Secondly, when are we going to start the Revolution? I just read a review of The Republican War on Science and I am itching to get started. Just when I decide that I'm being immature, and that a bloody revolution will cause more harm than good, I am reminded of just where our country is headed if drastic action is not taken. There will be no scientific advances in the US if Republicans stay in power, because there is an evil axis of fundamentalists and business working to undermine science. From global warming to secondhand smoke to evolution, Republicans are manufacturing "controversy" where none really exists. No longer content to attack the legitimacies of policies based on science, they are attacking the science itself.
Last year I prayed that the American people wake up soon, so we could vote the crazy idiots out of office, but we had huge numbers of scientists endorse Kerry and decry Bush's hostility towards science, and the American people showed they didn't care by voting for Bush anyway.
So if a slim majority of Americans are idiots, how can we change things? Well, only around a third of Americans supported the American Revolution. Another third were firmly in the English camp, and a third basically were too busy to care much. If we can get ten percent of Americans to really give a crap about the future of our country, we can leverage our numbers and convince those who we can convince to join our cause. And then we can try winning the 2008 elections. And if that doesn't work, we can find our course of action laid out in the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
A newspaper reporter said of Emma Goldman that he agreed with everything she said, and that her only problem was that she was 8000 years ahead of her time. For anarchy, perhaps, but I hope we don't have to wait that long for intelligent leadership.
At core, all this comes down to my faith -- or lack of faith -- in my American brothers and sisters. Maybe it's a lost cause, and my future lies in making aliyah, like Israelisms' Carol and Charley talked about today. Or maybe when I have been in Israel for a decade or so, I'll agitate for Revolution there, as well. But no Che posters, please.
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