The protests in Wisconsin (and the demonstrations in Indiana and Ohio) feel pretty personal. I’m not from Wisconsin. I’ve never been there; in fact, I’ve never even been to any of the states that border Wisconsin. It’s not where the protests are but what they are. That is, the protests are a well-deserved reaction to an assault on public-sector unions led by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).

The assault comes in the form of a budget-reduction bill that would make public-sector union members—namely, teachers, cops, and firefighters, among others—pay much more of their pensions and health insurance costs as well as eliminate their collective bargaining rights.

And here’s the thing: the union members are perfectly willing to make the concessions on benefit costs—you know, the ones that would actually help reduce the budget. The protests center on the stripping of collective bargaining right, which would leave every worker to fend for himself in negotiations, essentially stripping the power of the union itself.

That is, of course, what Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated legislature of Wisconsin want. They’re not alone, of course; right now in America, public-sector unions—particularly teachers, the most numerous public employees—are being villified by conservatives as scapegoats for sky-high budgets, government incompetence, and the end of American exceptionalism.

In other words, teachers (and other public employees) have suddenly become the new “welfare queens” of the nation, symbols of freeloading and stupidity. To be honest, I’m not sure how it happened. It seems that economic conservatives—you know, those good ol’ Tea Partiers—believe that these new welfare queens are lavishly paid and made in the shade. And that goes back to why these protests are pretty personal to me: I’m the son of two teachers.

But we don’t prance around mansions in velvet robes or go to the Country Club in Cadillacs.

In fact, my parents, one a middle school teacher and the other a public-university instructor (read: instructor) aren’t paid well at all, and it shows. We’ve never bought a new car. We live on a busy section of Route 42. We’re extremely cold in the winter and extremely hot in the summer because heating and A/C simply cost too much. I could go on. We’re about in the middle of the middle class.

Are we better off than most working-class Americans? Yes, but that’s about it. Union busters often point to the fact that public-sector employees earn higher wages and benefits than private-sector employees. Then again, does it really come as a surprise that a teacher with a master’s degree (which teachers must increasingly have to do well in the job market) makes more money than a McDonald’s fry cook or a cab driver?

Also, consider the skyrocketing costs of education. When education costs, which for teachers now often involves grad school, are factored in, teachers make far less net income—from salaries that rarely exceed $50,000 dollars, anyway.

Compare this to other professions with high rates of grad-school experience: law, medicine, and business. Out of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and teachers, who do you suspect makes the least money on average?

If you’re extremely well-informed, you might be saying to yourself right now, “Wait, teachers in Virginia aren’t even allowed to unionize.”

You’d be right. Teachers in Virginia can’t unionize yet Virginia still has some of the best public high schools in the nation: Thomas Jefferson, McLean, George Mason, etc. Compare this to the situation in DC, where teachers’ unions are often cited as the leading cause of the failing of almost every public school in the District.

Virginia’s schools’ greatness doesn’t lie in the lack of teachers’ unions, though. The state’s great schools—the ones nationally recognized for student academic achievement—are almost entirely in Northern Virginia, one of the largest intellectual centers in the country (along with suburban Maryland). We’re not having an education crisis in our suburbs and college towns (largely where educated people live); we’re having them almost entirely in poor, brain-drained inner cities and rural areas.

Schools in college towns and suburbs have a certain dynamic that make them work well; the administrators, teachers, students, and parents symbiotically hold each other accountable for failings and deal with them accordingly. Why? Because educated people know that education translates to success, so their children are ingrained with a passion to learn and succeed. Everything follows from there.

This, sadly, is not the dynamic of inner cities and rural areas, which participate in an endless blame game that is centered almost entirely on teachers, who are the easiest scapegoats and most expendable players. This is why we hear about massive layoffs and failing schools in Providence, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—but not in Northern Virginia, the Silicon Valley, or the Research Triangle.

The point is, teachers’ unions aren’t the biggest part of the problem or the solution. But they—like all unions, public and private—give leverage to workers who otherwise wouldn’t have it. Without that leverage, wages would forever stagnate and decrease in real value due to inflation. In a society that is becoming more unequal every day as part of a Second Gilded Age, there’s real value in that, and it must be guarded fiercely.

Luckily, the public employees of the USA have descended upon Madison, Indianapolis, and Columbus with fury. The Los Angeles Times estimates that nearly 100,000 people came to Madison Saturday to protest Scott Walker’s union-busting bill, with hundreds more in cities across the nation. Even more luckily, Gallup polls have indicated that two-thirds of the nation supports the right of public employees to collectively bargain.

While the people of Wisconsin and the nation demand that Walker fight the real enemy of state budgets (historically low taxes combined with rising medical costs), the Wisconsin governor, who is flippantly refusing to rescind the union-busting provision, says “Let them eat cake,” while trying to force-feed them crap. No wonder he resents public education.