Community Organizers and Social Transformation

I’ve always enjoyed reading about history but I think the one thing I can tell younger generations is that, for those of us born at the end of the “60″s onward, reading history is not nearly half as fun as living it!

People often ask what will distinguish Generation X and the generations that come after.  I would say it is that we have had the privilege of being the first generation to grow up in an era where social paradigms that have been held for centuries are completely shattered. 

We were born at the “end” of the Civil Rights era where in the US and across the globe people were awakening to the fact that words like equality and freedom could not just be put on paper and repeated, they have to be honored through actions and deeds.

The nuclear arms race and the resulting “Cold” War made us all realize the folly of trying to resolve social and political issues through global warfare (at least let us hope this lesson prevails).

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Challenger taught us not to be overconfident in the power of our technology or complacent about safety issues.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dissolve of the USSR, and the end of Apartheid taught us both that you cannot rule through oppression and that you can have peaceful yet radical revolutions against oppression.

Then came the Internet which created a complete social paradigm shift that has shattered communication barriers, business barriers, distance barriers, social interaction barriers,…and this is just the beginning.

So why in the context of all of this am I now talking about Community Organizing?  Let’s start with the definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_organizing

I was utterly stunned during the Republican National Convention to hear all the jeers and sneers about “Barack Obama is just a community organizer.”  If I had to give one example of how, of all parties, the party of Lincoln has lost touch it is this example.  Lincoln championed the emancipation of slaves.  The movement that led up the emancipation was a community organizing movement whether you called it the Abolitionists or the Underground Railroad or any other name. 

Women gained the right to vote through community organizers called Suffragettes who mobilized in the UK and the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette  (those pesky and militant radical extremists!).