Obama's Organizers

There is a lot of depressing stuff going on out there these days. But if I may bloviate a little, if we have one unadulterated force for good in the world right now I think it may be the Obama campaign and what it is doing to bring people together and build the infrastructure and social capital that is absolutely necessary to creating a healthier nation. Most of us here have felt it at least in some small way. This is a great, great (and long) article about how the Obama organizers are doing things differently than ever before, and succeeding beyond their wildest dreams:

In the middle of a good organizing campaign, volunteers will stop and tell you that they are becoming better people. That's sounds cheesy, doesn't it? But I'll tell you, I wrote that line in a first draft of this article while waiting for my own neighborhood team meeting to start in Westport, Kansas City, Missouri. I looked at it and thought, "People won't buy that." I figured I'd delete it.

Then, at the end of our meeting, my neighborhood team leader, Jennifer Robinson, totally unprompted, told me: "I'm a different person than I was six weeks ago." I asked her to elaborate later. She said, "Now, I'm really asking: how can I be most effective in my community? I've realized that these things I've been doing as a volunteer organizer—well, I'm really good at them, I have a passion for this. I want to continue to find ways to actively make this place, my community, a better place. There's so much more than a regular job in this—and once you've had this, it's hard to go back to a regular job. I'm asking now: Can I look for permanent work as an organizer in service of my community? And that's a question I had not asked myself before the campaign. It never occurred to me that I could even ask that question."