Organizing is disorganizing

"All organizing is disorganizing," Alinsky told his young organizers and their community leaders.

If you are in a neighborhood or a city or a country where the order of relationships among residents or citizens is such that some can have life, liberty, and can pursue personal and public happiness and some can not, then the way that community, city, country is ordered needs to be changed. The "cannots" have to organize themselves and change the order of things so that they can be "cans." In organizing themselves, the "cannots" welcome assistance from some of the "cans" who identify with them and their suffering, but the "cannots" themselves need to do it and lead it.

I remember in Chicago living and working in black ghettos becoming slums (first in public housing and then in private housing). And I only began to understand why after many months of talking with residents and with others who helped me understand how the social order of Chicago worked for a few but not for many--both black and white.  That order of things ("res" in Latin) had to be changed radically, i.e. at its institutional roots. How?  By building a public, a res publica, an open place where all could see the hidden patterns of behavior and what they were doing to people.

Only through speech and action in public did the stories of the people and the policies and practices of the social order come to light. By organizing the "cannots"into action the hidden, private behaviors of institutions and the people who headed them became public along with the laws that legitimized them and the religions that blessed them. The studies and experts helped--but it was the people going public that changed the game and its rules.

In following up the footnote to my last post, I want to thank Mr. Trump and his loyal acolytes. In trying to understand how this "wreck of a man," as staunch conservative George Will called him, became President, we have been forced to uncover the habitual patterns of thinking and behavior, supported by Republican and Democratic Parties, that made him possible.

I thank Mr Trump for calling attention to the BLOB (look it up!) who have committed us to neoconservative foreign policy from Yale and neoliberal economic policy from U of Chicago. Even though he is not changing but reenforcing those policies.

I am grateful to realize that I myself am among the "cannots" who feel so powerless in this national and world order today.

But now that we can see the hidden patterns of our rulers and their results, perhaps we "cannots" will organize ourselves as "yes, we cans" and reorganize ourselves to Lincoln's new birth of freedom. It will take a lot of organizing and a lot of action, much tension and conflict probably extending way beyond my death. The oligarchs running the new world order won't go softly into the night. But I take solace in seeing some light.