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Protests—An American Pasttime

If you have followed the news, you'll know that Ohio's Senate Bill 5 has shoved us into the fight to protect union rights, particularly union rights for public employees. Thousands of people have gone to Columbus to give strength to the numbers, and when the governor locked the doors to the state house, they stood outside in the freezing winter weather. Former governor Ted Strickland has put the word out to send more "troops" by joining the crowd in Columbus, and everyone with an opinion has a strong one either side or the other.

So, it isn't just distant lands making a stink. It's my home state, or at least the state where I have lived for 23 years. In light of the current situation, here is this week's column in Small Town Newspaper.

Comments

dive said…
Robyn, you have a great gift for taking extremely emotive and polarised arguments and treading a reasonable centre line. If only everybody was like you.

In the meantime, Neetzy posted this on FB, which tickled me (and is kind of relevant):
"A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie."

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