Spadework | Issue 34 | n+1

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Your job as an organizer was to find out what it was that people wanted to be different in their lives, and then to persuade people that it mattered whether they decided to do something about it. This is not the same thing as persuading people that the thing itself matters: they usually know it does. The task is to persuade people that they matter: they know they usually don’t.

In 2007, when I was 21 years old, I wrote an indignant letter to the New York Times in response to a column by Thomas Friedman. Friedman had called out my generation as a quiescent one: “too quiet, too online, for its own good.” “Our generation is lacking not courage or will,” I insisted, “but the training and experience to do the hard work of organizing — whether online or in person — that will lead to political power.” I myself had never really organized. I had recently interned for a community-organizing nonprofit in Washington DC, a few months before Barack Obama became the world’s most…

Spadework | Issue 34 | n+1

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