Even the Right to Unpaid Family Leave Was Once Revolutionary

[Uncle Joe]

BY JUDITH L. LICHTMAN AND DEBRA L. NESS
FEB 09, 201810:00 AM

There are moments when you can almost feel the ground shift beneath you. When then–Sen. Al Gore took to the Senate floor to describe his 6-year-old son Albert’s terrifying 1989 accident, it was a pivotal moment not just for the Gore family but also for the country.

Albert Gore had been hit by a car outside Memorial Stadium in Baltimore following an opening day Orioles game. The accident was near catastrophic: The child had a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken thighbone, a ruptured spleen, a concussion, and a bruised lung, kidney, and pancreas. Sen. Gore and his wife, Tipper, spent almost a month at their son’s hospital bedside before he was sent home in a full-body cast.

The family, of course, was severely shaken. But what Sen. Gore did afterward is what changed the dialogue about family and medical leave forever. He took to the Senate floor to discuss what it meant to him to be able to be by his son’s side during those desperate days. “That experience changed me forever,” Gore would later say. “When you’ve seen your 6-year-old son fighting for his life, you realize that some things matter more than winning, and you lose patience with the lazy assumption of so many in politics that we can always just muddle through. When you’ve seen your reflection in the empty stare of a boy waiting for a second breath of life, you realize that we weren’t put here on Earth to look out for our needs alone; we’re part of something much larger than ourselves.”

It was what we today might call a “Jimmy Kimmel moment,” because Gore talked about the flexibility senators enjoy and what life was like for others—parents who risked losing their pay or their jobs if they took time off to care for children who, like Albert, were sick or injured. That speech transformed the debate—in Congress and in the country—about family and medical leave. It made it personal and relatable. It was a giant step forward at a time when our country didn’t have a single national law designed to help people meet the dual demands of work and family.

(snip)

https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/02/even-the-right-to-unpaid-family-leave-was-once-revolutionary.html

[LT Barclay]

1. Al Gore should have been president

That was a complete theft by corporate media

[Uncle Joe]

2. I agree LT Barclay

but the Internet was too much of a threat to their bottom line and mega-phone power.