Street roots., May 13, 2011, Page 5, Image 5

street roots
TRUE BLUE, fro m page 4
different message from time to time. All of
that had been eroded by the time President
Obama had gotten in there.
thing on how do you choose tactics that on
the* one hand are very strategic and on the
other hand are really provocative. It’s who
are you trying to piss off. What’s the
purpose of your action, what’s the campaign
it’s a part of and how actually are you
moving toward it. I’m not always sure that
showing up at another rally, when there’s
five of them this week, is the way to use my
limited time in a setting like Portland.
J.Z.: So the Right did a better job in
organizing.
M.W.: I’ll tell you what; if you look at
who’s bought Saul Alinsky’s books in the
last x number of years, 90 percent will have
gone to the Right and 10 percent will have
gone to the Left. You go on any of the blogs
or book reviews, you’ll see who’s reading i t
Or if you go to a Tea Party meeting. I bring
more anecdote than data, but it’s very
sobering. I think it’s too easy to come up
with any one answer, but yes, I think they’ve
done a better job.
J.Z.: You’re extending your work with the
Open Society Institute.
M.W.: I started designing this many years
ago and actually started in January 2010,
and then I was diagnosed April 2010, so I’m
on a very different trajectory
What I had intendedto do, and am very
excited about, was working on Idaho,
Nebraska, Washington and Colorado, four
states with a strong rural profile, on what it
would look like to update some of the basics
of the model of the Rural Organizing
Project, and what pieces would work there,
and how they could find greater success in
leveraging the voices of all of the state.
J.Z.: What is the greatest motivator to
getting people involved in a movement?
M.W.: I believe people need to speak to
their anger and then they need a place for
that anger to go. We create community and
then we stop when we get a nice
comfortable number. So we tend to create
smaller clubs. The Right does not. That Tea
Party meeting I recently went to had over
100 people. There was an incredible effort
to greet people, make sure everyone signed
up, and a whole lot of basics that come out
of a Saul Alinsky’s book. It was Friday night,
they were having a blast, and there were
great cookies...
I feel like if we’re talking to ourselves
we’re not doing the work. Last meeting I
went to before I became sick, you had the
Tea Party folks being belligerent and crying.
It was horrific. And then you had us, who
wanted single-payer and sanity around
immigration and health care, being slightly
spirited and catcalling. So no ohe looked
good. And my role was going round and
trying to calm things. And everyone was
being rude to me. So that’s a breakdown of
There’s nothii^U1g.oodjthat caii:.<yyQ^
from that level of polarization, _„
,
J.Z.: Creating a toolkit of sorts?
M.W.: Yeah. I was very sad to have to cut
jt short But there was great response and
interest. I think everyone recognizes that
not only do they not know how to be
effective at taking urban progressive politics
and running it in a smaller town-community,
but also that if people feel unsure about the
methodology, they also don’t feel like they
have any of the capacity — that actual cash
in hand — to be that ever-present.
One of my conclusions is that the current
model of running nonprofits is very staff
heavy. And it’s very, we don't have- the money
o 4 ejiS JLJMM
predictable in what gets left on the cutting
room floor when the cash isn’t there; And I
believe that we need a different model of
orgahizing, which to some extent is how the
J.Z.: Your father is a Dutch immigrant,
ROP always functioned. It’s always
and your grandfather was involved in the
functioned saying we’re going to be
everywhere. We’re going to be in all of those Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation.
How did that shape your philosophy of
counties (and we have a staff tif two). Our
resistance and the extent o f resistance, because
philosophy says in black and white that the
I read that you said it
more rural, and the.
didn't go far enough?
lower density your
population, the
M.W.:Ihmany
greater access you
many ways. As an
"We've
made
that
mistake
have to our
adult, I’ve been really
that our organizations are
resources.
fascinated by this
J.Z.: Do you think
the structure of '
nonprofits and the
direction that they’ve
gone, perhaps to
survive in this
economy, has
damaged organizing
efforts?
actually how you change the
world. Onr organizations can
be a part of changing the
world, but when you look at
the history of rebellion and
uprising, good organizations
w ill fast figure out how to
support that, but they
usually haven't created it."
M.W.: I think in
general, looking at
what’s happened to
nonprofit culture
since the 1960s, it
has been damaging, I also think there are
many gfeat things that have and are even
starting to happen more in systematizing
ba&c capacity, and everyone having data
bases that, can be shared, organizations are
getting smarter. But I think that the
revolution will not be televised, the
revolution will notbe funded, is just core.
And we’ve made that mistake that our
organizations are actually how you change
the world. Our organizations can be a part
of changing the world, but when you look at
the history Of rebellion' and uprising, good
organizations will fast figure out how to
support that, but they usually haven’t
created it. r
5
<1 f Y / S
May 13, 2011
whole cell structure
of how do you start a
resistance movement.
What it meant for my
grandfather wais to do
weekly visits, so he
had the knowledge
that at this
household, they’ll
take Jews at the drop
of a h a t This
household, never let
them know what’s
going on. So when
you talk about
mapping, it’s really that concept of figuring
out what is in our community so that in a
worst case scenario we can walk around on
eggshells and make sure everyone gets out
alive, and in the best case scenario, already
know that, I don’t need a conversation with
you; you’ve got a lot of this figured out, but I ’ve
got to spend a lot of time over there. So it’s
being strategic.
My grandfather was a great person, but
he was a man of his times. And I think it’s
about being righteous without being really
evolved. And I think that as a Left, we want
people to really be evolved before we move
forward. And the thing is, that’s a process,
and it’s also about that celebration. Go have
a lot of celebrations, but I just want to keep
J.Z.: After 18plus years, of ROP, what do
: you count as your milestones?,
everyone alive. And that’s a different kind of
organization. I’m proud of my grandfather,
but not because of what we want to make
him, but because he said, “No, we don’t kill
people here.”
J.Z.: What do you consider the biggest threat
to poor people’s rights in Oregon right now?
M.W.: I think it’s the cheapening of life.
We did make progress in the war on poverty,
the only failure was that confidence that you
could put a timeline on it and; say in 25
years we can remove these protections
because we will have won that war. I think
it’s devastating how quickly we’re rolling
back to what’s acceptable.. That it’s
acceptable to walk down the street and see
so many people who are clearly not making
ends m eet
J.Z.: Is it acceptable or is it a resignation
that it cannot be changed and this is the status
quo?
M.W.: I’m not sure there’s a huge
difference - either way it seems like those
numbers have no choice but to grow
enormously given the values that we’re
putting forward in our budgets, and who
gets tax breaks. ...
How many decades have we been talking
about the same thing? It’s like our whole
society has been moved tremendously to the
right At the same time, with Obama and
the disappointments and what it means to
go from such an incredible unity of voting in
this new president and then recognizing
how little that meant and more than that,
how this incredible communicator was
basically going to abdicate. We’ve eroded
every little stop or firewall that had been put
in place to limit the power of corporations
and even two parties that actually had a
M.W.: I would love to have a fairy tale and
I don’t I feel like the struggles to make us
be as effective leaders as possible are not
much different than 20 years ago. I think
humankind is humankind. What I feel like I
am the "most proud of is that we’re still a
low-to-the-ground organization, The
successes have been about maintaining a
community that is adding new people. We’ve
lost very few, even though we’ve forced
people to confront things that they never
signed on for.
It’s why rural matters. It’s in the cultural
wars. One of the very humbling things about
these recent decades» is how they’ve kind of
taken away the comfort of urban areas and
feeling like they had the numbers and the
power and all of the rest to kind of move
things along without looking at the whole.
And, God bless our democracy, every
person does still matter. And it behooves
our urban organizations that continue to get
a little bit lazy to remember that if We can’t
realty move this whole state forward, we’re
positioning us more and more toward civil
unrest, which is really leading to civil war at
some level.
J.Z.: We do get a little cocksure that we have
Portland in our back pocket.
M.W.: Right. And the times that we live in
with global climate change and everything
else, why would we possibly think that this
victory or this victory really matters? What
matters is actually bringing more and more
people to a place of critical thinking on a
range of issues. That’s the best security
we’ll ever get.
Learn more about the Rural Organizing
Project at www.rop.org
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