RIP Pete Seeger

I grew up listening to the Almanac Singers. My family had a record of their Talking Union album and as a kid I used to sing along with Union Maid and You've Gotta Go Down and Join the Union. Pete Seeger was a founding member in 1941, during the dramatic growth in unionism in the 1930s and 40's after the passage of the Wagner Act.

Pete Seeger was there for the wild ascent of workers as they leveraged a fair wage from the plutocrats who had wrecked the economy during the Great Depression. And then Taft-Hartley was passed and, little by little, the labor movement has been chipped away at until today it is a ghost -- a mere vapor -- of its former self. And we have a new crop of plutocrats and robber barons who've wrecked the economy. Pete Seeger watched it all from the beginning to the end.

I wonder how it must have felt.

Through it all, Pete never seemed to lose hope. He never gave up. And, in the words of the immortal Joe Hill, let us remember to not mourn but, instead, organize.