Prologue xxiiiOriginally Posted by dwarthog
how bad things are now, they are better than that." So they begin to turn
back. They regress into acceptance of a coming massive repression in the
name of "law and order."
In the midst of the gassing and violence by the Chicago Police and
National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention many students
asked me, "Do you still believe we should try to work inside our system?"
These were students who had been with Eugene McCarthy in New
Hampshire and followed him across the country. Some had been with
Robert Kennedy when he was killed in Los Angeles. Many of the tears that
were shed in Chicago were not from gas. "Mr. Alinsky, we fought in
primary after primary and the people voted noov\ Vietnam. Look at that
convention. They're not paying any attention to the vote. Look at your
police and the army. You still want us to work in the system?"
It hurt me to see the American army with drawn bayonets advancing on
American boys and girls. But the answer I gave the young radicals
seemed to me the only realistic one: "Do one of three things. One, go find
a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start
bombing — but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a
lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you
be the delegates. "
Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly
agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From
there it's a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon
pollution.
It is not enough just to elect your candidates. You must keep the pressure
on. Radicals should keep in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a
reform delegation, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring
pressure on me!" Action comes from keeping the heat on.
Prologue xxiv
No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
As for Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the first in the history of
man to publicly say, "We were wrong! What we did was horrible. We got in
and kept getting in deeper and deeper and at every step we invented new
reasons for staying. We have paid part of the price in 44,000 dead
Americans. There is nothing we can ever do to make it up to the people of
Indo-China — or to our own people — but we will try. We believe that our
world has come of age so that it is no longer a sign of weakness or defeat
to abandon a childish pride and vanity, to admit we were wrong." Such an
admission would shake up the foreign policy concepts of all nations and
open the door to a new international order. This is our alternative to
Vietnam — anything else is the old makeshift patchwork. If this were to
happen, Vietnam may even have been somewhat worth it.
A final word on our system. The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of
liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights
of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of
religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state.
The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the
individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve
as much of his potential as possible.
Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of
destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Thus the greatest
enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
From the beginning the weakness as well as the strength of the
democratic ideal has been the people.
So this is your overthrow the government?
