Since Donald Trump moved into the White House, we’ve seen a couple of responses play out over and over.
One has been despair. It’s easy to see in the Trump administration’s attacks on the most vulnerable in US society — from undocumented immigrants to Muslims to women — and in the increased organizing by the far right, invigorated by Trump’s hateful policies, evidence that the US is in bleak times, with more of them to come.
The other response has been solidarity — from the first weeks of Trump’s presidency, when people rushed to airports to protest his Muslim travel ban, to NFL players taking a knee to protest police brutality, to the #MeToo wave when women stepped forward to talk about their experiences of sexual assault and harassment.
Today, in the so-called “red states” that voted for Trump, we’re seeing another example of solidarity: Teachers walking out of the classroom to demand the wages and working conditions they deserve, and finding that there are educators in other states who are part of the same fight.
The wave of teachers’ strikes that have struck five states this spring — so far — contradicts just about everything we’re taught in the US: that we and our families are on our own and in it for ourselves; that whether we starve or succeed is totally up to what we decide to make of ourselves.
By contrast, the whole experience of these strikes and protests has been not just teachers working together, but a recognition that their futures are inextricably tied to one another, and they have to struggle together.
As a rural Kentucky social studies teacher explained in an interview with SW, referring to the West Virginia teachers’ strike the month before: “Seeing how those school teachers could come together in solidarity was really awesome. It lets me know that it’s possible for thousands of people to come together for a common cause.”
This is an important point because the society we live in sets up some intimidating obstacles to workers concluding that they have…