====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
Just some early morning coffee thoughts. And, on coffee, it tastes even better right now since the revelations of the past day or so that add up to its medical benefits, including its role as something of bulwark against male prostate cancer. (Not a problem of mine, I'm glad to add.) But coffee, along with the Human Horrors that grace the world, and natural ones as well such as the rejuvenation of Old Man River, has taken something of a back seat to Sex. Specifically, Sex in New York City and Sex on the West Coast. Brings to mind a pleasant dinner of slightly more than half a century ago. The setting was Wasau, Wisconsin, and the dinner was on the nickel of a good guy and developing friend, Elwood Taub, then research and education director of the International Woodworkers of America -- the CIO lumber workers union. He, a seasoned veteran of a good many extremely tough organizing campaigns in Dixie, much of this in Textile before he took the IWA job, and aware of my developing interest in "going South", was trying to maneuver my being hired as an organizer by his international. Though not without influence therein, he -- and I -- were aware that the top leadership, in contrast to the still extant Wobbly spirit that pervaded much of the grassroots in the Pacific Northwest, had grown cautious. In the end, the officialdom balked at me -- and I, of course, found my Dixie door and Destiny at Tougaloo College, just a bit north of Jackson. Elwood and I remained friends and, in time, he found another union. During our leisurely dinner, he looked at me and remarked rather directly, "When you go South, always remember this: Keep your pecker in your pants." Actually, I'd heard that advice a bit earlier, not delivered quite so bluntly, by a Mine-Mill organizer and good friend, a Southerner by origin, who'd been through his share of fire fights. I've followed that advice -- obviously figuratively. Hardly a "tight" personality sort by any remote stretch [and I hate formal suits], I was occasionally tagged cordially by such worthies as my late Dixie [and elsewhere] buddy, some years younger than I, the late J.V. Henry and himself a North Carolinian, as "the Puritan of the Civil Rights Movement." A couple of months after Wasau, Eldri and I married. The world is much the better via our four offspring, and the now ten grandchildren. And, decades later, when I penned my little and subsequently much reprinted piece, "Just What Makes A Damn Good Community Organizer," the second basic dimension of my eleven point catechism, is this: "The Organizer should be relatively "pure" in the moral sense. But not too pure -- because no one, anywhere, wants a sanctimonious conscience hovering about. Set a good personal example. Do your recreational thing away from the project. Wherever you are, avoid all drugs and go easy on alcohol [if you are even into that sensitivity-dulling stuff.] Remember the old labor adage: "You can't fight booze and the boss at the same time." Always a special target, the organizer has to be aware of the consistent danger of frame-ups." http://www.hunterbear.org/just_what_makes_a_damn_good_comm.htm Sometimes, when starting a talk, I hand my Eleven Points out to the audience. Older people read it somberly and younger folk, coming almost immediately to that which I've just quoted, often look up at me, grinning. I always grin back. And no, I am not sanctimonious, But I am very serious. In Solidarity, Hunter [Hunter Bear] HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ and Ohkwari' I have always lived and worked in the Borderlands. Our Hunterbear website is now eleven years old.. Check out http://hunterbear.org/directory.htm See - Personal and Detailed Background Narrative: http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm See Outlaw Trail: The Native as Organizer: http://hunterbear.org/outlaw_trail1.htm [Included in Visions & Voices: Native American Activism [2009] And see Forces and Faces Along the Activist Trail: http://hunterbear.org/forces_and_faces_along_the_trail.htm ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
