Change by electronic communication?: "The death of activism"

Community organiser and Chicagoan Saul Alinsky, circa 1946: 'I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back.' Photograph: Myron Davis/Time & Life/Getty

Clancy Siga(GuardianUK):

We've plenty to protest about in the US, but on the streets there is no dissent. Why is our liberal mood so paralytic?---In my middle-class neighbourhood, you can organise people around dog-walking exchanges, the crimewatch duty roster, mutual baby-sitting, earthquake preparedness and dire household emergencies. But even the most liberal-minded among us seem totally spooked by the currently toxic idea of politically organising our private economic tragedies into any form of communal resistance to Bush-Obama's class warfare – skyrocketing unemployment, home foreclosures, bank failures, vanished investments and social service cuts that directly affect us. Politics? Ugh. Please, don't bother me. I'd rather talk about Tony Soprano's latest session with his leggy shrink.
(SNIP)
The late, great Chicago community organiser Saul Alinsky liked saying that the only way to activate people is to appeal not to altruism but to their self-interest. Yet perceived self-interest is unpredictable and sometimes comes from the heart as well as the pocketbook. For example, all across the country, ordinary, deeply conservative Catholic parishioners have recently been motivated to march, protest, sit-in and even barricade themselves when they felt threatened by local church closures demanded by a cost-cutting hierarchy hungry for money to pay out in the sex assault cases.

Rank-and-file parishioners didn't organise by listservs or electronic communication but face to face, neighbour to neighbour. MORE...