Remember that even if you cannot win over the lower middle-class, at least parts of them must be persuaded to where there is at least communication, then to a series of partial agreements and a willingness to abstain from hard opposition as changes take place. They have their role to play in the essential prelude of reformation, in their acceptance that the ways of the past with its promises for the future no longer work and we must move ahead -- where we move to may not be definite or certain, but move we must. People must be reformed -- so they cannot be deformed into dependency and driven through desperation to dictatorship and the death of freedom. The silent majority, now, are hurt, bitter, suspicious, feeling rejected and at bay. This sick condition in many ways is as explosive as the current race crisis. Their fears and frustrations at their helplessnesses are mounting to a point of a political paranoia which can demonize people to turn to the law of survival in the narrowest sense. These emotions can go either to the far right of totalitarianism or forward to Act II of the American Revolution. The issues of 1972 would be those of 1776, No Taxation Without Representation. To have real representation would involve public funds being available for campaign costs so that the member of the lower middle class can campaign for political office. This can be an issue for mobilization among the lower middle class and substantial sectors of the middle class. The rest of the middle class, with few exceptions, reside in suburbia, living in the illusions of partial escape. Being more literate, they are even more lost. Nothing seems to make sense. They thought that a split-level house in the suburbs, two cars, two color TVs, country club membership, a bank account, children in good prep schools and then in college, and they had it made. They got it -- only to discover that didnt have it. Many have lost their children -- they dropped out of sight into something called the generation gap. They have seen values they held sacred sneered at and found themselves ridiculed as squares or relics of a dead world. The frenetic scene around them is so bewildering as to induce them to either drop out into a private world, the nonexistent past, sick with its own form of of social schizophrenia -- or to face it and move into action. If one wants to act, the dilemma is how and where; there is no when? pp 189-191 of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky published 1971
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 07:03:55 +0000
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