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Michael More in Wisconsin

Posted by Mark | Filed under Politics

I don’t always agree with Mr. Moore, but I appre­ci­ate his will­ing­ness & abil­ity to go after alter­na­tive sides to impor­tant issues. Today he sent out an email regard­ing a speech he gave in Wis­con­sin that I thought worth shar­ing. I found his descrip­tions, of what it was really like in Wis­con­sin when he went there to deliver his speech, par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because of dif­fer­ence in view­point it gave ver­sus what the main­stream media has been telling us (when they bother to cover the events in Wis­con­sin at all).

The scene in Madi­son is noth­ing like what they are show­ing you on TV or in the news­pa­per. First, you notice that the whole town is behind this. Yard signs and signs in store win­dows are every­where sup­port­ing pub­lic work­ers. There are thou­sands of peo­ple out just ran­domly lin­ing the streets for the six blocks lead­ing to the Capi­tol build­ing car­ry­ing signs, shout­ing and cheer­ing and cajol­ing. Then there are stages and friendly com­pet­ing demos on all sides of the build­ing (yesterday’s total esti­mate of peo­ple was 50,000–70,000, the small­est one yet)! A big semi truck has been sent by James Hoffa of the Team­sters and is parked like a don’t-even-think-of-effing-with-us Sher­man tank on the street in front of the Capi­tol. There is a long line – sep­a­rate from these other demon­stra­tions — of 4,000 peo­ple, wait­ing their turn to get through the only open door to the Capi­tol so they can join the occu­pa­tion inside.

And inside the Rotunda is … well, it will bring tears to your eyes if you go there. It’s like a shrine to work­ing peo­ple — to what Amer­ica is and should be about — packed with fam­i­lies and kids and so many senior cit­i­zens that it made me happy for sci­ence and its impact on life expectancy over the past cen­tury. There were grand­mas and great-grandpas who remem­ber FDR and Wisconsin’s La Fol­lette and the long view of this strug­gle. Stand­ing in that Rotunda was like a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. There had been noth­ing like it, for me, in decades.

If you’re inter­ested in his speech you can watch the video below or read the text on his web­site.

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