The Importance of Progressive Activism
It was just a little over four years ago that I remember sitting in front of our TV with our neighbors, watching the election returns, preparing to celebrate.
I think it was the New York Times website that I had open on my iPad, showing a dynamic chart tracking the projected probability of victory for each presidential candidate.
And then, within what seemed like only a few minutes, those two lines — one red, one blue — changed direction, crossed one another, and reversed positions.
So much for the value of political prognostication.
It was a month or two after that when our son sent us an email with a link to a Google doc that was publicly available. I followed the link and it looked interesting. It was a little treatise describing practical ways for citizens to influence their elected representatives.
A month or two later I had the good fortune to hear one of the authors of that document in person, speaking here in Seattle, to a crowd of about 1,000 people gathered downtown in our venerable Town Hall. His appearance had been hastily arranged by a local political player who had met him just a few days earlier, at a party in San Francisco, and persuaded him to make a quick detour to Seattle, to speak to a small group here.
