Ah, Sachmo, that sounded beautiful. Thank you, Liz. All right, they say the most important thing in the world is love. And I won’t dispute that, but I won’t give a talk on that. That’s the realm of the poets and mystics, but the second most important thing in the world is activism and real activism, the daily defense of our self-governance, the defense of democracy, not jaw-boning about policy. My favorite poet, Gary Snyder, says, the wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, forward the streams and cross ridges and tell a good story when we get back home. To that, I would add, and when we encounter Goliath on our travels, trick him up as a tribute to our home. That is my mantra. It’s a do-it-yourself democracy. It’s something we have to work on every day, lest it go to seed like my old VW camper. This isn’t actually mine, but mine is somewhere looking very much like that. Once I stopped working on it every single weekend. So who is our Goliath and how do we trip him up? Corporations once really rescued us from a feudal society. We were at the behest of kings and little princelings who were pretty tough to get a fair wage from. And corporations, incorporating is the way we organized our labor and our money and built this modern world that we have now with all its efficiencies and wonders. And at the same time, these corporations became far too powerful. We no longer rule the corporations. They now test chemicals that are in our foods themselves. We don’t do it for them. They now get to classify themselves as people with the same rights that we have. So we need to hold these guys in check. Coke Industries, Exxon Mobil, Monsanto, they need to serve, not rule. So how do we do that? Well, let’s just look at some great defenders. So here you have New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. She did a piece in August 2010, New Yorker, about the Coke Brothers. It was built on research provided in a report from Greenpeace and another amazing journalist, Lee Fong. And the way Jane pulled this all together took a couple of industrialists who were invisible and untouchable and changed the way we think about them. And Merchants of Doubt is really an extension of that. And by the way, that movie, the director of it is Robbie Kenner, who did Food Inc. So I do highly recommend you see Merchants of Doubt. Some other defenders. This is Scott Proudy. He was a caterer. He’s the caterer who taped presidential candidate Mitt Romney. When Mitt Romney famously said, 47% of Americans won’t vote for me, because they feel entitled to things like food and shelter and housing. This isn’t Bill Lipton, but Bill Lipton is from the New York Working Families Party. And when there was a fight in New York City to get paid sick days rights to a million additional New Yorkers, a lot of politicians, a lot of people who already had paid sick days and vacation days, didn’t really care about this extra million sort of working poor. Bill figured out if you thought about that single working mother, for example, who if she got the flu, if she didn’t go to work, she got fired. If she went to work, she was going to share the flu with you, with your entree. So the campaign was built around that. And now a million people, a million additional people have paid sick days, the right to earn those days in New York. There have been a lot of good civil rights stories here. This is the Friendship Nine, Clarence Graham and the Friendship Nine. These guys figured out how to do this action, integrating a lunch counter before the civil rights movement even used this technique. They did this 54 years ago in South Carolina. Then there’s Aaron Schwartz, the late, the great late Aaron Schwartz, who when the Stop Online Piracy Act was rolling through Congress, it had all the big media conglomerates behind it. It had the unions behind it. It was a freight train running to the president’s desk for signature. Aaron figured out how not to fight these guys the way they fight, with money to politicians and lobbyists. He didn’t have that, but he organized the internet companies that we love the most to do these blockades on their websites. And then there’s Toto. Toto is a great defender, and I’ll get to him more later. So what do all these defenders have in common? They have big opponents. They don’t compromise. They win completely, but they’re not fighting epic battles. This is not a Hollywood set. The Braveheart stuff is absolutely terrible for your strategic thinking. That teaches you to run up against the enemy’s breastplate, which works great for Hollywood directors, but mind you, you know, they’re in Lexuses in LA. They’re not actually fighting the real fight. So how did these people do this? Well, they start off, you have to love something deeply, right? They all love something deeply. An idea, an issue, people, a place, people’s right to paid sick leaves, not wanting to have record numbers of our citizens incarcerated, incarcerated, wanting to eat foods that haven’t been contaminated with chemicals that were invented to gas people in the trenches of World War I. Pretty basic things. And they have to want to win. So now we’re going to go through six ways that you can work more effectively to do this. First, channel your inner Toto. Often we seem like extras in a new version of the Wizard of Oz, just kind of waiting for the banks to peel the curtain back on themselves, say, here’s the chicanery we’re up to. Yeah, we’ve been kind of double billing you and slipping in some extra fees, or waiting for the chemical companies to say, actually, we are putting that in your bread. But they don’t, right? They don’t do that until we, like Toto, pull that curtain back and hold that curtain back. So the public doesn’t need this X-ray vision to see it. The public doesn’t really know this stuff. The public doesn’t see this stuff the way we do. We think it’s obvious. It is not. Second, we have to understand power so that we can both build it and use it. Now, this is not that old canard speaking truth to power. That’s wrong on both accounts. We don’t have all the truth. Our opponents don’t have all the power. Clarence Graham in South Carolina, he had power. Nobody thought he did. The Kennedys in Washington didn’t think he had power. He was irrelevant to them. The truth was obvious, that people of any race or creed could go and sit at that lunch counter in the Five and Dime. That’s so obvious, right? But to go do it, to have the hoodspot, to go and do it, to integrate that lunch counter and to create that space, in a way that sparked a whole movement to do it, that was real power. Sun Tzu, the Taoist sage of ancient China, said that the best strategist will win without fighting. In other words, not burning up all his or her resources in that brave heart type of fight. And that to do that, you must first know yourself and your opponent. Well, our opponents don’t really care about our ideas or our logic. And the Democrats, they’re not coming to our rescue. People aren’t just going to do what’s right. There’s a wonderful graduation speech that many of you have probably watched on YouTube by David Foster Wallace that he gave at Kenyon College. And in it, he tells this fun little story of three fish. And the older fish is swimming by two younger fish and says to the younger fish, good morning, boys. How’s the water? And as the younger fish swim past, one younger fish looks to the other and says, what the hell is water? Well, water is what we’re in. We are children of empire. So one of the reasons I think we don’t understand power as well as we might is that we grew up in this country where our country kind of gets what it wants. When it wants something from another country, we bomb it, or we trade with it, or we buy from it. But that’s not us. That’s not the issues we care about. That’s not how we get to work every day. We’re actually underdogs within this modern empire. And when we understand that, we can come up intuitively with the same kind of things that Clarence and Aaron did. Here’s a graphic that some activists I know use to help them understand power that they’re dealing with. By the way, I love these lighted tripping hazards. Moving around is beautiful. I’ve been waiting for someone to go down on it. It’s going to be me. So here are the corporations. What do they want? They want to influence state and federal policy. But they don’t just do it directly. They go through front groups and PACs. And I’ll talk about Alec in a minute. And they use these different PR firms. Because these activists have to know how their opponents are working and what their opponents are working through. Number three, pick where to fight. It improves the odds. And this is what we call formlessness. We want to choose the most advantageous field. Another little story from the civil rights movement. We know of the great high peak of the civil rights movement that fight, that struggle on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. The reason King and the activists moved the fight there from Tennessee. The racism was just as bad in Tennessee. It might have been worse. But the opponents in Tennessee were too smart to take the bait. They weren’t creating, giving King and his marchers the fight they needed. But they knew they could count on crazy racist governor Wallace to take the bait. Formlessly, they pulled out of Tennessee and they went to Alabama. And now you have the movie, Selma. That’s why the movie is not Tennessee. That’s formlessness. So we get to be like changelings. Clarence did that, figuring out it was the five and dime counter. Aaron did that, figuring out, let’s go to the people’s favorite websites. And it ends up creating these swarms where people are copying your actions. Goliath can’t squash all the swarms. There’s too many Davids. They can’t get old Jug Jord senators so and so as chief of staff to call the executive director and say, I’m going to peel off your funders. I’m going to call. Kiddo, you can’t. You got to stop doing that. The swarm can’t be stopped that way. Too many pesky Davids. Number four, don’t face a united front. Divide and conquer. This is called disaggregation. See, our opponents like to be all synced up. That’s what trade associations are for. Here’s a story of the American Legislative Exchange Council, one of the important chains in the corporate power chain there. Alec, a woman named Lisa Graves with a group called the Center for Media and Democracy built a network of groups called Alec Exposed and taught the environmental and the progressive and the union movement that Alec was actually this bill mill where corporations could write their own legislation and slip it through and it would look like state legislators did this. Not long after that, Common Cause discovered a bunch of documents that absolutely proved that Alec was a corporate bill mill. Then with the tragic debt of Trayvon Martin, it turned out that the law that his killer was hiding behind, Defend Your Ground, was an Alec inspired bill. That’s when Rashad Robinson, Color of Change, began to peel one big vulnerable corporation off after another off of Alec, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coke. Not long after that, my friend Daniel Sawan, in Forecast the Facts, Greenpeace and others, began to peel other organizations off because they could show the bills that Alec was pushing that were denying climate, that were blocking climate and energy solutions. So then Google left and Apple and Facebook. And so now it’s getting pretty lonely at Alec standing there in the front group. If you’re some of the last to leave, your Coke Industries, your Exxon Mobile, your Peabody Energy and you’re thinking, why is not enough people around here? It’s like when you get to a party too early and you’re looking around like that. That’s what it might be feeling like at Alec right now. So a further way to disrupt your opponents is with number five. There we go, the Wheel of Separation. Think of it this way, when President Obama first rolled out this great fight, once in a generation, the Affordable Care Act, now known as Obamacare by the way, that was done as an insult initially and now I love it. I think he must love it too. Obamacare. But they rolled that out after such a tough fight and then they just sort of said, let’s just let things settle down. Let’s not push any more initiatives. Let’s let our critics kind of take this in and maybe they’ll chill out. Well, they did. They came after a week, after a week. One more state, another lawsuit, another attack. They built campaigns around it. And the White House kept waiting and waiting and it only got worse. After that most recent bruising election, we saw a different President Obama and he seems to be rolling out a new initiative every week. The Wheel of Separation comes from something in Air Force, one of the winningest fighter pilots of all time, Colonel John Boyd. And he said, the way to win is to the person who can most quickly sort of observe, orient, figure out that whole landscape without dogma, without bias, and then decide and act and then continue to make your decisions that way. If you can do that really fast, you’ll actually crack into your opponent’s decision-making loop. In his case was another fighter pilot. That’s called the Oda Loop. And you can see President Obama is spinning his Oda Loop and he’s in his opponent’s loops now. Whereas earlier they were cracking into his and their loops were built around that. Activists break a piece of this off and we call it the Wheel of Separation where you want to learn what you can, investigate your opponents. You want to share the love, you want to spread it around the world. Update and you want to spin this, wash, rinse, repeat, until ultimately you get to separate the polluters or your opponents from the policymakers. And they end up being kind of like the modern-day tobacco guys. They really can’t have their water carried anymore by the Democrats or the Republicans. They’re separated. So now the tobacco guys have the same votes on tobacco issues as you and I do, which is the way it should be. All right. So you keep them guessing with the wheel. Now number six, the last one. Don’t get mad. You want to get even. The big word for this is equanimity. It’s Latin for having an even mind. But if you think about it, the really great activists, whether it’s Clarence or Lipton or Rashad, they get to put their emotions aside. Of course they feel those emotions deeply. Who wouldn’t? That’s why we’re here. But you have to set those emotions aside. There’s training that it requires. You set them aside so you can think, you can ask yourself in the morning, what can I do today? The best trip up Goliath. So ultimately you say, well, what does this really look like? To me, the complete activist. We get to steal this concept from Bauhaus philosophy, which led to the modernist movement. Which advocated creating a total work of art. Pulling in all the disciplines, architecture, etc. And we too want to have this sort of total activists with all these skills and communications expertise and servant leadership. And Zen Buddhism for the power of equanimity and the roaring Gonzo nature of Teddy Roosevelt and the rage of Ed Abbey. The truth is, activism going back to antiquity is hard, is even dangerous. But at its best and at its most powerful, it’s rooted in love. Where something more powerful can then happen. Rachel Carson, one of my favorite activists of all time, got her real start according to her. In a college biology class, she was an English major. She was a gifted writer, an English major. And there was a required biology class in freshman year. And she said that that teacher had reawakened the sense of wonder in her. A sense of wonder that went back, reminded her of the time she was walking and exploring the tide pools of Maine with her auntie. When she was two and three and four. So Carson with this sense of wonder, so I use the word love, I think Carson’s word for love is wonder, reawakened the sense of wonder in her. And she went on this epic journey and gave us a modern mythos. So her book was not just a book on the ecology of DDT making the eagles eggs thinner and therefore the eagles die and then the songbirds die. It was that and it was mythological. What would happen if the spring was silent? Thus being one of the most powerful things ever written in modern environmental literature. Well we too can take that journey in our own way, built on what we love and what we want to protect and defend. Learning these skills, turning this stuff into a craft. So we will end on love, or what Rachel called wonder. And this is from a book she was working on when she died, a sense of wonder and I’ll read it. A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us, that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy, I love that, I don’t know why she’s talking about the good fairy, who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life. As an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year, the alienation from the sources of our strength. There is a person who took an amazing journey, and I say take this journey as well, don’t you want to, please. Thank you all very much.