Revolution Number Ten

Robert Kennedy said "Some people see things as they are and ask why; I see things as they never were and ask why not." It is safe to say that, I too, see things as they never were and I offer you a chance for change. This book is a holistic approach to the healing of our country. It attempts to deal with a very broad spectrum of our problems, how they interact and what must be done to improve the situation. For this reason the book is comprised of three parts. In part one I do my best to explain what I personally think has gone wrong and why. In part two, I offer up my solutions. In part three, I lay out the plans for transition and the terms for reconciliation. There are no chapter headings, subheadings, no tittles. Were I to lay everything out in a table of contents, I'm sure that most people would begin with part three and then proceed to their personal area of significance in part two. That kind of self-centeredness is as much to blame as anything else for where we find ourselves today. I apologize for the length of the book. I wish I could have gotten my plan across on a matchbook cover. Never the less, if you intend to judge my work by excerpt, you will have to do it without my help. Instead, make this your book, with your notes and references: study it, contemplate it. I have worked alone, without benefit of an editor. My spelling has always been bad. I may have used some words inappropriately. I may have used some big words when they were uncalled for. Forgive me. I may have made mistakes of all manner and said things that I will regret in the future. But without a plan, there can be no change. Without a consensus of which plan to enact, there can be no change. If I have misquoted or in any way said anything, which is untrue about anyone, let me apologize here at the beginning; because this work is not about hurting but healing. It is not about falsehoods; it is about a search for the truth. It is not about me, it is about Us.

Let me say first that I am an American. I've always been, simply, an American and nothing else, although I'm not always proud of the things my country does. I grew up in a time when anything and everything was possible. The nation was full of hope and of itself. But as we grew up, my generation was finding that the nation was not perfect. Still, we believed that we had the tools to change things; to right wrongs and heal old wounds. Today I think most young people are of the opinion that the protests against the war in Vietnam were somehow championed by the press and accepted by the public. The truth is that they were often not even tolerated. There was a lot more "Love it or leave it" in the land than there was debate. Protesters found themselves at odds with parents, government and society at large. But we had been inspired by the work of Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. We knew what was wrong and we were determined to fix it. So, we put an end to the "Police Action" in Vietnam, we fought racial injustice and we fought social intolerance and we fought sexual inequality: and with each new fight we built organizations, with politically powerful leaders; and the politicians played up to the leaders of our organizations until the leaders of the organizations became politicians themselves. And in time, each new power hungry individual outside the political parties, found their own cause to champion and gained their own political clout, until we as a people became so fragmented as to be politically impotent. Our inner cities are war zones. Our water is unfit to drink. Our politicians and our judges are corrupted. The list goes on and on, and yet, nearly all of our elections in 1990 [when I began this book] seemed to focus on the issue of abortion to the exclusion of all else: an issue on which the country is evenly divided. Prier to 1990, congress voted itself a $35,000 RAISE in salary over the furious objections of the whole country; then they publicly agreed not to discuss it in the 1990 elections and We took it. We voted in the same faces. We tell the world that we are a democratic society, but in fact, the government functions independently of the will of the people. Public reaction is merely pandered to. By 1994 the Democrats would be voted out of Congress and the new Republicans would move to make sweeping changes. But in the end, nothing would really change. In our furor to change the world in the 60's and 70's we handed out what little political power we had to watchdog groups that are self serving and fanatical.