Suddenly, solidarity.

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

I had been waiting a long time for the fight-back.

With wages stagnating for 90 percent of Americans over the last three decades, even as the top 1 percent raked in the dough, I'd been wondering why there hasn't been widespread resistance.

With fifteen million Americans officially unemployed, and millions more unofficially out of work or underemployed, I'd been wondering what it would take for them to hit the streets.

With more than rive million Americans thrown out of their homes over the past four years, often by unscrupulous bankers, rd been wondering when the foreclosed upon would rise up.

And when almost no one was rising up, the thought crossed my mind that the plutocrats would get away with everything--that people would just continue to take it all lying down.

But then the fight-back erupted, just four blocks from my office door. After Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker issued an all-out assault on public sector unions, people finally said they'd had enough.

On February 15, unions called for a protest at the capitol in Madison at noon, and 10,000 people showed up in the cold. The crowds built to 35,000 two days later to hear Jesse Jackson. By that Saturday, 75,000 filled the capitol square. And a week later, 100,000 pro-labor supporters rallied even as it snowed. In the meantime, hundreds of people occupied the capitol building for days on end, and teachers walked off the job in school district after school district.

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. To be at these protests, to see Howard Zinn's teachings of resistance come to life, to march with ironworkers and steelworkers and Teamsters and laborers and teachers and nurses and electricians and professors and secretaries and printers and social workers and firefighters and caregivers and prison guards lifted my spirits as nothing has in my...