In Wisconsin, more than 12 elections in the last 24 years have been won by less than 30,000 votes—a statistic that has become a talking point among politicians. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the state by a little over 20,500 votes.

That election after election here is determined by such razor-thin margins underscores the potential influence of young voters. The University of Wisconsin campus at Madison alone has nearly 50,000 students. In the 2022 midterm elections, nearly half of Wisconsinites under age 25 cast a ballot. Months later, in spring 2023, young voters turned out again to elect liberal-favored Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The youth vote is often a driving factor in election results, but young people across the state, feeling their concerns about Palestine and other pressing issues are being sidelined, are flexing their political power in other ways. Some may still go to the polls, but they’re taking action beyond the ballot box, too, pressuring local and national politicians and institutions to enact change, and showing up or their community when the government fails to do so.

The trend has been obvious since Biden stepped away from the presidential race and Kamala Harris stepped in, bolstering her outreach to Gen Z with plans to reach swing states through targeted digital ads, campus visits, and Gen Z-focused social media content.

But such efforts miss the mark when they ignore Gaza. Some might argue that young voters “risk” the future, jeopardizing chances to ensure better policies for climate, health, or housing here in the U.S when they focus on foreign policy in the Middle East, eschewing voting for Harris-Walz to write in an “uninstructed” vote (as it is called it in Wisconsin) when no candidate aligns with their position on Israel’s military violence in Palestine.

But young progressives in Wisconsin—and across the country—aren’t burying their heads in the sand, or deprioritizing homegrown issues. Rather, they see U.S. support for Israel as inextricably tied to these issues at home, and fighting for justice in Palestine as a means of fighting for justice here. There’s a reason why young people championed demands such as “Money for Jobs, School, Healthcare, Housing, and Environment, Not for War!” at the March on the DNC, a march organized by the Coalition to March on the DNC, a collection of grassroots organizations fighting for the same demands.

Activists, including Greta Thunberg, argue that climate justice depends on a free Palestine. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to climate justice everywhere,” said Wisconsin climate organizer Max Prestigiacomo, who is a recent UW-Madison graduate and former alderman. “In a fight to prevent the climate crisis which first and foremost recognizes that the impacts of said crisis—death—will fall on marginalized people worldwide, ignoring the active oppression and genocide in Palestine is complacency.”          

Reproductive justice, too—another issue bringing many young voters out to the polls. “Roe v. Wade got overturned here, we obviously have to fight for a women’s right to choose in the U.S.,” said 25-year-old Danaka Katovich, national co-director of CODEPINK, a feminist grassroots organization, during a protest at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. But “in Gaza, women are having c-sections with no anesthesia. Their children are being crushed under rubble and bombs that say ‘made in the USA.’ We’re here to link those two issues.”

CODEPINK also protested at the DNC in Chicago—just like thousands of young people, including from Wisconsin, who protested both conventions, linking justice in Palestine to climate and reproductive justice but also to immigrant, worker, LGBTQIA+, and women’s rights, and to ending police violence. “What made me come to the march was the genocide in Palestine,” commented Wisconsin student Cesar Moreno at the March on the RNC.

Youth politics beyond the ballot box in Wisconsin traces its history back to UW-Madison, a campus with a rich history of protest, just blocks away from the state’s capitol. It’s not uncommon to see students marching down the street in protest or tabling for causes—regardless of the weather forecast.

“Students have been protesting since the beginning of UW,” Kacie Lucchini Butcher, director of the Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, told campus radio station WUWM in a recent interview, calling UW-Madison students “civically engaged.” The Black Student Strike in 1969 mobilized thousands and eventually led to the development of a Black Studies Department; protests against South African apartheid began in the late 1960s and extended through the 1980s.

A crystallizing moment came in 1968, when hundreds of students protested the presence on campus of recruiters from Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm. Protesters encountered brutal police violence that, the Wisconsin Historical Society records, “politiciz[ed] thousands of previously apathetic students” and transformed the campus into “one of the nation’s leading anti-war communities.”

Community members today draw comparisons between the Dow Chemical protests and 2024’s pro-Palestine protests. Student groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine at UW-Madison have pushed for cutting U.S. military spending for Israel, interrupting a Harris rally in September and threatening to withhold their votes until she met their demands for an arms embargo. In May, students launched a pro-Palestine encampment to demand the university divest from Israel, which was met with police violence and arrests.      

Beyond political protests, students and community members show up for each other when government and local institutions fall short. Whether students are using social media to raise funds for peers in need, starting community campaigns to provide legal support to those arrested at pro-Palestine demonstrations or various grassroots organizations working to support their community, young people are dedicated to dreaming up and building a better world.

Social movements have long leaned on mutual aid—“the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world,” as lawyer, activist, and author Dean Spade puts it—to address community needs. Now, young people are rallying around one another. They feel their elected officials are failing them.

“I think this moment represents a turning point,” said Wisconsin youth organizer Aliya Glasper. “We are depending on our community, our collective power, strength, resolve to resist the current system that exists to work toward a fully liberated world that benefits everyone. A world where the ‘lesser of two evils’ doesn’t exist.”

Young people are ready to be heard. In Wisconsin, in the U.S., and around the world, those in power must listen and react to what we’re saying—not only on November 5th, but every day. And understand that young people are more than their vote.

The post In Wisconsin, Young People Are Thinking Beyond the Ballot Box appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And the longer I live in Wisconsin, wandering its trails and walking near its wetlands, the more the “ghost of a glacier” seems not only an apt simile but also an encompassing presence on the land itself.

Except for the “Driftless Area,” the unglaciated southwest corner of the state, Wisconsin’s landscape is rife with reminders of glaciers. The most recent glaciation, the Wisconsin Ice Sheet, receded 10,000 years ago, leaving a variety of formations that determine the contours of the terrain. Mile-high plows of ice scraped and gouged the surfaces they slid over.

Where they stopped and melted back, the glaciers left moraines, hilly rows of gravel and rock, or drumlins, inverted spoon-shaped hillocks; they left eskers, the winding debris-strewn beds of rivers that flowed through the ice, and kames, earthen cones formed by till dropping through holes at the top; they left kettles, depressions in the earth where buried blocks of ice eventually melted when the glaciers retreated. The fens, the bogs, the marshes, the wetlands along the rivers and lakes—all testify, silently, to their origins in the glacial past.

A great deal has happened to that glacial terrain in the last 10,000 years, especially in the last 200, as agriculture and commerce and transportation deposited all manner of dwellings, structures, and thoroughfares across it, the outwash and till of American civilization, the residue and distractions of easily-preoccupied populations. Today, in their determination to reach Wisconsin destinations of one kind or another, inhabitants and interlopers alike barely have a sense of the landscape they’re crossing, unless somehow they’re aware of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.

The Ice Age Trail winds across the state, following the terminal boundaries of the last ice sheet. At one end of the 1,200-mile-long trail it touches Minnesota; at the other end it looks down on Green Bay. More than 600 of those miles, a footpath well-marked by yellow blazes strategically painted on trees and posts, lead hikers over terrain rich in glacial reminders.

To get a sense of the trail’s shape, picture a closed fist with one finger pointing down: The fist crosses the northern portion of the state from the St. Croix River almost to the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest; the chubby finger extends down almost to the Illinois border near Janesville, one side running through the middle of the state, the other eventually touching the shore of Lake Michigan. The northern portions of the trail are less populated, passing often through deep forest and wilder waterways; the eastern portions are seldom very far from villages and towns, farms and parklands. Maintained by a network of volunteers in chapters throughout the state, the Ice Age Trail always crosses natural features of the landscape, climbing moraines and eskers and kames, skirting kettles, fens, and bogs.

Volunteer work on the Ice Age Trail began in 1957 and President Jimmy Carter approved the act making it a National Scenic Trail in 1980. In those 60 years, more than 160 hikers have walked all 1,200 miles of the trail. Some progressed incrementally, section by section over a period of months or even years, and about one-third of them hiked straight through from beginning to end, in a matter of weeks and sometimes in a matter of days. In the course of a year more than a million hikers and snowshoers, like me, wander shorter trail segments closer to home.

In the solitude of woods and wetlands, from the vistas of moraines and eskers, it doesn’t take long to feel connected to the earth beneath your hiking boots, to recognize a kettle or kame with a fond glance that may well be a greeting, to pause by glacial erratics carried down from Canada, and to look for striations and gouges in the surface of exposed rock. It becomes natural to welcome nuthatches, wild turkeys, herons, cranes, and deer whenever they appear. You don’t have to walk very long or very far to bring the landscape into you and to know it will stay with you when you leave the trail.

Poet Wendell Berry, in “The Peace of Wild Things,” spoke of escaping despair by resting near the wood drake and the great heron, of feeling free when he can “rest in the grace of the world.” That’s very much what those of us who walk the Ice Age Trail feel, as if we have become a part not only of the natural world that surrounds us, but also of its history. We feel connected, somehow, across the ages.

That feeling persists even after you come off the trail. To walk it is to acquire an abiding sense of where you are, as if you are never far from the companionable company of the white ghost of a glacier.

The post Hiking Wisconsin With ‘Ghosts’ of the Ice Age appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is still a shocking thing for lifelong Wisconsinites like me. Wisconsin is not typically characterized as resentful. We are supposed to be nice—“Wisconsin nice” is a special version of Midwestern polite.

But there is now some deep resentment in Wisconsin, driven by economics, and propelled into politics by savvy politicians during this decade. And now it is hitting this presidential election with full force.

I am a professor at the state’s flagship public university, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and also a life-long Wisconsinite. I have been studying the politics of resentment here for the last nine years. I didn’t set out to study resentment, but it was what I found. I study public opinion, and have always been interested in the way people make sense of politics. Rather than using polls, I listen to people talk to the people they normally talk to, in the places they normally spend time.

Back in 2007, shortly after I earned tenure, I wanted to do a study in my beloved home state to help me understand the role social class identity plays in how people interpret politics. So I sampled 27 communities from across the state. In each place, I sought out people in the know, who would direct me to groups of people who meet regularly on their own accord. This took me to diners, churches, McDonald’s, and gas stations.

So far, I have met with 39 groups across those 27 communities, listening in on conversations over multiple visits. Whenever I joined a group of regulars at a gas station for the first time, I would walk in, introduce myself as “Kathy from UW-Madison,” and ask if I could turn on my recorder. Then I’d ask people what their main concerns are and we went from there.

What I learned surprised me. Half of the people in Wisconsin live in rural counties, and half live in urban counties. I had grown up in a town of 7,000 just outside the Milwaukee metro area. I thought I knew Wisconsin. But I did not realize the extent of the resentment in small towns and rural Wisconsin toward the main cities—Madison and Milwaukee.

There were three parts to this rural resentment. Many folks perceived that the state government in Madison sucked in all of their money, and spent it on itself or on Milwaukee, and not on their own community. They also felt that people in their communities and in similar places did not get their fair share of attention. They felt that the important decisions that affected their lives were made in the cities and communicated out to them. In their eyes, very few people were listening to their concerns. They were amazed, for example, when I came back for a second and third visit.

They also felt disrespected, that city folks did not understand their way of life, what they valued and the way they lived. They valued knowing their neighbors, and having deep roots in the communities where they lived. They lamented the way those communities used to thrive and believed that cities were thriving while small towns are “drying up and blowing away.” They perceived that city folks did not understand their difficult economic situation—poverty and unemployment are higher in rural counties here and median income is lower.

And they resented how their own resentment of people in cities often gets labeled as racism, and subsequently ignored. That’s wrong—the resentment fueling our politics is more complex and thus more powerful (which is why it’s a mistake to write off Trump supporters as racists). Racism is part of this mix, but it is bound up with resentment toward a variety of entities by which people feel ignored and disrespected, including government.

That potent mix of attitudes is fueling our politics. When Scott Walker ran for governor of Wisconsin in 2010, he made use of these urban vs. rural divides (even though he was at the time the county executive of Milwaukee County) by warning that “our” roads wouldn’t get funding if we accepted an $810 million dollar federal grant for high speed rail between Madison and Milwaukee. He also talked about the overpaid public employees in “places like” Madison. He ran implicitly against what many people perceive as the centers of power: the cities.

He also ran against the government and public employees. Once in office, Walker tapped into resentment against the cities to propose legislation that effectively outlawed collective bargaining for public employees, and required them to substantially increase their paycheck contributions to their health insurance and pensions. This worked, because, even though many public school teachers or state employees live and work in rural communities, many rural residents perceive unions as an urban thing.

In those occupations, teachers and employees in rural government offices such as the Department of Natural Resources were part of the “them”—extensions of a government that does not “get” rural life. And, in many of these communities, the teachers and government employees were the highest income earners in town and among the few with employer-provided health insurance. Rural people working several jobs to make ends meet resented that they couldn’t match these wages and benefits. From that perspective, why would anyone agree to pay more taxes or have more government programs?

Many of these rural perceptions are misperceptions. It is not the case that rural areas in Wisconsin are getting less return per capita on their taxpayer dollars; to the contrary, rural areas get a higher return than cities. But it is these perceptions, not realities, that matter.

Anti-urban sentiment, bound to a profound sense of economic injustice, has produced a significant regional divide among Wisconsin Republicans. Ted Cruz is polling well in the heavily Republican and relatively wealthy Milwaukee suburbs, while Donald Trump is coming out ahead in rural areas of the state.

Trump is the candidate who has been unabashedly about resentment. From his announcement speech onwards, he has told people bluntly that they are not getting their fair share, and has shown by example that it is legitimate and acceptable to target this resentment toward other people in the population.

National pundits describe both Sanders and Trump as anti-establishment candidates tapping into anger. That is not quite right. Both are arguing that politics is out of touch with ordinary people. But they are not tapping into the same anger. Sanders is arguing for more government, not less. His targets of blame are groups in power: Wall Street, the wealthy. Trump is calling for a day of reckoning and a tearing down of government structures. His targets of blame have less power: immigrants, Muslims, and women, to name a few.

Trump is waving into a raging fire what has been smoldering as resentment: a perception that there is significant injustice and disrespect in this world, and government is the cause.

Once the presidential campaigns move on from Wisconsin next week, it is hard to know exactly what will be left in their wake. No matter the election results, this state has some work to do to reconcile the deep divide between its rural and urban spaces.

The post How the Politics of Resentment Corrupted Wisconsin’s Culture of Nice appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why Wisconsin? Why not Wisconsin?

An inherent and sensible trait of the successful monster is that it can show up anywhere; unpredictability is key to inflicting a proper scare. Still, after 22 years of looking into reports of unknown beasts from around the United States, I’ve noticed that some places are consistently more monster-rich than others. The Dairy State is one of them.

My first brush with this phenomenon came in 1991 when, as a reporter for Delavan, Wisconsin’s The Week, I broke the story that a Walworth County animal control officer was recording reports of an upright, wolf-like creature I called the “Beast of Bray Road.” I realized that sober, credible people from Rhinelander to Potosi have long claimed encounters with dogmen, Bigfoot, giant storks, super-sized humanoid bats, lizard people, pigmen, goatmen, out-of-place kangaroos, lake monsters, UFOs, and even an aggressive tribe of weird, tiny-baseball-bat-wielding little people that folks around Muskego Lake call the Haunchies. I could go on. Knowing my state as I do, I believe that there are some good reasons for this abundance of beasties, and that those reasons stem from the breathtaking diversity of two things: Wisconsin’s people and its land.

Woods and fields where the Bray Road Beast is said to roam.

Let’s start with the land. Yes, those bucolic, cow-filled pastures that comprise most people’s mental image of Wisconsin do exist, but they are bounded by the deep pine forests of its northern half, the river bluffs and yawning gorges of its western counties, the Kettle Moraine State Forest with its deep, round washbowls slashing through the southeast, and the 30 miles of ancient, red quartzite hills that form the Baraboo Range and anchor the state’s rocky heart. Toss in major rivers like the mighty Mississippi and the serpentine Wisconsin that spread into myriad lakes and marshes, add the windswept shores of lakes Superior and Michigan, and the amazingly varied habitat that is Wisconsin begins to emerge.

For millennia, this wild backdrop inspired indigenous people—the Ho Chunk, Algonquians, Mississippians, Fox, Sac, Ojibwe, and others—to tell stories about living cheek by jowl with every monster imaginable. Stormy nights brought the massive flying raptor known as Thunderbird whose eyes and wings created lightning and thunder. This spirit bird hovered over the rough waves to battle Mishipeshu, the horned water panther, as a lordly river serpent known for carving out the Wisconsin River looked on through dinner-plate-sized red eyes. In the winter, when game grew scarce among the snowy pines, many northern tribes watched carefully for signs of Windigo, a dark spirit that could possess a starving person and turn him or her into a cannibal. As it fed, the Windigo grew into a gaunt, skeletal giant made mostly of ice. If defeated, its melted remains would reveal the shriveled carcass of its original victim.

When fur trappers, traders, and Jesuit priests of European descent landed along the shores of lakes Superior and Michigan in the 17th and 18th centuries, they introduced their own tales of European monsters—werewolves and little goblins chief among them—to lake ports like Green Bay. They and the settlers that followed them added names like Fairy Chasm, Black Earth, and Devil’s Lake to the landscape.

The Bark River, near Whitewater, is the scene of several Bigfoot sightings

In the 1800s, more legends of upright wolves howled their way into the state’s interior along with settlers from German-speaking lands. One alleged werewolf named Gross made its living as an itinerant dance master in the Dane County town of Springfield Corners in the 1840s. When a prosperous farmer from whom Gross rented a room was found dead, the townsfolk blamed the suspected shape shifter, who eventually died and was buried in a nearby cemetery. Although it was never proved, the tale persisted well into the 20th century, when state folktale specialists recorded it.

More immigrants—Yankees, Poles, Italians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Irish, Dutch, African-Americans, Hmong, Latinos, and more—found their way here and brought their own vampires, chupacabras, and phantom hounds with them. On top of that, lumberjacks hired to cut down the northern forests invented mythic beasts like the cougar fish and the snow snake and added them to the spooky mix.

But there is more to it than sheer diversity. Wisconsin is a state that doesn’t mind being known for its love of cheese. Its people are used to being referred to as “the flyover state,” and they don’t give a goatman’s whisker about what people of any other region may think of it. This is the sort of attitude required of anyone willing to avow that Bigfoot lurks in the back 40. It takes true intestinal fortitude buoyed by bratwurst and a lifetime of self-reliance for a man to report that a humanoid bat with a 15-foot wingspan almost took out the windshield of his pickup truck, as did one resident of the La Crosse area in 2006.

Does Wisconsin really harbor more monsters than any other state? I don’t think we know, and I don’t think most residents care where the state stands on a monstrous scale. All I can say is that we boast more than a few citizens who aren’t afraid to call a pigman a pigman when they see one shopping at the second-hand store in downtown Marshfield. I think the monsters know and (grudgingly) appreciate that candid nod to their existence. And this is the true reason they are here.

Vampire and werewolf of Mineral Point, Wisconsin

The post Wisconsin, Monster Capital of America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We hear so much about presidential candidates–and so little about life in the states that elect them. In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the trail and give us glimpses of politically important places. Today, Janesville.

In his speech to the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan portrayed himself as an emblem of his Midwestern hometown, where he lives on the same block where he grew up and attends the same church in which he was baptized.

I have lived in Ryan’s hometown–Janesville, Wisconsin–off and on for the past 20 years, and have learned that its story is more complicated, and more important, than that.

Janesville is a city of about 63,000 located 40 miles south of Madison. In addition to its outstanding public library, lush Rotary Gardens, and plethora of historically significant domiciles, Janesville has so many retail outlets (two huge malls) and restaurant franchises that people call it “Chainsville.” The city is a merchandise center for the surrounding area–over half a million people live within 30 minutes. It also is a Rust Belt town that, not unlike the United States, is slouching toward some sort of reinvention. But let us not get ahead of our story.

Janesville is a fine specimen of American history, and this isn’t its first brush with presidential politics. Abraham Lincoln stopped here twice, first when he was a young man helping to clear out the Blackhawk Indians so that white settlers could develop the Rock River for commerce; and later when he was unofficially running for president in opposition to the further spread of slavery. Then he stayed for a single night at an Italian villa newly built by a lawyer named Tallman; it is now called the Lincoln-Tallman House and stands, albeit in need of repairs, next to the Rock County Historical Society. Tourists still stop by the Lincoln-Tallman house, but fewer than used to.

Many weddings in American family history have been enhanced by “I Love You Truly,” a tremolo paean to love written by Carrie Jacobs-Bond, originally from Janesville. And what would we do without the spirited aphorism “Laugh and the world laughs with you, Weep and you weep alone,” penned by Ellen Wheeler Wilcox, also from Janesville?

One in five of the Wisconsin houses on the National Register of Historic Places rest on their foundational laurels in Janesville. There are 10 different historical neighborhoods, of which my family has lived in two. Courthouse Hill has one of the best collections of Gilded Age homes in the United States. Our current historic district, Columbus Circle, is chock-a-block with 1920s bungalows of almost every conceivable form: Tudor, Dutch Colonial Revival, Mediterranean, Cape Cod, and Prairie Style.

As for Native American history, the most recent major event since the Blackhawk War of the 1830s was the birth of “Miracle,” a white buffalo accorded wondrous status by Native American tribes, who gathered in droves at a farm just west of town to behold him. Miracle lived from 1994 to 2004. “Second Miracle” was born in 2006 but was felled by lightning at an early age.

Parker Pen Company, once the largest maker of writing instruments in the world, used to be a big employer here, but a consortium bought and downsized it two decades ago. Now, if you want a Parker Pen in Janesville, you go to Staples. The old Janesville Machine Company, which in 1919 was bought by General Motors and merged with the Samson Tractor Company, was the oldest General Motors assembly plant in North America until GM closed the plant for good in 2008.

In my old hometown of Waco, Texas, residents long believed that no tornado would ever strike the city (it was an old Huaco Indian legend). They were accurate until 1953, when true believers failed to heed storm warnings and became victims of one of the worst storms in American history. Janesville had a similar type of magical thinking: “GM will never close. They’ve been talking about it for years. But it just never does.” Well, it did.

General Motors was once the biggest purely commercial employer in town. Now Wal-Mart is. Workers making $29 an hour left Janesville or switched to jobs that paid $8.50 an hour; or they retired early with much less money; or they decided they could never afford to retire. Some lost everything. Janesville had been a GM town. It had also been a union town.

What followed this debacle–when GM closed, a lot of other, allied companies shut their doors, too–was what documentary filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein, director of the forthcoming As Goes Janesville, has called a “golden moment” of cooperation. Democrats and Republicans, labor union members and bankers: all came together to see what could be done. They tried to get GM to change its mind (it has not), and they tried to get ownership of the abandoned facility (they never have), and they tried to attract new business (with some success). Janesville is strategically located in reasonable proximity to Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Des Moines, and Minneapolis. Interstate 90 sweeps along just east of the city. Already, there are signs that Janesville is attracting distribution centers. These jobs do not pay as well as “Generous Motors” did, but there are other promising shoots in the garden, such as a coming manufacturer of isotopes for cancer treatment. But can Janesville re-cast itself as a high-tech city in a region far removed in every way from Silicon Valley?

Whatever results from the “golden” collaboration of which Lichtenstein spoke, Janesville embodies much of what has divided America in the early 21st century.

It is the hometown of ex-Senator Russ Feingold, famed for his attempts to limit the influence of big donors over regulatory policy and to slow American military adventures overseas. Feingold is the latest incarnation of Wisconsin Progressivism, rooted in the community-minded reform movements imported from Germany and Scandinavia. But Janesville is also hometown to Paul Ryan, who comes from a different tradition: that of the entrepreneur who starts a business (for example, Ryan Construction, founded by Paul’s forebears). The entrepreneur prefers to have as few taxes and regulations as possible.

The Wisconsin progressive yearns for the middle-class security once guaranteed by high-paying union jobs, often held by those with no more than a high school education. The entrepreneur envisions a more “dynamic” America, one fueled by the risk-taking of entrepreneurs, free of the demands imposed by collective bargaining.

These competing visions have come to a head in disputes such as that between Wisconsin’s conservative governor, Scott Walker, and his bitter foes, the public employee unions. They have also created a rift, after the closure of the GM plant, between those who believe prosperity is founded on protected jobs and those who are glad the United Auto Workers are gone. Janesville is a place where the profound dislocations of globalization and outsourcing are on painful display.

A decade ago I happened to be in one of the city’s two big shopping malls at a chain eatery called “The Old Country Buffet.” A 50-something GM worker, wearing a pants suit, had just finished a hard week of work. But it was payday, she had her grandkids with her, and they were delighted to be eating all of the pork chops and banana pudding they wanted on a Friday night. Such comfort and assurance, after so much hard work, seemed deeply right to me. Today in Janesville, that seems like a time that may never come again. But these days, it also feels like a new chapter is aching to be born.

Tom McBride is a professor of English at Beloit College, and coauthor, with Ron Nief, of the Annual Mindset List and The Mindset Lists of American History (Wiley, 2011).

*Photo courtesy of cliff1066.

The post What We’re Debating In Paul Ryan’s Hometown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Something strange is happening in Wisconsin. In parking lots and on front lawns. In the aisles of corner grocery stores and on highways. On Facebook and bar stools.

People are behaving badly.

You have to understand Wisconsin to get how unusual this is. Because Wisconsinites are nice. You can call them naïve. You can dismiss their state as a “flyover” and laugh at their collective fixation with all things cow, cheese, Packers, and hunting-related. As you laugh, they’ll smile and say, “Won’t you come in for a cup of coffee and a muffin?” And say you were to turn down that muffin? “No problem,” they’d say. “I’ll bring it next door to Mildred after I mow her lawn later. Because she just had her hip done and all.”

I know because I’ve spent most of my life here. I was born and raised five miles from the state border in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which might as well be part of Wisconsin. We cheered for the Packers, not the Lions, after all. I have been to Detroit only twice, save for the occasional airport transfer, but ventured to Green Bay and Milwaukee so frequently that I can now estimate exact travel times from most points along I-41 and I-43 better than my GPS. I went to college in Wisconsin, left briefly for graduate school (back to the UP), and then promptly returned.

I thought all places were like Wisconsin. I assumed that, outside of Los Angeles and New York, traffic regularly backs up at four-way stops because drivers are too busy ceding their rightful turns with frantic hand-gesturing and insistent smiles. (“You go.” “No, you! Please, go ahead.” “No, you!”) I assumed that store clerks nationwide chat with you like old friends as they bag your goods, wondering what you have planned for that night or weekend.

Then I moved to New Jersey.

On the East Coast, I learned to wield a grocery cart first defensively, then offensively, eschewing the need to look both ways at the end of an aisle before proceeding. I learned not to signal a lane change until I was well past committed to it. I stopped smiling at clerks when I got the impression that I might have ruined their day simply by approaching the register. I longed to be back in Wisconsin, honest to God. See? In Wisconsin we say things like, “Honest to God.” It isn’t a put on. It’s a way of life.

Or, it was.

Things have changed in the past year. Things have changed a lot.

You’ve probably read about all our political news, about how Governor Scott Walker and the legislature’s Republicans ended collective bargaining for public employees, about the massive protests against those actions, and about the vote to recall Walker next week. You probably haven’t read that, in communities all across the Dairy State, decades-long friendships have cooled. Parents send vitriolic e-mails to school superintendents who they believe are either being too sympathetic to teachers’ unions or not sympathetic enough. Billboards for and against the recall of Governor Walker dot the highways. One billboard on 41 North between Oshkosh and Green Bay reads, “Governor Walker–Working for all of Wisconsin, not just the spoiled few.”

People are flipping one another off after a good horn-honking in a state where most people have never used their car horn, because that’s just rude. Or was. And neighbors who used to shovel one another’s sidewalks now stay behind closed doors and let their yard signs do the talking. Sometimes, especially in rural areas, those signs are hand-constructed and hand-painted.

The bad behavior has come from all sides. At the annual Wisconsin Law Enforcement Memorial ceremony in early May, the governor had just started his remarks to the families and comrades of fallen police officers when a protester disrupted the service by shouting, “Scott Walker, you suck!” After appearing in a pro-Walker TV ad, teacher Kristi LaCroix received threatening phone calls and emails.

Later in the month, a Walker supporter was arrested after leaving messages at Democratic campaign headquarters saying that he wanted to blow up the offices and that he had a concealed carry permit, so his foes “better be wearing bulletproof vests.” On the day of the primary for the recall election, a Chippewa Falls man tried to stop his estranged wife from getting to the polls, so she couldn’t vote for a Democrat (he was a Walker supporter). He repeatedly jumped in front of her SUV, which was parked in a dead-end alley, and climbed onto the car’s hood at one point. When she finally tried to make a move around him, the man jumped in front of the SUV once again, but this time, the woman didn’t stop. He was hospitalized and she was arrested. “These crazy liberal nuts are always pulling this,” the man’s brother told the local paper.

Just last week, an anonymous group printed a flyer that it put in newspaper tubes in homes in Janesville, a city in the southern part of the state. The faux ad listed more than 300 local teachers who had signed the recall petition and included their salaries and “Local Educational Facts,” one of which implicitly links the educators’ compensation and benefits to a 300 percent jump in area home foreclosures. A tear-off “Parents’ Rights Protection” form at the bottom can be sent to the Superintendent requesting that one’s child be assigned to a “non-radical” teacher.

*

A couple of weeks ago, I visited Stoughton, Wisconsin, 20 miles from Madison, although it might as well be 20 years away. Stoughton is a town of about 13,000, and its main street is called “Main Street.” People gather there for the Syttende Mai (the “Seventeenth of May”), a celebration of Norwegian Constitution Day. Street vendors sell leftse (but not beer), and it’s considered not at all dorky for local teenagers to perform in traditional Norwegian regalia as part of the high school-sponsored dance troupe.

This year, Syttende Mai fell on a weekend with temperatures north of 80 degrees, and the whole town turned out. At the local Recall Walker headquarters, housed in a cheery little building on the banks of the Yahara River, people were bustling in and out of the office, which was a large room with a bunch of folding tables adapted to a variety of uses. A slew of red signs with the names of the Democrats challenging Governor Scott Walker and Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch leaned against what used to be a small bar. Tacked to the wall was a handwritten sign on loose-leaf paper: “Being Harassed in Any Way? Let the Police Decide. Take a picture!” It listed the emergency and non-emergency numbers for local law enforcement.

A fit-looking, middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard asked if he could help me. He was wearing a T-shirt popular with the anti-Walker crowd: a closed fist in the shape of Wisconsin, bright blue on a red background, with the word “Solidarity” printed underneath. He had kind eyes and a firm handshake. I pointed to the sign and asked him if I could talk to him about it–not, I clarified, about the sign itself, but the idea behind it. The need for it.

His name was Roger Thompson, and he was more than happy to–as long as I promised to take a cookie before I left.

“There’s this weird combination of togetherness and anger right now,” he said. “This isn’t political any more. What it is is a difference in decency.”

That difference had led to family rows between Roger and his siblings, who are evenly split along party lines. Family gatherings, which didn’t happen too often before January 2011, were now even fewer and farther between. “I’ll be cordial to them,” he said, referring to his sister-in-law and other conservative relatives. “But it’s a cold cordial. ‘Hi, how are you doing,’ and I’m out of here.”

He’d lost friends, too. On Valentine’s Day 2011, Roger and his wife stopped by to see a friend who had been widowed more than a decade before, and who they had looked after ever since. But on that Valentine’s Day, the subject of Walker popped up in conversation. The friend, a retired teacher, said that she wholeheartedly agreed with the governor. Roger tried to change her mind, to get her to reconsider. Because for him, this was not simply a difference in political opinion. His mother, a victim of domestic abuse, worked at a laundry until she was 40 years old before she got a job at a post office. That job, with its union protections, “elevated her” to a place she deserved. Roger, too, is a state worker, and he and his wife had seen their household income cut by $6,000 to $8,000 over the past year and a half-money, he said, that they’re now unable to spend at local restaurants, specialty shops, or other local establishments.

As Roger and his wife got back in their car and drove away, she asked, “I don’t think we’ll be back there, will we?”

“I just don’t see how I can,” Roger said.

When the widow sent Roger a card at Christmastime that year, saying that she felt as though she had lost a friend of 13 years, Roger wrote back and told her that it was all just too hard to understand. You worked for all those years, he wrote. You have your pension, and you deserve that. But others deserve the same.

As I was leaving the campaign office, a woman came in to get a bumper sticker. She said she’d seen too many recall stickers ripped off people’s cars, so this one was going inside–in her back window–“so they can’t get at it.”

Just then, someone shouted in from the street, “We love Walker!”

A man standing near me shook his head. “The kind of people who like Walker–those are the kind of people who’ll give you the finger,” he said.

Another woman asked one of the volunteers, “How are we doing? We got any numbers for Rock County yet?”

We, us. Them, you. And so it goes.

“Take a cookie!” Roger said to me on my way out. I wasn’t hungry, but I picked one off the platter anyway. Because it’s the polite thing to do.

Farther down Main Street I saw a row of houses with dueling yard signs. One had a sign with the names of the Democrats challenging Walker, while on either side in the neighbors’ yards were signs that said, “Stand with Walker.” One of the Walker supporters, a man with a near-handlebar moustache and red trucker hat, was standing in his yard. I smiled and waved; he waved back. The house behind him was white and simple and modest, with an impeccable lawn.

I asked about the signs.

“Well, I wish there were more of them,” he said, gesturing toward his yard sign.

Were they causing any neighborly fallout?

He shook his head. “Naw. We just ignore one another. But a woman stopped me the other day and thanked me for putting these signs up, because they destroyed three of hers.”

There was that word again–“they.” It didn’t used to be this way. It used to be “we,” and we used to be nice. Are we still?

“It’ll be a whole lot better when this election is over and all the signs just go away,” the man said.

The answer is yes–and no. The answer is complicated. The answer is, we’re trying.

Erin Celello is the author of two novels from Penguin/NAL: Miracle Beach and forthcoming in April 2013, Learning to Stay.

*Photo courtesy of Dave Hoefler.

The post Eat Cheese and Die appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.