Like a vast majority of Americans, you're on the sidelines. Other than my comments online, so am I. You have some ideas about how you'd like to see things run, and they trend left, but you know too much and have too much personal background in your own life to be an enthusiastic statist. I talk a lot of big noise, but I've never even been to a local city council meeting. I suppose that's when it gets to be work, doesn't it?

Dedicated activists have a lot more influence on our lives than their numbers would indicate. It's scary to follow up some of the regulations, policies, and other things that are inflicted on us over the years and find out how few people were behind it, and that they shoved it through mostly due to lack of any obstacles in their paths.

The sad part is that activism, almost by definition, is about people who want to reorder everything to their own worldview. You don't really get a lot of activists who believe that everyone should be able to go their own way and make their own decisions. This is bipartisan. You don't get hard leftists who think people should make their own economic decisions. You don't get hard rightists who think abortion should be decided by local authorities, or personal decisions. The war cry of the true activist is "My Way or the Highway."

Most people could give a rat's ass about politics most of the time. Like whether the Earth is actually flat or round, the truth of these things doesn't often impact their daily lives. People resist oppression only when their faces are shoved into it.