In Praise Of Community Organizers

I saw the happiest looking person I’ve ever seen in my life one day while making a turn into the school parking lot; he was pushing a shopping cart that appeared to be full of an entire chain link fence. His clothes were ratty, shoes beaten up and his stocking hat was falling off his head, but the smile on this guy was priceless.

Lord knows where he got the fence from or how he managed to stuff it in his shopping cart, but it’s no mystery that he was going to take his winnings to a local scrap metal shop and earn a few bucks. I won’t venture a guess to how he spent his money, but I have a few ideas.

When Sarah Palin made her mocking remark about community organizers not really doing anything or having responsibilities, it sounded to me like a swipe at the inner cities of the country. These are the communities where some people are so hopeless that they put fences in shopping carts to earn money and where schools churn out uneducated and unprepared citizens. These are communities that don’t need our mocking; they need our conservative ideas carried out with ground-level action.

I work with community organizers at my school. They spend day and night in a small windowless room in a poorly heated part of our very poor, mismanaged and mistreated school building. Each Friday, they hold a week in review meeting. I have been fortunate as a human being to sit in on a few of these meetings.

The issues discussed at the meetings are powerful: Teen homelessness, single teenage mothers without transportation to their job out in the county or at the airport, how to clean up the crack houses across the street from the school so the students don’t have to see it on their way in and out of school, and on and on.

It’s not helpful for Republicans to mock these communities. There’s no doubt that the family structure must improve in our inner cities – that goes without saying. Certainly, cities won’t tidy up like a neat suburban neighborhood or traditional small town until Mom and Dad are taking responsibility for raising their kid and putting food on the table. Until that happens, though, what are we as Republicans doing about it at the ground level?

We can continue to call the Democrats “elite” and laugh off their false hopes and high ideas. But which party seems more elitist to someone in an inner city when a leader like Palin basically laughs off their communities? I don’t agree with how the Democrats go about governing inner city communities, but it disgusts me that our party let’s them get away with it by being as disengaged as we are. This is especially true among young adults around my age, 24, who are committed to issues of justice for the less fortunate ranks in the country. Of course my peers will turn to the Democrat party – the one that seems to give a rip about those who are less fortunate!

It’s so obvious where I work that anti-poverty programs don’t work. After school each day, kids line up outside a room where they are served fruit juice and bags of Doritos or Lays by a separate community organization group from the one described earlier. The snack isn’t solving the problem of hunger in a school where many kids are hungry; it’s a little band-aid. The snack is another thing now that the kids expect the school to give them.

I disagree with the handout, but I admire people who are trying to help in our school. I don’t give out food; I give out knowledge and empower students to make their own decisions. The Democrats believe they are their brother’s keeper. And even if that just means handing out a bag of chips in a run-down school, it’s more than Republican and conservative organizations are doing by sitting on the sidelines when it comes to inner city issues.