‘Freedom’s Fray’: Democracy at Work
Our democracy doesn’t just permit you to speak freely, but it requires it. It’s through the freedoms of speech and press that our democracy defends itself, strengthens itself, and grows itself.
Our democracy doesn’t just permit you to speak freely, but it requires it. It’s through the freedoms of speech and press that our democracy defends itself, strengthens itself, and grows itself.
“The West Wing”, Season 3, Episode 12: “100,000 Airplanes” (January 16, 2002) SCENE: The team is gathered in the Oval Office. President Bartlett has told them that he wants to include something in his State of the Union speech to say that we will cure cancer. His advisers explain, one by one, why he can’t…
We stumbled in recent days, choosing someone who claimed greatness but delivers fear, weakness, greed, corruption, confusion. Who delivers insult, derision, and mockery to America’s friends, and platitudes, flattery, and encouragement to those who seek to harm America.
In two short years, America has surrendered its standing.
It plays on your sense of guilt that you missed an email, that you rudely ignored an email, that the sender is really interested in helping you – when, in fact, this email is just a pretense.
It took the Resistance, the nationwide gaggle of Indivisible groups, ADAPT protesters, health care advocates, and the people themselves to bring this reality to the forefront. They marched and shouted, they posted and tweeted, they emailed and called and sang, they carried photos of their friends and family, yes, they disrupted and got arrested – but mostly they told their stories.
We trust in the institution of government, a government that is, in the end, made up of all of us, all of the people, a government that creates the law by which we agree to be governed.
Republicans will openly, unashamedly say that 712,000 D.C. residents can’t have representation in Congress because it would endanger their power. That’s it. Nothing else to say.
In liberal views, if people donʻt benefit – if wages donʻt go up with productivity, if houses arenʻt affordable, if medical bankruptcies are rising, if school debt is crushing, if lives are lost – then the economy is failing.
He’s been murdering people week after week, sometimes day after day, now month after month. We’re getting used to it. It’s not a big story anymore. It isn’t the headline. It isn’t the lead story. Oh, sure, at first, some folks were shocked, outraged, demanded an investigation. At first … but not now, not anymore. It’s become normal. Dog bites man. No big deal. Happens all the time. Not news.
Almost 50 years ago, I was transfixed as a NASA astronaut climbed down a ladder and pressed his boot into the grainy surface of the moon. A week ago, I sat transfixed as NASA guided a vehicle to a soft landing in Elysium Planitia, a “flat, boring equatorial plain” on a planet 300 million miles…