Many of the ideas for my blog What Does It Mean to be a Political Revolutionary?, came from Jonathan Mead’s “in inspiration, passion,” website: http://paidtoexist.com/how-to-start-a-revolution/. The blog he wrote was entitled How to Start a Revolution and was posted on his website on May 21, 2009.

He starts out his blog by stating: “I’ve found the secret to being excited about waking up every day, and I’ll tell you what it is right now. ‘It’s starting a Revolution.’” The revolution he’s thinking of starting within you is how to help you live your life with purpose, dedication inspiration and passion.  He then takes his revolution one step further where you take your dedication, inspiration and passion and make your purpose influential towards something greater than yourself, where there’s a “deepening of community and purpose.”

Well, obviously, the kind of revolution that Mead speaks of starts within and in that sense is internal to oneself, which ultimately teaches people and eventually communities how to “live within their own terms.”

The only difference between his revolution and mine is difference of kind, not substance. For all the ingredients necessary for Mead’s revolution to be successful is the same as would be true for a political revolutionary’s uprising to be successful as well.

If you perceive yourself as being a political revolutionary, you have to see your objective as being bigger than yourself – as germane and intimately related to not only your own existence, but to the well being of 95 percent of the political population you’re part of as well.

In order to qualify as a revolutionary, you have to feel so passionate about your mission that you’re driven to pursue your goal with so much fervor and zest, that’s it’s difficult to think about anything else. It is a need so pervasive that it’s the last thing you think of when you go to bed at night and the first thing you wake up thinking about in the morning. It ends up being an all encompassing and consuming passion.

The other thing that is absolutely necessary to qualify your actions as being revolutionary would be your willingness to give of yourself to a cause not only that’s bigger than you, but also, that you’re willing to give up not only your property, your treasure, but also your life to accomplish.

At the moment, there’s not the 95 percent of Americans who are sufficiently concerned about what has happened to the corrosion of our country’s integrity to feel the need for a dramatic change of how our political figures do business between and among one another, the results of which are impacted on not only how we look at them, but also how we view ourselves and our fellow Americans.

I contend that if any of us took the time to focus on just what has happened to our country’s morality and our treating one another as we would like to be treated, we would discover the goodness of our fellow American’s to one another has rapidly deteriorated to such an extent that compared to the 1940s and early 1950s, there’s a dramatic sea-change in the decline of civility and guiding our lives with integrity, empathy and compassion. And if we’re really honest with ourselves, it’s not a pretty sight. The acid test as to whether or not what our civil servants are doing to our country, which, in part is how we view ourselves and each other, is whether or not when everything is said and done, at the end of the day, we can say, “I’m proud to be an American.”