Are you a doer, or a non-doer?

Saul Alinsky saw life itself as a battle. He also saw duality and complementarity everywhere: "everything has an indivisible partner of its converse." He noted that the "CIO was once a militant champion of America's workers, but now is an entrenched member of the establishment" (Is it ever!) Alinsky saw life as a constant struggle between the positive and its converse negative. "The positive of today is the negative of tomorrow, and vice versa." He believed that the revolutionary cycle goes on - the revolutionary group becomes the establishment and a new revolutionary group picks up the torch.

Now, men like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are trying to organize the great middle class of America. The difficulty in organizing the middle class, said Alinsky, is that we generally seek the safe way, where we middle classers can profit by some change and yet not risk losing what we do have. Yet, Alinsky saw the middle class as the "genesis of creativity." However, whenever "sparks of dissension promise to flare up into the fire of action," there are "individious Do-Nothings who abstain from and discourage all effective action for change." The non-doers are the ones who "drew their window blinds when the Nazis dragged people through the streets. They privately deplored the horror of it all - and then did nothing."