A few days ago, I made comments on a new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. For those who might have missed my earlier blog posting, this new book is focused on what is, essentially, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence.
Today, let me draw attention to the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence. It reads as follows:
For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor (emphasis added).
Yesterday, I implicitly suggested that we need, now, in the United States of America, to be considering how to carry out a new kind of "revolution" - consisting of genuine, fundamental, and "real" changes to our government and how it is working - and I did so by highlighting Hannah Arendt's wonderful book, On Revolution. Arendt celebrates our revolution, but is not uncritical, and I think that is the correct way to consider the genesis and the current status of "Democracy in America" (to appropriate the title of an important book by Alexis de Tocqueville).
In short, we need to make some changes around here, and it's our obligation to do so, starting now, should we wish to continue to exercise the important obligations of "self-government," which was the aim and ambition of the American Revolution, now 250 years old.
Should we wish to take back effective responsibility for "running the place," as I like to put it, we need to change what we are doing in our "normal lives." At least some of us need to do that. Small groups of "friends," who are "pledged" to enter into politics, to make needed changes, is how truly revolutionary changes can be achieved. There is no better way to understand what is required than to see what those who signed the Declaration of Independence claimed was necessary. To effect the kind of changes needed (and explicitly disavowing every and any thought that "violence" is to be used), we need to mobilize both "our lives" and "our fortunes."
We need, in other words, to reallocate our time (our lives) and to invest our reallocated time into activities that can shift political power from the elite and entitled to all of us "ordinary people." That means, just to be clear, that group of ordinary women and men who have been designated, from the inception, as "we, the people." That is the group that Abraham Lincoln reminded us is who we really are, as citizens of the United States of America.
How we spend our individual time, what we do with it, and how we mobilize our financial capabilities, as great or small as they may be, will be determinative of the outcomes that can transmute our "possibilities" into "realities."
For those who understand that it is, in fact, a "sacred honor" to be called to "self-government," and to achieve in reality what that phrase demands of us, there is much work ahead.
And a whole New Year, just beginning, to address the tasks before us!
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