A Beginning

They had fought and risked their lives, their families lives, for the ideals of freedom and equality. Tearing away from the grasp of a strangling and suffocating iron hand that ruled without care or consideration. Fathers had lost their sons, and sons had watched their fathers die. Children had been torn away from their mothers. They had endured seasons of scarcity and hunger; times of bitter cold with hardly a shawl draped over their tired shoulders. Overcoming the mass differences and prejudices, they had managed to unite a people to fight and to see the vision of a nation, one nation, moving and breathing as one organism standing and fighting for the same ideals they were fighting.

After the shedding of blood had ceased and they were able to severe the hand away from around their young neck, new struggles began. With an unstable government put in place, the people with many differences began to think that it would be better if they were rulers over themselves, besides each of them were different. What a pang of fear and urgency there must have been among the leaders who had seen these people unite to fight off Britain, who had seen the potential of greatness that lay here in the people and in the land. Then to see it all crumble before their eyes, they could not let it happen. They believed too deeply in the values and ideals they had fought for and brought others to fight for. They knew that if they could not pull the people together now, under one vision and purpose, the lives given in that war, in that revolution, would have been in vain. Brought to nothing. They cared and loved this land and the people far too much to let them stand separate and weak rather than together and full of life.

So a few of them began to write. Why did they write and not gather big public speeches? Their writing could not be lost in the air after it was conceived. Their writing could grab hold of minds and reason with them and guide them back to the vision, to the hope, to something better than what has been before. They wrote and defended their values again. They started over and got the people to focus on what matters, on why they were in this land and why they had fought that war, it was a revolution. A revolution of non-conformity and of life. A revolution to step out of the darkness of oppression and into the light of freedom. Then the people remembered, and they were reminded of their mission. They came together because one stick can be broken easily, but when you bind 13 sticks or 30, or even 50 sticks together, it is impossible to break them.