Are You Willing to Get Angry?

"There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty."

John Adams, the second president of our dear Nation, wrote these words in 1776 in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren, America's first female playwright.  I think he was onto something here...

"There must be a positive Passion for the public good...established in the Minds of the People..."  Do you have a positive Passion?  As you must know by now, I am very fond of word definitions.  "Passion" is defined as "intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction; an outbreak of anger."  Would you be willing to break out in anger for the good of the public?  What about honor?  Power?  What is it that strikes a chord within you?  Mr. Adams said that if we don't have that intense conviction (or we aren't willing to get angry about it) within our minds, then we can forget about real Liberty.  I understand from this phrase that our freedom starts from within.  Think about that.  Do you feel free, from the very depths of your being?  Do you know that you are free?

"...the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory," all of these are ours.  If we are willing to fight for them.  If there is a passion burning within us, established in our minds, to have these things, then we can begin to have a real Republic.  I like Encyclopaedia Britannica's definition of Republic, "a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, retain supreme control over the government."  You see, we have the right to vote, do demand representation from our elected officials, and to hold them accountable for the decisions they make on our behalf.  But we only retain that right, that supreme control over government, if we make our Passion for our rights public.

There is no such thing as passive activism.  For the last two and a half centuries, rights have been won, our Constitution has been interpreted time and again, not because of somebody waiting on their neighbor to take action, but because people have gotten angry.