Hmmm - Of topic?
I don't think so even if it is from the bloody septics.
This piece if one of the better descriptions of the current human
condition in industrialized society.
A careful read will get you to precisely how it's all happened - that the
story explains a great deal about the very things many of us here know
are implicitly Wrong.
Think infrastructure, and Laws, and all the rest if it that really does
effect our daily existence.
"For the past quarter century our views on change have been heavily
influenced by the top down principles of cor****ate management and
marketing, when, in fact, many the most effective institutions work more
like communities than bureaucracies. Adopting the cor****ate model of
leader****p, organization and change has damaged everything from political
movements to social service organizations to public schools. Below is an
article on how change is really made. In addition, we have posted a web
page which includes a crib sheet for bottom-up organizers as well as
excerpt from an interesting interview with Saul Alinsky. We urge reader
to check it out and pass on the link to others.
<http://prorev.com/wherechange.htm#crib>
Sam Smith
One of the reasons that change is so hard to come by these days is that
the things that make it happen have increasingly been forgotten,
replaced, dismissed or ignored. .Just as urban migrations have caused
tens of millions to lose simple but critical skills of rural survival, so
the tens of millions of Americans who have migrated into the pur****ted
sophistication of post-modern politics have left behind many of the
habits, technique and skills that created democracy in the first place
and then sustained it.
Who needs community when you have television commercials and the
Internet? Who needs serious conversation when you have tracking polls?
Who needs the grass roots when you can afford to lay Astroturf anywhere
you want? Who needs local organizing when you have huge national groups
that can raise more money in a few days than a nation of precincts once
could have in a whole year? Who needs the skills of a community organizer
when you can go to the Harvard Business School?
Except for one problem: the cor****ate based system that has seized
control of our politics lacks the interest, imagination, integrity,
capacity and soul to produce positive change. Whatever the sign on the
side of the political machine says, whatever the TV commercial claims,
how ever many times the candidates chant the word "change," we have, in
fact, systematically been destroying the means by which we once achieved
what it is we say we want.
This fact is hidden because of the language used by our leaders, the
media and ourselves - and our acceptance of it. We happily applaud a
politician promising to bring change without demanding to know what the
hell the candidate is talking about. We accept hope as an objective
though devoid of detail, dimensions or even simple description. We have
become a nation mainlining comforting nouns and adjectives as a
substitute for the social, economic and physical improvements that used
to be the goals of a good politics.
Another reason we find it hard to recognize or talk about real change is
that we haven't seen its positive form on any scale in some time. Thus,
it is not surprising that many don't seem to realize that while
politicians can help to create change, they are rarely its source. Even
the best politicians need a community of creative and conscientious
pressure to discourage their response to those forces that have never
suc***bed to believing for themselves the advertising slogans they foist
on others. Even the best president steps into the Oval Office surrounded,
beleaguered and manipulated by the most skillful organizers in the
country - those who organize the bankers, cor****ations, religious
extremists, polluters and other assorted hustlers - while well
intentioned but nave ordinary constituents of that president assume their
work was finished when they left the voting booth.
This is one major reason why the Democratic Party has done so poorly in
recent years. With the election of Clinton, its liberal wing became
subservient acolytes at the altar of the most reactionary Democratic
leader of modern times. For the crowd on the inside, it was playtime.
Consider in contrast, Franklin Roosevelt, constantly being pushed from
the left by everything from communists to socialists to Midwestern
populists, or Lyndon Johnson, shoved towards progressive politics by
forces like the civil rights movement.
Nothing like that exists today. Instead we have change reduced to a
matter of simple iconography. In the 2008 campaign, for many a choice of
a woman or a black was considered change enough. The rest would take care
of itself.
Of course, it never does, in no small part because the bad guys fully
understand that politics is about real things, not cuddly symbols. And
well before Inauguration Day they are on the case, cutting the deals,
writing the legislation, and passing the bucks.
Yet one has to go back a decade or more to find the creation of effective
alternative models such as the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-
sweatshop movement and the national Green Party. And back even further
for the explosion of truly revolutionary civil rights, women's, gay and
modern environmental movements.
Today we have two illegal wars, the greatest glacial melting in 5,000
years, the collapse of constitutional government, a sinking economy and
fraud at every turn - yet the streets, communities and hearts of America
slog along largely unaware of their latent power to turn themselves from
victims to creators.
The origins of this civic impotence are many. The rise of greatly
segmented television programming and the internet have tended to isolate
us from a common sensibility and each other; the Ipod earphone has helped
finish the task. The ubiquitous acceptance of the values, cliches and
leader****p assumptions of big business have helped change our thinking
from that of citizens to that of mere aspiring cor****ate staffers. People
appear overloaded with the requirements of a life that keeps them apart
from others who might share their feelings. Programs like the endless
s****tscasts and American Idol teach us to think constantly about winning
rather than working together with others. Business and political machines
have each conspired to take the language and systems of democracy and
turn them to their narrow uses. For example, that icon of decentralized
democracy, the town meeting, is now a gimmick used by bureaucrats and
politicians who want to make their targets feel good without having any
actual power. And even Barack Obama, drawing on his community organizing
experience, altered the nature of this technique so it no longer
empowered the voter, but himself.
From the American revolution to the underground railroad, to the
organizing of labor, to the drive for universal suffrage, to the civil
rights, women's, peace and environmental movements, every significant
political and social change in this country has been propelled by large
numbers of highly autonomous small groups linked not by a bureaucracy or
a master organization but by the mutuality of their thought, their faith
and their determination.
Whatever the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs
up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it
once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like
"entrepreneur****p" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any
magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully
constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have
been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they
might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and
lack of trust.
The re****ter risking status by telling the truth, the government official
risking employment by exposing the wrong, the civic leader refusing to go
with the flow -- these are all essential catalysts of change. A
transformation in the order of things is not the product of immaculate
conception; rather it is the end of something that starts with the
willingness of just a few people to do something differently. There must
then come a critical second wave of others stepping out of a character
long enough to help something happen -- such as the white Mississippian
who spoke out for civil rights, the housewife who read Betty Friedan and
became a feminist, the parents of a gay son angered by the prejudice
surrounding him.
Too often today, we expect our leaders to do our work for us, to save us,
to redeem us. There is little sense of the wisdom laid down by Eugene
Debs: "Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to
lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would
not lead you out if I could for if you could be led out, you could be led
back again."
I put it this way once: "We have lost much of what was gained in the
1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion, our energy, our magic
and our music for the rational, technocratic and media ways of our
leaders. We will not overcome the current crisis solely with political
logic. We need living rooms like those in which women once discovered
they were not alone. The freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the
folk guitar. The plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The
laughter of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected
gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together because
they disagree on every subject save one: the need to preserve the human.
Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous revival and silent
meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers."
We need to do this because, as Lau-tzu said:
Of the best rulers, the people only know that they exist;
The next best they love and praise;
The next they fear;
And the next they revile . .
But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done,
The people all remark, "We have done it ourselves."
"
OK - got this far?
Next step is to actually attend the very next public meeting you can, and
call the bastards running it out.
Now there's a challenge.
--
Toby
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