Governor Scott Walker has been in office for about four months now and has already started an uproar in politics in Wisconsin that I have never seen before. I don’t necessarily like politics or pay attention to them very much because I figure it is just a bunch of rich men who get to decide what the rest of the state, nation, world gets to do and no matter what there is always someone who is upset. I just can’t stand to think about how much he has such an effect on the state I was born and raised in. Therefore, because there are so many sides to this story I wanted to convey how I feel about this issue.
When this repair bill came out there were heavy hitters that were immediately shown by the media – Fox, MSNBC, etc… bargaining rights were being taken away from the public workers and we were cutting budgets from education which is where America has failed in comparison to the rest of the world for years. There have been pieces in the media already that show how much America as a whole fails as an education leader. As a daughter of two teachers, I couldn’t stand to watch my parents be hurt by this bill because of how much they put into their time at the school district they work at and how passionate my mother is in particular about education (this should explain why I am now finishing my seventh year of school even though I’ve considered dropping out multiple times). The hardworking ethic instilled in me is directly from my parents and they put just as much passion into each child they work with. What kills me though to watch happen is this idea that Walker wants to cut $550 from each student from each public school. I did some research on this. I went to school with a student body of about 1000 kids. That alone is just below $550,000. That is also the high school alone. My home town also has four elementary schools and a middle school. The total student body of all six schools combined is 2600 kids under the age of 18. 2600 students multiplied by $550 has a grand total of $1,430,000! What is the Wisconsin Debt again?
Based on all this information, I started to form my idea for my piece. Then I started to watch the news, the facebook updates, and reading online stories. There are so many different sides to the story that no one actually goes to read the bill to see what it really says. Even the senators don’t take the time to read most of the bills because they are so long and laborious. So people read parts of this bill here and there and take what they want hear into mind and do not read what is really there on paper in black and white. Words are skipped. Whole paragraphs are skipped as if to say “oh no nevermind.” That also became a defining moment of my piece. The protests also started to affect my choices. One in particular was the word “forward” spelled backwards with “Wisconsin’s new motto” scrawled above it. How right was this guy?
I began to research in class different people in class and was inspired by Andrea Bowers and Sam Durant. Both of them are using words to convey their thoughts of protests and world events around the world. I think that I took both of them in to consideration but I didn’t do exactly what either one of them does. I used a tag board type of medium and markers to symbolize the protesters and took a quote from Scott Walker’s speech about this bill and twisted his words a bit. I wanted to find something that said “forward” in it and twist it and turn it like the media does or how I feel about how Walker is pushing us backwards when we should be on the cusp of education but we aren’t. I think that my work is more closely related to Sam Durant’s than anyone else’s. I took ideas from the posters than the protesters have made but I didn’t write them out exactly. I wanted to have my own twist on it and show what I really thought of the of current events.
I suppose that my work could be closely related to Jen Holzer as well. She used words instead of drawing pictures of how she felt. I think that the written word has so much power behind them especially when chosen correctly. I find it very interesting to be on the cutting edge of this sort of “protest.” I wanted to find something that took our motto in Wisconsin and turned it on itself. In this case, Scott Walker says “This is why we need to move this process forward and get this state working again.” Great point, Walker but you’re going about it all wrong. So I highlighted other ways to look at it and in the end you can read through the word forward and know what it says and then you look back because it’s not the first thing you see and say “hey, that wasn’t right.” Hopefully people have that moment with this in congress more so than they are now.
