Howard Zinn

A good home garden is organized. Plants are arranged in good soil, in sun or shade, in rows, hills or bunch. Plants are weeded, pruned and watered as they need to be. The gardener is the organizer of the garden. A good business is organized. Tasks get done on time, there is accountability and hard work pays off.

Yet when it comes making changes in our government structures we are all over the place and are not very well organized. Some want this changed and some want that changed and sometimes groups want the same thing but compete against each other, rather than work together, to do the job.

I was talking today with a friend how we in the peace and justice movements need to organize and work together to make significant change. We talk cooperation and community but do not organize in action. Thus the powers structures that be do not change.

Hearing the historian Howard Zinn talk about “people history’ tonight on TV I heard the same message from him that I heard in 1968 when he testified in the trial of the Milwaukee 14: change in a democracy comes from the bottom up, not from the bottom down. We need to work together, to organize, and sometimes we may even need to engage in civil disobedience to change structures. Watching a video tonight on the History of India I saw how a famous ‘war lord’, hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, discovered the power of ‘nonviolence’, organized and made changes that radically changed the course of history in India.

Look at the nice garden, how it is well organized. Learn from the garden and history. Organize!

Comments

(:commentboxchrono:)