Strike,” Brenna Dean

Brenna Dean

I first learned to walk when I was one year old.

My father held my hand and guided me across the hardwood floor of our living room, careful I didn’t fall and learn the sting of skinning my knees on its waxy surface.

Now I am 18 years old and my father teaches me to walk again.

We stand on the outside of the fence framing the parking spot he’s claimed for 25 years, knees still bleeding red as the union shirts on our backs, kicked to the ground and told to accept a five-dollar-an-hour dock in our pay, but quickly lifted up by the honking cars who seem to say Keep Walking!

Keep Walking or you’ll get thrown off the property for loitering by a manager happy to live in a right-to-work state. Keep Walking and ignore the infections festering in your knees because they’ve already stripped your health insurance away. Keep Walking like your grandfathers and great uncles who walked for 67 days straight, unafraid to let the CEOs sweat for a change. Keep Walking because you’ve been learning since you were one, and the cars will keep honking until this strike is done.