Dream On

Sing with me, if it's just for today - Happy Thanksgiving

Dream On, America

Here I go again, dating myself. Who else still gets chills when Steven Tyler wails those opening lines of Aerosmith’s “Dream On”: Listen here in Aerosmith concert: Aerosmith - Dream On

Every time that I look in the mirror

All these lines on my face getting clearer

The past is gone

It went by like dusk to dawn…

Yeah, I know. 1973 feels like three lifetimes ago. But lately those lyrics have been looping in my head—not because I’m staring at new wrinkles, but because I just read the Brownstone Institute’s proposed U.S. Senate resolution titled “What the U.S. Senate Should Say,” and damn if it isn’t the most grown-up, clear-eyed, rock-and-roll act of defiance I’ve seen in years.

And in the 70s, that’s what the song was about: defiance.

You got to lose to know how to win.

We lost.

We lost years of our children’s education, our businesses, our parents we couldn’t hold as they died, weddings, funerals, family reunions, hugs, first steps, last breaths. We lost trust in institutions that told us to be afraid of our neighbors and obedient to experts who kept moving the goalposts. We lost freedoms we were assured were non-negotiable. We paid dues most of us never imagined we’d owe.

And now the Brownstone Institute, along with some of the bravest health-freedom organizations still standing, has handed Congress a mirror. The draft resolution is brutal in its honesty: it names the “grave mistakes” one by one—school closures, lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, censorship, suppression of early treatment, the whole grim parade—and declares, in the plainest language possible, “Never again.”

[Read it here: Brownstone on proposed Senate Resolution]

Not a commission.

Not a “pandemic preparedness” working group that will inevitably recommend more of the same.

A full-throated, unambiguous Senate resolution that says: We screwed up. We hurt you. We violated your rights. We are sorry. And we are writing into law—permanently—that these things can never be done to Americans again.

Thirty-day limits on emergency declarations.

Schools and churches stay open by default.

No forced medical procedures.

No censorship-for-hire.

No compensation for takings.

Real-time data transparency.

Sunset clauses on every power grab.

These aren’t radical ideas. They’re the bare minimum after what we just lived through.

And when I read the resolution’s closing line to posterity—“The deeper wound was self-inflicted… lessons purchased at so dear a dear price shall not be forgotten”—I heard Tyler’s voice again:

Sing with me, sing for the year

Sing for the laughter, sing for the tear

Sing with me, if it’s just for today

Maybe tomorrow the good Lord’ll take you away…

We sang for the tears plenty in 2020–2023. We sang through masks, through Zoom funerals, through the silence of empty playgrounds. Now it’s time to sing for the laughter again. For the kids who get their childhoods back. For the small-business owners who won’t be crushed next time. For the elderly who won’t die alone. For the doctors who can treat patients without fear of losing their licenses. For every American who wants to look in the mirror someday and see lines on their face that came from smiling, not from crying under house arrest.

The Brownstone resolution is the nation’s way of saying what Tyler screamed into that microphone fifty years ago:

Dream on.

Dream on.

Dream until your dreams come true.

Not the dreamy, sleepy, “trust the experts” dream we were sold in 2020.

The wide-awake, eyes-open dream that says we paid the price, we learned the lesson, and we are never, ever paying it again.

So here’s my message to every senator who still has a pulse and a spine:

Put this resolution on the floor.

Vote yes.

And then crank Aerosmith so loud the marble shakes.

Because America needs to remember how to win.

Dream on, dream on.

In health,

DocofLastResort