WHAT NOW?

Dr. Frances Piven, who I bother from time to time about old
movement tumult, has written a piece in The Nation entitled
“Obama Needs a Protest Movement”. I couldn’t get the
damn thing out of my mind…. In some ways, it reflected
my own view of things…..but more importantly it organized
my feelings….gave shape to my unexpected sense of loneliness,
even despair…that followed the election. I couldn’t figure out
on that Tuesday evening, with everyone around me rattling and
raving about this incredible turn of events, why I was silent,
confused and even a little depressed.

The only thing I remember saying that night, when it became
clear that Barack Obama was going to be elected, was
“I’m 78 years old!”

I don’t know what the hell I meant, except that I probably wanted
a piece of the applause and wanted to explain that it had been a long,
unbelievable struggle that had consumed most of my life.
If I had really celebrated (maybe even taken a jar) I probably
would have started shouting a bunch of slogans and all sorts
of nonsense….and my friends would have locked me up.

With her faultless prose, Dr. Piven explains her title by making
the parallel with the election of 1932….that both FDR and
Obama came to office at time of “economic catastrophe” and
that both were great orators. I might add some further similarities
of both their predecessors. And she goes on describe the movements
of the 30s; bread riots, rent riots and the crowds of unemployed
that marched through the streets in New York and Chicago
….suggesting that Obama, despite his argument for change “from
the bottom up” will need the boost of widespread dissent to unify
and mobilize the country.

It occurred to me that she may have missed a piece of the puzzle.
Both Dr. Piven and I agree that the background music for this
marvelous turn of American events is very different than it was
76 years ago. I should explain that both of us were hip deep in
the modern civil rights movement….and she and her partner Richard
Cloward went far beyond me…sustaining the struggle and , as Jim
Farmer once said to me, “clearing up the battlefield” with initiatives
on welfare and voting reform.

But I have to go back to that feeling of despair that I felt the night
of Obama’s election. I miss the action something awful….and
it’s possible Frances Piven does as well.

There is no question that America is still, as she says,
“divided by race, by party, by class” But it is just possible
that a new game is afoot. That the arc of our lives, the
continuing protests, have brought us to a place where serious
social and political change can come with the diplomacy
of an elegantly-led democracy. That the new generation
(who I don’t envy) can pour their lives into the work of the
civilians of this world; tolerance, the dying ice, fossilized poverty
and violence.

Have we won? Certainly not.

But it’s been one hell of a trip.