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Public
Employee Press Aquarium worker,
poet and cyberactivist By
GREGORY N. HEIRES When a co-worker lost his job as the Wildlife Conservation
Society laid off 50 employees last year, Ralph Ramos, a Supervising Maintainer
at the New York Aquarium, launched his own war in cyberspace. Outraged,
he set up a mini-theater in his Brooklyn home with an American flag on the wall
of an improvised stage. Then Ramos, a 21-year employee at the aquarium, filmed
his own YouTube video with a camera tilted upward in a shoebox on the floor.
Co-worker Bill Sheehan has his job back, thanks to the efforts of DC 37 and
Local 1501. But Ramoss manifesto, New Union Creedo, (thedoubler1965
on YouTube) still rings true in this era of high employment and stagnant income:
We were taught to work hard to earn our prize, Unfortunately,
the wool was pulled over our eyes. Theyve replaced pensions with tensions
and health care with welfare, Denying us of what we have worked for, but why
should they care? Ramos a filmmaker, poet, author, illustrator,
union delegate, former shop steward and doting dad calls poetry musical
words in your mind. His wife, Barbara, a registered nurse, occasionally
jokes that he needs his head examined. A collection of over 80 of his
poems, From Within the Boundaries, is in the Library of Congress.
Ramos, 44, wrote the poems mainly musings about the travails of everyday
life years ago on napkins and scraps of paper. He can recite many of them
from memory in a rat-a-tat delivery.
Ramos also has penned 15 childrens
stories. He wrote his latest, The Wonderful Box of Crayons, in just
a few minutes after he quelled bickering over a crayon between his children, Ella,
5, and Daniel, 3, by splitting the crayon. The book, which he illustrated
and is trying to self-publish, is a tale about bickering among crayons of varying
colors that come to appreciate their diversity a message the idealistic
Ramos hopes our society will someday embrace.
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