by Fred Van Deusen
On April 19, 1775, the original Patriots’ Day, the citizens of Lexington, Concord, and surrounding towns came together to defend their towns and their way of life. Thus began the war for our independence. They started a revolution. Samuel Prescott came to warn us “The British are coming, The British are coming!” and we came together to stop them, to fight them off. We did not want to be under British rule.
This Patriots’ Day in 2024, I’m bringing you the message the MAGAs are coming, the MAGAs are coming! And believe me when I say we really do not want to be under their rule.
They want to put in place an extraordinarily corrupt man as President of the United States, a man who is despised by millions and loved by some. A man who succeeds by telling big lies. A man who cares much more about himself than he does about our country.
The leaders of the MAGA movement have a plan for America. They want to destroy our public education system, rewrite our history, and ban books. They deny the issues of climate change and want to wreck our environment with massive fossil fuel production. They plan to take away our basic rights — our reproductive rights, our freedom to vote, our freedom to speak out against them, our very identities. They will persecute immigrants and minority groups.
They will flood our government with MAGA loyalists. They plan to decimate government departments that protect our rights, our country: the FBI, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control. They are following a well-worn and recently updated authoritarian playbook used by Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Putin, and Viktor Orbán. And they have a 900 page Project 2025 plan developed by the Heritage Foundation with its billions of dollars, to tell them what to do.
They want to replace our democracy with an autocracy. Our government of the people, by the people, for the people will be gone. In their extraordinary need for power, the extremely wealthy and extremely conservative oligarchs who fund the MAGA movement will ruin our country in order to create a country in their own very ugly image.
Yes, the MAGAs are coming, and we must stop them. We must use the next six months leading up to our next election to build a powerful, inclusive, collaborative Democracy Movement. A movement that is bigger and more powerful than the MAGA movement. They have been working on their plans for many years, and we need to catch up very quickly.
The critical advantage we have is that those of us who care about our country, who care about our democracy, are in the majority. But we must come together. We must speak out about what the MAGA group has planned and tell the story of democracy. Why it is important. Why hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died to protect it.
We must tell the story of a democracy that we have always wanted and now must create. A democracy where all people really do have equal rights. A democracy where we work together to solve problems. A democracy where we care about each other and our communities. A democracy where we share our extreme wealth, not use it to destroy the country.
Yes, the MAGAs are coming, and the whole world is watching, and is very scared. The U.S. has long been a beacon of liberty, freedom, and democracy. Democracy has held the world together, and for the last 79 years, helped us to avoid large scale wars.
On this Patriots’ Day in April, 2024, we, the people of Lexington and Concord, we the people of America, must join together to create a powerful Democracy Movement, a movement to save our country. We must do this for our children, for our grandchildren.
We can do this. We must do this. Let’s get started.
Fred is a retired computer scientist, quality manager, and researcher. He leads the Reclaim Our Democracy group, based at First Parish Church in Concord. This post is re-published with permission from his Medium blog.
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