Buckle Down, Wisconsin!

Buckle down, Wisconsin, buckle down
You can win, Wisconsin, if you knuckle down!

And so was born the Madison Revolution....

I was going to call this little ditty "Is Wisconsin Our Egypt?" but I was beaten to the punch by the lovably subversive website, AlterNet. I hate when that happens.

I would also hate to be Wisconsin governor Scott Walker today. One of the most annoying developments of recent years is how Republican lawmakers have started to use people whose incomes are paid by the public as scapegoats for all that is wrong with America. This is a despicable effort to divert our attention from the tsunami of American jobs that have gone overseas because of the idiotic actions of conservative politicians of both parties. It's all the fault of the public workers - THESE GODDAMNED BUREAUCRATS! - with their cushy jobs and their sweet pensions. It would be political suicide to demagogue police and firefighters, so they attack the less visible and more vulnerable ones: teachers, government workers, highway departments, tax collectors - especially tax collectors. They tell us that this country is going to hell in a hand basket because these people are little more than paid parasites. My goodness!

Back in the day, the political extremists used African Americans as scapegoats. Today it is the moderately paid people who work for the public. The more things change, the more they stay the same. To their credit they're a tad more subtle about their contempt for black people these days. That's progress....I guess.

The good people of the state of Wisconsin are taking this crisis lying down - quite literally! Scores of them camped out in the rotunda of the state capital last night; so determined are they to read their elected representatives the riot act. I learned that something was brewing days before the main stream media caught onto the story. On February 13, I received an e-mail from the very youngest of my many cousins - Amy Clements. That is her in the photo on the left. Said she:

"Hey cousin Tom. I'm looking for advice from the wise: Scott Walker is crazy. Advice?! What would you do if you were me, living in the state capitol? There's a rally at his mansion today. I'll start there. Perhaps you have other ideas?.. :) xo"

You need no ideas or advice from me, Cousin. You and your friends have awakened the nation! How the heck do you do that?

Amy and her compatriots are right there in the thick of things, standing up for America's core principals that were articulated by Abraham Lincoln on the blood-drenched fields of Gettysburg in 1863: "....government of the people; by the people, for the people." Governor Walker would be wise to avoid pissing off Cousin Amy any further than he already has. Heaven help the poor, clueless bastard if he is forced to spar with her. Seriously.

Could this be the beginning of a revolution that might spread nationwide? I'm hopeful. Unlike the clueless tea party types, the good people of the state of Wisconsin realize that the blame for the problem lies not with those naughty, bleeding heart Liberals, but with the plutocrats and greed heads who long ago hijacked not only our government, but both political parties - including the one that Lincoln helped found in 1856. Bob Dylan once said, "A hard rain's gonna fall." Indeed. I hope you have an umbrella at the ready. The shit storm has arrived.

What I'm curious about is how dah man is going tp try to suppress this revolt before it spreads - and it will spread. Count on it. Sooner or later he will have to understand that (again, to quote Dylan) "the times, they are a'changin'" They had better not even try to stand in the way of the mass sense of outrage and the desire of millions for a remedy to the economic injustices they have been forced to live with for decades. They might as well try to keep the sun from setting in the west this evening. It would be a lot easier.

Dick Gregory once made a beautiful analogy comparing revolution to a coffee pot. The pot makes a whistling noise to warn us that it is boiling. (Boiling mad, in this case). If an attempt is made to ignore that noise by plugging up the hole, sooner or later that coffee pot is going to explode - burning everyone in the room. Can you hear that whistling noise, Governor Walker? That's the people of your state sending you a little message. You would be smart to listen to them. You would also be wise to pick up a couple Dick Gregory albums. The gem of wisdom paraphrased above is from the LP "Dick Gregory at Kent State". You can probably find it on ebay.

In the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowing rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burning constantly at stake
As we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

-Bob Dylan

Honestly, you can't go wrong with Uncle Bobby. You really can't! That was from the song "Chimes of Freedom". Might I suggest to the workers of Wisconsin that they use it as their anthem? Springsteen once did a great, kick-ass cover of it. Just a thought.

If present trends continue, the second decade of the twenty-first century promises to be one of positive change for people all over the world. As the call for revolution in Egypt seems to be spreading throughout the Arab world, so, too, should the Madison Revolution be a cry to the American people to wake up and demand what is rightfully theirs. How fitting that this new American revolution was born in a city named for one of the framers of the Constitution.

Now is the time to brush up on our Gandhi and our Dr. King. We have the power to turn this country around, and we can do it non-violently. It happened in India in the 1940s and again in this country in the 1960s. Let's make it happen again.

Wish I could be there with you, Amy! You make us all proud to call you family. Love ya!

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
tomdegan@frontiernet.net

SUGGESTED READING:

Letter from a Birmingham Jail
by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here's a link to read it in its entirety:

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

It really is a humdinger.

Here's a link to Amy Clements' Facebook page. You can view the video she shot on the floor of the rotunda in Madison:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=492966527451&comments#!/video/video.php?v=492966527451&comments