Global Research Centrum: Chicago, RV, Social Methods
School 12-1474
Just before Summer '73, we decided we were actually
going to begin the primal community experiment called Uptown.
We were all scared to death as we prepared for this absolutely
incredible miracle. Several colleagues went out across the street,
cut the grass, painted little yellow lines on the parking lot,
picked up the paper and came back victorious. I can sense that
you do not all see how that was a miracle. You have to understand
that miracles are always appropriate to the situation. They are
miraculous to the believer. We were all sure that we would be
picked up by the police for creating a mob scene, or that we would
be exposed in the newspapers as people taking over Uptown. Strange
thoughts went through our heads. We voiced our doubts, saying
to each other, "We're probably about three years too early
to move out into this, or any other community. Let's work on 5th
City a little longer. Are we sure that this is what we want to
do?"
That questioning seems ridiculous, when we have 100
experiments, as of January 1, going far more extensively than
that one was at that point. But our internal state was such that
we were convinced that we couldn't do anything. Our courage only
came when that first person walked across the street with a broom.
We needed someone who would be obedient, without questioning the
wisdom of our task. It became an internal sign to us that something
new was about to happen, that we could, in fact, reengage in the
parish.
If you try that in your parish today, people would
say, "Well, it's about time you cleaned up that mess."
People in Uptown made that comment, too, because that was not
a miracle to the community. It was only a miracle to us. It was
only a miracle internally, but it was a miracle.
We look back at where we began. How simple it seems,
but every time it was the very edge of what history demanded.
We went into 5th City and built that model. We went into Uptown
and developed the tactics. We went into Mowanjum and broke loose
the idea that if you didn't deal with the heritage and uniqueness
of the community, you get nowhere. Now, we are going into Majuro.
In 5 years, if not in 2, we will look back and say, "Why
did it seem so unusual or so miraculous? Didn't it seem miraculous
to you as you heard about it?
This school is similar to each of those experiments.
Yesterday morning, we distributed this piece of paper, then we
passed out this one. "How awkward" is the way it came
to me. Yet I knew that it wasn't true. I realized that I expected
to leave here with all the answers on how to formulate a complete
set of rules and regulations on indicative battleplanning in your
local situation. We are doing exactly that, but we are doing it
at the very edge of our creativity. We are trying to answer those
difficult questions about what is required now in terms of battleplanning.
It is not RSI yet. We are experimenting with some great
things in this school. Yet, we know the way history operates is
that you could take any number of versions of battleplanning,
follow a few simple rules, and win in that kind of situation.
All through our history there has been that kind of experimentation,
building, testing.
The 5th City presuppositions have pervaded all of
our work operating within a very specific and delimited
geographical area, in terms of the people of the area, with all
the problems, all the ages, the depth spirit problem and working
with symbol. We are beginning to get clarity that these presuppositions
are generally accurate. Beyond that, we are still learning, still
building, still trying to figure out what to do in a community.
We are on a 20, a 40, a hundred year march. We are not playing
games. We are trying to answer the question, "How do you
actually participate in what is happening in history?"
We are operating out of an assumption that there
is something going on in history, that it is worthy of the attention
of man, that he can choose to reinforce certain points or not
to reinforce at certain points, and that as a result, incredible
things happen in the historical process. Beyond this assumption,
we are trying to work out the answers to practics of what you
do what are social methods?
This morning, we talked about the edges within the
external frame. As edge we are not implying something out on the
lunatic fringe, but where the very front of the 20 years is taking
us. The edge is the clearest picture we have now about what we
are doing when we work in a community.
I want to talk about internal or structural dynamics.
Again, I am not going to provide any answers. It would be foolish
to say here is the model, because we know that is not the way
the process works. All of our models are tested by the historical
process. With these insights, we go back and rebuild the model
and move at it again.
This evening, we are going to talk about catalytic
action. It is very clear that if what happens is only as a result
of the people in this room, we'd be a big joke. If we break through
to some catalytic action and move where we see trends, then things
will happen beyond anything that we have imagined.
I'm going to talk about two basic arenas. The first
of these is structural dynamics. Another term for that is the
tactical systems. Be careful of that one, because you already
have some ideas, and that is not what I mean. What are the dynamics
that must go on in the primal community to get the external work
done? It is not simply internal nurture. It is the structure of
the whole community. There are four: the Temple, the Stake, the
Guild and the Galaxy. These last two are a swampland. Then I want
to talk about four tools, or four tactics, that seem to be emerging
as central. If you don't do these, you're missing the boat. These
are the community grid, community story, community miracle and
community consensus. The tools which evolved in 5th City are still
there, but our concern is to find which four are essential.
I want to tell you a story about temple activities.
It happened in 5th city during Summer '66. When the exodus of
people to the suburbs occurred, it scared the rats, and they did
a reverse exodus into the inner city. I think the rats saw the
possibility of the future, and most of them moved into 5th City.
Those who went out early in the morning would see the pavement
turn from brown to white. In one of those summer projects we volunteered
to pick up old furniture. One woman said, "How about taking
my garage?" We said, "Fine," and sent some people
to take the garage down and put it in the truck. These people
were gleeful about the whole thing and not exactly quiet. They
took sledge hammers and banged on all the wood until it all came
down. There was nothing but the cement foundation left, so they
went after that too.
Now, pretend you are a rat for a minute, living underneath
that, hearing all that commotion upstairs, and you looked at the
neighbors first. After a while, you say, "Hey, George, the
noise is getting closer. I think something is going on. Shouldn't
we go check?" When that kind of selfstory started,
a few of the smarter rats were already moving next door underneath
the ground. We began pounding on the cement floor, and as it broke
through, the rats began to emerge. Everybody was excited. I have
worked with statistics, so I was trying to count them. I couldn't
begin to keep up with the live rats. The smart ones, who had heard
all the noise, packed and left, before we even got through the
cement.
We had organized teams of ten adults, who were waiting
with hoes and rakes. They were doom. We also had a cadre of young
men in the neighborhood who had been waiting for this opportunity
for years. They were standing on the outer rim of the crowd with
baseball bats, rocks and anything else you can think of, trying
to catch the rats that got through the front lines. We proceeded
to remove that whole cement foundation. When we were done, we
decided to see how many rats had not made it. We lined them all
up like fish and took a photograph of the 74 rats that were killed.
We proceeded, late that evening, to hold a cremation ceremony
of all the rats.
That was probably one of the most healing events
of that entire year in 5th City, as a genuine symbol of overcoming
the forces of evil. Nobody had any illusions that the rats next
door were gone. Rats were not eliminated. It was not that kind
of operation. It was a vast kind of Temple operation. You bring
the community together, you celebrate, you confront the mystery.
We had some other experiments. Some of you know about
the Uptown carpark cafe. That comes out of Singapore. Lots
used for commuter parking during the day are transformed into
night markets at the close of the business day, and all kinds
of people come to sell food and clothing. We decided to do that
here in Uptown. One afternoon, we cleared all the cars out of
the parking lot (which was quite a miracle in itself) and invited
the merchants of the community to come in and sell their goods.
I could get into all kinds of stories there. Some of them said
"Yes," about eight times, and didn't show, while others
said "Yes, " and then sent their spies over to see if
we were serious. Several hundred people came that evening. That
was a form of temple activity - celebrational activity.
We had a flatbed truck at one end with music playing and with
various cultures of the community participating in that entertainment.
That clearly is one of the structural dynamics which
has to be present. There has to be a way in which the whole community,
maybe even formally, on a certain day, once a week, once a month,
or maybe twice a year, comes together for a great festival celebration.
The festivals in 5th City are another example of that kind of
activity. With the Bicentennial coming up, that is going to be
more important than ever before. We are going to see a lot of
inauthentic temple activity being attempted as every town tries
to find some way to celebrate, and has not yet broken through
to the way you celebrate life through temple activity.
Another dynamic, or way of operating is the stake.
We borrowed that term from the Mormons. It means a hunk of geography.
For us it means the hunk of geography that you are responsible
for. This is roughly what the church has always sought to define.
How do you care for everybody in your parish, your specific piece
of geography? We have the hardest time grounding that both for
ourselves and with the people in the community. There was an elder's
residence at one end of 5th City. We would go down there, talk
about stakes, and everybody would say, "Yes, that is important."
They then would fall back into the type of care that involves
only the people you know and the people you like. A woman was
found in that building three days after she had died. We were
able to use that event to say, "Now how do we care for everybody?"
How do we take care of the people nobody likes and nobody knows
and nobody wants to be taken care of? It is the question of how
you do that kind of Job.
We said that you have to take a community, delineate
the boundaries and subdivide it in a process we called "gridding.
We took an area of about 5,000 people. We divided it into stakes,
then into quads, and sometimes into units. We had stake meetings
in the particular arenas. People would come together to discuss
how they would care for the people in that particular geographical
community. The perversion that the church has fallen into (mind
you, I'm not beating the church, everybody who has tried to care
for people has been trapped by this same perversion) is the one
of people sitting around in a group feeling sorry for other people
and calling that care. Sometimes the church divides itself up
and goes out to see the people in what it calls an "everymembercanvass",
but then it sees only the members of its congregation, not the
members of its parish.
What would it mean to set up a care net, not as a
systematic, doortodoor visitation, but systematically.
Mr. Smith would have responsibility for the lives of twelve families.
Depending on how Mr. Smith operates, he might be having a conversation
with Mr. Jones and say, "Jones, I noticed you are coughing
a lot lately." In the back of Smith's head is that tuberculosis
is more prevalent in this community than anywhere else in the
city. "Why don't you go over to the Health Center and check
that out? You don't need to worry, because people over there are
all right and it is a good setup. They won't rob you blind. I've
been there and it is worth going by to check it out. There's no
sense in taking a chance on that." He has a sort of systematic
grid in his head. He just keeps his eye on those 12 families in
a consistent kind of way. That falls down, of course, when the
other dimension is missing; namely, if there isn't a health or
community clinic in this case.
That's where your third dimension, your guild, comes
into play. The other route the Church has taken in the last 15
years is one of setting up Health Clinics, Legal Aid Clinics,
all kinds of clinics. We had tremendous health clinics on the
West Side of Chicago. But, for a number of different reasons,
nobody would go to them. They didn't know the clinics were there,
or it was outside of the geographic area with which they were
familiar. They had gone to some clinics and had a bill for $15
slapped into their hands. When they reached the point of life
or death crises, they would go to the General Hospital, and wait
for eight hours.
We saw that you had to have the clinic right there
to serve the community, as a genuine function of the community.
The job of getting that done required a group of people, a guild.
A guild is whoever it is that brings these structures into being.
But your structures are no good unless you have people who make
sure that the structures actually serve the community. That's
not simple, by any means. Your structure has to function throughout
the whole of that community. One of the most important aspects
of the 5th City Health Clinic is that they do preventive, inthehome
care. They don't just sit there and wait for emergencies. As you
begin to bring those two together, you get that manifestation
of genuine care that we all know finally has to be there.
We did a lot of work to computerize care in 5th City.
The liberals reacted by saying, "Oh, you shouldn't do that,
you know...numbers... bad..." There are excesses, but who
has really experimented with getting the medical histories of
everyone in a community so that you have some context out of which
to decide whether lead poisoning vaccine, for example, is necessary
or helpful. You have to make some hard decisions: are you going
to let people's lives be destroyed because of a little bit of
queasiness about computers or are you going to finally see that
we have to take seriously dealing with every single human being?
That illustrates these two dynamics of the stake and the guild.
Now, look at the guild in the galaxy. We have come
at the question of that force working in structures in two ways.
One has been through the congregation. We have focused on the
congregation in order to build the cadre, though the only thing
we were finally interested in was how to care for the parish.
Then, we came at it the other way, through the guild,
the operation to rebuild structures, working through secular organizations,
and the secular people in the community. We are still right in
the middle of trying to figure out how to hold these two in a
healthy tension. This question is not going to be answered for
several years yet, I would suspect. Feel free to set loose on
them, use your good sense rather than some abstract theory to
decide in your particular local situation, how to bring these
two elements together.
We now see that the guild manifests itself in many
ways. We have a guildsman in San Francisco who is a top executive
in the Bank of America. He has had a LENS course. In terms of
guilding activity lately, he has talked to his boss who is in
charge of all the training in the world center of the Bank of
America. He has begun to nudge him to get more and more people
from the Bank of America into LENS training
Guilding activity is not just the people who come
on Tuesday night. Yet, that's where we are seeing something happen.
That is the glue that holds people together when they are working.
You don't want to settle down and think that because you have
these fantastic things going on here that you don't need any kind
of activity in that community.
In another sense, we have done all three of these
activities, the Temple, the Stake and the Guild, through the Galaxy.
We recovered the celebrative dimension there. You know that in
your own galaxy, the image of accountability is stake activity
in which you check to see where people are. Are they sick? What
do they need? That kind of accountability is concern, and care
is taking place. Of course, the guilding activity of rebuilding
structures in the community is taking place. We have combined
both guilding functions in all kinds of ways. One way has to do
with the issue of community. Working with some of the noted community
organizers in the country, I came clear on the "mealymouth"
approaches. We would go into a neighborhood, hold a meeting and
ask everyone what they wanted to do. That is what you would do
because the people ought to decide. We did not see the problem,
that people operate out of images which tell them that community
organization means whitewashing the bases of the trees and putting
up Christmas lights. When you ask them what to do, what else can
they come up with?
We saw that several dynamics had to be there. One
was a community congress which brought the whole community together.
Again, the idealistic romanticist in me objected, "Well,
the whole community isn't here, there are only 200 people."
Yet, if you looked at the actual statistics, you would see that
out of 5,000 people, there were roughly 2,000 adults. We had 10%.
Sol Alinsky says that getting 6% of a community involved is a
miracle. The Roman Catholic Church is clear that if they get anything
close to 5% of their parish through that building, that is a miracle.
So, that 10%, in the light of life as it actually is, is a fantastic
accomplishment.
The Congress is an event in which the community brings
together, not selected representatives, but everybody who chooses
to do so. They gather, report on the past, celebrate and plan
the future. It's not a democratic convention. If you intend to
have anything happen on that night, you get groups from those
guilds and stakes working in advanceplanning, presenting,
consensing, building, forminguntil you have a clear
picture of where people are. Then, people come together and move
at that kind of activity. You need a Board of Directors, or a
Presidium, a group of people to take responsibility for executing
the decisions of the Congress. The guild stands in relation to
that.
Tactically, the community grid is crucial. Can you
imagine not having a grid? One way I understand that is that if
I did not have in my head a grid of this building, every time
I wanted to go to the bathroom, I would have to run out to the
front desk, if I could find the front desk, and ask them where
it was. You see how elemental "gridding is. If we did not
have the capacity to grid, we would wander around in total aimlessness.
There is no community until you grid it; until you decide what
that community is. Exciting things happened in 5th City, when
we finally created that grid. It started operating in your head.
I would be walking around and say, "I'm about to leave 5th
City." There was an imaginal line in the middle of the street
which told me that I had walked out. I could sense that this was
5th City and that was not. People in the community began to operate
out of that internalization. When you rebuild community, you grid.
The creation of a community story is so crucial that
we cannot see its importance. For example, a hundred years ago,
America had a clearcut story of what it was about. Today,
it does not. Because it is so lost, America is in terrible agony,
trying to see that story is important. In local communities today,
especially the suburbs, it is far worse because of the strange
rootlessness that has occurred. Creating stories in the suburbs
will be far more difficult than any place else. You use songs,
rituals, rites, symbols, and you don't be cute about it. Some
of you saw what happened at the 5th City Congress, December 15,
1973. That phenomenal Iron Man given to Mayor Daley excited him
deeply. He keeps it in a prominent spot in his office. That symbolism,
and the story about what was happening infected him so that to
this day, he is deeply excited about what is going on in 5th City.
Then, consensus is not something superficial or imposed
on the group. Consensus is determining what is actually there.
Early in 5th City, we learned about consensus at a Christmas party.
That was fine, because we were experimenting. Nobody came800
kids, but maybe 20 or 40 adults. We had romantic notions that
there might be a lot more. We became very clear that the consensus
was not to have a Christmas party this year. I remember the reverse
of that was a community congress which drew 220 people when we
thought that 150 would be a miracle. For about three days we all
walked around saying, "We have done something unbelievable
here." Finally, it dawned on us that we had happened to hit
a time when the consensus was that there was going to be a congress.
What you are doing with the community is discerning the actual
consensus.
The key to community miracles is doing the impossible,
relative to that situation. In Majuro, getting those ships is
a miracle because of the way it happened. If we had arranged to
buy those ships, it would not have been a miracle. If Rockefeller
had given us the money to buy those ships, that would not have
been a miracle. If we had worked it out over 18 years, that would
have been just plodding through, just enduring, and that is not
a miracle. But to be able to come home in a month and say, "Somebody
gave me ten ships." A miracle. People don't go around giving
away ships. It's utterly impossible.
In Mowanjum, they started raising sheep as a miracle.
Now , there' nothing miraculous about raising sheep. But, the
context was that everyone knows that aboriginal communities cannot
support themselves. Everybody knows that, and the aboriginals
were more trapped in it than anybody. Then overnight, that miracle
happened. The sheep came and for the first time in their lives,
they were selfsupportive. Or the little park across the
corner. If we had gone in there with jungle gyms, it wouldn't
have been a miracle. It would have been just one more example
of liberal patronage. The impact on people's lives was utterly
miraculous.
The shopping center over in 5th City was another
miracle. It was a miracle that we finally got it, in one sense.
Most of the inner cities in the rest of the United States, after
the rioting of 1968, were not rebuilt. We broke through with a
brand new image of shopping center. When you live in that kind
of community, you don't expose the entire thing to the structural
difficulties that encourage crime. You create a new type of architecture
that is not a fortress, but community inside the shopping center,
that does not put all the emphasis on trying to sell things that
people don't need. That turned the shopping center into an incredible
miracle.
Finally, engagement is the key to any community activity.
I am going to tell you one more story. One Saturday, we drove
around 5th City, picking up old furniture, which was worn out
and then tossed into the back yard. The city of Chicago only picks
up that kind of thing by special negotiations. We didn't know
what to do with it, so we contacted the city. We said, "We
would like to put three small truckloads of refrigerators and
so forth on an empty lot on Saturday. Then you could pick it up
on Monday. We will have it ordered there and you can just drive
it away! Well, Saturday came and we got started. People saw what
was happening, so they brought out refrigerators, couches, chairs,
and they brought out stuff as fast as we could move it. We had
four trucks going, and put 28 dump loads of stuff on that lot.
I thought, "Oh, my God, I'm going to Jail." I called
the guy on Monday and told him. Then I went to one of my colleagues
and said, "He's mad, he doesn't like what we did." My
colleague said, "You could be so lucky to go to jail at this
time. It would be a fantastic sign to get all that publicity about
cleaning up the trash in 5th City.
Now, we chose that model out of a careful plan. That
is my first point under number four. Indicative battleplanning.
We were doing indicative battleplanning, but we didn't know that
was what it was. We asked, what can we do that will be effective
and involve the people in, the community? It was a great sign.
It did involve some of the people in the community. We knew that
this was not going to solve the trash problem because in another
month, it would look just like before. We were trying to break
loose people's images, to train people in moving in an effective
way in their community, and operating out of a clear plan.
The second point is grassroots participation. We
knew that whatever we did had to involve the people of the community.
We could not get some streamlined dump truck from the suburbs
to pick up the stuff and take it back out again. That would get
the community clean, but it wouldn't do the job of grassroots
participation. So we knocked on doors and said, "Hey, do
you remember that you agreed to come. I know that it is raining,
but you agreed to come for an hour." Grassroots participation
occurred, and that is always crucial in terms of your engagement.
We worked out of a rational system. We determined
in advance where the junk was, then we carefully moved through
all the key alleys. We couldn't hit them all, so we hit most of
the symbolic alleys, that people would see and be excited about.
That finally was an incredible manifestation of care. People went
home that night saying, "I cared for my community."
This was done not just once, but again and again. We would do
it again, but not as that kind of a miracle or sign. This and
several other things began the long, hard process of beginning
to engage people in such a way that they could see the same kind
of vision that we were operating out of. Something new was happening
in that community.
Robert Vance