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In reply to the discussion: This, my friends, is far too typical for my generation. [View all]struggle4progress
(117,949 posts)Nobody likes it when I tell them to choose between doing the work and getting the credit, but it often seems to me an essential distinction to make in political action: what frequently wins is great unglamorous heaps of nitty-gritty nuts-and-bolts work, that doesn't sound at all hard to do when you describe it to somebody else, but that is really key to the whole thing
I mean, for example, spending days and weeks and months or more, trying to get people to take an issue seriously, and collecting a name or ten names at a time and making sure somebody calls them to show up for something more every now and then, and finally getting together more than a handful of people, and suddenly you've got several hundred folk in a room all clamoring for real action, and they vote for somebody to coordinate stuff, and you make a suggestion, and everybody turns around with who-the-fuck-are-you expressions on their faces, and you realize, holy shit! yes! this is really going to work this time! But the dynamic changes, because before it wasn't a big deal to many folk, and now suddenly there are turf fights over who is in control? and a thousand variants of that, and not everybody is really here for the same reason: there are people who want to sound informed but aren't; there are people who would be really great at the task but are hypersensitive; there are people whose real interest is to be the center of attention; there are people who think nothing should be done until we resolve all of our philosophical differences; there are people who are only there to disrupt ... And every time I've ever gotten credit for anything in a context like that, it's only because there were a lot of hard-workers helping me, who should really be getting the credit: the lady (say) who came up with perhaps the most brilliant strategy I ever heard for this or that particular issue, but who never ever showed up in a group of more than five or six people, or the guy who studied the hell out of one particular aspect of the issue -- so the rest of us could utter an absolutely accurate sentence or two in reply to a minor question that was sometimes asked, because being able to answer questions like that really did help our credibility