"Common Sense" on the 4th

[S]upplement your reading of the Declaration of Independence with a passage or two chosen from Common Sense or Paine’s later work to rally the weary Continental armies, The Crisis. You might like to visit your local library, take out a copy and do likewise on our nation’s 238th birthday. And start fighting back!

How?

On Friday supplement your reading of the Declaration of Independence with a passage or two chosen from Common Sense or Paine’s later work to rally the weary Continental armies, The Crisis. You might like to visit your local library, take out a copy and do likewise on our nation’s 238th birthday. And start fighting back!

Recognize that for all of us, these, too, are the times that try our souls. Be peacefully but persistently aggressive. Demand of your representatives at national, state and local levels: either they deliver their votes to break the Money Power or they don’t get yours. Nothing less will get their attention. This weekend and in the coming elections they will be showing up in person; find out when they will be where you live and turn up to challenge them.

Don’t wait for some far-off organization to send you a petition. Get off the couch and picket their home offices. If you are ignored, or they protest that your defection will lead to their defeat, remind them of the advice of General Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Revolutionary fame: “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.” That’s why the Constitution provides for frequent elections, new chances to turn opinion in your favor. And that’s why it ensures your right to be as demonstrative as it takes to be heard. Don’t leave it to others. Be as immovable on your side as the tea party is on theirs and don’t shrink when the corporate media and partisans on the cable channels and talk radio equate you with them as “extremists” and sing their love songs to “centrism.”

Write to the editors of your newspapers or what is left of them, go see them, call on the heads of the networks and tell them to fire their carnival barkers for the one tenth of one percent who have bought our government, or at the very least open their pages and their mikes and cameras to genuine debate with bona fide reformers and radicals of many stripes.