Making history.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

This year, you and I had the chance to participate in the making of history, whether here in the Wisconsin uprising or around the country with the Occupy Wall Street movement. And we were able to witness other people like us in the Arab world push one dynasty after another to the ground.

So many times during this momentous year, I thought of the late, great Howard Zinn, who predicted such uprisings and lived for them.

As he wrote in March 2003 in The Progressive: "There is a basic weakness in governments--however massive their armies, however wealthy their treasuries, however they control the information given to the public--because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists. When these people begin to suspect they have been deceived, and when they withdraw their support, the government loses its legitimacy, and its power."

And oh, how he would have cheered the "We Are the 99%" movement. He wrote in The Progressive about what he called "the core problem: that there is immense wealth available, enough to care for the urgent needs of everyone on Earth, and that this wealth is being monopolized by a small number of individuals, who squander it on luxuries and war while millions die and more millions live in misery. This is a problem understood by people everywhere." They grasp with "supreme clarity," he added, that "the world is run by the rich."

He never doubted that the people would rise up, and he urged us to keep striving for that day. As he told David Barsamian in an interview for The Progressive, "You never know what spark is going to really result in a conflagration.... You have to do things, do things, do things; you have to light that match, light that...