Good evening.
I'm Lawrence Husick, and I'm a nerd.
I can prove it. I can program in 11 computer languages.
I'm also a geek.
I'm a chemist by training.
But more than that, I'm a wonk and I'm a lawyer.
And I woke up after the last presidential election
to my wife sobbing in the bed
next to me
because she'd stayed up all night and I'd gone to sleep.
And she knew
what I learned from those sobs.
Now her response to that tragedy of our
democracy
was to withdraw into a fetal position for about six weeks
but that's not how I'm built.
You see, lawyers don't get mad, they get even.
So I decided to get even.
Now how would I do that?
I took a self-assessment.
What is it that I do well?
Well, first I speak to people,
and I convince them.
I do that with judges. I do that with executives.
I do that with juries.
I figured, well, how different could voters be?
Foolish me.
And then I thought what distinguishes me?
What makes me think that I could do
anything?
And I came up with an answer,
and that answer is that I have the
world's longest attention span.
And that's something that's missing from
American politics.
So I looked for a problem that required a ridiculously long attention span,
and it was, well, sitting right in front of me.
It was the stuff you should have learned had you been paying attention in high school.
It's how we draw the lines on our maps that figure into how our elected officials get elected.
Now I knew this was a problem, and I barely remembered the name for the problem.
Gerrymandering.
Yeah, Gerrymandering.
Not Jerry because the guy, if you go down to the Constitution Center
down about seven blocks, is Elbridge Gerry.
That's who it was named after.
He signed the freaking constitution.
He should have known better.
But after he did that he went back to
Massachusetts, became a partisan
politician and approved this ridiculous
salamander looking map which the Boston
newspapers termed a Gerrymander.
And we've made it easier to pronounce
so that we could forget it.
Well how was I going to deal with this
problem?
Oh, I didn't tell you one thing. I'm Jewish.
So every year my family, my
extended family,
sits down around a table, like there's 28 of us,
and we hear the
same old story.
You were once a stranger in the land of Egypt.
God did for you, as if you had been there.
I've been hearing this for 59
Passovers.
It must have sunk in
because
I figured I had a job to do.
So I called up the inimitable Carol Kuniholm
of Fair Districts PA and said
Hey, I can convince people, put me to work.
And she said, that's cool. You can be a speaker.
And so, I did what any good lawyer did
I researched. I put together a
PowerPoint presentation,
and it went on the road.
And here I am about 18 months later.
About 8,000 more miles on my car going all over eastern Pennsylvania
talking to groups as small as, well let's admit it,
three people
and as large as a couple of thousand
and telling them that they need to do something
because right now our politicians choose their voters
and not the other way around
God help me.
Why am I doing this?
Because it takes a long time to fix the
Pennsylvania Constitution.
Five years at a minimum.
And believe me even though the
politicians dealt dirty with us this time.
We're still fighting.
When they finished writing the Constitution
Dr. Franklin stepped out of that
building down there and a lady said
What have you given us sir?
Dr. Franklin said
A republic madam, if you can keep it.
That you
is the same you as the you were
strangers in the land of Egypt.
It's you, and you, and you, and you, and you
and all of us.
It is our republic if we can keep it.
Keep it away from those politicians
who want to choose us
rather than the other way around.
And we will prevail.
Good evening.
