The Good Shepherd (Pt II)

"And there is great power to be had by being the one to initiate a new order."

Our Fair State is currently awaiting the official results of yesterday's elections. And the results of the most high-profile race on the ballot - Supreme Court Judge - are close. Very close. (As of 11:40 AM, only 200 votes separate the candidates, with just one precinct not yet reporting. (via)) This race is viewed by many as a referendum on the recent right-wing power grab that involved a legislative attempt to take collective bargaining away from public employees.

In addition to shock and anger at the consequences of this "non-fiscal" budget repair bill, a sense of solidarity among workers of all kinds has emerged. What has not yet emerged in this situation is a single individual as the face/voice of the movement. There has been no 'Joe the plumber', no Joe Hill... and no Anton Drexler. Perhaps it is simply too early. Perhaps the outrage is still too fresh.

And perhaps it is naive to hope that this movement, this sense of solidarity and community, will continue uncorrupted. Eventually there will be an organized response, above and beyond attempts to recall current legislators or endorse candidates in races where the candidacy was already determined when the collective shit hit the fan. (Pardon the pun.)

Another episode in the ongoing series of weird coincidences that permeate my life began when I was in the library recently, looking for research material on workers' rights. While I didn't find what I was looking for in the area of workers' rights, as I perused the early-300s I did come across a book called Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, by journalist Robert D. Kaplan (2002). (If you know me, you know that that book was bound to go home with me.) It was a bit unsettling, given the current situation, to see sentence two of Chapter One - "The Nazi party began as a crusade for workers' rights organized by a Munich locksmith, Anton Drexler, in 1919, before Hitler took it over the following year." This sense of creepy coincidence developed further when I saw a published letter to the editor of a local news outlet this morning. The letter was a single line - "Ich bin ein pro-labor Wisconsinite." I have to wonder how many readers understood the significance of that letter. And I have to say, it probably would have gone right over my head had I not just been reading Kaplan's book.

As personal as the current situation in Our Fair State feels to me, and as much as it has pissed me into political activism, I also don't want our collective response to lose its sense of purity. Right now we are angry and in shock. Right now public employees are trying to figure out what to do if/when their take-home incomes are suddenly cut by $350 a month. Right now My City of 25,000 is poised to lose over 1000 years - years - of teaching experience as many public school teachers make the difficult decision to retire. (It shocked me too, but 30 teachers averaging 35 years each adds up.)

But it won't be long before the political interests involved find a face for the outraged masses to rally behind. And so we are forced to consider the first sentence of Kaplan's treatise - "The evils of the twentieth century arose from populist movements that were monstrously exploited in the name of utopian ideals, and had their power amplified by new technologies."  Can there be a reasonable response to what has happened in Our Fair State and is happening in states across the country? Absolutely. Can it be an effective response without large-scale organization, financial resources, and leadership? I would love to believe that it's possible, but I have doubts...

One thing I have noticed in recent weeks is that people desperately want to be told who to vote for, and more generally, how to funnel their outrage. No one has time to do all the research themselves, they doubt their ability to 'get it right', and they are looking for a reliable source of information and direction. Here's just one example of a directive to the public that has gathered momentum, even though it may be only tangentially related to the average voter's actual source of ire. (I've also heard more than one person say that they'd like Russ Feingold to become the governor of Our Fair State.)

While emotions continue to run high, we the average voters also need to consider how to shape an effective political response to the actual issues, without getting lost in sentiment and rhetoric. We've seen what democracy looks like, but what will organized leadership look like? You turned out at the polls yesterday, far in excess of the 20% normally seen for this election. Don't lose your momentum; continue to demand the best from yourselves and any leaders you choose to follow!