We should have done it weeks ago, but I was away when the strike began. Then we assumed the strike would be over any day and didn’t think it worth the trouble to cancel our subscription only to have to re-instate it a day or so later.
  As of today, though, we’re a two-newspaper household-both papers local-and will be until the strike is over.
  When I was young, my attitude toward labor organizations was shaped as much by the corruption in many large unions as it was by my own independent streak. It’s easier to stand alone when you’re young and can imagine no limits to opportunity than it is when you’re established in a career and too old to start over in some other.
  We airline pilots like to consider ourselves “professionals”, whatever that means. We don’t carry battered lunch buckets or wear hardhats, but we are labor, pure and simple, and forever on the other side of the divide between labor and management.
 It was only when my hair began to thin and turn gray, only when I realized that advancing age disqualified me from many alternative careers that I began to see the worth of organization.
  When I dispelled enough of my own ignorance to learn that pilots’ unions were instrumental in forcing airline management to accept work rules that help make American commercial aviation as safe as it is and that unions were not simply a mob force to gouge money and benefits from employers, and when I realized that I was too old to start over in some other career, I became a union man.
  So it is with a sense of the worth of solidarity that we belatedly cancelled our subscription to the struck newspaper.
  The Seattle papers are free during the strike, whether from boxes on street corners or by subscription. The owners give them away. They don’t want us to get used to not having the newspapers because they fear many of us won’t bother to re-subscribe when the strike is over.
  That fear is not groundless.
  With so many sources of news these days, and with so many of us too busy to linger over a newspaper with our morning coffee, and with more and more people not bothering to read anything beyond instruction manuals for computer games and VCRs, newspaper readership has been declining for several years. (The Peninsula Daily News is a notable exception to this trend.)
  It’s not as difficult giving up my daily fix of Seattle newspaper as it might be. The columnists and bylined writers I like to read aren’t writing for their paper during the strike, and I can read them in their online alternative newspaper at www.unionrecord.com.
  The comics section is another matter. Nobody reads comics on the radio or shows them on TV, so I read my favorites on the struck newspapers’ web sites. Doing so makes me feel like a dieter sneaking forbidden snacks, even though the newspapers generate no revenue from my doing so. They generate no revenue from my reading their free newspapers, either, but it’s the principle of the thing.
  There are only a few comic strips I hate to miss that aren’t in this newspaper, so it won’t be hard to scout the Internet for papers that carry my other favorites. 
  The day may come when paper newspapers will become a historical artifact, when a dining room wall becomes a huge screen showing news, advertisements, and even the comic pages during breakfast. Long strikes such as the one in Seattle will hasten that day.
  I’m old enough that newspapers will outlive me. I’m also old enough to prefer reading black ink on newsprint to listening to a TV newsreader or to scrolling down the computer screen, so my house will never be without newspapers. The day the strike is over and my union cousins go back to work is the day we’ll subscribe again.