"Anger," he shot back. "It's not hot anger. It's not rhetorical anger. It's not the ability to give a speech. It's deep anger that comes from grief. People in the community who look at their children, look at their schools, look at their blocks, and they grieve. They feel the loss of that. Often, those people are not the best speakers or the best-known people in the community. But they're very deep. They have great relationships with other people. And they can build trust with other people because they're not self-promotional. They're about what the issues are in the community. So we look for anger. We look for the pilot light of leadership. It's always there. It's always burning. Good leaders know to turn it up and down depending on the circumstance."
If we are to succeed we will have to make alliances with people and groups whose professed political stances are different from ours and at times unpalatable to us. We will have to shed our ideological purity. Saul Alinsky, whose successor, Ed Chambers, was Gecan's mentor, argued that the ideological rigidity of the left -- something epitomized in identity politics and political correctness -- effectively severed it from the lives of working men and women. This was especially true during the Vietnam War when college students led the anti-war protests and the sons of the working class did the fighting and dying in Vietnam. But it is true today as liberals and the left dismiss Trump supporters as irredeemable racists and bigots and ignore their feelings of betrayal and very real suffering. Condemning those who support Trump is political suicide. Alinsky detested such moral litmus tests. He insisted that there were "no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only permanent interests."
"We have to listen to people unlike ourselves," Gecan said, observing that this will be achieved not through the internet but through face-to-face relationships. "And once we've built a relationship we can agitate them and be willing to be agitated by them."
The homogenization of culture in the wake of the death of the local press and local civic, church and other groups has played a large part in our disempowerment, Gecan argues. We have lost connection with those around us. We do not fully understand the corporate structures of power that wreak havoc with our lives both nationally and in our communities. And this is by the design of the corporate state.
"Over seventy-five years the process of community dissolution that took place in Back of the Yards has been mirrored in thousands of U.S. communities," Gecan wrote of Alinsky's first community organization, Back of the Yards Council, founded in 1939 in Chicago. "Everywhere the tightly-knit worlds of a dozen or so blocks -- where workplace, church, neighborhood, recreation, tavern, and political affiliation were all deeply entwined -- have given way to exurban enclaves, long commutes, gathered congregations, matchmaker websites, and fitness clubs filled with customers who don't know one another. A world where local news was critically important and closely followed -- often delivered by local publishers and reporters and passed along by word of mouth--has been replaced by the constant flow of real and fake news arriving through social media. A world of physically imposing and present institutions and organizations has morphed into a culture of global economic dynamics and fitful national mobilizations built around charismatic figures."
"You have to organize who is in front of you," Gecan said. "Not who used to be in front of you. In places like Chicago, Cleveland or Baltimore, the congregation used to be very robust. Congregations that were strong are weaker. We're still organizing with them but still looking at different institutions. Schools are institutions. They're more complicated, but they're institutions in those neighborhoods. We're recruiting schools in many places; sometimes it's housing groups. Sometimes we build new institutions called East Brooklyn Congregations or United Power for Action and Justice. We're recruiting the best of the existing, we're working with the existing to reconnect with people and expand. And we find new institutions. It has to be institutional in some way."
Gecan concedes that America's future under a Trump presidency, and amid democratic institutions' collapse and climate change, is bleak. But he warned against falling into despair or apathy.
"In 1980 in New York, all the liberal establishment, the entire establishment, was saying New York would never be as strong as it once was," he said. "It was called benign neglect. They wrote off parts of New York permanently in their minds." But community groups, including Brooklyn Congregations, which built 5,000 low-income homes, organized to save themselves.
"Our organizations and our leaders simply didn't accept that judgment from the elites," Gecan said. "Things are tough, hard, but we're going to build an organization. We're going to identify things we can correct and correct them -- with government if we can, or without it. We'll raise our own money. We'll figure out our housing strategy. We'll hire our own developer and general manager. It's about being more flexible and plastic about solutions. It's not relying on what the state or market says is possible. It's creating your own options."
Institution building is possible only if you "engage institutions or create newer and better ones -- whether it's churches or civic unions," he said. Without these, the power in the other two sectors -- corporate and governmental -- dominates.
The state, he said, has learned how to manipulate familiar protest rituals and render them impotent. He dismisses as meaningless political theater the kind of boutique activism in which demonstrators coordinate and even choreograph protests with the police. Activists spend a few hours, maybe a night, in jail and then assume they have credentials as dissidents. Gecan called these "fake arrests." "Everyone looks like they've had an action," he said. "They haven't."
He called the choreographed protests sterile "re-enactments" of the protests of the 1960s. Genuine protest, he said, has to defy the rules. It cannot be predicable. It has to disrupt power. It has to surprise those in authority. And these kinds of protests are greeted with anger by the state.
No movement will survive, he said, unless it is built on the foundation of deep community relationships. Organizers must learn to listen, even to those who do not agree with them. Only then is organization and active resistance possible.
"Three things have to be happening in great organizations: people have to be relating, people have to be learning, people have to be acting," he said. "In many religious circles, there's some learning going on, there's a little bit of relating going on, but there's no action. There's no external action. And it's killed many institutions. In a lot of activism, there's a lot of acting but there's not much relating or learning, so people make the same mistakes again and again.
"I was in Wisconsin during the [Gov. Scott] Walker situation and the reaction to it," he said about the 2011 protests by union members and their supporters. "They did 23 major demonstrations. Fifty [thousand], 70 [thousand], 100,000 people. After the second or third I said to those people, why are you doing all this? Because as you do these, you can't be building relationships in local communities. And you don't know what your own members are thinking about this situation. It ended up being unfortunately the case.
"Can we rebuild unions?" Gecan asked. "We can. It takes time. And we're doing it in some parts of the country. Can we rebuild civic life in our cities? We have and will do more. Can we take these people on? I know we can. But it will take different tactics. It will take some very unconventional allies that will surprise people."
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