Dear Julie Taymor,
I read your Vanity Fair questionnaire and was touched and hopeful by its sentiments/poetry. If humans are bent on destruction, shouldn't idiots in power do something? Of course they should, and of course that's our socio-political contract, that we vote folks to office to act in our interests responsibly. Sadly, over the past quarter century the system we've agreed to for so long has become point-blank destructive due to the influence of private money on public policy.
Good news is, a lot of recent research, scholarship, and legal action has unearthed the concept of a convention, where each state would send delegations to meet and discuss what might get seven out of ten Americans to agree to as addition to our high law. This simple/rudimentary way of building consensus has been framed by politicos as a scheme for the bad guys to destroy the country (the left says Koch Industries will take it over, the right says George Soros will), but in actuality we know the convention itself will end because at some point the majority of participants will want to get home, and someone will make the motion to adjourn. When it does, nothing will have changed, except that we will have gone through a formal discussion of our collective situation. We will have built consensus, like responsible adults.
You're powerful as an artistic shaman, and maybe that's who we need to calm fears of a convention. It will not be divisive as we'd intuitively figure it to be, instead it will create clarity and understanding, even joy, discovering what the majority of us alive today believe. There's nothing bad guys on either side could propose as an amendment that 75%+ of us would agree to.
Maybe make a documentary about 150 college students who hold a convention at a Marriot in Kansas. It would be funny, endearing, and informative, the take-away being that we need to do it for real.
The cloud you'd like to come back as, you can actually be right now. A convention would drench the idiots, fortify protections for the innocent, and transform the discussion into discovering what we can actually agree upon, rather than the endless divisive blather of corporate news. Be the cloud now JT, in this life!
Sincerely,
John De Herrera
Co-Founder FOAVC
