Troopers Intimidation of Legislators in Wisconsin – Special Emergency Powers Legislation

By Jonathryn

The news from Wisconsin today is that Wisconsin State Troopers, under the direction of a political appointee of the Governor, are visiting the homes of legislators who are resisting the Governor’s deeply unpopular legislation. By what reckoning can an executive, using armed men in state uniforms, dictate a legislator’s prerogatives, or the prerogatives of a caucus of legislators? If you chose “brute force,” you answered correctly.

The National Empathy Divide

By Robert C. Koehler

“The loose network among relatives offers the grim solace of knowing that others too have suffered the same curse.”

Every terrible rift is the occasion for peace and the place for the peacemaker. And often peace is nothing more, at first, than connecting, pulling the injured or ostracized back into the social circle and  beginning the process of healing.

Peace is not a state of “perpetual pre-hostility,” as it has been described by military strategists — that is to say, perpetual armed readiness and checkpoints and unending displays of superior force, eventually and inevitably lapsing into horrific violence. That may be the state of the world, but it’s not peace, nor is it sustainable. It’s the downward cycle in which we are caught — and in which we fully and enthusiastically participate, with bloated national defense budgets and uncounted trillions spent globally to stay armed, terrified and isolated.