Even when all 13 colonies finally signed on the dotted line in 1776, they still didn't have a plan for a new system of government to replace the old. And while the Declaration may have been a poetic statement of collective principles and grievances, it offered nothing in terms of solutions.
The Continental Army was a ragtag, disorganized, unruly band of volunteers who seemingly didn't stand a snowball's chance against the crushing might of Britain's superior forces. These men fought an eight-year war without so much as a blueprint for what the hell they were going to do with their hard-earned freedom should they emerge victorious. Once the war was won, it took another six years of bickering, compromise, and re-tooling the Constitution before we finally had a supreme law of the land. All the while, Congress ran the United States because there was no leader; the new nation didn't elect its first president until 1789.
All in all, the process of the American Revolution comprised 35 years--a generation.
What is happening in the streets today is being hailed by some as the Second American Revolution, and it may very well be that our tree of liberty is beginning to bloom anew. By that historical comparison, the agitators who are taking it to the streets would be the modern day Patriots. The majority who tell them to just sit down, shut up, get a job, and stop whining already are the Loyalists. All of these empty arguments being made today against the Patriots as a bunch of naive, ungrateful, disorganized fools are nothing new under the sun . W e Americans have heard that old saw somewhere before. Washington, Adams, Jefferson and even Tom Paine didn't have all the answers in the beginning, either.
Not until 1774 did the First Continental Congress convene to draft an official list of grievances, a statement of principles, and plans for organized resistance to England within the colonies. This bold first step towards independence had been 20 years in the making.
Today's revolutionaries actually seem to be moving forward much, much faster. Already, an Occupy Wall Street working group is calling for the election of a National General Assembly to meet on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia. According to the 99% Declaration, " 870 Delegates shall set forth, consider and vote upon a PETITION OF GRIEVANCES to be submitted to all members of Congress, The Supreme Court and President and each of the political candidates running in the nationwide Congressional and Presidential election in November 2012." Now that sounds like a plan!
It took many decades of unsustainable excess and deep-rooted corruption for America to reach this critical stage of mass unrest. So no one should expect us to get out of this mess tomorrow.
We're done with trusting politicians to sort it out for us. We have finally come to the inevitable conclusion that if we want the job done right, we'll have to do it ourselves. We The People will fix this, even if we don't know quite how to do it just yet. We will win some, lose some, fall on our faces sometimes, and learn from our mistakes as our forefathers did. If it took them at least 35 years to come up with a system that worked . I nstant gratification is not something we can expect this time around, either. Give it time. Better yet, roll up your sleeves and help if you want change to happen faster. Many hands make light work, and we've got a hell of a lot of work to do.
To borrow from President Kennedy, who outlined the New Frontier's goals for the 1960s in his inaugural address and called his fellow Americans to action: "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."
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