A Mother of Three on the Picket Lines in Oakland

I wasn’t raised to rally.

My parents didn’t have a problem with activism, but they also didn’t spend a lot of time educating me about the finer points of picket line etiquette. As a kid, the closest I got to understanding unions — or the general need for them — was repeated viewings of Newsies. I spent an entire summer entering every room shouting, “Never fear! Brooklyn is here!”

It was rough for everyone involved.

My parent’s benign neglect of activism was enlightened compared to the attitude toward it in the conservative corner of California I grew up in. The prevailing ideology was that if you put your head down and worked hard enough, things would work out. If things weren’t working out, you simply hadn’t worked hard enough. Strikes and marches were for people with too much time and too little ambition.

Of course, that narrative is nonsense. It assumes we live in a world absent of bad actors, institutions with ill intent, crushing circumstance, pressing prejudice and plain bad luck. It assumes we completely control our own destinies and manifestly in a shared society, especially one as strapped and striving as our own, we do not.

The picket lines full of teachers in Oakland are proof that hard work isn’t always enough. I’ve had children in Oakland schools…