After this morning’s Barnes event at the Milwaukee War Memorial, I headed down to the lakefront Colectivo — a recently unionized coffee shop that resides in the defunct Milwaukee River Flushing Station. With distressed brick and a post-industrial vibe, it’s a destination for yuppies and student socialists. Outside the shop, facing the street, were climate and women’s rights protesters waving signs at the passing traffic.
Standing on the apron of N Lincoln Memorial Drive, I chatted with Mike, a retired residential-interior painter, and Roger, a Vietnam vet and wrestling instructor for struggling kids in the Milwaukee school system. In between frequent honking of support in this heavily blue progressive enclave, Mike shared that he came to climate activism after observing the warming of the fall weather over his lifetime. He now suggests solar power as the answer to climate issues. While he doesn’t have any solar panels yet, he’s planning to purchase some in the near future. Familiar with solar installers in San Diego when I was stationed there, I asked if there were any local to Milwaukee. Mike said that Current Electric is one such local solar group. The more you know.
Then there was Roger, who came with a humdinger of a story. Combat vet, wrestling coach, and appreciator of the VA, Roger lost friends during his time in Vietnam, taking shrapnel to the face with fractures in multiple places, then convalesced in Japan. He was then redeployed to Tráng Báng after MLK’s death and the dissolution of the Army’s cohesion along racial lines in its aftermath. Threreafter, he attended UW-Madison, joining in with the war protesters, and has been a leftist ever since. He now looks after many of the city’s most desperate kids, who join his wrestling program and are provided structure and a demanding regimen — both in athletics and academics. Students who are falling behind in classes are required to get signatures from each of their teachers to bring to practice, where the contents will decide the push-up totals for the group . . . corporate punishment that would make a football coach or drill sergeant shed a tear of joy.
Whatever the truth of the stories — or the disparity between our voting records — theirs was a series of grand tales eloquently told in the warmth of a November sun.