Rules for Radicals

While I may not have agreed with his politics, Saul Alinksy, (1909-1972), was truly one of the most masterful and powerful organizers. His belief in empowering people to confront “the system”, and his methods of doing so, ring true today. Especially in Delaware. While he focused mostly on the poor and disenfranchised, he also saw that the middle class was ripe for revolution. In an interview with Playboy Magazine in 1972, he says,

“Remember, people are people whether they're living in ghettos, reservations or barrios, and the suburbs are just another kind of reservation -- a gilded ghetto.”

Think about yourself, your situation, your perception of your own power to shape your own destiny. Whose hands is it in? Some senator, representative, insurance company, developer, government agency or business? How do you feel about your sphere of influence and those of your neighbors? Sure, we all bitch and moan and complain, but do we do anything about it?

Saul Alinsky goes on to say in the interview:

“The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.”

Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, is for real. It shows you how to deal. But to be effective, you must discard your middle-class niceness and deal with the enemy on your own terms. Understand their turf: power, authority, longevity, comfort needs. Confront them. Demand to be heard. And if you think about it, it is not really all that radical. It is just trying to ingest a little common sense into the process.

A perfect example of the Alinsky tradition is John Allison, author of Kilroy’s Delaware. Here is a man intensely involved in education issues. Here is a man of both passion and humor. If you can’t handle his get-in-your-face blog, you may as well go back to your HD-TV and call it a life. Are you pissed off? Do you know a better way? Make it known instead of just bitchin’.

In his book, Alinsky says,

“I do not propose to be trapped by tact at the expense of truth”.

Are you trapped?

Get involved. Make a difference. Get up off of your sorry ass.

“To know power and not fear it is essential to its constructive use and control”. – Saul Alinsky