April 1st 2012: Torn between running for re-election as mayor of Milwaukee or getting a mulligan to run against Scott Walker again in a recall election for governor of Wisconsin, in a surprise move Democrat Tom Barrett left the jaws of pundits county- and countrywide dropping today by announcing that instead he plans on running against Barrack Obama to become the next president of the United States.
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Today marks the last day of the (ir)regular session of the Wisconsin State Legislature; good riddance to bad rubbish indeed! While halfway through lent, this lapse Catholic is glad the state is giving up Republican mandates for a short while at least. Plus spring has sprung, and with it that irrepressibly burning eternal. Keeping with the lenten theme, the days are longer (lengthened, you might even say), the sun brighter and warmer. With recalls soon to be set, there is light for sure at the end of this tunnel that has been the yearlong winter of our discontent, and hope outshining the audacity of dopes.
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As best as I can recollect, this country founded itself on three essential matters: no taxation without representation (which credo is abrogated daily for the half-million residents of Washington, D.C., said country’s very capital, but that’s another story); self-rule by way of representational government (democracy, not monarchy); and freedom of (or from) religion. The only thing that truly keeps us as a nation bound together is a piece of parchment that begins “We the People.” Our common denominator is neither racial nor religious, unlike so many cultures of the world. Even what literally grounds us could hardly be more incongruous; from the Olympic Mountains, rain forests, and glaciers of Washington to the swampy gators of the Florida Everglades, or the windswept hush of Kansas to the roar of the New Jersey Turnpike, our basic geography alone divides us. Regional distinctions abound; for the reality of a back-to-the-land Vermonter might as well be its own subject of anthropology when compared next to a Sunbelt computer programmer in Tucson, a shrimper’s day to day humid toil in the Gulf of Mexico to a Montana rancher baling hay in the first snowstorm before Labor Day. Our dialects and our diets wildly diverge; we are what we speak and eat where we’re from, and Southern ain’t New England any more than a Midwest casserole hotdish makes a lick of sense to a Tex-Mex plate of frijoles con carne asada. No, what keeps us together is the Constitution, that we are a nation of laws. And we vote. Call us “e plebiscite unum.” Read the rest of this entry »
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