The news from Wisconsin between 3/10 and 3/12 (HUGE rally in Madison, 4 senate recalls certified, Photo ID declared unconstitutional) is really good news, but this diary proposes that these are VERY important events that will be placed in the historical record for your children and grandchildren -- as essay topics and as exam fodder. For me, these events are the most significant proof of what republican democracy can mean in these United States that I've experienced in my 62 years as an American citizen.
Seriously. You've been running a clinic for the past year on how democracy should work in this country. You've also provided a great deal of excellent primary source material here: when this started and Ed was covering it in superb detail, I came here for confirmation and for fuller coverage of what the images I was seeing on TV actually involved -- and meant.
So, something of a rant as a history lesson. I'm teaching the American Revolution this week in one course, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in another accelerated course, and both provide examples of how ordinary people who were committed to a cause had an effect on the course of events. It makes me wonder how the events that were set in motion by the introduction of the ALEC-sourced union busting bill in the Wisconsin Legislature, the so-called "Budget Repair Bill," February 11, 2011 might be taught forty years from now -- about as long after the Progressive Movement as it took for historians to start trying to figure that out (yes, according to the Library of Congress catalog, the first primary source material emerged in 1912 and the first history books in 1951).
But, since this is still history VERY MUCH in progress, I'm not going to pull out a textbook for a model. In my life, I've seen demonstrations produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which took even longer to be put into effect. I was an undergraduate at Cornell University in 1969 for this:
(Steve Starr, Newsweek, April 1969)
(that's Willard Straight Hall, the student union, and those are some of the African-American students at Cornell, and a fuller explanation is for another diary) and I was at the big anti-Vietnam demonstration that directly followed Nixon's bombing of Cambodia the following year. They say that the demonstrations against that war had something to do with the end of the war, but I don't think so. I've profited as a human being and a scholar from the Stonewall Riots, but we're still not reaping all the freedoms that gay liberation suggested were coming. I haven't been much of an activist as an adult, but activism is driving my writing here.
So, naturally, when I turned on the TV last February and saw this
(CNN, February 23, 2011)
I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this is how democracy is supposed to work, as all of you said, "This is not what we voted for." And then the first set of recalls happened, and then Ohio put Measure 2 on the ballot and defeated it soundly, and now another set of recalls is in the works and the Voter ID law is dead. And I know this is just the beginning!
So thank you. H/Ts to puddytat, noise of rain, Giles Goat Boy and all the other contributors to Badger State Progressive. Your diaries show that you know how important what you're doing is, and I want to say it might be even more important than that.