Shreveport

There is a clearly a strategic split among the reformers that has existed in a dialectic for some time, but is increasingly sharpening in more stark relief between organizers who believe that the chance has to come from local projects and grassroots organizing and resistance versus the policy-lobbyist wonks with the greater resources still spinning the stories of a immaculate change conception with the Beltway.  This division is spoken of in quiet tones behind the scenes but is constantly part of the debate.  With more than 150 organizers in New Orleans the absence of some of the folks from the national campaign “table” was shocking to me, even if there presence had been no more than solidarity.

I hope I’m not grabbing at straws but the best news I heard in my conversations was the increasing confidence that the days of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror in Maricopa County, Arizona are numbered.  I heard rumors repeated from Justice Department sources, which has now sued Arpaio for federal violations in recent weeks, is that he will be indicted after the mid-term elections are over in November.  He will be a martyr to the whack right, but given the line drawn in the sand for years by so many in Arizona; this will be a significant victory.  I wish I could report more optimism from organizers on the chances of Attorney General Godard replacing Governor Jan “Brain Freeze” Brewer, but most just shrugged that there was no contest still.  I don’t know.

Good energy and deepening conviction will have to be what we go on now, since the numbers and politics seem aligned increasingly against us.

Silver Springs

These are not the narrow, crooked name changing city streets I have learned in a hundred cities, but long six-lane avenues as large as interstates without the high speed limits.  Driving by an area in Silver Springs there was a small park on the left as we motored by and in the early morning one could see Latino soccer players changing shoes at their trunks before going to work.

My friend commented that building the park with a soccer field had been controversial because neighbors in a huge apartment complex on the right thought there would be too much noise and whatnot.  Must have been the whatnot that worried them, because counting the lanes someone would have had to hear the excitement of a scored goal across almost eight lanes of road bulging with vehicles moving at a fast clip in both directions from a field that was set off the road so far that it could not be seen from the street.  For the complex to even consider using the park at all would have been an exercise in courage and reckless abandonment or a walk of almost a mile to circumnavigate the traffic.

My point about the suburbs is not an effort to raise the old canards about their monotony or homogeneity, because I have no idea what it would be like to live there.  My orientation if from an organizer’s perspective in trying to really learn the nuances of the geography and how it works for the people there in the process of unraveling the keys to the mystery.  The longer one looks the more one finds that many of these endless apartment complexes represent the only semi-affordable housing for miles around which has pushed some many people out there.  Gradually one realizes from various signposts that one is driving through miles of housing dominated by Latinos as I learn to spot the food trucks parked behind the stores and see the scores of day laborers around an abandoned gas station and the other sign posts.  With every trip up here I recognize more easily when I have passed into a Salvadoran area versus a Mexican or African American or mixed community.

We might scoff at the sprawl that has created these trackless expanses, but there are a lot of our people out here desperate to build organizations and with real opportunities to win.  I’ve learned that much now, even if I still have no idea where one town or county starts and the other one ends.  A map will tell me that eventually, but open ears and eyes are all that can teach me the real terrain.