Doug wrote:
My father was in the CCC, and he loved it. His family was broke, living in an unheated house in Jersey City. Along came the CCC and he went off to the southwest - by choice! where did this "dragooned" thing come from? - did some useful work, and sent some money back home. He still talks about enthusiastically it 75 years later, and never misses the chance to say we should do it again. Where does this shit come from?
Dwayne wrote:
Ditto for my Grandfather. In his final years, there were two things he fondly remembered (and vividly described) from the Age of Wireless: one was the CCC, which delivered him from crushing, empty belly poverty. John writes:
Seriously, these two testimonies are really moving, and tragically speak to unrealized possibilities today. Maybe this just reflects my crusader's cause of late (if you haven't noticed), but I believe (without sufficient empirical backing, perhaps) that one of the biggest obstacles to a cool thang, nouveau CCC are the dozens of nominally progressive green 401C3's (and I'm not talking about malevolent Big Green here, malevolent though Big Green may be).
Umm... how do I say this politely, without painting in huge brushstrokes? Too many of these CBO's are run by egomaniac mini-empire builders, who prefer serving as middlemen allocators of government outlays, rather than banding together with like-minded organizations (and moreover their constituencies) to press for really huge increases in government largesse, initiatives that might involve direct relationships between government agencies and grassroots folks, with the middlemen cut out. The leaders and spokespeople of such CBO's talk a good green social democratic game (which is tough for me to admit, because I'm wont to harshly criticize people simply at the level of discourse), but in practice too many are self-promoting "social entrepreneurs." (The widespread valence of this term in the 401C3 world should in and of itself be cause for suspicsion and moreover... revulsion.)
Of course I'm not going to name names here, of course there are many excellent people in the movement, and of course the problems are deeply structural... but I'm just sayin'...
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