The Wisconsin State Capitol lies pretty much on a straight line between my office and my home, and for the nearly three years I've lived and worked here in Madison, it's been one of my many small, sustaining pleasures to cut through the capitol building on my walks home. It's a really magnificent building, and it always make me feel a little taller, a little braver, and a little better to walk through it somehow.
But this winter changed all that. The Republican governor who was inaugurated in January had the capitol sealed off when thousands of Wisconsinites began regular protests around and in the building, decrying Scott Walker's stated goal of taking away collective bargaining rights from public service workers in our state. One door was left unbolted of the score of doors that are usually wide open, and if you were determined to enter by that one door, you were greeted by ostensible law enforcement officers of sometimes indeterminate affiliation, made to empty your bags, packs and
pockets with a thoroughness and a lack of good humor that TSA would do well to imitate.
The last time I tried it, halfway into the ritual of dumping my pens and and pins and private belongings into plastic bins for these strangely unidentified men to inspect, I realized I was about to start crying. I refused. I grabbed back everything I had already deposited, told the unsmiling men, "I hate how you're doing this; I really hate how you've destroyed the civilian atmosphere of this building," and I ran back through the metal detectors and out of the building.
Today, for the first time since then, on an absolutely beautiful day toward the end of June, nearly four months to the day since we were surprised on February 28 to find the entire capitol in lockdown despite a promise to open it after what was to be a temporary closing for cleaning it after many days of protests, today I got to walk freely through my House again. During those four months, I felt seriously depressed every time I walked around the Capitol Square. To see the doors shut against the people the building proposes to serve provided a gut wrenching reminder of the fact that the present state government did not even pretend to be interested in serving me, or any of the 49 percent of the voters who are reliably Democratic right now. Republicans thoroughly control both the Assembly and the Senate, as well as the Governor's Office, and, most cruelly of all, the State Supreme Court, once naively assumed to be a chamber where party affiliation was not relevant. If you live in Wisconsin, you know all this. If you live elsewhere in the States, but are politically active or involved in labor issues, you probably know this too. Developments here got quite a lot of press this winter, most of it as outrageously slanted as our alleged representatives here.
But today I got to walk straight up the stairs to the big revolving doors and enter the high cool hallways of my beloved state capitol. I sensed a knot begin to dissolve a little in my chest, a knot that has felt oddly like a clenched fist instead of a heart pounding inside me. But I vow not to forget. Today, the Capitol was reopened because Governor Walker signed the state's new budget into law this weekend, a budget that is built on the premise that the rich deserve more, that the poor deserve nothing, and that the working class, the middle class is too concerned with reality television to bother with reality of class issues and public education.
Perhaps the governor's right. I have become a little more cynical since we lost our noble efforts to influence public opinion enough to alter the shape of our state's financial future. An article in the New York Times yesterday detailed how the boxes that Americans use to deliver cable signals to their televisions consume more energy in our homes than our refrigerators and in some cases even more than our air conditioning systems. Perhaps we do care more about reality TV than reality. Perhaps I'd better subscribe to cable and see what the hokey-pokey's all about.
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The last time I tried it, halfway into the ritual of dumping my pens and and pins and private belongings into plastic bins for these strangely unidentified men to inspect, I realized I was about to start crying. I refused. I grabbed back everything I had already deposited, told the unsmiling men, "I hate how you're doing this; I really hate how you've destroyed the civilian atmosphere of this building," and I ran back through the metal detectors and out of the building.
Today, for the first time since then, on an absolutely beautiful day toward the end of June, nearly four months to the day since we were surprised on February 28 to find the entire capitol in lockdown despite a promise to open it after what was to be a temporary closing for cleaning it after many days of protests, today I got to walk freely through my House again. During those four months, I felt seriously depressed every time I walked around the Capitol Square. To see the doors shut against the people the building proposes to serve provided a gut wrenching reminder of the fact that the present state government did not even pretend to be interested in serving me, or any of the 49 percent of the voters who are reliably Democratic right now. Republicans thoroughly control both the Assembly and the Senate, as well as the Governor's Office, and, most cruelly of all, the State Supreme Court, once naively assumed to be a chamber where party affiliation was not relevant. If you live in Wisconsin, you know all this. If you live elsewhere in the States, but are politically active or involved in labor issues, you probably know this too. Developments here got quite a lot of press this winter, most of it as outrageously slanted as our alleged representatives here.
But today I got to walk straight up the stairs to the big revolving doors and enter the high cool hallways of my beloved state capitol. I sensed a knot begin to dissolve a little in my chest, a knot that has felt oddly like a clenched fist instead of a heart pounding inside me. But I vow not to forget. Today, the Capitol was reopened because Governor Walker signed the state's new budget into law this weekend, a budget that is built on the premise that the rich deserve more, that the poor deserve nothing, and that the working class, the middle class is too concerned with reality television to bother with reality of class issues and public education.
Perhaps the governor's right. I have become a little more cynical since we lost our noble efforts to influence public opinion enough to alter the shape of our state's financial future. An article in the New York Times yesterday detailed how the boxes that Americans use to deliver cable signals to their televisions consume more energy in our homes than our refrigerators and in some cases even more than our air conditioning systems. Perhaps we do care more about reality TV than reality. Perhaps I'd better subscribe to cable and see what the hokey-pokey's all about.
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