{"id":2627,"date":"2012-04-26T17:55:02","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T21:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2627"},"modified":"2013-09-12T10:57:03","modified_gmt":"2013-09-12T14:57:03","slug":"rebuild-the-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2627","title":{"rendered":"Rebuild the Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebuild the Dream<\/a>, by Van Jones
\nI picked up my copy at my friendly local bookstore (Village Bookstore<\/a> in Littleton NH- may they live forever) yesterday, and read all the way through it.\u00a0 The first part is painful, about the missed opportunities of Obama, his administration, and the progressives.\u00a0 But Van Jones is so intelligent and knowledgeable, and the story carries on through the Tea Party, and the Occupy movement, to a final chapter that is totally inspiring.\u00a0 Don’t give up!\u00a0 Don’t ever give up!\u00a0 The arc of the moral universe is long BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE.<\/p>\n

His own words:
\n\u201cJefferson … accepted that the nation was founded on higher ideals than his generation could embody.
\n\u201cAnd yet those very ideals became our true north, calling us always to higher ground.\u00a0 \u201cWe hold these truths to be self evident, that all … are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.\u201d\u00a0 The story of America is the story of an imperfect people, struggling to bring our founding Reality closer, ever closer to the beauty of our founding Dream.<\/p>\n

\u201cRemember, every cause and constituency that people of conscience care about was in the garbage can, as recently as 1900.\u00a0 At the turn of the last century, women couldn\u2019t vote.\u00a0 African Americans and other people of color had no rights at all.\u00a0 Workers had no rights or security; there were no weekends; there was not one paid federal holiday; there was no middle class to speak of.\u00a0 Kids were toiling in factories.\u00a0 There were no environmental protections at all.\u00a0 Not only did lesbians and gays have no rights; they didn\u2019t even have a specific designation or acknowledged term in the English language.\u00a0 That was where we were in 1900.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 p244<\/p>\n

He goes on to talk about the people who wanted something better than this, who said \u201cAmerica will never be perfect.\u00a0 But we can have a much more \u2018perfect union\u2019 than this.\u201d
\n\u201cThose heroes and heroines worked day after day, year after year, decade after decade, often risking their lives\u2014to bring about progress<\/em>.\u00a0 Some were jailed.\u00a0 Some were beaten.\u00a0 Some were martyred.\u00a0 But they didn\u2019t give up.\u00a0 By the end of the twentieth century, we had a much fuller expression of American Democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose heroes forged an extraordinary century, characterized by the birth of a mass middle class.\u00a0 They made heroic advances in the areas of worker\u2019s rights, environmental protection, equal opportunity, and more.\u00a0 What the world came to call \u201cThe American Way\u201d is, in many ways, just an amalgam of all their hopes and aims: that America could be a thriving, entrepreneurial nation, where work is respected, workers are protected, the middle class is growing, and opportunity is expanding to more and more of our people.<\/p>\n

“…\u00a0 Some progressives take umbrage at the notion of American exceptionalism, seeing nothing but arrogance and jingoism in the idea.\u00a0 But America is exceptional if for no other reason than because Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr made us exceptional.\u00a0 The suffragettes made America exceptional.\u00a0 Dolores Huerta and C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez made America exceptional. The Stonewall rebellion made America exceptional.\u00a0 Over the decades and centuries, countless good and decent people of every color and every class have marched, worked, bled, and died to make this country exceptional.\u00a0 We should be proud of their past achievements.\u00a0 And we should speak from that place of pride as we share our dreams for America\u2019s future.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 p245<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebuild the Dream, by Van Jones I picked up my copy at my friendly local bookstore (Village Bookstore in Littleton NH- may they live forever) yesterday, and read all the way through it.\u00a0 The first part is painful, about the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-interesting-link"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}