Just a Community Organizer !

One of the things that make me really mad is the way Republicans like Sara Palin, Rudy Giuliani.  And now Mitt Romney made fun of President Obama for the decision he made to become a community organizer after he graduated with his undergraduate degree from Columbia.  After listening to this crap for over four years I thought I would set the record straight once and for all.

So here is what Giuliani, Romney and Palin didn’t know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed–job training, help with housing and so forth–from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work–the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a “task from God.”) What a moron!

This is what Palin Romney and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man’s decision “to serve a cause greater than himself”.  Obama served the poor for three years, and then went to law school. To describe this service–the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other–as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme just like the attacks and moronic jokes made by Republicans .

Catholic Democrats, like me, are expressing surprise and shock that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech almost four years ago mocked her opponent’s work in the 1980s for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.  She belittled Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he undertook instead of pursuing a lucrative career on Wall Street.  In her acceptance speech, Ms. Palin said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”  Community organizing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching to end poverty and promote social justice. This kind of service to your fellow man is the kind of compassion and service we should expect from our potential leaders. The Right has a problem with this kind of service because they do not believe in social justice but do embrace, to the death it seems, tax cuts for business and the wealthy. They show their true colors and what kind of people they really are. Selfish and self-absorbed with money and power. We must stand together and deny them the power they desire this fall