To my fellow patriots, who are rallying today in state capitals and major cities around the country in support of the government workers of Wisconsin:
I deeply regret that we were unable to make the long journey to Santa Fe to join you today. We support you from afar, as we have supported from afar the beloved granddaughter who is at this very moment with the freedom fighters in Madison, as she has been from the outset.
Like those throughout the Arab world fighting nonviolently for freedom, you are predominantly young, seeking to restore the democracy we older Americans let slip away. Why did we allow giant corporations, plutocrats, oligarchs, to capture our democracy? Avarice. Ignorance. Distraction. Moral sloth. Ethical indifference. Self-deceit. Deafness to uncomfortable truth. History, I fear, will judge us harshly as it will the leaders we allowed to be "elected."
We have placed a terrible burden on your shoulders. We gave away our moral standing when we allowed our leaders to lie us into a degrading, illicit war, which is continuing endlessly, draining our resources and plunging us ever deeper into debt. We forfeited our most precious rights, enshrined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, when we failed to rebel against the so-called PATRIOT Act. Party labels aside, we have persisted in electing a kakistocracy to public office, ignorant or cowardly or amoral individuals eager to trade the public good for private profit.
In the outcome of your struggle lies the fate of the nation. The power of organized workers is the last remaining counter-force in these United States to the corporate takeover of everything. Only you stand between the hope for a rebirth of freedom, and a dictatorship of the obscenely rich.
The odds are against you, as they are against the masses of the common people in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and the other Arab countries where, by some miracle of the human intellect and spirit, a vast clamoring for human rights has spontaneously erupted. They are seeking what my generation had, and squandered.
It remains for you, the young and idealistic, to fight to regain them. We have handed to you, patriots in the capitol squares of America, what our greatest president called a "great unfinished task." You must see to it that government of the people, by the people and for the people does not perish from the earth.
You are the last, the best, the only hope. May you find the strength, the courage, the resolve to win this great battle on behalf of all The People.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
