I am old enough to have watched Anna Eshoo go from a rinky-dink Santa Clara county supervisor (with only a 2 year associates degree in English) to a Congressional Representative. Her path was pretty straight forward, she was interested in politics, she <i>cared</i>, she hung out with the Democratic committee groups and then got her ticket punched for the big leagues in 1988. (I voted against her).<p>Trust me, if she can make it all the way to Congress on passion alone, anyone can.<p><pre><code>   &gt; That&#x27;s a mythology we are told to pacify us. 
   &gt; It has no factual connection to reality.
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Sadly it is what people would like you to believe because it keeps people who care out of the way, but it is factually untrue. At any given <i>instant</i> in time you are not the government, but over the <i>span</i> of time you absolutely are. Civil rights, the Suffrage movement, Gay Marraige, Health Care reform, these are all things that are driven by <i>people</i> through <i>instititutions</i> that are designed to give them the power to affect change <i>over time.</i><p>There is a folk story, I think it is originally Chinese about a worker told to move a large boulder out of the road. He says &quot;Can&#x27;t you see, no man could move that rock it is too large!&quot; and another man steps up and says &quot;I&#x27;ll move it.&quot; The second man picks up a rock hammer and walks to the boulder and taps it until a piece breaks off in his hand. He carries that to the side of the road and then goes back to the boulder. The next day the rock is gone.<p>The moral of course it that what you clearly cannot do in an instant, you can often do over time. That is the power you wield. And it might take you 5 years of hanging out with the local party bigwigs, then another few years of local public service, before you make it up to the big leagues, but if you care you can do that. We take high school students and train them to be Neurosurgeons in 15 years, but nobody expects that they can say &quot;Hey I want to be a neurosurgeon!&quot; and instantly become one, why is it so surprising that you can&#x27;t just decide you want to be president or governor without any training at all?