Travel Notes: Wisconsin
I’m so glad to be home.
Travel does that sometimes: makes me appreciate home more. This time it’s especially true. The SF Bay Area is definitely where I belong.
I’ve been wanting to write about my time in Wisconsin, the Green Bay area and some of the rural areas around it. Much like when I write reviews, I try not to say negative things unless I’m actively warning others to avoid things. I don’t want to make the nice people who live there feel bad. Some of them definitely did make me feel welcome and comfortable.
But Wisconsin itself, the strangers on the street, the businesses, the billboards, the general aura of the place is stifling.
The area is economically depressed, like most of the world right now. Chain restaurants and big box stores seem like the only places that aren’t heavily understaffed. Nearly every person I saw there seemed miserable, almost zombie-like, while they were on the clock. These interactions were mostly with front-of-house workers: cashiers, clerks, waitstaff, bartenders. The people working in more middle class jobs might not hate those as much, but I didn’t tour any office buildings on my trip. Service workers are the face of a city, and Wisconsin’s expression is dour and neglected.
The suburbs are nice in some parts of town, but they aren’t welcoming to out-of-towners. There is apparently an ordinance in Green Bay against parking on the street — even in residential neighborhoods — overnight. I use the term “apparently” because there are no signs anywhere about this fact. As a visitor who arrived on a plane and used a rental car to get around (there is pretty much no public transit, and nothing is really walkable), I learned about it by reading the $32 citation on my windshield the first morning there. When I grabbed it from under the wiper blade, a neighbor across the street who I’d never interacted with previously loudly mocked me for it, laughing about it being $32. When I got home to California and attempted to pay it, I had been charged an additional $12 late fee within less than a week.
We went into the central part of the city one morning to get coffee at a local business (and not a chain) and the parking was metered everywhere, but the meters didn’t accept cards or cash, and the coin slots were all taped over with out of order stickers. The only way to pay was to download a specific app, which requires you to give it permission to sell your data (license plate info, car info, name, phone number, etc.) and charges a $0.10 “convenience fee” for every transaction on top of that.
And then there’s the more obviously on-purpose ways they showed me I’m not welcome.
You can’t go more than two blocks anywhere without seeing “Don’t blame me, I voted Trump”, “Let’s go Brandon”, or other assorted taunting signs related to it. Thin blue line flags all over the place, often alongside these.
I’m used to seeing Trump flags, bumper stickers, and the like. I’m used to seeing Fox News on televisions in bars, gyms, and airport lounges. I can laugh off the random silly outrage of the week (this week Fox Business was appalled about the San Francisco school district voting to remove the word “Chief” from some job titles, as if that has some sort of business ramifications to make it relevant on their national “business news” channel) and the absurd mud-slinging, dog whistling political ads on the radio. It’s not special.
But these areas of Wisconsin were especially dense with the most mean-spirited type of right-wing signage. The type that’s specifically there to give the middle finger to anyone who disagrees. Perhaps not as overt as the formerly-confederate states, but it was impossible to avoid.
I shudder to imagine how it’d feel for a young kid there who was in one of the many marginalized groups these symbols are aimed at. Seeing it every day for a little over a week ate away at me, and I had the knowledge that I got to go home afterwards. It’s not as easy to escape these places for most.
At one point while we were being given a tour of some Irish farmhouses and cottages in the country, one of the people showing us around made a point to mention how the ships that brought the Irish here during the famine were “worse than the slave ships” because Bill O’Reilly said so in one of his books. I don’t know why that comparison needed to be made, and it was hard for me to swallow my response about how you don’t see many giant tracts of land passed down for a dozen generations to black folk around there (or in most places anywhere in the U.S. for that matter). But I was on foreign soil with that mindset, and the man saying it was in his 80’s at least, so I kept the peace this time.
We were brought to a bar that had food (I wouldn’t call it a gastropub, because it wasn’t very good) by family members who repeatedly told us how much they loved the place, and how they go every week. The place was full of anti-vax, pro-gun, pro-Trump paraphernalia. In the back corner near the men’s restroom were life size stand-ups of Trump. The crowd included bikers tattooed with white supremacist symbols, and even the most basic-looking suburban middle aged patron scowled at me as I walked by. (I wore one of my t-shirts with the cut-out neck, joggers, and Vans. Not a dress, not one of my Liz Warren shirts, nothing sparkly, or anything else especially loud.)
When I later looked the place up, I saw several reviews about how unwelcoming and hyper-political the place is. The majority of “Laugh” reactions to these reviews confirm it’s intentional. They don’t want us there.
And it seems like the people who live there are either on that same page or oblivious. It’s honestly hard to tell when you want to give new friends the benefit of the doubt. If I made this post visible to a wider audience, they’d likely be shocked and hurt by what I’m saying, but it’s all true. 
[Editor: this post was originally shared to a limited audience on Facebook]
They point at the Black Lives Matter and Rainbow flags that we wave in our city and act like those are the opposite side of the same coin, but they most certainly are not. Those symbols are to make people feel safe and welcome. The only people they intend to deter are those who believe the people they represent deserve to be treated as second class citizens, or worse.
I don’t know what to do about it. I wish the marginalized people there could see how much better it is in other parts of the country where they aren’t constantly bogged down by hate, resentment, and neglect. In places where the minimum wage gets closer to paying for rent, where our bosses can’t fire us for being queer or because our natural hair is “unprofessional”.
I wish they could feel the way I feel today simply being back to my regular boring routines in a state and city that accepts me as I am.
Ugh. It feels good to let this out, but I definitely left a lot of examples out. I might come back to it later.