'At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.'
-Emma Goldman, Living my Life
Image by André Karwath ( CC ) I do not presume to be the mouthpiece or leader of the 21st century American Tea Party movement, so the following is a summary of my personal vision for the modern American Tea Party, a list of objectives I believe it should seek to accomplish, and a set of principles I believe it should strive to embody. I am writing this because the Tea Party movement will fail to create real change unless it finds direction in sound principles and takes specific, practical steps to ensure the implementation of those principles in public policy. I. Principles Any political movement is doomed to failure so long as it is merely fighting for a particular, isolated policy preference or even a set of such preferences, absent of any context and underived from or related to a unified framework for viewing reality, humankind's role in reality, and government's role in humanity. The following (originally published in the Dec. 2008 article " Six Reasons Not To Bailo...
