By Corrine Hendrickson

New Glarus, Potential candidate for SD17

To the Editor:

Politics. The process of how people make decisions that affect our lives has become quite simply, exhausting.

We see the headlines, feel the impacts, and far too often settle on a shoulder shrug amid the chaos because changing it all is just too much to handle. Politics has become too personal, too mean and nasty and no healthy person wants more of that in their lives. Our solution has been to carry on and buffer ourselves from the noise.

I believe there must be a better way.

I want to introduce myself and ask for your ideas. I have been a family childcare provider in rural southern Wisconsin for eighteen years. My husband is a fire chief in a small-town volunteer fire department, and we have a couple of kids. Like most families with young children, we didn’t have money for fancy vacations, but we took the kids camping, swimming, hiking, kayaking, and hunting throughout Southwest Wisconsin; exploring and making memories. I taught my kids how to fish in Lake Montesian in Monticello and Yellowstone in Blanchardville; even ice fishing!

Like all of us, we want safe communities to raise our kids in but also places where they can do the same for their little ones down the road.

I’m sharing this because I’ve given some thought to helping real people have a voice in their government again. I’m not a member of a political party. I’ve never run for any partisan office before. I’m a mom who wonders if we all did something together, could we change the thing that frustrates us so much?

There’s an election next fall for state senate. The person who’s represented us in Madison has been there a long time and done a few good things. Like any line of work though, new ideas can help us work through stubborn challenges. Too many of our schools are struggling. Too many of our roads are crumbling. There isn’t enough good paying work across rural Wisconsin to keep families here and the places we fish, well gosh, the water isn’t always the greatest is it?

There are lots of good things happening, but if we want southwest Wisconsin to truly be great again, I think there’s room for some new ideas. What do you want to see done better around these parts? Contact me at corrinefor17@gmail.com. Let’s have a conversation and see what it leads to.