idea(s) for a tv show

the conversation veered from poets to poetry to movies to tv shows, which always rounds back to the state of the world. we in our human activities seem to be a collection of serious fuck-ups, short-sighted and often mean-spirited. s. mentioned that he and his wife are fans of the critically-acclaimed television program mad men which recreates with astonishing vivacity and authenticity life as it was lived in the early 1960s thru the agency of an advertising firm. now, i was born in the late 1960s, the hippie era of free love, drugs, rock&roll and social foment. the world a few years before i arrived on the scene was often radically different.

s. got his daughter to watch an episode or few because his daughter, a young woman of the early 21st century, might've forgotten how historically the role of women in society was often subservient to men, an era like the early 1960s. s.'s daughter was enraged when one of the characters, the wife of one of the ad execs, was seeing a psychiatrist, yet the dr. consulted with her husband rather than the wife herself. such a thing is inconceivable now but the early 1960s was not so very long ago.

the conversation turned to historical alzheimer's. how we often forget that the rights we enjoy today were hard-won because of the thinking and actions of individuals and organizations that fought, sometimes literally by suffering bruises, blood and even death, to gain these rights. i'm speaking generically of course but as hard as some rights, the rights of women to be recognized by law to make their own decisions, the right to vote, the right to their own bodies and reproductive health, etc. etc. these rights so hard-fought and won can also be eroded.

i said what they should do is make a tv show about the wobblies and have us remember that there were people who died for the rights of workers, the right to a fair wage, the right to overtime pay, the right for collective bargaining, the right to an 8-hour work day and 40-hour work week, the enactment of child-labor laws. because we have short memories and we have forgotten, esp. now with the ascendancy of the far-right and their free-market ideas of no government regulation, and now we are witnessing a few of the horrors of a deregulated energy market, that these rights we currently enjoy can be, and in some instances, like collective bargaining [i know there are still unions but we live in a union-busting (began when reagan crushed a strike by air-traffic controllers) era and the popular conception -- not shared by all, of course -- of unions as being corrupt, morally and fiscally] , quickly eroded. i am, again, speaking broadly and i know that some would think that the wobblies politics were odious but they did fight, and sometimes died, for the rights of workers. i would like to see a show about the workers of the world and perhaps we might remember a little of what the world was like before there was such a concept as workers' rights.