Summer Editorial

Droughts, hurricanes, deadly heat waves, melting ice caps, warming seas, deadly storms and mass migrations long predicted, are now upon us. In these nightmarish times, this journal often feels like the fossil record, thus this issue's cover. Our summer issue deals with the inseparable issues of climate and war. This issue is no exception -- and like the times -- bleaker than most.

Poems in this collection deal with the rise of right-wing extremism and social division. They stand in opposition to racism and the persecution of immigrants. The reality of class war waged from above and the power of class consciousness as a uniting force long suppressed by those who profit from our division are fleshed out in these pages.

In memory of the devastation unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the shadow of monstrous threats of nuclear war emanating from the megalomaniacal sociopath-in-chief, we have poems of resistance to the insanity and criminal horror of nuclear war and the poisoning of our world and our bodies by nuclear power. The toxic, biosphere-killing disease of capitalism is called out in these pages along with the remedy of massive class unity.

This diseased system takes a hard toll on the vast majority of us. The poorest, the colonized, and despised minorities are the hardest hit. The abandonment of urban centers, of Puerto Rico and the continuing police violence against Black people demonstrate this.

Efforts to dumb down our society over the last few decades combined with the export of jobs and the replacement of workers by machines has been devastating to us as well, from the disappearance of needed skills to the rise of ignorant demagogues to power. Another result is the so-called "gig economy" which is nothing less than the desperation which emerges from the cynical abandonment of workers and the devolution of wage workers to "independent contractors." Several poems in this issue address this reality.

Our summer issue also announces the winner of the Working People's Poetry Contest. This year's winning poem, "Elegy for a Seamstress" by Don Narkevic speaks to the loss of basic skills over generations as productive professions gave way to less practical clerical work and service industry jobs.

Unlike the hopeless and depressing jeremiads that increasingly accost us, the militant anger, community, solidarity, realization of our shared experience and our firm commitment to resist and move forward, comes through in this and every issue of the Blue Collar Review. We're down, times are bleak and a livable future is in question, but we ain't out yet and we ain't givin' up.

The poem, "Living as Equals" by Angelo Mesisco, says it all: "we live as equals or not at all."