Welcome to American Commons!

This project is about common people using common sense & common decency to find common ground for the common good – period – plain & simple.

In an increasingly complex world, keeping things plain & simple is easier said than done.  However, failure to do so is not an option.

• We, the people, must remember that citizen is still the highest office in the land.
• We, the people, must set about designing and building a new system – of the people, by the people, and for the people.
• We, the people, must set our differences aside and find common ground.
• We, the people, must step beyond ideology, keep moving forward together, and practice the deep democracy of civil civic dialogue.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete“

- Buckminster Fuller

…that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863

Capitalism, Communism, and Christianity are three great ideas that have never been tried.

- Gore Vidal

Oh, let America be America, again, for it has never been America for me…

- Langston Hughes

Man is by nature a social animal, and an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something in nature that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or he is a god.
- Aristotle, Politics (1253 A) [4th Century BCE]

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common.
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose

The Law demands that we atone
When we take things we don’t own
But leave the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine,

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the Law to break;
This must be so, but they endure
Those who conspire to make the Law.

The Law locks up the man or woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common flock
Till they go and steal it back.

- English folk poem, circa 1764