Wednesday, September 21, 2011

"Queer folk & Queerness" in Walkers Wisconsin.

Now the media has really stepped up the game of trying to split apart the ranks of the majority of Wisconsinites who oppose Scott Walker and his radical agenda of class warfare.  And what is really depressing me today besides a heavily biased article in the Wisconsin State Journal by a seemingly biased reporter, is the fact that we have been allowing ourselves to be divided by this blatant series of falsehoods.
In J.R.R. Tolkiens series of novels titled 'the Lord of the Rings' the central figures as I am sure you are all aware of are folks called Hobbits.

  You know cute little people with English accents and big hairy feet.  The Hobbits live across the countryside of their little part of the world (middle Earth) in villages and shires.  They are all merry and happy folk, very dedicated to their communities and their family ties.  So much so to the point that they have developed an unhealthy and, to my way of thinking, borderline paranoia of anything outside of their village limits.  Hobbits from just down the road are 'queer'.  Not in the homophobic way of course but in meaning 'different', 'weird' or something of that nature.

It doesn't take very much at all for one Hobbit to cast suspicion on others for wearing a slightly different style of hat, or for drinking ale and singing a song that another doesn't know.  This will get the Hobbits to labeling you a 'queer sort' of person.  Of course if you live in a different village five miles down the road then you are bordering on altogether alien standing.  "That Sun Prairie is a queer place and its folks are even queerer."  is something a Madison Hobbit may say of a suburban Madison Hobbit.

Of course we can have a good little chuckle at this right?  Because we can see right through this to the truth, or can we?  Wisconsinites from rural area's (and I was once one) have an odd or curious way of looking at folks in the big towns of LaCrosse or Green Bay.  The pace of life is a little different and the culture is very subtly changed from that of say a small town like Ripon, Cataract or Taylor.  And if your from one of those little towns or villages you may have a tendency to see the residents of a small city like Madison, or a big city like Milwaukee as being somewhat odd to you.  You may ask why are they going out to lunch instead of brown bagging it?  Why are they sitting in cubicles all day instead of pulling teat's or throwing bales?

Truth is it just doesn't matter.  We all need each other to get along.  City folk cant live without rural farms producing all of the goods that they produce.  Country folk cant get news or entertainment without city based government and infrastructure allowing for interstate sales of produce and import of products from other places.

At the end of the day, we are all Packer fans, we are all Badger fans.  We like beer in our bellies and cheese on our heads.  Which by the way looks darn 'queer' to folks from anywhere else on the planet.  We all pronounce the name of our state wis-CON-sin.  We are all considered hick citizens of a fly-over state by folks on the east and west coasts.  We are all the same.  We are all Wisconsinites and we are all proud to live and work together in the best state of the best nation on Earth.

So don't let out of stater's like Scott Walker from Colorado, or Robin Vos who takes all his cue's from special interests in New York and New Jersey tell you what a real Wisconsin citizen is because they have no clue.  They just want to confuse you and split you up and weaken you all and take over the badger state and sell it off to the highest out of state bidder.  And it wont be a public auction either, we are not invited.
Yeah folks in Madison are a little more politically aware of some things because they live in the political capitol of the state.  Just like folks in Colby know more about colby cheese than others.  Just like folks from Milwaukee and LaCrosse know more about mass beer production than some others.  In the end we are all in this together and if we are going to keep our state for ourselves and our children we all need to continue to stick it out together through these long and troubling times.

So put on your Bucky Badger sweat pants, your Green Bay Packers sweatshirt and your white tail deer antlered cheesehead and be proud.  Folks from other states may not get it and think we are all 'queer' but you know what?  In the words of the Hobbit Samwise "If that's being queer than we could all use a little more queerness in these parts."

On Wisconsin!    FORWARD!!!!

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