>On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > And what about the old GI coffeehouses from the Vietnam days? Was there
> > just more discontent to work with within the military then? Are they all
> > just good soldiers now.
>
>There's lots of discontent, but the difference between a draft and a
>volunteer army seems to make a huge difference. The idea that "they
>signed a contract" seemed to play an extraordinary role in the
>contemporary soldiers' thinking -- and obviously played no role at all
>among drafted soldiers, many of whom felt that they were entirely and
>unjustly coerced.
>
>And secondly of course there's the selection process. When you have a
>draft, some people who hate the military and the government end up in the
>military simply because they don't want to go to jail. So you get a bunch
>of guys who start out already in boot camp seething in opposition and
>equipped with an alternative worldview and who work up from there.
>
>Combine those two things, and you end up with an almost ready-made
>activist corps to set up things like coffee houses.
>
>Michael
You know, it's funny. I'm living in a hYOOOOGE military town right now. I interact with people everyday who have spouses, children, and even parents in the .mil, some stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. You can pretty much say what you think about getting the troops out. No one bats an eyelash, not even guys/gals IN the military. Not even the woman I was talking to at work, who's thinking about re-enlisting. No shit, she is. And she'd probably put to shame all y'all that have some pretty bogus notions of what kind of people join up during war-time. She really doesn't give a shit about it, in terms of being a warrior. It's a job, and it was a damn good job by comparison. You got some stress, but you don't have the stress of say, advertising sales.
I expected to see a lot of rah rah siss boom bah patriotic flag-waving on bumper sticks, but I swear to dog I saw more of that in LimpDick. About the only thing I've seen is a chevy blazer with a huge painted message on it about how her son was stationed in Iraq and did YOU support him?
That truck's message impressed me as one in which the mother felt the desperate need to make this plea to an otherwise hostile or apathetic majority. I don't know, it just did sitting there in Walmart, sticking out like a sore thumb in a Walmart located on a highway that's named after the fact that it was a supply road between between various military bases in the area. (I don't know how many there are for sure, but off the top of my head I can think of 3 air forces bases, 5 naval bases, 3 army bases, and probably some marine installations I don't know about. All I know is I see them running down by the harbor every morning. Which is funny because, the ones that go into the army? About 20% of them are overweight. What a ragtag bunch -- not in formation at all, barely making it across the bridge, huffing and puffing like they were chain smokers.
None of this is to say that I think we have what ComRod Cox calls the "cadre". My objection to CHuck's line of thinking is not just that we don't have the numbers -- we don't. It's rather that people tend to be pretty wishy washy. They like to complain. But they look down on extremists. Like Doug says about poll responses, USers can't stand to be pinned between extremes. They don't want to be seen as one. They've spent much of their life putting down anyone who gets too much into anything -- and they especially frown on people who are too extremist in terms of politics. Entire talk shows and radio programs and editorial personalities in Alt Rags are based on the notion that they are the common sense middle road between left and right. Our vocabulary puts down anyone who is *partisan* -- as if that's a bad thing to take a side, to take a stand.
What is needed is what Carrol always said: a lot of patience. A willingness to build alternative organizations that carry out the boring, ordinary and very necessary working of building and maintaining a movement infrastructure: communications, leadership skills, organizational skills, negotiating skills, people skills, knowledge, research skills, information gathering, information protection and information security, etc.
These are very real things that vital movements need and people don't often have. Ralphie--White Sox--Nader is right that people were more involved in civic groups in the past -- in things from little league to sewing circles to the Moose Club that helped people cultivate these skills and build communications networks of people and information. Today, lacking this sort of thing, and people lacking the desire to participate because they have other things to keep them occupied: television, continuous training, getting exercise b/c you don't on your sendentary job, the demand to care for children who, in the past, were left to their own devices b/c we had diff. norms about parenting....., we have a hard time gathering people in ways that can help us build alternative organizations.
The groups I've investigated here, carrol's right again, do the heavy, dirty work -- and in what can obviously be a pretty hostile environment when people want to be. There's a vibrant arts community that does what it can. There are the religious peace activists who are the core of the antiwar movement and always have been. These folks are in it for different reasons and, as a consequence, they don't sit around gazing at their navel trying to figure it all out muttering "woe is us who can't get our head out of our ass because we just don't try hard enough and just aren't smart and creative and noble enough...."
The reason why building the movement in the way Carrol says matters is that people will become creative and noble, not that they aren't already, when their circumstances and the social milieu within which they work together with others on a common goal demands it of them. When they feel they can no longer situation as it is. It's happened to me a couple of times. I've watched it happen. People step up to the plate when it matters and trying to force the situation -- and berating people for not being noble and risk-taking enough now -- seems pointless. It requires a level of judgmental bullying that I find problematic, because the people attracted to such moralizing, humilation inducing language too often do so because they're attracted in a narcissistic way. Because they want a leader to tell them who they are and what they ought to do. Because they too willing give up themselves in order to become something someone or group exhorted them into being. It seems to me a very weak and tenuous relationship to a social movement and, thus, a recipe for failure.
I'm re-reading Hirschorn's The Workplace Within and a lot of the stuff he talks about in there can be applied -- hence the psychoanalytic language.....
The examples Doug provided in response to WD are examples I think are good ones: the type of movement building, community education, and solidarity building activities that can sustain and slowly grow a movement.
Anyway, this bitch has worked 46 hrs alreayd this weeka nd I'm bushed. I'm going to go unpack some more. I f I can work up the energy, I'll post some pics later.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)