Origins of An Organizer

It interests me as well how the social position of Community Organizer received far greater attention with the rise of the Obama spectacle. He effectively called attention to its importance, not permitting that people in high school, junior high school and elsewhere might note his ‘accomplishments’ and use them as a model for themselves, their own activity. I remember back to junior college myself, feeling as if there wasn’t quite yet a social position, a category for what I wanted to do, but increasingly, I see there is. Still, many have been left out in the singular scrutiny and credit Obama has received. So many Organizers who will remain unknown and unconsidered. 

It is a trend of the spectacle to fixate on a handful of individuals (possibly) in order to displace an explanation which suggests far greater participation in such activity or merely for the purposes of commercial and political concision, relegating those who do not cleanly fit the bill to official and written and archived historical oblivion.

On a more personal note, I feel the yearning for academic life has not yet deserted me, even if I have relatively little time to dedicate to it (while I do, certainly dedicate every non-committed waking hour to these questions and matters nonetheless). 

Other questions that continue to interest me – what do we mean when we say ‘organizer; what and who are they organizing exactly and what qualifies them to determine the standard for organizing? That is, to what end? These questions remain marginalized as pundits and advertisers look for expedient ways to simply frame and circulate a superficial understanding of what it may be – assuming a lay appreciation of the term – in order partially to avoid a more complex discussion of what is assumed but not explained or explored.

Hopefully I’ll return to them in up and coming posts.

Moreover, it’s not just with his rise in notoriety that we begin to care further about the position of those who work to solidify, furnish and fabricate necessary community relationships within, inside of and between different local, regional and global communities, but with a more broadly felt sense that, perhaps the way that we’ve created this world – as result of the structures of political economy that predominate and are routinely reproduced – has directly resulted in the absolute demolition of community, or at least the production of a false or hollow sense of it that systematically fails to provide that which we hope to produce.

That we have people paid to fix, arrange and produce Community says so much about the tragic state of the world, and, forebodingly, a lot less about what we might actually be able to do to go about changing it.