Millions of People

One of the most important aspects of doing organizing is the idea of communication. Communication is essential to every and all degrees of organizing. After all, organizing is about people power, not corporate power, so what activists continually draw off of is the power to bring many people together around a common good cause. In a globalized community, bringing people together is much more complex than it was 100 years ago, when people were brought together through direct interaction through calling a meeting.

Today, things are different yesterday, I probably made 100 phone calls to different people throughout the community wanting to know if they would be intrested in having a Labor in the Pulpits program at their congregation. Although I talked to so very many people, I came to the realization that organizing is about relationships, and the new avenues that we have for communication leave us with a sense of alienation from not only ourselves, but the people that we talk to. The internet, the phone and all other forms of communication can never be nearly as effective as the face to face, sit down one on one conversation. On the phone, through the internet, we mask our identities from one another, and although it is highly efficient, much of the time it leaves us wondering who or what the person that we were talking to is all about. These forms of communication are good if your not really looking to get to know somebody, but if we wish to find out who and what the people in our community are all about, they leave us wanting.

In human interaction so much of the time, we only focus on what we see as seemingly important so much of the time. We discuss at our places of work what tasks need to be accomplished with our co-workers, at home, we take this socailly constructed philosophy home to our friends and relationships and simply continue it. We drive ourselves to such a great degree of efficiency that we get lost in what is really important in the end. The feelings thoughts and emotions that each person feels, but never has the chance to completely vocalize because of the way that things have been structured. It sort of seems like a great loss to me, such a great chance to interact on a level that is not clich'e or efficient. In these interactions, we feel, we move and we change in mostly positive fashion.