Reaching people outside the choir isn't easy. Most communication channels are overloaded or expensive or segmented. It's particularly hard to find a medium for outreach that allows real messages, longer than a soundbite but short enough for the general public. In my experience over the last half year with our local Occupy group, I've found that old-fashioned leaflets are one of the very few ways to reach the public- we've given out a few thousand of the ones whose links are below..
Unlike the web, leaflets have a cost. It's not mainly the $0.07 or so for printing a two-sided sheet on bright paper. The main cost is the personal one of standing in public, making eye-contact with strangers, and asking if they're interested. This is a feature, not a bug, since it's precisely this small cost that prevents the sort of overload we've got for electronic spam. Direct personal contact also triggers a certain instinctive respectfulness that may not exactly always be present on the Web.
Some of my fellow local activists have seen the appeal of this approach. In Urbana, we've successfully gone through a petition/town meeting process to get a referendum on the next ballot, calling for the city to allow leafleting/petitioning in malls and parking lots. That addresses the main logistical problem, that most pedestrian traffic is now in nominally private spaces. (California and some other states already have similar provisions.)
Logistics aside, the question of what to put in the leaflets is not easy. For some examples and a brief discussion, join me below the mystic symbol. (in flight wi-fi willing)
Let's start with examples. Each of these leaflets has a topical side and a flip side aimed at the general basics of a progressive message.
1) Supporting an organizing effort at a plant owned by a local billionaire. (This one is in English, Spanish, and Congolese-style French, to reach the plant workers.)
2) On money in politics, pointing toward Move to Amend.
3) For a university football crowd, emphasizing how tax cuts hurt their own alma mater.
I'm more interested in getting a discussion going that in setting out a big thesis, but for starters here's what these attempt. The central message is that we have collective problems and we can use the government to solve them collectively. But I would never use abstract words like that in a leaflet. Here's some tentative guidelines.
0) Have some particular readers in mind, not yourself or your buddies.
1) Stick to the basics. It's amazing what people don't know.
2) Keep it short and simple.
3) No jargon.
4) Use words carefully, as if you were a benign Frank Luntz.
5) Always offer some small action to take.
6) Splurge for bright yellow paper- then people see each other reading it.
What does it accomplish? I'm not sure, but I do see people reading them under the lights at bus stops, etc. The contents need to be heard, and there seems to be little in the way of other paths.
Enough for now- see you in Providence.