Today marks the one year anniversary of the day the Wisconsin Senate Republicans violated state Open Meetings Law in order to split the collective bargaining provisions from the Budget Repair Bill and bust the public employee unions. The manner in which this went down was so appalling and so shocking that potentially tens of thousands of Wisconsinites were compelled to descend upon the Capitol building. A couple of weeks ago, Michael Matheson asked friends of his to submit their recollections of that dark and fateful night in Wisconsin history to supplement a piece he was writing for the Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op. He compiled these stories into a blog that he also published today.
At almost precisely this time, somewhere around 4:15, I unassumingly walked into the Capitol on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. What happened after that was permanently seared into the minds of Wisconsinites. This is my story...
I was leaning over the first floor railing of the Capitol rotunda, having gone home early from work to visit the doctor and try and cure whatever had ailed me since the beginning of the protests. This was my first time inside the Capitol since the building had gone into illegal lockdown and I had come that day to see what the atmosphere was like now that all of the signs had been taken down and the masses of humanity had dried up. Around maybe 4:45, a woman came running up to the same balcony I was on and began screaming bloody murder that someone within the TAA had learned that the Repugs were splitting the bill and going into session at 6 p.m. She yelled something along the lines of “Get on your damned phones…call, tweet, text, I don’t care what you do, just get people down here as quickly as you possibly can!!” At that point, no more than 20 to 25 silent protesters were present in the Rotunda. I instantly descended the stairs and went running to my car in the nearby parking ramp to gather up my protest signs. By the time I returned to the Capitol no more than ten minutes later, there was already a line of maybe 100 people waiting to go through the building’s metal detectors. I was stunned.
As I made my way in, the whole crowd was making a beeline for the corner of the Capitol the illegally-called meeting would take place in. The sheer amount of people crammed into the several floors as the clock ticked nearer to 6 was incredible. I had staked out a spot no more than fifteen feet outside of the door leading to the destruction of fifty years of workers’ rights in Wisconsin. I had heard noisy crowds in the early days of the protests but nothing to the extent of what was ensuing. In those early days, there was a sense of hope. On March 9th, the tenor had completely changed to one of sheer outrage. The looks of pain, frustration and anger were visible on nearly everyone’s face and the boos and chants of “YOU LIED!! YOU LIED!! YOU LIED TO WISCONSIN!!!” were deafening. Before long, the doors opened back up and the Republican Senators exited to hate-filled chants of “SHAME!! SHAME!!” The spineless vermin hurriedly slunk down the back steps and into the night.
I still wasn’t exactly sure what had just ensued or how it had gone down in the blink of an eye, but I knew that Wisconsin, its citizens and its Progressive traditions had just been steamrolled. The hard fought battle to save workers’ rights had been lost but the war to save Wisconsin’s soul from the authoritarian rule of nearly unchecked right-wing extremism had only just begun…