We need to declare indepenence again! Where is Jefferson when we need him?

Well it has been 232 years!  Actually things went sour quite a while ago, but that is the time from then until now.  The last really strong thoughts I had about a new American revolution were during the Vietnam War.  I wasn't alone.  Not at all.  I just reached over to my bookshelf to pull out my copy of the book that sums that all up.  It is entitled: The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a Long Revolution  Assembled by Mitchell Goodman, A Charter Member of the Great Conspiracy, in behalf of the movement.  It is 752 pages long and the size of a big city phone book.  Here's how it starts:

WHAT IT IS

This is not a book of the mind alone.  There are minds here - some of the best in America.  The Movement is not mindless.  It is a book of bodies, souls, minds - inseperable.

It is a book of the Movement experience; ideas, theories, analysis are set inthe experiential context.  It is a book of acts, of voices, plans, hopes - of how to live, what to do.

 It may seem funny that we have such a document.  I'll bet almost no one has seen it.  Look beyond the break and allow me to share some things with you.  I think they matter very much right now.

First of all who was Mitchell Goodman ?  He was many things, but one thing he did is particularly important to me since I was deeply involved in it.  We like to think we were a major force in stopping the draft.  We organized a draft card turn in that involved thousands.  We collected draft cards all over the country and the day before the Pentagon Demonstration we turned them in to the Justice Department.  As an ex Marine Officer I was classified 4D but was required by law to carry a draft card.  As a university faculty member and  organizer I wanted to share the act of Civil disobedience with the young who were putting themselves on the line so I turned in my card on national TV on the steps of the Justice Department.  Our plan was to commit Civil disobedience to challange the draft laws.  The Justice Department saw it differently.  They prosecuted our five top leaders under an obscure 1918 conspiracy law:

Mitchell Goodman, the impassioned author who organized an antidraft protest that led to the trial of the Boston Five in 1968 and helped galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War, ...It was known as the Spock trial, for its most famous defendant, Dr. Benjamin Spock. And it was another well-known defendant, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., the Yale chaplain, who had hit on the idea that led to the trial: gathering up draft cards from young war protesters in Boston and elsewhere and turning them in to the Justice Department in Washington.

But it was Mr. Goodman who had prodded Mr. Coffin into action. It was Mr. Goodman who spent a series of 14-hour days planning and coordinating the protest, and it was he who was aptly described by the prosecutor as ''the detail man'' of the conspiracy to ''counsel, aid and abet violations of the Selective Service law.''

When the trial, in Federal District Court in Boston, was over, one defendant, Marcus Raskin, the co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, was acquitted. The four others, including Mr. Goodman and Michael Ferber, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate student, were found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to two years in prison.

The convictions were overturned, and charges against Dr. Spock and Mr. Ferber were dismissed, but the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, ruled that while the judge had erred in his instructions to the jury, the evidence against Mr. Coffin and Mr. Goodman was so strong that they could be tried again.

Not surprisingly, the prosecution was not renewed.

The draft ended some time later.  What our role was I'll never really be able to sort out.  The whole thing galvanized a spirit in many of us that we were not acting illegally, our government was.  We also knew it had to be stopped.

The introduction to the book has this to say, among many other things:

Something is happening.   It goes deep, deeper than we know.  Some call it revolution.  Too easily, at times.  Too simply.  Often without knowing what they mean, until the word is thinned out.  Yet it persists.  And we are no longer afraid of the word. [My emphasis].  We begin to see what it means, in peculularly American terms.  There is a revolution.  No other word for it.   It has only begun.  It lives in the minds of a handful of men and and in the hearts of many more.  It shows itself in our most intimate lives, and on the streets.  It will take a long time - a long revolution.  If it succeeds there will be no end to it.

  Naive?  Foolish ideas?  Maybe.  More profoundly, the absence of any serious notion of counter revolution is the real key.  We were becoming effective.  Political movements against established power that do not stir those powers to strike back with might are really not doing much.  We learned the cost of our sometimes clumsy, sometimes very effective efforts to change this country.  History is a strange thing.  Where is any knowledge of these things now?  I have this book.  You have been exposed to a few words from it.  Where else can you learn about what went on back then?  Who will tell you?  

There are many many people who carefully rewrote the history of that era so that no chance that the ideas would live on.  They were dangerous for both sides.  It was far beyond the kind of thing we experience with our elections and our candidates.  

So here we are again.  We are beginning to get signs that the election may be ours and that we may still have much to accomplish beyond that if we really want our country back.  So as we celebrate the event that changed the world tomorrow we have much to think about.  Where are we?  Where have we been?  Where are we going?  At 72, I have a sinking feeling that I may not live to see the kind of country I have dreamed about all my life.  I worry that it will fall further into the political quagmire than it already has.  

Then there is the election.  I am excited about it!  I look to senator Obama to be a leader like I have hoped for for many many years.  He is writing a new declaration of independence yet many will want something very different.  The revolution we tasted in the Vietnam era was bitter and costly even as it was being thought about.  That that embryo was aborted may have been a good thing, I'll never really know.  The aftermath and the counter revolution has been ugly.  Let us hope together that this time we will do it right!