"The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. . . . These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened." - George Orwell

"A union which cannot look back on one outrageously selfish act on behalf of its members may have a respectable history but it can hardly claim an important one." - Murray Kempton

"The best way out is always through." - Robert Frost

As I work with the police unions of both San Francisco and San Jose in the toughest economic climate faced in generations, the challenges come in such numbers and with such speed that it feels at times like being in a batting cage where the automatic pitching machine has suddenly gone haywire, hurtling fast ball after fast ball without stop. How else to describe the flood of events that has occurred since last I paused to take a breath and write this monthly dispatch from the front?

Here is just a sampling of the fast balls: San Francisco enacts large-scale pension cost reform which will profoundly affect new public safety hires by forcing them to pay higher contribution rates than their predecessors and reducing the take-home amount of salaries for all new employees. San Jose announces at contract talks that a 5% decrease in total employee compensation will be required of all employee groups to grapple with the city's burgeoning deficit. San Francisco announces plans to layoff 15,000 employees and re-hire many of them at a reduced 37½-hour work week in order to cope with its own deficit (police are exempted but the threat of layoffs of sworn personnel is floated ominously). San Jose's mayor goes further than the demand made at the bargaining table and insists that he will need 10-15% reductions in overall employee compensation to afford cutting city services. The mayor of San Francisco's chief of staff appears before the SFPOA Board of Directors and asks the union to forego future wage increases amounting to 6%, despite the fact that the rank and file already gave back close to $17 million when asked to do so by the city last year. San Jose proposes a long-expected set of draconian takeaways, including elimination of the sick leave "cash-out" benefit and a reduction of overtime compensation to the bare minimum required by federal law. Query: are you still managing to swing the bat at those fast balls?

I find my own reaction to this dizzying chain of events to be anchored by the three quotes above, the first from the brilliant novelist and essayist George Orwell, the second from the Pulitzer-winning columnist Murray Kempton, and the third from the great American poet, Robert Frost. The wisdom conveyed by these lines might not appear at first to be of a unified whole, but I think you'll find a certain symmetry if you follow my line of reasoning.

First, Orwell, who famously excoriated both the right and left for refusing to see facts as they are but, instead, succumbing to the temptation to view all events through a partisan lens so that "truth" could actually become "untruth" if your enemy happened to utter it. As Orwell countered, some things happened even though your enemy says they happened. Here, one cannot argue with the cold, hard fact that the economic collapse has decimated state and local revenues. We might rightly fault various politicos for some of the spending choices they have made over the years, but one cannot avoid the fact that the American people have $13 trillion less than they thought they had before the Great Recession. Quibbling about how a city's budget might have been better spent only gets you so far when cast in the naked light of that economic "truth."

That having been said, state and city budgets are invariably the product of political choices, and here is where the line from Kempton enters the picture. To blame budget deficits on "selfish" unions - a tact currently all the rage as the chattering class denounces public workers' pensions as the root of all state-and-local budgetary evils - is to ignore the fact that the very purpose of labor unions is to secure, in Kempton's words, a more than "respectable" amount of wages and benefits. That goal will always be at odds with the aim of management - albeit the management of a public employer whose financial base is ultimately the taxpaying public - to see that labor takes as little as possible. As San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón put it in an appearance last year before the SFPOA Board of Directors, "They'd pay you minimum wage if they could get away with it." A union's job is to not let them get away with it.

Enter America's arguably greatest poet, Robert Frost, who wrote in his "A Servant to Servants" that the "best way out is always through." By this, I take him to mean that one does not do well by turning a blind eye to unpleasant truths and sidestepping inconvenient facts but, rather, confronting reality head-on, harsh as it may be - in our case, economic reality. We must avoid the twin hazards of (1) comforting ourselves undeservedly by assuming all claims of financial hardship to be tall tales and (2) being cowed into submission by the canard that the gains we have made over the past fifteen years or so have been "selfish." In fact by having the courage to acknowledge the first we put the lie to the fiction that is the second. Frost was right: "The best way out is always through."

"Roll the Union On . . ."