I remember his words well.  As America careened amidst the countercultural machinations of the Sixties, Tom Hayden's insights captured for many of us the heart of what the movement was about:  liberating government for the good of the people. Profoundly disappointed with the Johnson and Nixon's adminstrations' handling of the war in Vietnam, millions of us came to think that the government, the establishment, lived only for itself.  We wanted a voice.
     And Tom Hayden, who passed away yesterday, was one of our icons.  Primary author of the Port Huron Statement that called for participatory democracy, testifying to the House "UnAmerican Activities" Committee about his convictions, enduring the circus trial of the Chicago 8, and much, more more, Tom Hayden spoke for a generation of disillusioned people, people who believed that the country, gripped by a seemingly fascist Nixonian regime, could do better.
     As I was writing my first book, Imagining Eternity, and making my initial explorations of my journey out of the Catholic church and into the political radicalism of the Sixties, I wanted to use some of Hayden's words to illustrate my angst.  So I wrote him, requesting permission to quote from one of his books, a transcript of his testimony to the House Committee I mentioned above.  "OK with me," he wrote back, "go ahead."
     The U.S. government, he said in the book, is a government "which relies more and more on the use of force, on the use of police to maintain itself rather than relying on consent or persuasion or traditional techniques of democracy.”
     Though we may wish to dismiss Hayden's words as artifacts of their time or distortions of some form of religious truth, given the way in which wealth and highly connected lobbyists shape so much of the American government's policies today, we eer if we overlook his essential point:  democracy only works if it works for everyone.
     We're all equal before God.
     Thanks, Tom Hayden.  Farewell.