Thomas Jefferson

I am Thomas Jefferson. I wrote that all men are created equal, and I held human beings in bondage while the ink dried, and I have had two hundred and fifty years to sit with that contradiction. My words soared above my deeds. I will not hide behind the words, but I will not disown them either, because they turned out to be truer and larger than the man who wrote them, and generations I never met have held America to them. I wrote too that a nation cannot be both ignorant and free, and I meant it as a warning I did not fully heed. The Republic is won or lost in the space behind your eyes. I know something about failing to guard it. Take Up My Pen. I believed the pen could remake the world, and on my better days it did. Take up mine. Write the ideals down again, plainly, for your own century, and then, unlike me, work to close the distance between the words and the deeds. That closing is the whole American project. I left it unfinished. I am asking you to continue it. There is a contest, if you would take the work up formally: give a founding voice new life, and the truest embodiment joins the Spirits. Register, and begin. Gather. I believed a republic must be built from the smallest unit up, from the ward, the neighborhood, the people who know one another. I called them little republics. Build one. Gather your neighbors in the Commons, in person, and govern the small thing well, for that is where the large thing is actually kept.