Revolutionaries, Evolutionaries, Solutionaries
The response to The Next American Revolution ( UC Press, 2011 ) has been awesome.
Multiple copies are being bought by people to share with family and friends. Teachers are assigning it to their classes. Faculty, students and staff at several small colleges are reading it together, sometimes planning a SKYPED discussion with me.
As a result, although the book has been out only a few months, Amazon is ranking it ahead of political bestsellers by Chomsky and Krugman.
Maybe it’s because it is giving Americans in all walks of life a more people-friendly view of revolution as empowerment rather than struggle for political power.
Maybe it helps us view Revolutionaries as Solutionaries, working together to solve very practical problems of daily life, growing our souls by growing our own food.
Maybe it’s giving us the new, more positive view of ourselves that we’ve been hungry for.
Maybe it helps us envision ourselves as Revolutionaries, moving away from the wrong side of the world revolution where we have seemed stuck since the Vietnam War.
Maybe it also helps us see ourselves as Evolutionaries, making the radical revolution of values that Dr. King called for during that war, transforming ourselves from materialists, militarists and individualists into a people who can be proud of how we are advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness, creativity, and social and political responsibility.
The diversity of enthusiastic readers reminds me of the remarks about this country that Hector Crevecoure made more than two centuries ago:
“ Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims.”
(In Detroit I’ll be signing copies of TNAR at Source Books during the West Willis Village small businesses celebration on Saturday, June 18. ENJOY music, a fashion show, children’s hair show, and other fun stuff).
