Just to have a written copy handy for referencing, and because last weekend Pappa kept asking, as if bewildered “Where’s your dog in this fight,” here is a list of my goals.
1) This budget sucks. My education growing up was a crapshoot full of incompetent teachers, rescued only by a handful of abused, deluded devotees, and this budget will, among other sins, turn education in Wisconsin into something like that. I don’t plan to forgive anybody for the faults of my education, and I am not about to sit still while those faults spread to places where things used to be better. I want this budget dead. Delayed until July, when we ought to have new people in for some of those senate seats is acceptable.
2) There are 8 Republican senators eligible for recall. When all of this got started a month ago, I did a lot of laughing at the people who thought that was a worthwhile tactic. Since then, the Republicans have made it clear that this is our fight to lose, and they’ll bend over backwards to help us out. So yeah, I’m throwing time and effort behind the recall efforts. They’re going well, too. Getting anything less than six of them means we screwed up.
3) I want Scott Walker publicly flogged, then displayed in stocks mounted on the State st corner of the square. Failing that, I’ll accept recalling the impudent twit and turning his political career into a cautionary tale for future power-grabbing executives. This fight is not over until that man leaves office in disgrace.
4) The anti-Tea Party. I want people who are just as passionate, just as angry, and just as devoted as your average Tea Partier. Except I want them smart, educated, an invested in the big picture, complete with thinking about secondary and tertiary consequences of policy choices. I’ll work with Communists and Socialists to get it. Hell, I’ll work with the Tea Party to get it, if that’ll do anything for me. I want them buying candidates and ad space, educating the public, and performing relevant yet surreal pranks on government officials.
5) I want people to have a natural sense of ownership over the capitol. I did not care two bits about that building a month ago. And honestly, the only reason I care is because somebody told me I wasn’t allowed to be there when that was patently untrue. But I do care. Now I have visions of people who work on the square taking their brown bag lunches to the rotunda and nibbling away at meat and cheese sandwiches while listening to people talk about public policy, or watching mimes. Mostly, I want the mimes. And I want the idea of locking the doors on that building during business hours, or forcing people to go through searches to get in, to be so viscerally absurd that the suggestion prompts laughter instead of confused compliance.
There’s my dog in this fight.
Anaea Lay 