I’ve never been so proud to rep Wisconsin.

More than the Packers bringing the Lombardi trophy back to its birthplace, more than the moment I introduced my boys back in DC to the glories of a cheese curd, the massive uprising to defend workers’ rights that has erupted over these past two weeks in Madison has cemented my Badger pride forever.

I’m 2000 miles away from the action inside the Capitol Rotunda, but through text messages, Facebook reports, and (sweet Jesus!) decent coverage from the national media, I feel like I’m just down the block on State Street.

While my analysis is secondary to the activists and agitators in the trenches (snow trenches, to be exact), I want to offer some notes on what has made all this so amazing:

When I see the crowds protesting against laws that would strip the collective bargaining rights of government employees, I see an apt comparison to the crowds protesting for freedom across the Middle East. Some observers – Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and New York Times columnist David Brooks among them – think that the comparison goes too far. On Meet the Press, Sunday February 27, David Gregory wanted his guests who supported the protesters to denounce the signs that compared Governor Walker to Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak and to Hitler. I agree that we ought to just leave Hitler to history, but in many ways the comparison to Mubarak is not incorrect.

It is true that the people of Wisconsin and of the other states protesting similar legislation are not ruled by an autocrat who has held power for thirty years. It is true that they are free to peacefully assemble without worry of police brutality. It is true that their complaint is with governors who have been elected recently. The similarity that I see is that people are taking to the street both in the Middle East and in the Mid-West in the United States for the sake of winning and of keeping their human rights. And human rights are not ends in themselves; rather they are means to an end. The end is a better quality of life.

I have never been successful at mastering obedience. As a child, often enough it was my attitude toward my father rather than something in particular that I did which was the cause of punishment and criticism. Obedience is highly prized in authority-based systems. No surprise, then, that my father was attempting to control my defiant spirit more than my specific actions.

Obedience is a form of submission, of giving our will to another out of fear of consequences. It is almost essential to obedience that there be no specific rationale for the action demanded by the authority. “Do as I tell you” leaves no room for questions. We are not supposed to understand, only to carry out.

My father never managed to break my spirit, as was his clear and explicit intention (my mother regularly tried to dissuade him from this plan, to no avail). My defiance, a deep-seated rebellion of the spirit, became an article of pride for me. More often than not, I did what he insisted I do, simply because I had no particular reason not to. And yet I knew that I wasn’t going to let him “get to me,” and I know much of his wrath was precisely about that.

Given my inner satisfaction at emerging from childhood with my full defiant self, I was utterly surprised when I first heard Marshall Rosenberg say: “Never give anyone the power to make you submit or rebel.” It had never before occurred to me that my rebellion, however successful, left the power in my father’s hands. Internally I was more preoccupied with not giving in than with knowing what I wanted and going for it. I chose my actions reactively, not truly from within. I didn’t see what is now so clear to me: that true choice, true freedom, emerges from inner clarity.