Less hiking, More Marching!!!

Friday night was about indoor campouts, popcorn and movies, as the kids drifted off to sleep on the livingroom floor in their sleeping bags, Lisa and I were making plans for a trip to Madison on the next morning. With a snow and rain mixture coming down we packed a knapsack with peanut butter sandwiches, bottles of waters and a ration of girl scout cookies and started the drive south, to help drive home our political message. We waited in orderly lines to take a shuttle bus down to the Capital building. The kids have been helping out with the local protests around town, but it was time for the big show. A show that did not disappoint. Merrick spent most of his time on my back and I packed a section of rope and quickly fashioned a tether to keep Sophia tied to us. I meet up with one friend down there and bumped into two others, but the meet up still took two adults with cell phones 20 minutes to find each other, a kid would have been lost for a long time. The crowd was immense in size and generosity. Estimates around the capital were near 150,000 people and that didn't include the spoke streets leading to the capital circle that were equally filled with humanity. One lady gave Merrick a granola bar and then in the spirit of fairness gave one too Sophia. An hour or so later and another lady kindly handed me a kleenex, because she said Merrick had a runny nose. These throngs were the masses of generosity and kindness that easily parted to allow people to move in and out of the pulsating mass of frustration, with excuse me's and thank yous. I suspect it was the first time any of these people had been considered thugs, they were librarians, nurses and farmers they were firefighters, professors and teachers. We decided we needed to go down for a variety of reasons including to make sure that the kids knew what a jilted democracy looks like and to give them context for a government that is meant to be by the people and for the people. This an experience and a lesson that should give them a very organic sense of other grassroots movements and uprisings that does not come across on the printed page in which it is impossible to capture the bumping, gyrating, noise and foot stomping emotional chants that spring up with little leadership and create a mass of individuals with a single voice. Coincidentally it was also day light savings time in Wisconsin, so we set our clocks back 100 years.