Twenty two months since it all began. Feels more like twenty two years. So much has happened since the uprising against the fraudulently (and now it seems, illegally) elected, psychopathic governor of Wisconsin first started coming together.
300+ blog entries
28 days on hunger strike
30 pounds of muscle and organ weight lost
2 cardiac arrests
150,000 people encircling the Capitol building.
9 elections in Wisconsin since this began
Over 100 death threats
3 physical assaults against me, none effective
17 nations not including the U.S. that covered the hunger strike (that I know of)
100's of television, radio, magazine and newspaper interviews
1 major motion picture documentary I may be a small part of
1 former Wisconsin right wing fanatic legislator we had arrested
3 we had recalled from office
1 non-Wisconsin conservative extremist's legislators career I helped ruin along with
1 multi-million dollar lobbying firm
500+ and still going strong, Solidarity SingAlongs
2 Koch brothers who started it all
1 Tea Party subverted and turned into a short lived neo-con extremist movement
All this and so much more has happened since everything began in the winter of early 2011. My head spins whenever I start to even begin thinking about it all. The Wisconsin that I live in now bears little resemblance to the Wisconsin that I grew up in. The face I look at in the mirror every morning looks mostly the same as the one from 22 months ago, but the person inside is very, very different. It would be impossible for me to put into words all that has changed with me since Scott Walker dropped his bomb on Wisconsin. It would be impossible for me to put into words how much I have changed physically, mentally and emotionally, how much Wisconsin has changed as well as millions of her citizens here at ground zero Madison, and across the entire badger state.
We have been tormented and battered, marched in the bitterest winter winds and slept in the snow. We have been lied to, threatened and arrested. We have been released without charges and supported by people the world over. We have stood around the Capitol in the blazing summer sun and crept through the halls of that same building at night, lifting advance copies of legislation and revealing evil plans. We have fought and fought and fought until we were too weak to even breath it seemed, and yet still somehow we continued on. And every bit of it has made us stronger, smarter and more effective.
I am much harder and crueler than I ever was before. I am also, at the same time, much more compassionate and thoughtful. I sometimes have trouble picturing exactly who and what I am now as opposed to when all of this started. I look basically the same but I am much different. I am no longer the person who started writing this little blog back in the winter of 2011. And that is one of the reasons why I must lay this project to rest now. It has served its purpose, to inform people everywhere of the struggle here at ground zero. To tell them the day to day struggles of myself and many others in the fight to save Wisconsin and the spirit of democracy, fairness and justice. It has served its purpose and now its time has come, and besides, the person who used to write it no longer really exists anymore.
This collective "we" which I belong to is still going strong, stronger than ever as a matter of plain and simple fact. We may have not achieved all of our goals but we are also not giving up the fight nor the momentum which we have built either. We helped elect our nations first African-American president to a second term and broken the back of the radical and extremist neo-conservative movement in America. We helped achieve health care and a better quality of life for more than three hundred million people in the last election. We also lost one crucial state senate seat to the hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into Wisconsin from out of state and even outside our national borders.
Some would say that we have only fought to a draw, that we are back at square one, exactly where we were twenty two months ago. But that is not true, there will be only a bare trickle now, of out of state money, flowing into Wisconsin. The ALEC-loyal members of the Wisconsin GOTea legislature know now that they have been and can be defeated again. They know that the national tide has turned and that they will not be able to bully and push around the majority of citizens anymore. The entire dynamic is different, it has changed irrevocably. And we the people are still here. We are all changed now, we are much more fearsome foe's to those that oppose the will of the people than we were not two years ago.
Some may say that the most important thing though has not changed, that Scott Walker is still here. And yes it is true, for now at least. Scott Walker is still the governor of the great state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin the state that created the majority of the campaign finance laws. The state that prided itself since the year 1848 on clean and representational elections and government. And that now appears to be what will cause the undoing of Scott Walker, what will lead to the emancipation of our great state. Here are a few more numbers for you to contemplate:
50,000+ recall volunteers
1,000,000 signatures on the recall ballots
$180,000,000.00 mostly from out of state, that barely kept Scott Walker in office.....for now.
???? How many hundreds of thousand of dollars or more transferred to Walkers legal defense fund.
We lost phase one which was the recall election against Scott Walker. But many said that we would never get anywhere close to the recall and in the end it was a narrow margin that was only possible due to the literal tons and tons of cash that was desperately poured into our election. And like I said, that was only phase one, there is more. We had a back up, a plan B, a phase two to our effort. We have the John Doe investigation that only yesterday in a court of law in the city of Milwaukee named Scott Walker as the ring leader in a felony criminal enterprise that was his becoming the governor of Wisconsin.
The dragnet has drawn in and ensnared not just Walker, but also the fraudsters that he recruited for his campaign. The forgers and the liars, the thieves, embezzlers and child molesters and endless perverted types with which he surrounded himself and created his criminal enterprise. Even as those people have been brought to trial and are now being sentenced we are also learning that nearly $100,000,000.00 is missing from the states coffers, disappeared without a trace under Scott Walkers watch.
Soon, I am very certain, this temporary state on insanity which the psychopathic Walker has inflicted upon the good people of Wisconsin will end. Walker will meet justice and those that supported him will begin to make their claims that they are innocent, that they were lied to and duped and that they never had any idea of what was really happening all along. They will in the end, try to blame those of us that fought Walker and his regime and say that we never told them what was really happening, that they never had fair warning. They can say what they want for in the end we will win and we will write this chapter in the history of the badger state.
Normalcy and decency, fairness and transparent, representational government and clean and fair elections will return to Wisconsin. The false Norman Rockwell, conservative image of a yesterday that never was will not return because it never existed. The real Wisconsin built the hard way on generations of toil and struggle, of decency, hard work and dedication to the human spirit, that which we had and then lost under Walker, that is what was and will be returned. And thus as I close this posting and likewise this chapter not only of my life and recent struggles but of the Wisconsin Movement as well, thus the future begins. . . .
Thank you my sisters and brothers united in our toil and struggle, thank you one and all. To the thousands which I met and worked with and the millions more that I have shared this solidarity with.....thank you. And although this blog is coming to an end you will still hear from me from time to time in my new writing project called WisconsinVictorious. You see the new me is already looking towards a new future.
And the future begins, our future, us, we, Wisconsin!
Now as always and without end.....solidarity forever!
On Wisconsin! FORWARD!!!!
300+ blog entries
28 days on hunger strike
30 pounds of muscle and organ weight lost
2 cardiac arrests
150,000 people encircling the Capitol building.
9 elections in Wisconsin since this began
Over 100 death threats
3 physical assaults against me, none effective
17 nations not including the U.S. that covered the hunger strike (that I know of)
100's of television, radio, magazine and newspaper interviews
1 major motion picture documentary I may be a small part of
1 former Wisconsin right wing fanatic legislator we had arrested
3 we had recalled from office
1 non-Wisconsin conservative extremist's legislators career I helped ruin along with
1 multi-million dollar lobbying firm
500+ and still going strong, Solidarity SingAlongs
2 Koch brothers who started it all
1 Tea Party subverted and turned into a short lived neo-con extremist movement
All this and so much more has happened since everything began in the winter of early 2011. My head spins whenever I start to even begin thinking about it all. The Wisconsin that I live in now bears little resemblance to the Wisconsin that I grew up in. The face I look at in the mirror every morning looks mostly the same as the one from 22 months ago, but the person inside is very, very different. It would be impossible for me to put into words all that has changed with me since Scott Walker dropped his bomb on Wisconsin. It would be impossible for me to put into words how much I have changed physically, mentally and emotionally, how much Wisconsin has changed as well as millions of her citizens here at ground zero Madison, and across the entire badger state.
We have been tormented and battered, marched in the bitterest winter winds and slept in the snow. We have been lied to, threatened and arrested. We have been released without charges and supported by people the world over. We have stood around the Capitol in the blazing summer sun and crept through the halls of that same building at night, lifting advance copies of legislation and revealing evil plans. We have fought and fought and fought until we were too weak to even breath it seemed, and yet still somehow we continued on. And every bit of it has made us stronger, smarter and more effective.
I am much harder and crueler than I ever was before. I am also, at the same time, much more compassionate and thoughtful. I sometimes have trouble picturing exactly who and what I am now as opposed to when all of this started. I look basically the same but I am much different. I am no longer the person who started writing this little blog back in the winter of 2011. And that is one of the reasons why I must lay this project to rest now. It has served its purpose, to inform people everywhere of the struggle here at ground zero. To tell them the day to day struggles of myself and many others in the fight to save Wisconsin and the spirit of democracy, fairness and justice. It has served its purpose and now its time has come, and besides, the person who used to write it no longer really exists anymore.
This collective "we" which I belong to is still going strong, stronger than ever as a matter of plain and simple fact. We may have not achieved all of our goals but we are also not giving up the fight nor the momentum which we have built either. We helped elect our nations first African-American president to a second term and broken the back of the radical and extremist neo-conservative movement in America. We helped achieve health care and a better quality of life for more than three hundred million people in the last election. We also lost one crucial state senate seat to the hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into Wisconsin from out of state and even outside our national borders.
Some would say that we have only fought to a draw, that we are back at square one, exactly where we were twenty two months ago. But that is not true, there will be only a bare trickle now, of out of state money, flowing into Wisconsin. The ALEC-loyal members of the Wisconsin GOTea legislature know now that they have been and can be defeated again. They know that the national tide has turned and that they will not be able to bully and push around the majority of citizens anymore. The entire dynamic is different, it has changed irrevocably. And we the people are still here. We are all changed now, we are much more fearsome foe's to those that oppose the will of the people than we were not two years ago.
Some may say that the most important thing though has not changed, that Scott Walker is still here. And yes it is true, for now at least. Scott Walker is still the governor of the great state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin the state that created the majority of the campaign finance laws. The state that prided itself since the year 1848 on clean and representational elections and government. And that now appears to be what will cause the undoing of Scott Walker, what will lead to the emancipation of our great state. Here are a few more numbers for you to contemplate:
50,000+ recall volunteers
1,000,000 signatures on the recall ballots
$180,000,000.00 mostly from out of state, that barely kept Scott Walker in office.....for now.
???? How many hundreds of thousand of dollars or more transferred to Walkers legal defense fund.
We lost phase one which was the recall election against Scott Walker. But many said that we would never get anywhere close to the recall and in the end it was a narrow margin that was only possible due to the literal tons and tons of cash that was desperately poured into our election. And like I said, that was only phase one, there is more. We had a back up, a plan B, a phase two to our effort. We have the John Doe investigation that only yesterday in a court of law in the city of Milwaukee named Scott Walker as the ring leader in a felony criminal enterprise that was his becoming the governor of Wisconsin.
The dragnet has drawn in and ensnared not just Walker, but also the fraudsters that he recruited for his campaign. The forgers and the liars, the thieves, embezzlers and child molesters and endless perverted types with which he surrounded himself and created his criminal enterprise. Even as those people have been brought to trial and are now being sentenced we are also learning that nearly $100,000,000.00 is missing from the states coffers, disappeared without a trace under Scott Walkers watch.
Soon, I am very certain, this temporary state on insanity which the psychopathic Walker has inflicted upon the good people of Wisconsin will end. Walker will meet justice and those that supported him will begin to make their claims that they are innocent, that they were lied to and duped and that they never had any idea of what was really happening all along. They will in the end, try to blame those of us that fought Walker and his regime and say that we never told them what was really happening, that they never had fair warning. They can say what they want for in the end we will win and we will write this chapter in the history of the badger state.
Normalcy and decency, fairness and transparent, representational government and clean and fair elections will return to Wisconsin. The false Norman Rockwell, conservative image of a yesterday that never was will not return because it never existed. The real Wisconsin built the hard way on generations of toil and struggle, of decency, hard work and dedication to the human spirit, that which we had and then lost under Walker, that is what was and will be returned. And thus as I close this posting and likewise this chapter not only of my life and recent struggles but of the Wisconsin Movement as well, thus the future begins. . . .
Thank you my sisters and brothers united in our toil and struggle, thank you one and all. To the thousands which I met and worked with and the millions more that I have shared this solidarity with.....thank you. And although this blog is coming to an end you will still hear from me from time to time in my new writing project called WisconsinVictorious. You see the new me is already looking towards a new future.
And the future begins, our future, us, we, Wisconsin!
Now as always and without end.....solidarity forever!
On Wisconsin! FORWARD!!!!
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