It was a great rally. It was many great rallies. It was more than 7 million people out in the streets saying “No Kings!” It was also simply a tool in the process of organizing.
I started as a professional community organizer back in the late 1990’s working for an organization called SOCM in East Tennessee. I was just out of college and had the justified anger and the will to fight every day for social social justice and the big environmental wins. I was there to stop the multinational corporations that were clearcutting the foresting and stripmining the hills. I knew if we just fought hard enough, rallied enough, yelled loud enough, we would win. We had to win. There was no other option. We had to save the world.
Every month I had to take on the hardest struggle of my organizing work. I had to first write my work plan then, even more challenging, I had to sit down with my boss, Mo, and review and edit that work plan. Every single month Mo would ask me the same question multiple times as we went down my list of things to do. She kept asking me over and over– “How does this move the work forward?”
That question still echoes in my mind. “How does this move the work forward?” Rallies are great. They are important. Writing to your legislator, voting, writing letters to the editor, signing petitions, volunteering, and some many activites are wonderful things. But, we must remember that each is simply a tool. What is it that we are working to do? It’s not enough to simply point out that Trump is not good for the US or the world. We have to develop and work toward a different answer.
Are we working to save democracy? What does democracy really look like? What is the role of the grassroots in a healthy, functioning democracy? Once we start asking ourselves those questions and really coming up with our vision of what a healthy, functioning democracy based in the power of the grassroots might look like then we can speak to that question “How does this move the work forward” with each and every action that we take. Each thing that we do needs to move toward the goal.
We don’t rally for the sake of rallying. Rallies are a tool. Let’s use them in the best ways possible. Let’s ask ourselves “How does this move the work forward?” When we make our path and goal clear the seven million engages beyond the day of the rally and the movement multiplies. We can win. First step is knowing what winning is. Is our goal to save or rebuild democracy or is it simply to get Trump out of office? Second step is figure out what we need to meet that goal. Third step is to determine how we get those things that we need whether it be redistricing or strong presidential candidate or any of a hundred other things. Next we prepare to act while asking ourselves every step of the way, “How does this move the work forward?”
It is a long and hard journey. We know that. We also know that long journeys are often much easier once we pull out a map. It’s time to create our map of where we want to go.
