It is absolutely gorgeous outside today and I'm happy to see signs of spring in the air. But I need to remember after a night of drinking to NOT read the Wisconsin State Journal the next morning.
Destruction of wetlands and the devastation of the Penokee Hills for a mining bill ripe with imaginary economic prosperity; Families struggling to figure out how they are going to survive after Scott Walker politically cast away billions of dollars in federal funds intended to expand Medicaid.
Educational and environmental leaders desperately trying to make sense of the elimination of the student-friendly MacKenzie Environmental Education Center in favor of an NRA-approved hunting, fishing, trapping and shooting gallery; Editorial applause for the "resourcefulness" of the new pro-school "choice", pro-school report card Madison Superintendent of Schools, Jennifer Cheatham;
Letters to the editor decrying the hijacking of our state via politically-motivated and engineered redistricting through the process of unabashed gerrymandering; 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing that awoke American citizens to the reality of global terrorism and the potentially devastating consequences of a neo-imperial foreign policy; Chris Rickert writing yet another un-apologetically amateurish and uninformed article, this time implicitly bashing teachers while explicitly mocking their silly fight for workers' protections...under the guise of bashing NOT the "pro-union" school board candidates, but merely the "union-owned" candidates.
All of this was juxtaposed with an opinion piece from the WSJ from 40 years ago tearing apart the shameful treatment our government and citizens directed towards the returning Vietnam War veterans after fighting in a purposeless war that many of them wanted no part of. Oh yea, and the 40-year old editorial dared to call out the regressiveness of the Nixonian budget austerity...in a paper which some 30-plus years later happily endorsed the Walkerian candidacy and resulting austerity that is destroying our state and its progressive history while the rest of the nation slowly recovers from its 21st century depression. But hey, at least we will be the recipients of a tax cut that won't possibly wouldn't even cover your next meal out at a local restaurant. Welcome to Wississippi, version 2013. Fuck...this is going to be a long next two years.
Awesome photo and banner courtesy of Lisa Wells