Thanks Peter. Good insights. Don't worry about the videos. I went to youtube to try to find examples of protests for immigration, climate control and gay rights, three issues that I think are going to loom large in the next few months.

Several years ago I read a quote by radical cartoonist Jules Feiffer that got me interested in the relationship between radicals and liberals in effecting social change. He said in an interview:

"I've always seen liberals as people who've taken radical ideas, whether from socialists or communists, finding ways to redefining them, relabeling them, reforming them, compromising them, and then improving the society with them. And the liberal's job generally has been to process and homogenize the more radical notions out there for some time and make them acceptable to the mass society. And to that extent, liberals have played an important part. That liberals innovate anything is questionable. But that they innovate anything worth innovating is doubtful. The innovation comes from more radical sources generally."

Over the years I read a few books that seem to show a similar relationship between radicals and reformers in history. One book is Arguing about Slavery: the great battle in the United States Congress by William Lee Miller. This book details how New Englanders were sending petitions to Congress to try to get them to debate on the abolition of slavery. Southern Congressmen suppressed the petitions under a gag rule to not allow any debate on slavery to take place in Congress. John Quincy Adams felt this was wrong, and in his fight against the gag rule, he became educated by abolitionists on the evils of slavery and became an ardent supporter of abolition.

Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union by Paul and Stephen Kendrick is a great book about how Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists influenced Abraham Lincoln to take stronger stands for the enlistment of African Americans into the Union Armies, for the civil rights of African Americans and for the abolition of slavery.

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Raymond Arsenault documents how the Freedom Riders forced the Kennedy administration to enforce federal laws banning segregation on interstate travel and pushed Kennedy to take a stronger stand for civil rights. Kennedy was initially lukewarm to civil rights, hesitant to offend Southern Democrats whom he needed to pass his economic policies. Kennedy was more focused on the Soviet Union and the Cold War, but the Freedom Riders and the Civil Rights activists pushed him to be a stronger civil rights advocate.

You're right Peter about Obama. I think Obama is sympathetic to progressive causes, but I think he's going to stay a centrist unless he receives the same pressure that John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy received from the radical activists of their day.

Angelo & Peter,
The Everyday Citizen blog and this post are terrific examples of the change we need ... citizens in thoughtful dialogue.

The media does so little these days to provide context or connect the dots. It gives as much weight and coverage to the impulsive behavior of a prominent golfer (which has little or no impact on the rest of us) as it does to the systematic actions of our elected officials to transfer health and prosperity from everyday citizens to a tiny majority.

Let's keep talking and bring some balance into the national dialogue.