LTG Blog

This pivotal economic crisis in 21st century finance capital now underway is so fundamentally different from others we have lived through that it will be years before we know its full impact on American life. After all, when GM looks like its going under, housing stock has lost 30% of its value in 18 of the 20 largest American cities, Lehman Bros. goes the way of the Edsel, every American with a pension is losing sleep over declining net worth, and the American public is asked to bailout JP Morgan Chase and a few other dozen banks, you know it sure isn’t the same 'ole-same'ole. When you add in that we’re trying to figure out what the hell $62,000,000,000, 000 credit swaps could mean when our national GDP is only a measly $16,000,000,000, 000, you begin to see why people these days tremble now and again.

So, yeah, it’s a mess, bigger than your usual, every-fifth year fiscal crisis, a close cousin to the Great Depression, minus only the catchy name. I don’t have anywhere near the economic smarts to know how it’s going to shake out, but I do know it’s also connected to the politics of how people act on their own behalf and, secondarily, for those with whom they relate as having similar interests. As someone steeped in community organizing, both in practice and reading a few hundred histories over the years, some of how our society ends up depends on how people shape their own answers to meet those needs.

Watching the McCain-Palin rallies is a little scary. No, it’s a lot scary. The intensity of their rage at Obama is obviously fueled by the awareness that their world view on free markets and anti-government intervention is as dead as Lehman Bros., while their assumed beliefs in the inherent exceptionalism of the American way of life—our economy is safe, so everyone who wants to work can and will; we win all wars, so people in the world can trust us; every person with a job is “middle class,” so we’re just one lucky step away from being like the rich—have gone up in the smoke of a bad debt, bad militarism, and very, very bad 401(k)s.

When people have cherished beliefs, to be confronted with the stark reality that you may have been sold not only a bill of goods but down the river is psychologically devastating. What we’re seeing at those rallies is how not just anger but the outcome of massive cognitive dissonance: if I let go of all that I have believed, I lose my identity; if I hold on to what I believe, I may lose my life. Trapped between these two poles, people adapt to this unbearable tension by becoming even more extreme in one belief or the other. Every teenager goes through this as they begin to distinguish the simple truths of their childhood with their dawning awareness that the world is more complex (and inevitably more hypocritical) than they realized as children. We can go through this as adults, too: a divorce can challenge one’s beliefs about love and trust; beliefs in fairness may be tested in similar ways at work. Lucky for the world, the extreme behaviors of teens and adults in various moments of mid-life crisis get acted out pretty much away from the center stage of national life.

Barack Obama was a community organizer before he moved on to do somewhat different things. Sarah Palin was a small town mayor, a job she describes as “like an organizer, only with actual responsibilities.” So what exactly is a community organizer? So far from this election, you’d think it was a short-term job for young people, waiting around to grow up.

As a long-time professor of community organizing at City University of New York’s Hunter College School of Social Work, I’d like to offer for counterpoint a few stories on who community organizers are, what they do, and what happens to them as they move along in their careers. Some folks might be surprised.

Now a political person I am not. As a matter of fact I am far from it. A friend and I once said in a joking manner but totally serious, “There are three things that we will never discuss or even bring up at a party or with any group of people and that is Religion, Politics and who’s the best rapper: Tu Pac, Jay Z, Biggie, or Nas?” Why? Because they are all based on a matter of opinion with some facts thrown in here and there but when it all boils down what is it? One’s opinion, so why even bother wasting energy discussing them. KNOW ONE WILL EVER WIN!

That being said I have on occasion been known to express my disenchantment with the whole voting process and the outdated system of the Electoral College, who, I believe, are the real decision makers in the whole grand scheme of this thing we call voting. Never believing that my vote would truly count – especially after the Bush/Gore debauchery of 2000, I must admit never excised my right to do so.

After Barack Obama, Sarah Palan has done more for community organizing than anyone else in the last 40 years. “A mayor is sort of life a community organizer, only with actual responsibilities” What a great line! Sure, it’s a crock, but lots of people loved it and everyone noticed. When’s the last time c.o got noticed by 35 million people?

And by he way, who was laughing? A bunch of white guys who look like me, except their ties are more expensive. They should laugh: after all, organizers have been running environmental campaigns that threatened their toxic run-offs, stopped the developers among their ranks from completely bulldozing the Everglades, kept pro-choice clinics open for scared teens, made sure people saw that the last three wars were kinda horrible, and generally worked to make their corporate lives miserable.

Obama and McCain have another issue to spar over: affirmative action, that old liberal chestnut and conservative bugbear dealing with access, opportunity, standards, merit, values, historic racism and present-day opportunity, or the lack thereof. No one blog can capture all the fun stuff in this debate, so I want to start from a different angle. It’s a college story about the time a group of us guys got invited to meet a bunch of alumni at the Union Club here in NYC. There were about fifty of us, all class officers and fraternity presidents and team captains. Oh yeah! We weren’t just all white, we were mostly Protestants, with a few Catholics, too. You know, people who already knew how to use all that silverware without having to ask.

Senator Obama can’t win sometimes. First he gets lambasted by seven Black revolutionaries calling him a sell-out for not advancing the Black liberational cause. Moving through the week, he goes from complicit Uncle Tom in Florida to stoker of the racial fires in rural Missouri. Why? He reminded folks that some don’t like him because he doesn’t resemble “all those presidents on dollar bills.”

Now there’s a racial zinger for you! Personally, I thought he was talking about all those fright wigs that pass for hair on those old guys, but McCain’s fiery reaction and ensuing press commentary about the racial genie being out of the bottle sent me to thinking again, back to my then almost lily-white hometown of Groton, Connecticut. As a kid, I never knew a genie and never saw that kind of bottle. And yet…

I was recently at my birth home in Apalachicola Florida soaking up sun, enjoying seafood and wonderful long visits with family and friends. Because of Florida’s longstanding relationship to disturbances in the Gulf of Mexico – hurricanes – we decided to have the trees on the property pruned back from the house. For this task we hired Joey and John’s Tree Service.

My family moved to Apalachicola in the early 20th Century from Alabama and Georgia. They came to this part of Florida because of a lumber company that was cutting dead head cypress along the Apalachicola River. My mother’s father was a river boat pilot and my dad came along with his brothers to work in the lumber yard. My parents met and married in 1926 and I am the last of their nine children.

The house that we had the trees pruned back from has a relationship to the lumber business that brought my parents to Florida. When my parents purchased the land for their home in 1947 they did not have much money left to buy materials to build a house. It just happened that the lumber company was giving away old houses that had been used as camps for the men who cut the cypress along the river and one of the houses became my family’s starter home. The core of this existing house is that old camp from “up the river.”

Watching CNN’s Soledad O’Brien’s show on “Black in America” and the segment on the Rand family made me pause as I realized one of those “hiding in plain sight” realities of white American life: large gatherings of all our kin don’t happen very much anymore, if they ever did. If my extended family’s any guide, we know our genealogy ( all the way back to the Pilgrims on our mother’s side and New Amsterdam Dutch on my father’s ) better than we know each other.

The Rand’s, 300 hundred strong, get together every two years with family cheers, bar b-q cook-offs, and buses arriving from around the U.S.; t-shirts sing it loud and sing it proud. On my Burghardt side, we’ve got half a family tree on eight feet of graph paper sitting on a shelf in the shed. On my mother’s side, the Robinsons, there are a couple of pictures of an old guy with a hell of a beard. He’s not cheering in any of them.

Senator Obama’s talk on M.I.A. and AWOL Black Fathers delivered at a Chicago Church on Father’s Day lacks the informed analysis that I expect of him if he is win the vote of this African American father for President of the United States.

The absence of some black fathers from the lives of their children is owing to many reasons far too complex to cover in this space. I would like Mr. Obama to take the time to understand this complexity and not paint all black men with the same brush. Furthermore, I ask him to please share with the citizenry what he considers a father’s responsibilities. Surely there are many constructions of what is considered responsible father behavior.