> i don't have time to elaborate as I'm too busy and in too much pain at
> the moment to have the patience to fine tune this, but some quick
> thoughts:
>
thoughts?
so, about the begin with solidarity / organize a call to solidarity
this is actually a favored method among various 20- and 30-somethings around here.
you get everyone together over pizza, often at someone's house. you begin with a problem or a desire. often, it's been a desire.
I want a better bike culture in this city. I want more public art. I want to make ____ city more hospitable to young people. I want to create a bike share program. I want a grocery store in the downtown sector. I want more support for public art. I want a ferris wheel on the waterfront.
These are all projects i've seen get off the ground. You start with a desire or a complaint. You invite all your friends and they can invite theirs. Etc.I won't detail the rest of how it's done. But basically, what the beginnings are always like is this process of building solidarity around the public expression of "I want...." undergirding the I want, of course, is a complaint about current conditions. But that's not the focus, though it sometimes is. It's certainly what motivates a lot of this: a general pissed offness at the powers that people who cockily refuse to listen to "kids these days". But instead of focusing on this - and I've seen facebook threads where someone is inclined to be all bitchy and negative, blaming this or that entity for the problem, but is met with subtle pressure to turn the bitchy crank session into an "I want..." session, where the idea is to figure out how all the people who want something can get it.
It all flows from there. Seriously, with the ferris wheel business, there was so much interest in this as a way to change up the moribund waterfront park the city built decades ago, that somehow or other they eventually drew up architectural plans for a new building, a park, a ferris wheel, a small fairgrounds. I mean, it was something that would have normally taken a 20 person agency to create, this presentation that was eventually put before the city council. It was all done on the basis of voluntary contributions of talent and time...
I bring this up because, recently, catching up with the backlog of posts I didn't read when I was offline, I noticed that someone sneered about how the protests didn't have a lot of organization behind them.
If what I've seen in this backwater city is any indication, this method of organizing is so common and part of every day life that, well, some of this stuff -- this organization -- is so much a part of daily life for some of the more activist kids - even if they are merely activists around cultural issues -- that they've been preparing for this most of their young adult lives.
These examples may also explain why the emphasis is on solidarity around a desire.....