Wisconsin State Journal, Opinion Page, Guest Column:
I was saddened and appalled when I saw the cartoon on your editorial page Friday.
The picture showed two men enjoying a back yard barbeque and one telling the other how much more he prefers his neighbor’s barking dog to his neighbor, Madison City Alderman Austin King’s, rancorous preaching about the inadequacy of the minimum wage and the need for sick leave now.
The arrogance and callousness shown by your editorial staff by allowing this cartoon to appear in the Journal was truly insulting to our higher nature.
It trivializes what for many Madisonians consider to be a serious human rights issue.
Our community’s failure to provide our neediest working people in the greatest economic need, with paid sick leave is most certainly no joking matter. The fact that it may not be economical for small businesses does not in any way make it okay and a suitable subject for derision and scorn. It is humiliating. It is unjust. It is unchristian. But most certainly it is not a situation that Journal’s readers should be expected to laugh at.
King may be naïve and inexperienced but he is truly also a brilliant young man and a “neighbor” with a strong social conscience who should be respected as a young, very committed public servant and not deserving of derision and ridicule.
To me, it seems inconsistent that such an otherwise balanced and steady voice for social justice as is the Journal’s editorial department, who supports constructive social welfare reform, would find it okay to lampoon and mock efforts by anyone to put in place an infrastructure that would make such reform more realistic and humane.
Perhaps not until a person can see their daughter as that young mother who is being forced to live and raise her family on less than $1,000 per month before taxes; a woman who is often forced to witness her children experiencing hunger and sickness.
Perhaps nothing will happen until people can see their daughter in that single woman who is folding clothes at Wal-Mart, or that waitress who serves them at night even though she may be sick, or that woman doing the dishes in a nursing home, or scrubbing your office floor late at night.
And then the policy makers of this country should read Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, “Nickel and Dimed – On (Not) Getting By in America,” .
Respectfully, William R. Benedict, MSW, ACSW
