Growing up in Milwaukee in the 1990s, it seemed the only way the area rose to national relevance was by way of one searing indignity or another.
Cryptosporidium; Dahmer; then a new world-class baseball stadium rising from the brat-grizzle-encrusted parking lots of County Stadium, only for us to collectively watch “Big Blue,” the locally famous crane tasked with assembling the retractable roof, tilt over one day to demolish it instead, causing the tragic deaths of three ironworkers.
I left the Milwaukee area for college in Minneapolis, followed by nearly two decades in New York City. In telling people, amidst small talk through the years in NYC, that I came from Milwaukee, there were three reactions: no reaction at all; “Have you seen Wayne’s World?”; or, “Oh, I love Milwaukee.”
For that third group, they ended up in town for a wedding or work event, and were surprised, sometimes very surprised, to genuinely love it. Part of this reaction came from visiting a “great town” for the first time, while the rest of it seemed to emerge from something darker: the city winning at a game of rock-bottom expectations. As much local pride and sarcastic spunk as there is in the city, it often seems to be baked into an overall concoction of fatalism and toxic humility, as though it’s not okay to stand out or make demands.
Before moving back to the area one year ago, I watched the city flag drama play out from afar in 2015, when some smarmy “flag expert” used Milwaukee as an over-the-top punchline and punching bag in his TED talk. At the time, I thought, “So what? Who cares what he thinks?”
Instead, the city seemed to bask in the attention and organized itself around winning this random person’s approval by following his bland principles of flag-ology. The resulting new flag is fine enough, but I wish the city had given more consideration to reworking an older design, from the age of its singular Socialist tradition, in 1897, that simply featured the waxy green leaves and strong, slow-growing twig of a bur oak tree, characteristic of the area and known for hardiness in the face of extreme conditions, along with clusters of acorns and a slogan of “Steady Progress” against a cream background and blue border. This was the flag of a city that knows itself, knows its strength, values nature and finds ways to decisively move forward in its own way.
Milwaukee seems stuck in a cycle of slow passivity, when it may be the most influential and important area in the world, one of boundless unrealized strength; and that is not hyperbole. Local activism and turnout have the power to swing Senate majorities and decide presidential wins, serving as a tipping point of almost cosmic importance.
The thing about New York City, and the coastal elite areas in general? In today’s contest of real political power, they are basically irrelevant, along with blue state cities like Chicago. They have gobs of wealth, resources, cultural institutions, and media companies that frame the national conversation, but what does it matter if, at a time when we sit on the knife edge of climate Armageddon and the overturning of our democratic republic by conspiracy-addled fascists, at election time every two years those “coastal elites” are turned into nothing more than helpless bystanders, fantasizing about having Milwaukee’s power?
Our area should adopt an edgy confidence in the fact that no city is more influential to the place of America today and where it is headed. If we turnout with force and make a break in the direction of health, progress and self-determination this November 8th, and in the months that follow, it will be felt around the country and around the world, as the autocratic axis of Vladmir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman toy with oil prices and watch to see if our democratic resolve will crumble.
What would this “edgy confidence” look like?
Undermining Milwaukee has become an ingrained reflex for Wisconsin Republicans. Just last week, Ron Johnson implied — with zero evidence — that voting in Milwaukee is inherently suspect. And while the city has grown accustomed to absorbing derogatory rhetoric and voter suppression tactics, it is with state funding that the Wisconsin GOP turns the screws on the city with greatest consequence, after gerrymandering itself into, practically speaking, a permanent majority in the legislature. As the City and County of Milwaukee attempt to deal with catastrophic budget shortfalls, the GOP legislature is starving the Milwaukee area of the “shared revenue” it is owed amidst a $4.3 billion budget surplus.
Before Milwaukee finalized their winning bid for the 2024 Republican National Convention last summer, the city was facing a competing bid from the City of Nashville. In The Recombobulation Area, essential reading for local politics, Marquette University’s Phil Rocco noted that whereas the Tennessee GOP actively convinced the “blue city” of Nashville to host the convention, offering up $25 million in funding, “Wisconsin Republicans have offered no positive inducements to persuade Milwaukee to host the RNC. Instead, they seem to be relying on a tacit threat: host the RNC or we’ll make things even worse.”
Now, the increasingly fascist Republican Party will bring God-knows-what to the streets of Milwaukee in the summer of ’24; and the powers that be in the Milwaukee business and political community were left looking like beggars for basic dignity.
As opposed to this submissive approach, edgy confidence would mean Milwaukee leaders regularly putting the GOP on the defensive by uniting stakeholders and broadcasting to the entire state that the GOP withholding of state funds to municipalities is unacceptable and causing damage to all communities, rural and urban, while ensuring that every Milwaukeean knows they can directly do something about the situation right now, by coming out to support Governor Evers on Nov. 8, then flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April, potentially delivering fair maps that would return actual democracy to the state for the first time since the craven GOP gerrymander of 2011.
Why roll over in submission when you can fight back and assert real power?
Milwaukee can be anything. It can be a national model for modern urban life that reconciles with nature, while demanding better support for its racially and economically diverse communities after decades of redlining, segregation and underfunding of resources.
We can see strands of this energy of possibility in the grassroots demands to address reckless driving and decisively tear down the I-794 downtown highway in favor of transformative urban development; in the revamped Black Holocaust Museum, the rehabilitation of the post-industrial Menomonee River ecosystem, demands for full funding of public schools and Medicaid expansion, adventurous designs for the new Milwaukee Public Museum and, finally, the Ascent, certified as the world’s tallest “timber tower” made of renewable materials: as good a symbol as any for what Milwaukee can embrace and build anew, at its own scale.
As this age of global instability grasps for balance, Milwaukee may be the central fulcrum, no other place achieving our relevance. Cream City has the chance to also be the City of Steady Progress, the City of Power and the city that refuses to take any crap from the insecure, gerrymandering cowards that inhabit the state GOP.
We’ll have a lot more fun, and do a hell of a lot of good, if we take that spirit to heart, on the road to taking it to action.
Chris Ruen is a New York Times-published writer, author of “FREELOADING: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content is Starving Creativity,” a voice actor and digital consultant. He lives in the Milwaukee area and can be found on Twitter at @Chris_Ruen and also chrisruen.com.