Saturday, October 4, 2014

An Open Letter to Scott Walker


Mr. Walker,

When I cross over the border each weekday to teach at my new job at the Hudson High School, there is a “Thank You For Visiting Minnesota” sign but none welcoming me to Wisconsin. Indeed, the first sign that I am in a different land comes from the occasional sign proclaiming “I Stand with Scott Walker.” I hadn’t given the name much thought until last week, in a section of English 10, when one of my students came in wearing a shirt with the same message. “What do you think of my shirt, Mr. Dahl?” the young man asked me.

I know I have to be careful. Even the American Civil Liberties Union would warn me to consider holding my tongue. “A teacher appears to speak for the school district when he or she teaches,” says the ACLU’s website. And as a new teacher, I am unsure of what my district thinks (or admits publicly) about Scott Walker. So, on the fly I invent an answer that I hope stirs this student’s brain into thinking past his party’s rhetoric and yet helps me retain my employment. “I believe in human rights,” I tell him. 

It may seem like a funny thing to say, perhaps. I mean, don’t we all believe in human rights? The more I study the issue, though, I realize that no, not all believe in them universally. The matter is probably in the forefront of my mind because one of the graduate courses I am taking this semester is an Ethics course in which we are studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Right now we are reading A World Made New, which tells of Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It had been a while since I’d read them. Mr. Walker, when was the last time you read them? I’ll remind you of the first two.

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Mr. Walker: when you put limits to the brotherhood in this state for the purpose of collective bargaining, aren’t you stepping onto a slippery slope? What I mean is, when you take away some people’s rights for the sake of the “greater good,” where do you stop?

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind.... Mr. Walker: why do the laws you propose and support reduce the number of people included in the word “any”? In particular, what about the rights of the teachers, police, and firemen in your state? 

When you were facing a recall election, and asked why, you said, “Simple: the big government union bosses from Washington want their money.  They don’t like the fact that I did something fundamentally pro-worker; something that’s truly about freedom. I gave every one of the nearly 300,000 hard-working public servants in my state the right to choose. Now, each of them gets to determine whether they want to be in a union or not.” But you are incorrect, Mr. Walker. I am now a hard-working public servant in your state, and I didn’t have a choice. I asked about union dues when I got my job, and I was told that we no longer had the right to unionize. So Mr. Walker, where is my freedom? How was your decision to take away my collective bargaining “fundamentally pro-worker”? In other words, in what ways am I benefitting from your reducing my human rights?

I’m not asking you, Mr. Walker, to agree with history that claims that unions have given us (your hard-working public servants) higher wages, greater benefits, reduced hours, or improved working conditions. But I am asking you to live up to your words. You promised the right to choose. You promised freedom. But if your decision was such a good one, why did USA Today report that 100,000 (of your nearly 300,00) public servants publicly protested against Act 10?

Maybe it's because they have read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for protection of his interests. Maybe they know, even though Article 10 may have been formed in the greatest of interests, that it is taking away something we hold so dear: universal human rights.

Sincerely,
Matt Dahl

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