Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 5

I saw the need to change the California feudal system, to change the lives of farm workers, to make these huge corporations feel they’re not above anybody.

They can have land subsidies for the growers but they can’t have adequate unemployment compensation for the workers.

They have heat and insulated barns for the animals but the workers live in beat-up shacks with no heat at all.

It’s mostly back trouble, rheumatism, and arthritis, because of the damp weather and the cold. Stoop labor is very hard on a person.

I would read all these things in the papers about Cesar Chavez and I would denounce him because I still had that thing about becoming a first class patriotic citizen.

We’re trying to stipulate it in our contract that the company will not use any machinery without the consent of the farm workers.

The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats.

Smoke the right cigarette or drive the right car—so the ads imply—and girls will be swooning into your deodorized arms or caressing your expensive lapels.

We need mavericks and dissenters and dreamers far more than we need junior vice presidents, but we paralyze them by insisting that every step be a step up to the next rung of the ladder.

We need mavericks and dissenters and dreamers far more than we need junior vice presidents, but we paralyze them by insisting that every step be a step up to the next rung of the ladder.

Many have even come out famous. History is strewn with eminent dropouts, “loners” who followed their own trail, not worrying about its odd twists and turns because they had faith in their own sense of direction.

Obviously the colleges don’t have more than a partial answer—otherwise the young would not be so disaffected with an education that they consider vapid.