Thank God it's Friday! Not so much because there's a weekend coming tomorrow (doesn't everyone work on weekends?), but because Friday is the day that I, as an organizer really do love. You see, we're probably not going to have a lot of events, meetings, or speaking engagements on Fridays, because most people are cleaning house and heading out for the weekend, which means Fridays are a great time, as an organizer, to do the really important work, the work that really gets results. That's right, it's a great time to do follow-up and record keeping.

Just for instance, this week had been, as those of you who've been keeping up with your TCASK blog reading know, a busy week. And in fact last week was too. We've had a huge event at UT Knoxville, Bill Babbitt in Nashville, and I had a very busy day on Thursday with meetings all over Carroll County and a speaking engagement just outside of Memphis. So, we have met a lot of people and (even more importantly) a lot of new people. I'd like to believe that we've changed some minds and moved some people to get involved. But even if I gave the greatest speech of all time on Wednesday, even if David and Bill moved 300 people to tears last week, if we don't then harness the energy that we generated at those events and get people to take some concrete actions, then we really haven't accomplished much. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, but it was a dream that is being brought closer to realization by individual people taking small and concrete steps every day. So on Fridays, when it's time to clean house and clean up my desk, it's time for me to make phone calls, send emails, and work on how to keep people involved and activated.

So I'll be calling Knoxville to talk to our members who did such a great job setting up the Kaczynski and Babbitt program to talk about how we can bring the people that were moved by the speakers into the movement against the death penalty. I'll be writing emails and sending thank you notes to the people that I met with on Wednesday to show appreciation for their time and to remind them of some of the steps that we're going to take together. I'll be following up on leads that our members have sent me and checking in with other members to see how they're doing on our upcoming projects like write-a-thons and film screenings. Because it isn't my standing up in front of church congregations, or Bill speaking to college auditoriums that is really going to bring an end to state-sanctioned murder. It's you writing a letter to your state senator and talking to your co-worker. I'm just here to try to remind us all to keep doing that.