A Couple of flyers to answer the "But I don't know you. Who are you?" question

There is this relatively short WhoAmI two-page flyer.

And this somewhat longer Memo2Voters.

One of the more difficult concepts for folks to grasp, especially with the putative candidate within hand-shaking distance, is that the phase the Nov. 2 election is in now for independent candidates is the "Get 2,000 signatures of registered voters from your congressional district so that you can have your name put on the ballot" phase.

It's only after someone's name is actually on the ballot that a registered voter, on election day, can actually go into a booth and vote for or against those individuals on the ballot.

A good measure of how completely frustrated and turned-off and angry at "that government in Washington" is, IMHO, how intensely some folks grill your's truly--"Are you honest?" "Why should I trust you?" "How long have you lived here." "Oh, since 1980? Well, then you're one of us!"

One young woman this evening [Sunday, July 11] challenged me with this hypothetical, saying that if I answered her correctly, she would consent to sign my nomination papers.

Here's the hypothetical: "Say, for instance, that outside this place there was something going on, like chaos. What would you do?"

"Well," I answered," if the police had not yet been called, a 911 call, I would do that. Then I'd look to see what the situation was, how dangerous, the level of violence, tools of violence, and assess whether there was something constructive I could do with the tools at hand, or the better part of valor was to hunker down or flee.

In Vietnam, of course, we had a good number of tools at our disposal for 'managing chaos'--an M-14 rifle (it was the early days, and only supply sergeants of Ammo battalions got the lighter M-16s--though they were less reliable, they were lighter to carry) and in our unit, both officers and non-coms carried pistols, the better to do our job of inventorying our ammo dump. We could use mortars, machine guns, call in artillery rounds, helicopters, tanks, even fighter jets. But in a civilian setting, there are fewer options and the organization is not at all wired to a command structure.

As she seemed unsatisfied with my answer so far, I continued, "But let me suggest this from my civilian past. One thanksgiving holiday we were driving from Manhattan to the Finger Lakes region of NY State, going up Route 17, the "Quickway," as it was called. There was a blizzard promised, and when we got to the Poconos, it hit. The State Police closed Route 17 and had all the traffic exit onto the side-roads.  A huge traffic jam ensued.  I was driving and, from about 30 cars back, could see that there was a crossroad up ahead without benefit of traffic light, police or troopers. So I asked my late father-in-law to take the wheel, while I got out and hiked up to the intersection and directed traffic, letting three or four cars go in one direction, then the same number from the other. After a while, the family car got through the intersection, I hopped in and we were on our way again.  Is that the kind of chaos you had in mind?" I asked the woman.

"No. You can't just go out and direct traffic unless you have a license. You have to be trained to do that," she replied, and seemed genuinely offended that I had the temerity to have done something "so illegal." Though she claimed never to have been in a blizzard, she did hail from California and had a good bit of experience with traffic jams (in France one would call them Marmalade's de Traffique, given the amount of Citroen in the mix, but I didn't mention that).

This young woman also, as she expatiated on the topic of criminal intent, y'know what I'm sayin', insisted that trained psychologists and police officers could determine the state of mind of anyone they came across, by virtue of that training. They could tell, for example, if a person were having criminal thoughts, were thinking about committing a crime, and could thereby decide to arrest that person.

 I took out my handy-dandy pocket-sized Constitution (What's that, she asked. I told her it was the Constitution, the rest of the document that followed after the the 52-word first sentence I've based my party on--the Preamble--and I read to her the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to our Constitution, but she remained convinced that "trained people" could assess anyone's state of mind. It's just common sense, y'know what I'm sayin', she insisted. And this from a young citizen of no easily identifiable ethnic group.

My take is that she was clueless in California, and coming to Cambridge (this was in another nearby city, but it doesn't start with a "C") wasn't going to have an ameliorative effect.

I left our discussion with the uncharacteristic (for me) thought that maybe some people should not be allowed to vote.  Good grief, Charlie Brown. What's happened to our schools in the three-score years since I attended?

Looks like my call for a Home Ec. for boys and girls--real business economics--needs to be augmented with training in law, the Constitution, and our history--along the lines of the late Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States--1492 to the Present.