Jay Smooth said it pretty damn well, but I still feel a feminist obligation to talk back to the Republicans who made fun of community organizing last night.
Thank you to all the community organizers, past and present, who have recognized the ways in which the personal is the political, hearing--in the individual stories of ordinary people--a common thread of struggle deserving of action and resolution. Thank you to those who jump started whole movements (feminism, civil rights, labor) with their audacity and daily, hourly, minute-by-minute courage to knock on doors, sit down with friends and strangers alike, educate, and most of all, listen. Thank you to the community organizers who have targeted environmental racism--making sure that folks aren't poisoned in their own neighborhoods just because they don't have the resources to fight back. Thank you to the community organizers who have targeted civil rights, educational failures, classism, racism, sexism, ableism etc. etc.
Thank you to my friend Daniel, who has done community organizing from Harlem to LA to Boston. Thank you to Biko Baker of League of Young Voters, who I once interviewed and was immediately impressed by. Thank you to Saul Alinsky, largely considered the father of community organizing (pictured above). Thank you to all of you I don't know, who every day, make the choice to listen to ordinary people's stories and help them link these stories into a template for honest-to-goodness social change.
And, yes, thank you to Barack Obama, for making the choice to be a community organizer so many years ago and for continuing to be proud and loud about the importance of the role of the community organizer for our nation's wellbeing.
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You know, I really think the Republican party has sunk to a new low when it's become acceptable to mock grassroots activism like that. How do they think any positive change gets made if not at the community level? Not to put a feather in any conservative's cap, but how has the Republican party itself survived without people in small towns across the country working their asses off to engage their fellow citizens?
These folks have reached a new level of scary. I mean, hey--drill, baby, drill!
Utterly disgusting, these people.
Thank you Courtney!
As a community organizer, I was shocked and awed by last night's insults. My lingering impression is this:
Are community organizers really the group you want working against you?
Right on Katie! Kinda sounds like they're crapping on their own supporters. Gotta love that.
If anyone's a Facebooker, there are several new groups for community organizers (and their supporters) there:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=23209984436&refurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fn%3D-1%26k%3D200000010%26init%3Ds%253Agroup%26q%3Dcommunity%2Borganizer
http://www.facebook.com/search_redirect.php?q=community,organizer&fc=0&gc=0&cl=300&rc=290&rank=2&friends=0&sns=0&sf=i&init=s:group&cururl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fn%3D-1%26k%3D200000010%26init%3Ds%253Agroup%26q%3Dcommunity%2Borganizer&k=8589934608&is_friend=&id=23593764283&o_type=2&t=c:name&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fgroup.php%3Fgid%3D23593764283&k=8589934608
Yes! Thank you to everyone who devotes their time and energy to grassroots organizing. Thank you for all of your hard work and all you've accomplished. Only someone who didn't understand the job of a community organizer could even begin to imply that it wasn't important work.
That comment made by Palin was a glib little one-liner in a speech full of glib little one-liners.
Obama would be wise to extrapolate in his stump speeches about the important role of a community organizer by way of response.
I'm glad to see someone make this point. As I posted in response to another post here, community organizing is a powerful form of activism. It's connecting with people at the most intimate and personal levels, something those in Washington need to do more of. And, it works. Just read Charles Payne's "I've Got the Light of Freedom" to see how effective community organizing can be. In fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. may have motivated the masses, but it was community organizing that formed the foundation for much of the entire American civil rights movement's gains.
While the often highly-embellished and mythologized elite are the ones that go down in the history books, it is the thousands upon thousands of small personal choices made by men and women every day that have the most far-reaching impact in producing change. Barack Obama gets this. The grand old party, unfortunately, does not.
Amen!! So glad to see this here.
Repubs mock community organizing out of fear, basically. They KNOW what it can accomplish, all right, and it's precisely because they DON'T want change to happen that they belittle community activism.
thanks for the love!!!! I am damn proud to be an organizer!!!!
SarahMC - I agree completely!
As soon as I heard the speech on NPR last night (thank god I don't have a tv. I think it would have gone out the window if I'd watched that spectacle), I jumped online and emailed all of my closest contacts, including a couple of the anti-organizer quotes from the RNC.
I explained how I felt personally insulted by the subtext that I don't have a real job (since college I've been a full time - well, more than full time! - organizer on both community and electoral issues).
I asked them to pledge at least one day of volunteering on my behalf, and forward the email to everyone they know. And since I'm in Massachusetts, a safe blue state, I invited them to come with me to New Hampshire to do some of that dreaded grassroots organizing. Many have already pledged to do so.
I am just one of many many thousands of pissed off organizers who will use that insult as a reason to marshall support against the Republicans.
And how about the right wing now embracing feminism! How dare we question Sarah Palin's POLICY positions? Part of me thinks "thank god. it's about time they at least paid lip service to women's equality." but the rest of me is just sick to my stomach about how two-faced it is. bash hillary and her call for equal treatment one minute, cry foul on behalf of Palin the next.
:sigh: how long till november 5th?
Right on katiemaenot! If anyone knows how to take "the man" down it's community organizers. We've got waaaay more support and peoplepower than the republican party, just be careful who you insult.
I don't think I've ever felt so good about what I do! :-D
PTA = Community Organizing
Oh my gosh, that asshole just did it again! McCain and Palin are talking in Cedarburg, WI and she just repeated the "a small town mayor is like a community organizer... except with actual responsibility" bullshit. Shame on her.
(Of course, the rest of the speech is almost exactly the same as her RNC speech and she is reading it off of cue card. Would it actually kill her to speak for herself???)
Thank you lovely women for bringing this issue up on the blog. My Campaign Coordinator used Palin's statement to rile up our community organizers for the day.
Here's a petition you can sign to pressure Palin into apologizing for that statement:
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/defend_community_organizers/
I say, try knocking on doors in the TEXAS SUMMER HEAT to talk to citizens about the environment! Try educating and motivating those people into action that will pressure our legislators into paying attention. Try being a part of an organization that has never lost a campaign in 17 years due to the hard work and great responsibilities of it's community organizers. Try being me, Sarah Palin, a 21 year old progressive activist who gives a damn, working for change in one of the reddest states and on one of the most conservative private university campuses (SMU) in the nation and then tell me that the last 4 years of my life have been laughable. Rather I be addicted to meth working in some fast food joint, uneducated and unable to shake up this system that so desperately needs it.
PS: I saw Biko speak on a panel in DC at the YP4 conference and he was wonderful.