Granted, we’re far from where we thought we’d be when Barack Obama was elected and people danced in the streets. Change was on its way, spearheaded by Obama’s soaring words and by the millions of ordinary Americans who got involved as never before to help carry him to victory. We thought we’d finally created the opening for a historic transformation.
Now, too many of us watch morosely from the sidelines, feeling disappointed, spurned, and betrayed, wondering if anything we can do will matter. We’re angered by the gap between Obama’s lofty campaign rhetoric and his reality of half-steps and compromises, and by his failure to fight passionately for his policies. We’re angered that we dared to hope for more. We’re angered at scorched-earth Republican obstructionism, a Supreme Court inviting corporations to buy our democracy at will, and a public all too receptive to blatant lies. In response, we decide not to let our hearts get broken again by taking the risk of working for change, at least not in the electoral arena. We feel this way even though most of us have done little since Obama took office to create the kind of sustained grassroots movements that could have actually pressed him and a resistant Senate to take stronger stands.
So how do we act in the upcoming election despite dashed hopes? How do we do this in a way that builds for the future?
]]> Granted, it’s far easier to take a stand in those moments when, in the words of poet Seamus Haney, “the longed-for tidal wave of justice” seems to rise up, and “hope and history rhyme.” Yet unless we decide that our democracy and the planet are all simply doomed, we can’t afford to succumb to cynical retreat.We might start by acknowledging our disappointments. We don’t have to be delighted about Obama’s Presidency to get involved in the fall elections. We can talk honestly about areas where he and the Democrats have fallen short, while still making clear the major differences between their positions and those of the Republicans. In fact, people may respond even more positively if we admit our mixed feelings, some of which will reflect their own. This approach may not be quite as time-efficient as simply repeating whatever standard talking points we’re given, but it lets our conversations do justice to reality.
When I’ve tried this approach with disenchanted friends, they’ve confirmed that they’d be much more likely to volunteer in the election if they could voice the full complexity of their feelings. They don’t want to be spectators. But they want to acknowledge critical areas where they’re angered and frustrated. They don’t want to surrender their voice. We’d do well to be honest both with those who we need to recruit as fellow volunteers, and with the ordinary citizens who we need to convince to show up at the polls.
If we’re going to be honest about our disappointments, we should be equally clear that opting out of this election portends disaster. For all our frustrations with the Democrats, at least we’ve been fighting about how to move the country forward, out of the hole of the disastrous Bush years. Productive change will be far more difficult if our inaction helps hand the Senate over to those who deny climate change, scapegoat immigrants, blame the unemployed for their fate, and strive to privatize Social Security, make permanent Bush’s regressive tax cuts, and block every conceivable environmental and consumer protection regulation. Equally troubling, they seem to have no shame in campaigning on gross distortions and lies, from talk of health care “death panels” to claiming to stand up against Wall Street while blocking everything they could in the financial reform bill to doing nothing to challenge the belief in Obama as Kenyan-born closeted Muslim. Though we may want to deny the possibility, the polls threaten major Republican gains, the right-wing base smells blood, and even once-safe states like Illinois, Washington, and maybe even California are in play. The important legislation from green energy funding to the valuable parts of the health care Democrats are equally at risk in the House, where Nancy Pelosi has led in passing and financial regulation bills to the strongest student financial aid program since the Pell Grants got started. Were it not for Senate intransigence, Pelosi would also have passed a climate change bill, a far larger stimulus package, and a health care public option. But if we don’t get engaged in the next couple months, we risk electing enough Republicans to replace her with hard-right Republican John Boehner, who’s already talked of reviving Gingrich-style investigative crusades against every conceivable Obama agency and program. Despite the frustration that many of us have with Obama, we might also remember some of his underappreciated actions, like appointing a labor secretary and National Labor Relations Board strongly supportive of workers’ rights, an EPA head who’s begun to regulate greenhouse gasses and pretty much ended destructive mountain-top removal, and an attorney general who by accepting state medical marijuana laws, has opened space to question our costly and futile prohibition policies. It matters that Obama has saved America’s auto industry, appointed two decent Supreme Court justices, and begun to reshape our international image from one of reckless belligerence. For all the Democrats’ failure to adequately reverse their inherited crises, their flaws don’t compare to those of a party determined to turn everything over to the most predatory forces in America.
Making all this clear is essential when we’re trying to bring people out of demoralized retreat. Obama had 13 million people on his email list. If we can reengage enough of them, including those who’ve pulled back from active political involvement, we can help our fellow citizens reject the corporate-funded lies. In the wake of the ghastly Supreme Court decision gutting campaign finance laws, groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and the US Chamber of Commerce are spending four hundred million dollars to try to buy the election, and the impact of their spending will be everywhere. For the moment, we can’t stop it, although it would take only one honorable Republican to require financial transparency by helping pass the Disclose Act. But even without this, if people knock on enough doors, make enough phone calls, talk to enough neighbors and coworkers, donate enough money and engage in enough real dialogue, we have a chance to make the lies backfire. Massive citizen-to-citizen outreach will be critical for engaging the young and minority voters who carried the Democrats to victory in 2006 and 2008, but largely stayed home during subsequent Democratic defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts and threaten to do so once again. Americans do mistrust the powerful economic interests that have strip-mined our country. But they’re also scared, overloaded, distracted, cynical about government, and insulated from perspectives that could help them separate truth from lie, or give them reasons to vote. So we need to get as many volunteers as possible to help them sort through the political arguments and to convince them to go to the polls. We do that best by reaching out as directly as possible and honoring whatever mixed feelings people have.
We might remind those we approach to volunteer or to vote that they’ll never know when their participation will make a crucial difference. On Election Day of 2004, I was knocking on doors in Washington State and turned out three additional voters. One had forgotten about the election. Another needed a ride. A third didn’t know how to submit his absentee ballot. My candidate won the governor’s race by 133 votes, over a right-wing Republican who’s now running neck and neck with the once seemingly unbeatable Senator Patty Murray. Had just 50 of us stayed home that day, we’d have lost. Our outreach made a similarly critical difference two years ago in Minnesota when Al Franken won his Senate seat by 225 votes. In an example of why involvement can’t wait until the election, I once interviewed a young woman who registered 300 voters on her Connecticut campus, helping her strongly progressive Congressman win by 27 votes.
In 1994 we paid the price for not having these volunteers. Infuriated by Bill Clinton’s support for the NAFTA trade agreement, core Democratic activists stopped knocking on doors and making phone calls. Because there was no one to get out the vote, the Democrats lost race after critical race, often by the narrowest of margins. According to CNN and Gallup surveys, the forty-two percent of America’s registered voters who stayed home leaned Democratic widely enough that they would have reversed the electoral outcome, had they only showed up at the polls. NAFTA helped destroy America’s industrial base, and I shared the anger of those who opposed it. But even a modest effort could have prevented the Republican sweep.
We now risk heading down a similar path, one we might have avoided entirely had we built stronger grassroots movements to pressure Obama from the start. Two years into Roosevelt’s first term, with one in six Americans still out of work, the Democrats swept the 1934 elections, winning nine more seats in both the Senate and House. But they had a president who overtly challenged the “money changers” of Wall Street, and a Senate and House that did far more to address the economic crisis. Most important, they had organized citizen movements that actively pressed Roosevelt from day one. We haven’t created these movements, or engaged enough people to give them clout. Instead, most of us have spent far more time griping about the real shortcomings of the Democrats than we have engaging our neighbors, rallying in the streets, showing up at Town Halls and community meetings, or doing anything else that could have actually changed America’s politics in the directions we wanted. This trend started early, during the summer of the “death panel” rallies (much as those who’d supported Clinton failed to adequately organize to pressure him once he took office), and it’s continued ever since. Other than the useful but limited activities of signing petitions and automated letters, we’ve mostly ceded the field to Exxon, Goldman Sachs, United Health, and the tea partiers.
We can still push Obama to deal with the massive crisis of the unemployed, (for instance by joining the October 2d national rally for jobs and justice). If he challenged the Republicans strongly enough on this it would help, whether or not he can pass the necessary bills before November. But whatever Obama does between now and then, and he needs to do far more, much of what happens is still in our hands. If we don’t want corporations, billionaires, and the religious right running our country even more than they do already, we owe it to ourselves to do all we can to prevent their power from increasing further through this election. We’re going to lose some battles. That’s inevitable. But the path of purist retreat prevents even the chance of our efforts succeeding, whether for now or down the line.
Imagine if each of us did as much between now and November 2d as we did in the election of two years ago. If enough of those who’ve pulled back from political involvement can become reengaged, and if we can find ways to keep them involved, we can begin rebuilding the grassroots momentum that we should have been creating from day one of Obama’s term. So we have to act and keep on acting. Think of the civil rights movement and its relationship to Kennedy and Johnson. Both were personally sympathetic but initially held the movement at arm’s length for fear of driving southern segregationist whites from the Democratic Party. Civil rights activists then created a political and moral force so strong that it expanded the horizon of the possible. In the wake of the March on Washington, and marches like those at Selma, Johnson put all his political skill and capital on the line to pass the civil rights and voting rights bills. He did this while accurately predicting that the Democrats would, as a result, lose the South for a generation or more. But he did the right thing because ordinary people took a leap of faith, convinced that their actions could make a difference.
There’s no guarantee that our efforts will work, whether in November or long term. But the stakes—whether regarding climate change, the economy, or every other major issue we face—remain as high as they’ve ever been. Most of us have mixed feelings, but rather than waiting forever for the perfect candidates or ideal political context, or riding an endless emotional roller coaster between elation and despair, we can instead do our best to plunge into the messy and contradictory now. If we can do that well enough, we can once again begin to recreate the base for the kind of change we hoped for just two years ago.
Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback, April 2010). Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.” Loeb also wrote The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org.
]]>This dual aspect of online engagement isn’t new. It’s been building since the Internet came of age. But it’s worth looking both at how technologies that we now take as for granted as the air we breathe have both empowered us politically and created new traps.
We now expect that organizations that would once have reached us through expensive mailings or time to contact us via the internet. As action alerts arrive in our inbox, we click and sign, and our Congressional representative receives the letter or petition du jour. Or a group we support sends out a video of an ad it wants to run on network television, we donate $25 (along with 10,000 others), and it shows up in its audience’s living rooms two days later. The founder of the Students for Barack Obama Facebook group mined the site for references to Obama, and grew her organization into a 150,000-name list while barely leaving her campus in Maine. Where Daniel Ellsberg had to laboriously copy 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks can make enormously consequential buried documents available near-instantly.
Our online networks build on what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “the strength of weak ties.” Older forms of community built on distinct local networks where people knew each other face-to-face, but where reaching out beyond those they saw day-to-day was harder. Our new tools make it easy to maintain far looser networks that we can continue to easily nurture. As Gideon Rosenblatt of the environmental group Groundwire points out, “these networks of weak ties can be put into action on a moment’s notice, enabling online social change efforts to go viral at a speed and on a scale never previously possible.” We take for granted our ability to link overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances in a manner until recently inconceivable.
For all its strengths, though, online activism has its limits. True, we can pass on information to friends who are on the fence about issues or haven’t yet gotten involved. But most of what we do with the new tools reaches the unconvinced only fleetingly, and in a way that’s often too peripheral to engage them. Because the threshold of response is so low, the representatives to whom we send our online petitions and automated emails can readily discount them. Even those who know us can become so saturated that they dread hearing from us. So while our forwarding, clicking, and networking can help us reach out and be heard, the Internet furthers social and political engagement only when it’s used alongside other approaches. It’s all-too-tempting to assume that because we’ve clicked on a petition on a given day, that’s all the political involvement we need.
MoveOn’s election efforts illustrate the challenge of persuading people to act offline. In 2006, the organization mobilized roughly 100,000 members to call Democratic-leaning voters who had a history of only showing up intermittently at the polls. Although follow-up studies suggested these calls made a major difference, just three percent of the organization’s members participated. Most didn’t make the leap from clicking and sending to picking up the phone or knocking on a door. In 2008, MoveOn created a massive phone bank where members called other members and encouraged them to participate—and managed to get a fifth of its members involved. But it took this older and more personal technology to do so. The organization and others continue to try to involve people face-to-face through efforts like their local MoveOn Councils and August 10 rallies against the corruption of American politics by money, but it will always take more than emails to get large number of people to participate.
We resist these more challenging forms of involvement because of vulnerability. We’re invisible when we click, even if our name is attached to a letter or petition. If people disagree with us, we don’t see their faces or hear their voices. When we call or knock on someone’s door for a cause, we’re far more exposed, not to mention ambivalent about intruding on private space. We’re even more vulnerable when we raise contentious issues with people who know us. While our wonderful electronic tools can help people take non-threatening first steps toward engagement, proceeding beyond that is neither automatic nor inevitable.
The new technologies also help scatter our attention. We can waste endless days and nights clicking on Weblinks, texting or Tweeting about the minutiae of our lives, or being so focused on our Facebook friends that we have little time left for flesh-and-blood relationships, much less larger causes. Our Attention Deficient Disorder culture creates so many competing claims that it’s now almost impossible to escape the noise, and harder still to distinguish important claims from trivial ones.
Given all this, we’d do well to remember that our new technologies work best when we combine them with more traditional mechanisms of engagement. The Obama campaign complemented new-media tools by establishing on-the-ground field offices in every corner of key states, recruiting and training local volunteers with deep community roots, following up again and again to get supporters to create the kinds of political conversations that actually changed minds. Similarly participants in recent immigration rallies texted, emailed and Tweeted to help bring their friends. But they also got encouragement through their churches, through Spanish-language radio, and through networks of more direct personal outreach. We’re going to need all the public conversations we can create between now and November, and beyond.
When we create these more face-to-face connections, they can build sustaining community, which is no small thing in these frustrating times. For all the strengths of online engagement, people still need to gather together, eat, joke, flirt, tell their stories, attach names to faces, and ultimately build deeper levels of trust. And we need to keep reaching out in less glamorous ways. An activist in the University of Connecticut PIRG chapter described how she ignored endless email and Facebook solicitations for worthy causes. “Then someone actually called me. I was just so surprised because people almost don’t do that anymore. It’s easier to get involved when you’re actually talking with another person.”
If we assume that people will jump on our favorite cause just because they receive our communiqués and agree with us in principle, we underestimate the degree of inertia in our culture. For most people who are contemplating taking their initial steps into social involvement, a more intimate approach is often required, one that will put them at ease one question at a time, take their hesitations and uncertainties into account, and reassure them that the barriers they face are hardly unique. This more personal reach is key to enlisting new allies and to ensuring our political actions are visible enough to create a genuine public impact. That doesn’t mean abandoning the astounding communicative tools we now have. But if we want to realize their potential, we’re going to have to sooner or later step away from our screens.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks
From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>As a candidate Obama spoke out strongly for reversing this policy, promising to “take a back seat to no one on Net Neutrality.” His FCC appointees were at first strongly supportive of extending the protections of equal access to online technologies (which would make moot a federal court decision based on the Bush-era rulings). But now, following massive telecom company lobbying, they’re seriously wavering. Google is now exploring a private deal with Verizon, where Google would pay for YouTube content to get higher priority delivery to consumers, shifting them from Net Neutrality advocate to de facto opponent. With a final FCC ruling coming any day now, an equal-access internet is now in serious jeopardy.
In the Soviet Union, cultural commissars determined who would see what information and in what context. In the US, it’s corporations, and their choke-hold is about to get tighter unless we speak out and act. The fight to keep Net Neutrality has produced some important victories as when MoveOn and the Christian Coalition joined in an unlikely partnership to help block Congress from destroying Net Neutrality four years ago. FreePress.net, who’s led on this issue all along, is now organizing now to help people speak out before final FCC decision. But we’d better act while we still have a chance if we don’t want to be cut off in midstream from equitable access to all the new media whose promise and power we’ve come to take for granted.
Paul Loeb is the author of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times,” recently published in a wholly updated new edition after 100,000 copies and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks
]]>Think about your own political participation since Obama took office, and compare it to 2008. You’ve probably signed online petitions, clicked to contact your representatives, maybe commented on political blogs. These are valuable activities. I do some most every day. But they aren’t the same as knocking on doors, making phone calls, talking politics with people who may disagree with you, and doing all the other things that created the 2006 and 2008 Democratic victories. They also aren’t the same as rallying in the streets, attending town meetings, picketing the offices of predatory corporations or destructive politicians, or working in other visible ways to shift America’s political culture and pressure on our elected officials to genuinely address our urgent crises. Since November 2008 it’s been the political right that’s largely dominated public discussion, even though their policies have created our vast array of problems to begin with. Of course they have the advantage of a shameless echo chamber, from Andrew Breitbart to Rush Limbaugh and Fox. But the grassroots right has also been more active on the ground, while those of us who helped elect Obama have acted in mostly virtual ways, leaving us all too often invisible and unheard.
This dual aspect of online engagement isn’t new. It’s been building since the Internet came of age. But it’s worth looking both at how technologies that we now take as for granted as the air we breathe have both empowered us politically and created new traps.
We now expect that organizations that would once have reached us through expensive mailings or time to contact us via the internet. As action alerts arrive in our inbox, we click and sign, and our Congressional representative receives the letter or petition du jour. Or a group we support sends out a video of an ad it wants to run on network television, we donate $25 (along with 10,000 others), and it shows up in its audience’s living rooms two days later. The founder of the Students for Barack Obama Facebook group mined the site for references to Obama, and grew her organization into a 150,000-name list while barely leaving her campus in Maine. Where Daniel Ellsberg had to laboriously copy 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers, WikiLeaks can make can make enormously consequential buried documents available near-instantly.
Our online networks build on what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “the strength of weak ties.” Older forms of community built on distinct local networks where people knew each other face-to-face, but where reaching out beyond those they saw day-to-day was harder. Our new tools make it easy to maintain far looser networks that we can continue to easily nurture. As Gideon Rosenblatt of the environmental group Groundwire points out, “these networks of weak ties can be put into action on a moment’s notice, enabling online social change efforts to go viral at a speed and on a scale never previously possible.” We take for granted our ability to link overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances in a manner until recently inconceivable.
For all its strengths, though, online activism has its limits. True, we can pass on information to friends who are on the fence about issues or haven’t yet gotten involved. But most of what we do with the new tools reaches the unconvinced only fleetingly, and in a way that’s often too peripheral to engage them. Because the threshold of response is so low, the representatives to whom we send our online petitions and automated emails can readily discount them. Even those who know us can become so saturated that they dread hearing from us. So while our forwarding, clicking, and networking can help us reach out and be heard, the Internet furthers social and political engagement only when it’s used alongside other approaches. It’s all-too-tempting to assume that because we’ve clicked on a petition on a given day, that’s all the political involvement we need.
MoveOn’s election efforts illustrate the challenge of persuading people to act offline. In 2006, the organization mobilized roughly 100,000 members to call Democratic-leaning voters who had a history of only showing up intermittently at the polls. Although follow-up studies suggested these calls made a major difference, just three percent of the organization’s members participated. Most didn’t make the leap from clicking and sending to picking up the phone or knocking on a door. In 2008, MoveOn created a massive phone bank where members called other members and encouraged them to participate—and managed to get a fifth of its members involved. But it took this older and more personal technology to do so. The organization and others continue to try to involve people face-to-face through efforts like their local MoveOn Councils and August 10 rallies against the corruption of American politics by money, but it will always take more than emails to get large number of people to participate.
We resist these more challenging forms of involvement because of vulnerability. We’re invisible when we click, even if our name is attached to a letter or petition. If people disagree with us, we don’t see their faces or hear their voices. When we call or knock on someone’s door for a cause, we’re far more exposed, not to mention ambivalent about intruding on private space. We’re even more vulnerable when we raise contentious issues with people who know us. While our wonderful electronic tools can help people take non-threatening first steps toward engagement, proceeding beyond that is neither automatic nor inevitable.
The new technologies also help scatter our attention. We can waste endless days and nights clicking on Weblinks, texting or Tweeting about the minutiae of our lives, or being so focused on our Facebook friends that we have little time left for flesh-and-blood relationships, much less larger causes. Our Attention Deficient Disorder culture creates so many competing claims that it’s now almost impossible to escape the noise, and harder still to distinguish important claims from trivial ones.
Given all this, we’d do well to remember that our new technologies work best when we combine them with more traditional mechanisms of engagement. The Obama campaign complemented new-media tools by establishing on-the-ground field offices in every corner of key states, recruiting and training local volunteers with deep community roots, following up again and again to get supporters to create the kinds of political conversations that actually changed minds. Similarly participants in recent immigration rallies texted, emailed and Tweeted to help bring their friends. But they also got encouragement through their churches, through Spanish-language radio, and through networks of more direct personal outreach. We’re going to need all the public conversations we can create between now and November, and beyond.
When we create these more face-to-face connections, they can build sustaining community, which is no small thing in these frustrating times. For all the strengths of online engagement, people still need to gather together, eat, joke, flirt, tell their stories, attach names to faces, and ultimately build deeper levels of trust. And we need to keep reaching out in less glamorous ways. An activist in the University of Connecticut PIRG chapter described how she ignored endless email and Facebook solicitations for worthy causes. “Then someone actually called me. I was just so surprised because people almost don’t do that anymore. It’s easier to get involved when you’re actually talking with another person.”
If we assume that people will jump on our favorite cause just because they receive our communiqués and agree with us in principle, we underestimate the degree of inertia in our culture. For most people who are contemplating taking their initial steps into social involvement, a more intimate approach is often required, one that will put them at ease one question at a time, take their hesitations and uncertainties into account, and reassure them that the barriers they face are hardly unique. This more personal reach is key to enlisting new allies and to ensuring our political actions are visible enough to create a genuine public impact. That doesn’t mean abandoning the astounding communicative tools we now have. But if we want to realize their potential, we’re going to have to sooner or later step away from our screens.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>When Jorge Rivera was hired at ASI, a small Boston mattress factory with forty production employees, he was paid only $7.50 an hour, but was promised quick raises to $11 an hour. Once on the job, Jorge learned how to coil inner springs, build frames, and sew padding and fabric. He assembled displays for trade shows and helped sell the company’s high-end mattresses to customers. Some days he’d work sixteen hours straight. But his promised raises never came.
Jorge let it pass for six months. “Then after another six months I asked what happened to the original offer,” he said. “I was giving the best of myself, but they said I had to wait a little while.” By the time he finally got a 50-cent raise, well over a year had passed. “It was like they were using me, acting like I was stupid, so I said, ‘I want the raise that you talked about when I got hired.’ I was getting madder and madder, until one day I just stayed home and told them I was going to look for another job. They called and offered me nine-fifty because they didn’t have anyone else to do the work I was doing.”
At that point Jorge realized that “all these other people in the company hadn’t had a raise in three years. People wouldn’t even get their overtime unless they went to the office and complained. I told them, ‘You have to do what I did. Go and speak up.’ “But most were afraid to. While Jorge was born in New York City of Puerto Rican parents, most of his co-workers came from Central America and knew only Spanish. “So I started speaking out for other people, because I spoke English.”
The factory had other problems. The workers’ bathrooms were filthy, “like we were animals. Nobody cleaned them. The drinking water from our fountain came out green. They didn’t give you safety belts for your back when you lifted heavy mattresses. We used hot metal glue from a pump gun, but they didn’t give us gloves or masks.”
When Jorge began talking openly about these and other issues, he says, “the manager told me to look out for myself and they’d take care of me. I felt bad because these were my partners. I was trying to make conditions better so people would be happy and increase production.”
When Jorge heard about workers at another Boston firm who won the right to be represented by the textile union UNITE, he and a few co-workers quietly met with a union representative. “I also started talking with people inside the plant and asking them how they felt about getting paid just five or six dollars an hour, when in that same hour they made three or four top-quality mattresses that sold for eight hundred dollars each. ‘You can’t buy a house with that money,’ I said. ‘You can’t raise a family.’”
Jorge knew his actions were risky. “But I had to do it for the people who were there, even if lost my job.” The managers called a series of company-wide meetings. “They said that if the union came in, the owners would have to close the plant. That’s the first thing they always say.”
But momentum kept building. Jorge addressed groups of people during his lunch breaks. “The management could see us, but they didn’t know what we were saying, because we spoke Spanish and they didn’t.” When the mattress workers finally had a vote, the union won. But ASI offered to increase base wages by only 16 cents an hour. Jorge and the other workers felt they had no choice but to strike.
“Only five workers crossed the picket line,” Jorge recalls. “Even some people who’d voted against the union and had been with the company for years were with us. These were old men and women who’d worked hard all their lives and gotten nothing. I was so happy to see them I almost cried.”
The workers built outside support with the help of UNITE, organizations like Jobs with Justice, and members of other unions. “We told our customers about the strike,” Jorge says, “so they’d call and put pressure for delivery. The company ran out of inventory.” After five days, the company settled. Workers received an immediate dollar-an-hour raise and a guarantee of additional raises for each of the next two years, plus sick days, health insurance, and two weeks’ paid vacation. The bathrooms were cleaned, and there was talk of a cafeteria. “Now people dare to talk with the boss and tell him what they feel,” Jorge explains. “They go by themselves to the office, with the problems they have. They learned to stand up for themselves.”
Even in environments that have not yet been unionized, employees working in concert can produce astonishing transformations, although with far fewer protections. At Chicago’s Inland Steel, four African American employees became concerned about how minority employees were treated. “The paper policies were fine,” says saleswoman Scharlene Hurston, “but they weren’t carried out. When you were involved in meetings, you always felt like you weren’t part of the group. You felt you were invisible. Although you’d speak up and have a reasonable opinion, your ideas would be ignored or discarded. Then someone who was white would bring up an almost identical proposal, and everyone would jump to embrace it. Forty percent of our plant workers are minorities and they had a common voice through their union. But it stopped when you got to the upper levels. Out of two hundred managers in sales and marketing, we had three African Americans. We felt totally isolated.”
Fed up with the lack of progress, Scharlene began meeting informally with three other African American colleagues who had individually approached management to discuss advancement practices, only to find their complaints dismissed. They echoed Scharlene’s judgment that “the situation violated principles I hold very dearly, about doing what’s right and truthful and honest.” Over a period of months, they brainstormed together, finally deciding to approach Steven Bowsher, a white general manager they respected. Inviting him to dinner, they told him about the racist jokes, derogatory comments, and overt and covert obstacles that they and others had faced at Inland. Although Bowsher was sympathetic, he found the examples abstract and remote from his experience. But he was interested enough to take a two-day race relations seminar led by a longtime civil rights activist, and unexpectedly saw his company with new eyes.
“Suddenly, we weren’t talking at each other,” Scharlene Hurston recalls, “we started to talk with each other.” Bowsher had his entire team of managers attend the seminar, then established an aggressive affirmative action plan. His department began to systematically promote minorities on the basis of their total years of experience and the general strength of their skills, even if they’d been stuck for years at the lower levels of the corporate hierarchy. After some prodding from Bowsher, Inland’s president attended the same seminar, convened a meeting of top officers to deal with racial issues, and seriously solicited the opinions of women and minority employees.
Scharlene’s group met resistance, of course. “When you take on something controversial, you’re going to get shot at,” she says. “We all had colleagues who explained to us how our future looked so bright—if we just divorced ourselves from those other people who were causing trouble. Most of our opponents weren’t bad people. They were simply ignorant, afraid of controversy and change.”
But that didn’t stop the reformers. “We energized each other,” said Scharlene. “When one of us got tired, the others were there to pick them up.” Besides, it was no longer just the four of them. Each major department and manufacturing plant now had a group to address racial and sexual inclusion. When Bowsher became head of Inland’s now-independent Ryerson Coil division, he appointed the company’s first African American general manager and first Latino and female plant managers, conducted a major campaign against sexual harassment, and revoked a long-standing policy that made the office areas off-limits to ordinary workers. When the division finally turned a profit, after years of losing money, he attributed its success to unleashing the energy and creativity of workers who finally felt they had the respect and support of management.
“A corporate culture takes forever to create and forever to change,” said Scharlene. “But the issues have been legitimized. We’ve learned the art of negotiation and the strength of solidarity. Before, there were little pockets of questioning, or people denying that these issues existed at all. Now people aren’t nearly as afraid. They’re much more ready to speak up.”
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. You can also join Paul’s monthly email list and follow Paul on Facebook at Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks
From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>“You’d have a hard time spawning, too, if you had a bulldozer in your bedroom,” Pete reminds us, explaining the destruction of once-rich salmon spawning grounds by commercial development and timber industry clearcutting. Pete could have simply accepted this degradation as inevitable, focusing on getting a maximum share of dwindling fish populations. Instead, he’s gradually built an alliance between fishermen, environmentalists, and Native American tribes, persuading them to work collectively to demand that habitat be preserved and restored and to use the example of the salmon runs to highlight larger issues like global climate change.
The cooperation Pete created didn’t come easily: Washington’s fishermen were historically individualistic and politically mistrustful, more inclined, in Pete’s judgment, “to grumble or blame the Indians than to act.” But together, with their new allies, they gradually began to push for cleaner spawning streams, rigorous enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, and an increased flow of water over major regional dams to help boost salmon runs. They framed their arguments as a question of jobs, ones that could be sustained for the indefinite future. But large industrial interests, such as the aluminum companies, feared that these measures would raise their electricity costs or restrict their opportunities for development. So they bankrolled a statewide initiative to regulate fishing nets in a way that would eliminate small family fishing operations.
“I think we may be toast,” said Pete, when Initiative 640 first surfaced. In an Orwellian twist, its backers even presented the measure as environmentally friendly, to mislead casual voters. It was called “Save Our Sealife,” although fishermen and environmentalists soon rechristened it “Save Our Smelters.” At first, those opposing 640 thought they had no chance of success: They were outspent, outstaffed, outgunned. Similar initiatives had already passed in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, backed by similar industrial interests. I remember Pete sitting in a Seattle tavern with two fisherman friends, laughing bitterly and saying, “The three of us are going to take on the aluminum companies? We’re going to beat Reynolds and Kaiser?”
JESUS WILL RIP YOUR HEAD OFF
But they refused to give up. Instead, Pete and his coworkers systematically enlisted the region’s major environmental groups to campaign against the initiative. They’d built up longstanding working relationships, so getting them involved was easy. They also brought in the Native American tribes, with whom they’d also painstakingly built coalitions and with whom they were now accustomed to working with.
Equally important, they enlisted some unexpected allies. When a local affiliate of the fundamentalist Trinity Broadcasting Network broadcast a segment supporting Initiative 640, a fisherman who was a member of the highly conservative Assembly of God churches and who Pete had helped get engaged, called the reporter. “Do you know who Jesus’s disciples were? he asked. “They were fishermen. What do you think Jesus is going to do when he comes back and finds out you’ve stopped people from making a living by fishing? He’s going to rip your head off.”
Taken aback, the reporter apologized and Trinity gave the fishermen a half hour to make their case on the show. Later this same fisherman, together with some others, persuaded his minister to give an invocation against corporate greed on the steps of the Washington State Capitol and to send a letter challenging the initiative to three hundred Assembly of God congregations. “We’ve got to keep approaching the Pentecostals,” Pete said, later on, thinking back on the campaign. “Lots of their members are getting economically screwed. They mistrust the giant corporations. But if we don’t reach out to them and establish some dialogue, they’re going to be pulled into the right-wing coalitions.”
Pete’s group also worked with the media to explain the larger issues at stake. And they focused public attention on the measure’s powerful financial backers, and their self-serving stake in its outcome. On Election Night, remarkably, Initiative 640 was defeated throughout the state. White fishermen, Pentecostals, Native American activists, and Friends of the Earth staffers threw their arms around each other in victory. “I’m really proud of you, Dad,” Pete’s son kept repeating. Pete was stunned.
“Everyone felt it was hopeless,” Pete said, looking back, “just as people say the Gulf fishermen don’t have a chance when they go up against BP for the destruction of their livelihood. The Exxon Valdez spill just destroyed the value of our product for years, and the same thing is likely in the Gulf. But you have to stand up whatever the odds. If we were going to lose that initiative, I wanted at least to put up a good fight. And we won because of all the earlier work we’d done, year after year, to build our environmental relationships, get some credibility, and show that we weren’t just in it for ourselves.”
We often think of social involvement as noble but impractical. Yet as Pete’s story attests, when we reach out broadly enough to find new allies, it can serve enlightened self-interest and the common interest simultaneously, while giving us a sense of connection and purpose nearly impossible to find in a life devoted purely to private pursuits. “It takes energy to act,” said Pete. “But it’s more draining to bury your anger, convince yourself you’re powerless, and swallow whatever’s handed to you. The times I’ve compromised my integrity and accepted something I shouldn’t, the ghosts of my choices have haunted me. When you get involved in something meaningful, you make your life count. It blows my mind that we beat these huge interests starting out with just a small group of people who felt it was wrong to tell lies.”
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. You can also join Paul’s monthly email list and follow Paul on Facebook at Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>Suggestion #2: Take things step by step. You set the pace of your engagement. Don’t worry about being swallowed up, because you’ll determine how much you get involved.
Suggestion #3: Build a supportive community. You can accomplish far more with even a small group of good people than you can alone.
Suggestion #4: Be strategic. Ask what you’re trying to accomplish, where you can find allies, and how to best communicate the urgencies you feel.
Suggestion #5: Enlist the uninvolved. They have their own fears and doubts, so they won’t participate automatically; you have to work actively to engage them. If you do, there’s no telling what they’ll go on to achieve.
Suggestion #6: Seek out unlikely allies. The more you widen the circle, the more you’ll have a chance of breaking through the entrenched barriers to change.
Suggestion #7: Persevere. Change most often takes time. The longer you continue working, the more you’ll accomplish.
Suggestion #8: Savor the journey. Changing the world shouldn’t be grim work. Take time to enjoy nature, good music, good conversation, and whatever else lifts your soul. Savor the company of good people working for change
Suggestion #9: Think large. Don’t be afraid to tackle the deepest-rooted injustices, and to tackle them on a national or global scale. Remember that many small actions can shift the course of history.
Suggestion #10: Listen to your heart. It’s why you’re involved to begin with. It’s what will keep you going.
I’d love reader comments on how these idea have played out in your own personal social engagement.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. You can also join Paul’s monthly email list and follow Paul on Facebook at Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks
From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>We can and should pressure our elected officials through non-electoral means: letter writing, petitions, and town hall meetings, running ads in their districts, vigils and protests in front of their offices, and organizing their constituents to speak out. If enough people participate, these approaches can not only pressure recalcitrant representatives, but also shift the horizon of what’s deemed politically possible. But some entrenched incumbents, and I’d put Lincoln in this category, are so unresponsive, so compromised by wealthy interests, that we need to confront them electorally. Even the threat of a primary challenge can move incumbents to vote more wisely—as was true when Arlen Specter began shifting his votes after Joe Sestak first filed against him. When MoveOn, Democracy for America and several other groups raised several million dollars in pledges to support primary challenges to any Democrat who filibustered health care, their targets stopped talking so loudly about taking this possible stand. Primary challenges can matter even before the elections are held.
They also give us an alternative to other problematic options:
We can accept the tenure of these regressive representatives as inevitable, but that allows them to block necessary change at will.
We can run third party challenges, but that will likely elect more right wing Republicans. It’s not just Ralph Nader helping George Bush defeat Al Gore. Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell himself first defeated a moderate incumbent Democrat by less than the margin of a Socialist Workers Party candidate. On the Democratic side, Washington state Senator Maria Cantwell defeated an awful Republican incumbent only because a Libertarian candidate split the conservative vote. Absent instant runoff or fusion voting, third party campaigns risk making matters still worse.
We can also vote with our feet and stay home, but we know where that leads. In the Gingrich sweep of 1994, long-time labor, environmental, and other progressive activists were so angered by NAFTA that they refused to knock on doors, make phone calls, donate to campaigns, or do any of the kinds of things they usually did to get to get Democrats elected. As a result, the Democrats lost race after race by less than the margins of those their lapsed volunteers would normally have gotten to the polls. We don’t want to go down that road.
This brings us back to primary challenges. They won’t always succeed. Given the resources and commitments involved, we need to be selective in choosing them, and not take on every quixotic campaign. But I don’t regret the $50 I gave to Bill Halter (or the money that my union gave) any more than I regret money I’ve contributed to other causes that have come frustratingly close but lost. Obviously, winning would have sent a powerful message and opened up at least the chance of electing a decent Senator. But Arkansas was a tough state to compete in from the start, with little union presence, Bill Clinton campaigning actively for Lincoln, and Obama allowing her to use his endorsement in ads. Yet even losing this closely means other fickle Democratic representatives and Senators will think far more carefully before they take regressive stands. At least between now and November, Lincoln is also more likely to continue to embrace her newfound populism (real or spurious) on issues like financial reform. The turnout for Halter may also have helped nominate some other more progressive Democrats, as in Chad Causey’s defeating a rightwing opponent 51-49 in Arkansas’s first congressional district.
Like all political efforts, primary challenges are never guaranteed. And yes, Lincoln’s victory is a defeat for a more accountable politics. But recapturing America is a long-term struggle, and we aren’t going to always win every round. If the coalitions that came together to try to elect Halter can continue to broaden their reach, perhaps in more hospitable environments, the Halter-Lincoln race will have been worth it.
Paul Loeb is the author of the newly revised Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, April 2010 ). Bill McKibben calls Soul “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” The Sierra Club magazine writes, “Loeb examines the stumbling blocks—perceived powerlessness, cynicism, burnout—that keep most Americans from participating in the public sphere, as well as the rewards of following a different path.” See www.soulofacitizen.org
]]>But as Johnson explains, “the reality of a broken world” often leads to ambiguity rather than certainty. “What we thought, believed, assumed, or followed is suddenly brought into question …. Receiving more information unsettles us rather than making things clear and easy …. It should not surprise us that our journey into the lives of those who cry for help will be discomforting.”
As a result, those of us who work for social justice often have no choice but to pursue our fundamental goals by approaches that are sometimes unclear, ad hoc, and seemingly contradictory. I remember one Vietnam-era demonstration in San Francisco that focused on the role of major oil companies in promoting the war. My friends and I drove the 35 miles to get there. As we stopped to fill up at a gas station, we felt more than a little absurd, but there was no other reasonable way to get there. I experience a similar disjunction when flying across the country to give climate change talks that I hope will move people to act, while contributing to the very greenhouse gases I’m aiming to reduce.
We’re used to dealing with contradictory situations in our personal lives. We love family and friends despite their flaws and missteps, sometimes major ones, while trying to help steer them do what’s right. A lonely few wait indefinitely for partners who match their romantic ideal in every possible way, but most of us take the leap of falling in love with people who, like ourselves, fall well short of faultlessness; then we do our best to love them for who they are. Anyone who has children knows that they are the very embodiment of unpredictability. We can influence, but surely not control them. To all those who are dear to us we can only respond, moment by moment, as lovingly and mindfully as possible, improvising as we go. We embrace these necessarily uncertain human bonds, because the alternative is a life of isolation.
Effective public involvement demands a similar tolerance for our own doubts and mixed feelings, and for the inevitably partial nature of almost all of our victories. Think of our relationship to political leaders we have supported. We work for their campaigns knowing that it may take at least as much effort to convince them to act with courage and vision once in office as it did to help them get elected to begin with. The Gulf oil disaster is an example. The Minerals Management Service, the Federal agency that bent the rules to allow the drilling to begin with, was riddled with Bush/Cheney appointees who’d spent their entire careers taking lavish gifts from the oil industry while granting them every favor they’d wanted. If McCain and Palin were in charge, we’d have “drill baby drill” until the shores of the Potomac were soaked with oil.
But many of us are also profoundly frustrated that Obama hasn’t been tougher in responding to this immensely challenging crisis. We want him to put the government in charge of the efforts to plug the leak. We want him and Congress to remove the oil-drilling liability cap so the costs of the disaster will be borne by BP, Halliburton and Transocean, instead of the taxpayers and the ordinary citizens whose lives and livelihoods are being destroyed. We want him to lead on shifting our economy away from coal and oil. We need to speak out on all of these issues and more, and find ways of pressuring Obama to lead, as when he recently advocated rolling back “billions of dollars in tax breaks” for oil companies and using the money for clean energy research and development. Yet the magnitude of the crises we face and the ambivalencies of his responses make it easy to write off the very possibilities of our doing this. By dismissing them because we want all our victories to be pure, we end up dismissing our own power.
When we do act, others may view us as heroic knights riding in to save the day, but we’re more like knights on rickety tricycles, clutching our hesitations along the way. Gandhi called his efforts “experiments in truth,” because successful approaches could be discovered only through trial and error. As I’ve explored, Gandhi himself was once so literally tongue-tied he could not get a single sentence out while advocating for his clients in court, and consequently lost all his cases. So we grow into our involvements and strengths, taking action despite all our uncertainties.
We might therefore characterize the citizens who make the most difference in this difficult time as people of imperfect character, acting on the basis of imperfect knowledge, for causes that may be imperfect as well and in circumstances they’d rarely have chosen. I think that’s a profile any of us could match. If the change we need occurs, it’s those who act for justice despite their doubts, limitations, and uncertainties who will ultimately bring it about.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. You can also join Paul’s monthly email list and follow Paul on Facebook at Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks
From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb. Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>Over nearly forty years that I’ve spoken out on various causes and written about citizen movements, I’ve come to believe that people work for justice when their hearts are stirred by specific lives and situations that develop our capacity to feel empathy, to imagine ourselves as someone else. New information—the percentage of people out of work or children in poverty, the numbers behind America’s record health care costs, the annual planetary increases in greenhouse gases—can help us comprehend the magnitude of our shared problems and develop appropriate responses. But information alone can’t provide the organic connection that binds one person to another, or that stirs our hearts to act.
]]> Powerful stories can break us beyond our isolated worlds. “They link teller to listeners,” writes Scott Russell Sanders. “and listeners to one another.” They let us glimpse the lives of those older or younger, richer or poorer, of different races, from places we’ll never even see. Showing us the links between choices and consequences, they train our sight, “give us images for what is truly worth seeking, worth having, worth doing.” Stories also teach us, Sanders suggests, how “every gesture, every act, every choice we make sends ripples of influence into the future.”This means that we are more likely to challenge homelessness if we hear the testimonies of individual people living on the street. We will work to overcome illiteracy after gaining a sense of what it’s like to be unable to read. We need to know how many thousands of gallons are leaking out each day from the Louisiana oil spill—that gives clues to the magnitude of the disaster. But we’re more likely to act on it if we can envision what actually happens as the oil begins to poison the shrimp, oysters, crawfish and pristine beaches we’ve long taken for granted. Psychological studies of those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust found they differed from their peers in their ability to be moved by pain, sadness, and helplessness.
Concrete stories can help us engage the world’s troubles without becoming so overwhelmed that we despair of ever being able to change things. As psychologist Joanna Macy reminds us, “Information by itself can increase resistance [to engagement], deepening the sense of apathy and powerlessness.” Stories about particular individuals and specific situations usually have the opposite effect. By giving seemingly overwhelming problems a human face, they allow us to act from a sense of loyalty to specific people, communities, or places. Responsibility in this view becomes not an abstract principle but a way of being and connecting.
Of course our culture has plenty of false stories. So we need to ask whether the examples that stir our hearts—or those of our political opponents—are accurate or whether they’re manipulated inventions, like the talk of government “death panels” or Obama as Manchurian Kenyan. A recent Harris poll found that 45% of Republicans believed Obama was not born in this country so had no right to be president, and 57% believed he was a Muslim. That’s a stunning indictment of Republican elected officials who know that those beliefs are absolute nonsense, but (with a few exceptions like Lindsay Graham) have been conveniently silent on them, perhaps because they like stirring up the Tea Party base.
But that doesn’t negate the need to get beyond arcane policy prescriptions to tell the examples at the core of the issues we care about. It just means we need to ensure our stories are accurate. We could even say that whichever side gets their stories out to frame public discourse will likely win any given political battle.
Stories motivate through a sense of connection, whether we encounter them first hand or retold by others. A Long Island teacher named Carol McNulty felt inspired to take a stand after watching a video of a brown-eyed girl, in a documentary called Zoned for Slavery. Though only fifteen, the girl had worked for two years making fifty-six cents an hour sewing clothes for the Gap and Eddie Bauer in a maquiladora, a factory inside a free-trade zone in El Salvador. Her eighteen-hour days left little time for eating, sleeping, or even going to the bathroom. She had to buy her food from the company store. Attending high school was out of the question, though she said shyly that she’d like to someday. The factory bosses prohibited workers from talking with each other, and when some of the bolder ones tried to organize, they were fired.
“I saw such a look of helplessness,” Carol explained. “My own children’s eyes are so bright and cheerful. Hers were equally beautiful, but so beaten down and clouded by despair. It’s wrong for children to live like that—undernourished, without hope, literally chained to machines. She was just one young woman whose life was so blocked. If you multiply that by all the others, it’s horrendous.” It angered Carol that a child could be this abused for greed.
So every Saturday for two months Carol and her husband stood in front of a nearby Gap store, braving biting winter rain and freezing snow, and joined by a dozen others. Like citizens picketing the chain’s stores throughout the country, they handed out literature and talked with customers. They helped promote a Long Island visit by a group of young women who worked in the factory and were touring the U.S. to tell their story. In the face of a growing public outcry, the Gap capitulated, pledging to ensure that contractors allow independent monitoring by churches and human rights groups and free access by unions. The campaign had won at least a beginning step.
Like the organizers who worked to tell the stories of the maquiladora workers, the most successful activists know the power of stories to move people’s hearts, so weave the richness of personal example into their arguments. If particular institutions are exploitative, ecologically destructive, or otherwise oppressive, effective activists don’t rely on mind-numbing rhetorical labels to arouse concern. Instead, they describe precisely how the institutions damage people’s lives or degrade the environment. They frame policy proposals not in terms of arcane acronyms, bill numbers, or implementation details, but particular consequences. They continually link their arguments and visions to narratives that can touch people’s hearts.
I saw this when Oregon state employees, who were predominantly female and universally underpaid, began fighting for a living wage. Their unions started the campaign by hiring experts to draw up more equitable pay schedules. The resulting task force surveyed every category of job, then presented an elaborate report in the most neutral technical terms. At the request of top-level managers, they added more data. Eventually the study became so unwieldy and abstract that ordinary workers felt it had nothing to do with their lives, or their gut sense that their labor was undervalued. “Most of those affected couldn’t even talk about the proposals,” recalled the economist who chaired the task force, “because they didn’t know the language, all the personnel-oriented, management-oriented terms. It left them completely out of the discussion.” Lacking popular understanding or support, the effort collapsed of its own weight, dead on arrival at the legislature.
Then the unions shifted strategy, arranging for public-sector employees to speak for themselves to the media, community groups, and their elected officials. They posed simple but very telling questions: Why did women who took care of children at university daycare centers earn less than workers monitoring animals at local private research labs? Why did public-sector secretaries earn less than mail carriers? Why did nursing-home aides earn less than entry-level workers at insurance companies and banks? Testifying before the state legislature, they explained that their jobs mattered greatly to them, as well as to the community. Then they asked the senators how much they thought they earned. Holding up pay stubs as proof, they shamed the legislators with the reality of their economic plight: Some made so little for full-time work, they needed food stamps to get by. The union won pay raises and other concessions that made working conditions more equitable. It triumphed by letting their members tell their own stories, in their own words, and by so doing going to the heart of their cause.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of “”Soul” every Thursday. Click here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb
Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>David still looks intimidating: He’s a six-foot-two, 220-pound African American man with a shaved head, a handlebar mustache, and eighteen-inch biceps, one of which is adorned with a fading tattoo and a scar. But his eyes and voice are no longer edgy and desperate. Patient, reflective, and forgiving, David is a very different man today than he once was.
David started his downhill slide when he was ten. Though undiagnosed at the time, he was dyslexic. His school responded by placing him in a class with mentally retarded kids, where the teachers did little but baby-sit. After they told him he had no educational future, he felt there was nothing to be gained by trying.
Bored, angry, and powerless, David began drinking and skipping school, making “a conscious decision to take whatever substances would change the way I felt.” When David was fifteen, Nixon cracked down on the marijuana trade, and heroin flooded the streets. “It felt really good to take a shot of dope,” he says. “It took all my pain away.”
David soon found other kids who were also scorned, discarded, and wanting to get back a sense of worth however they could. “We’d come up to a random person, the biggest grown man we could find, and knock him unconscious with a single punch. I could do it with either hand. People on the street started treating me with respect.”
David grew bolder, entering drug dealers’ apartments with a sawed-off shotgun. “I’d fire it at the ceiling, then clean them out. I never killed anyone, but I was crazy enough to threaten people. I liked being the kid with no future, the kid people were afraid of.” When David was eighteen, he and three friends were caught robbing a gas station of $156. The judge sent him to San Quentin.
David mastered the prison environment quickly. He felt at home with inmates who’d similarly learned to survive from score to score and crime to crime. Many shared David’s dyslexia and had been excluded from school. The once-terrifying clanging gates soon became familiar, almost reassuring. Even when David joined a prison affiliate of the Black Panthers, he and the other key leaders spent most of their energy finding ways to get high.
Two and a half years later, David was released, only to be turned in a month later by a onetime friend, to whom he’d sold $20 worth of heroin. This time the sentence was ten years to life. Prison became steadily more comfortable, despite its physical harshness. David found a pet mouse and “fed it, played with it, tried to teach it to play chess, did everything but make love to it.”
He was released a few more times. But in each case, life outside prison seemed like a strange hiatus. An uncertain spectator in an alien world, he’d eat food from the kitchen pot and sit on the toilet with the door open. “I had no social skills,” David says. “I felt like God had left a component out of me, and that I didn’t fit.”
He also kept returning to heroin. “I always thought I could regulate it, not let it master me. Then I’d do something crazy to get back inside, where I had a place and a reputation. If I was hungry, I’d get a gun to take what I needed. Someone else could work and stand in line, but I wasn’t going to.”
David’s turning point came while he was getting ready to watch the World Series on a small TV set in his San Quentin cell. The ground started shaking. It was a major San Francisco earthquake. “I felt helpless and hopeless, locked in a cage. I heard the Bay Bridge had collapsed. I thought of my twenty-seven-year-old son, who I’d had when I was seventeen. I’d spent half my life behind bars. Now he seemed headed for jail, too. I wondered if both of us might die here.”
This sudden sense of vulnerability, David now believes, was the key to his transformation. In prison, people admired his toughness. It didn’t matter that it led nowhere. “Only when I began to doubt could I change.”
But wanting to change wasn’t enough. David was full of resolve the next time he got out, but still had no clear models for a different way to live. Aside from a few men who’d embraced more religion than he could handle, he knew of no long-term inmates who’d “broken free and gotten a regular life with the job, house, wife, dog, goldfish, and a car that you don’t have to steal.”
David’s probation officer found him lying beneath a bridge with a needle in his arm, then got him into a rehab program. There he saw a video in which the veteran convict turned leadership trainer Gordon Graham described prison as a comfort zone, where people came to feel more at home than they did outside.
“I’d never seen anyone really change who was like me,” David said. “Gordon spoke in a language I knew because he’d been there. He showed me how I was stuck, like a broken record going rup, rup, rup in the groove, and how the survival skills I’d learned didn’t work. He helped me get past just endlessly repeating.”
David stayed in the rehab program nine months, got a job as a painter, and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. They were his medicine, says David, “just like someone sick with diabetes needs insulin, or someone whose kidneys don’t work needs dialysis. If you don’t remember what you’ve been through, you’re doomed to keep doing it, which means something dreadful will bite your ass like you never want to think about.” After David appeared in a Bill Moyers TV program on an African American men’s support group, he got a call from East Palo Alto’s mayor. “She wanted me to help stop the community violence. I was one of the people who’d helped sow the land mines of violence to begin with. When you have a war like the war in our streets, it’s the people who sow the land mines who know best how to dig them up.”
A POLITICS BASED ON STORY
Drawing on his own story, and with support from San Mateo County, David started a drug and alcohol rehab center called Free at Last. Its approach stemmed from the lessons of the street culture he’d inhabited. Instead of hiding the program, the staff tied it to the community with a highly visible storefront center. They kept it open late, so people could drop in and get support at almost any time. By day, people enrolled in the center’s education and health programs. At night, Free at Last outreach workers, led by David, visited bars, crack houses, and shooting galleries to test people for HIV and offer them treatment programs. “Most IV addicts are out at night. So it doesn’t work to have a clinic that follows the standard medical model, open eight to five, and expect people to come to you. You have to go to where people are. We got trained in how to draw blood and give the tests, so we didn’t need a nurse. We’d pass out bleach and condoms as a way to draw people into the rehab programs. They’d listen to us because we’d been in gangs with them and shot dope with them. We’d been there.”
Monday night was a bad night for murders in East Palo Alto. “On the weekends you’re getting high,” David explains. “You’ve got your money, your drugs, maybe a girl. Then it’s Monday, the money from your payday is gone. You have to start all over, broke and hurting. That’s why all the blues songs talk about ‘Stormy Monday’ and ‘Blue Monday.’ You have to steal to get what you need. That’s when you feel desperate and people kill each other.
“We developed one of the early Midnight Basketball programs for Monday and for Thursday, which is another bad night. To join you have to be a school dropout or on parole or probation. Our players attend a workshop at eight in the evening, where they talk about their lives and learn about alternatives. Then they play in the basketball games, with community coaches. We give them somewhere to go when they’re likely to be the most vulnerable and reckless. They don’t have to go blow someone away.”
David built the clinic through state and private grants and community health program contracts. He drew no salary, keeping his other job as an HIV outreach worker. But under his guidance, the organization has grown over 15 years. Like the community they serve, the 54 staff members are overwhelmingly African American and Latino, and two thirds are in recovery. Free at Last developed residential services for women going through rehab, so they wouldn’t be separated from their children. They challenged liquor store licenses, advocated for access to treatment programs, worked with the local court system to offer alternatives to drug-related incarceration, and ran domestic violence groups for women and for the men who abused them. Together with Gordon Graham, David continued to lead prison workshops nationwide, developing prerelease programs to address the chasm between prison culture and the outside.
“Lots of things I do today use the same energy and drive as when I was crazy. You don’t go into a person’s house and rob them with a shotgun without emotional faith. It’s just as scary as asking for a hundred thousand dollars from the president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I just discovered a way into being a powerful person instead of being a fool.” Within a few years after Free at Last began, three-quarters of the people who graduated from its programs remained clean, sober, and gainfully employed. David continued to serve as its president, and has used the organization’s innovative approach to develop similar programs in Tanzania, Kenya, and Kazakhstan.
David wanted to see a new politics coming out of the stories of the recovery movement, where “we start in a dark room, lift the shades so we’re able to see, and begin fighting for a fair chance for our communities. If they’d had ‘three strikes’ laws when I was in prison, I’d never have been released. But I’m not an exception, just an example of what can happen when people get the support they need, in a language they can understand.”
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of “”Soul” every Thursday. Click here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb
Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>Virginia Ramirez, of San Antonio, Texas, could easily have lived out her days without ever discovering her ability to speak out. She left school after eighth grade to get married. “That was what most Hispanic women in my generation did. My husband, who drives a taxicab, went to work after sixth grade.” Although dropping out seemed normal at the time, she felt frustrated when she couldn’t help her five children with their homework.
When Virginia was forty-five, she realized that an elderly neighbor was getting sick every winter. The neighbor was a widow who lived in a house so dilapidated that it couldn’t retain heat. “She was one of those people who always paid her taxes on time, always faithfully making out her little money orders. But she couldn’t afford to repair her house, and everyone around here was just as poor. So I went with her to city agencies trying to get help. They kept sending us from place to place, from department to department. Finally she died of pneumonia. The paramedics said she’d never have died if her house hadn’t been so freezing cold.
“I’d never been so angry in my life,” Virginia recalls. “This woman had done everything she was supposed to, and now she was dead because no one could help her fix her house. Someone said there’s this community organization called COPS, and maybe they could help.”
At that time, the largely volunteer-based COPS (Communities Organized for Public Service) had been around for eight years. The organization grew out of The Industrial Areas Foundation, a network established community organizing Godfather Saul Alinsky. COPS began by working through churches to organize San Antonio’s desperately poor Latino population. The group successfully pushed for municipal investments in storm sewers, parks, and schools in the town’s long-neglected barrios, and got major downtown businesses to hire their residents. COPS eventually secured over a billion dollars of public and private resources for their community through a combination of grassroots organizing and innovative protests. But Virginia had paid the organization little heed.
So it was with some hesitation that she attended a COPS meeting at her church, where she raised her hand and said, “I have this problem. This neighbor lady of mine died because it was cold and they wouldn’t fix her house. I want someone to do something about it.” A few days later, a COPS volunteer knocked on Virginia’s door and asked her why she was so angry.
Virginia was angry, she said, because she’d tried to help the old lady and failed. She was upset because her kids weren’t getting properly educated in school. Because she’d given up on her own education and dreams. Because she’d had to watch her father, whom she’d adored, be humiliated again and again by police and store owners when they drove from state to state to pick crops. No one seemed to care about her community. The volunteer didn’t advise Virginia to do anything in particular. She just asked if they could talk again. When she returned, she suggested that Virginia hold a house meeting, to see if her neighbors had concerns too.
Nine people came. Virginia had never conducted a meeting. Her legs shook so much she almost fell over. She could barely open the door. But gradually people began to talk of their problems and experiences. Their neighborhood had been thrown together at the cheapest possible cost, built for workers at the now-closed nearby slaughterhouses. It lacked sidewalks and adequate sewers. Most of the houses were crumbling. As she listened, Virginia realized this was about the future of her community.
Virginia and the other COPS members painstakingly researched documents at City Hall, discovering that the city had built a street in a more affluent area with money earmarked to repair their barrio homes. Virginia’s next step—testifying before the City Council—felt terrifying. When she walked to the podium to protest the diversion of funds, she was so nervous she forgot what she was going to say. “I didn’t remember my speech. I barely remembered my name. Then I turned around, saw the people who’d come with me, and realized I was just telling the story of our community. So I told it, and we got our money back.
“It was hard to stand up to politicians and tell them what we wanted, because it’s been embedded in my mind to be nice to everybody. It seemed rude at first. But I began to understand the importance of holding people accountable for what they promise.”
As they did with other newly energized community members, COPS trainers helped Virginia reflect on each step she took in every campaign, and acquire the skills to research, negotiate, articulate a point of view, analyze people’s needs, and channel her anger. They also introduced her to a new community of people who were similarly involved. Even with this support and inspiration, Virginia’s journey into public life wasn’t easy. She often prayed over whether her newfound path was right, asking God for guidance, “like what am I doing with these crazy people and where is it going to lead?”
Yet her involvement also strengthened her faith, giving new meaning to biblical lessons that had once seemed more remote and abstract. “Suddenly you read these stories about injustice from thousands of years ago,” Virginia says, “and it seems like they’re talking about today.”
Virginia’s choices still raised difficult tensions, particularly in her family. “It was like twenty-four-hour guilt. You’re torn between your home and your desire to grow as a person.” After Virginia returned to school, acquired her GED, and enrolled at a community college, she was studying for a college test—her first test in over 40 years—when her husband came home. Virginia was sitting with books spread across the kitchen table, and no supper ready. He ran his finger over the furniture to show her the accumulated dust. “Look at this house!” he yelled. “It’s going to ruin. You’re not taking care of anything.”
“I’m preparing my future,” she responded, her voice trembling. “If you don’t like it, that’s too bad, because I’m going to do it.” She’d never talked to him that way, and he was shocked. “I’m sorry,” Virginia said, “but this is a priority.” It took her husband a long time to get used to her new attitude and concerns, “to realize,” as Virginia says, “that I was going to keep on going to school and to my meetings.” He realized I was getting involved for both of us.”
College gave Virginia the credentials to secure a new job, training and supervising over 300 volunteers who do health education outreach in low-income neighborhoods. During more than 20 years with COPS, she’s moved up in the organization, first training people in her parish, then working with other local churches to develop their members’ leadership skills as well. She’s focused particularly on women like herself. Using her own unexpected journey as an example, she’s taught them to find their own voice and speak out for their communities, despite any doubts or hesitations they might have.
By now, Virginia was negotiating with the mayor and bank presidents on major community development projects, pressuring local corporations for decent jobs, and working on after-school literacy projects. “We have a new business incubator and a teen center so kids have someplace to hang out besides the streets. The city gave people money to fix up the crumbling houses. Now they take so much pride in it. We’re still a poor neighborhood but we finally have hope.”
Virginia realized how far she’d come when she went to Washington, D.C., to testify before a U.S. Senate committee on an innovative job-training program that she and other COPS members had helped develop. The night before, she “prayed to God that I wouldn’t make a complete fool of myself,” but she said that she’d been far more afraid “talking to my neighbors the first time, and speaking at that first City Council meeting. By time I got to the U.S. Senate I was used to it.” Afterwards, standing outside on the steps of the Capitol, Virginia thought “about how this process has changed me, developed potential I’d never have dreamed of. When I started, I was a stay-at-home mother. That was my world. Never in my wildest imagination could I have thought that I’d be here. Now I tell people I learned all my talents and confidence at the University of COPS. The people there found some spark in me. I never knew I had it.”
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of “”Soul” every Thursday. Click here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb
Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>Gandhi’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, tells the story of how his grandfather’s family mortgaged everything they had—their land, their jewelry, everything of value—to send Gandhi to law school. Gandhi graduated and passed the bar, but was so shy that when he stood up in court all he could do was stammer. He couldn’t get a sentence out in defense of his clients. As a result, he lost every one of his cases. He was a total failure as a lawyer. His family didn’t know what do to. Finally, they sent him off to South Africa, where he literally and metaphorically found his voice by challenging the country’s racial segregation.
I love viewing Gandhi not as the master strategist of social change that he later became, but as someone who at first was literally tongue-tied—shyer and more intimidated than almost anyone we can imagine. His story is a caution against the impulse to try and achieve perfection before we begin the journey of social change.
“I think it does us all a disservice,” says Atlanta activist Sonya Vetra Tinsley, “when people who work for social change are presented as saints—so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, they never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I’m much more inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It’s a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing things too.”
Sonya had attended a talk by one of Martin Luther King’s Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came to college, getting only a C, for example, in his first philosophy course. “I found that very inspiring, when I heard it,” Sonya said, “given all that King achieved.”
I was similarly inspired to learn that when union organizer and Montgomery NAACP head E.D. Nixon bailed Rosa Parks out of jail and then called Martin Luther King to help lead the bus boycott, King initially resisted. He was new in town. People were just getting to know him. Since he was only twenty-six, he was reluctant to take the lead. He had all sorts of understandable reasons to demur. But Nixon persisted and when he called him back, King responded, “Brother Nixon, I can go along with you on this.” Had Nixon not approached him, King might never have taken his own first steps toward deeper involvement, on a stage that ended up making him a national figure.
King’s hesitation matters, because once we enshrine our heroes on impossibly high pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, and for whatever cause, we can always find some reason to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, for not being able to answer every question put to them, or for the smallest inconsistencies in how they act or live. We can’t imagine how an ordinary human being with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in a worthy social cause.
Others will also apply the perfect standard to us when we act. At Minnesota’s St. Olaf College, students were sleeping in makeshift cardboard shelters to dramatize the plight of America’s homeless. As one participant recalled, “Lots who passed by treated us like a slumber party. They told us we were cute. But when we kept on for a couple days they began to get annoyed. One girl yelled, ‘Homeless people don’t have blankets. You’re being hypocritical.’ She looked like she’d be satisfied only if we got soaked in the freezing rain.”
In effect, the activists were ridiculed for not being pious enough. Yet even had they demonstrated their commitment by standing in the rain until they became hypothermic, or by launching a hunger strike, odds are the critics still wouldn’t have been satisfied. They would have turned their argument around and accused the activists of trying to be martyrs, of taking things too seriously. Whatever the critique, the approach is the same: Identify a perceived flaw, large or small, then use it to write off an entire effort.
It’s hard enough to be the recipients of perfect standard dismissals. It’s worse to subject ourselves to it. As a result, for instance, we often refrain from tackling global climate change because we’re not climatologists or because we might have to drive to a rally promoting alternative energy. We don’t speak out on homelessness because we aren’t homeless ourselves. Though outraged when moneyed interests corrupt our political system and when the Supreme Court encourages even greater corruption, we believe we lack the credentialed authority to insist campaign financing be reformed—even when terrific models exist, as when Maine, Vermont, Arizona and Connecticut give candidates seriously public funding if they gather enough $5 grassroots contributions. Whatever the issue, whatever the approach, we never feel we have enough knowledge or standing. Then if we learn more or gain more experience, we simply raise the bar higher, ensuring that it’s always out of reach. We decide that anyone who takes an effective public stand must first become a larger-than-life figure—someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, knowledge or certainty than a normal person could ever possess.
No one is immune to the crippling effects of the perfect standard. In this time of massive technological and economic change, many of us who’ve been active in social causes before feel daunted by both the size and array of contemporary problems. Even when we know better, we sometimes feel we have to tackle everything at once. If our efforts don’t instantly achieve dramatic results, we are quick to criticize ourselves, and doubt that our efforts can matter. And we apply the same impatience toward national leaders, like Obama.
We face a parallel trap in seeking endless information. We can spend our lives trying to gather endless facts and arguments from every conceivable website, blog, Facebook posting, and 24-hour cable news source. Just as our culture has no notion of economic sufficiency, so the perfect standard leaves us with a permanent insufficiency of knowledge—and a convenient way to dismiss anyone who dares take a public stand. As everything that can be known continues to increase, the effort to know everything grows increasingly doomed. We don’t dare speak out unless we feel prepared to debate Bill O’Reilly on national network news.
The perfect standard can also limit our time horizon. In this view, we shouldn’t begin working for social change until the time is ideal—say, when our kids are grown or we ourselves are out of school, when our job is more secure, or when we retire. We wait for when our courage and wisdom will be greatest, the issues clearest, and our supporters and allies most steadfast. Such hesitation is reasonable. We are subject to real pressures and constraints. Yet when in life will we not be subject to pressures, of one kind or another? When will public participation not require a shift from familiar and comfortable habits? What’s more, the issues that most need our attention will probably always be complex, forbidding, and difficult to address effectively. As Rachel Naomi Remen reminds us, “Being brave does not mean being unafraid. It often means being afraid and doing it anyway.”
Social change always proceeds in the absence of absolute knowledge or certainty. In the 1960s, psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott developed the now-accepted concept of “the good-enough mother.” Winnicott argued that the goal of errorless child-rearing is a destructive and impossible standard that produces guilt and recrimination. As Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn explain in their book about parenting, Everyday Blessings, “There is no question about doing a perfect job, or always ‘getting it right.’ ‘Perfect’ is simply not relevant, whatever that would mean.” In this vein, maybe we should all aspire to become “good-enough activists,” remembering that though some of our actions will fail, and some will be flawed, our contributions matter all the more because we’ve proceeded despite our uncertainties and doubts, in a way that can then inspire others to take the risk of acting despite theirs.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, “Soul” has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of “”Soul” every Thursday. Click here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb
Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>Millions of us participate in voluntary activities. We serve in soup kitchens and shelters, conduct literacy programs, read to otherwise isolated hospital patients or the elderly, work with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts. We teach Sunday school, coach Little League, work at our children’s schools, and run churches, temples, mosques, volunteer fire departments, and historical sites. Usually, our motivation is the same as that of citizens involved in more political forms of advocacy: We want to alleviate human pain and affirm a sense of human connection. And we get back similar feelings of personal meaning and common purpose. Clearly, America would be a far meaner society without our efforts.
Yet many of us also find it easier to help our fellow citizens one on one than to exercise our democratic voice. We’re far more likely to volunteer to meet a specific human need than to work to elect wiser leaders or pressure major economic, political, and cultural institutions to act more responsibly. That’s particularly true when the process of shifting larger institutions is difficult, which it often is. But in the process of scaling down our expectations and horizons, we risk allowing the problems we address to grow worse.
Social change and more personal acts of compassion can feed each other. As Jim Wallis of the Christian social justice magazine Sojourners points out, “In any good community center that deals with the problems of youth, the youth workers will spend most of their time talking about how the young people can get their lives together, find the spiritual and moral resources to make responsible choices, and take control of their own futures. Self-respect and mutual respect, cultural identity, community spirit, and social responsibility are all central…. But when describing the wider society, those same youth workers often will speak about the economic, racial, and social oppression that lies at the root of the problems their kids face.”
As Wallis suggests, volunteer efforts can help us regain our sense of connection, offer lifelines to beleaguered communities, and change people’s lives. Like Gandhi’s “constructive program,” where his supporters created local self-help projects, they can create new ways to address urgent problems, such as Habitat’s pioneering work in building affordable houses. For certain kinds of crises, like the situation of young men and women trapped in bleak cycles of violence, the only solution may be to develop powerful relationships with people who can help them feel cared for in ways previously lacking, and show them a different way to live. Indeed, the best responses to many of our society’s ills may be local and decentralized, drawing on such spiritual virtues as love, generosity, a willingness to listen, and the capacity to see a divine spark in even the most desperate and self-destructive of our fellow human beings.
Yet most of these one-on-one approaches require institutional support. In his powerful memoir, “Always Running,” poet Luis Rodriguez describes his journey into East Los Angeles gang life in the 1960s—and how he finally left, thanks largely to the influence and example of a former gang member turned community worker. Now Rodriguez works with Chicago gang kids, running poetry workshops in which young people can express and exorcise their pain. Without the resources that let the community worker turn social intervention into a full-time job, enabling him to spend hours and hours with Luis and his friends, Rodriguez might never have left the gang culture in the first place.
We should work to heal the wounds of our culture whether or not government programs support our efforts. But we should also realize that gang members, for example, need more than mentors and models. They also need jobs to teach them skills, drug treatment programs to help them overcome their addictions, and schools where teachers and counselors can spend the time and energy it takes to stop them from joining gangs or becoming homeless to begin with. Our critical social problems demand both individual and structural solutions. To rely on volunteer efforts is to duck the basic issue of common responsibility, and to ignore the fact that individual crises often result from collective forces.
I’ve seen too many compassionate individuals trying to stem rivers of need, while national political and economic leaders have opened the floodgates to widen them. We build five houses with Habitat for Humanity, while escalating rents and government cutbacks throw a hundred families into the street. We laboriously restore a single stream while a timber company clear-cuts a watershed or global climate change turns once-fertile agricultural land into desert. As the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin once said, “Charity must not be allowed to go bail for justice.”
THE POLITICS OF WITNESS Greg Ricks, former director of Boston’s powerful youth involvement program, City Year, compared the situation of community service volunteers to people trying to pull an endless sequence of drowning children out of a river. Of course we must address the immediate crisis, and try to rescue the children. But we also need to find out why they’re falling into the river—because no matter how hard we try, we lack the resources, strength, and stamina to save them all. So we must go upstream to fix the broken bridge, stop the people who are pushing the children in, or do whatever else will address the problem at its source.
How do we combine this with a more personal touch? How do we proceed if we’re inclined to act on a more personal level but also want our individual actions to have an impact on a larger scale? The link, I believe, is the concept of witness, developed by people like Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement. We can use our service efforts to help cross daunting boundaries, like those of race and class. We can listen to those who come to the food banks, homeless shelters, and battered women’s centers, and learn how they got there. We can talk to those on the street, and hear their stories. We can work to understand why our society produces so much needless human pain. Appropriate solutions will undoubtedly require supporting powerful local projects with common resources. And we may not always agree on the lessons. But whatever stories we encounter, whatever conclusions we draw, we can’t keep them to ourselves.
The politics of witness involves taking these examples and lessons to the village square—or its contemporary equivalent—and then doing our best to convey them to as many others as possible. It means using them to refute myths that justify callousness and withdrawal. It also implies that we do all we can to help those who are habitually ignored or silenced to find their own voices and platforms, such as the street newspapers sold and often written by the homeless.
An ethic of witness also affirms the bonds that link us. It helps us avoid being so ground down by our efforts to ease day-to-day miseries that we have no time to address their larger context. Given the deep roots of our culture’s winner-take-all individualism, it’s hard for those of us who work in beleaguered communities not to feel defensive, on the losing end of history. We may even mute our voices, lest we offend those whose financial and political resources our community institutions may depend on. Yet at least some of the energy we spend on volunteering should be directed toward the roots of the crises we address. If we want to stop the needless drownings, we must ultimately look upstream.
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of “”Soul” every Thursday. Click here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb
Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>As vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Rich Cizik represented 4,500 congregations serving 30 million members. Considering himself a “Reagan conservative” and a strong initial supporter of George W. Bush, Cizik had been with the organization since 1980, serving as its key advocate before Congress, the Office of the President, and the Supreme Court on issues like opposition to abortion and gay marriage. During the Clinton era, he had begun to expand the organization’s agenda by tackling such issues as human trafficking and global poverty, working with groups across the political aisle. Later he’d convinced the organization to take a stand against torture.
But he thought little about climate change until 2002, when he attended a conference on the subject and heard a leading British climate scientist, Sir James Houghton, who was also a prominent evangelical. “You could only call the process a conversion,” Cizik said. “I reluctantly went to the conference, saying ‘I’ll go, but don’t expect me to be signing on to any statements.’ Then, for three days in Oxford, England, Houghton walked us through the science and our biblical responsibility. He talked about droughts, shrinking ice caps, increasing hurricane intensity, temperatures tracked for millennia through ice-core data. He made clear that you could believe in the science and remain a faithful biblical Christian. All I can say is that my heart was changed. For years I’d thought, ‘Well, one side says this, the other side says that. There’s no reason to get involved.’ But the science has become too compelling. I could no longer sit on the sidelines. I didn’t want to be like the evangelicals who avoided getting involved during the civil rights movement and in the process discredited the gospel and themselves.”
One day during the conference, Houghton took Cizik on a walk in the gardens of Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s ancestral home. It was a lovely day, sunny and bright. Houghton said, “Richard, if God has convinced you of the reality of the science and the Scriptures on the subject then you must speak out.”
“Let me think about it,” Cizik responded. He knew he’d meet resistance from his colleagues and board. But Houghton convinced him that the world couldn’t solve the issue without serious American participation, and that the Republican Party was the major political force blocking action in the United States (in contrast to Europe, where conservative parties had helped take the lead on the issue). “As evangelicals, we’re 40 percent of the Republican base, so if we could convince the evangelical community to speak out, it could make the key difference,” Cizik said. American evangelicals, Houghton told him, might literally hold the fate of the planet in their hands.
After leaving the conference, Cizik began reading and learning. Flying over the Sahara, he got a sense of the “tens of thousands of acres that are lost to climate-related desertification each year,” which in turn leads to major refugee migrations and potential wars over water. He coordinated a retreat with key evangelical leaders, like Rick Warren, and major scientists, like Houghton and Harvard’s E.O. Wilson. Then he took a similar group to Alaska to witness the melting glaciers and permafrost, the disruption of native communities, the spruce trees dying because the bark beetles now survived the warmer winters. They visited Shishmaref, a native village that is being forced to relocate because the permafrost has crumbled beneath it and the sea ice that once served as a storm buffer is gone. “Our first night there, we saw a lunar eclipse, shooting stars, and the Northern Lights.” It reminded him of the phrase in the psalm, “Creation pours forth its praise to its creator…. The heavens give witness to God’s glory.”
His Alaska group, said Cizik, “included those who believe life on earth was created by God, and those who believe it evolved over three and a half billion years. What became obvious to both groups is that this earth is sacred and that we ought to protect it. God isn’t going to ask you how he created the earth. He already knows. He’s going to ask, ‘What did you do with what I created?’ If we’re leaving a footprint that destroys the earth, we’ve failed to be good stewards.”
The more Cizik learned, the more it challenged him to “treat caring for God’s creation as a moral principle,” and to continue enlisting others. In 2004, Cizik convinced the NAE to release a paper called “For the Health of the Nation,” which urged its members to live in conformity with sustainable principles, talked of “creation care,” and stated, “Because clean air, pure water and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation.” Two years later, he helped organize the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a major statement from 86 key evangelical leaders, including major megachurch pastors like Warren, the presidents of 39 Christian colleges, and the national commander of the Salvation Army. The statement described climate change as an urgent moral issue for Christians and called for the government to act on it.
Cizik also joined James Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network in carrying a placard to a pro-life rally that said, “Stop Mercury Poisoning of the Unborn” and handing out fliers explaining that most of the birth-defect producing mercury comes from coal-burning power plants. “If you care about the sanctity of human life,” he said, “then care about whether people live desperate lives and care about the mercury from power plants.”
As Cizik expected, not everyone was happy with his taking environmental stands. “I had people on my board who said, ‘Don’t touch the issue. If you do, we’ll make your life very difficult.’” Twenty-two evangelical leaders signed a letter urging the NAE not to take a position on global climate change. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and major conservative activists like Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich and the Family Research Council’s Gary Bauer called for Cizik’s firing.
Some of this Cizik attributed to “simple ignorance of the science” and some to “bad theology—people who believe the earth is going to be destroyed anyway, so why bother.” But he also wondered how much came from people “afraid they’ll lose their power, influence, capacity to raise money, what they perceive to be their priorities. They’re afraid they’ll offend political allies.”
But Cizik and the others persisted. “As a biblical Christian,” he said, “I agree with St. Francis that every square inch on Earth belongs to Christ. “If we don’t pay attention to global climate change, it’s pretty obvious that tens and or even hundreds of millions of people are going to die. If you have a major sea-level rise then Bangladesh becomes uninhabitable. Where do you put its 100 million people? Do you put them in India? In China? They’d have no place to go. Britain’s Christian Aid talks of climate change impacting one billion people by mid-century, with drought, floods, disease and malnutrition. I’ve asked African American leaders whether, as a white man, I can call climate change ‘the civil rights issue of the 21st century.’ Unanimously they say ‘You not only can, but you must.’”
Cizik believed he could still preach the gospel while also talking about these kinds of issues. “You need both. To go to bed at night and say that over a billion people live on a dollar a day and can’t go to bed themselves with a full stomach, can you live as a Christian happily in your suburban home, driving your SUV? Of course you can’t. Not as a real Christian. And if you happen to be a liberal, conservative or centrist, I don’t care. The gospel has priority over politics.”
Although Cizik and his allies never quite convinced the NAE to take an official stand on climate change, and he eventually got forced out after telling radio interviewer Terry Gross that he was beginning to rethink his opposition to gay civil unions, the organization reaffirmed the moral importance of “creation care,” a core perspective that encouraged further dialogue. And Cizik has gone on to start an organization, the New Evangelicals, devoted to issues like poverty and environmental engagement. He called his fellow evangelicals “a slow-moving earthquake. They don’t quite understand themselves how they’re changing, but they are.”
“The issue shook my theology to its core,” Cizik told me. “It changed me as much as my being born again thirty years before. This threatens the whole planet, so it raises a basic issue of who we are as people. Climate change isn’t just a scientific question. It’s a moral, a religious, a cosmological question. It involves everything we are and what we have a right to do.”
Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”
Loeb also wrote “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear,” the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. Huffington Post will serialize selected sections of “”Soul” every Thursday. Click here to see previous excerpts or be notified of new ones.
For more information, to hear Loeb’s live interviews and talks, or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org. To sign up on Facebook visit Facebook.com/PaulLoebBooks From “Soul of a Citizen” by Paul Rogat Loeb
Copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Griffin. Permission granted to reprint or post so long as this copyright line is included.
]]>