Jack Grant at The Moderate Voice has a simply marvelous take on freedom and fear and hope and despair and, well, it’s hard to describe. But it’s one of the most essential things I’ve read in awhile. He draws on everybody from Paine to Reagan to Roosevelt to Einstein to Franklin to Pitt (and a bunch more) along the way, and notes that:

Our founders managed to leave us with a system of government that has swayed like a pendulum, too far to one side or the other between anarchic freedoms and overly-regulated lives, but self-correcting for over 200 years. We cannot be complacent about that self-correction, because despite the nomenclature, the “self” in the correction is our responsibility.

Go. Read it now. Whatever you’re doing will wait.