Understanding Obama

I found this fascinating site  via Kathy Shaidle's Hippies: Still Not Dead Enough provides some background to events of the 1960's.  How does that relate to Obama?

Andy Cornell, in a letter to the movement that first radicalized him, “Dear Punk Rock Activism,” criticizes the conflation of the terms “activism” and “organizing.”  He writes, “activists are individuals who dedicate their time and energy to various efforts they hope will contribute to social, political, or economic change.  Organizers are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis and confidence within the context of organizations.  Organizing is a process—creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics.”  In other words, it’s not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they’ve got to move toward “organizing masses of people.” 
Aha!  Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building.
Until recently I’d rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.”  The common term for years has been “activists.”  Organizing was reduced to the behind-the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration.  But forty years ago, we only used the word “activist” to mock our enemies’ view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us “mindless activists.”  We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy, and tactics (and later, contributing to our downfall, ideology).
Thinking back over my own experience, I realized that I had inherited this organizer’s identity from the red diaper babies I fell in with at the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS.  Raised by parents in the labor and civil rights and communist or socialist movements, they had naturally learned the organizing method as other kids learned how to throw footballs or bake pineapple upside-down cakes.  ”Build the base!” was the constant strategy of Columbia SDS for years.
Yet young activists I met were surprised to learn that major events such as the Columbia rebellion of April, 1968, did not happen spontaneously, that they took years of prior education, relationship building, reconsideration on the part of individuals of their role in the institution.  I.e., organizing.  It seemed to me that they believed that movements happen as a sort of dramatic or spectator sport:  after a small group of people express themselves, large numbers of by-standers see the truth in what they’re saying and join in.  The mass anti-war mobilization of the Spring, 2003, which failed to stop the war, was the only model they knew.   

 Now you know, straight from the horse's ASS.
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