Dear Amy:

I enjoyed seeing you this week. Seems like we have much to do!

Last Tuesday, our people and our nation were given a gift.

From early morning to late at night, my brother, a few friends and I worked a precinct in San Miguel, New Mexico, where nothing but good people live: farm workers, shop owners, retired teachers and a few students.

We did the work of democracy all day; we talked/discussed politics and gave rides to home bound elderly citizens who needed to get to a polling site. Then at 9 p.m. we were called to the Doña Ana County courthouse by the County Chair. There, a dozen guys in dark business suits, lawyers from San Diego and Marin County hired by the Republican national committee, were working just as hard to knock out the ballots of citizens that we had just worked so hard to secure.

In democracy, rarely are values and actions so clearly contrasted.

Hard times mean good work. More people are engaged, more are thinking, more are resolved to act than ever in my lifetime. What we need to do is to take the energy beyond talk, beyond anger, even beyond precinct walking and civic debate to concrete democratic action like a free press, serious forums, ballot initiatives and support for the many great candidates who will be born of the heat of this era.

What happened in 1900 will happen once again.

As progressives, we must articulate the message that makes America unique in the history of the world. With all her flaws, with the dramatic and recent inequalities in income and influence, our democracy is still the best expression of human ideals in the history of human endeavor. So ours is a basic message that has been repeated in every generation from Jefferson to Lincoln, from Roosevelt to Kennedy. Ours is the message of hope, equality, opportunity and justice that has inspired men and women across the world since 1776.

Today is much like the era of 1900 that spawned the original progressives: robber barons run government; regressive tax policies replace progressive taxes; a massive tax burden is shifted from the wealthy to the worker; income increases in the top 1% and declines in nearly all other deciles; inheritance taxes on millionaires go down, tuition taxes on students go up; the middle class American dream can no longer be sustained because the ‘net living wage’ after paying for consumption taxes will not pay for food, housing, health, retirement with enough to educate kids; tax cuts for the wealthy produce program cuts for middle and low income families in key areas like CHIP, pregnant women’s health and public education; government is corrupted by the wealthy at every level with no bid contracts to major donors who then push ‘privatization’ concepts to reap the corporate profits from campaign contributions; illegal campaign practices run amok where influential leaders like Tom De Lay use power and position to make corporations deliver ‘administrative’ monies, push polls, TV ads and 527s to elect Texas House Speakers and trash Presidential candidates with Swift Boat tactics; radical strategies like re-redistricting deliver a coup de etat in the US House; public attention is diverted from corruption to wars.

We have seen it before, never on this scale.

The good news?

Democracy will prevail, but she needs her defenders.

What do we do? How does a moral citizen engage? What is our message? What do we need to do next Tuesday and the week after that?

Our role is the same as it has been since this great experiment in liberty was launched in 1776. We are each engaged citizens, we are the yeoman farmers of Jefferson, we are the shop owners and freemen of Lincoln, the working families of Roosevelt and Clinton; we are each bulwarks of freedom, educated Americans who share widely the values of justice, equality, liberty and tolerance that make our government work so that all can engage in the pursuit of happiness based on what is in their heart, head and soul, not what is in their wallet. Ours is a nation founded in principles of fair play and tolerance, where all citizens must do the heavy lifting that democracy demands, not cede that work to a lobbyist or talk show host who has other interests to protect.

We are fighting to invent at home what Bush and Cheney admit we are fighting for in Iraq: a liberal democracy.

We want an America that is just, that treats every citizen with dignity, where leaders defend constitutions and basic freedoms from those that seek to silence opposing views; an America whose courts are objective, where lawyers fight for freedom and defend the Constitution without fear of retribution.

We want an America that is fair, where every man and woman has the benefits and duties that come with citizenship in a great democracy, where taxes are based on an ability to pay, where well conceived programs like public education give meaning to the words of Thomas Jefferson that “all men are created equal”and invest in the potential of our people so that the next generation is more prosperous than the last, where essential programs that increase our human capital are funded and improved, not pilloried and privatized to benefit influential vendors who then use the profits to fund certain candidates in a cycle of corruption.

We want an America where government is of, by and for the people; where a middle class family can thrive, not just survive. Where a “net living wage” after taxes can pay for food, pay for housing, pay for health care, pay for kids to get educated; where the values of fair taxes take equally from the wealthy and the worker and do not leave a soldier in Iraq paying more that a millionaire in Milwaukee; where American entrepreneurs are rewarded and supported not outsourced, and where corporations bear a fair tax burden and are not dealt tax breaks to subsidize in foreign lands predatory labor and environmental practices long ago abandoned in western democracies.

We want an America where the wisdom of our founding fathers is honored through a true separation of church and state, so that the head of government does not also become the head of some sect or religion, and convince the people through the power of his pulpit that he is the messenger of God; where “morals and values” mean tolerance and unity, not division and mean spirit; and where the meek might inherit the earth, or at least some tiny part of the American dream, not just predatory lending practices and more sales taxes.

And we want an America that is strong because her traditional values of liberty, democracy and equality act as a beacon of hope to the peoples of the world whose governments join us in that vision because of its demonstrated power in the course of human affairs, not an America whose old friends are coerced into preemptive wars based on uncertain or false threats, a policy so fundamentally in conflict with fair play and freedom that it has put popularly elected leaders at risk from Britain to Spain to Japan.

So what do we do?

First, we get out of our chairs. Our democracy is not a spectator sport. Let’s do what our mothers did in the Civil Rights movement, our fathers did in World War II, our great, great grandfathers did during the American Revolution, let’s enter the arena and defend our Democracy.

Next, let’s speak openly, honestly and boldly the language of a Great America, a progressive America, where all men and women are created equal, where a President and a schoolteacher are equal under the law, where in a single generation a Mexican American rancher can run for the US Senate or an Irish schoolteacher can run a great company; where government is of, by and for people, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not for the benefit of the plutocratic few at the expense of the many.

Let us affirm by our lives and actions the values of liberty, justice, equality, tolerance and religious freedom that have attracted the talent of the world to our shores, where by the sweat of our brow, the work of our brain and the drive in our heart each of us can reach the highest and best value that our Creator intended for us.

Let us devote our civic time, the time we have after faith, family and work, to deliver our best effort to make better the best Democracy the world has known.

And as we say here in this part of America, let’s do it “hoy” not mañana!

Adelante con ganas!