Fight, and Fight, and Fight Like Hell

Begin with the morning, because the morning is where the truth of a thing lives. Before the speeches and the headlines and the men in good coats explaining to one another that nothing could have been done — before all of that, there was a man walking to punch his strike card, and there was a sky over the Embarcadero the color of wet tin, and there was the smell of salt and diesel and rope.

His name was Howard Sperry. He was a longshoreman and he had been to a war and come back from it, which is to say he knew something about how cheaply a body can be spent by people who will never spend their own. He had been on strike since the ninth of May, for the radical and dangerous proposition that a man ought to earn a living wage under conditions that would not kill him by inches. Near him a cook named Nick Bordoise, who was not even on strike — who simply believed that the trouble of one working man was the business of all of them — fell that same afternoon.

The police fired. The two men went down. Someone took a piece of chalk and wrote on the sidewalk, in letters that ran a little because the hand that wrote them was shaking, the only editorial that mattered: Police murder. Two shot in the back. People came and laid flowers on the rust-colored stain, the way people will, because the heart insists on doing something even when the law has done its worst.

Now here is the part the comfortable always misunderstand. They think what came next was a riot. It was the opposite of a riot. It was the most disciplined thing this city has ever done.

Tens of thousands walked behind the two coffins down Market Street, and they walked in silence — no band, no shouting, no fists in the air. Just the sound of feet. A whole city deciding, all at once, to stop. The wheels quit turning. The cranes hung still over the docks. And in that silence was the loudest argument labor ever made: you cannot run this without us, and we will not be run over.

That is what it means to fight like hell. It does not mean to rage. Any fool can rage; rage is cheap and the powerful are happy to sell it to you, because a man swinging blindly is a man who can be clubbed and arrested and put on the front page as a brute. No. To fight like hell means to refuse the funeral as the end of the story. It means you take the grief they expect to bury you with and you organize it. You turn the mourning into mathematics — into a count of who is missing and why, and who profited from their being made to disappear.

Mother Jones understood this when she stood in a rented church in the coalfields and told the miners their union was not a praying institution but a fighting one. She was not handing them their anger. The mines had already done that. She was giving them permission — and a direction. Pray for the dead, yes. Light the candle, sing the hymn. Then get up off your knees and fight like hell for the ones still breathing, because the dead are past your help and the living are not.

Grief that goes nowhere is just a second death. Grief that gets organized is a strike.

The shipowners had the money and the police and every newspaper but the few that worked men read by candlelight. The strikers had nothing but each other and the plain fact of their own indispensability. And they won — not everything, never everything, but enough that a longshoreman's son could stand a little straighter than his father had. That is the only kind of winning there is. You do not get the kingdom. You get the next inch. And then you hold it, and fight for the one after.

The waterfront is quieter now, and the docks are mostly machines, and a man can go his whole life without seeing a coffin carried down Market Street. It would be easy to believe the fight is over — that it was a thing of grainy photographs and great-grandfathers, settled long ago by people braver than us. That is exactly what they would like you to believe.

Because the dock did not disappear. It moved. It became the warehouse floor where a worker walks twelve miles a shift and is timed to the second by a screen, where the rate goes up every quarter and the body does not. It became the delivery route run by an app that decides each dawn whether you eat this week, the way the old shape-up decided which men got to work and which got sent home hungry. It became the hospital ward at 3 a.m., the restaurant kitchen, the classroom of a teacher buying pencils with her own thin pay. It became the spare bedroom where someone — a daughter, a son, a husband — provides round-the-clock care for a person they love, off the books, uncounted, with no shift that ever ends.

These are the overlooked and the overworked. They are the ones who keep the lights on and the shelves full and the sick tended, and they are precisely the ones the country has trained itself not to see. We have a word for the people whose work is most visible. We do not have one for the people whose work holds everything up and goes unremarked — except, maybe, the oldest word of all: us.

So let us be exact about what we are fighting for, because a fight without an object is just a tantrum, and we have had enough of those sold to us in place of remedies.

We are fighting for fairness — not the fantasy that everyone ends in the same place, but the floor beneath which no working person should be allowed to fall: a wage you can live on, a schedule you can plan a life around, a say in the conditions that wear out your one body.

We are fighting for dignity — the radical idea that a person's worth is not set by their pay stub, that the woman cleaning the office after dark is owed the same baseline respect as the executive whose desk she clears, and that no system gets to decide some lives are simply cheaper than others.

We are fighting for recognition of all people — every one, with no asterisk. But here we have to be honest, because “everyone” is how the unseen get lost. The light does not need help finding the people already standing in it. So we point it, on purpose, at the back of the room: the overlooked, the overworked, the uncounted. The home health aide. The night-shift nurse. The warehouse picker. The caregiver who has not had a full night's sleep in years. Recognition means being seen, named, and counted — and you cannot fight for people you refuse to count.

The first act of justice is arithmetic: refusing to let a person disappear from the ledger of who matters.

This past winter the line came due again, and it came close to home. In Minneapolis, in the first weeks of 2026, two of our fellow citizens were killed by federal agents for the oldest reason there is — for standing, peacefully, on the side of other people.

Renée Nicole Good was thirty-seven, a mother of three. She came out to her own neighborhood as a legal observer — a citizen bearing witness, which the Constitution not only permits but depends upon. She was driving home, having dropped her child at school, when an agent's bullet ended her. The people who built her memorial left flowers and candles; someone noticed the stuffed animals still tucked in her car. She was, by every account of those who knew her, exactly the sort of person a decent country is built to protect: the kind who shows up.

Alex Pretti was thirty-seven as well, an ICU nurse who had spent his working life caring for veterans — the same men, generations on, that Howard Sperry once stood beside in a war. He was not a protester by habit. He went into the street only after Renée Good was killed, because, like a cook named Nick Bordoise ninety-two years before him, he could not accept that the trouble of one citizen was none of his business. He was filming with his phone, telling an agent not to shove people toward the traffic, when he was tackled and shot while held to the ground. He was holding nothing but that phone. The men in good coats called him a terrorist. His patients called him the nurse who saved their lives.

Set their names beside Howard Sperry's and Nick Bordoise's, because they belong there. Different decade. Different uniforms on the men who fired. The very same indispensable, unglamorous courage of ordinary people who decided that a stranger's safety was worth their own discomfort — and then their own risk — and then, God forgive this country for it, their own lives. A nurse and a mother are not a riot. They were the silence on Market Street, walking.

That is the unbroken line from the chalk on the Embarcadero to a sidewalk in Minneapolis. Someone is being treated as expendable, and the rest of us are invited to look away and call it the natural order. The fight, in 1934 and this morning both, is the refusal to look away. It is the insistence — the one Bordoise died for, and Pretti after him — that the trouble of one person is the business of all of us. A person's politics do not matter here. It is their humanity and their suffering that matter to this movement. You only have to be honest about what was taken, and from whom, and why.

This movement does not ask who you voted for. It asks where it hurts.

You do not need a waterfront to begin. You need only to decide that the person nobody is counting is going to be counted by you. Learn their name. Ask what they need. Add your weight to theirs. Vote it, organize it, write it down, repeat it until the comfortable are tired of hearing it. Do the small, stubborn, unglamorous work that grief gives you instead of letting the grief do its quiet second killing.

And when they tell you it cannot be done, that it is simply how things are, that the powerful are too many and you are too few — remember the silence on Market Street. Remember that the few who are indispensable have only ever needed to discover, all at once and together, that they are. Pray for the dead if it eases you. Then get up.

Fight, and fight, and fight like hell — for the living.