Progressives Made This Country Great!

The right would have you believe that everything which ails this country is due to big government, taxes, and too much government spending....oh, and then you have the bunch that believes we need more religion in our lives.

The reality is that it is the lack of a PROGRESSIVE Movement that is the reason we find ourselves so overwhelmed by all that is wrong with our society.

As a society we no longer have the ideas and the people who believe in these ideas to drive us forward. We are a generation without radicals. Or as Peter Dreier states in a recent The Nation article:

The radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next. When that happens, give credit to the activists and movements that fought to take those ideas from the margins to the mainstream. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of radicals and reformers who challenged the status quo of their day.

Lets not forget that it was not all that long ago, when blacks were second class citizens, women were to be homemakers (YES, Sarah Palin, you can thank a PROGRESSIVE for all that you have thus achieved in your life!) and workers did not enjoy 8 hour work days or 5 day work weeks.

These were all utopian and radical ideals. The ideals that were expressed in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and The Bill Of Rights were also very utopian and radical at their time too! The right does not even realize that Thomas Jefferson LOST the battle over a strong central government while Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison argued for a stronger federal government.

But, like Peter Dreier continues on to say:

Unfortunately, most Americans know little of this progressive history. It isn't taught in most high schools. You can't find it on the major television networks or even on the History Channel. Indeed, our history is under siege. In popular media, the most persistent interpreter of America's radical past is Glenn Beck, who teaches viewers a wildly inaccurate history of unions, civil rights and the American left. Beck argues, for example, that the civil rights movement "has been perverted and distorted" by people claiming that Martin Luther King Jr. supported "redistribution of wealth." In fact, King did call for a "radical redistribution of economic power." Using his famous chalkboard, Beck draws connections between various people and organizations, and defines them as radicals, Marxists, socialists, revolutionaries, leftists, progressives or social justice activists—all of which leads inexorably to Barack Obama. Drawing on writings by conspiracy theorists and white supremacists, Beck presents a misleading version of America's radical family tree.

If you believe that you, "....want your country back" or if you truly fear for the future of this country and want to leave your children and grandchildren a better country and world, then understand that what you so desire from the past, what you want to rekindle, that greatness that once was AMERICA, then you have to seek out the radicals...you have to seek out the Progressives!
Then educate yourself and review the following slide shows and reflect on how each one of these Progressives changed YOUR life and allowed you to enjoy some of the most important aspects of your life that YOU now take for granted!

The Fifty Most Influential Progressives Of The 20th Century - Part 1

The Fifty Most Influential Progressives Of The 20th Century - Part 2

The Fifty Most Influential Progressives Of The 20th Century - Part 3

The future belongs to those who seek out the new and untested, it does not belong to those who keep looking back. If we are truly to overcome the problems we face as a nation today, then we must become radicals not patriots! Greatness never comes from reliving the past but from thinking outside the box.