The Crazy Wrong Costs of Freedom

This winter, the good people of my home state of Wisconsin decided it was time to let our new governor know we objected to his plan to send our population back to the Dark Ages. During the coldest and snowiest months of the year, we gathered by the tens of thousands at our state capitol to demonstrate that we had another vision for our state, one that involved moving forward. We were, admittedly, inspired by what we saw happening in another part of the world, far away in Cairo and Alexandria, and so, young and old, white collared and blue collared, farmer and teacher and firefighter and civil servant, we shouldered our hand-lettered signs and raised our out-of-tune voices, and we marched and we slept and we sang; we fed each other, and we learned to respect and admire each other. Altogether, we comprised a fine and noble chorus.

 And when our efforts turned from the physical to the political, when our efforts to persuade our legislators came to naught, as the doors of first the hearing rooms were bolted and eventually the doors of the entire Capitol were locked, we turned our efforts toward that ultimate repository of American free speech: the ballot box. In Egypt, where the precedent of genuinely free and open elections has yet to be realized, the voices of the Spring Uprising are also waiting to gain expression at the ballot box. Across the whole world, people are speaking up in unprecedented numbers. China has noticed and has cracked down on journalism and the social media, afraid demands for democracy may spread to their big city squares. Even Israel's cities, in a bizarre counterpoint to the government's repressive response to the failed freedom flotilla, are full of citizens protesting, demanding lower rents, demanding lower child care costs.

Bizarre? Well, sometimes it seems like there's a really gigantic problem with myopia in what maps call Israel, what my friends in Egypt call Occupied Palestine. I mean, daycare and housing costs are very real concerns of a lot of working people in all parts of this fermenting, fomenting world, but right now in Israel there is another housing related crisis: The Israeli government this week filed a NIS 1.8 million lawsuit against 34 Beduoins living northeast of Be-er Sheva whose homes have been demolished by the state repeatedly. Yes, that's right. The Israeli government razed the village of Al-Arakib 27 times, according to its leader, and each time the villages rebuilt it, absorbing the cost of rebuilding each time, and now the Israeli government is suing the villagers to pay for the costs they incurred with their repeated demolitions. The right of the Bedouins to live on this otherwise unoccupied, public land is under consideration by the courts. This whole tactic, of using a prolonged combination of legal and physical obstruction, has become the main method used to take away land from the Palestinians living within Israel's boundaries. For a very good read on this, check out Palestinian Walks, by Raja Shehadeh, a short and excellent book.

It cannot help but remind me of some of the mind-blowing tactics we saw tried here in good old Wisconsin this winter of our discontent and protest. We occupied the state capitol for several weeks trying to get our message heard by the legislators and media, and we covered the walls and the staircases with our hand lettered signs and petitions. When the government was finally successful in evicting us and barring us from the Capitol along with all other citizens and even some of our state legislators, they announced that it was going to cost the good State of Wisconsin (aka all of us, its citizens) an estimated $7.5 million to clean up and repair the building. Eventually, that estimate was lowered a bit, lowered by well over $7 million. Indeed, certain parties offered to clean it up for a mere $7,500. Eventually, the (unionized) janitors who work there, whose collective bargaining rights were being stripped by the very budget we'd been protesting, would simply apply a little acetone to the marble to wipe away the residue of the painter's tape we had used to hang up our signage. No one has so far confessed how little it ended up costing. But the cost was made to seem ours. We were made to seem the criminals. And meanwhile, today the papers reveal that this same governor authorized the payment of up to $500,000 to his favorite law firm to defend his move against collective bargaining rights.

Follow the money. Follow the money. Let me know in whose pockets you eventually find yourself.