Dear AOG,

This is my first letter to you, and I won’t make a habit out of it. I’m writing this because I know so many of you are upset over the news this week, the messages I am receiving are full of anger, concern and mostly fear about our country.

I am not here to tell you how to think or feel about things, we each have to make our own choices.

Pain and disappointment are unavoidable, suffering is a choice for me. I will tell you that this morning, I woke up with much concern, but with even more of a sense of hope and promise.

The future belongs to the young, and I believe, to the young people and the women who are rising, not to me.

I have one hand in the past and one in the present, and a few fingers in the grave.

My future is much shorter than my past, I will not live to see the outcome of the conflicts and struggles now underway.

First off, I would suggest  this morning that you go and look at the remarkable campaign video of 28-year-old Alexandria Orcasio-Cortez of New York City, the charismatic 28-year-old who won a stunning primary election Tuesday, defeating an accomplished elderly white man, one of the most powerful people in Congress.

His time, like mine, was up.

The media completely missed what was happening in this radically fresh and simple campaign – she had no money and no staff, and they are still missing it.

Whether you agree with  her or not, is besides the point. She is not a freak, or a geographic accident. She is very important.

She is honest and very real, and as yet uncorrupted by the money and corruption that has overwhelmed our political system.

We have the people, she said in her campaign, they have the money.

That has always been the story of political power, and we are now engaged in a great and long and difficult struggle to see which will prevail – the needs of people versus the power of money.

My first editor told me there is only one story in American politics, and that is the rich always screw the poor until the poor have had enough and rise up, and for a few brief moments in time, the money is driven back, and the people win, at least for a while.

Here we are. There is nothing new in history.

I don’t know Alexandria, but she has give me great hope, I see the revolution is underway, the great wave of change is stirring and gathering speed. She is the future, not me, or those hoary and angry old men in Washington.

I am not discouraged or  frightened, I am hopeful and excited. Every day, I will try to do good, and the more bad news I hear and see, the more good i will set out to do. That is our revolution, our response, I believe, at least is is mine.

If I can’t dance to it, said the anarchist Emma Goldman, it’s not my revolution. I can dance to Alexandria Orcasio-Cortez’s song, I believe she is the most important political figure in America right now, not because she is always right, or because she is left or right, or because she is Democrat or Republican, but because she comes from the people.

She knows them and cares for them, and has a purity of spirit and fierce idealism that I will will ultimately carry the day. She reminds us how rare it now is for a politician in America to come from the people or know them. They responded to her, in great and surprising numbers. They call to us to wake up and be hopeful and determined, not small and angry.

I know enough to get out of the way and work on the outside of this, I am not joining that scrum, we do good every single day now, you and me. One life at a time, one small act of great kindness at a time, one refugee mother and child at a time.

I’m going to see Lisa in Albany this morning.

i believe it is better to go down fighting for good then be a prisoner all the days of my life. R. Buckminister Fuller said you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, one must build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Alexandria Orcasio-Ortez is building a new model, almost all by herself she made the existing model obsolete. She is the future, she is full of hope and promise, not jaded or tired or bitter as so many people have become.

As happened in 2016, no mainstream media journalist saw what she was doing, or grasped its significance. Why on earth should be believe their hysterical alarms and prophesies of doom? They sit in their offices and hide behind their podcasts and cable news slots. They are yesterday. She is tomorrow.

This work we do purifies and uplifts us and gives us that hope and promise. It’s my revolution, and I hope you will join me in it. The future does belong to the young, and Orcasio-Ortez has given us notice that they are on the march, and will cast their own future and make their own new revolution.

Jefferson warned us that it would take more than one revolution to bring freedom and equality,  and we are seeing that he is right. I would have joined the first one, I’m happy to jump into this one. I think I already have.

I do not get my faith from the news, they are thrilled to be able to spread fear and division for the rest of the year at least, they will make a lot of money from it. But they are not my news, and have lost their compass for truth,  I don’t have to accept theirs.

It was Franklin Roosevelt who asked us to remember that all of us are descendent from immigrants and revolutionaries. You don’t have to shoot people or shout at them to make a revolution.

We are doing it right here every day. Just ask the Mansion residents and the refugee mothers and their children.

My wish for you is that you not succumb to panic and fear, both are pointless and off the mark. I’m not playing the games of the left or the right or their media.

I don’t care to live like that. I choose to not live in despair or fear.

When I open my eyes, I see a lot to rejoice over. There is good news, right under our noses.