Writing Regularly

I started writing with consistency when I began work in Las Vegas.  My need was to make sense of a personally and politically chaotic situation.  At first, living in Las Vegas was mind-blowing.  How do people live like this?  All the stereotypes ran circles in my brain.  So writing - even in fits and starts - helped.  Not only to shape an organizing narrative, but also to locate my place in it.
I wasn't sure I could make a go of the project until after a year or so.  That would be early 2011.  I never did shrink from plunging in to settings with dramatic potential.  Las Vegas was that in spades.  Early on, I knew it wasn't a good place for "three yards and a cloud of dust" relational organizing - to which IAF organizing sometime seemed to boil down.  Of course, I had to do the hundreds of individual meetings - that's a given - but at my age I figured I'd be long gone before anything of substance happened if I didn't try to break things open pretty fast.  Plus, I was getting impatient with overly patient organizer colleagues.
So it was a conscious gambit, a gamble - on an approach radically different from my other efforts and what IAF - at least the West/Southwest part - had adopted as standard issue.

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There's a sweet spot in the organizing business between patient, plodding work and trying to blow the cover off a place.  IAF history suggests that either can fail.  One, through a surfeit of actions that don't build much.  The other levelling down into power/political invisibility and irrelevance.  It's not an either/or, which is where instinct, judgment and risk tolerance come in.
Decades after he parted from Alinsky, Nick von Hoffman levelled a sharp critique of the modern IAF in Radical, A Portrait of Saul Alinsky.  It was published in 2011 about the time I landed in Las Vegas.  I'd put it high on the list of must-reads for organizers of all stripes, even though I was pretty defensive about some of what he had to say when it first came out.   More on this to come.