Beware the risen people...

[pscot]

I picked this up over at Altercation. The inimitable Charlie Pierce on what's at stake here:

".let old Lyndon have the last word. On the evening of March 15, 1965, he gave the greatest speech any president has given in my lifetime. He told Congress and the nation that it was time to put aside the nonsense and let black people vote. "There is no constitutional issue here," said the last real Texan president. "The command of the Constitution is plain...There is no issue of states rights or national rights. There is only the message of human rights."

This is why I've come to so love this election -- because it is going to be decided by how many people decide to get off the parliamentary side of their arses and vote. If enough of them do, then John Kerry's picking a Cabinet by this time next Tuesday. If enough of them do, then we can have not merely a defeat, but a resounding public repudiation, of the cramped and twisted view of America held by an administration that holds in fundamental contempt a lot of ideas that are a great deal more noble than the members of the current government ever will be.

"Beware the risen people," warned the doomed Irish rebel (and distant relative, if family legend is to be believed) Padraic Pearse, "you who slander and scorn."

God, this can be a great country when it rouses itself and begins to move.

And that is what is left at the end of it. The people standing in line, refusing to be misled, or frightened, or cheated out of their most basic voice, ferociously demanding through all the noise their most basic right to be heard. Stay there, you lovely people. Give water to those who are thirsty and food to those who are hungry and a shoulder to lean on to those who get weary. Pack the polls. Swamp the bastards, setting off a floodtide that even Republicans won't be able to steal themselves out from under.

...Keep in your hearts the advice that the boxing trainer gave Joe Louis before the second fight with Max Schmeling. Joe was afraid of being cheated out of a victory.

Joe, the trainer told him, let your right hand be your referee.

Let your ballots -- millions of them -- be your Supreme Court justice.

All of you, standing in line, is what they all fear -- the administration, of course, but also the cheap political gabbing class that has so abdicated its serious work in favor of tinpot performance skills that would embarrass Soupy Sales. Do any of you believe that Little Tim, or Tuckerboy, or any of them have more to say about this election that Eminem does, or Bruce Springsteen, or everyone of you? That line is a living, breathing, voting rebuke to the professional cynicism by which truth is rendered merely a tactic, less effective than most.

Be proud of being in that line. As Lyndon concluded on that night long ago, "Their cause must be our cause, too ... and we...shall...overcome!'"