Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, January 5, 2008, 4:55 pm PST
This Week's Show
Today they built the biggest snow man you probably ever saw. When it was finished they stuck a Ron Paul sign in his hand. The Revolution is in South Hampton, New Hampshire. It's coming to your home town, too, if it is not already there.
Roxi Collinson was completely alienated from politics. She had never registered, never voted, and had decided that the entire system was corrupt. A good percentage of her generation agree with her. Registration among people in their 20s was low, as was political activism.
Roxi is in her late 20s. It was just nine months ago that she found a candidate who changed her mind. That candidate for president is Ron Paul, the 72 year old Obstetrician and Congressman from Texas has changed the minds of lots of Americans. Raised in a home by parents who she describes as life long, Republicans, Roxi had rejected their party and their ideas. Now, she is a Ron Paul Republican.
When Roxi discovered Ron Paul, in the shock waves of publicity that his appearance in the South Carolina Debate stirred, she began studying his ideas and his life on the Internet. She was impressed. Here was a man who had consistently held the same views for decades. His speeches on subjects of principle did not change. His personal life reflected the same values; he was still married to his wife of over 50 years and they have 18 grandchildren.
His values were about personal integrity and adherence to the principles laid out in the Constitution. Roxi had never studied the Constitution. Civics was not taught in her high school. Today her own copy is well used and discussions of the articles, routine in the House.
Over that period of weeks last summer Roxi had found someone for whom she could vote. Then, she realized that if she and others did not become his campaign she would never be able to vote for him. Others had realized the same thing.
The movement his candidacy has started has changed the way individuals, like Roxi, view politics, and how politics works.
Until what supporters of Ron Paul call The Revolution, started, politics in America ran rigidly, mostly within party likes of affiliation, divided by chasms of distrust over issues that marked the boundaries of Right and Left.
The Ron Paul Revolution is changing that, and everything else. Now, political action has begotten not just a movement but a movement that is changing far more than politics.
Roxi and her boy friend, Jay, had a garage sale, selling off a third of what they owned, to raise the money to go to New Hampshire. That, and some items sold on E-bay came to around $2,500.00. The others in their Meet Up group chipped in to help out. In New Hampshire they immediately began working, canvassing, phoning, and doing things that other campaigns have never imagined doing.
Conventional, hierarchal organizing cannot compete.
Traditional campaigns are run from the top down. This campaign is being run by people who do it themselves. The Official Campaign, headquartered in Arlington Virginia in a small space over a Chinese Cleaning establishment has practically nothing to do with the campaign that the Paul Candidacy has wrought. Most campaigns focus tremendous energy on fundraising. Traditionally, those campaigns have a hierarchy and the top level is occupied by the Finance Committee, the well-heeled individuals, many of them actually acting for corporations, who get their circles of business and personal acquaintances to donate large chunks of money.
In the Ron Paul Revolution the money comes in unsolicited or through the efforts of volunteers who, using innovative approaches persuade other activists to donate small amounts of money. The typical donation is around $100.
In that way the campaign raised nearly 20 million this last quarter, more than any other Republican candidate.
Some activists, like Jijay, give more. If you saw the Google Interview with Ron Paul, you know about Vijay. This is from the Operation Live Free of Die Website.
“My name is Vijay Boyapati and I'm an Engineer at Google. Some of you may remember me from the interview with Dr Paul at Google (skip to 42:31 in the interview - that's me). I'm the fellow that flew down from Seattle to hear Dr Paul talk and to write him a check. Seattle's local newspaper, The Stranger, wrote an article about my visit to Mountain View to see Dr Paul.
I'm organizing Operation Live Free or Die because I believe we have a chance, a real chance, of restoring our Republic to the principles on which it was founded. We have a chance to end the undeclared, unconstitutional, murderous War in Iraq and bring our troops home -- immediately. A chance of ending the government's theft of the fruits of our labor via the IRS. A chance to run our lives as we see fit without a bureaucrat in Washington telling us what we can and cannot do. For these reasons I want to do everything I can to restore freedom to our great country by electing Dr Ron Paul as President. I hope you will join me.”
Ron Paul volunteers may well have previously worked in Fortune 500 companies.
Most signs, literature, and other traditional adjuncts to campaigning are also directly provided by the activists, who design, share costs, and pay for printing.
The same activists, who have converted social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook, and others to their use and also use the social spaces specifically provided by other volunteers, have found unexpected ways to use each of these tools.
What was mostly Internet is now flooding out into the mundane world.
Roxi is now living in a big old house in Hampton Beach with eleven other activists. According to Roxi there are no problems getting along with each other. They have a common focus, electing Ron President. The house was rented not by the Official Campaign but by Vijay as are 12 other houses around the state.
When a new activist arrives they are taken to the local gas station to discover that there is also a Ron Paul Network for buying. Activists and supporters are working on the problem of buying local by building their own network. Politics, and America are changing.
Roxi left her young daughter with her mother, quit her job, and put everything she still owns in storage to go to New Hampshire to work for Ron Paul full time. She has a mission. She says she is doing this for her daughter because, unless America returns to the Constitution, the future will be bleak for all children.
Hear for yourself why ordinary people are joining the Revolution.
Roxi Collinson will be on Off the Grids, or the Spiritual Politician, this Friday at 4:55 pm Pacific Time. Read about Roxi's New Hampshire RonPauling on her blog, Tulsa to New Hampshire. Listen, call, and find out what is moving Americans, left and right to support the Doctor from Texas. Find us at BBSRadio.com.
Off the Grids
Most of us are scared. We know that the economy is out of control, the dollar is on a downward spiral that will take with it our pensions and hopes for prosperity and security. America is facing real problems – but there are solutions and those solutions can take us to a place that is much better than you imagine.
The problems above all originate in Grid Points that we have been forced onto through strategies carefully orchestrated by corporations, such as petroleum companies and power companies working with and through government. In effect, we have paid to forge our own shackles and then lock them in place. Do not think for a moment that those who are profiting did not understand where the policies we were sold over the last many years would take us.
It was power companies and government that decided that your electric company was a quasi-governmental agency without liability for anything they do. That is why when the electric company causes fires, burns out motors, or leaves you without power, it is not liable. But they are quick to turn off your power. Today most Americans live only months, or days from disaster. That must change and those changes hinge on understanding how we got here and how to move forward into a better world. It can happen and it will.
You can get off the grids and back to real security and a freedom that is true and not illusion. Endless indulgence was always an illusion. No matter what those in power said the free ride had to end, and it has.
America was seduced into believing that consumption and emotional disconnection is freedom. It isn't and it never was. Real freedom starts with responsibility and community, helping others and standing tall in the knowledge that your honor is intact because you have done right by others and yourself. That is something people like George Bush can never feel because their sense of power comes from deceit and generations of violence visited on all of us. George Bush would be funny if he weren't so dangerous. This year consider buying a Christmas card that sends a message that makes you laugh and speaks real real peace. Doing so supports our work. Also, please think about sponsoring our work or becoming an advertiser.
On Off the Grids, the radio program every week hosted by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, the Spiritual Politician, we talk about the grids that bind us for the profit of corporations and how to step off to freedom.
Join us to begin the journey to freedom and community as we find out how others across the country are solving the problems. Live Locally and in Community with others.
About being a Spiritual Politician
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
Greed: The NeoConning of America
