Paul G Collier

How do we begin our history as Americans? Does it begin with the Boston Tea Party? Does it begin with the shots of Concord wicks had been tamped?

Two years before this night that birthed a new people, tea filled the harbor of Boston, tea that had become the symbol for the unspoken principle that made all of us Americans. They called it freedom. They called it liberty. They themselves did not know that liberty, that freedom were all different words for this same, unspoken American ideal.

But the spilling of the tea was like a soft flicker, a brief spark that to a King was a skyline littered with dark clouds. This was not our birth, but our conception. For two years, the concept gestated. For two years, Americans-to-be struggled to reconcile love of country with love of what they called Freedom.

No taxation without representation, they cried. An angry leviathan, its hour come at last, slunked towards a new Bethlehem. One if by land, two if by sea, was the mythology that grew from the birth of a new people. Midnight struck, the dead hour, the hour without hope.

In this dark gloam, one rider went out. Paul Revere took to his horse. Man and rider had become the conduit of that American ideal. The birth of a people were held in a saddle that April midnight. Lights shone, lights lit by the first Americans, who had lit the American flame. Paul Revere rode out and cried “The British are coming. The British are coming!”.

His family was offered, he must have known, to fight for the birth of a people, the birth of sovereignty. He sat in that saddle, perhaps a bit cold, perhaps a bit tired. He saw the American light. That light, he knew, meant death to the old world, meant death to comfort. It called men out of their homes. It called wives into tents of death on the fields of battle.

He must have known war. He must have known the choice he was making. He must have known he had a but two options, move on and go back to comfort and fat christmas turkeys, or stay and invite war into your home. Men killed women and children in war. He must have known this. He must have known what it meant when he decided to take up that ride, to bring the news to the people, the REAL NEWS, that the reds were coming.

With that ride, Paul Revere offered his family’s security for a principle, THE American principle that made all Americans who we are today. I have a child, a daughter, just three years old. I have a wife. I would die for both of them. But would I ride? Would I shout out ‘The REDS are coming?”, knowing that I put a mark on my life, a mark on my family?

This great, revolutionary American light that fascists and corporatists are still trying to extinguish, was so essential to Paul Revere that he rode, knowing he had killed the comfort he and his people once knew. America had her birth April 18th, 1775 when our American flame owed all of its fuel to one man and one horse who had two choices to make, keep safe or keep the light on.

When Paul Revere saw the American light, he did not go, he did not move on, he rode into the new American nation that grew life with every gallop, that grew brighter with every cry….the REDS are coming, the REDS are coming.

He made himself all of America for that April night. He rode through the sleepy villages of Massachusetts as America, the great, America the brave, America the Sovereign.

From Paul Revere, the American flame became a dream of sovereignty, sometimes flickering, sometimes blazing bright, but never dying.

Two hundred and thirty three years later, on the first day of August, citizens elected by citizens stood up to demand our American sovereignty. In the halls of congress, a select few stood up and said, ‘We surrender no more!’

Nancy Pelosi, queen of the Reds, marshaled her soldiers and turned off the lights. But Nancy and the Reds were not turning off lights in a building of marble, they had reached back two hundred and thirty three years, into the midnight sky that Paul Revere saw, and they tried to turn off the light of America, the light that announced to the four corners of the world that the birth of a new people had finally come, that these Americans were all born out of the same sweet crucible, the flames, the light

of Sovereignty.

You are in the midnight hour, America. The Reds are real and dressed as polite people with blackberries and carbon imprints, with madras’s and 527cs, with AK47s and tenured Professorships. Sovereignty, the unique American dream, is the last light standing in their way of shutting out all the lights of hope, freedom, and liberty.

You are in the midnight hour, America. The Reds are your neighbors and your newscasters and your comedians. The Reds are language warriors who’ve claimed all of your symbols and sullied them with hate disguised as a polite smile set against a pretty movie theme, politely tearing down the mythology that carries us through the dark times when the Reds assault with their long knives disguised as PDAs.

You are in the midnight hour, America. A light has shown. A fortress is under assault. What do you do? Do you rise with the ghosts of our past that put life, limb, and family into a horrible flame of war. Our light, our American inheritance was borne from blood and death and decay. For facing death, for facing blood, for facing the end of comfort was the choice that our great ghosts made to stand for sovereignty or to die free,

You will not die free in the land of the Reds. You will not find America in the land of the Reds. You will find only death and grey existence. Don’t go. Don’t go back to sleep. Don’t go back to the comfort of your bed to make peace the next morning with polite, bloodthirsty invaders.

Don’t go. The light is still on despite Queen Nancy and her Red Brigades. Don’t go. The light is still on a day after August 1st, 2008, the date that Americans entered the midnight hour. We shine the light. We say “Don’t go! Keep the Lights ON!”

God bless you all as you sleep tonight. Your horse is outside. Your turn has come. You, and only you, can stand sentinel in that midnight hour. No one else will do. Don’t go. Keep the Lights on.

Paul G. Collier
American Sovereignty Union,
infrastructure director for the Dontgo Paul Revere network

coda:
I heard a story from a woman who had felt death a week before 911. She touched the towers a week before they died, and her warm hands went cold, but not from stone. A knowing had entered her, a knowing she would not understand until the planes struck.

It tied her to that place before the death came. When it happened, it emptied all of the stuff in her body conveniently in a small metal can on the floor of an empty room. She felt the call. She followed.

She came back to New York for she was a part of the terrible debris that day she felt the towers. She was a bombed-out building, a kindred spirit with those two felled American lamps. She picked through the jagged remains. She ate dust and death with the same gulp that forced water into her broken body.

She was as much an American as George Washington or Able Lincoln. She wept for America’s dimming sovereignty. She wept for the shaking of the light.

She has been with our revolution from the beginning, from before we knew that the beginning had……begun. She shamed me. She literally made me weep with embarrasment, for I lived not more than 2 hours from New York on that fateful day, and I stayed home in comfort. I ranted. I screamed. I cried. I vowed blood. While I spoke of injustice, she reached into that awful wound to place a bit of grace, to give of her own fuel to protect that light from going out.

I was Paul Revere and I moved on. I went home. She was Paul Revere. She stood her ground. She stood with the brothers and sisters of the dead and became a part of them while I drank coffee in my living room.

Something told her that by going to New York she was saying to us all, ‘Don’t go, the light is still on. Keep the light on.’

This woman, whose name I will not share unless she tells me to, did not come from Boston. She came from Toronto, a Canadian, but more American that week than I ever was. America’s light is not America’s but the world’s. If we die where we stand, the world will not know the awful death that flattened out existence to that state-run drone.

If we decide to move on, after Congress has returned, after the gas prices go back down, then we are Paul Revere and we are going back to sleep.

I vow I will never leave my country as I unknowingly did that day. I vow I will never choose comfort for sovereignty. It’s a Canadian, not any American I knew at that time, that opened my own eyes to my own cowardice. I will not go gentle into that good night. Will you.

[1] SPONSOR US

[2] SUBSCRIBE to our blog by REGISTERING FOR FREE