As Campaign 2010 Comes To A Close …

We here at Viewfinder Redux have had a time of it. At first, we came together to write a few articles that might shed light on important issues facing our Union. We thought of ourselves as providing members with a place to explore independent opinions.

We are a diverse group. What ties us together is a belief in free and open dialogue. Each article has made the rounds. We have learned from each other as we hope you have learned from us.

From the outset, our writing has been closely monitored by Steven Poster and his hand-picked team on the electstevenposter site whomever they may be. The turnaround has been stunning. Within hours after we posted an article, our email boxes, and we assume yours as well, were filled with contentious and angry campaign literature from the Poster camp. Many of our writers were personally named and personally defamed.

As direct result of these unbridled attacks, readership for Viewfinder Redux increased by as much as 300% per day. Our stats have shown us that people across the country as well as overseas have been increasingly interested in what we’ve had to say. And that interest, in turn, has encouraged us to take on more topics and to state our views with a bit more gusto. We have been busy. And we have enjoyed our labors. Perhaps we should tip our hat to Poster & Co. for generating such effective buzz.

Well, we have endeavored to present a side of Union politics that is unlike what you may have read in Poster’s emails, Camera Angles or ICG Magazine. We have put into writing some of the concerns, fear, and worries that have been told to us by our esteemed colleagues, the members of this Union, on sets across the nation.

Thank you for your time considering what we’ve had to say during this election campaign. With your interests in mind, we have taken a stand. Like the Phoenix, we have risen to champion the value of democracy and free speech in the labor movement. Down the road, look for Viewfinder Redux to keep up the discourse and give you, the members, an opportunity to join in the conversation.

We at Viewfinder Redux now urge you to:

Vote your conscience
Vote your self interest
Vote timely
and
Vote wisely

“Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty … If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

 — Justice Louis Brandeis, concurring in Whitney v California, 274 US 357 (1927) —

…

“What’s past is prologue … what to come in yours and my discharge.”

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest —