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OP ED: Coping with 'interesting' times
By Jon B. Cooke/West Kingston
Now, with the campaigns subsided, rhetorical flourishes quieted, partisan marching bands at rest, now comes the time perhaps for real change in these United States of America, where we, as individual citizens, can help those in need and, if we’re lucky, in the process help ourselves through what lies ahead.
What was that old Chinese curse? – “May you live in interesting times!” Boy, what we’d give for some dull and boring these days, eh? And who doesn’t pine in some way for that “same old, same old” of pre-9/11 America? “Interesting” we can do without, at least for a spell.
But, here we are, smack dab in the middle of “interesting,” in a whole world of a mess, two wars weighing us down overseas, economic turmoil swirling about here at home, along with skyrocketing food and energy costs, plummeting home values, and uncertainty incessantly knocking at the door. Locally, we’re facing an ominous budgetary crisis coupled with the sad distinction of being the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country. And we’re only starting to fathom the implications of the bruising campaign fights as we wake up from that (finally!) concluded election. So, amid all this “interesting” stuff, we find ourselves facing a couple of alternatives: We can become consumed by apprehension, cowering in fear of the next knockdown blow to come. Or we can Do Something.
Predicaments such as the one we’re currently in sometimes bring out the best in the citizenry of our nation. During the Great Depression, not only was the New Deal established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to pull folks out from poverty and put ‘em back to work, but individuals such as Dorothy Day were motivated to directly help those in need (in her case by founding, with Peter Maurin, the Catholic Worker movement, which continues to this day to aid those in the margins of society). The social turbulence of the 1960s gave rise to a newfound sense of purpose within an entire generation of Americans, with the emergence of a legion of youths calling themselves by a new-fangled job title: community organizer.
Anyone who has kept an eye on the presidential slugfest knows that the designation of “community organizer,” as a past occupation listed on the résumé of Democratic candidate Barack Obama, took a pounding by politicians at the Republican National Convention late this summer. His voice oozing with contempt, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani sneered at the Illinois senator’s charitable work in Chicago’s South Side during Obama’s formative years. GOP candidate for vice president Sarah Palin, comparing her experience to the top of the opposing party’s ticket, said in a mocking tone, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.”
Joe Klein of Time magazine succinctly defended the Democratic nominee, when he wrote in his “Swampland” blog after the convention, “So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn’t know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed – job training, help with housing and so forth – from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work – the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a ‘task from God.’)”
Other renowned citizens have listed “community organizer” on their curriculum vitae, including U.S. labor leaders César Chávez and Samuel Gompers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Congressman John L. Lewis, consumer advocate and perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader and even televangelist Pat Robertson. Heck, as pundit Klein alludes above, a lot of people say Jesus Christ was perhaps the ultimate community organizer.
Thus maybe becoming a community organizer just might be a valid, say even laudable thing to do as these “interesting” times bear down on our state and nation. Recently this writer, looking for purpose, stopped by Pawtucket’s George Wiley Center to visit a local living legend, a man who has been passionately fighting on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised in the Ocean State for decades, Henry Shelton. The self-described “hell-raiser,” while cautiously optimistic for positive change to come, bemoaned the lack of Wiley Center community organizers in this writer’s neck of the Rhode Island woods, South County, especially considering the forward thinking of many residents and presence of the University of Rhode Island, long a bastion of progressive thought.
Shelton, a former Catholic priest who, as Wiley Center coordinator, is currently a thorn in the side of Governor Carcieri and the state Public Utilities Commission, having voiced his concerns regarding the effects of the cascading economic downturn on the underclass, never mind spiraling energy costs on lower income families, turned to yours truly and put the question square on the table, “Now, what can YOU do to help?” And so the assignment was cast.
And now the same query, asked in this climate of tumultuous change in these “interesting” days, is placed before you, kind reader: “What can you do?” For one, this writer attended the regional George Wiley Center held Wednesday at the Peace Dale Congregational Church. Henry Shelton was there ready to hear your answer.
The writer is a freelance writer, editor and graphic designer and editor of Comic Book Artist magazine.
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