I woke up today eager to return to the capitol, after a good Light Brigade action last night, when we shined a message on the building even while the Republicans were shutting down the public hearing inside due to a bogus claim of “credible threat” from protestors. I made it to Madison a bit early for today’s rally, so milled about in the bitter cold, headed for the rotunda, warmed up, hung out, talked to friends. In the years since Walker was first elected, I’ve gotten to know a broad cross-section of Wisconsin’s activist community, and am a better person for it.
At noon, people began to head outside to the rally. The unions were there in force, had set up a nice stage, good speakers, a press box. As I left the building, the guy in the picture below handed me a cardboard sign: hand-made and pretty rough, spray painted stencils on irregular cardboard. He asked me to carry it, and I agreed.
I walked through the crowd slowly, holding it aloft, when a young guy in an official looking orange vest came up to me and said, "Sir, could I ask you not to display that "General Strike" sign?" He was polite, but insistent. He said it was disrespectful to the rank and file. That they'd all taken a vote, across the state, and concluded that a strike was not a direction they were willing to advocate.
I was astounded. While my first thought was "Fuck you, I'll hold what I want to hold!" I realized that my heart wasn't in the argument, so I said, "I'll tell you what... I'll give you this sign, and you can figure out what to do with it."
I do understand that strikes need a lot of work, a lot of background planning, and that it is easy to hold a sign. However, I also understand the necessity of framing issues with a sense of urgency, putting ideas into the world that need to be addressed. If not now, in the midst of the second greatest threat to organized labor, then when? If not us, then whom?
I listened to one of the speakers, who seemed perplexed about the assault on the private unions. He spoke of fair wage, of affording a house, of a stable job, of how some people describe the unions as political, as radical, but all union members want is a good living. Who would argue with that? A car, a boat, a pension.
The men in hardhats today seemed bewildered that Walker is going after them, and say things like "we cost the public nothing," implying that they are not freeloaders like the public unions who already got "the bomb" dropped on them four years ago, and perhaps kind of deserved it. Most of these once proud unions haven't done any ground work for the last four years, as if they were living in some separate reality, where the middle class was still a stable and cherished position. This is why they have no recourse now, and resort to the same tired speeches; because they have no strategic vision of what it means to be a worker in a globalized economy that is being dismantled and a country that is being internally colonized.
This is what made me so deeply, bone-wearily sad today. This same disconnect hovered over the whole protest, making me feel like I was standing in the last flock of passenger pigeons as they were flying over Wisconsin, with the shooters at the fence line locked and loaded.
I walked back into the rotunda, and found the Solidarity Sing Along, buoyed by the swelling ranks of protestors, holding the people’s place in the capitol. They are well over 1,000 consecutive sings. The sound resonated throughout the building, tuneful, peaceful, harmonic, and resilient. Banners hung over the balustrade. In my mind’s eye, I saw the cops arresting people, and it struck me that these folks have kept this place open through their brave activism. They are a thorn in the side of the kinds of people who shut down public hearings and refuse to let people who have been waiting all day say their piece. They are a burr under the blanket of the kinds of people who say that they would not pass Right To Work laws, and then pass Right To Work laws. They are a pebble in the shoes of people who would strike words about seeking the truth from the Wisconsin Idea charter, and then lie about the deletion of truth. I stood next to a woman holding a banner that draped down over the stone balustrade, and said to her, “you guys made it possible for us to even be here.”
The union guys began to filter in to the rotunda, the first floor, the second floor. They seemed stand-offish, kind of embarrassed by the hippie radical nature of singing. Like they didn’t understand what this not only symbolized, but what it had actually accomplished. Songs like Union Maid and Solidarity Forever got particularly loud, and I couldn’t help but notice that few of them joined in, few of them held fists aloft, and most looked uncomfortable. I won’t ever forget how people came together four years ago, though I don’t know how useful such nostalgia is. I drove home, trying to forget the constant feeling of mourning for a state being dismantled, and the lost opportunities for organizing resistance by institutions who already understand that they are finished, and are just trying to figure out how to protect the little that is left.