At 4 am in a sleepless rage I recollected that Obama
said history does not repeat but it does rhyme. In the words of Murrow:
“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplice… We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world…”
And I cast my mind back to a poem I learned as a child about the revolutionaries and how they stood up to the superpower of their day:
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
Paul Revere’s Ride
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807 –1882
Today I wish us all to raise the cry of defiance and claim our heritage of ideas and courage.
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