Schools

Common Sense Society Celebrates 'Thomas Paine's Birthday'

The annual event took place this year at Fort Lee School No. 1 and also served to kickoff the group's "$17.76" fundraising campaign.

The Fort Lee Common Sense Society sponsors an annual celebration of the birthday of American Revolutionary War patriot Thomas Paine, who was born on Jan. 29, 1737. This year, with Paine’s actual birthday falling on Sunday, the celebration took place Wednesday at .

The goal this year was to hold the celebration not far from where Paine was encamped with General George Washington’s Army in 1776 and started to pen “The American Crisis,” said Tom Meyers of the Fort Lee Common Sense Society and the Fort Lee Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs prior to the event.

This year’s celebration also marked the official kickoff of the Common Sense Society’s “$17.76” fundraising campaign.

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Meyers talked to the third- through sixth-graders about Fort Lee’s , referring to the statue there, depicting two soldiers from the American Revolution.

“Now we’re going to put Thomas Paine there with your help; we can’t do it without your help,” Meyers told the kids. “And when we raise enough money to put that statue there, Thomas Paine is going to be looking up at the other statue. But he’s not going to be holding a musket; he’s not going to be holding a weapon. Do you know what George Washington said was his most important weapon during the American Revolution? The quill pen of Thomas Paine.”

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Members of the Fort Lee VFW, including Commander James Viola, who is also president of the Fort Lee Common Sense Society, were also in attendance Wednesday.

Viola, who Meyers said was “very adamant about not having Paine hold a weapon,” addressed the students, saying, “When you sit at your desk, you have in your hand either a pen or a pencil.”

“That is the mightiest weapon that you can have,” Viola said. “Thomas Paine changed the Revolution during that time by sitting down and writing what he thought.”

Meyers then asked the students to become “ambassadors of Thomas Paine; not to give us money, but to go out and tell Thomas Paine’s story to the rest of Fort Lee.”

“We realize that times are tough, so we can’t ask people for a lot of money,” he said. “We need about 2,500 residents to contribute $17.76 each, and we’ll have our statue completely funded, and we’ll have it up in November of 2013, and you’ll help us unveil it.”

Meyers told Patch the Common Sense Society has raised about $88,000 since 2008 toward the cost of erecting the statue of Paine in Monument Park, leaving it about $40,000 short of its goal. The total cost of the statue is $128,400, he said.

The program for this year’s Thomas Paine birthday celebration—it was Paine’s 275th—also included a display of Revolutionary War artifacts and photos of the statue in progress; performances of “Yankee Doodle” by the school’s beginner band and a colonial line dance by a group of fourth-graders, both led by Music teacher Lisandra Hernandez; Palisade Interstate Park historical troubadour Thaddeus MacGregor leading the students in songs of the period beginning with a round of “Happy Birthday” for Paine; and Thomas Paine impersonator Ken Miller.

Miller as Paine talked about his journey from England to the United States, saying he was “very ill” when he arrived in Philadelphia.

“And while I was getting better, I was watching out of my window the slave trade, and I began to realize why I was here,” he told the students. “And this reason is still the same reason that we all have today. It’s the cause. And the cause is an ideal of what America is. [America] is not a set of boundaries; it’s not an ethnic group; it’s not a religion. [America] is people who all believe that other individuals—all individuals—around the world have rights to determine their own destinies.”


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