The New Revolution – OF, BY, and FOR the People

During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a “culture war” or even a “second Civil War.”  These descriptions are no longer accurate.  The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United States today is revolution.

Because of our country’s history, we tend to think of revolutions as military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and Concord lies deep within our DNA.  But sometimes — quite often, actually — revolutions aren’t military conflicts, and the bad  guys are the ones trying to keep the revolution from happening.  In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend the next two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his political allies in the  Reichstag .  In October 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats — who had overthrown the Czar earlier that year — entirely through parliamentary maneuvering in Russia’s fledgling  Duma .

What defines a revolution — and this is the crucial point to grasp — is that when it’s over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system.

Since most of us think of computers when we hear the phrase “operating system” let me use this analogy to illuminate my point:  Every computer has an operating system, and most of us are using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating system.  If you want to do something with your computer — send an email, watch a DVD, read an online essay like this one — you must do it the way your computer’s operating system is designed to work.

No operating system is perfect, which is why Microsoft and Apple send updates to their customers from time to time.  And every so often these companies launch new versions of their operating systems that incorporate a lot of modifications at once.  Can you change the operating system you use?  Of course you can.  Two years ago I threw out every Microsoft-based machine in our company’s office and replaced them with Apple products.  Last month I met a corporate CEO who had just done the opposite, and replaced the Apple computers in his office with ones that run on the Microsoft operating system.

Our country’s future now lies within our own hands — yours, mine, all of us who comprise what the Washington insiders sneeringly call the grass roots.  Good, because unless I’m very much mistaken the politicians and the 1% have over-estimated their strength.  There still are more of us than there are of them.  I mean ordinary, decent Americans from across the political spectrum who may disagree about specific issues, but who understand who we are and how we became who we are; who love our country, have a genius for self-organizing, and won’t let the United States go down without a fight.

We need to launch a counter-offensive, so to speak, and the place to start is at the local level.  Working with our county and state political parties when we can — or working around them when we must — our objective will be to elect as many people as we can to public office who understand what a democracy is and how the  market works.  This will include city council members, county commissioners, school board members, judges, sheriffs and even members of the local parks commission.  With the strength and political momentum their elections will provide, we can surge to the state level and then — before it’s too late — take back the power in Washington DC.

I know this isn’t the kind of battle most of us want to fight; we would rather watch the talking heads slug it out on Fox News than stand on a street corner handing out campaign flyers.  And given our country’s history, for a while it will be uncomfortable to find ourselves fighting the revolution and against the status quo.  But we’ll get used to this as we make our case over and over again — to our friends, our neighbors, at barbeques and PTA meetings and at public rallies like those marvelous revolutionaries before us that drove the politicians insane.  And we’ll draw strength as our ranks swell with new recruits.

The alternative to launching this kind of peaceful and political counter-attack is horrific.  Right now sales of guns and ammunition are rising sharply.  This reflects an intuitive grasp by hardened right wing extremist Americans of what history teaches may lie ahead.  It was only after the Nazis had secured their grip on power in Germany, and only after the Bolsheviks had seized control of Russia, that they set out to disarm and destroy the vast numbers of ordinary citizens who – to the astonishment and fury of the revolutionaries — just wouldn’t go along.

That’s when the real shooting started, and when blood began flowing in the streets.

We invite you to join us tonight, Saturday Jan. 21st 8PM EST on Revolution Now 2012 http://www.blogtalkradio.com/forwardblitz/2012/01/22/revolution-now-2012 or call us at 424-675-8317 and tell us your story.