Esteemed but silent readers of Firedoglake and MyFDL . . . I know there are vast multitudes of you out there who just read the diaries or comments but never post anything, never say anything, never ask for help or offer any. I’m not sure why so many of you have remained silent through all these years of wreckage and ruin, but the Boss knows why.

It looks to me like he wrote a song about it, about all of you hiding out there on the backstreets of cyberspace, huddled at your keyboards in the deep heart of the night, waiting for the bells to ring, hoping they might ring again someday, trying in vain to breathe the fire you were born in, scraping your tears up off the street and then scraping them up again, trying to make it through all this by yourself, hanging on with a love so strong, but filled with frustration and defeat.

He knows what that feels like . . .

I don’t know who “Terry” really was, she might even have been Jane for all I know, but I’m not going to speculate. If she slow-danced with Springsteen a time or two, on the beach at Stockton’s Wing or anywhere else, it’s none of my business. All I know is that someone he decided to call “Terry” broke his heart into a million pieces, which left him no choice but to let her go and settle for becoming a legendary songwriter.

I’ve had similar experiences with love, the only difference is that I didn’t become a legendary songwriter.

But you probably know that.

I’m not an editor, I’m not a frontpager, I’m not a moderator, I don’t have any right to ask the silent readers of Firedoglake and MyFDL to start posting, to start talking to us, to become activists and protesters and seekers of peace, but I’m asking anyway. Please. Speak out for the warriors whose strength is not to fight, for the refugees on their unarmed road of flight, for each and every underdog soldier in the night.

Speak out for the searching ones on their speechless, seeking trail, for the lonesome haunted lovers with too personal a tale, for every gentle harmless soul misplaced inside a jail.

Speak out for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless, confused, accused, misused, strung out ones and worse, for every sacred child of God in this whole wide universe . . .

Speak out, because when the breakdown hits at midnight there’ll be nothing left to say. That breakdown is coming, it knows where you live, it knows where I live, it knows where we all live, and it’s coming unless we all start speaking truth to power, unless we start taking power away from the banks and the corporations and the politicians they own and start giving it back to the People.

It’s called DEMOCRACY.