On Monday, January 13, 2003 at 13:43:05 (-0800) Ian Murray writes: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Bill Lear" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> You do the emotionally hard and intellectually easy work of getting >> your ass in front of people and talking to them, educating them (I >> prefer the didactic mode to that of storyteller, incidentally). I'll >> bet Doug Henwood alone has managed to change the minds of oodles of >> the formerly benighted. > >The "one" speaker "enlightening a passive audience is a horrible method >for organizing. One need only think of all those citizens sitting in >church pews to realize this. It's not the content alone, but the form of >communicating that has created the passivity that we see in large public >speaking venues. This is part of why many activists are quickly seeing >as the limitations of the communicational formatting of large >rallies/demos; too much effort is wasted on the positional goods paradox >of who gets to lecture "the crowd." I need only mention how TV >reinforces that dynamic on a daily basis.
I don't agree. I am working with a religious group of peace activists who have been amazed at the things I tell them about how our political process works and who are hungry for more information --- they even want me to write a pamphlet about how politics works in this country and the barriers to democracy we face. There's a tremendous amount of confusion and misinformation out there that must be countered. Teaching need not involve a passive audience nor lecturing --- that's your contribution, not mine. The teaching should be mutual --- I'm learning a hell of a lot about the practice of organizing a small and poor peace organization, and they are learning the ABCs of political economy from me. They are the ones driving the process --- I'm merely gathering and presenting information to them, and they convince themselves, I have not "made" them turn left or whichever way you want to put it, as Michael does --- they have done it themselves, with my input (and that's all it is). Without an understanding that politics is the shadow cast on society by business, the root causes of so much of our government's actions are often missed. People don't realize the myriad ways in which the law is crafted to make organizing anything other than a rally extremely difficult, and they get discouraged when things go slowly. Understanding the immense barriers makes it easier to have a realistic picture of how to tackle the problem and to feel energized to try again when you fail. >> I want people to be pissed. They are being robbed blind, their >> children are denied the glorious opportunities of full development >> (use just about any sense you want, Amartya Sen's would be fine), and >> the blood of innocents is being spilled to satisfy the wants of a >> small sliver of the population. > >People are pissed. They just don't know what to do about it because >they're so busy paying the rent, sending the kids to school, putting >food on the plate etc. that they have little time for thinking through >the tough issues in a non-anxiety laden way with others. The time >poverty is every bit as pernicious as the pecuniary poverty. Pissed at whom? At a government that is merely handmaiden to those with real power? At a few corporate criminals who got caught with their hands in the cookie jar? Or at the entire structure of greed which ramrods injustice down their throats and uses their tax dollars to ram it down the throats of others? Bill
