<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>Four Hours, Once a Week</title></head><body> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com, Tue Aug 17 12:31:40 PDT 2004</font>:</div> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">At 02:53 PM 8/17/2004, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:<br> >>There are immediate things that need to be done. People need affordable<br> >>childcare, for instance. I see all kinds of churches offering inexpensive<br> >>child care and free summer bible camps. Well...? Why not? Why let the<br> >>dead guy on a stick worshippers monopolize this territory? (And it sure<br> >>as shit  doesn't have to be a full-time fucking job. That is one thing<br> >>that annoys me about left workerism: the insistence that you give over</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">>>your entire life to the movement, 24/7 slavishly "organizing". Please.)</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">><br> >The obstacle is that secular leftists in the USA, on the average, have</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">>become lazier, stingier, and more pie-in-the-sky than religious leftists.<br> <br> Dennis Redmond wrote:</font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"> > The US Left continues to lead the world in its ability to generate<br>  > circular firing squads.<br> <br> Carrol Cox wrote:<br> Are you or are you not a member of that firing squad?</font><br> <font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"></font></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">If not, then the people you criticize are not members of the left, for if they are, then you are firing at them, i.e. are a member of the firing squad.</font></blockquote> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">You can't create anything on the left (or on any other point on the political spectrum) by spending neither time nor money -- that is just a fact.</font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">How did Hugo Chávez win a landslide victory?  Luckily, oil prices have gone up, and he, already holding the levers of state power, could spend money (take that, capitalists!), and the money was well-spent by tireless Bolivarian organizers: e.g.,</font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">"Ms. [Evelyn] Uzcanga's role has been to spend up to 15 hours a day tramping along narrow passageways between ramshackle homes, talking to people, looking for voters. With her son Daniel - who is 5 and, coincidentally, somewhat resembles the chunky president - at her side, she would peer into doors and stop by shops, pulling aside people and peppering them with questions" (Juan Forero, "Chávez Loyalists Troll Venezuelan Barrios for the Undecided," <em>New York Times</em>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/international/americas/1<span ></span>5venezuela.ready.html">August 15, 2004</a>).</font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">Leftists in the USA are light years behind leftists in Venezuela; the latter are defending what they have already won and are poised to winning more; the former, first and foremost, need to create the ranks of organizers and activists willing to spend time and money organizing to break through "the corrupt two-party system favoured by the oligarchy" (Tariq Ali, "The Importance of Hugo Chávez: Why He Crushed the Oligarchs," <em>CounterPunch</em>, <a href="http://counterpunch.org/tariq08162004.html">August 16, 2004</a>).</font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">BTW, anyone who has ever visited Columbus, OH knows that my partner, a leftist who is a Presbyterian, union man, and public-sector worker, is far more generous with his time and money than I am.  Then, he does more housework than I do, too.  Behind every female leftist there is a good man (or woman).  :-)</font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000"><br></font></div> <div><font face="Lucida Grande" size="-4" color="#000000">Yoshie</font></div> </body> </html>