Racing In The Street

The Onondaga County Democratic Party has a potential challenger to entrenched Republican incumbent Jim Walsh for the local seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Sam Gruber used to be head of the local preservation society, but according to news reports is now "a self-employed cultural resource management consultant serving companies and governments worldwide." He just returned from a year in Italy. The Italian connection will probably gain him some votes on the Northside of Syracuse, but considering that the district now spreads as far west as the Rochester suburbs, those votes probably will not put him over the top.

This latest chimera of a candidate will likely disappear sooner than the past lineup of lightweights, cranks and nobodies--since he has to gather over 1,200 signatures in three days. When will the the local Democratic party wise-up and learn my first rule of politics? A successful candidate has to have paid their dues. Your first attempt at office shouldn't be for Congress. The candidate should have a track record of civic involvement--committees, school boards, showing up at meetings and making statements at hearings. I go to a lot of hearings on a wide variety of city issues and I've never heard Mr. Gruber speak on anything other than preservation issues. He's very good on that issue, by the way. But is that enough to be considered for Congress?

The local Democrats are clueless anyway. They are hanging onto their fiefdom inside the city of Syracuse and abandoning the suburbs to the Republicans. The party chair is a yuppie lawyer who was best high school buds with the head of the national Democratic National Committee. The trend to associate with other non-working class folks and obsess about raising money that marks the current national Democratic Party A.C. (After Clinton) is a hallmark of the local party.

The party has no training and recruiting program for potential candidates. At nominating time they are forced to put the screws to lawyers or businessmen to run for the seats with a county-wide (or larger) constituency. They shrug their shoulders when the candidates turn them down--after seeing no organization and no plan for expanding their base. So the Democratic candidates for offices such as County Executive and U.S. Representative are either non-existent, third party pretenders or fringe personalities. "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." --Will Rogers

Bono, the lead singer for the rock group U2 gave the May 2004 commencement address at the U. of Pennsylvania--my alma mater. No offense to Ellen Goodman, the journalist from the Boston Globe who sent me off into the world with what I think was a decent graduation speech--I wish I had graduated this year.

Aside from being a rock star, Bono is the most effective celebrity activist of our time. Trading on his stardom, he is working to end poverty and AIDS in Africa--using the tool of forgiveness of Third World debt by international financial bodies and western governments.

He is also one of the best speakers of our time. He gave the speeches inducting Bob Marley and Bruce Springsteen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the introduction speech for Frank Sinatra's Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammy's. All of these speeches are incredible--funny, touching and uplifting.

Bono is my age and his speech resonated with me on many levels:

"I was 17 when I first saw The Clash, and it just sounded like revolution. The Clash were like, 'This is a public service announcement--with guitars.' I was the kid in the crowd who took it at face value. Later I learned that a lot of the rebels were in it for the T-shirt. They'd wear the boots but they wouldn't march. They'd smash bottles on their heads but they wouldn't go to something more painful like a town hall meeting. By the way I felt like that myself until recently."

"I didn't expect change to come so slow, so agonizingly slow. I didn't realize that the biggest obstacle to political and social progress wasn't the Free Masons, or the Establishment, or the boot heal of whatever you consider 'the Man' to be, it was something much more subtle. As the Provost just referred to, a combination of our own indifference and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of 'no's you encounter as people vanish down the corridors of bureaucracy."

"There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly,  and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it." What does that mean to betray the age? Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths."

I could quote the whole speech--go back to the top and hit the link for the whole thing. I've got to go blast my copy of Rattle & Hum!

A new survey by the National Endowment for the Arts finds that fewer Americans are reading serious literature. I have always been an avid reader, the summer trips to the library being a highlight of my childhood. Even though I find it hard to believe, my mother used to insist that the first book I read was "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain. I do remember reading the book though--and many others off my parents' shelves.

I always thought that I came by my political ideals and my love of debate as dinner table discussion from my reading. I was armed. In later life I have come to believe young people who become serious readers will avoid the problems I see daily in my community--drug addiction, crime, teenage pregnancy. They too will be armed.

I may be a naive middle-class white guy, born and bred in the suburbs, but I still believe this to be true. It may be true for more than just serious reading. I'm always a sucker for those stories about urban kids who turn their lives around after they get into say chess or fencing. I guess anything that instills discipline and makes you stretch your brain will work.

"Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul." Thomas Paine

This was a favorite quote of Saul Alinsky, who developed the idea of community organizing.

One of the reasons that I love my job as a community organizer is the opportunity to directly confront our enemies. Successful community organizations believe in direct action, showing up at the homes or offices of the people, politicians and/or businesses that are screwing up our neighborhoods. We try to have some fun, but our "hits" are deadly serious. We have demands--a meeting, a list of things to fix or maybe just publicity.

In the past couple of years we have gone to the homes and offices of Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll, County Executive Nick Pirro and M & T President Matt Schiro. Just this past month we went to the office of the Onondaga County Republican Party to protest President Bush's cuts to the Section 8 housing voucher program.

Every time the community group that I work for engages in direct action, or what we call a hit, we come in for criticism from a wide variety of sources.

Saul Alinsky, in a long interview published in the late 1960's said "People don't get opportunity or freedom or equality or dignity as an act of charity; they have to fight for it, force it out of the establishment. This liberal cliche about reconciliation of opposing forces is a load of crap. Reconciliation means just one thing: When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it."

I always tell those people that are opposed to our tactics that we are walking in the footsteps of Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. I do believe that, but I hear Alinsky in my mind more than the acknowledged patron saints of non-violent direct action. I also hear the words of one of our members. She's a very sweet and kind African-American woman in her seventies who cares for her ailing husband. She wishes she could be more active, and she says she really misses being able to go on hits with us. It reminds her of the Civil Rights movement. "I really like it when you shake people up. We need to do more of that."

See you at the next protest!