I read the now legendary WaPo article about Mary Scott O'Connor. What becomes clear very quickly to anyone with a sense of the flow of American History is the time-honored place that MSOC and her legion of Angry Agitators hold in American History.
A Metaphor... Political Rage in America accumulates like snow on a mountaintop... The accumulation during a particularly precipitous winter promises a deluge when the thaw arrives.
One tends to focus on the most prominent peaks during such times fearing the vastness of the accumulated rage in that one locale... However, such focus misses the point... The deluge does not belong to the mountain... it belongs to the storm that left it on the mountain.
So it is with Political Rage in American History. The rage of Sam Adams and his Sons of Liberties was much noted and used to divide Colonials from one another... But time proved that the rage was not a product of the Sons. Rather it was left by the onerous taxation and tyrannous actions of George III's monarchy. And it was left from north to south. The colonial governors pointed to Adams and his ilk as the mountains holding the greatest accumulation of rage... but blaming the Sons was like blaming the mountain for the snow. The monarchy's governors ignored the fact that rage had accumulated on peaks from Boston to Philadelphia to Charlottesville and when the thaw came, they were so busy looking to the northern peaks they did not see what hit them from the middle and the south. And the monarchy was swept away from America.
And again it happened with the Civil Rights Movement. The powers that be focused on the revolutionary rage of Malcolm X. But again, they were blaming the mountain for the accumulated snow. The rage in Harlem was the same rage that fell on Birmingham and on Watts. It was not produced by the Mountains of Malcom or Martin. When the thaw came that accumulated rage came down from the many mountain tops on which it rested and made for a deluge that swept away the old order and changed history.
And so it is with MSOC. She and our beloved Kossack siblings are but a few of the mountain tops on which the tundra of rage has accumulated during the brutal winter storms of the Bush/Cheney/Rove years. And when the thaw comes... and it is coming soon... the deluge will clean this country of this cult of Secrecy and Authoritarianism.
You can bet on it.