In a rage, Friedman went online. “I started doing research about car alarms and discovered that they were totally useless in preventing car theft,” he said recently. “That’s when this really became, you know, a vendetta.” In short order, Friedman, who as the son of a Berkeley judge decided long ago to live an apolitical life, became an expert and an activist and, within a year, the citizen spirit behind what could soon be a total ban on car alarms in New York City.
First came the obvious: phone calls to the Mayor’s office and the local councilman; a community-board speech. Then Friedman set out to create an alarm-eradication group. He searched the Times archives for people who had written letters to the editor featuring the term “car alarm,” and called them on the phone: thirty citizens to the barricades. He also set up a Web site, www.silentmajorityny.org, which features legends (a mockingbird in Brooklyn that sings alarm songs), confessions (“A friend of mine once peed on a car with an alarm going off and I cheered him on”), and instances of wonderment (“I feel like I have road rage and I don’t even have a car”).
Articulito en el New Yorker sobre lo que puede conseguir la gente cuando se organiza. Todo muy bonito, pol