February 11, 2010 08:42 PM UTC

The Challenge at Hand

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• by: Steve Harvey

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Thomas Paine’s words aren’t just a call to arms in time of revolution, bucking up dispirited soldiers. They are also a constant call to duty to the civic minded, to those who do not want to let the least rational and least kind among us shout us down and dominate our public policy.

Our souls have been tried by what has happened to health care reform. Our souls have been tried by the right-wing confusion of “liberty” with “mutual indifference.” The struggle to define who we are, what kind of a people we are, is a perpetual crisis that demands of us a public service that we must not shrink from.

Having interned at the state capitol, I know that one of the obstacles that we progressives face is the volume and vitriol of blindly ideological responses, by email and by telephone, to pending progressive legislation. We need to match, and exceed, that voice of our baser nature every time a bill like SB 10-076 comes up for a vote, telling our legislators that as a state and as a people we believe in reason and good will.

Every engaged progressive should mine his or her social networks, through Twitter, Facebook, and email, rallying others of like mind to support every piece of well-conceived progressive legislation that comes along. And we should mine those networks in the interims as well, organizing, mobilizing, ensuring that we are a people defined by reason and good will rather than by irrationality and vitriol.

Just as the 2010 election will be a battle for turn-out (and, if I might add, for getting people to vote all the way down the ticket), every day of every year is a battle for degree of engagement. The party, the ideology, the point-of-view that succeeds in rallying the most people, and motivating them to action, is the one that has the greater influence in defining who and what we are.

One lesson of history that is unambiguous is that there really is so very much at stake. All of the great tragedies of mass human cruelty, and all of the great triumphs of mass human achievement, and everything in between, were the result of how well both reasonable people of good will, and irrational people of ill will, managed to rally and motivate people to action.

The sad fact is that we are all too quick to blame the individuals who represent and express the results of this on-going struggle (the president, our senators and congresspeople, etc.), and too slow to blame ourselves for failing to do enough to turn the tide.

The buck stops with each and every one of us. It’s time, it’s always time, to step up to the plate and get the job done.