For Show or For Soul

Sooner or later we begin to understand that love is more than verses on valentines and romance in the movies. We begin to know that love is here and now, real and true, the most important thing in our lives. For love is the creator of our favourite memories and the foundation of our fondest dreams. Love is a promise that is always kept, a fortune that can never be spent, a seed that can flourish in even the most unlikely of places. And this radiance that never fades, this mysterious and magical joy, is the greatest treasure of all - one known only by those who love

(Taken from Marc at http://www.marcandangel.com/2008/02/06/26-life-lessons-learned-by-age-26/ )

Here is a list of 26 life lessons I have learned thus far at the age of 26. I pass this list on to you witHere is a list of 26 life lessons I have learned thus far at the age of 26.  I pass this list on to you with the simple hope that it makes you think.  Sometimes thinking about your life and sorting out what you have learned is just as important as tackling a new venture.

1. Being an adult can be fun when you are acting like a child.
2. Love has nothing to do with looks, but everything to do with time, trust, and interest.
3. Laughing, crying, joy and anger… All are a vital.  All make us human.
4. The greatest truths in life are uncovered with simple, steady awareness.
5. Greed will bury even the lucky eventually.
6. Bad things do happen to good people.
7. Paving your own road is intelligent only if nobody has gone exactly where you are going.
8. Uncertainty is caused by a lack of knowledge.  Hesitation is the product of fear.
9. Time heals all wounds… regardless of how you feel right now.
10. Most of the time what you are looking for is right in front of you.
11. Your health is your life.
12. Chance is a gift, so act on chance when given the opportunity.
13. Kindness and hard work will take you further than intelligence.
14. People deserve a second chance, but not a third.
15. Marry your best friend.
16. Take lots of pictures.  Someday you’ll be really glad you did.
17. Money makes life easier only when the money is yours free and clear.
18. Carelessness is the root of failure
19. Your actions now create memories you will reminisce and talk about in your elder years.
20. Stepping outside of your comfort zone will put things into perspective from an angle you can’t grasp now.
21. Motivation comes in short bursts.  Act while it’s hot.
22. Purposely ignoring the obvious is like walking backwards toward the enemy.
23. Taking ownership of failure builds the foundation for success.
24. First impressions are completely worthless 50% of the time.
25. Personal glory lasts forever.
26. If you never act, you will never know for sure.

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Charles Denby was a Black auto production worker who grew up in rural Alabama and came north to Detroit with many other young Black men in the 1920s to work in the auto factories. He became involved in race and class struggles and was recruited into the Trotskyist movement. He quickly discovered the increasing division between rank-and-file labor and the union bureaucracy and refused to become a part of the union leadership. During the 1950s he chose to work with Raya Dunayevskaya and remained with her through several organizational splits. Their experiences led him to accept editorship of NEWS & LETTERS when it was founded in 1955 because he “felt strongly that there was an imperative need for A NEW KIND of workers’ paper” (emphasis added).(2) His column “Worker’s Journal” appeared on the front page of each issue until his death in 1983.

What does it mean to say “Workers as revolutionary thinkers?” First, Denby’s experiences as an African-American Southern farmer and autoworker had given him a desire for freedom that was total. He fought a life-long battle against the fragmentation of himself that capitalism forces upon us all. In Marxist-Humanism Denby helped develop a philosophy of liberation which in turn helped him develop and concretize his drive to be a full human being. Marxist-Humanism strives toward Marx’s vision of a society centered on human needs and capacities. Denby understood how alienating capitalist society is and how totally it must be uprooted for a better world to begin.

Denby’s writings, as he was the first to insist, reflect dialogues, discussions, debates with other workers. His was an individualism that always retained his awareness of connection to the mass movement, or as Hegel had put it, “individualism that lets nothing interfere with its universality, or freedom.” In the pamphlet WORKERS BATTLE AUTOMATION written in 1960, Charles Denby is the primary author, but brought in other workers to tell their own stories and share their own views, often differing from his own, of automation in steel, light manufacturing, and even offices. This is indeed revolutionary in a society where workers are supposed to be ignorant and unwilling to think.

“A unique combination of worker and intellectual”— this is not only a principle of Marxist-Humanist journalism and organization, but a description of Charles Denby himself. The stories of his life that make up his autobiography, INDIGNANT HEART: A BLACK WORKER’S JOURNAL are not abstract discussions about philosophy. Philosophy is present throughout.

In 1943 after returning South, Denby came to Detroit again to find a better-paying job in the auto factories:

They had recently had a stoppage because Negroes were put in that department…

I said [to Wide, Denby’s roommate], “How come? Isn’t there a union now?”…

Wide said, “The union doesn’t mean everything to Negroes that some people think”…

The employment office was practically filled. I met up with a white fellow from Tennessee who had just come to Detroit… He asked me what I was going to ask for.

I told him riveting.

He said he didn’t know the names of any jobs and would ask for the same thing. He’d never been North before or in a plant. He was in the line behind me.

When I reached the desk I asked the man for riveting. He told me that there weren’t any riveting jobs. He asked if I had riveted before.

I said, yes, in Mobile, on bridges and in shipyards. I was lying to him but wanted to get the job.

He said that was an altogether different kind of riveting and that my experience wouldn’t apply. If I wanted to learn, he could send me to the school and they would pay me sixty cents an hour. He said he had a laboring job open, it only paid eighty-seven cents an hour… The man promised I might get on another job in a day or two that paid more…

I waited for the fellow from Tennessee… He said they had given him a job, riveting. “And I just come in from the field.”

I asked him if he had said that he had experience or if they mentioned going to school.

He said, no.

I got kinda mad and went back to the man at the desk. He said he was busy and that he had given me the last available job.(3)

Denby’s story reveals the persistence and depth of the racism even unionized workers confronted. It also points a direction for overcoming it: dialogue between white and Black workers that all with a stake in systemic racism strive so hard to prevent.

Denby continued to struggle against injustice in the shop, fighting for Black women workers to be given jobs in the sewing department. He insisted that there be no compromise on full integration, and that the Communist Party’s support for the “no-strike pledge,” which the government had convinced the union leadership to agree to in support of the war effort, would only hurt workers.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Denby continued to write about the increasing gap between the union bureaucracy and rank-and-file union members. Racism continued unremittingly and profoundly to drive a wedge between white and Black workers and limit their power to challenge the direction of the union leadership. Denby recounts his experiences with the Communist and Trotskyist parties during this period, where he sought for Blacks and all workers to be treated as full, thinking human beings.

http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2003/December/Essay_Dec03.htm <——-

3 Positive affirmations: I am worthy to give and recieve love. I can change my life. I am important.

Strength will always attract weakness and weakness will always disguise itself as strength.