I’m going to be out of town some for the 4th of July, so I’m writing this the week before (my husband still loves to light stuff on fire, just as he’s done for the past 30 years…). It is my sincere hope that, by the time that this publishes, the situation in Iran will have dramatically improved and this will seem dated. But I fear that it will not.
For now, I’m almost obsessed with the protests in Iran, particularly with the role that courageous women are playing in leading the call for greater transparency and democracy, an especially bold stance given the oppression women face on many levels in Iran. I do not claim to be an expert on Iran’s electoral process, or even on the irregularities and their alleged impact on the outcome. That’s not, really, what primarily interests me about Iran today, although I very much hope that the violent repression ceases and there is an open process to account for every vote and deliver a just electoral result to the people of the nation.
What has really transfixed me, though, is this idea of ‘why don’t people get that excited about democracy here?’ I had this conversation, actually, with some of the students in my poverty and the global economy class a few weeks ago. We were talking about the protests across Latin America against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, and several of my students wondered aloud why, given what they are learning about the impact of these free trade agreements on workers and citizens in the U.S., there has not been a more mass uprising here. I pointed out that there has, in fact, been some significant mobilization on fair trade issues in the U.S., and we’ve seen people engage not only in more traditional street-type protests but also actions as consumers and shareholders, in ways that are creative and compelling. But it’s true that we have not seen the scope or scale of the demonstrations seen in other parts of the world, and I spend quite a bit of time asking myself questions like that too.
I think we need to be careful not to fall into the ‘Americans don’t care’/apathy argument–I believe, in fact, that there is considerable evidence that Americans are quite engaged in the work of charitable nonprofit organizations and that people are connecting with each other in new, albeit often less deep, ways in the global economy. Besides, there is an abundance of evidence that, while the U.S. may not have as rich a tradition of social protest as some countries, our history certainly has its share–including the founding of the nation and the struggles for some of our most valuable and precious victories: women’s suffrage, abolition, and the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. I myself have had the extraordinary opportunity to be involved in the immigrant ‘uprising’ of 2006 that saw more than two million people around the country, at various points, engage in peaceful street protest.
No, my thoughts do not turn to a lament over some perceived inertia on the part of the American ‘public’ (the extent to which this sense of ‘we-ness’ is elusive is a related discussion, but one that I’ll return to in an organizing context in another post) but, rather, to a wonder about how organizers can take better advantage of the protections, the space, so to speak, in which we can agitate. I know that people in the U.S. were very, very angry about the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election, for example, yet we certainly did not see the same kind of mobilization we’ve seen in Iran these past two weeks, despite the assurance that the consequences for such activism would have been less deadly here. I truly believe that the difference in response has more to do with differences in organizing, differences in the culture of collective action, than in differences in passion about issues or injustices.
I wish that there was more news coming out of Iran about the how of these demonstrations, instead of just the why and the what and even, although I find their stories tremendously inspiring, the who. I want to know what it takes to mobilize such mass action in the face of tremendous oppression. I mean, one person’s incredible commitment to courage is noteworthy, but the overwhelming courage of conviction of hundreds of thousands of people cannot be accidental, nor do I believe it to be genetic–it’s a triumph of organizing and, if we are to live up to those pieces of our nation’s history which are its most noble (and claim the future that we would want for ourselves), we’ve got to learn from it, capture it somehow, and make it resonate here.
PS. So, obviously, I’m not the only person asking these same questions. Good Washington Post article on Arab activists’ own analysis.
One of the pieces the Invisible Kansas Campaign developed for their branding
Strangers make the best allies
Sometimes the strangest sources prompt my thinking about advocacy and organizing. I guess that’s what happens when you almost always have them on your mind, hunh?
I was reading an excerpt of an interview with the music critic for Rolling Stone (funny, I know, since I don’t listen to music (!), but I subscribe for their political coverage, muddle through missed references to popular culture, and end up having heard of enough bands to impress my husband over dinner conversation). I can’t remember now exactly where I read the interview excerpt, but I think it was on a blog created by the woman who started the fun website Epic Change. He was bemoaning the fact that most people are using social networking applications (he mentioned Twitter, specifically) to keep up with their interests, their friends, their (in his case) favorite music, rather than to connect with disparate interests and new figures beyond our normal networks. Basically, that we’re social networking with the same folks we would normally email and call and talk to, making the technology an interesting way to communicate and a nice addition to our repertoire, but not a revolutionary tool for linking new people and new ideas.
His point in regards to music was that this has the tendency to create a mass effect, where technology drives people to the lowest common denominator of sorts–I think his quote was something like the music that the most people can stand, rather than the music that this person or this person like the most (I’m sorry that I can’t find the link to the actual post anymore; that’s what happens when you scan blogs while building Duplo blimps and keeping twins from crawling under the couch).
And that got me thinking about a conversation that I had with some students last spring about organizing in Second Life. One student raised a pretty vigorous objection, claiming that the ‘kind of people’ who spend a lot of time in a virtual world probably aren’t going to be core activists in this actual reality. And I think that she has a solid point, but, as I argued then, the point of organizing in Second Life is not to convert our current allies into avatars but to engage people, even in a limited or highly unorthodox way, with whom we would never normally have any kind of relationship.
And so, when I read this interview, I started to think about how most nonprofit organizations, and the social workers who work in them, are currently thinking about emerging technologies. From my conversations and the reading I’ve been doing, I’d venture that it’s primarily about how to communicate their message through them and how to engage their supporters (and maybe likely but not yet supporters) in a new, ‘hip’ way, but less about how to reach totally new populations, untouched by their other outreach strategies, and how to engage in a dynamic conversation with those folks, rather than a primarily one-way flow of information.
But, really, if we’re going to change the world, we need more than our current allies, or even our current allies plus their friends. We need to connect with issues that we don’t think we could really care less about, but then find out that we do, and we need to think carefully about how our issues connect to those. We need to talk with, not just at, people we’d usually walk right past on the street, find out what really matters to them, and craft messages about our causes that resonate. We need to engage those who care deeply about life and justice and peace but have never found a home in the nonprofit sector; and we need to engage those who don’t think that their interests align with our causes at all (but, of course, they really do).
And that’s the real power of social networking and other emerging technologies, and, more importantly, the organizing ideologies behind them. While it would be very difficult and very expensive to find and connect with and listen to all of those distant and diverse voices using our traditional methodologies, it really is possible, and not even too technically difficult today. The challenge is really one of will–we have to be willing to open ourselves up, to expand our ideas, to, well, to listen to music we normally wouldn’t. If we do, we just might be able to build a network that’s truly a force for good.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged organizing, technology