Today in the blogosphere much is being made of anything approaching a precise  count of the hundreds of thousands of, if not a million Americans who turned up in Washington, DC on Saturday, September 12th to send their government a message. Yet, it’s clear from the coverage of as notable an event as the inauguration of America’s first black president that no genuinely precise number can, or will ever be established, let alone agreed upon.

It’s expected that bloggers, Left and Right, will argue over such things; it’s what we do. But that is not what matters most to America today. What matters is that a significant and growing number of Americans now share serious and deep concerns over a Federal Government seemingly intent on spending America into bankruptcy, while also attempting to control, or regulate so many aspects of American life that it’s becoming difficult to understand what constitutes genuine freedom in America anymore.

And that, in a country where freedom, above all else, has been almost sacrosanct throughout her hundreds of years of existence.

Something is beginning to change.

After the 1960′s and in large part as a result of them, another change took place in America. A small town values seemed to fall out of vogue. Critics argued they no longer had a place in, or value to America as a whole. They were replaced by a larger alleged national consciousness often manifesting itself in greater central government control, even if it might not be what the people wanted. Perhaps common sense was replaced by a purported conventional wisdom that was mostly elitist in design.

The media culture and eventually the political establishment seemed to leave the people behind. The so-called little people of America, the ones who quietly worked their jobs, paid their bills, raised their families and didn’t make much news or noise were told they were irrelevant, … or worse, dumb.

Big Media’s editorialists and journalists, who always think they know better, or are somehow better informed of what happens on every little mainstreet, had their day. They influenced thinking and even government to a degree they hadn’t previously enjoyed in contemporary times. Government took off and left the people, convinced that they, too, knew better, or were somehow better informed to dictate and regulate just about anything they chose – from your job, your backyard woods, even to family life inside the home and what you ate. But a funny thing happened on the way to a would be government designed and engineered utopia.

The people eventually stood up in mass and yelled, “Stop!,” just as a conservative editorialist had done some years before. He’s gone now. But the American people and the American spirit still lives on. September 12th showed us that.

And whether they numbered half-a-million, a million, or even more, what September 12th, 2009 in Washington, DC clearly demonstrated was that they might just be getting ready to yell stop, again. And this time, they’re even better prepared and far more informed and empowered than they ever were when the Reagan Revolution was born.

And it might not take decades to develop this time around, as so many things seem to happen almost overnight in this new Internet-driven, new information, New Media age.

Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at RiehlWorldView.

0