General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 10 reasons why girls and women are essential to ending extreme poverty [View all]freshwest
(53,661 posts)Women are unlikely to withhold education and other tools to ease poverty for religious or the other reasons it's done to them. And a 'rising tide lifts all boats.' Why not make these steps to lift up half the human race, in some nations where girls are not even given birth certificates, as if they are non-persons?
I think something must be done, no matter how disdained the solutions may be. Because of the forces arrayed against equality, we must not just leave the solution as an it's not worth doing, or a 'do nothing' and leave it there. I think we can trust women as well as men to solve this problem.
Saul Alinsky, a well-known and effective community activist, said this:
These Do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, 'I agree with your ends but not your means'.
Alinsky wrote these books that are considered standards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rules_for_Radicals.png
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals is the late work of community organizer Saul D. Alinsky, and his last book, published in 1971 shortly before his death. His goal for the Rules for Radicals was to create a guide for future community organizers to use in uniting low-income communities, or "Have-Nots", in order to empower them to gain social, political, and economic equality by challenging the current agencies that promoted their inequality.[1] Within it, Alinsky compiled the lessons he had learned throughout his personal experiences of community organizing spanning from 1939-1971 and targeted these lessons at the current, new generation of radicals.[2]
Divided into ten chapters, each chapter of Rules for Radicals provides a lesson on how a community organizer can accomplish the goal of successfully uniting people into an active organization with the power to effect change on a variety of issues. Though targeted at community organization, these chapters also touch on a myriad of other issues that range from ethics, education, communication, and symbol construction to nonviolence and political philosophy.[3]
Though published for the new generation of counterculture-era organizers in 1971, Alinsky's principles have been successfully applied over the last four decades by numerous government, labor, community, and congregation-based organizations, and the main themes of his organizational methods that were elucidated upon in Rules for Radicals have been recurring elements in political campaigns in recent years.
Democrats know something that is imperfect ideologically is better than nothing.