Reply #148: Help or hurt is an important consideration; it's the thing to be sensitive to, but the bottom line

[Land Shark]

is this:

Americans, though their dream is constantly hijacked for other purposes, nevertheless remember the real dream when they hear it in abolition, Lincoln, women's suffrage, civil rights, I Have a Dream.

Subgroups can bond around particular language and concepts, but the real test is just this: THese guys, whatever they are, are fakers, usurpers, it's not the real dream and it's not US.

Once the above is nailed down, then I ask you:

Do you think americans can really lose a moral struggle for their own country's most precious ideals ON THEIR OWN SOIL? No, NOT IF THEY REALIZE THIS IS WHAT IT IS!

The only ways to fail is (a) not to keep our eyes on the prize and know the dream, and see the difference clearly with what IS at present, and (b) failure or refusal to engage and educate our fellow people so that they, too, may see.

Once again, I can't quote Paine too much, he speaks to the enormity of the task as well as the tendency towards impatience and frustration:

"It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy."