat, and allow said tyrant exciting new powers and authority, is always suspect - because it always, always, ends in trampling (at an absolute minimum) the rights of the individual...usually in service of some alleged ("SAVE THE CHILDREN") good cause.

Once upon a time, unionization was a good thing. It balanced the worst excesses workers faced from industrial barons, and served to broaden the American middle class. But like anything, in sufficiently large doses, it becomes toxic. Say, in Wisconsin...

Tell me this isn't toxic...

And then tell me that folks aren't starting to get fed up, and aren't starting to contemplate "doing something" about this as it places their immediate safety and future prosperity at risk for limited economic gain by folks who already have it pretty darned good.

Dark times coming...