No Kings! An Idea With Deep Roots!

Between the early 1300s and the American Revolution, Europe saw hundreds of popular uprisings, from the English Great Rising of 1381 to the German Peasants’ War of 1525, from the Diggers of St. George’s Hill in 1649, to hundreds of smaller, local, less well-known uprisings. Almost all were put down with great violence and brutality, yet the resistance always rose up again. The human yearning for freedom, opportunity and equality simply cannot be suppressed.

Those who crafted the U.S. Constitution were aware of this history. They knew from hard-lived experience that vesting absolute power in one man, or an elite few, is a really, really bad idea. Their ideas were shaped by the example of self-government and federation they saw in the indigenous Nations of this continent, honed over 10,000 years. They incorporated beautiful ideals of liberty and justice for all, and they made horrible compromises out of fear of revolts by their own underclasses and to appease the slaveholders among them. Despite these contradictions, they crafted a government capable of reform and improvement, that over time and with immense effort has broadened to assure greater equality and fairness. And they devised a system of checks and balances to assure that no autocrat could ever again assume supreme power in this land.

Now those checks and balances are stretched to their limit, and a would-be king and his harem of oligarchs and liars are doing their best to break it. It is time to march, again. As I head out to the No Kings March today, as I hope you are too, know that we don’t march alone. Wat Tyler and John Ball are with us, and the market women of Paris who stormed Versaille, the abducted Africans who overthrew the slavemasters of Haiti, the Witches and heretics who refused to recant. We march with Spartacus, Geronimo, Judah Maccabee, Sitting Bull, Boudica, Nzinga, with the partisans and soldiers and so many of our own grandparents who fought fascism in the ‘40s—with heras and heros of every continent and heritage who stood up for justice in their time.

Now it’s our time. Be glad—it’s a gift to be alive in such a time, when every small action can make a difference. Come out to the streets today, and don’t be afraid. We march with friends and allies and kin, and we never march alone.

The ancestors are with us.

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