Addendum addendum.

The socialist organization my one (hippie) friend from Michigan volunteers with is a mixed bag, it seems.

She met them when they were tabling outside a health foods store near the restaurant where she works, and on the one hand they do good immediate-needs work with un- and underemployed folks in the city’s worst neighborhoods – getting gas reconnected, fighting electricity rate hikes; utilities companies break the law and shut off basic services and want exorbitant “fees” to re-connect though they’re in the wrong and legally can’t do that  – but on the other hand, they’re a moribund organization that really can’t effect political change though they think they can.

I went to a movie/meeting/meal with one of the original organizers in the city, this Jesuit who had been in Guatamala, and talking with the organizers afterwards was intense. 

I was talking the politics of my university with them and how the admin was siphoning off huge amounts of money, and the answer to everything was, “But whose interest does that serve?”, and they kept saying the university didn’t help the poor.

“It does and it doesn’t,” I was like, and added that recent programs that they had started up had helped city kids from public school go on a full ride etc.

“But whose interest does that serve?”, they kept saying.

“You know,”  I was like, “I don’t think everything is some evil conniving scheme.  Hell, I wish it was sometimes, because at least those people are competent and predictable.  I’ve met some of the people who run the place, and they’re fuck-ups.”

That didn’t go over well, and then I added that even if the place was god-awful from the beginning with no social purpose, it was still rhetorically smarter to claim charitable origins and lob out that the people in power had betrayed that beneficent founding vision.

But, like practicing pastors says, you can’t answer a question someone doesn’t have.

My one (hippie) friend from Michigan says that they’re often accused of being a cult, since organizers commit 24-7, live on site, and can’t use drugs or alcohol or have sex.

“And that [name of the one male organizer] is hot,” she was like.  “The other day our hands touched and we just held them there.  But then again, I think, guys spend their early 20s learning how to f*ck, and he’s been in this group since he's 20.  He’s probably awful in bed.”

She also said they’ve learned from the mistakes of past labor groups, and someone’s always at the office near the files.

In fact, she herself has taken night-duty every now and then and up to two times a week has slept overnight on a cot in a room adjoining the office, along with another voulnteer.