We are the American people, strong and proud.   White and black, brown and yellow, man and woman, adult and youngster.  Brother, sister, father, mother, uncle, aunt, grandparent, grandchild.   We are Irish and Scottish and German and French, we are gentile and Jew, African and Asian, Dane and Swede. We are the end product of history's greatest ethnic smelting process. 

We are Catholic and Protestant, believer and agnostic, Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Wiccan and six thousand other religions and creeds and belief systems as well.  We have faith, or we have no faith; we are idealists and cynics, we are Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Libertarians, independents, progressives, socialists, communists, objectivists, everything and nothing. 

We believe in a day's work for a day's pay, an  honest job for an honest man, in hard work and clean living.  And we believe in something for nothing, that it's better to be lucky than smart, and that you never give a sucker an even break. 

In God we trust, all others pay cash.

We are the rich white men who first declared independence from the imperial yoke, and we are the poor black men and women they owned.  We are the red men who were pushed off their land to make way for the railroads, and the yellow men who built the railroads at gunpoint and in chains, and the white men who slaughtered and enslaved in pursuit of, and then sold tickets for and rode on, those railroads. 

We are the soldiers who slaughtered in trumped up wars to increase American territory, and we are the brown people of Mexico and Hawaii who were murdered in those wars, and we are the poor men who bought the cheap beans and pineapples that resulted from those wars and the rich men who profited from those sales. 

We are the labor leaders whose skulls were broken on picket lines, and the Irish cops who swung the night sticks.   We are the flower people who burned their draft cards while chanting "Hell no, we won't go" and we are the riot shielded peace officers who lobbed tear gas in response.  We are protesting college students, and the National Guardsmen who gunned them down.   We are the Quakers who refused to be sent off to combat, and the MPs who locked them up in Leavenworth.   We are the men and women of color who refused to sit in the back of the bus any more, and the thousands of others who marched along side them, and we are the racist crackers who turned firehoses and loosed vicious dogs in response.   We are the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, the Weathermen and the FBI.

However much we may hate the Illinois Nazis, we are the Illinois Nazis.

 We are not Iraqi, or Iranian, but someday we may be, and then, we may be ashamed at what we once did to ourselves, but for now, those people aren’t our people, and thus aren’t really people at all, so we really don't care all that much.

We are the American government, which is by the people, for the people, and of the people.  We are the voters and the voted on, the successful and the also-ran, the incumbent and the challenger, the winners and losers, the high and the low.

We are those who know the secrets, and those who are ignorant of their very existence.  We are those who vote to go to war, and those who actually go.  We are the people in charge of our children’s safety, who prey on those children in Internet chat rooms while sitting on the floor of Congress.  We are those who pay bribes, and those who take them, those who peddle influence and those who purchase it, those who break laws, and those who decline to prosecute.   We are the activist judiciary, the unitary executive, the mostly supine legislature.   We are those who impeach over acts of adultery, and refuse to impeach over crimes against humanity. 

We did not have sex with that woman, but we believe strongly in the rule of law.

We triangulate and count the cost, we hoard our political capital and choose our battles.  We stand on principle when it won’t cost us votes, we stall investigations and classify reports.  We rig the vote, we cage the polling lists, we demand ID to prevent vote fraud. 

We believe in old time religion and San Francisco values, we support the troops and we stay the course, we swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, and then we vote to get rid of habeus corpus.

All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of justice.

And the beatings will continue until morale improves.

We are mostly unaware of the ironies implicit in every action of our political system. 

We believe in change, and we should, because we are seeing change right now.  Change That We Can Believe In is all around us; it is the change from “I will filibuster any bill that contains retroactive immunity for the telecoms” to “National security trumps immunity and I will vote for this bill even if it contains immunity”.  And we can like it, or lump it, because in November, we can vote for the liar we like a little less than the liar we like a little more, or we can vote for the liar we like a little more than the liar we like a little less.

We, The People, the American people, the Great Unwashed, are being bent over the table and greased up for another major screwing, and what is the prescription for our ailment, the solution to our problem, the new direction forward?

We can bite the pillow and take it like grown ups.

Yes.  Yes, We Can.

Because, you know, doing anything else might actually cause us some serious discomfort. 

At least we're used to being screwed by politicians and their promises.

Hell, some of us seem to have learned to like it.