I was going to blog yesterday, but it slipped my mind. Can't even say I was so enthralled by the playoffs: especially not that second game. All I did in the last two days was watch football, play Football Mogul (it's a sim game - I know, total sports nerd-dom), watch TV, and write. Y'all didn't miss much. I haven't even left the house. Have to say that part's been cool. Need to work out, but it honestly might wait until tomorrow. We'll see. Not terribly impressed with what I wrote, but I think I said I'd put it here so I'll leave with it and say "see y'all tomorrow".
So this year I admit I had no idea what I was going to write about. This didn't come to me until maybe Thursday, and I just started writing Saturday morning. At least I can focus because it's too cold to do anything else.
I wouldn't call it a stretch to say that when most people think of Dr. King, they think of the dream - be it the speech or the dream itself. This is somewhat of an unfair label to Dr. King because it doesn't give him all the credit he's due. When we talk of dreams and of dreamers, we often do so with the idea that dreams are picked out of the clear blue sky and have very little foresight. Obviously, that was not the case. According to the prevailing vernacular, goals and plans have the foresight that dreams lack. Well, Dr. King's dream did not lack foresight. His dream contained a goal, and he had a plan. His plan was to use the power of societal action to achieve his dream.
Before anyone asks, there are two reasons I said 'societal action' rather than 'collective action'. Mancur Olson pretty much cornered the market on 'collective action' when he wrote his book. More importantly, Dr. King didn't want collective action - he wanted societal action. Collective action can come from a group of any size. Two people can participate in collective action, but it obviously takes more than two people to participate in societal action.
It surely took more than two people to participate in the societal action known as the Civil Rights Movement. Can you imagine how far the movement would not have gotten if there were only two or ten or even a thousand people involved? Well, you don't have to. The numbers were small, but the motive the same, when slaves revolted 100-150 years before Dr. King marched down the streets of some of the south's biggest cities. As a matter of fact, the slave revolts of the 1800s are the perfect example of the main difference between collective action and societal action (numbers).
There is another difference between collective action and societal action that the two events show. The civil rights movement was much more organized. One can easily attribute this to the advances made in the interim, but the numbers also come into play here. The network was increased, so it was easier to coordinate efforts. Larger networks also increase the fear from the other side exponentially. If every plantation's slaves revolted at the same time, the owners would have been more alarmed than if they occurred at different times. It's easier to squash isolated incidents than it is a larger circumstance.
Planning scares people because of all that it entails. Let's look at that a little bit. To plan something along the lines of the above events, there are a few necessary conditions. There has to be a problem, for one. There has to be a large enough group of people that feels the problem is one that needs to be solved. There has to be at least one person who is both smart and dedicated enough to create a plan on solving the problem - one that includes altervatives that fit the inevitable difficulties that lie ahead. The group has to have the resolve to see the process through.
There are a few more, but I think the point has been made. I don't mean to impugn the efforts of the slaves who revolted, I'm just illustrating the difference between Dr. King's efforts and those that came earlier. So much of his part in the movement was planned out. He knew the roadblocks (sometimes literal) would be there. He knew he would be arrested. He knew the strength of the opposition he would face. He went ahead anyway: because of the cause he believed in, but also because of the plan he had to get us there.
I think one of the great historical fallacies of the movement is that many of us have allowed ourselves to think that the events therein occurred by happenstance. That is simply not the case. In addition to being possibly the most influential event in the history of humanity, it was also extremely well thought out. We don't give Dr. King and his colleagues enough credit for that. It's important that we recognize them not only for being courageous, but also for being intelligent. There's a saying that mentions the perils of failing to plan. Dr. King avoided those perils, and that - as much as anything else - is why he had the success that he had.
*I didn't say that he succeeded for a reason. His success still depends on us - and our part in determining that outcome is undetermined at best, woefully unfulfilled at worst. It brings up a question I will have to ponder over the next couple of weeks.
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