In at least one way, our system of government is simple: Those who make the rules respond to whoever comes at them with the biggest stick. For as long as any of us remember, that's been narrow interests with lots of money to spend. Congress and the Oregon legislature will respond to us ahead of them, I wrote in last week's column, if we "put together the biggest stick we can ... commit to carrying it permanently ... and use it with intelligence and focus."

Last week I centered on the first of these, which starts with turning our attention from red-meat issues dangled in front of us before every election — same-sex marriage, abortion, flag-burning — to problems that actually menace our quality of life (health care, the threats to our homes, pensions, and children's future), wherever we perch on the political spectrum. The first step is clear recognition that we agree on far more than our overheated politics makes it seem.

Which drew a major online yawn from a reader "As with all government policies, the devil is in the details. Agreeing on ends doesn't mean agreeing on means. Golden's 'vision' of an army of like-minded citizens wielding a 'big stick' is naive at best." His first two sentences are exactly right. The third needs definition. If he means naive as in "blowing off massive evidence on how the world's always worked," fine; to overcome entrenched lobby power, we need popular majorities bigger, more focused and more tenacious than we've ever seen. If he means naive as in "there's no way this will ever happen," we're at odds; I want my country back, and if it's true we can't find agreement on the means, at least in broad terms, then "Yes, we can," and "Change we can believe in" will amount to nothing more than insipid happy talk.

So let's talk about making this premise less naive. That's the intention of the third of the three tasks I set out last week: wielding the stick with intelligence and focus. That in turn has two parts to it: selecting the issues rooted in our most obvious common ground, and holding ourselves to the same expectation of open-mindedness we preach for everyone else.

Issues first. Which ones do you think could pull 80+ percent of Oregonians or Americans together? My short list includes health care, because we've reached a point where nearly everyone feels abused or impoverished by the system, or knows someone who does; changing the tax system, both to make accurate filing a humanly possible task, and to direct a bigger slice towards local government, which delivers real on-the-ground value every day (and here a nod to Reagan-era conservatives who talked about "bloated federal bureaucracies" — you were right); and shoring up our Bill of Rights freedoms, because the ongoing fears of the right about Constitutional encroachment make a lot more sense to the left after the experience of the past eight years. These are three places where the agreement on the ends may be strong enough to bleed over to new flexibility when it comes to the means.

Which, of course, is entirely up to you and me. Those of us who care passionately about politics have had a hard time letting go of our version of the way Things Have to Be, even when we know we have to expand our numbers. Now that the world situation has us up against the wall, are we ready to change that? Is our survival instinct strong enough? We have to find out. For me that could mean sitting down with others who share my heartburn about the sketchy performance, inefficiency, costliness and profiteering of the health care system, but, with Harry and Louise's artfully scripted lines still in their head, push back hard against "socialized medicine."

That gives me two choices. I can try to educate them towards a viewpoint that makes more sense (i.e., mine); that's been my standard approach, and I'd peg my success rate somewhere around 2 percent. Or I can leave my strong belief in a single-payer system at the door and listen to opposing concerns with a lot more attention. If I can do that — and I mean listen, not trot out the stock tools I learned at some active listening workshop — my own views might get a fresher hearing than before, if not right away, then maybe in a second meeting that we schedule after discovering that we can stand each other after all. If that happens, we start getting places we haven't been before.

How naive is all this? Beats me. But here's what has to be more naive: expecting that the Voice of the People will ever make much difference if we don't figure out how to harmonize and amplify it.

Jeff Golden is the author of "Forest Blood,"0" As If We Were Grownups," and the recently released novel "Unafraid," with excerpts available at www.unafraidthebook.com.