[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] The Distinction Between HillaryandObama

[John Cock]

Another great "editorial." Thanks, Jim, also, for your spin on
"transestablishment." 
 
The fervor in these campaigns in not motivated by the pro- or
dis-estsablishment. That fervor has been motivated by a sense after the
transestablishment that we'd all believed was impossible. A refreshing
surpise. 
 
The last week or so it has slipped back into pro-establishment style -- even
from Obama. Sure, we all agree with Zinn that "two minutes in the voting
booth" is hardly what democracy is all about. 
 
But let us not diminish the memory of this Democratic campagin surpirse upon
our consciousness. Let us give thanks for this reminder of "blessed unrest"
and "dreaming" that have temporarily recharged the process and produced
doubled participation in the booth -- and probably beyond. I bet thousands
of young folks get called during this span of resurgence.

  _____  

From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of James Wiegel
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 11:57 AM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] [Oe List ...] The Distinction Between
HillaryandObama


Keep in mind that Brooks is a conservative columnist.  Nevertheless, this
focus on competing theories of social change brought back memories of the
ol' days and the New Social Vehicle.
 
In his book, The Courage to Lead, Brian Stanfield devoted a chapter to the
transestablishment, something I consider an important conceptual
breakthrough we had in the midst of everything and allowed us to define a
role which, 3 decades later, is behind the whole profession of facilitation
-- that in any situation, there are those who are being served and
benefiting from the structures that have been established (we called this
the PRO establishment) and there are those who are not being served, not
benefitting, or have fallen out of the structures that have been established
(we called this the DIS establishment).  Most theories of social change, or
revolution, talked about either working patiently within the structures to
gain power to make change, or  mobilizing the disestablished to overthrow
the pro established and create a new social order.  In the work on the new
social vehicle, we suggested a third force -- the transestablishment that
worked to bridge the two, moving them forward.  This imagery was inspired,
in part, by the movie Little Big Man, in which Dustin Hoffman, as Jack Crab
is tossed between "the indians who call themselves human beings" and the
white man.
 
There was an interesting article in the current issue of The Progressive by
Howard Zinn (who has done a lot trying to write history from a "people's"
perspective vs. the perspective of those in power) 

Election Madness

By Howard Zinn, March 2008 Issue
  <http://www.progressive.org/files/story/zinn_0.gif> 
There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages,
handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has
held—security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts,
night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have
always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to
assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is
now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a
wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say
something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the
majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many
are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad,
I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved
watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction.
They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this
event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other
homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments
and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where
they were now.”
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the
Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ’07.”
The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ’06 rate.”
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with
disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits
because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to
handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a
flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to
ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up
to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most
important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one
of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a
multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher
would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and
radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject
of the Presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the
media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued
to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a
shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant
amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An
occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our
marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.
No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally
insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral
purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and
at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right
now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter
of life and death. 
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election
madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two
minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting
booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be
spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the
workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to
build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it
reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House,
in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social
justice.
Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better
Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will
not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that
the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal—Social Security, unemployment
insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing—were not simply
the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into
office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover
Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army—thousands of
veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from
Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the
unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the
country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San
Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the
South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people
were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the
furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with
hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis—economic destitution and rebellion—it is not
likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms
that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular
upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates
have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to
the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a
government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for
every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or
foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical
changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for
social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its
historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war,
only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and
the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in
November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental
illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire
society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct
action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their
homes—they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary
War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our
homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened
with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands
around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place. 
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of
what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings
of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the
authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats,
conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to
by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people,
strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of
soldiers in order to stop a war.
Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for
democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,”
“Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A
Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”


401 North Beverly Way 
Tolleson, Arizona 85353-2401
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Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to
go back to. Ashleigh Brilliant 


  _____  

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