Sound familiar?
Follow the word “change” here:
In Rules for Radicals, [Saul] Alinsky outlines his strategy in organizing, writing in the prologue,
“There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution…”
The Alinsky model for community organizing came up today in a compelling interview for ‘America’s Lifeline’ this week (we had a last minute switch). The guest was on to talk about social moral/bioethical issues of the day, especially this week’s embryonic stem cell order. He turned out also to be a former Chicago community organizer trained by those rules and that model. And he pointedly emphasized that it forms your instincts to create not only a new worldview, but a new world.
One of the rules, he stressed, was ‘pick an enemy.’
rule 12: “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Right now, the guest said, the organizer is the president, and the enemy is the pro-life movement.
