Steve Harvey

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

Thomas Paine's words aren't just a call to arms in time of revolution, bucking up dispirited soldiers. They are also a constant call to duty to the civic minded, to those who do not want to let the least rational and least kind among us shout us down and dominate our public policy.

Our souls have been tried by what has happened to health care reform. Our souls have been tried by the confusion by some of "liberty" with "mutual indifference." The struggle to define who we are, what kind of a people we are, is a perpetual crisis that demands of us a public service that we must not shrink from.

Having interned at the state capitol, I know that one of the obstacles that reasonable people of good will face is the volume and vitriol of blindly ideological opposition, by email and by telephone, to pending legislation, no matter how well conceived and well designed, that serves the public interest. We need to match, and exceed, that voice of our baser nature every time a bill like SB 10-076 comes up for a vote (prohibting insurers from offering financial incentives to adjustors to deny claims), telling our legislators that as a state and as a people we believe in reason and good will.

Every civic minded resident of this state should mine his or her social networks, in person as well as through Twitter, Facebook, and email, rallying others of like mind to support every well-conceived piece of legislation that serves the public interest. And we should mine those networks in the interims as well, organizing, mobilizing, ensuring that we are a people defined by reason and good will rather than by irrationality and vitriol.

Just as the 2010 election will be a battle for turn-out (and, if I might add, for getting people to vote all the way down the ticket), every day of every year is a battle for degree of engagement. Engagement makes us both more effective and better informed. The person who listens to and reads well-reasoned analyses applied to reliable data becomes a representative of well-reasoned policies. The party, the ideology, the point-of-view that succeeds in rallying the most people, and motivating them to action, is the one that has the greater influence in defining who and what we are.

One lesson of history that is unambiguous is that there really is so very much at stake. All of the great tragedies of mass human cruelty, and all of the great triumphs of mass human achievement, and everything in between, were the result of how well both reasonable people of good will, and irrational people of ill will, managed to rally and motivate people to thought and action.

The sad fact is that we are all too quick to blame the individuals who represent and express the results of this on-going struggle (our elected, and other, officials), and too slow to blame ourselves for failing to do enough to turn the tide.

The buck stops with each and every one of us. It's time, it's always time, to step up to the plate and get the job done.