LIVING FOR CHANGE

The Authenticity of Obama's Leadership

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Feb. 24-Mar. 1, 2008

My eyes and ears are riveted to TV. I can't get enough of Obama's calling upon Americans of all ages, all walks of life, all faiths, all abilities, all sexual orientations, all political leanings, to stop thinking like victims and start believing that we have the power within ourselves to create the world anew.

"I am asking you to believe not only in my ability to bring about change in Washington. I am asking you to believe in yours."

Obama is providing the authentic, visionary leadership we need in this period when our challenges are so great and our politics (as he puts it in The Audacity of Hope) so small.

That kind of leadership is very precious.

26 year-old MLK provided it in 1955 when he inspired Montgomery blacks, sick and tired of being sick and tired, to go beyond protest and manifest a more advanced humanity in their yearlong non-violent boycott.

Jimmy Boggs anticipated it when he said in his last speech to University of Michigan students in 1991 "I don't believe nobody can run this country better than me. I'm saying you better think that way. You need to stop thinking of yourself as a minority because thinking like a minority means you're thinking like an underling. Everyone is capable of going beyond where they are."

Liberals and radicals tend to be skeptical of this kind of leadership.

Viewing society as a laundry list of problems, liberals promise solutions. Radicals, having concluded that another world is necessary, begin to lose hope that another world is possible when only a few people show up for their meetings.

Obama does not promise solutions. He doesn't view people as masses. Out of his experiences as a community organizer and his dialectical/historical appreciation of movement building in the U.S., he is asking us to become active citizens, builders of a new America that all of us will be proud to call our own.

As he put it in a 1995 interview:

"What we need in America, especially in the African-American community, is a moral agenda that is tied to a concrete agenda for building and rebuilding our communities, We have moved beyond the clarion call stage needed during the civil rights movement. Now we must move into a building stage"

"We have no shortage of moral fervor, In every church on Sunday in the African-American community we have fervor. But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates. The biggest failure of the civil rights movement was in failing to translate this moral fervor into creating lasting institutions and organizational structures"

Chicago's first African American mayor, Harold Washington was the best of the classic politicians, But he, like all politicians, was primarily interested in maintaining his power and working the levers of power. He was a classic charismatic leader,..

"How do we rebuild our schools? How do we rebuild our communities? How do we create safer streets? What concretely can we do together to achieve these goals?"

"For our agenda to work, we can't see voters or communities as consumers, as mere recipients or beneficiaries of this change. It's time for politicians and other leaders to see voters, residents or citizens as producers of this change. The thrust of our organizing must be the whole agenda of creating productive communities. That is where our future lies.

"The right wing talks about this but they keep appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and get out. Our goal must be to help people get a sense of building something larger…

"People are hungry for community, hungry for change…

"What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions"

"The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility"

"Now we have to take these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society. Let's talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more."

That is what Detroit City of Hope is about.

Email Grace Boggs Center,

LIVING FOR CHANGE

A New Generation, Out of Obscurity

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, Feb. 17-23, 2008

If you want to know more about the young people who are making Obama’s presidential campaign not just a fairy tale, you need to read their blogs.

Here are the reflections of one blogger:

She begins with excerpts from a speech by Obama during his first state senator’s campaign in 1995 (which she found only after Obama had inspired her to re-engage with electoral politics),

“…What we need in America, especially in the African-American community, is a moral agenda that is tied to a concrete agenda for building and rebuilding our communities,…

“…What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.”

Then she speaks for herself:

“This moment that I hadn’t anticipated has clearly come. We have a presidential candidate who not only engenders our belief in his ability and integrity, but pushes us to transform ourselves.

“Obama has a subtle and beautiful undertone in all his messaging. He’s talking about all of us doing this thing called democracy together. He can’t get away from the spotlight and the adulation that many, myself included, project onto him, but I think he’s asking us to become something higher than ourselves.

“Obama is the first presidential candidate that has successfully built a campaign around Gandhi’s ‘be the change you want to see in the world.‘ This is where I love his background as an organizer. It’s the first time I’ve seen someone effectively articulate the need for each of us to become engaged in the process, rather than spouting more politics-as-usual rhetoric. This is the kind of leadership this country needs.”

I know the young woman who wrote this blog . After graduating from college, she became an environmental justice organizer in Detroit where she was also active in the Detroit Asian Youth Project, the Detroit Summer Collective and the League of Young Voters campaign. From her own experiences as an organizer, she can appreciate the difference between aggressive campaigning and the “simply meeting people where they are” community organizing of the Obama faith-based mobilizations.

She believes that another world is both possible and necessary and that we must change both ourselves and the world in order to slow down global warming, to keep five million of the world’s children under 5 from dying of malnutrition and disease every year, and to stop the commodification of all our human relationships by corporate globalization. To realize her own humanity and to make this country a beacon rather than an enemy to the world, she is committing her heart, hands and head to creating this new world.

Like many other young people whom I have met on college campuses and in community organizations all over the United States, she is like “the pitcher who yearns for water to carry” (in Marge Piercy’s poem To be of use). She isn’t just looking for a job. She yearns for work that is real.

Obama is the catalyst that has brought this new generation out of obscurity onto the historical stage. But they were already in the wings.

These young people are our children, our grandchildren, our nieces and nephews. We should be encouraging, supporting, joining them in the many ways in which they are rebuilding, redefining and respiriting our communities. Our future and the future of our communities, our country and our planet depend on them. We can’t leave it all up to Obama.

Email Grace Boggs Center,

King’s Legacy of Change

by Grace Lee Boggs

I have had the privilege of participating in most of the great humanizing movements of the second half of the last century: peace, labor, civil rights, black power, women’s rights, Asian-American rights and environmental justice. Each was a tremendously transformative experience, expanding my understanding of what it means to be an American and a human being, challenging me to become more visionary and creative in developing strategies to bring about radical social change.

In all of those movements, Americans found the courage to question what kind of people we were and the wisdom to change ourselves into a people offering new hope in the world. The struggles of African-Americans for full citizenship and dignity inspired more than a half-century of progressive movements in the United States and around the world. People long denied and disrespected found their voices in the struggles.

More than forty years ago, The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that unless we engage in a great revolution of values and overcome racism, materialism and militarism, we would be “dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

That dark time has come. We face a constitutional crisis brought on by the imperial and arrogant acts of a President who has placed himself above the law and is conducting an illegal war, subverting the Constitution and willfully ignoring a planetary crisis that threatens the future of life on earth. As we are manipulated by fear and distrust, despair overcomes decency. We are losing faith in our capacity to create the world anew.

As we celebrate King’s birthday this month and commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his assassination in April, we can look to the guiding light of his vision, at the height of his awareness, before he was taken from us. It is a vision that went beyond the “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a vision of which many are unaware. Many of us have amnesia when asked to recall the fullness of his message.

In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a world revolution because we refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.”

“We have come to value things more than people,” he said. “Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”

In order to get on the right side of that revolution, King said that as a nation America must undergo a radical revolution of values against the giant triad of racism, materialism and militarism.

“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The urban rebellions had also made King acutely aware of the need of young people for community and participation. “This generation,” he said, “is engaged in a cold war with the earlier generation. It is not the familiar and normal hostility of the young groping for independence. It has a new quality of bitter antagonism and confused anger which suggests basic values are being contested.

“The source of this alienation is that our society has made material growth and technological advance an end in itself, robbing people of participation, so that human beings become smaller while their works become bigger.”

The way to overcome this alienation, he said, is by changing our priorities. Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for “agape,” the love that is ready to go to any length to restore community.

This love, King insisted, is not some sentimental weakness. We can learn its practical meaning from the young people who joined the civil rights movement, who put middle-class values of wealth and careers in second place, put on overalls to work in the isolated rural South because they felt the need for more direct ways of learning that would strengthen society and themselves.

At 92, going on 93, I am fortunate to still be around to rejoice at the new energies being unleashed all across this country by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In his person and in his prose, Obama embodies the achievements of the great movements of the twentieth century and the hope that by building on these movements we can become the agents of change that we urgently need in our country and in the world in the twenty-first century.

The challenges before us now are not unlike those King described: ending our catastrophic occupation of Iraq, addressing global warming, rebuilding cities and industries devastated by globalization, reducing the growing gulf between the haves and the have-nots. These demand huge changes, not only in our institutions but in ourselves. To become part of the solution, we, as a people, must recognize that we are a large part of the problem. To change the world, we must practice a much more active and participatory concept of American and global citizenship.

Obama can become a great President only if we become a great people. Though his image inspires us, Obama alone is not the movement for change. We have the right and the duty to create the vision that we want him to represent. Instead of projecting desired outcomes on his redemptive persona, instead of viewing ourselves solely as followers of a charismatic leader, we can and must become the leaders the nation has been looking for. This is the best way to make us less vulnerable to corporate funders and lobbyists who refract our values for private gain.

None of us can step back from the responsibility of becoming part of the solution. Because of the struggles of working people in factories and on farms, African-Americans, women, Chicanos, Native Americans and immigrants, gay people, youth and the disabled, all of us have a new “burden and responsibility.” All of us have the opportunity to create a more human, more socially conscious and more ecologically responsible nation. I cannot imagine a better way to celebrate King’s birthday and to honor his true legacy.

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer and speaker whose nearly seventy years of political involvement encompass the major US social movements of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, Living for Change (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), is widely used in university classes on social movements, the history of Detroit and Asian-American studies.

© 2008 The Nation