War, Environmental Destruction, Recession: It's Time for a Revolution

War, starvation, disease, inflation, environmental spoliation and severe recession domestically and around the world possibly leading to a full-blown depression: these problems can only be ameliorated and resolved with popular citizen involvement and new citizen movements. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that in a democracy a publicly elected servant was not a commander but a catalyst who moves people into action by giving them the public space to take action within new and democratically agreed upon frameworks. But FDR also urged us never to forget that "the ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country."

Some 133 million people voted in 2008 elections, a record. But if all citizens do is simply vote and walk away until the next election cycle, little will be accomplished, and the nation will continue to travel down the slippery slope of disaster. We must realize that like a person, a nation needs head, heart, hand and soul not just to survive but to endure.

The surprising excitement around the elections suggests that people were "sick and tired and not going to take it anymore." With the rise of Barack Obama, there was a quality of democratic hope in which Americans announced that they were no longer passive. It seemed that they were saying that their intention was not only to judge the government, but also to participate in it.

If Obama was the first presidential candidate to truly harness the power of the Internet to win office, a new generation of Americans should be able to use the Internet 24/7 as watchdogs, not only to guard against future incursions on their freedoms by the Executive Branch and Congress, but to rollback unjust and illegal laws that have steadily chipped away at our freedoms -- and in the case of Bush II, stolen some of them outright. Obama announced that he wants his presidency to be transparent. Using the Internet in all of its permutations can be an instantaneous way of holding his feet to the democratic fire.

After the Glass Shatters

Given the anxious state of the union, this is no time to settle for mere fragments of the shattered glass. We face, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "the fierce urgency of now," by which he and we mean the unresolved American democratic problems of permanent war, economic hardship and unfairness, the fragility of the environment, class disparity, gender equality and identity, and, yes, race.

Which poses questions unique in American history: Will our first African American president, who did not run on the issue of race, initiate a national discussion to heal our racial wounds? Will the image and actions of this intelligent, charismatic leader continue to lift up African Americans and bridge the 400-year divide with white Americans when his election euphoria wears off from media overexposure and impatience with not quickly "fixing" the economy and ending the wars? Will Obama prove in his actions and words that the U.S. is in fact a human blending -- that we are all one people? Or will a black man in the White House bring old wounds to a new and even uglier surface than the covert racism of the 2008 campaigns of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (with an assist by her husband) and Sen. John McCain's running mate, Alaska Gove. Sarah Palin, who seemed to feed off slurs and threats against Obama and blacks from her white audiences?

The authors, "children of the Depression, war, the Cold War, surveillance and McCarthyism" no less worried about the future than our fellow citizens, choose to raise a brand new glass, brimming with fresh ideas, even ones mistakenly discarded, and new infusions of energy and hope for a changing and beleaguered world, and we offer a toast to this and future generations.

Adapted from the afterword of the new paperback edition (Potomac Books) of The Four Freedoms Under Siege: The Clear and Present Danger of Our National Security State by Marcus Raskin and Robert Spero.