Are you an agitator? You know, one of those people who won’t leave well enough alone, who’s always questioning authority and trying to stir things up.
If so, the Powers That Be detest you — you … you … “agitator!” They spit the term out as a pejorative to brand anyone who dares to challenge
the established order. “Oh,” they scoff, “our people didn’t mind living next to that toxic waste dump until those environmental agitators got them upset.” Corporate chieftains routinely wail that “our workers were perfectly happy until those union agitators started messing with their minds.”
In each case, the message is that America would be a fine country if only we
could get rid of those pesky troublemakers who get the hoi polloi agitated
about one thing or another.
Bovine excrement. Were it not for agitators, we wouldn’t even have an America. The Fourth of July would be just another hot day, we’d be singing “God Save the Queen,” and our government officials would be wearing white-powdered wigs.
Agitators created America, and it’s their feisty spirit and outright rebelliousness that we celebrated on our
national holiday. I don’t merely refer to the Founders, either. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington,
James Madison, Ben Franklin and the rest certainly were derring-do agitators
when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill
of Rights, creating the framework for a democratic republic. But they didn’t actually create much democracy. In the first presidential election, only 4
percent of the people were even eligible to vote. No women allowed, no African
Americans, no American Indians and no one who was landless.
So it’s neither the documents of democracy that we celebrate nor the authors of the
documents. Rather, it’s the intervening two-plus centuries of ordinary American agitators who have
struggled mightily against formidable odds to democratize those documents.
America’s great rebellion didn’t end with the British surrender at Yorktown. It was only getting started — and the rebellion has moved through such great forces of agitation as the
abolitionists and suffragists, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, the
Populists and the Wobblies, Fighting Bob La Follette and Huey Long, the Square
Deal and New Deal, Mother Jones and Woodie Guthrie, Rachel Carson and Ralph
Nader, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez — and on into today’s continuing fight for economic fairness, social justice and equal opportunity
for all.
Without agitators battling in politics, on the job, in the marketplace, for the
environment, on Wall Street, in education, for civil liberties and rights, and
all across our society, democratic progress doesn’t just stall, it falls back.
The Powers That Be — especially America’s overarching corporate and political forces (often the same) — give lip service to democracy, but tend toward plutocracy, autocracy and
kleptocracy. They prefer (and often demand) that We the People be passive
consumers of their economic and political policies. Don’t rock the boat, stay in your place, go along to get along — be quiet, they urge.
Be quiet? Holy Thomas Paine! How could freedom-loving, democratic citizens
shrink into quietude, especially when the Powers That Be feel so entitled to
run roughshod over us? Even a dead fish can go with the flow. We’ve got to be livelier than that.
July is a time to enjoy fireworks, flags, hotdogs, ballgames and such — but it’s also a time to remember who we are: agitators!
It’s not easy to stand against powerful interests. Sometimes it’s lonely, and you get to feeling like the guy B.B. King sings about: “No one likes you but your momma, and she might be jiving you, too.” It’s not easy, but having those who dare to stand up is essential if our country is
ever to achieve our ideals of fairness, justice and opportunity for all.
And when the establishment derisively assails you as an agitator, remember this:
The agitator is the center post in the washing machine that gets the dirt out.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2009.
