No One Wants A Revolution

No One Wants A Revolution

I should probably have put “wants” in all capital letters or something to indicate greater emphasis since inflection doesn’t carry through text unless you know someone very well. However I am getting ahead of myself.

Hello again, I know it has been some time since my last missive and for that I am deeply sorry. Work has recently shifted gears throwing me “off my game” as it were. I offer this not as an excuse but as answer. You deserve to know why so this is the answer. I should be adjusted now and you can expect things to resume their usual pattern.

Now about that revolution stuff.

I am certain you can think of many people in your own life, if not yourself who you think “want” a revolution but I would argue that you probably do not.

A revolution is a response, an answer, to a long period of injustice. It’s people deciding that the maladies they are suffering are worse than the maladies they will suffer in revolution. No one wants to fight for freedom they want to have freedom.

On July 4th America celebrates the declaration of its independence from the British empire. The beginning of the Revolutionary War. Often, however, we forget this was not cause for celebration for the colonists. It was people come to their wits end and resigning themselves to malady and death because they saw it as the only way to gain the liberty they deserved.

It is simply an unfortunate truth that liberty is rarely given and most be torn from the grasp of those who would deny it.

I feel it is important we remember this because it is easy to lionize the actions of those who fought for our freedom and not really understand how hard they fought to not be revolutionaries. That they did not take up such things lightly and with great sorrow. A revolution is not a celebration, it is a mandate laid upon you by suffering of others that will cost you more than you ever had.

This is not an argument that one should accept the horrors heaped upon yourself because revolution is hard. Revolution is necessary. It is recognition that it is necessary and hard. And not a path to be trod lightly.

I pray that we need not walk that path. I pray again that if we do, we do so for liberty and justice, not tyranny and pleasure. And I pray that no one need walk this path ever again.

Thank you my dear readers and God bless;

~S. Wallace