Worried about civility

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is worried about civility in this state as our political discourse sharpens. I understand. We worry about that, too. We also would like to invite all those engaged in Wisconsin's popular democracy efforts right now to act like adults, to be the political culture we would like to be.

But let's also be clear about what is creating this acrimony. When parties representing one set of narrow interests uses cudgels of power to beat down the rights of others, those latter folks get upset. That upset ought not be equated with the atmosphere created by those with the cudgel.

And those with the cudgels need to take responsibility for the hatred, racism, and resentment that often gets unleashed in the spaces created by their politics of arrogant exclusion. When your policies increase the suffering of the suffering, when they squeeze more from those who have less and less to be squeezed, when they take rights that empower workers, students, poor people, and elderly to participate in democracy away from them, or make it harder to exercise them, they create fear, frustration, and growing feelings of powerlessness.

The Walker recall campaign did not create this acrimony, but acrimony from the right and the cudgel being used by the Walker/Fitzgerald regime helped mightily to create the recall campaign. People didn't take to the streets and shopping malls and Lambeau Field and their own front yards to gather signatures because they don't like Scott Walker or just for fun or because they are Democrats or because they don't like Repubs and on and on. And despite what the governor says, they aren't doing this because 'big unions made me do it!' They are doing it because of concrete tangible grievances having to do with the politics of deception of the Walker 2010 campaign, because of anti-democratic policies that have passed the state house and been signed by the gov. They are doing it because of the threats they feel to their livelihoods and well-being. They are doing it because it has become abundantly transparent that this current government exists to promote the narrow interests of its corporate and other rightist backers, not the interests of the public it is meant to serve.

Just want to make note of yesterday's front page article on the Bradley Foundation. The writers note that while we have focused so much attention on the Koch brothers, this Foundation has helped put Walker in the governor's mansion and been architect of many of his policies.

I didn't vote the Bradley Foundation into office, nor the Koch brothers and their offspring, Americans for Prosperity.

Yup, it's true; elections have results, as Walker's supporters love to tell us. Democracy is built upon them, but not on them alone. Some of the most important aspects of democratic participation are what happens between elections. The recall 'tool' (Walker loves to use that term, so we will, too) exists for a reason - to provide a mechanism through which the people can reverse an election when the outcome is undemocratic, a threat to democratic rights (like worker rights), or when it is discovered that a government is at the service of interests that are at odds with the common good.

I won't hold my breath, but maybe we could allow this recall process to unfold the way we do an election. They are both written into democracy here in Wisconsin. Sadly, elections themselves have become subject to the culture of nastiness that has emerged in our difficult times.

So what I do ask here is that all of us who care about these things raise ourselves to a different level. Even when that guy roared passed me with his car the other day when I signed the petition, I found myself wondering what his story is, his particular fear and anxiety. What is it that makes him feel such threat, as if his world is somehow rocked by my signing the recall petition.

Maybe if we could realize that most rage, resentment, and fear is based in pain and suffering, we could approach even the angry and resentful with the necessary compassion required to tamp down the fiery, volatile tones of this political era.

It's not as if life is going to get easier - not for a long while. But it can become kinder if we can figure out how to get to the point of realizing we are all in this together. We can go up in flames together, or we can figure out how to get through the hard times with a better world than this one, so full of injustice, violence, anger, and ecological unraveling. We can figure out how to re-knit the human community into one that has compassion at its heart and the well-being of all of us and the generations to come after us at the top of its priority list.

We are in urgent need of a new political culture

So I shared this story on Facebook yesterday, but here it is in more detail:

I was driving home from a morning gathering around 10:30 or so, and passed an older neighbor here in Bay View who had set up a table outside his house to collect signatures for the Walker/Kleefisch Recalls. It was 37 degrees and windy. A woman was sitting at the table signing. I thought, what a perfect moment for me to stop and sign, greet a neighbor, offer encouragement for his effort.

I parked, crossed the street, we shook hands and had a little chat as I filled in the form. Suddenly, a man turns his car at an angle to the corner and yells out his window, "I don't agree with what you're doing." I shrugged and said, "Okay." But clearly he had come for more response than that, so he said, "Scott Walker is doing a great job!" Now I didn't really want to get into an argument on a quiet Bay View street out there in the cold, so I just said, "We disagree."

Then he made some nasty comment about teachers, which I wish I had heard clearly so that I could quote it here, closed his window and drove off in frustration. What was going on for him? I know this right-wing anger. I grew up with it - fear of all things unfamiliar, things that feel threatening to their world - taxes and union rights, immigrants and African-Americans, people they think want to take their guns away from them...

But teachers? What is it about teachers that has attracted so much irrational wrath? All they do is teach our kids, work long hours through weekdays and weeknights and often weekends with their work load. Oh, and they have been getting paid pretty well and getting some great benefits so that we can attract good people to this profession.

Somehow they are responsible for - well, for what? I can tell you what Koch Industries and their subsidiary Georgia-Pacific are responsible for in the way of phosphorous pollution of our waterways, of funding right wing groups like Americans for Prosperity (a misnomer - it should really be called 'A Few Wealthy Americans for Prosperity for a Few Wealthy Americans') whose money has been used to elect politicians who favor the erosion of broad worker, voter, and environmental rights, corporate tax cuts that have added to our deficit woes and tight budgets, corporations that have steadily and successfully whittled away at union rights bringing about the collapse of wages which further erodes our tax base while adding to demands for public services adding to our deficit woes - and on and on.

But teachers?

Okay, here is how this story ended. When I was done, I crossed the street to get back to my car. This guy had turned his car around and was now headed in my direction. I didn't realize this until I heard a car behind me suddenly picking up speed. It's not that he actually tried to come too close to me in a really scary way, but I got the message. As he passed by, he laid on his horn.

All I could do was wave to him by way of his rear view mirror, and then feel very, very sad.

What has happened to us? When did our politics become so mean, so angry, so full of resentment? And why does this mostly come from the right? I don't mean to paint all conservatives with this broad brush, because many conservatives are as sad as I am about the deterioration of our political culture. But we all know, though it is not politically correct to say this out loud, that this kind of very personal nasty behavior tends to come from one extreme section of the political spectrum.

I wrote a letter to the editor once responding to Sen. Ron Johnson's insistent climate change denial, a postion I find threatening to our human future. The Journal Sentinel published it. I received an anonymous postcard in the mail that reads in part, and in somewhat hysterical handwriting: "Only an idiot would believe in global warming...If you're really worried about our kids and grandkids, vote Barack Hussein out! Get rid of Pelosi, Ried [sic], and the gay blade Barney Frank. Green house gas emissions are the least of USA's problems, but just for you, I'll try not to fart."

Someone else left a vaguely threatening message on my answering machine at home referring to our president with a racial slur I cannot bring myself to write. Really, we have come to this...

A friend showed me a postcard that her spouse received in the mail - also anonymous, always anonymous - referring to him in what these folks consider a true expletive - a 'liberal.'

Liberals and teachers - you just can't get much more evil than that, responsible for all things wrong with this world. What's scary for me is this sense that a lot of these people really believe the world should be rid of us.

At Occupy Milwaukee rally

I share these stories because I feel it so essential that all of us rise to the challenge of this kind of political anti-discourse by a refusal to respond in kind or through confrontation, and by creating a new political culture. If this recall succeeds, things could get very ugly in this state. Our politics has become not only resentful but volatile. There is something that the religious right + corporate right + political far-right have stirred up in this culture since the 1990s that has opened spaces for the emergence of a lot of deep-seated resentments that are visceral responses to the many ways in which our world has changed.

Indeed, we are reeling with change. Population growth, the collapse of the post-World War II industrial dream as the backbone of a middle class, the surge of so many immigrant populations from around the world into our communities, the widening chasm between the wealthy and everyone else -- all this and more has created a whole lot of fear, and that fear is not being addressed at all by our current politics. Indeed, it is being stoked by those few with money and power who stand to gain from the politics of resentment. They can wield it as a weapon against anything that threatens their project to move this country away from a broad inclusive democracy to a nation of, by, and for the wealthy.

So let's actually be the world we so wish we could create - tolerant, respectful, able to absorb the anger and let it pass through rather than resist or respond in kind, peaceful, compassionate, inclusive, and most of all, in solidarity with all those who are feeling themselves on the margins or being pushed in that direction.

We're all in this together. That guy in the car may not realize it, but that is the case.

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All photos: Margaret Swedish

Needing protection

This was one of those eye-popping stories from today's paper:

Protection costs for Walker, Kleefisch more than double

I mean, I would love to have the info to know if they face more credible death threats than Gov. Doyle did, who was not exactly well liked by many Wisconsites. I would like to know how much of this is real, how much is paranoia, and whether or not Walker & Kleefisch feel at all that any of the vitriol of their supporters, or the policies that they have rammed through our state politics without popular support, have anything to do with creating this level of threat.  There are, after all, other styles of governing that do not leave people feeling so frustrated, powerless, and angry.

This is not to excuse a single credible threat. Sadly, these are part of our political culture now. I know what it means to be Barack Obama, for example. Being the first African-American president means you, your wife, and your 2 children are the subject of daily credible death threats because there are still white people who resent your mere presence on their TV screens. I am aware of this from my long time doing political work in DC. Members of Congress, too, get freaked out by the steady volume of threats that have increased exponentially in the past decade or so.

So, on the one hand, this makes me very sad. On the other hand, it reveals the consequences of a politics of rage and hate, resentment and division, and enormous frustration when those who now 'govern' (or try to 'rule') have often been part of that kind of politics, or even benefited from it.

I mean, listen to a little Charlie Sykes or Rush Limbaugh - these people are not innocent of creating the culture that gives rise to this kind of rage and resentment. They stoke it. They empower it.

There is no excuse for this on any side of the political and cultural divides; but, still, I would like to know more. I would like to know who is making these threats and why. I would like to know what leads law enforcement officials to be this concerned, and whether or not this level of protection is about something real or feared, often perhaps with good reason.

But here's the other thing that makes me crazy: Walker & Kleefisch, who are the targets of these threats, have just approved one of the nation's most permissive concealed carry laws in the nation!! People can now walk armed right into the Capitol!!

So this is my crazy-maker for this day: WI Repubs and Lena Taylor have just made our society less secure and a whole lot more frightening, and the result is more insecurity and more fear, and then more armed guards and more tax money to pay for more armed guards. We allow our people nearly unlimited access to guns, including high-powered handguns. And then we ramp up security.

And one day, we will wonder where our democracy went. Maybe that's what the NRA wants - a nation of scared people cowering behind walls and moats defending their property and their lives with guns (or 'works of art,' as Sen. Taylor calls them) against enemies, real or not, a statewide and nationwide O.K. Corral.  Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

I guess this story was for me yet another sad commentary on the state of the political culture. It will take a long time to repair these breaches of distrust. But let's remember where they came from - they came from a backlash against the broad social contract constructed over decades that included things like worker rights, civil rights, voting rights, affirmative action, Social Security, Medicare, more cultural inclusion of gays and lesbians, immigrants and people of other cultures, fair housing acts, more stringent environmental protections, and a tax structure that once helped prevent the kind of concentration of wealth we're seeing now, leading to the impoverishment of the middle class, a progressive tax structure that was one of the hallmarks of our relatively stable society.

Check out the list: virtually every one of these things is under attack right now, and the rollback began 10-20 years ago. It has been very successful, and it has torn the cover off of old animosities and prejudices, helping to re-create the politics of resentment that has brought our democracy to the edge of collapse.

So I hope nobody tries to commit violence against any of our elected politicians. It would be beyond tragic. It would actually pose a grave threat to our state's democracy. And I hope we can use this story as yet another stark warning: we need to start healing these breaches so that the social contract can be restored and a culture of tolerance and inclusion reborn.