A Citizen in Wisconsin
By Robert Chametzky
A friend of First's emailed us this note earlier in March.
A Citizen in Wisconsin
Drove up to Madison last Saturday. Me and about 70,000 other people were there. It is, but shouldn’t be, a somewhat revelatory moment when you experience the range of people who can come together when the organizing principle is economic (and political) rather than something else (that shall remain nameless). It’s s a commentary on the sad state of our public life that this is not the common experience of our citizenry. But it is also, as those professing a viewpoint now supposedly relegated to the ashheap of history used to put it, no accident. It’s American atomization by design. Anyway, I was there about two hours, with a drive each way of about three. It was worth the gas…
Some of the signs were notable, e.g., “I could eat a can of alphabet soup and crap a better bill.” I also found noteworthy “There has been NO fiscal analysis of bill # [the number of the bill in the Wisconsin legislature]” — this, I thought, was surely one to rally the Democratic Leadership Council troops, so that the fact that anyone who might be of such a mind was out on the street was perhaps itself a sign. Lots of Age of Obama signs imploring “compromise” “discussion” and “negotiation,” many employing “My teacher taught us” or “In my classroom we” tropes: the bipartisanitation workers. Quite a few stressing that they were Wisconsin residents, a response to Gov. Walker’s claim that outsiders were behind it all - I laid low. Many that were personal, even scurrilous, wrt Gov. Walker and/or the Koch brothers with “Koch sucking” joining them, if not at the hip.
“Democracy,” frequently opposed to “oligarchy,” was signed and chanted.
It was a totally grey day — a “snow sky” as my Boys like to say — cold, and, in fact, it began to snow at around 3, when the official rally began. It being Madison, there were numerous folks in, e.g., North Face down jackets; there were also numerous folks in what nowadays I am able to identify as Carhartt winter jackets and clothes. Though everyone was dressed for warmth, the difference between warm clothes for outdoor play and warm clothes for outdoor work suggests a difference also between the people who wear them. Not all divided along this town/down split, of course, but it was there to be seen.
Speakers included teachers, an Episcopal bishop, a nurse, an NAACP representative. There were constantly people marching around the capitol building as well as people gathered in front of the steps where the speakers’ platform was. Kids were sledding on the hill next to the speakers’ platform. There were long lines waiting to get into the building, to be part of the people occupying the people’s chamber, as it were. Food and drink were also being supplied to those inside.
There were various unionized workers, notably Wisconsin police and firefighters, who would be exempted from the union-busting of the bill and were cheered, applauded, photographed (by me, for example). Also there were private sector unions: Teamsters, Laborers, Pipefitters, among others. No doubt because of the centrality of teachers and health care workers, there were very sizable numbers of women; more generally, the fact that both public and private sector workers were the heart of the crowd meant that it was rather more heterogeneous—and so more like the US itself — than certainly most non-worker centered gatherings are. There still remain, it would seem, ways in which economic interests can unite that social networks cannot.
From March, 2011
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