It’s 1933 and Wisconsin is emerging from The Great Depression. Thanks to FDR’s New Deal program, federal dollars are beginning to flow into communities around the country, including Milwaukee, where visionary leaders years before had hired Frederick Law Olmsted, most famous for designing New York’s Central Park, to create a network of parks for the growing city. Olmstead believed that landscape architecture could serve various social purposes, including providing relief from crowded cities and encouraging people of varied backgrounds and social status to engage in community. Olmstead once described his park work as a “democratic development of the highest significance.”

A tree falls on your house. Instead of using the insurance money to fix it, would you instead use that money to pay your regular operational expenses, like food, gas, rent/mortgage? Wisconsin Republican legislators think that would be the wise way to go. And heaven forbid you use the money to repair your house so that it’s even better than it was before. They’d think that’s whack. In their proposed education budget, WI GOP legislators say we should use federal Build Back Better money to fund WI schools. Never mind that this federal funding is meant to cover additional expenses

Should Wisconsin include funding for the testing of our surface, ground and drinking water in our state budget, in order to be able to hold accountable businesses that release toxic “forever chemicals” into our environment? Should Wisconsin be the only state in the country that has refused to expand health insurance to more adults and kids living in poverty, resulting in a loss of $1.6 billion in federal funding to cover the expansion? Do you think big box stores like Walgreens should be able to lower their tax assessments by comparing their stores to shuttered retailers with lower values? Should

You’ve been vaccinated (yay!) and you want to take a trip, only you’re not sure where to go. It’s March, so heading to Phoenix sounds nice. But Chicago is always fun and you haven’t been there in ages. How to decide? Many of us would think about where we’ve been, as well as where we are, in order to figure out where to go. Reviewing your past vacations (hmmm, I’ve been to Phoenix a half-dozen times in the last few years) and surveying your current condition (I have two vacation days to use right now), might help you make the

A CEO carrying a leather briefcase and dressed in a cashmere overcoat hurries through the glass doors and into the marble-floored lobby of his office building. He pushes the elevator button as he’s done every week day for the past thirty years. He waits, but the elevator doors fail to open. He pushes the “up” button again. Nothing. Perplexed, he gives it another try, but still, nothing happens. He impatiently checks his watch and then pushes the button three more times. Still, the elevator doors refuse to budge. A scowl crosses his cleanly shaven face as he leans forward to

For those Wisconsinites who’ve waited far too long to collect unemployment benefits and can’t understand what in the damn hell took so long, perhaps a trip in the Wayback Machine will bring some clarity. Please stay seated during the trip. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Our first stop is 2001. Wisconsin’s jobless fund, which pays out unemployment benefits, has been severely weakened by the recession. If you look out your windows, a quick stop in 2009 reveals that the jobless reserve is now borrowing money from the federal government in order to keep paying benefits.   I ask

I feel embarrassed. Demoralized. Angry. Afraid, even. But what I don’t feel is surprised. And that, more than anything, makes me heartsick. Anyone else feeling similarly? We’ve heard so many lies during the past four years, thousands of them, told over and over again. Yesterday’s lie (shouted from a podium to thousands gathered in Washington, DC) was that the vice president could somehow break his oath to the Constitution by overturning the results of a free and fair election. And when it failed to come true, the mob attacked. Why would that surprise anyone? After four years of near-constant vilification

The American economy is like a schizoid yo-yo: On the way up, when times are good and getting better, some say “Government regulation of industry slows down growth–it’s anti-capitalist.” But when times are tough and on the way down, it’s all “Government to the rescue—where’s my bail out?” And it isn’t just industry or businesses sharing this seemingly bi-polar economic belief system. Take this quote from a recent poll regarding whether the federal government is doing too little to deal with the health and economic repercussions of COVID-19: “Gary Tidball, 52, a Republican from Overland Park, Kansas, has been relying

Dear citizens: Some of you, mostly my enemies, wonder how I’ve become such a great and adored leader. The ones who hate me puzzle over how I am able to do and say outrageous things, and still maintain the love and support of an adoring public. My approach is really quite simple and based upon the following: The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. Therefore, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of

We Americans are known for our “rugged individualism,” a term coined in a 1928 campaign speech by Herbert Hoover, who fancied himself a “self-made” millionaire. What’s interesting is that during the early days of the Great Depression, Hoover launched the largest public works projects up until his time. So I guess getting help from the government is sometimes okay—like during the middle of a pandemic, maybe? Speaking of pandemics, how has this idea of rugged individualism, of “going it alone” served us here in America, where absent a national strategy or coordinated federal effort, each state (and often, cities/counties within