RADICAL

At some point in human history, being "radical" became a bad thing. Radical is an epithet. It's an insult. It's meant to convey dangerous ideas, a lack of gravitas, some kind of fundamental unseriousness about solving problems. The stigma of radical is such that people bend over backwards to avoid identifying with any sort of radical ideas. I don't understand this. If you believe a thing, watering it down in the name of moderation seems like the worst thing you can do. We live in a time and a place wherein our governance is by compromise. If you come to that compromise having already compromised yourself, how will anything ever change?

Last month, I got a tattoo. It might seem strange, to some, that two years after #wiunion, after Act 10 was passed, after Scott Walker survived the recall election we forced, after Act 10 was upheld on a second appeal, I would choose to get this symbol tattooed on my body. It doesn’t seem strange to me. It isn’t strange to me because for me, this fist is a symbol. It is a reminder of that time, absolutely, and it is tied to it, but it is a symbol of something much larger. #wiunion was my moment of radicalization, and I chose this tattoo because I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want to forget what it was like to stand up with 200,000 of my fellow human beings and demand to be heard. I don’t want to forget what it was like to be ignored anyway.

I’ve always been liberal. I was raised in a very liberal, post-Vatican II Catholic church. My parents are liberal: my mother is a state employee who was directly impacted by Act 10 and former steel mill worker from Gary, IN; my father is a borderline socialist that spent large swaths of the 60s protesting the Vietnam War.

But me? I no longer consider myself simply “liberal.” I’m not a Democrat. I’m something else. I’m a radical, wild-eyed and imbued with a sense of purpose. And that change occurred during the Madison uprising.

I remember, on February 11, 2011, after Walker introduced Act 10 that my mother came home. It was a Friday. She was angry. But she was also tired. “No one but us will care,” she said to me. On Valentine’s Day, hearings on Act 10 were being held. The unionized teaching assistants at UW-Madison marched from the University to the Capitol and delivered hundreds and hundreds of Valentines to Governor Walker. “Don’t break our hearts. Don’t break our unions.” I was on Twitter. I saw. I went home to my mother after work, and I said to her, “I think you’re wrong. I think people do care.”

The next morning, we sat at the table drinking coffee. We decided that instead of going to work, we would drive to Madison. I knew the hearing had gone all night. People were camped in the Capitol. We went to see. We went to see, and to be heard. We live in a democracy, both of us thought, and we have a right to be heard. Two hundred thousand people stood outside the Wisconsin State Capitol one day weeks later, all thinking the same thing. “We have a right to be heard.”

Inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda, February 15, 2011.

Over the following months, through the capitol occupation, through the fleeing of our Democratic senators over state lines, through the passage of Act 10 in the middle of the night in a vote so fast that not even all of the bill’s supporters managed to get their votes registered, I learned. You could say my eyes were opened. You could say I developed a sensitivity to oppression, to oppressive tactics, and to the silencing of people. When Wisconsin’s historically open Capitol building was closed, I cried. When Wisconsin’s incredibly strong, deliberate open meetings laws were violated in favor of back-room dealings, I seethed.

While all of this was going on, Egypt was in the grips of the Arab Spring, growing out of Libya and Tunisia. Through the internet, I found people deeply involved in those events. That fall, Occupy hit America, and that, too, was a thing I watched, and cheered, and lent my voice to, and supported.

I came out with one crystal clear idea in my head: People over everything. People over profit, people over national interest, people over faith.

People are more important than profit. If your profit demands that hundreds of millions of people live in poverty and wage slavery to it, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that you be exempt from environmental standards designed to protect all of us, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that we lock up an ever-increasing number of people for nonviolent crimes for their entire lives, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that the freedom of the internet be curtailed, your profit is wrong. Money is a means to an end, and not an end. Money itself is not a good reason for anything. And I will fight to strip these profits falsely earned on oppression and human misery.

People are more important than national interest. If your idea of national interest demands that you create an apartheid state and consign millions to fear and abject poverty, your national interest is wrong. If your national interest demands that people be surveilled at all times “just in case” they’re doing something wrong, your national interest is wrong. If your idea of national interest cheers the automated killing of children and adults because it makes you feel “safer,” your national interest is wrong. People everywhere are people, and no person is inherently better because of the geography of their birth or the blood in her veins. And I will fight to smash a state that purports to do any of these things in my name and that builds its concept of safety and power on oppression and human misery.

People are more important than faith. If your faith demands that women be kept covered from head to toe and kept at home, your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that little girls have their clitorises cut off so that they don’t fall into “sexual temptation,” your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that women not have basic bodily autonomy, your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that men and women that love differently than you love be relegated to second-class status, that they be harassed and hounded and even murdered, then your faith is wrong. God forgives. God loves. And if you cannot forgive, and if you cannot love, your God is false and your faith is wrong. And I will fight to make sure that your faith does not have the power to spread its oppression and human misery through secular laws.

I have become radicalized. All of these many, many wrongs are other faces of the wrong done to the people of Wisconsin. There is nothing I will not question save that one crystal clear idea that’s been indelibly burned into the whorls of my brain matter: People over everything. There is nothing I can look at without straining to see how it fits into the systems we have constructed to control each other over millennia. There is no document and no institution that I hold sacred. There is only that one bright light that’s burned away everything else: People over everything.

I have become a radical, and the thing that led me to it was #wiunion. And for that, I will be forever grateful. Two years after the Madison uprising, I realize that I am forever changed. And it’s a good thing. For that, I had its symbol inked into my skin.