Overcoming defeat.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

June was brutal here in Wisconsin. After months of inspirational labor protests the likes of which this country hasn't seen since the 1930s, we suffered a string of near-crushing defeats.

First, the state supreme court, in one of the most lawless and biased decisions since Bush v. Gore, handed Governor Scott Walker the victory he was seeking when it validated his anti-collective bargaining law. The 4-3 decision was so baldly partisan that Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, in a scorching dissent, berated the majority for the quality of its arguments, which she called "clearly disingenuous, based on disinformation," and containing "numerous errors of law and fact." In conclusion, she wrote: "The majority, by sacrificing honest reasoning, leads us down a pernicious path ... and harms the rights of the people."

As a result of this decision, 38,000 state workers are taking almost a 10 percent hit in their pay, and the ability of public sector unions to function is now greatly in peril.

That same week, the Republican legislature passed Walker's budget, which aims to destroy everything progressive about Wisconsin, as Ruth Conniff notes in her column this month.

While all this was going down, the state AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin called two protests at the capitol, but fewer than 5,000 showed up for the first one and only about 1,000 turned out for the next.

It was a dispiriting showing.

And yet the fighting spirit lives on. Every day since February, the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice has been holding a sing-along in the capitol at noon. I joined it one day, a couple of weeks after the defeats, and it helped restore me. There were sixty-five people standing in a circle in the middle of the rotunda, with thirty-five more one floor above. With full voices, we all sang some standards, like "Solidarity Forever" and "Keep...