Striking a Blow for Workers Everywhere

The writers have been on strike for over a month now. Wait a minute, I’m a writer and I am writing this very moment. There I go again. I just wrote that sentence, too. I can’t seem to stop myself. Does this make me some sort of strike breaker, scab?
Oh, now I remember. It’s not Hutchinson News Community Columnists who are on strike, but rather television and movie writers who are walking the picket lines. Many scripted TV shows have already gone on hiatus. (The big question is: How will wrestling continue to air shows?) Will television networks throughout the land go dark? Unfortunately they will not. We will have a plethora of unscripted shows. Shows like “Survivor”, “The Amazing Race”, “The Bachelor”, “Wife Swap”, and “We Turned Over Another Rock to Find the Worst Aspects of Humanity and Now We Will Point a Camera at it to Prove Some People Will Watch Anything” will multiple like rabbits on Viagra.
This strike will not cause much consternation for me. I don’t really watch much television any more. This is not a way of setting myself up as some aloof person for whom television is not aesthetically challenging enough for my superior brain. I used to claim the sentence “I only watch public television” was the mating cry of the pseudo-intellectual. I like TV. I watched quite a bit during many different stages of my life. But, at the moment, I have a wife, three children, a mortgage, a job, and a strange desire to sleep so sitting in front of screen is not a frequent option. I do watch the Chiefs (the previous statement is akin to admitting one purposefully runs one’s fingernails over a chalkboard), and KU basketball whenever possible and I got hooked on “Heroes”, but I watched that on my computer. Television is not very important to me any more.
In preparing for this column I did my usual exhaustive four and half minutes of extensive research. It seems there have not been a whole lot of strikes in the entertainment industry. There was an actors strike in 1952. It seems Ronald Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was lucky there wasn’t an air traffic controller in the White House at the time or all actors might have had to look for a new profession. There was another actors strike in 1960. Then things settled down for twenty years. A three month actors strike in 1980 was followed by a three month writers strike in 1981. There was a short-lived (two weeks) writers strike in 1985. The one and only directors strike was in 1987 and it lasted three hours and five minutes, roughly the time it takes to watch Warren Beatty’s movie “Reds”. I’m sure that was a ploy by the producers. “If you don’t come back to work we will only have movies like this to watch over and over again.” The most recent writers strike lasted five months in 1988.
I remember no effects from any of those strikes. This leads me to wonder what repercussions other strikes would have on the world. A trash collectors strike would be noticed much more quickly than a strike by the people who put those colorful cellophane decorations on deli toothpicks. Oh, sure the ham on rye with sauerkraut and pickles would not be nearly as festive, but sandwich eaters throughout the land could make the sacrifice.
Living in a world without teachers would mean wholesale home schooling. Since the vast majority of people cannot stop working every day due to financial reasons many home schoolers would be left to self-teach. This would create a generation of people very adept at computer chatting, cell phone text messaging, leaving the lights on throughout the house, and sleeping until noon. I have yet to see a want ad listing that skill set as prerequisite to employment, and if I had seen one I would have driven my daughter there post haste.
I am sure everyone can suggest the job least likely to be missed if the people doing it went on a permanent strike. Jobs like: dust ruffle manufacturers, anyone helping Kevin Trudeau be on television twenty-four hours a day and campaign managers for Mike Gravel, the former senator from Alaska currently running for the Democratic presidential nomination. No really, he is. I read it on CNN. At the moment he garners only one percentage point more in the polls than either I or Ernie the Keebler Elf does.