Defend the Madison 13

Thirteen anti-Walker protesters were charged on Friday for their acts of civil disobedience in the Wisconsin state capitol on Aug. 25. Most of them, who are in their young twenties, have been arrested several times for nonviolently opposing the actions of Gov. Scott Walker. Over the last ten days, they’ve come under unwarranted attack by the Wisconsin State Journal, which is waging a campaign to have the police crack down on them and the district attorney throw the book at them. On September 21, a front-page story by Clay Barbour entitled “Wearing Out Their Welcome” said they “routinely disrupt meetings, harangue individual Republican lawmakers, stage publicity stunts, and”—God forbid!—“take video of almost everything they do.” The group, Barbour wrote, “has exasperated capitol law enforcement and Republican Lawmakers. But they also have frustrated Democratic lawmakers. . . . Many Democrats feel the group actually is hurting their efforts to fight Republican legislation.” And Barbour wrote that “several conservatives believe the protesters have been coddled by the Dane County District Attorney’s Office.” Barbour seized on one incident when protester Miles Kristan allegedly threw some beer on a Republican legislator in a downtown bar. “The group considers itself engaged in civil disobedience,” Barbour wrote. “But critics point out that pouring beer on someone or bike-locking your neck to a railing is not exactly on par with lying in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square.” Leaving aside Kristan’s alleged action—which, while I don’t agree with it, would be tantamount to a peasant throwing a tomato at a prince, and it’s not like Kristan put his hands around the guy’s neck, as a certain Republican state supreme court justice did—the protesters have handled themselves with admirable restraint for the past six months as Walker and his cronies in the capitol have been systematically destroying workers’ rights, public education, the social safety net, the environment, and just about anything else that remains of Wisconsin progressivism. I covered their protest on Aug. 25, and they couldn’t have been more civil. I admire these protesters. I was tempted to join them that evening. They are courageous. They believe in civil disobedience, a tactic exalted by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Howard Zinn. And they are not afraid to act on those beliefs. They have occasionally been manhandled by state troopers and dragged out of the capitol for simply asserting their First Amendment rights under the Constitution and their legal rights under Wisconsin statute to film public proceedings of the legislature. But now the Wisconsin State Journal is vilifying them. On Sept. 22, the day after Barbour’s snide article, the State Journal ran a big editorial entitled “Stop Harassing State Leaders.” It began in the most condescending way: “The handful of hard-core protesters still hanging around the state Capitol harassing lawmakers needs to grow up. Their silly and intolerant behavior is only hurting their cause with the public. Republicans and Democrats alike want the juvenile antics to end.” And the editorial demanded a crackdown. If the protesters don’t cease and desist, “then law enforcement officers and Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne need to make it stop.” Aside from an ambivalent follow-up column by Chris Rickert, the State Journal continues its vendatta. In today’s paper, it published a column by Karl Garson who even slammed the 100 people or so who gather every day at noon at the capitol for a spirited sing-along of pro-labor and anti-Walker tunes. (Just yesterday, I took a Progressive magazine subscriber who was visiting from Washington State over to the sing-along, and it was as fun and inspiring as the last time I was there.) But for Garson, the sing-along amounts to “only an aimless mass of tambourines, stabbed balloons, and the vaguely focused agitprop of Kumbaya.” He added: “What began as a perfectly understandable reaction to the Walker administration's first salvos now seems to have become with the imperceptible ease of a film dissolve just something to do during lunch. Sincerity has segued into silliness.” Silliness? The daily sing-alongs for the past seven months, led by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, combine commitment with joy, principle with pleasure, dedication and determination with creativity and community. The potshots from the State Journal, I suppose, are understandable, since it remains a conservative paper. But readers should not be misled. The protesters engaging in civil disobedience and the participants at the noontime sing-alongs are standing in for all of us who are outraged at what Walker and the Fitzgeralds are doing but don’t have the time or the temperament or the capacity to keep demonstrating. I applaud the protesters. I applaud the noontime singers. I urge you, if you can, to join them. And the next time Walker makes an egregious assault on what we hold dear here in Wisconsin, we not only need to have another mass demonstration of tens of thousands of people. We also need hundreds and hundreds of people to join the young practitioners of civil disobedience inside the capitol and to risk arrest ourselves, if you’re in a position to do so. Count me in. You? Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, based in Madison, WI.