The Political Commonwealth Ryan-RMoney Denies

This is my only religion: the political commonwealth of We The People. Not we the corporations. Not we the rich. Not we the white xian straight males.

These are my only prophets: writers like Charles Pierce who can explain it this well:

Freedom becomes free. That's the undeniable truth of it. You cannot forever hem it in with nuance and exception, with carefully crafted compromises that say that freedom is one thing in Wisconsin, but another thing in Tennessee, and maybe both things in Kansas and Missouri. And it was not merely over the gigantic issue of slavery in which this most basic American conundrum was contested and resolved, Americans also found their freedom bounded by class, by a structured social system in which higher education remained pretty much the province of the well-to-do, and pretty much glued to the eastern part of the country. Freedom, however, will make itself more free because people, together, through the free government that is the clearest expression of the political commonwealth, will make it so.

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You see, you really didn't build it by yourself, no matter what they tell you. You stood on the shoulders of other people while you did it, the people like Justin Morrill, who helped construct a political and social context within which the opportunity for individual initiative and entrepreneurial risk could be rewarded and, as much as it may be popular to deny it, the government was very much a part of it because the government is the clearest manifestation of the political commonwealth that made that political and social context possible.

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We are now in the middle of a strange political campaign in which the very existence of a political commonwealth seems to have been made into a matter of open debate. There are places that we all own together. There are things that belong to all of us. Yosemite belongs to us. So do Iowa State and Cornell and Purdue, and everything that is taught in all those places. The government is one of those things. So are the national parks. So are the land-grant universities, born 150 years ago this summer, and delivered by a guy who doesn't even have a statue in the hall of statutes he helped to create. Knowledge, Justin Morrill believed, knows no class, no race. It is part of of what belongs to all of us, because none of us, not one of us, built anything by ourselves. We decided that question once before. It is to our discredit as a country that we're arguing about it again.

Read the whole inspiring thing.