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Podcast    H2'ed 2/8/13

Staughton Lynd; Accompanying as an Alternative to Organizing

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Broadcast 2/8/2013 at 1:42 PM EST (47 Listens, 31 Downloads, 789 Itunes)
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Staughton served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964.  In April 1965, he chaired the first march against the Vietnam War in Washington DC.  In August 1965, he was arrested together with Bob Moses and David Dellinger at the Assembly of Unrepresented People in Washington DC, where demonstrators sought to declare peace with the people of Vietnam on the steps of the Capitol.  In December 1965, Staughton along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker made a controversial trip to Hanoi, in hope of clarifying the peace terms of the Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

Because of his advocacy and practice of civil disobedience, Lynd was unable to continue as a full-time history teacher.  The history departments at five Chicago-area universities offered him positions, only to have the offers negatived by the school administrations.  In 1976, Staughton became a lawyer and until his retirement at the end of 1996 worked for Legal Services in Youngstown, Ohio.  He specialized in employment law, and when the steel mills in Youngstown were closed in 1977-1980 he served as lead counsel to the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley, which sought to reopen the mills under worker-community ownership, and brought the action Local 1330 v. U.S. Steel. 
He has  written, edited, or co-edited with his wife Alice Lynd more than a dozen books.
This interview is based on Lynd's book, 
Accompanying; Pathways to Social Change. 
rough notes from the interview
(mostly my questions and quotes by him which I read)

Accompanying is an alternative to Organizing.

It's similar to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

Hogan: Many Minds, One Heart:

What did you do at the Freedom School? (in summer 1964

With accompanying, you go TO the people you want to help, to engage in activism with, with the assumption that you both have power, expertise and resources to bring to the table. 

Two experts.

Accompanar, accompanendo in Spanish

Tells us about Oscar Romero and why you bring him into your book. 

Romero was born of a peasant family, became a priest, and became a Bishop in one part of El Salvador-- a conservative bishop, archbishop" 

Liberation Theology" 

Current Pope defrocked Liberation Theologist Priests.

Let's talk about unions. You say in your book, "How did the new trade union movement become a top down, bureaucratic affair that caused me to describe rank-and-file labor activists as "broken hearted lovers"?

Punching Out by Glaberman

Quotation by Frederick Douglas

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

You also say, "I came away from the struggle with another conviction as well: that only local unions, not any national union or federation of nation unions, could be looked to for visionary energy and sends of change."

My take away is that you believe that the most effective activism is not centralized. 

And you say in your book, "Too often, Left intellectuals gather together and ask each other, "Now, how can we attract workers?" When workers show up, they are a minority. The culture and vocabulary of the meetings have already been established by middle-class conveners, and the workers soon leave."

"The whole bureaucratic apparatus has arteriosclerosis-- that also applies to the central labor body."

You talk about how small acts can become the key events that make big changes happen. 


Exemplary action? 


You say about occupy:


Acccompanying and occupying are first cousins, or perhaps, to speak more precisely, blood brothers. 

That is, when people set out to walk together as equals, to "make the road by walking,"  there is likely to grow from that horizontal companionship a shared desire for more enduring arrangements. 


Below and to the left (as subcomandante Marcos calls it.)

Our most urgent objective is not to give someone else the authority to act on our behalf. Our greatest need is not to hand over to somebody other than ourselves the responsibility to remake the world. 

No, we need to remake the world. 

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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