Boris
09-07-2008, 12:05 PM
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_12_60/ai_n26678768/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
Full disclosure before you click: It's a June 30, 08 diddy by Byron York of National Review, a conservative publication. But, Team Obama is now spinning the role of a "community organizer" as one that heals that which is broken. You've not doubt heard the line "Jesus was a Community Organizer". York did some research and interviews about what BHO did while in that position in Chicago.
Snip from the link:
Even Obama didn't know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."
Sound familiar? And then:
Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that "direct action."
Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be "an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions." Once such hostilities were "whipped up to a fighting pitch," Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising. At first, the organizer tackled small stuff, like demanding the repair of streetlights in a city park; later, when the group gained confidence, the organizer could take on bigger targets. But at all times, the organizer's goal was not to lead his people anywhere, but to encourage them to take action on their own behalf.
Alinsky started in the 1930s with workers in the Chicago stockyards. Many years later, when Obama arrived here, he came from a different perspective. "Barack had been very inspired by the civil-rights movement," Jerry Kellman, the organizer who hired Obama, told me recently. "I felt that he wanted to work in the civil-rights movement, but he was ten years too late, and this was the closest he could find to it at the time." Obama, in his memoir, put it more simply when he said he went to Chicago to "organize black folks."
Full disclosure before you click: It's a June 30, 08 diddy by Byron York of National Review, a conservative publication. But, Team Obama is now spinning the role of a "community organizer" as one that heals that which is broken. You've not doubt heard the line "Jesus was a Community Organizer". York did some research and interviews about what BHO did while in that position in Chicago.
Snip from the link:
Even Obama didn't know when he first gave it a try back in 1985. "When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly," Obama wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. "Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots."
Sound familiar? And then:
Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that "direct action."
Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be "an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions." Once such hostilities were "whipped up to a fighting pitch," Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising. At first, the organizer tackled small stuff, like demanding the repair of streetlights in a city park; later, when the group gained confidence, the organizer could take on bigger targets. But at all times, the organizer's goal was not to lead his people anywhere, but to encourage them to take action on their own behalf.
Alinsky started in the 1930s with workers in the Chicago stockyards. Many years later, when Obama arrived here, he came from a different perspective. "Barack had been very inspired by the civil-rights movement," Jerry Kellman, the organizer who hired Obama, told me recently. "I felt that he wanted to work in the civil-rights movement, but he was ten years too late, and this was the closest he could find to it at the time." Obama, in his memoir, put it more simply when he said he went to Chicago to "organize black folks."