Re: I still don't know what community organizers do.
by
Beathan
09/07/2008, 2:00 PM #
This GOP attack on community organizers is an attempt to run with a wedge issue (a Republican specialty), this time between small towns and large cities -- with a calculation that the suburbs will fall in with the small towns. As with most GOP wedge issues -- this one includes heavy doses of deception and hypocrisy.
The GOP loves to play up "small town values." Other than sometime small-mindedness and anchronisism, there is a lot to be said for "small town values." At their best, these values reflect that small towns are communities where everyone knows and cares about everyone else. This produces friendliness and helpfulness -- and these, in turn, cause the towns to pull together as a community when something happens to a member of the community (a house burns town, a person is injured in a car accident, etc.). This unified spirit also helps people who live in small towns feel that they have a common cause with their fellow-townsmen, often allowing town government to proceed more by consensus than by power-play politics (although Wasilla, under Palin, was a notable exception to this rule). This consensus also applies to how the town and its residents interact with and respond to the larger world. There is something deeply comforting and very healthy about these aspect of small town life.
The problem is that many of us (indeed most of us) don't live in small towns. We live in much larger, much more anonymous, much less cohesive settings -- large cities and their suburbs. At their worst, these cities and suburbs do not deserve to be called "communities" because the word "community" implies something shared, some mutual concern, something that ties people together in a social network.
People living in small towns rightly see that something is lost in big city life (and even in suburban life). This is why they value small towns and "small town values." Folks from small towns are not wrong. People who live in cities and suburbs, especially those who live in large cities, know and feel the absence of a community every moment of every day -- feeling displaced, forgotten, tossed-aside by an uncaring world into a sea of humanity that is far from humane and something less than human.
Community organizers come to this impersonal and inhuman sea of humanity and organize it, recreating small towns and small town values within large cities by organizing communities within them. These efforts create a social network of common causes and concerns, building relationships between and among people which, as with small towns, produces friendiness and helpfulness. Community organizers allow people who live anonymous lives in large and impersonal cities to nonetheless pull together when something bad happens to a member of the newly-organized community, or to proactively prevent the harms (gang violence, etc.) that results when people live without community.
That is what community organizers do. That is what Obama did as a young man. These are noble goals carried out by noble people -- God's work. It is, frankly, disgusting, dishonest and hypocritical for Republicans, who praise small-town values to the sky (and to the exclusion of the real faults of small towns and their values) to disparage the efforts of people trying to share what is best about small towns with folks who live in large cities.
Beathan
