Plan of Action

I came up with the idea for this site Saturday Morning after fuming about the vote in the House of Representatives on June 20 to support President Bush’s desire to rid our Nation of Constitutional protections.

We are off to a good start, but we have a lot to do and a lot to talk about. The purpose of this site is to give everyone a meeting place to voice their opinions, come up with ideas about how to repeal FISA and to drum up support for our cause.

I would like to put forth some notions about how we might go about this.

I propose we operate on a consensual basis. There are many reasons for this the first being that I do not believe in hierarchies. I am not in charge here other than my role as site administrator. We are in charge. What we agree to do collectively as far as the site is concerned will be implemented. The second reason is that our common goals can be better achieved if our actions truly reflect our common desires on how to achieve them. This is not to say that we can’t act in smaller consensual subgroups to take on a task. In fact the most efficient groups will probably be the smallest and most committed.

To that end I expect people to voice their opinion about what we should and could do to take effective action by becoming members of the blogging team. All you have to do is ask, everyone is invited.

People who agree with a posted idea should comment on it and start to form a group that will attempt to carry it out. It is up to those people who want to see an idea come to fruition to get it done.

To that end I have a few suggestions:

One: Talk about the action you want to be involved in with the people you are working with and come up with ideas.

Two: Plan the action. Figure out what is needed, who is responsible for doing what, and any other necessary details. If what you are doing is going to involves talking to the press you need to know the do’s and don’ts about that; which we can get into later. If you are going to have contact with the press you must try your best to pick the members of your group who are the most articulate and name them as your press spokespeople. If you are not on this list and are approached by a reporter just say, “You should talk to Sam or Julie. They have all the information.”

Three: Do the action, whatever it is. Whether it is leafleting, highway blogging, Civil Disobedience, going directly to your elected representative or whatever. If you don’t do this; steps one and two are meaningless. Don’t tell everybody you are going to do something unless you are.

Four: Evaluate the action. Go over what went right what went wrong and learn from mistakes and successes.

Five: Return to step one and repeat.

It is doing these small things over and over again that will help us get better and better and attract more support.

To help people who wish to work together get in contact and keep their privacy I will be happy to forward requests for emails. Just send a request to repealfisa@gmail.com