Connecting makes us smarter

There's a smart new tool under development that could strengthen what you might call the policy infrastructure for taking America back. It has the potential to capture the brightest ideas we can co-create together. According to the project's initial website

Democracylab is a non-partisan, non-profit website built upon the idea that technology can enable us to harness freedom of speech and the power of the vote in ways never before possible.

See what they're up to.

Standing up

I think I may have already cited YES! Magazine and the Positive Futures Network as magnificent resources for the work of taking America back. Their coverage of wonderful community-building work around the world is blasting big holes on the implicit social/poltical myth that the way we're doing things in this country is pretty much the only "realistic" way to do them. Well, no, each issue of YES! proves, in fact that's not true at all.

The current edition of YES! grabs the horns of the Big One. It's theme is "Stand Up to Corporate Power." That's more combative than some of the uplifting citizenship-building stuff that I'd like to see us sharing on this forum. Does that make it a turn-off for some people who want to take their country back. I hope not, because we're not getting anything back if we can't grapple with this hard reality. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Television to TAB by

If you would agree that taking America back means good clear information about what's going on, and that a whole lot of people will continue to rely on TV to find that out, I think you'll want to know about this.

Upside Down Spending

I spent today (Wednesday) in the Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse in Eugene, watching and testifying in a hearing to determine whether Pete Seda should be freed from custody while awaiting prosecution on terrorism-related charges. Pete, a casual friend of many years, is accused of laundering money through an Islamic charity to a Chechnyan group that the Feds have designated a terrorist organization. Pete returned voluntarily last week from four years of quasi-exile to face the charges, which makes the central question of this particular hearing—whether Pete’s a flight risk—a little peculiar. There’s more to the story than that. If you can figure out why the Feds have their teeth so deeply into this particular case, there’s a lot of us who’d like to know.

And this has what to do with Taking America Back (TAB)? It’s the venue. The new courthouse, named with no apparent intended irony for Oregon’s icon of the common man’s rights, covers most of a city block and looks like a titanium outpost from Star Trek. This is not a building that says to the people of Eugene “This land is your land.” It looks more like the fortress of an occupying power. But that’s just one guy’s opinion. More specifically and to the point, why exactly are we spending $ 75 million on a new Federal Courthouse (a whole bunch of which, based on my visit today, was spent on gorgeous natural wood paneling and elegant metal sculpture work) while Oregon counties are shutting down libraries, sheriff patrols and health departments? There are lots of ways you could put this question; this version happens to come to me as I recover from the sensory overload of this gigantic, architecturally lush building.

What we have here, seems to me, is one of many concrete (sorry) reasons that so many of us feel our country isn’t ours anymore. And it’s more than a feeling. While our local governments and communities are pushed to and past the breaking point, the federal government cruises along spending tax dollars pulled out of our community with no noticeable restraint or accountability. Every tax $ Congress spends is a $ that cash-strapped communities can’t use for vital services.

This is not rocket science. Consider the way local services are withering on the vine. Consider news stories like the recent admission by the Pentagon that it simply can’t account for two trillion (that’s with a ‘t’) tax dollars. Put them together and we might have the seeds of an agreement, and a big one, among Americans of every political stripe: our public spending is upside down, and life is only likely to get harder in this country if we don’t turn it around. That might be one of the most powerful and actionable elements of the “hidden agreement” I wrote about a few posts down. Which means it can be an important tactic for TAB.

More about this later. Today I’m just struck by how this damn courthouse rubs our face in it.

Nobody can do it for us. Yet...

"Dan" had a response that caught my eye about the video just below this post, which is a tribute to the unorthodox courage of famous leaders most of us admire. In part he said

"One individual is not enough, I think we need bigger change. The [video] is great in spirit but at the same time, it's an affectation.. it's a bumper sticker, it's an effing Che Gueverra T-Shirt. It's lip service it's dissent conveniently packaged with the teeth removed... one cant do it alone.. we've proven that to ourselves time and again. We don't need Ghandis or MLKs or JFKs, that takes the onus off of 'us' and 'ourselves' while we wait for the next 'great hope' to come along and deliver us from ourselves. But what we really need is each other. Then we've got a movement that will transcend race, income, education, religion, political party and country.

Then we CAN change the world."

Yep. I really had a sense of that this year when people reacted to Obama galloping over the hill on his steed: "Maybe he's the one." This notion that we can get the country back if only we invest power in good enough people comes from the child in all of us (I think it's all of us) that wants Daddy or Mommy to clean up this awful mess. TAB is a job nobody else, no matter how wonderful, can do for us.

And yet...didn't we need those folks in the video to get some great stuff done? Leadership seems to be an elegant balance of inspiring people with power (a noticeable, "famous" function) and getting out of the way so that they can effectively use it (not something high-level politicians tend to do well). Does that sound right? What leaders in your experience pull that off?

What's out there to help wake us up?

"Steve" offered a response to the last post (about "The Hidden Agreement") that reinforces a key principle of this blog: we're looking for the good stuff that's helping people believe in themselves and choose more engaged lives, no matter where it comes from. So whenever the spirit moves you, please send in links to extraordinarily energizing sites that you've found. I'll comb through and use my, um, rigorous criteria to select the ones that seem most resonant with our focus at REALLYtab. Rigorous criteria: I'll probably pass on New Age sites and the political sites that offer astute ongoing commentary on all that's wrong, though there are plenty in both categories doing terrific work. What I'm more interested in is those sites that speak with special power to the emerging activist in you. I'll list those on the right-hand sidebar for you find and visit.

Steve offered up two sites that fit the bill: Zaadz and Global Mindshift. I was taken with the short video at Zaadz that showed who we are. Or can be. Thanks, Steve...

Here's the Big Premise. Is it true, 1-10?

Naming a blog "REALLY taking America Back" strongly suggests faith that it can happen. I remember exactly when I got the faith. It was probably the juiciest aha moment of my ten years hosting talk radio on an NPR regional network. I couldn't get it out of my mind until I laid it out in a magazine essay called "The Hidden Agreement," which was reprinted at the end of As If We Were Grownups (I'll try hard not to overpitch that book in this blog; if I'm not trying hard enough I'm trusting you'll let me know).

I hope you'll take a few (5-10) minutes to read "The Hidden Agreement." This is important, because if its central premise doesn't work then the chances of taking America back drop down to, oh, about...zero, best I can tell. Go ahead, I'll wait...

...Okay. I'd like your gut check on this essay, ranked 1-10. 1 means "this essay's a complete crock" and 10 means "this is EXACTLY how it seems to me." Any particular experience about all this come to mind?

Let's get started

“Let’s Take America Back.”

That’s the slogan I chose for the prospective U.S. Senate campaign I’ve been exploring for the past two months. For me its power comes from ten years hosting a daily public radio talk show, listening to countless callers say pretty much the same thing: “What country is this we’re living in? And what did they do with the one I learned to love as a child?” It didn’t matter which party they belong to or where they stand on today’s issues. They all want their country back.

Some of my callers would explain, often in well-informed detail, how America’s corporate elite have Congress, the White House, the mass media, the election process and the financial system wired up so tight that We the People can never regain power (and what fun and merry conversations those were). Certainly true… if that’s what we believe. And if it is then we’re saying that a couple hundred thousand elites can permanently keep three hundred million of us from having what we want.

I’m sorry, but that’s just too embarrassing to accept. So what if we don’t? What if instead we remembered that we still openly elect our leadership in this country (we’ll talk another day about the growing scale of electronic fraud that brings that premise into question), which gives us some power and responsibility to move this country towards what we want it to be? What would happen if we took that belief, and the work/pleasure of citizenship necessary to animate it, much more seriously?

That’s one question that drove me to look hard at a run for the Senate. And the first thing I noticed was that just about every non-incumbent campaign I can find is making some kind of reference to “taking our country back.” Seems like we have an early nominee for the most overworked cliché of 2008.

Fine. So what does it mean? And how do we do it? This post begins a campaign to answer those questions. We start with a conversation, but conversation alone isn’t enough.. Remember this one?



Network came out in 1976. Think how much we have taken in the thirty years since. In the real world. sad to say, ‘not taking it anymore’ demands more of us than screaming that we’re not going to take it anymore.

I'm committed to challenging all of us to discover and advance whatever it takes to really take our country back. A partisan run for the U.S. Senate, boxed in by the demands of 10-second sound bites, dialing for dollars and delivering the goods to campaign contributors, turns out to be a poor way to do that. And it’s not just the campaign process that’s taken America astray; we have to take a fresh look at the core notion that everything will be fine if we just put good people into office. I'll bet you remember this one:


That fictional Mr. Smith held forth in 1939. Maybe back then white knights like Jimmy Stewart were enough to save the day (I doubt it). Today we know better. We can send the best people we know into the entrenched power matrix of Washington and they won’t take our country back for us. They need us with and behind them, actively, persistently, sometimes raucously, to overcome the huge hurdles that a century of big-money politics has set in place.

Did I mention that this revived citizenship has to be satisfying and (at least occasionally) fun? That’s because if it’s not, we won’t take it on. If you’re not thinking that your life is too busy to take on any more responsibilities, you’re unusual. The biggest challenge to taking our country back is finding ways to engage that enrich rather than drain energy from our lives. The activism we’re here to foster will flow from what we want more than what we “should” do.

Here’s the good news: a lot of activists within reach of this blog have experience and ideas on how to do that, and we’ll find out what they are. Better news: America's bursting at the seams with all kinds of smart, creative groups and organizations devoted to taking our country back. We’ll link to them to learn what works, what’s enriching and productive, what isn’t. I don't know about you, but when I get excited about a project I can forget that there are usually a lot of terrific ideas already out there for the sharing; it’s far too late in the game to burn up precious energy reinventing wheels. In the words of the Hopi Elder Prayer,

"This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and
will suffer greatly... Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate…. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!”

Okay. Let’s gather ourselves.