What Obama can teach us about community

Community work has been a catalyst to propel the citizenry to promote their cause. It’s difficult to organize yet learning of a group’s idiosyncrasies is amusing and its success brings brotherhood. Everybody does community work, sometimes without even knowing it, sometimes purposefully. Annie Andanar did community organizing for political reasons. Professor Lino Dizon does for sociology’s sake. Rosemarie, my chief of staff, organizes the day’s activities and sets the year’s goals with her community of employees. I’ve done community work with a historical dimension through interviews. In actuality, everybody works for his or her community! 

Barack Obama, the man of the hour, was a community organizer in Chicago starting in 1983. I’m going to give a briefer on his type of community work and his desire for change. As he has said, “Change will come from a mobilized grassroots.”

It’s expensive to organize people and to mobilize personal requests and personal funds to satisfy the demand, sometimes traveling from one end of town to another. It’s encouraging to note that, after six months in which Barack Obama was broke, unemployed, eating soup from a can and almost ready to give up on organizing, he was offered an organizing job in Chicago. His principle mentor commented, “You must be angry about something… anger is a requirement for the job… Well-adjusted people should find more relaxing work.” Onward, Obama carried on through the local churches. If poor and working-class people wanted to build real power, they had to have some sort of institutional base. So with a salary of $10,000 the first year and a $2,000 travel allowance to buy a car, he studied plant closings and layoffs sweeping across South Chicago and the southern suburbs.

In one of his assignments, he went to Altgeld Gardens which, despite its fancy name, was actually a dump and a place to house low-income blacks. Everything about “the Gardens” seemed in a perpetual state of disrepair. Ceilings crumbled. Pipes burst. Toilets backed up. Most children in Altgeld grew up without having seen a real garden. Altgeld may have been unique in its physical isolation, but it was part of many dreams of reformers to build decent housing for the poor. Obama went there, viewed the surroundings under the choking gray sky and, as he writes: “I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the car seat, feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.” 

Real communities have never been a given in America, at least not for African-Americans. Communities have to be created, fought for and tended like gardens. They expand or contract with the dreams of men — and during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, those dreams had been large.

Through organizing and shared sacrifice, membership had been earned. And because of membership the American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself — and Obama believed it might, over time, fit into the uniqueness of his own life. That idea of organizing became a promise of redemption; so he forged links between business, government and the inner city. 

In time, Obama was involved in organizing conferences on drugs, unemployment, housing and facilitating dialogues. But he actually preferred a job closer to the streets! For example, he spent three months at a city college in Harlem, New York convincing minority students of the importance of recycling. He met crowds of people, those laid-off steelworkers, secretaries and truck drivers, men and women who smoked a lot and didn’t watch their weight, shopped at Sears or K-Mart, drove late-model cars from Detroit and ate at Red Lobster on special occasions. Ordinary folks.

At one time, another community worker approached Obama and spoke about catechism. Obama nodded and decided not to ask what a catechism was. In Indonesia, Barack recalled, he spent two years at a Muslim school where the teacher wrote to his mother that he made faces during Koranic studies. “Be respectful,” she said. In Catholic school, when it was time to pray Obama pretended to close his eyes, then peeked around the room. Commenting, he said, “No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.”

In an innovative plan, he conducted a series of street corner meetings to get at the core of people, allowing the jobless and the struggling to gather on neutral turf and talk about things they wanted to complain over like potholes and sewers, stop signs and abandoned lots. His short-term wish was to make sure that the interests of black people were looked after. The long-term goal was all about ownership, “because they had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people that haunted black dreams...” But for Obama, nationalism became an affirming message of solidarity, self-reliance, discipline and participation in a communal responsibility that didn’t depend on hatred of whites. He believed nationalism provided a morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped.

Closer to home, nationalism made Annie Andanar travel to barangays to bring government issues to the barrio and to make the folks realize their lives could be better if they voted for certain candidates. Her choice was the PDP-Laban banner under Senator Nene Pimentel. Prof. Lino Dizon, interviewing informants for his sociology doctorate, gathered resource persons and even the curious and unschooled to relate what was making them appreciate their unique ways of life, like the Aetas.

Even housewives watching over their families, budgeting salaries, planning the week’s menu, nurturing their children, help to reverberate the strength of a purposeful community. Everything in life begins within the family. And everything is a matter of inculcating the very strong idea of “Yes, we can.” That famous line was championed by then Senator Obama when he won the Democratic Convention nomination.

My own community work started with raising my five daughters, like all housewives. It continued with organizing communities numbered by their streets and by the block. On a national scale, Annie and I met with family leaders, mudjahideens and businessmen for the then candidacy of Cory Aquino, naturally mingling with barangay folks to find out the roots of their problems and assisting them in their needs — understanding people and communities on their own terms.

Today’s condition of constant change requires that we pay attention not only to improving present processes but also preparing and making plans for the unseen future ahead. Evolutionary change, defined as “a process of growth or development,” is different from revolutionary change, which we can define as “a sudden, radical or complete change.” It is more comforting to talk about evolutionary change, which can be sensibly planned, and is reasonably predictable.

But change — whether evolutionary or revolutionary — is in each and every one of us, according to Prof. Lino Dizon of Tarlac Historical Research, and can carry on the balikbayan spirit. Through local history, one renews his ties with his past, strengthening that bond with his community. A forgotten thread or a loose stitch can — and needs — to be rewoven. That’s my definition of community work.