One advantage (really) of my present employment situation is that I’ve been able to go on field trips with all our kids this spring. That included the Ledge View Nature Center in Chilton for Dylan, the Wild Air Play Zone and bowling for Shaena, and, yesterday, the state Capitol in Madison for Michael.

Being from Madison, I’ve been to the Capitol more times than I can remember. Two instances I do remember are visiting as part of my high school political science class (and my teacher is on Facebook), and attending the inauguration of state legislators who had won elections in 1984. (And those who know my political bent would never believe whose campaign I had worked on in the summer and fall of 1984.) Everyone in Madison lives within eyesight of the Capitol. It is smack in the middle of the Isthmus, and it is by city ordinance the tallest building in Madison. I’ve never been to Washington, D.C., but I have to believe that state government looms over Madison — Dane County, in fact — as much proportionally as the federal government looms over Washington. That came to mind when I came upon buildings I didn’t recognize as state office buildings that apparently now are, whether or not the state actually owns the buildings.

Michael’s teacher warned us that getting into the Capitol is now a laborious experience, thanks to the metal detectors now manned by Capitol police and the Wisconsin State Patrol. (For those wondering how police overtime during Protesterama could near $8 million — the equivalent of about 110 state employees’ total yearly compensation — I think I saw the answer Tuesday.) One wonders how much the increased security has to do with credible threats and how much has to do with legislators’ sense of self-importance. And in case of the latter, shame on the majority party in the Capitol.

Speaking of protesters, yes, I saw a few. (I saw a whole bunch of them, apparently fans of former Supreme Court candidate Joanne Kloppenburg, a couple blocks northeast of the Square apparently gathering for some kind of protest.) One person was either protesting or going on his daily walk holding his unreadable (from the Capitol building) neon green sign. Someone claiming to be from AFSCME had a similarly colored shirt announcing his opposition to whatever Gov. Scott Walker is doing now. Another protester carried a sign with the communist-looking fist in the shape of the state of Wisconsin. (Which shows what he thinks of non-liberals, doesn’t it?) Another held up a sign that said “Republicans are WMDs.” (An interesting phrase given what WMDs mean to the anti-Iraq War crowd. For those not fans of the protesters, perhaps it means “We Must Downsize,” say, by 110 state employees.) A woman had a clear umbrella that had cards that claimed that election fraud starts with election officials, perhaps an early arrival for the first protesters mentioned in this paragraph.

(Later Tuesday, the Wisconsin State Journal reported, or tweeted, that a blood drive being held in the Capitol shut down more than three hours early because the daily noontime protest was too loud to ensure confidentiality of donors. What a positive contribution by the protesters Tuesday.)

I wrote on Facebook Monday night that I was going to stop by Gov. Walker’s office and do some protesting myself about Memorial Union parking, the lack of which, for those not on Facebook, caused us to not purchase Babcock Hall ice cream and go to a private-sector ice cream vendor instead. Well, Walker wasn’t in, although we did get to see his press conference room:

Time was when I could look at the state Capitol (even after the Carter administration’s toxic brew of ineptitude, incompetence and malign intent) and marvel about laws being created and the political process taking place. If you’re about my age, you remember …

Then, once I started getting twice-weekly paychecks, I started noticing how much was coming out of my paychecks for taxes, even at $3.35 per hour. Later I noticed that politicians don’t give a damn about you if you’re not one of their people — their voters, their supporters, their contributors, their favored interest groups — and yet they act like they feel your pain. (See Clinton, Bill.) Unfortunately, neither my La Follette political science class (though taught by a great teacher) nor my UW political science major (and, I think, not my wife’s Ripon  College politics and government major either) taught me the ugly reality of politics at any level, which is that politics is a zero-sum game where one side wins (gets power and/or control and/or goodies, from the taxpayers and/or the losers) and the other side(s) loses.

And that is why the older I get, the more libertarian I become. (As H.L. Mencken once said,  “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” Or, put more nicely — or maybe not — on Tuesday, “Most of us are not political crack-heads, jonesing for our daily fix of victimhood, partisan spin, overhype, and payback. We prefer to focus on our families, homes, businesses, jobs, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, hobbies, schools, sports teams, meals, clothes, entertainment, charities, and friends.”)

We went to the Senate and Assembly chambers, and my thought was: Too many seats for senators and representatives. (Definitely too much security.) And there are too many suits walking in and out of the Capitol, whether they have offices in the building or not. And there are too many state office buildings because at some point in our state’s history — perhaps May 30, 1848, one day after statehood — the people we vote for decided that government should be an employer, a wealth-redistribution machine, a distributor of carrots and sticks instead of performing essential government services and nothing else.

The afternoon, one day after Memorial Day, was spent at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, where it is easy for a World War II buff (somehow the term “fan” seems inappropriate) to get lost in the World War II section. One wonders what those who died for their country would think of the country they died for. (Is it unpatriotic to write that?)

I think I’ll skip future state Capitol trips. Unfortunately, the history is overwhelmed by the present-day reality.