Waking Up to Our Power
by Mike Davenport, Ex-Mayor of Prosperity, Pennsylvania
‘America is an idea – the most powerful idea in the history of the world. And it beats in the hearts of the people of this country.”
Joe Biden
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Declaration of Independence
The most powerful idea in the history of the world is that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are God-given rights, not gifts from a king, dictator, or pope that can be revoked on a whim. When we create governments, our leaders rule by our consent. If they don’t respect our rights, we can throw them out and start over.
When I was elected Mayor of what is now Prosperity, Pennsylvania, I took this idea to heart. The town had fallen asleep to our potential for people-powered prosperity and happiness. The sprawling steel mill that had put half our people to work had gone out of business thirty years ago. Our once-thriving Main Street was a tumbledown wreck of abandoned storefronts. Too many of our people were huddled in alleys and behind dumpsters numbing themselves with opioid drugs.
Our people had fallen asleep to their power. It was my job to wake them up. We’d become a food desert, with abandoned buildings lining streets filled with trash…so let’s grow our own food on our abundant vacant land, renovate our buildings for new businesses, and pick up the trash! And while we’re at it, let’s create a wellness center devoted to healing everyone addicted to drugs.I encouraged everyone to ask, “What can we do right now, together, that will make us happier?”
People began waking up. And when others saw what we were doing, they woke up as well. Folks in the press started to notice. Some called me a ‘miracle worker.’ All I did was point our townsfolk to the power our Founders “declared” back in 1776. They understood that true freedom and prosperity came from empowered people working together toward a common civic purpose. Every crisis in American history has led to a similar revival of our original intention.
When Abraham Lincoln was confronted with a terrible Civil War, he went right back to the words of the Declaration of Independence. He reminded us that “We the People” had the power to purge the moral stain of slavery because “all people are created equal,” no exceptions. The irony isn’t lost on me that the man who wrote these words, Thomas Jefferson, was a slaveholder. The ideals he and his fellow delegates put forth were so profoundly radical that nobody involved in their drafting could live up to them. I love the hell out of the fact that Jefferson wrote those words anyway so that every generation of WE THE PEOPLE could have the chance to live up to them. When we do, astonishing things happen.
When Franklin Roosevelt became president during the Great Depression, he knew it was time (once again) for the American people to wake up to their power. He did a version of what we did here in Prosperity. Since the government is “things we choose to do together, We the People can create good jobs that make things better for everyone. It’s hard to wallow in despair when you’re working in a National Park building trails, cabins, and centers for visitors.
Black Americans had been denied their rights for so long by so many vile Jim Crow institutions, they’d fallen asleep to their power. The courage, vision, and audacity of Martin Luther King changed that. The civil rights movement succeeded because ordinary people—maids and ministers, students and teachers—reclaimed their agency and refused to accept that “the way things were” was the way they had to be. They insisted that “We, the People” meant them as well. They were right.
I love walking the streets of Prosperity. What a difference! Our community gardens feed everyone in town. We serve most of this magnificent produce at our daily community meal and sell the rest at our Farmers’ Market. That money builds our greenhouses so we can have fresh greens all year round. Our medical clinic welcomes everyone. Our downtown is thriving with cafes, boutiques, and new small businesses. We party in the park on Friday nights and polka every Sunday afternoon.
When Jefferson wrote that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were "unalienable" — meaning they cannot be surrendered, sold, or transferred — he was declaring something revolutionary: Our dignity is not a gift, but our birthright. Our freedom is not a privilege to be earned but a fundamental condition of our existence. With a stroke of a pen, citizens stopped being subjects and became self-determined actors. We all carry within us the seed of that audacious declaration — that we are born free, that our potential is limited only by our own imagination and effort, and that no external force can define our worth or crush our dreams.
AUTHOR NOTE: Mike Davenport is a character in the book “Prosperity, Pennsylvania.” You can buy a copy here and here.
You can find the Audible version here.
The book is about how an everyday collection of optimists transformed a downtrodden Rust Belt town. The town isn’t saved by a miraculous intervention of government or big business. The people save themselves by imagining a society that works together to work for them and then gets to work to make this vision a reality.
Here’s what reader (and friend) Ingeborg Walther said about the book: “For anyone who, in these dark times, feels hopeless and powerless to fight back against big money, big tech, and the fascist forces currently destroying our democracy, this book is a ray of light, showing us that “we the people” indeed have the power to create change. The characters are engaging, and the story is entertaining as well as instructive.”
The book is a ‘how-to’ manual for how we can all get beyond the stale ‘hate-your-neighbor’ red-blue, right-left narratives. What do we want? The love of family and friends, enough to eat, a home, health care, and a loving community where we belong. We can create these things for ourselves.
I didn’t make anything up. Everything in the book happened somewhere in the world. I just put it together in a new way.