The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Bringing it all together

Phew! I'm just now done settling back in after the big public forum tonight. It was really great. For the past two months or so, I've been putting together a public forum called "Law Enforcement and the War On Terror in Nevada County". And, like the Funeral for The Bill of Rights, it put a lot of my skills to the test. Not such a wide range of skills as the funeral, which involved a lot of craftwork and protest elements, but many instances of a smaller set of skills. Communication skills mostly -- writing, persuading, meetings, and phone calls.

This event involved a LOT of phone calls -- probably somewhere near 200 -- and it involved a lot of diplomacy. As someone who has always felt at odds with authority (just look at yesterday's post), it was quite a twist to be bringing together the top officers from 6 different law enforcement agencies. I met, on very friendly terms, with 7 different major law enforcement agents and officers tonight, and it was pretty cool. 3 police chiefs, a sheriff, a CHP Lieutenant Commander, and two FBI agents, including the head agent of the Sacramento Division of the FBI-- who, incidentally, seems like a really nice and earnest guy. They all seemed nice enough, some more than others. It was really refreshing that they were all eager to help share what they know with our community. Nevada County is really a great community, and the kind of community that can really do a public forum when we set our minds to it-- or in this case, when I set their minds to it. ;-)

I'll post a lot more about this event -- there will be a couple news stories tomorrow to link to, and I'll give a breakdown of how to put something like this together -- or at least how I put this one together. It wasn't all that hard really, but it did involve a ton of work. I'll lay it all out soon in case anyone else wants to try puttin' on a shindig like this. It was really worthwhile -- it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty damn sweet.