Republicans Don't Know Community Organizers Organize Communities

I got sick to my stomach watching the RNC when Palin, Pataki and Giuliani resorted to calling Obama a -gasp!- community organizer.

Obama's right- he's definitely been called worse. And I'm not too worried for him because his work as a community organizer is laudable and this attack has already backfired on the Republicans.

But what I am upset about is the fact that this shows us WOWWOWOWWOW- the Republicans are superbly out of touch with reality. To denigrate and devalue the work of a community organizer infuriates the hell out of me.

Mr. Giuliani-to answer your sneering questions, "What IS a community organizer?" I'll have to turn to the summer of 2000- when I spent a summer working with NJPIRG community organizers to keep chemical plants from polluting several NJ rivers.

The organizers were in their 20s and 30s , just graduated from top schools (Columbia, Upenn, UCLA) who forfeited a stable lifestyle and comfortable income by traveling to colleges around the country. Their jobs were to recruit and organize young people to travel around the state and have them educate residents on major issues impacting lives of its residents and collecting donations to support major causes.

These people were being paid practically minimum wage to walk 5 hours a day in the summer to knock on stranger's doors. All other hours of their day was devoted to recruiting people to join their specific cause, educating trainees on issues, writing and collecting petitions...etc... Sometimes we'd get the door slammed in our faces- but thankfully more often that not we would convince a person to donate money to the lawyers representing families suing large corporations for polluting and causing cancer spikes in their hometown.

And at the end of the day I'd go home to my family's house while the organizers would either sleep on couches or roll sleeping bags on the floors of friend's houses or in the office headquarters. To save money- they would prefer to choose this option rather than spend money on a rent they couldn't afford based on their meager salaries. Especially if the longest time they spent at each campus was three months before packing up and moving onto the next state.

Question answered, Mr. Giuliani? Remember these people now? Especially from after 9/11?

It's easy to understand why I am angry that a potential Vice President and the other puppet politicians who should know better-would mock such people. Seriously- imagine how the Special Needs community organizations are feeling now after hearing that speech juxtaposed with folksy cutaways to young baby Trig being passed around by the rest of her brood?

But Palin's zeal in delivering those scripted words without any ability to comprehend their meaning makes me fearful as well.

This fear comes from the fact that the most important lesson I took from working for a community organization was empathy.

Like everyone- I KNOW people are poor, losing jobs, sick and need help- but it was an entirely different thing to meet and speak with those people in person. I met a woman who was taking care of her partner who was dying from AIDS and didn't know how to balance that with keeping her job. Someone moved from their old town after their only son died of cancer around the time a new chemical plant was built next to the park he played at every day. A man screamed at me to get off his lawn until he saw I was campaigning to preserve the health of his local river- and then he revealed he was in danger of losing his home because he was a commercial fisherman severely affected by dwindling hauls due to saltwater pollution.

It wouldn't be a stretch to conclude that these types of encounters- experienced by a community organizer every day - would have some lasting effect on my psyche.

The people Palin chose to make fun of devote their everyday lives to helping people who are entirely unlike them with no clear monetary rewards or recognition-a concept that she apparently has difficulty grasping.

Now add this to the fact that she didn't even have the intellectual curiosity to leave our country (not even Canada for chrissakes?!?!) until she had to 18 months ago as Governor makes me seriously question her ability to relate to other Americans- who, um, aren't her.

Sigh...if she met me- she'd probably assume I was Inuit or some other Alaska Native...heck-she'd probably just call me an Eskimo to my face.

e_e .....