in that. I want the….
Kall: Great!
Wolf: ....people to have as much power as a lobbyist. Absolutely. I want Congress to worry about the people and worry about what the national referendum will view. Absolutely. There are many other examples. I want there to be like the equivalent of a 311 phone call you can make. It’s so confusing right now and it’s so not transparent. If I have an issue, like I want a greenbelt around my town. Do I call the city council, do I call the state legislature, is it a federal issue? You know, who knows? And this is one reason people give up. It’s been made deliberately opaque. I want there to be a national 311 where operators are standing by to tell citizens, “Well, this is how you take this action, this is where you go, this is how you get it done, this is how it can support you.”
I want citizens to write the op-eds. As you know there’s a section in the book on ‘become a media yourself’, write the op-ed, here’s how you do it, pitch it, do radio, do television, here’s how you do it, frame the story, here's how you leak to a reporter who’s on background, off the record, on the record. Many, many changes. But this is just the beginning because the ideal is that everyone reads this book and looks around them and thinks, “Ha! This is an institution that’s missing. I can create it,” because I also offer people steps like ‘start your own political movement,’ ‘fund raise for your own nonprofit,’ and so on. It’s... the only thing that can save us from this descending repression is millions of people taking these steps. Because it... history is clear – they cannot control us when we are running through their hands like sand. They cannot control us when millions of people are saying, “No,” and taking action and building their own power.
Kall: You know what I’ve found, in my experience in working with
activism, is there’s the power curve law or the 80/20 rule where 20% of the people do 80% of the work; although it’s really more like 2% of the people do 98% of the work. And I don’t think that people don’t want to do it; I think they don’t know how. And I think your book gives them a lot of ideas and practical things that they can do to go further. A lot of times I send out a daily newsletter through http://www.opednews.com and I’ll sign it off, “Do something extra today.” I mean, it’s so easy to just spend five minutes making an extra phone call or just doing something that takes you out of your ordinary, and all of a sudden you’ve gone from being a spectator to being a revolutionary.
Wolf: I totally hear you and I love it that you’re doing that, but what I also now feel is that the kind of activism we’ve been expecting of ourselves, like – understandably, I mean, this is how it was set up – make a phone call, or, e-mail your Congressperson, or, at the most hold a meeting. That should be just the very beginning of this incredible dance. And really….
Kall: Absolutely.
Wolf: ...interesting, “OK, what... should I run for office? Well, how do I do that? OK, well, here’s Curtis Ellis, he can tell me how to run for office; he has a campaign network, I can call them.” Or, “Do I have a friend who would be a terrific Congressperson? OK, well, let me get that ball rolling.” Or, “Do I want to write a law? Well, how do I write a law? Let me call the Initiative and Referendum Institute.” In other words, what I’m trying to do is bump up people’s sense of what their job is. Their job is supposed to be to lead. That’s what the people are supposed to be doing.
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