Dear Wisconsin:

I’ve been chosen by me to write to you on behalf of the good people of Illinois. We want to tell you: It’s OK. We all make mistakes.

We’ve always felt a real connection with you, though we don’t always say it (Midwestern humility, you understand). Our states already have so much in common—Lake Michigan, snow, flatness, fat people—and now that you have a terrible governor disgracing your reputation nationally, we feel like your clearly more attractive twin. Yes, Scott Walker is a bad, bad man. He is destroying your state with remarkable efficiency.

Nobody understands what you’re going through right now better than us FIBs. We do bad governors like you do…you know, whatever you guys do up there. Worse, we have no one but ourselves to blame. You would think that after having three of the last six elected governors convicted on criminal charges, we would have learned our lesson. But Blagojevich had the cutest dimples…we’re suckers for a nice smile.

But you couldn’t have seen this coming. Scott Walker ran as fun-loving frat boy, endearing for his stupidity, and never campaigned on union busting. You couldn’t have known that, upon assuming office, he would focus all his efforts on systematically stripping unions of their collective-bargaining rights.

How infuriating it must have been when Walker explained that the state had to denude its workers of rights established through generations of struggle in order to balance the budget, while simultaneously passing massive tax cuts that hugely increased the deficit.

But you knew it was never about the budget, and not just because he exempted the unions that supported his campaign. When governors of other Midwestern states, like Ohio and Indiana (they got nothin’ on you, neighbor), tried to dismantle unions, it was clear that this was a national political strategy for the GOP.

Indeed, union busting is all about the money. It’s a straightforward strategy:

The biggest contributors to the Democratic Party are unions. Of the five outside groups who did the most campaign spending in 2008, the top two were unions. The other three were corporate-funded Political Action Committees that mainly funded Republicans.

In the 2010 election (after Citizens United) seven of the top 10 groups, including the top four, were corporate PACs that funded Republicans. Kill the unions, kill the major organizing and financial force that makes the Democratic Party able to compete with the corporate cash that fuels the right.

To say we were proud of your reaction, Wisconsin, is a gross understatement. You flooded Madison and stormed the Capitol, braving months of bitter cold to express your outrage. You held recall elections and unseated two GOP state senators and gathered more than 1 million signatures to force a recall election for governor and lieutenant governor for June 5.

We are so enamored of you, we don’t even mind that Walker slithered to Springfield Tuesday to campaign in front the Illinois Chamber of Commerce at the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel. (We even staged a mini-Madison protest of 3,000 outside.)

You might be surprised Walker found time to campaign in Illinois. He seemed to be busy trying to win the hearts and minds of cheeseheads, signing bills this month that repealed the Equal Pay Enforcement Act (because why does wage discrimination have to be a legal issue?), require schools to “stress abstinence” in sex education and “ignore contraception completely,” and limit abortion coverage.

But there he was in Springfield (the Wisconsin Dells of politics), invoking our great secular saint, Abraham Lincoln, in his courageous War Against the Unions. You guys still teach history up there, right?

He’s changed his tune a bit. Apparently this whole union busting business was about job creation all along. Of course, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists Wisconsin as 50th in the nation in job growth, but those are just numbers. Sorry, this was supposed to be uplifting.

Listen, you are setting things right. On June 5, you can start fresh and go back to the fine place we vacation When we are broke and out of ideas. Walker will get a cushy job in the private sector he loves so dearly, which will be less embarrassing than if he, say, joined the cast of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Then the two of us can go back to feuding about important matters, like sports rivalries and the appropriate speed for driving in the left lane.

With love, sympathy and support,

Illinois

Dave Balson is a senior journalism major.

He can be reached at 581-7942 or DENopinions@gmail.com.