Letters to the Editor

Dear editor, Wisconsin has a legacy left to us by our Scandinavian ancestors who immigrated here in the 1850s.  This heritage is expressed by the Danish writer Aksel Sandemose, who wrote, “You’re not to think you are anything special” and “You’re not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.”  Their sense of community is captured in the Swedish word folkhemmet, or “the people’s home.”  The people’s home was perceived as a place of safety and protection, a place where everyone is lifted up – it was their term for welfare or ensuring the common good.  This is the story of our ancestors, the creed they lived by, the standards they set for themselves, the story they endeavored to pass down to us, and the direction they provided for the state they were hugely instrumental in forming.  It was these forebearers who pioneered the worker’s compensation program, child labor-laws, a progressive income tax, the unemployment insurance program, strengthened worker’s rights, and were vehemently anti-slavery.  They were instrumental in starting the Republican Party – which comes from the Latin res publica, that can be translated as “the common good.”  Somehow that lofty heritage seems to have been lost or perverted by our current generation of Republican legislators who were either never brought up in this culture or have been progressively subverted into a cultural belief that has led to actions which our grandparents and great-grandparents would never have accepted.  This is nowhere more apparent than in the actions of the Republicans in the Joint Finance Committee as they write a proposed budget.  Expand BadgerCare to 90,000 Wisconsinites and gain an additional $1.6 billion in federal funds for the state – no.  Adequately fund our schools to provide for our children’s future– no.  Provide funding to upgrade the antiquated unemployment compensation system – no.  Provide funding to replace poisonous lead-based plumbing and clean and protect our water – no.    This is not the future our ancestors envisioned for us, and it is not a storyline we should allow to continue.  Wisconsin was designed as “the people’s home.”  To honor our ancestors we have an obligation to revive their story and reclaim the heritage our grandparents and great-grandparents placed in our path.  Welfare is not the dirty word so many are trying to make it, it is the commitment to the common good our ancestors laid out for us to follow.  Welfare is the heritage of “everyone does better when everyone does better” that our ancestors understood and practiced.  Thanks to the author Dan Kaufman for this history Beverly Pestel  Richland Center