I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace – a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
The quote you just read was from Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address broadcast to the nation on January 12, 1989. It was the last time he spoke to the American people from the Oval office but his words would live on in the minds and hearts of many.
Yours truly was one of those Americans. I was only 12 years old when Reagan gave his historic address. I was old enough to remember seeing him on television, to hear my parents discussing him, but too young to fully appreciate the gravity his insprirational words endued. Like my parents, I disliked him for many reasons I never fully understood. I was to harbor those feelings through my teens and well into adulthood.
It wasn’t until I was in my late 20’s after almost a decade of being engulfed entrenched within the Socialist machine that his words hit a chord deep within my core. Like most life changing events, I remember it vividly.
For a few years, I was heavily involved in political groups, majority of which were academic, but a few of them were “realist” as I called them because they attempted to enact scholarly ideals into real world solutions. I did semi-regular work for MoveOn.org and messed around with groups such as the Free People’s Project based out of Boston. I wasn’t a die hard Liberal or Progressivist – I was a die-hard Marxist. My motley group of friends consisted of Socialists, Communists, Progressivists, Post Revolutionary Liberals, Leninists, Pseudo-Fascists, and plethora of GLBT group members.
While I hung around these friends, I experienced and learned everything they believed. Their diversity of thought, their hope and dreams for a Utopian realization. I was the perfect Marxist foot soldier/scholar and I believed in his vision utterly and completely.
Or so I believed.
November 1, 2000 was the day I started my 3 year journey towards the distant glow of the Shining City. It wasn’t a eureka moment that our friend, Archimedes, enjoyed. It was a gradual process, that peeled away layer by layer the protective plaque I built up around my beliefs.
At the time I just started work as a bartender at a local brewery. The Free People’s Project was my soul source of political junk and I was doing part-time work for United Workers Alliance. Our time was passed protesting various events held in Boston by local GOP groups. But our favorite pasttime was going after the Great Deceiver himself, none other than Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh represented a threat to our ideals: people followed him. That made him dangerous.
So we started calling his show.
I had my chance with the Great One on November 1, 2000.
Keep talking, get your point across. Don’t let him talk. Let your anger come through, I thought to myself. I expressed my anger to his support of Capitalism and “Free” Market ideals. I saw it as a bane of America’s existence and only leads to tyranny of big coorporations enslaving the People in their puny lives.
Halfway through the “conversation” Rush cut my mike, which is something to this day he rarely does.
Then he did something I didn’t expect. He inspired me. He didn’t call me naive or mislead by Marxist propaganda. He trusted that I really did believe what I was fighting for.
He called upon the words of Reagan. What he believed in. His ideals. It was a shock to my system. I had never heard of these ideas.
In hindsight, it was a small event. His words weren’t large, just simple.
After hanging up, my friends (who have been listening in the other room) came in and we all started berating and bashing Rush. Typical slander, same words. We all believed in individual rights, but we only believed in our reality of those freedoms.
But the seed was planted. I started looking at the world in a different light and, although it wasn’t easy, ultimately found my own way to the Shining City.
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