Worthy Dreams

Editor's note: The following is a speech delivered at a Rolling Thunder Tour event in Manchester, NH.

Well here we all are again, some of us together for the first time but many of us now getting to know each other rather well. This has been a special time in the history of our nation. Through our anger and our pain we have also found great joy. It is the joy of making our lives mean something – it is the joy of connecting with deep values and worthy dreams.

And in the past few months I have come to understand that human values and truth are winning, as they sometimes do. They are lighting up the dark and challenging the politics of fear and lies with the politics of love and truth.

We don't know how many times we will be able to meet together – life is short – so we should savor these moments. We should take a moment to recognize what has been done by a small group of these friends here present and so many others around our nation.

One of my favorite moments in this hard time was when, in a District of Columbia courtroom, as I stood accused of reading the Declaration of Independence aloud in the Capitol Rotunda, and for which I and many of my friends had been arrested and jailed – we were there to push for campaign finance reform and to ask Congress to declare its independence from special interest money – the judge passed judgment on us. He could have kept us in jail for some time, of course. What dear old Judge Hamilton said was exactly this – it is from the court record:

"As you know, the strength of our great country lies in its Constitution and her laws and in her courts. But more fundamentally, the strength of our great country lies in the resolve of her citizens to stand up for what is right when the masses are silent. And, unfortunately, sometimes it becomes the lot of the few, sometimes like yourselves, to stand up for what's right when the masses are silent."

Well, he wasn't just speaking to me and to my friends in that room. He was speaking to you – you brave souls who dared be Americans when that meant speaking out for the soul of your nation, against a torrent tide of madness. It became the lot of the few to speak out even when the greatest newspapers and news broadcasters were silent, and when our very Congress was spineless and complicit. You stood in small groups on street corners with signs. You wrote letters and you protested and you emailed, emailed, emailed and shared what you could find out. You suffered name-calling and abuse and many of you went to jail. Our founding fathers led a revolution with bravery, but they were a strong brotherhood of great men acting together, and sometimes it was just you, and just him, and just her, and I want to say how proud I am of all of you, for the tide has turned and you have turned it.

And sure, we have a long way to go, and the suffering is only beginning, and the forces of fear are still in their ascendancy, though we now see their mortal arc. We know now that a sleeping nation has awakened and our dear neighbors and our Congressmen and newsmen who were so long asleep or so bent under their anchor desks in fear have begun to remember who they are and what there jobs are.

And who was it who held the torch while they were away but you, and you and you – ye band of sisters and brothers?

Can we see forward to a time when the American government represents, all over the world, the best and happiest instincts of the American people? Can we see a time when we, each of us, can live in responsible balance with nature and all other people? Can we evolve to our better selves as a nation, whose people are at the reins of our own government and whose harsh past, harsh from its very beginning, can move into the light? What better thing have we got to do?