Howard Zinn was not a saint. None of us are. It’s important to remember that whatever revolution we make, it has to be made with people as they are, with all the contradictions that come with living under capitalism. There is no other way for it to happen. But in the course of trying to change the world, with others, we change ourselves, and new possibilities emerge.

There are, from time to time, people who can crystallize the aims or goals of a movement in an especially compelling way. Who can rally greater numbers of people to take a particular action or, in the case of Howard Zinn, make a lifelong commitment to activism. But such people cannot substitute for a movement.

Howard Zinn’s death this week at the age of 87 was a loss that should have drawn much more attention from a press corps that spends an inordinate amount of its time obsessing idiotically over the likes of Tiger Woods and John Edwards.

Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Howard Zinn refers to them as ‘the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.’

Who is the most influential historian in America? Could it be Pulitzer Prize winners Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Joseph Ellis or David McCullough, whose scholarly works have reached a broad literary public? The answer is none of the above. The accolade belongs instead to the unreconstructed, anti-American Marxist Howard Zinn, whose cartoon anti-history of the United States is still selling 128,000 copies a year twenty years after its original publication. Many of those copies are assigned readings for courses in colleges and high schools taught by leftist disciples of their radical mentor.

Howard Zinn’s gone. Gone, now, just when we need him the most. But his whole life he has been pointing us in the right direction. Don’t be impressed by the men in suits. Don’t listen to the pseudo-scientific babble of the high priests of the economy. Take things in your own hands, work for what’s right, make a bold move in the direction of the common good. It’s you and me who have to get up front and grab the wheel. We have to do it now – we have no time to waste.

Howard Zinn labored long and hard on his masterpiece, always retaining that astonishing mixture of humor and humility that made him such a unique and irreplaceable treasure. No one ever wrote or spoke with a greater instinct for the True and Vital. His unfailing instinct for what is just and important never failed him — or us. The gentle, lilting sound of his voice put it all to unforgettable music that will resonate through the ages.

Like Eugene V. Debs, it is no cliché to say that Howard Zinn truly lives uniquely on at the core of our national soul. His People’s History and the gift of his being just who he was, remains an immeasurable, irreplaceable treasure.

The insistence on building more nuclear weapons, when we already possess more than enough to destroy the world, is based on ‘realism.’

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

How many times have the dreams of young people—the desire to help others; to devote their lives to the sick or the poor; or to poetry, music, or drama—been demeaned as foolish romanticism, impractical in a world where one must ‘make a living’?

It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of someone else’s description of reality.

What do I do when pessimism strikes? I get together with other people. I’m encouraged when I get together with other people who feel the way I do about things, and I realize I’m not alone. Or I’ll turn to the arts. The great poets and the writers were almost always progressive people who saw beyond the politics. So I’ll read Mark Twain and Helen Keller and Upton Sinclair and Tolstoy and Thoreau. I’ll read things that are encouraging and uplifting.

What is important is how closely we look today at what is done to human beings, what criteria we use for “progress.” We are accustomed to measuring the state of the nation by the numbers on the stock market rather than by how many children die of malnutrition.

Behind the claim of someone giving us an objective picture of the real world is assumption that we all have the same interests, and so we can trust the one who describes the world for us, because that person has our interests at heart.

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.