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The hammer and the chisel
An update from the grassroots.
| Unless you have been endowed with superhuman strength, you probably can’t split a boulder in half. But what if two relatively small tools enabled you to do the job? Just a hammer and a chisel (and a whole lot of patience). That’s all it takes to crack a massive stone like a crayon. There’s just one problem: no one knows how close the rock is to breaking. “When nothing seems to help,” writes James Clear, author of the best-selling Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, “I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.” If you stick with it, the rock is bound to splinter. But that’s a big “if.” Frustrated by a lack of perceptible progress, many will give up. They may even begin to criticize or mock the diligent, unflagging souls who continue to hammer away at the seemingly unbreakable rock. But, as old Aesop taught us, slow and steady wins the race. Those who persist will eventually taste success. Therefore, we should not track success by the number of big, flashy battles we win, but every faint, unremarkable, but meaningful tap, tap, tap. For the COS grassroots, summer 2025 has been a season of persistent tapping. Over the past weekend alone, our activists volunteered at the Wisconsin State Fair, a county fair in Colorado, the Albany Gun Show in New York, and a shopping for petitions event in Massachusetts, held annual state strategy meetings in Connecticut and New Jersey, and prepared for the upcoming Iowa State Fair, the top event for petitions in the country.    Notably, every state on that list (except Iowa) has a Democratic governor, and none have passed the COS application, proving that COS truly is a bipartisan movement. Moreover, it serves as a reminder that “passing” in a state is far from the only marker of success; before any state can pass — before the boulder breaks — it must reverberate with the steady clinking of the “irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” Continuing with the theme of blue states making progress for COS, one of the hottest events this summer was at FreedomFest in Palm Springs, California, where Mark Meckler delivered a showstopping speech — “DIY Nation – Forcing the Feds Back into the Constitutional Box” — and the California team collected 200 petitions.  Watching hope-deficient pessimists write off the Golden State while the COS grassroots in that state continue to fight for its future is reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous injunction: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” But Californians aren’t the only ones to defy the odds. The long march continues in states like Hawaii, where activists decked out a dazzling parade float for the Kailua Independence Day Parade and distributed over 2,000 COS wristbands to the public.  Yet another state dismissed too readily by the faithless, the Aloha State is graced by the presence of a strong hānai of highly trained and determined patriots and activists, known for their six-week capital surge season and kind, welcoming spirit. From participating in Honolulu County’s Holiday Wreath Contest to record-breaking gun shows and impactful committee hearings, this team is always looking for creative new ways to inspire a bottom-up revolution. As Hawaii Grassroots Coordinator Brett Kulbis once said, “Time cannot be wasted when you’re on a mission to save the country, and [the Hawaii team] clearly understands this.”Petition signatures remain an invaluable and highly coveted resource in that process. Last week, North Carolina joined the 100k club, with Deanna Jones of Waxhaw becoming the 100,000th person in the Tar Heel State to sign the COS petition. That truly is an impressive number, especially considering Regional Director Grant Martin’s observation that all 100,000 signatures represent a one-on-one conversation; North Carolina volunteers “reach out to each petition signer to personally thank them.” Regional Director Michael Arnold reports that Illinois, potentially days away from cracking 90,000 petitions, has transformed its petition apparatus into “a well-oiled machine.” One hundred thousand, Arnold believes, is “within sight.” Additionally, Michigan is less than 500 signatures away from crossing 100,000.  But, of course, the grassroots don’t stop there. Those who roll their eyes at “yet another petition” and think we’re using it just to build our email list clearly misunderstand the purpose of the petition. Every petition signed represents a direct contact with the signers’ representatives in the state legislature, urging them to support the growing call for an Article V convention. What’s more, our true mission is to build the nation’s largest, most formidable grassroots army of self-governing activists, and signing the petition often serves as a vital first step in converting passive onlookers into battlefield champions. Texas, which passed a clean version of the COS application without an expiration date earlier this year, serves as an excellent exemplar of the many ways our grassroots can continue to fight for liberty beyond passing the resolution. In July, when the team put out a notice to back Texas Senate Bill 12, a bill blocking public funds for lobbying activities, the grassroots turned out in force, resulting in nearly 300 emails and phone calls delivered to the state capitol from supporters across the state. A member of the team also testified to the Senate State Affairs Committee in favor of the bill. Somehow, our detractors will look at everything the grassroots have done thus far this summer (we’ve only scratched the surface in this piece) and still disparage COS as a “waste of time.” But they don’t know how close the stone is to cracking. Even the so-called “small wins” are big, potentially historic, in the sense that every hit, every event, every petition brings us one step closer to achieving a historic breakthrough. So let’s not be discouraged. Let’s not give up now. The boulder in our path may seem indestructible, but how much more can it take? The hour is late, but the message from the grassroots to the rest of the nation has never been clearer: Just keep hammering away. Sign the petition below to join the movement and show your support. # | PETITION_WIDGET{petition_tag:comms_blog_NA_08/05/2025_thehammerandthechisel08052025;coalition_id:;anedot_url:} | # |
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| Created: | 2025-08-05 01:08 GMT |
| Updated: | 2025-08-12 07:00 GMT |
| Published: | 2025-08-05 15:45 GMT |
| Converted: | 2025-11-11 12:06 GMT |
| Change Author: | Jakob Fay |
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public/cb_mirror/the_hammer_and_the_chisel_txt_blogposts_30684.txt · Last modified: 2025/11/11 12:06 by 127.0.0.1