Golden Gate Objectivists Meeting Summary

Thank you to all of you who attended our first Golden Gate Objectivists meeting last Thursday. It was great to meet about a dozen people from all over the Bay Area - from Palo Alto to San Francisco, Emeryville to Sacramento.

Our meeting goals were threefold: getting to know each other, understanding what each person would like to get out of GGO, and developing an agenda for our activities going forward. We had a lot of discussion on these topics, and agreed that it made sense to have a chance to reflect on all that was said, as we decide how to move forward.

We covered four broad areas around which we can structure our activities:

Community Outreach
Leveraging our local presence, our understanding of Objectivism, and our passion for ideas, we discussed several ways to get our message out. These include

• Bringing ARI speakers to local non-Objectivist forums, for example, the Commonwealth Club. Leveraging established forums outside of Objectivism, we can get other honest people exposed to Objectivist ideas, provide them with moral ammunition to fight battles they care about, and, possibly, generate financial contributions to ARI from sympathizers who may not be Objectivists, but share key premises. We can leverage people's different backgrounds - from physicians to business people - to penetrate different groups on relevant topics.
• Creating a local letter-to-the-editor group. With our differing locations and expertise, we can monitor key local publications - from the SF Chronicle to the Contra Costa Times - and generate letters to the editor on current topics where Objectivism can provide unique insight (see topic list below.) By doing this consistently, combined with other activities, we may manage to become go-to people for the press (similar to the success Quent had with his opposition to the local government imposed business association.)
• Supporting campus clubs. As more experienced Objectivists outside of academia, we can lend support to campus clubs on important topics such as fund raising and getting publicity off campus.

Topics to rally around
For all of this outreach, we discussed the need to identify a few (1-2 topics) to rally around at any given point in time: by joining forces on a few areas, we are better able to support each other, and get critical mass and awareness. We discussed that topics we pick should ideally have several characteristics: they need to enable us to bring a unique Objectivist perspective; they need to be controversial -but have enough 'American Sense of Life' in favor of our position for us to be able to get heard (i.e., it will be less productive to get active on a case of eminent domain related to building a highway vs. one where private property is taken for private development); they need to be current, that is, a topic on people's minds now; ideally, they should allow us not just to dwell on an issue, but to support positive news and achievements, too.

Specific topics we discussed as candidates for our first round of activism include

• Immigration - current topic, with unique Objectivist perspective, a local connection in the Bay Area where many immigrants live, and a component of celebrating achievement (think of recent stories of scholarship winners who were illegal, but managed to succeed)
• Eminent domain and takings. A particular case of Walmart in Hercules was mentioned, showing that this broad topic has relevant local applications we could rally around.
  

Member education
Our discussions about possible topics highlighted another important point: the need to educate ourselves better on these topics, if we want to be effective intellectual activists. We discussed several possible elements to self-education:

• Letter-to-Editor writing seminar. Robert Tracinski conducted a very effective persuasive writing course online several years ago. If enough of us were interested - and maybe in cooperation with another community group - we could engage Robert (or someone else) to conduct an online course for us, using our own LTE work as subject matter to learn to be better persuasive writers
• Study group on focus topics. We could meet and leverage writings by Objectivist intellectuals on the topic of our choosing, and discuss and sharpen our arguments (for instance, we could discuss Harry's recent comments on immigration, if we chose that topic)
• Online discussion forum. We could also potentially add an online discussion forum to our web page, where members who struggle with philosophical questions related to our theme topic can work together to clarify their thoughts.
  

Group infrastructure to support activities
To support these activities, we discussed putting in place several mechanisms:

• Online discussion forum - see above
• E-mail list/online group. This can be done via Google or Yahoo groups, to get a forum for online exchange, and prevent cluttering up people's inboxes
• Regular meetings. We agreed to schedule a follow-on meeting for late June, to agree on which of the above topics and initiatives we want to take on first - and to hold meetings about once a quarter going forward.
  

To move forward, we need to decide, by our next meeting, which of these possible activities we want to pursue first. Please let us know your thoughts - especially if you would like to take a leadership role on any of this. Until we have an online forum set up, please e-mail us at goldengateobjectivists@yahoo.com.

Thanks again for coming: it was great meeting everybody, and we look forward to making GGO a recognizable voice in the Bay Area.