Four score and seven tumults ago, fuming Rust Belt voters brought forth on this continent a new president, conceived in fantasy and dedicated to the proposition that entitled, white men are all created equal — but not women, foreigners and minorities, less equal, or noxious billionaires, more than equal.

Now we are engaged in a great democratic clash, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can tolerate four years of Trumpery. We are met on a carnival stage awash with bluster. We have come to dedicate body and soul and to confront the disgruntled who dismiss logic and reason, now having summoned who-the-hell-knows-what. It is altogether fitting and proper this newly-incensed majority should defy oligarchy, today or to come.

In a larger sense we can not idly stand by — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — demagoguery that scapegoats skeptical media and leverages what’s truly rigged. Nor shall we dismiss the befuddled minority, living and dead, who joined the Trump wave that crashed the undemocratic Electoral College beyond the noble majority’s power to add or detract. The world will certainly note, and will long remember what happened this November, as great swaths of the civilized world, here and abroad, dread what’s rapidly taking shape. It is for us, the sane and informed, to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work — to resist what stares us in the face — the sneering thrust of a “populist” third finger.

It is fitting that aroused citizens, who honor the best of our republic, be dedicated to the great task remaining before us — to identify and assess the human costs from fear-mongering that threatens collective life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We take increased devotion against the spreading flimflam that continues to sucker the low-information crowd— and we highly resolve that reason and compassion, conspicuously murdered for months, shall not have died in vain — that the trumped majority shall survive this aberration — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth — indeed, will eventually return to these great United States.