I'm on vacation, or so they tell me. I'm not very good at being on vacation, too many years of having my own business, but I'm trying. I stayed up late reading the first of three Star Wars novels my kids got me for my birthday last week. The main theme is the invasion of the galaxy, now run by the New Republic, by particularly nasty, souped up sci-fi versions of Genghis Kahn's hoards. Fits right in with how I feel about the goons running the country these days.
I know Luke and his Jedi niece and nephews, his sister Leah's kids, will kick butt in the end, but not after enormous suffering and death. Sound familiar?
So what will be our equivalent of The Force? What will we use to defeat the forces of darkness arrayed against us?
I see many great ideas bubbling up from the grassroots, but I worry that these ideas are not making it to the people who need to see them. I see the (relatively) big outfits with real money behind them doing essentially the same things over and over again. I see overlap and little, if any, coordination of message or action; I see a plethora of alerts about dozens of issues requiring "immediate" action; I see the grassroots potential being diluted and drained.
Of course the staff of each of these organizations first and foremost needs to secure funding to pay their salaries, and of course in order to raise money they need an angle for their organizations that's different than the organization next door; end result? That plethora I mentioned...
OK, so we're not going to collapse all of these non-profits into one, or even a handful, so what about a federation? What about the equivalent of an AFL-CIO for progressive groups? What might it look like if there was a way to truly coordinate our resources? Someone who could line up the right array of groups to tackle each challenge we face? What might it look like if all of the progressive groups could share a single, (overlapping perhaps) e-mail list that could be managed to reduce donor fatigue and bring to bear the right segment of the grassroots on each issue?
Nah, never mind... more science fiction.