A Labor Notes Conference, May 4-6, 2012, turned into a liturgy of deeds.

     Leading and participating in a Wildcat Strike against The Taft-Hartley Act is a character builder and a way of re-defining your life through struggle.  I led a Wild Cat Strike against Taft-Hartley at the O'Hare Hyatt in Chicago.  The Haymarket Riots were a wild cat strike in progress.  The agent provocateur in the Haymarket Riot was never found. Peter Atgeld's America lives on.    The gravestones of the Haymarket Rioters and Elizabeth G. Flynn, William Foster and Emma Goldman are Beta blockers in your life line to your heart.  They are like masks of the divine.   Make the neighborhoods of Chicago which follow, the compassion mapping of your collective conscience and consciousness.  Turn these neighborhoods into a wild cat, a calico cat.

     Union Row, Chicago, ILL.: This neighborhood was named after the Federal Union in 1853.  The Civil War lives on in this community.  Many Reconstruction projects failed here.  This neighborhood became the home of the 1930s labor movement.  Today many unions still front Ashland Ave in this neighborhood.  Your neighborhood is a union, a collective and a collective unconscious.

      Pilsen is a neighborhood on the Westside of Chicago named after a City in Bohemia.  The anarchists, syndicalists and socialists living in this neighborhood in 1873 led a series of strikes and protests against the recession of 1873.  By 1910 Pilsen was the largest Bohemian Neighborhood  in America.  Suburban gentrification to the suburbs began after WWII from this neighborhood.  Bring your vagabond heart back from diaspora in Pilsen.

     Back of the Union Stockyards:  This neighborhood includes Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Canaryville.  Uptown Sinclair's, The Jungle, and Mary McDowell and Saul Alinsky's neighborhood councils  paved the way for community organizing across America.  These councils came out of this neighborhood.  Who is at the foot of the cross? The mob is at the foot of the cross.   This is who rules Chicago's neighborhoods.

    The Loop contains the famous Printer's Row and the Mariana City Towers built with Pension Service Employees funds.  It is located at 300 N. State Street, the great street. The elevated trains  dominate the landscape of the loop.  Andrew Greeley's novels header this Loop like stain glass windows in a Cathedral which connect and disconnect the architecture into patterns hard wired steel and stone linked in associative thinking patterns.  Greeley's novel, Irish Stew, highlights the Haymarket Riots and Irish Civil Rights martyrs.

     Pullman neighborhood is company town industrial type of development.  As a result of the 1893 financial panic, the American Railway Union led by Eugene Debs fought with the General Manager's Association.  President Grover Cleveland bought in federal troops against the objections of Governor John Peter Atgeld and Mayor John Hopkins.  It was considered a plighted community in 1960 by the City of Chicago.  Re-seed this plighted community with Mango Seeds of Justice from the House on Mango Street, your street.

     Bronzeville is the historic Black metropolis neighborhood of Chicago.  A different way of thinking about Bronzeville is to think of it as a new Bronze Age.   The music created in this metropolis is the foundation pentatonic scale of the information age.   My deceased uncle, John ODougherty, was Black Knight piano player in this community.  He was an Irish Catholic black knight out of Chicago who helped make Black Irish Chicago.

He taught me Frederic Chopin's, Prelude in a E minor op. 28, No. 4. Variations on this Prelude are his lived signature in time.  Bronzeville is my childhood fantasy.

     Washington Park is the historic home of the Irish/German/Jewsish immigrants to Chicago.  By the 1930s over 90% of Washington Park was Afro-American.  Washington Park changed the way the world images America.  The world now sees America "through a glass darkly" or a Guinness glass of stout.   The lenses of modern nuclear physics are through a Guinness "glass darkly" which translates to filter theory.

     South East Chicago contain the steel industry. The Lakshore South  of the Calumet River was filled with Steel mills like US Steel's South Works.  The 1937 Memorial Day Massacre occurred in this neighborhood.  James T. Farrell immortalized Chicago's South East in works like Studs Lonigan and the Danny O'Neil series.   These novels shattered the green ceiling in America.  Today, if you look at Chicago from a flight and through a green lens you will see connecting the neighborhoods an ideographic image--Abe Lincoln.

Praxis:  Take labor concepts like bargaining, contract writing, organizing, coalition building, strike strategies and green job creation and turn these concepts into tool boxes and translate these tool boxes into deeds.   For example, I helped the Labor Notes group organize and actually carry out the Wild Cat Strike against the Hyatt Hotel.  This hotel chain has partial Arab ownership.  I filmed and marched in this strike.  This film making deed is my Celtic/Arab Spring.  The afterimage seen behind these words is the image of Joe Hill in my thought, words, and deeds.  Turn these thoughts, word and deeds into the neighborhood of your heart.  Develop a creative visualization retreat out of the life and times of Elizabeth G. Flynn and place your burdens at her feet.

Memory is duty.  Stand on a corner like state street in Chicago!  Thinker of yourself as a labor divining rod.  Look into the eyes of laborers passing you on the street.   Think of times in your life when you felt pain in the workplace.  Try to relate your absence of receiving a raise or tip to the absence and presence of pain you see in the laborers passing by you on the street.  Then transform these thoughts and memories into multiple images in catharsis  of anger and guilt.  Relate this catharsis to issues of lack of control of your life.  Take control of your street memories.  Own your working past!

A Pound Imagist Prose Poem:  Why do workers leave the city? Like wolves they are in search of food.  The food they seek are word morsels from their companeros.  The shared word companeros means with bread.   Transform the bread relationship you have with Jerusalem its themes, walls and content/context to the Mills Cities in your life.  Make the underground railway part of your navel cord.  The letter "l" relates to labor and the "l" train architecture.    Starve your hunger.  Labor citizenship is motion like laborers in motion on the "L" with brown lunch bags.  Brown bag it today in memory of John Lennon whose belongings came home from the NYPD in a brown lunch bag.  Make labor history the bookends of your life.

Map reference points:  Labor Trails Map, et. passim, Labor Notes ConFerence, Chicago, I'LL May 4-6, 2012 Crowne Plaza O'Hare