This is without a doubt one of my favorite resources from our class, in part because I am always happy to be reminded that our generation, in fact even the 60's and 70's do not have a monopoly on activist media. From Salt of the Earth, to women's suffrage, to the fight to end slavery people have accomplished many acts of activism, even at times when it was perfectly legal for people of their particular demographic to be treated as though they were not even, by legal standards, human. This is not to say that this does not still occur today, but I do believe that we constantly have more and more legal protections, methods of exposing maltreatment, and opportunities for individual and collective dissent. This film depicted how workers and their families were able to come together to demand better treatment from their employers, and to defy their attempts at manipulating unfair laws to stop them from peaceful protest. I also believe that this was a great example of how those being stepped on by the people above them, may also be stepping on other people below. This reminds me of our conversations in class on horizontal hostility, in which oppressed groups victimize and vilify each other, even when they may have in common the same group oppressing them. I used to wonder at this, but I realized some time ago that it is, truly, a failsafe built in to the system to keep people from directing their ire further up the food chain. After all, if you make it difficult enough to attack the person above you, but don't give people enough of their own resources to survive without taking from others, who will they take from? Well, from people it is easiest to take from, (a prime example of this is how much harder and more dangerous it is to steal a more expensive, alarm-protected car in a nicer neighborhood than a busted old car in a neighborhood similar to your own). This isn't to say that people can't obviously work past this, and, as evidenced in this film, do the harder, better thing, but it is important to work to identify what it is that can help raise people's awareness of their ability to band together and combat the tyrannies of even the most powerful, and seemingly invincible of oppressors.
