It's February 1st, 2009. President Obama's historic inauguration, and dramatic address to the nation went off without a hitch. The new Administration has sent cabinet nominations to the 111th Congress, and larger Democratic majorities assure them a smooth confirmation. The President's agenda is off to good start.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of energetic Obama volunteers, from the netroots and grassroots, have been wrapping up their celebrations (some have been drunk off their ass since election night), and nobody wants it to end. New friendships and a new sense of purpose are apparent to everyone. The World Has Changed. America has its first President born of the Space-Age; its first African American in the White House. Not since 9/11 has anything happend that suddenly made things so ... different.
The campaign, which began an entire Moore Doubling ago, is now over. The world, country, and volunteers are networked and connected as never before. Not just blogs, forums and websites, these people have actually ventured out of their homes, and connected in realspace, even meeting each other in person. Nothing like it has ever happend before. Where should it go from here? Some ideas...
- LOBBYING - WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN! - Oh S H U T U P! We've just elected all these people, they've hardly memorized their parking spaces yet, and we'd like to think they at least have cat-brains enough to vote right on President Obama's 100-Day Agenda, and then some. We'll begin harranguing them months down the road, when they've settled in and started acting stupid. But the organized base needs something to do now, in February, not in September.
- COMPLETE PARTY TAKEOVER - The Obama Revolution recaptured the White House, and swelled Congressional (and Statehouse) numbers for Democrats, but the DNC and most State and County party Executive Committees are still controlled by the legacy faction, representing years of prior incumbency, compromise, and failure. To recruit, nominate, and elect better Democrats in 2010 and 2012, its necessary to complete the takeover, purge the establishment residue, and give those legacy precinct committee slots to new young and minority voters that Obama brought into the process for the very first time. But some of those positions wont come up for a year; other than filling vacancies, the best that most can do until then is to join the local Young Democrats, Democratic Women's Club, etc., and purge their leadership instead, while waiting.
Okay, those were the easy, obvious ones. Now lets get serious. Our new President began his career in Faith Based, Non-Governmental Organizations, solving local community problems on a voluntary basis, without bureaucracies. Everywhere in America, we can do the same.
- HOMELESSNESS - One of the most intractible social problems, resisting most federal, state, and local government programs to solve it, homelessness has a strong social dimension, with "people problems" that have nothing to do with the availability of money or brick-and-mortar housing. Many homeless do not want to enter into rehabilitation programs, often due to mental illness, and many neighborhoods do not want to accommodate them, often for that reason. A new approach is needed, by innovative volunteers who truly care about the homeless, not some Official Social Worker from the Bureaucracy. Each community - even each homeless person - calls for their own unique solution, because "one size fits all" answers have often failed them in the past on this issue. Suppose we put in the time and effort, and found accommodations and employment, grooming, clothing, and medical/mental health care for 10,000 homeless people across the United States? Ten thousand specific people, whose stories we could tell, whose pictures and video we could post, whose success in finding new lives we could rejoice in afterwards. By then we will have donated or raised probably $500,000,000 to elect President Obama; surely we can mobilize to solicit or contribute some transitional bedrooms, clothing, transportation, etc. to help the poorest among us to start building new lives. Success stories would powerfully identify Progressives with Compassion instead of the Bureaucracy that is emblematic of old-style Liberalism.
- VICTORY GARDENS - Immigration, Fuel Costs, Global Warming, Bacterial Contamination, Genetic Modification, the Trade Deficit and other issues encourage the relocalization of food production where practical. While people cannot grow their own Wheat on a quarter acre suburban housing lot, many families can grow plenty of Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Herbs, and Mushrooms at home, at minimal expense. During World War II, people were encouraged to plant such "Victory Gardens" in their yards, or to volunteer at Community Gardens, which beautified vacant land while raising food to alleviate shortages. Nothing about our modern age renders this concept obsolete; in fact, much higher planting densities and higher yields can be achieved with contemporary techniques for accelerated composting, hydroponic drip irrigation, etc. A netroots/grassroots initiative could mobilize, train, and equip a million home gardeners to seek their own backyard food independence, to share their abundance with community food kitchens, and to come together to also beautify vacant donated or public land with edible landscaping. America has more acres of lawn grass under cultivation than all food crops combined. We can do more than haggle over nuances in the next Farm Bill, we can bring forth millions of pounds of safe, clean, natural food that would not otherwise exist, without a single USDA Inspector, ICE Agent, or Farm Subsidy check in sight.
- COMMUNITY BIOFUELS - A growing number of people are now manufacturing their own home-brew Biodiesel and Ethanol using common organic wastes which otherwise wind up in our waterways and landfills. Inexpensive equipment can now turn common waste vegetable oil and meat grease from restaurants, institutional kitchens, and even collected from homes, into clean, safe biodiesel fuel at approximately $1.00 per gallon. While many do this for their own economic reasons, there are worthy charities in every community (i.e. "Meals-on-Wheels") for whom rising fuel costs are severely inhibiting their humanitarian efforts. Despite the growing hobby of handcrafted biofuels, most used cooking oil and grilling grease in the United States still winds up poured down the drain, complicating sewage treatment and contaminating rivers. Lets process all of it. Moreover, new cultures and enzymes now make possible the small scale, community level fermentation of lawn grass clippings and similar leafy wastes (i.e. kitchen/food waste) to produce Corn-free Ethanol on a distributed basis. We can mobilize public participation in a new "hands-on" energy future, person-to-person, to capture pollution and fuel the engines of compassion, all at the same time.
- STAND UP A SUMMER SCHOOL - Next summer, a mass mobilization of the highly educated Obama base could create a thousand volunteer-based community Summer Schools around the country, to give kids of all ages and backgrounds an extra boost before returning to their public school classrooms in the fall. With a little legwork these could be organized in libraries, churches, recreation centers, vacant storefronts, parks, barns, airport hangars, and marinas, sufficient to accommodate hundreds of thousands of students. These ad hoc Summer Schools could utilize Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, and Pilots to teach Science and Math, Journalists and Lawyers to teach English Composition & Rhetoric, Social Activists and Community Historians to teach Civics & History, and so on. Musicians and Artists could participate, giving kids a taste of those aspects now lacking from many public school curricula. Environmentalists could teach ecology while leading kids in community cleanup activities, and farmers could teach botany while leading them in raising food gardens. Every Chef, Auto Mechanic, HVAC Repairman, Fireman, and Medical Technician has at least one valuable lesson to teach, which kids will draw on in some class during the following academic year. These Summer Schools would be organized, promoted, and taught by volunteers, in donated spaces, with donated materials, and streamed live online - and archived for download - for FREE from simle laptops and webcams, everywhere. For hundreds of thousands of kids in mediocre or failing schools that NCLB has left behind, enough of us could put in three months (or a week, or a weekend, or an afternoon of it) to help them get ahead.
- CONSERVATION TREES - Planting a tree costs $1.00 and takes less than 10 minutes. If 100,000 of us devoted an afternoon and the price of lunch, we could plant 1,000,000 trees which would capture CO2 from the atmosphere for the next 50 years or longer. In addition to sequestering Carbon, they filter water, secure and enrich the soil, give habitat to birds and squirrels, and provide shade to reduce summer A/C demand. The virtual "Obama Forest" a million trees would represent, in one afternoon of effort, would do more to fight Global Warming than the entire 110th Congress managed, despite its early promises to the contrary.
- RECYCLE POLITICIANS - After replacing Bush with Obama, and giving Pelosi, Hoyer, and Reid some younger and more dynamic colleagues to challenge them on Capitol Hill, suppose we mosey down to City Hall in a coordinated fashion? In cities and towns across the country, Progressives could swarm the City Council to press for expanded community Recycling Initiatives. Recycling is a very local issue, not one that the State Capital or Washington brings much to the table on. However, often, municipal bureaucrats do this very badly, leading to programs which are inefficient, poorly promoted, fail to pay for themselves, and have even been found corrupt in several instances across the country. Armed in advance with nationally negotiated engagements with major Aluminum, Glass, and Plastics recyclers, we could expand local participation by a million tons annually. The not-so-subtle threat to be implied is that we will invoke Obama's Army of Millions of votes at the Municipal level next year, if our cities and towns dont suddenly become a good deal more green in a hurry.
- FREE CLINICS - While politicians dither over national health care, we could manage a series of nationwide weekend events which not only highlight the issue, but bring home real solutions that help people immediately. We could solicit Doctors and Lawyers in the community to participate in Free Clinics in poor neighborhoods, on a pro-bono basis, with high profile community recognition for their self-less contributions of time, effort, and expertise. Progressives did this in the 1960s, and now have the manpower to do so again in the 21st Century.
- ORAL HISTORY PROJECT - The historic election will turn a new page in American history. Next year would be an appropriate time to capture on video the oral histories of Senior Citizens from all walks of life, who can now deposit their uniqe experiences and anecdotes into digital archives, preserved forever. Suppose that next July 4th, we organized weekend "studios" all across America, to let the surviving members of that "Greatest Generation" tell their stories before the last of them, ahem.... 'Move On', as it were?
Ironically, it was President Bush, Sr. organized what is now the Points of Light Institute which mobilizes and coordinates community volunteer efforts in a wide variety of fields. It inspired the current White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives, which Sen. Barack Obama just commited to not only keep but to expand during his Administration. The suggestions I've made above are but a handful of transformative community initiatives which the already mobilized Progressive Movement behind Sen. Obama can take, following his election as President, to help heal America after these many years of stagnation and strife.
Please give me your thoughts on these in Comments, and feel free to suggest others that you feel might also have potential. The criterion I used was that such projects should be achievable without waiting on Congress for appropriations, or really without waiting on anyone for anything; things which can be crystallized through myBO and DKos and mySpace and Facebook, conducted by volunteers, funded in-kind, or with small donations on a local basis, and leave a major quantifiable impact while publically highlighting issues of importance to our concerns.