Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Harris Jones

That opening refusal to be "blind" is a tactical confession: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones is signaling moral credibility before she asks for more from the very people she’s defending. In labor politics, praise alone reads as patronizing and denunciation alone reads as betrayal. This line threads the needle. By conceding "shortcomings", she inoculates herself against the charge that organizers romanticize workers or excuse bad behavior in the name of class solidarity.

The subtext is sharper than the phrasing suggests. "Our own people" is both embrace and boundary-setting. Jones is claiming workers as a collective "we" while also policing the movement’s self-image: discipline matters, drunkenness and infighting matter, prejudice and complacency matter. She’s preparing an audience for tough love, the kind that can justify strikes, boycotts, and confrontations without pretending the rank-and-file are saints. It’s an organizing move: solidarity without self-deception.

Context helps explain the restraint. Jones operated in an era when employers, newspapers, and courts routinely painted labor as a mob - ignorant, violent, easily led. If she only defended workers, she’d reinforce the caricature by sounding partisan. If she only scolded them, she’d hand ammunition to the bosses. So she chooses an ethos-builder: clear-eyed, unsentimental, still loyal.

The sentence also smuggles in a demand for dignity. To be "not blind" is to be fully seeing - and to insist that the working class deserves the same complex treatment granted to respectable society: capable of faults, worthy of power anyway.