My Jandek Plague Journal: 6/28/20 "From There"

"We all rise up and live our lives/Even though they want to beat us down/I got education till I'm full of it/And I blow it up, blow it away/I got time i spent in factories/I got dad and grandpa too." When I was a union organizer in Philly, one of the campaigns I worked on was forming a grad student union at U. Penn. When I would tell people that summer what I was doing, they'd be incredulous. "Why do Penn kids need a union?" (Philadelphians hate Penn kids because they're rich pricks who treat the community like crap) They'd turn on a dime and support the idea when I said that grad students didn't qualify for workers' comp. Curiously that argument didn't work for the Penn kids who worked with dangerous chemicals and saw their colleagues get hurt and have to pay out of pocket. And I still don't know how to address that challenge of trying to get a person to protect themselves from the very thing they've seen hurt others. -6/28/20. "From There" from Hamman Hall (one week earlier)