Yet throughout these years, a nagging truth has haunted me: Americans just don’t seem to care that much. Even though 96 percent of America believes it is “important” to “reduce the influence of money in our politics,” the reality, as any political pundit will tell you, is that it is almost impossible to translate that belief into any meaningful political action.

This puzzle only increased for me over the first few days of the walk, a march across the Granite State that we were calling the New Hampshire Rebellion. People knew who we were. New Hampshire is a small state with a limited media market. The one major television station had covered our walk extensively. We were on a few popular radio shows. We’d done a good job promoting the walk on the web.

So as we walked, the people of New Hampshire reacted—wildly. They honked their horns, they came out in their pajamas, a woman painted a sign and put it on the front of her lawn. When we met them—at stores, on the street, or going door to door—they almost screamed their frustration with the current system. Indeed, one person did scream. Many were overjoyed that “someone was trying to do something about this.” Many remembered fondly the woman who had inspired us, Doris Haddock, aka “Granny D,” who 15 years before had begun a 13-month walk from Los Angeles to Washington with a single sign on her chest: “Campaign Finance Reform.” They were eager to see the movement that she started continue.

So why is it that face to face, people can be so passionate about this issue, but forget it in the voting booth? What would lead them to honk their horns, lean their bodies out from their cars, stop, to give their thumbs up, chant as we walked, and yet allow them to give politicians a free pass?

As I walked more, and thought about this apparent contradiction a lot more, a second number from that same poll became increasingly salient: While 96 percent of Americans do believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics, 91 percent believe it is essentially not possible. It's like flying as Superman does, or traveling through time as starships in Star Trek did, or curing the incurable disease: Of course we all want that, but we’re mature, we’re adults, we know what we can’t have, and so we don’t waste our time pushing for things we can’t have. We are resigned, as a people, to the corruption of this government. We have learned to accept a fate that seems unavoidable.

But here’s the obvious fact: We may not be able to fly like Superman or travel like the Starship Enterprise, but we actually can end the system of corruption that has destroyed the capacity of our government to govern. Even without a constitutional amendment to deal with the mess that Citizens United created, we can radically change the economy of influence inside Washington, and undermine the economy of corruption that has overtaken it. A single statute could remake D.C., if only we could build the political pressure to force Washington to adopt it.