I'm here today, as a result of about a week of scouring the internet. I was in the Ron Paul campaign before of course. I became a state delegate for him, but after the convention I just hoped to return to my life for a while. Then I got the email about strangebedfellows and accountability now.

So is Bush determined to go to war with Iran before he leaves office? I don't know about you, but I'm enraged!

Not just no, but hell no!

Another anti-war march? If only that was our only problem!

So Obama's now running for Bush's first term, with support for retro-active telecom immunity and faith based programs even as McCain runs for his third term? Congress can't find the guts to use the power of the purse to bring troops home from Iraq, even though its widely believed thats why they elected so many Democrats in the first place? A speaker in one of the videos from the Ron Paul march in Washington informs me that we delegates to the Texas state Republican convention were lied to about the Trans-Texas corridor (part of the NAFTA superhighway) being dead. And they are taking our existing free highways and turning them into tollways while using our tax money to hire lobbyists in Washington and run a PR campaign to neutralize opposition to the TTC, illegally? A Federal circuit court affirms that the President can designate even US citizens within the country as enemy combatants and hold us indefinitely? And the folks at savetheinternet.com say that Canadians are already running into the plans to restrict internet traffic to plans of bundled websites by 2011.

It makes you wonder what can be done against enemies like this.

Well its clear to me that nothing we have on the table right now is hitting hard enough or moving fast enough.

We call this the Ron Paul Revolution, and some of the good feeling of calling it that comes from how it evokes the original American revolution; The Declaration, war of independence and founding of the US being the gold standard of genius and patriotism.

The problem though is that the problems we face today are nothing like the problems the original founders overcame. They fought a war against an organized army, yes, but they repelled a distant foreign power. And once they managed to repel them they filled out this continent with very little contact and interference from abroad.

This revolution was a very simple change, which simply made room for a way of life that wasn't hard to understand. Our problem, by contrast, is to root out corruption and the incentive to rob and control us from a hidden, diffuse threat already deeply entrenched in our government at all levels, and able to bring power to bear on us in a world that has been shrunk by cheap communications and transportation until all of humanity seems to be in each others faces.

I don't have an easy solution to this, and I don't know if there could be one, but I have some ideas.

For one thing, money-bombs are OK, they have served their purpose, but its a trick that seems to get less attention the more it is tried. I'm not trying to discourage anyone from the next planned event, I'm just saying that you need to start considering new tactics quickly. But they rely on people having something to give, yet we are in tough economic times and are donating depreciating dollars. And they seem to depend on the media being willing to report that we've done something significant. We need to move to tactics that can be felt more directly.

One idea I have would be to imitate something I'm hearing about being planned in Australia, a massive strike. Depending on who we could organize and on what issues, and I think a new war on Iran would be an example of an issue it will be easy to rally broad support behind, something like this could work.

Another would be a massive withdrawal of funds from banks.

One that I think deserves special consideration though, would be a "talk to your neighbor" campaign.
The campaigning for Ron Paul in the primaries was interesting, and I'm sure that spending time supporting each other and expressing our views on youtube and the rest of the internet helped us grow, but I think that from that time to this we are depending too much on electronic communication to get the word out. We should know that on the internet you mostly see what you want to see. Obama could have had 1/10th the videos Paul had, but an Obama fan could simply have reinforced themselves watching only those videos all day.

We need an event where we all, Ron Paulers, Libertarians, Salon readers, people demanding accountability, net neutrality, all go outside, walk to your neighbor's door, knock on it, and try to have a conversation. Maybe we could brainstorm some talking points, get some videos cued up to show on our laptops, bring a gift. We need to make conversation and door-to-door campaigning natural again. And do it outside of election season, on issues and such. We should spread our messages of concern but also ask questions. What would our neighbors do to right what's wrong? What are they concerned about that we haven't mentioned? What do they see? Where do they see this country going?
We need serious networking capital beyond the internet. We need close ties with the other common people. We need to get the word out, get them on board and multiply the brainpower working on these problems.

Please feel free to rewrite this any way you want an re-post it. Give me suggestions for improvement.