The headline refers to James Russell Lowell's essay The Present Crisis and hymn lyrics from the America of the 1840s. That crisis was the nation's enthrallment to human bondage, to organizing itself around holding millions of humans in chattel slavery. Lowell saw clearly that this crisis would not be resolved without disruptions and death -- as the slave system was death in life.
Yesterday a small crowd gathered at Manny's in the Mission to hear and meet Marshall Ganz, practitioner and theorist of organizing of the latter part of the last century. (Like me, but teaching at Harvard.) Marshall has a new book.
I love what the man has done and built and inspired. He was vital to Cesar Chavez in the best days of the United Farm Workers Union and movement in the 1960s/70s. He's taught many organizers.
But I couldn't help feeling he was out of touch with too much that is contemporary in the best of current organizing ... mostly led by women, almost always prominently Black women.
The terrible Trump regime ahead is a new occasion and the fight back will be new. That's what I know these days.
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