A Holy Book Not Yet Promulgated?

 By the time I got to college it was called Political Science.

I considered making that my major.

Not because of the upscale name - it had in grade school been called "Civics".

And that name just didn't stir me.

In grade school.

Or ever.

The reason I didn't make Political Science my major was because Doctor Cox made History so exciting I wanted to absorb it.

"Weird" I thought to myself back then; "I hated all those dates that was history back in High School; now I truck them - all those dates - out when I start telling the stories of Lincoln, or Cromwell, or Churchill, or Henri IV, or Napoleon, or Mao, or Eisenhower, or Truman or Hitler, or all the others that I now find to be so interesting.

Watch the movie A Little Chaos.

Alan Rickman's Louis XIV is so human that the mid to late 1600s come alive to us.

Here and now.

You might remember a date, not because it was of any use but because you were there.

And that's what we need.

We need Americans - us - to be "here" "there", and "every fucking where".

Intellectually and politically and empathetically.

We didn't start as so many of us today are, as docile donnieLand cattle being fattened for the slaughter for donnie's family's net worth.

Which, I guess, makes America great?

We started as a nation led by the first big picture guerilla warrior in history.

I am not even going to try to recount his accomplishments or his virtues, his frailties or, even, his name.

Because if you don't know any of that I have already made my point.

I was watching one of Sarah Longwell's brilliant tenacles into America's mind tonight.

They were saying that part of our terminally fatal decline within our boundaries and beyond our boundaries in the world has been due to the abandonment of "Civics" in K-12 education.

That may be true.

It probably is true.

But I think its abandonment is a symptom not the malady.

The malady is that it was abandoned because nobody teaching it had a fire in their belly.

Anymore.

Like Doctor Cox.

Or Father Harrington.

Sociology falls into stuff we ought to know.

And he made it so interesting.

Father Harrington, that is.

America, I have heard, is not easy.

I think Michael Douglas said that.

You have to know that you live in a country that said, for first time ever, "we the people are going to run this thing".

And all of us ought to cheer and gather around that simple statement's flagpole.

Instead many of us gather around demagogues and assholes.

Here is my idea:

• We exhume Civics from its grave
• We rename it "Understanding the Revolution"
• We deploy to its purveyance Americans with fire in their bellies for America: The Declaration; The Constitution; not Project 2025.
• We make screening the movie The American President mandatory to its lesson plan
• We make screening the movie Dave mandatory to its lesson plan
• Those two movies put the "story" into history; only the brain dead can miss their message; and it doesn't hurt that kids like really good movies.
• We make reading The Great Rehearsal mandatory course content with massive extra credit for discussing it en masse in class.
• We make knowledge of and contact with the indigenous people who used to occupy "our" land natural and mandatory.
• We replace "the lost cause" with the story of the Tulsa Massacre.
• And all the other black history that has been hidden from most of us.
• We make The Pledge of Allegiance our national, non-sectarian, prayer instead of all that "christian" bullshit palmed off on the weak minded among us to the ever-increasing net worth of those who palm that shit off.
• And we all look across the vast crowds of us and thank god for those vast crowds of us and swear on whatever holy book there be at hand - The Parable of the Sower comes to mind - that we will all go forward as one indivisible nation - all of us, even those who have had the guts to get here "without permission or papers or golden donnie visas" and love one another as fellow Americans.
• We are an idea, after all, not a transaction; and ideas live down morons, fools and wanna be dictators.
• If there really is a god and that god is on our side.
• A future vision:
• We relegate hate to donnie and his spawn, in prisons we all hope, but at least not in our way anymore, we choose to believe.
• And the rest of us can and will get back to the business of our HOLY Revolution.

AMEN