DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD: Our nearly decade-long nightmare is finally over.
Certainly anyone who still reads this blog knows how much misery and suffering Scott Walker has caused my family and the entire state of Wisconsin. No one has ever messed up my life the way Scott Walker has. As such, it was extremely difficult to reconcile my responsibility as a committed Christian to even consider forgiving him for what he has done to me and to my family. I know that he could care less, and never will care. How can I forgive him? He doesn't acknowledge any wrongdoing. Tony Evers may have sent him down in flames, but Walker will always be the smug, self-centered sociopath who thinks that he was elected to enforce the will of a smug, self-centered, sociopathic God.
Thankfully he wasn't elected President. Oh, never mind, that didn't come off right.
I suppose I could use that last paragraph to point out that we in Wisconsin had a very long prequel to the Trump presidency (about five years, to be exact). It was almost amusing to me, in a sick way, to watch Democrats go on and on after the 2016 election about how Trump had ruined their lives. To many Wisconsinites, it just felt like more of the same. Now the rest of the nation got to find out what it felt like to live under the iron fist of an anti-science, anti-education nitwit who thought that the law didn't apply to him and that anyone who disagreed with him should just be "disappeared." When laws didn't suit Walker, he either changed them or ignored them. He locked up his political opponents, even grandmothers who dared to protest him.
I kept trying to tell the rest of the country what it was like to live in a fascist dictatorship. Right-wing hate radio and the newspapers brimmed over with threats against people who dared speak against Der Neuen Reich. As someone who ran a blog that spoke constantly against the governor and a frequent writer of anti-Walker screeds on various platforms, I grew increasingly nervous when people called my house and hung up, or when I kept seeing a gray sedan with red state plates and two guys in suits pull up frequently alongside me when I ate my breakfast at Kwik-Trip. The suits never got out of the car.
Meanwhile people were being arrested at our state capitol in Madison for unbelievable reasons, including the guy who was booked for carrying a newspaper (his name was Ed Kuharski).
And this was America. That's what I kept telling myself. I live in America.
I desperately wanted to move to Minnesota and get away from the pressure, to return to the America I remembered. Where you could say unkind things about the governor (not that I would have; Mark Dayton is a perfectly decent and upright guy) and creepy apparatchiks in suits didn't hang around in the parking lot watching you eat breakfast. Where you didn't risk getting thrown in jail for exhibiting "the wrong attitude" in your own state capitol building. Most of all, where your governor didn't laugh while he peeled your civil rights away (while he opened another beer paid for by YOU, just to rub it in).
Yeah. That was life in Scott Walker's Wisconsin. Meanwhile, my wife was recovering from open-heart surgery. I was working as a school bus driver and watching teachers bail out en masse for jobs in Minnesota, where they'd be safe and wouldn't receive death threats from Walker backers. I lived through this; I lived through the denial of federal Medicaid dollars, the flirting with secessionists, the attempts to sabotage Obamacare with no replacement in the wings, the decimation of the University of Wisconsin (my alma mater and the reason I moved to Wisconsin 30 years ago), the trashing of Wisconsin's public schools, Walker's secret rewrite of the Wisconsin Idea which basically declared that the UW--one of the world's great research universities--was to become a voc-tech school that existed only to serve corporate Wisconsin*, the WiGOP's infamous "Fourth Of July Assault" on the state's open-records law, and so very, very much more. Neighbors would say to neighbors, friends would opine to friends (or in hundreds and thousands of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor), "He can't do that!" To which Walker, with his drunkenly drooping eye and sadistic smile would retort, "I just did!"
As a "compassionate conservative" (thanks, GWB), I quickly found myself unable to support a man who was quickly dragging the state into an anti-intellectual fascist quagmire where facts were distorted to fit the planning of the Regime and objective reality no longer existed (or, in any event, was not tolerated). As I have said, we in Wisconsin have lived under Trumpism since January 2011. God damn, we needed a break. Any kind of break.
Here's a 2013 S&G post that encapsulates the hopelessness that was life in WalkerWorld. I wrote it after one of my frequent visits to Minnesota to decompress:
After three years of living in the ruin Scott Walker has made of Wisconsin, I'd quite forgotten that in the rest of America that good old American optimism still prevails. People in other states smile, greet each other on the street (can't do that here, the person you're greeting might be in the "other camp"), and look generally happy to be alive. When I saw mobs of folks hitting a liquor store in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, on their way to Saturday Night In The Rest Of America, it really hit home that I hadn't seen so many smiling, convivial people in one place in a very long time.
Walker's Wisconsin is a grey, paranoid, Soviet-communist sort of place where factories are shuttered, everyone is suspicious of everyone else and no one can talk for fear that "The Forbidden Topic" (whether you think Walker is God or the Antichrist--there's no middle ground) will come up.
I almost wept when I crossed the St. Croix River back into this burned-out, beleaguered state. Sure wish I'd moved to Minnesota 27 years ago instead of here.
I'm sure Walker backers will find all of this to be perfectly hilarious (a little less so, perhaps, now that their tinhorn Stalin is about to leave the statehouse), but they took away eight years of my American citizenship, destroyed my wife's health, and practically bankrupted me.
I only wish that there could be show trials now.
*When caught trying to insert his rewrite into the state charter, the WiGOP claimed they'd made a "drafting error" after a firestorm of bipartisan protest ensued.
Posted by Alois on
