by Laura Flanders

I have good news and bad news. Usually I would start with the bad and move to the good, but in this case I'm going to start with the good.

As I traveled around the country promoting my book Blue Grit—a book about grassroots activism and what the Democratic leadership could learn from the base if they felt like it—I found groups all across the country resisting authority. These groups are doing even more. They are figuring out how to reconfigure responsible authority, how to respond to what's happening in their communities, how to wage the sorts of struggles that will create the kinds of institutions that will make our society better, all across the country. And that's what the book is about.

Probably half of these groups I've seen were funded by RESIST, such as the Rural Organizing Project (ROP). When anti-gay panic started spreading in isolated areas, instead of fleeing to the relative safety of cities, ROP convened community gatherings to talk about their neighbors' fears. They created an amazing statewide network of rural activists committed to social justice. That is just one of the small groups that are modeling change by giving people the experience of being deciders in their own lives. This is the kind of organizing that is happening across the country, often funded by RESIST.

That's the good news. The bad news is that while there are hundreds of thousands of people all across the country with a vision for a better country and an idea of how to get there, there is but a handful—and I do mean one handful—of representatives in Congress who even listen to what those people have to say, let alone act responsively towards those people, many of whom have helped them get into office.

That conflict leaves us in a very complicated situation. Just about a year after electing a Democratic majority into Congress to end the war in Iraq, there are more troops in Iraq than ever. We are left with very serious challenges. Do the Democrats in Washington have legitimate authority right now? How can the rising tide of progressive activism and resistance force Democrats in particular to do what is right? Who can we look to for the models of change that we need in our lives?

Recently I encountered one example at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta that poses those questions differently. Given that it was in its hometown, you might think CNN would actually cover the event, but of course it did not. The U.S. Social Forum, the first gathering of its kind ever to happen in this country, attempted to raise the profile of civil society, to connect civil society organizations to each other so they could more effectively become another voice, another power. The slogan of the U.S. Social Forum was “Another World is Possible, Another U.S. is Necessary.”

This was an organizing effort that had been undertaken overwhelmingly by people of color organizations, poor people's organizations. They didn't receive foundation support, because the foundations just didn't believe they could do it-RESIST was one of the few foundations that helped some groups to attend.

Each group that was part of the Organizing Committee for the Social Forum put in $5,000-nearly enough money to hire a part-time worker for a year. They decided that instead of paying a lot of money to send a few people by plane, they would send a lot of people by bus.
Those of us who went to Atlanta with the media-I think it was me and one other person and we called ourselves the medium-we were standing on the side of the street wondering who was going to show up. First we saw some Iraq Veterans Against the War, 15 or 20. After some time had passed, perhaps a few hundred people walked by and I thought, "Okay, they tried."

Then the word came, the buses had just arrived, and soon we watched as ultimately 15,000 people walked down Peachtree Street in the middle of Atlanta, without help or any say-so from authority. They took over that street, held a weekend of conferences about building power at a level our media almost never cover.

I encourage all of you to support RESIST, because the work you're doing is making all the difference. If you saw it tomorrow on the mainstream nightly news you would know you were probably funding the wrong thing.

I do urge you to continue supporting the independent media that can bring you word—maybe just a little bit of a whisper—about change movements. Resistance work is percolating up from the bottom, often with support from RESIST, so please keep doing the work you’re doing.

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Laura Flanders is the host of "RadioNation" heard on Air America Radio and syndicated to non-commercial affiliates nationwide. She is the author most recently of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (The Penguin Press, 2007). For more information, visit www.lauraflanders.com..