Wow. The new website Big Government is sure making a splash with its ACORN revelations, and beating the hell out of the news organizations that claim to be the pros when it comes to journalism. I want to see where all of this goes before I paint with too broad a brush, but I had my own experience with ACORN decades ago that soured me on the group. It would not surprise me if we see even more revelations in the near future.
Believe it or not, I once helped organize an ACORN group in the south Minneapolis neighborhood that I lived in at the time. I may have even become a member, I don't remember. I'm absolutely certain though, that I dispensed no advice on how to set up a brothel.
How could someone like me become involved in ACORN? Well, it was 20 years ago or so, and once upon a time ACORN actually did things like take on Democrats when they weren't serving their constituents. Or at least it appeared to.
At that point in the late 80s, Minneapolis had a mayor and police chief who were in denial about gangs, guns, and crack, and how they were devastating some neighborhoods, including my own. Minneapolis supported neighborhood associations across the city and I used to attend the meetings for mine, but became increasingly frustrated at how they were dominated and controlled by city employees. It eventually became clear that any issue that was perceived as embarrassing to the mayor or our Democratic councilwoman would get shunted aside and never addressed. And there were plenty of things in that neighborhood that they should have been embarrassed about.
I had a nice place, the newly remodeled first floor of a duplex. The rent was about half of what it would have been in a nicer neighborhood. I was a single guy in my twenties, had grown up in south Minneapolis, and knew how to handle myself in that part of town. But things went downhill fast in that neighborhood when crack and the gangs came in. I started hearing gunshots on a regular basis. The hookers on 31st Street got so bold that they would actually on occasion try to stop my truck by standing in the middle of the street. Then there was the crack house in the fourplex across the street that was closed only when the dealer was murdered by one of his customers.
I knew nothing about ACORN when the young woman knocked on my door one evening, but when she started talking about organizing a group that would go around the roadblock that was the neighborhood association, I was all ears. I agreed to help and since I ran a print shop at that point, I volunteered to print up flyers.
We got a core group of about 15 people from the neighborhood formed and began confronting the neighborhood association about problems. The neighborhood association was not pleased and there was some harassment of a few of the members of our group, mostly around suspiciously timed inspector visits and fix-it tickets.
There were 80 or 90 boarded up houses and buildings in the neighborhood and they were frequently broken into and used by prostitutes and drug addicts. They were a major blight on the neighborhood and the city was completely indifferent. So we organized our own tour for the media and got a reporter from the Strib and three TV stations to tag along with about 100 residents as we showed them some of the more decrepit buildings. It was awesome, and our flustered councilwoman showed up about 2/3 of the way into it to try to do damage control. Oh, did she get an earful, not at all unlike the town hall meetings we saw this summer.
The city began moving on those abandoned houses and the topic became, what's next? That's where ACORN and I parted ways. Other residents and I wanted to continue to focus efforts on improving the neighborhood. The ACORN leadership wanted us to focus on broader social issues though, and it was a decidedly liberal agenda, what we would call progressive today. Their take was that the problems were so big that we had to focus on a top-down approach. Nope, that's not what we needed in that neighborhood. There were real issues that city government was not addressing, issues that could improve life immediately in that low-income neighborhood. I drifted away from ACORN and, frustrated anew, bought a house in a first-ring suburb the next year, walking away from the whole mess.
I've often wondered if that ACORN leadership had been bought off by the mostly Democrat-run city government. Or maybe we residents were just pawns to be used by the main local leadership to get into bed with the Democrat-run city. All I know is that once we got the attention of the local politicians with a very local issue, ACORN suddenly turned us away from the remaining local issues and started pushing a much broader agenda.
It was too bad, because we could have made a positive impact on that neighborhood I think.
Recent Comments