Reprinted with permission from the Fall 2011 issue of The Prairie Progressive, Iowa’s oldest progressive newsletter, available only in hard copy for $12/yr.!! Send check to PP, Box 1945, Iowa City 52244. 

Co-editors of The Prairie Progressive are Jeff Cox and Dave Leshtz.

“…some things do change – for the better. The average lifespan of a prairie dog is three to five years in the wild; eight years in captivity. Rats live for about 2 to 3 years. Prairie Dog has gone beyond the life-span of an average prairie dog and outlived Howard Stern’s radio program, which began a month before the Prairie Progressive back in 1986. Long live Prairie Dog!”

by Marty Ryan

“What does labor want? We want more school houses and less jails. More books and less guns. More learning and less vice. More leisure and less greed. More justice and less revenge. We want more… opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

— Samuel Gompers, Chicago, 1893

My most vivid memory of that speech revisited was in Omaha during a Labor Day Celebration, twenty-five years ago. Lane Kirkland, the President of the AFL-CIO, was the featured speaker. At the time, I didn’t know a lot of Labor’s history.
It was a turning point in my life. History was being made in quiet increments. Just one month earlier, PATCO workers were fired by President Reagan. Two years earlier, I was elected Secretary-Treasurer of Local 440 of the United Food & Commercial Workers Union in Denison, IA, but I had not been a full-time business agent for much more than a few months.  Samuel Gompers’ philosophy, with better grammar, was mine.

I’ve been working for increased education, leisure, and justice ever since. Ironically, things appear not to change.  One hundred and eighteen years after Gompers’ observation, we are still struggling to contain the use of weapons (mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a continuing list of global skirmishes that seem to arise monthly now); cut down on vice (which the government now promotes on riverboats and in landlocked casinos); seeing an enormous increase in corporate greed; and an uprising of injustice fueled by the growing polarization of political parties.

What have we learned or changed in the past 25 years? The average cost per year of educating a K-12 regular student in Iowa – public and private – is $5,883. The cost of maintaining a prisoner in Iowa is $31,500. That means Iowa is spending over 5 times the amount of money on prisons as it is on schools. Gompers would be crying. What’s ironic is the architecture of new schools being built. They’re building schools now that have pods – like the prisons we’re building.  Both schools and prisons are top-heavy with management, and I assume the food is comparable, although I recently had some great cookies while visiting the Story County Jail. The transition from school to prison is becoming more adaptable, and unfortunately, more acceptable.

Since the days of Gompers, books have been virtually replaced by computers. “In fall 2008, an estimated 100 percent of public schools had one or more instructional computers with Internet access and the ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access was 3.1 to 1.” It would be ideal to have a 1:1 ratio, but this country has other priorities. As of November 2010, the United States has spent $900 billion on the Iraq War alone. This doesn’t include Afghanistan, Libya, or other spending within the Pentagon. So much for more books and fewer guns.

In the fiscal year that ended last June, the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Commission reported record numbers in the “final total of sales revenue, licensing fees and fines turned over to the state. The additional dollars came from people buying more liquor.”

A spokesperson for the Commission said “they saw around 7.5% increase in vodka sales, and pre-mixed cocktails were up about 7.25%.” Gambling hit record highs, also. Iowa’s gaming industry realized more than $15 million more this fiscal year than last year. How’s that for less vice? And the learning? Well, you have to be patient. “We don’t have the money.”

When Gompers envisioned more leisure and less greed, he surely didn’t have in mind the interpretations of today. More and more people are finding unwanted leisure time in unemployment lines (oops, I guess we don’t have those anymore, unless you mean the lines that will form at the kiosks at public libraries), while the greedy bankers, corporate CEOs and investors leave their mini-castles to fly off to check on their off-shore businesses, bank accounts, and mistresses.

Like Gompers, most of us want justice. However, with corporations being persons, radical wing nuts running campaigns to remove justices that don’t agree with their beliefs, and governors truly believing they can fire employees in the course of creating jobs, how can we ever define justice again? And who receives blame for the mess we’re in? The poor. They don’t pay taxes, they look to the government for assistance, and they won’t get jobs. Has no one come to the conclusion that the poor can only make as much as an employer will pay, if the employer will even hire a person living in America?

History isn’t neat. We know that the Challenger explosion of January 28, or the confirmation of William Rehnquist as the 16th Chief Justice on September 17, or the birth of Prairie Dog, all occurrences of 1986, are exact moments in history. But the gradual transition of an era is barely noticeable while we experience it. Maybe it’s because things haven’t really changed.

On the other hand, some things do change – for the better. The average lifespan of a prairie dog is three to five years in the wild; eight years in captivity. Rats live for about 2 to 3 years. Prairie Dog has gone beyond the life-span of an average prairie dog and outlived Howard Stern’s radio program, which began a month before the Prairie Progressive back in 1986. Long live Prairie Dog!