A prominent front-page, above-the-fold photo in Sunday’s The Star-Ledger depicts Barbara Keshishian, President of the New Jersey Education Association with her arms uplifted, addressing a throng of union supporters gathered in Trenton on Saturday to protest the fiscal reform initiatives of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
If you were looking at that picture without the headline and the accompanying caption, you could not be faulted for mistaking the scene for that of a televangelist addressing partisans.
I don’t intend any disrespect for either the NJEA president or for TV preachers by that statement, but the similarity of true-believer fervor implied in the pose captured by photographer Ed Murray is striking.
What I am underscoring by this pictorial comparison is that the zeal and passion with which both are dedicated to their causes doesn’t always support the legitimacy of the message which they deliver. People, at least those in the general New Jersey population, tend to listen better when the rhetoric is toned done a bit.
The fact is that The Garden State is near insolvency, and the national economy is in a state of major fiscal disrepair. No Trenton rally will alter that fundamental verity or the conviction that union leadership has a responsibility to encourage its members to acclimate themselves to that reality.
This by no means subtracts from the valuable contributions that public employees – in this case school personnel – have made and continue to make for the progress of this state. But it does mean that there is a permanent national economic shift taking place which public employees can no longer ignore and to which they need to adjust their financial expectations.
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