A Word to the Wise

And so it has come to this.

Barely a month into his term, the august person of the Governor of Wisconsin has threatened me with military force if I dare to disagree with his plan to strip state employees of their collective bargaining rights.

It’s nice to see all that talk about “freedom” and “individual rights” so popular among Republicans and Teabaggers (as if there is a difference anymore) being exposed as the nonsense it is in the hands of right wing extremists, people who define “freedom” as “the right to do as you are told by right wing extremists” and “individual rights” as “the responsibility to do as you are told by right wing extremists.” At least it’s out in the open now.

I’m not going to get into the actual policy decision here, the brazen power grab that is the destruction of the rights of the men and women who actually make this state function. There is enough anti-union hysteria in this benighted country that I am sure you could find a whole lot of idiots who have forgotten that it was unions who brought them the 40-hour workweek, the entire concept of the weekend, the idea that workplaces should not be deathtraps, and the concept of a living wage. It is unions who have made sure that American workers could afford to buy the things that drive the consumer economy forward and make this country prosperous. Americans as a group have for decades shown themselves eager to cut their own economic throats in the name of an ideology that will never benefit them or their children and nothing I say will change that, so I will skip that here.

But to threaten military action against American citizens based on policy disagreements strikes me as a betrayal of all that this republic stands for.

It strikes me as something more appropriate for a tin-horn dictatorship than for the supposed Land Of The Free (tm).

And it strikes me as just the sort of thing that is going to be very popular among the kinds of people who gladly trade their rights for the illusion of security, not understanding that they haven’t been spared the axe so much as had their turn delayed by the sufferings of others.

I am apparently a dangerous man.

A thinking man.

A man who knows the history of this country, the values of this country, and the truths that have made this country great.

Remember that when the troops march through Wisconsin.

Remember what this country once stood for.

And hang your heads in shame, because it not only can happen here but it has happened here and nobody did anything about it.

You’re next.