This was democracy in action. “There were fifty unions in line,” said the local paper. “For three hours,” wrote another journalist, the bridge to Harriet Island “was a mass of moving heads and shuffling feet.”
In the days leading up to the Republican National Convention, protesters hung out at Harriet Island Regional Park. They created Bushville. Threatened with eviction by the police, the protestors held firm. On September 1, Labor Day, the police arrested a number of protestors, including two producers from the Democracy Now radio show. When Amy Goodman, the show’s host, went to find out about her colleagues, she was arrested also.
Charles James would be outraged by the actions of his city today.
The entire purpose of a democracy is to widen civic, democratic action: people need to be involved in the process of social life through their various kinds of action.
By contrast, inside the convention hall a few days after Goodman’s arrest, the Vice Presidential pick of the Republican Party Sarah Palin belittled community organizers. In doing so, she confirmed that her party’s idea of democracy is in agreement with those who arrested Goodman and her colleagues.
“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’” she sneered, “except that you have actual responsibilities.”
More than an attack on Senator Obama, Palin’s disparaging comment took a swipe at democracy. What her comment glosses over is the fact that often the good in America does not come from the mayor’s office, but from the streets: abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights organizers, liberationists of various kinds, and yes, community organizers. And they are not only the foot-soldiers of Justice, but also their own leaders (hence our slogan: We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For).
Palin doesn’t get that community organizers have to hold the squirming hands of mayors as they sign any ordinance that benefits the bulk of the people.
If you go to any city in America, you’ll see the community organizers hard at work, many in communities of color. They are people of tomorrow, people of all backgrounds, who love freedom, who inhabit a consensual and community-building ethic. These are the people who Usher has in mind, when he sang “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
By contrast, Republican democracy, advanced by Palin and applauded by the Republican National Convention floor, is the jack-boot. It’s Rudolph Giuliani, whose speech sounded better in the original German (to steal from the late Molly Ivins). It’s Palin, who wants to pour oil on the Constitution of Obama’s Constitutional safeguards.
“Al Qaeda terrorists, she belched in her comments, “still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America—he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”
We have to fight for another America—an America committed to building the democracy that is possible, not the Republican democracy that wants us to be afraid.
Vijay Prashad is the author of the Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and professor of International Studies at Trinity College.
