Lived Through This by Anne K. Ream

Author:Anne K. Ream [Ream, Anne K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3337-1
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

New Rules for Radicals

I had been waiting for this man all of my life, so of course I fell head over heels when I finally encountered him. I loved his Jewish humor. I thrilled, as only a good Methodist girl can, to his bad-boy propensity for citing Lucifer, whom he considered history’s first great rebel. I even forgave him his relative indifference to women’s issues and his chain-smoking ways (a virtuous man must have at least one vice to be bearable).

I loved him for a dozen reasons, but mostly I loved him because he helped me make a sort of moral sense of my own worldview. He taught me that my ability to assimilate might—might—be wise instead of weak, if I chose to use that ability for the good. He convinced me that I could engage in radical acts while wearing four-inch heels (the better with which to be underestimated, my dear). He showed me that using words and stories that pull people in, instead of pushing them away, could open hearts and minds in a way that angry confrontation sometimes can’t. Make people feel, he instructed me, and then you can get them to act.

His name was Saul Alinsky. I never met him—when he died of a massive heart attack in 1972, I was just seven years old. But years later, when I discovered his groundbreaking third book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, it didn’t so much change my worldview as challenge me to act on that worldview in a new way.

Alinsky is sui generis, an activist who is widely considered the founder of modern community organizing, and Rules for Radicals is a blueprint for anyone interested in changing public opinion or public policy. Alinsky’s reach has been long and wide. Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote her Wellesley senior honors thesis about the man, and President Obama was inspired enough by Alinsky’s teachings to follow in his Chicago community-organizing footsteps, a fact that briefly made headlines during the 2012 presidential campaign (the words “radical” and “President Obama” being too irresistible a combination for Fox News to resist).

Alinsky was a radical in the true and most noble sense of the word—he wanted real change, in real time, and he believed that the fight for the poor, the marginalized, and the maligned depended on it. But beliefs are not the subject of Rules for Radicals. Tactics are. In the world according to Saul Alinsky, the desire to change things is good. But the ability to change things is, in the end, what matters.

No contemporary corporate CEO bandies about the idea of “getting results” with more relish than does Alinsky. He was a realist, but more than that he was a strategist—someone who believed that we work, and think, our way to change. He makes clear, over and over again, that passion must be paired with pragmatism to matter much at all. “Start from where the world is, as it is,” he implores his readers. “It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.

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