By Jeffrey A. Tucker
Commentary
You are part of a powerful, vibrant, super-engaged, erudite, and well-educated community. It extends from coast to coast in the United States but also to Canada, Latin America, and around the world. You are deeply informed, passionate and dedicated to ideals, sophisticated in your understanding of the world, open-minded toward facts, ready to engage in support of moral intuition and the cause of freedom. You are a mighty worldwide community even if you do not know everyone in it.
I’m newly aware of this because I’ve spent the last 10 hours, with many more to go, reading personal emails to me from many thousands of readers. Through a technological oversight, probably traceable to my own error, there was a stash of emails from readers that had escaped my notice. They were sent over the course of 24 months, and I’m working like crazy to get through them all. I deeply regret this but I do not regret gaining a vibrant picture of the wild upheaval of our times and how good people have dealt with it.
I’m not finished with my task but let me say: I’m absolutely blown away by the intelligence and pure fire I’m seeing in all these correspondences. And I’m deeply touched that so many of you are taking the time to dedicate yourselves to understanding and to public affairs. I can say with absolute assurance: you are changing the world. Every one of you.
You see, the readership of this paper, obviously vast and international, is of a highly special sort. You are not among the sheep or the “non-playing characters” frequently ridiculed on social media. You know what is what, how to read the surface and how to read what is under the surface, how to integrate ideas from history and from many disciplines, how to understand the relationship of the public mind and its influence on power, and so much more.
You might think you are alone but I promise that you are not. You are part of something grand, glorious, and epochal. You are the generation of change, the one that said absolutely not to the despotic trends of the last years and you have made possible what many thought was impossible, an actual shift in many sectors toward a recovery of the values that have built civilization itself.
Not only that but you know what the odds are and you have refused to be told that you cannot make a difference. You have known all along that the only way in which that is true is if you do nothing.
Instead you have decided to do something. You might have formed a supper club, hosted reading groups, passed out articles to friends, shared thoughts and news on social media, fought back against censorship, read deeply and reflected, taught your children, cared for grandchildren, prayed, and got active in your community even against enormous social pressure.
In such times, these are acts of moral courage. Against the wind and risking so much, you decided to trust that doing the right thing will be rewarded. And you were and are right about that.
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