In the Declaration of Independence, if you go to the second paragraph, which we’re never taught in middle school, it’s so radical, it’s a personal contract that each of us is supposed to commit to, to stand up against tyranny and oppression, and to overthrow our government, or defeat our government, or change our government when it’s no longer operating under the consent of the governed.
So it’s a very radical document, and I wrote Give Me Liberty because I had written this book, The End of America, which many people read last fall, which argued that there are these ten steps that you always see in a closing society, when a dictator is trying to crush democracy. People are quite persuaded by this. I thought it would get a lot more resistance, and they said, “OK, Naomi, we see this, these ten steps are here, now what do we do?”
So Give Me Liberty is a sequel and it’s supposed to provide answers, or the goal is to provide answers. Well, to provide energy, an inspiration, from this state of mind that we’re supposed to have, that the founders intended us to have.
Also to analyze this fake patriotism that we’ve been bombarded with intentionally for 30 years, not just the last eight, although the last eight were particularly egregious, that has been directed by people who profit from an oligarchy, basically, at us, to get us to accept what I call fake democracy, increasing the limited scope for our citizen leadership, to get us to accept smaller and smaller spaces for protest and assembly, more and more intimidation from the state, to accept this message: that our job as citizens is to vote and maybe e-mail our representatives, but not to lead and not to hold the debates and not to write the laws.
In fact, I learned from the founding generation of these ordinary people who changed the world, these farmers and artisans and washerwomen and enslaved African-Americans, that actually we are the ones who are supposed to be leading the country in a very revolutionary way. Lastly, then I add these seven core principles that I say we’re supposed to be carrying, that we’ve often been diverted from. Then the last third of the book is these 55 action steps that you can take to seize the power back and to restore liberty, because we really are in a war right now and it’s going to take all of us taking steps like this to restore our freedom.
Kall: And you really have put together very concrete, very specific instructions on just how to do these things. It’s quite a collection you’ve put together here.
Wolf: Thank you. Which do you like? Which struck you?
Kall: It’s just the comprehensiveness of it. Organizing national hearings; exposing government secrecy; making every vote count by Mark Crispin Miller, promoting democracy overseas through investment. It’s just great basic resources... how to organize a town hall meeting.
I got started in politics shortly before the war. I was not in it all my life. I was involved in trying to wake people up using biofeedback and inner self-regulation training approaches for most of my life. I just finally decided it wasn’t working fast enough, waking people up one at a time, and that’s why I started OpEdNews.
Wolf: Oh, that’s very interesting! That’s a fascinating background. And a good way to take a little more direct action.
Kall: (laughs) And another thing... Yeah, really (laughs)... But it’s always been about waking people up. So I got training back in, I guess, 2003 with Camp Wellstone and just recently I’ve been through some community organization training, and what you’ve given here is really practical, concrete, step-by-step stuff that people can use, there are so many people that have woken up in the last... in the Bush Era, and they don’t know what to do. They write blogs, they write articles...
Wolf: That’s exactly right.
Kall: And so you’ve given them very specific things to do. There are great training organizations out there, but this is the kind of stuff people need to take their passion to make a difference to the next level. It’s interesting – last week I had Mary Pipher on, who wrote a
book on writing to change the world, and now you’re going to give us some steps here, talk a little bit more about where we’re going with all this. Another thing I just wanted to mention is happiness. You talk a lot about happiness and it fascinated me, the way you describe the different way that people thought of happiness at the beginning of America.
Wolf: Isn’t that interesting?
Kall: Can you talk a little bit about that and about what Thomas Jefferson and others said about that? Because another thing I’ve been involved with is positive psychology, one of my web sites is http://www.positivepsychology.net.
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