Project 250

A comment in another Substack clued me in to the importance of this day: It was 250 years ago, today, that Patrick Henry declaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death!” to the Second Virginia Convention, an antecedent to the Continental Congress, and so to our nation. Henry was speaking in favor of his proposal to raise a militia independent of royal authority, expressly understanding that war might come. He is quoted as saying, “If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Actually, war between the colonists (as they saw themselves) and the British had not yet begun when Henry spoke. That was to happen less than a month later, on April 19th, at Lexington Green, in Massachusetts. There, Capt. John Parker would tell his ragtag band of militia, “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here, and now.” A few moments later, a shot was fired—no one knows from which side—and the fighting began. So, on April 19th this year, it will be 250 years exactly since the start of the Revolution that gave birth to the United States.

The Right has its anti-democratic, authoritarian, oligarchic Project 2025. I suggest that decent Americans join in Project 250: A movement to remember, relive and revive the principles that this nation was founded on, or at least the ones that have carried us forward, the unalienable truths of the Declaration of Independence, written down the year after Lexington, but very much in the air that April day: That all people are created equal. That all are entitled to a fair chance of life, liberty and to pursue their dreams (what else is the pursuit of happiness?). Our project does not need a lot of expiation or theorizing. We have hammered it out at Lexington and Concord, at Saratoga, in the Constitutional Convention, at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments that have been called a Second Declaration of Independence, in the drive to organize labor and protect the health and safety of ordinary Americans, in the New Deal, at Midway and the beaches of Normandy and the Bulge, in cities and small towns across the South, and in Washington D.C. at the March on Washington, in the struggle for the Affordable Care Act and to preserve the Constitution on January 6, 2021. We know what America ought to be. The challenge now is to remind our fellows of it, and to show them that their best life will come from the dream that made Americans willing to challenge the most powerful empire in the world 250 years ago.

Frankly, I’m not sure how to spread the idea of a Project 250, but I’d be happy to hear your suggestions. And even happier to see the concept spread across a nation struggling under the weight of tyranny and corruption.

As a coda, I offer a simple ballad by the great Paul Robeson; the same song was recorded later by Frank Sinatra in a bowdlerized version, but this is the one that still stops me in my tracks.

(As for John Parker, on April 19, 1775 he was suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him a few months later. Sadly, under the present regime, TB is showing signs of a comeback.)

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