The Democratic Party and its supporters have taken grand exception to the jabs that the Republican Party has thrown at the résumé of their beloved presidential nominee during the past few weeks. In his viewpoint Wednesday (What is a community organizer?, 09/10/2008), Scott Kurashige stomped his feet in righteous indignation at those fraudulent, conniving, almost comically evil Republicans.

The Democratic Party and its supporters have taken grand exception to the jabs that the Republican Party has thrown at the résumé of their beloved presidential nominee during the past few weeks. In his viewpoint Wednesday (What is a community organizer?, 09/10/2008), Scott Kurashige stomped his feet in righteous indignation at those fraudulent, conniving, almost comically evil Republicans.

How dare Republicans mock community organizing? Community organizing, Kurashige wants us to believe, is something very noble — so noble that those miserly Republicans are blinded to its power by their own selfishness. It’s above their charity grade. Only the most “politically active and astute young Americans” (read: college liberals) can see it. And we should take Kurashige’s word for it. He is politically astute because he sharply critiques the Right. And he is active because he has lived in Detroit, worked in Detroit and taught about Detroit. Oh, and did I forget to mention the two books in progress?

Well I, too, have lived in Detroit. I am a native of Ypsilanti, but spent the past year working for a non-profit youth work organization in the Motor City. I mainly spent my time working one-on-one with high school students from the local housing projects. My work involved everything from helping the kids find summer jobs to taking them to football practice. It was rarely glamorous, and truth be told, it wasn’t often fun. It was just hard work. Along the way, I saw things that brought me both tears of pain and tears of joy. But my story is immaterial to the issue at hand, because the fate of Detroit is not about me. It is about the people of the city. I was merely a specter. I was there for a moment and then I vanished.

I made no deep roots in the city and thus I hesitate to deign my work with any predicates that suggest anything more than a brief stint of service. I wasn’t a “community organizer” in Detroit, despite the fact that I organized service projects to help the city and its people. I was merely a link in a long chain of people who had at some point decided to do the same — sacrifice a little in the short term with the hope of accomplishing a lot in the long term. I tried my best to be a good role model for a few young men and women, but I knew one year of inadequate me wasn’t enough time to patch up all their bumps and bruises. Many more people needed to come into the lives of those young people in order to leave a truly lasting impact.

A real community organizer is not someone like me, the one-and-done sort. Nor is a community organizer someone like Barack Obama, who manages to squeeze in a few years of inner-city work before heading off to Harvard Law School. Kurashige wrote that the best community organizers spend their time “getting to know the people who make up communities and gaining intimate knowledge of their problems,” while “empower(ing) people to express their needs and concerns.” But this work, while admirable, fails to capture the essence of what it means to be a real community organizer.

A real community organizer doesn’t need to spend his time “getting to know people” because a real community organizer is one of those people. A real community organizer doesn’t need people to sit around in a circle and “express their needs and concerns” because a real community organizer already knows what those needs and concerns are.

Those of us who swoop into cities like Detroit or Chicago — whether it be with the University of Michigan or the Developing Communities Project — should be hesitant to speak authoritatively for these cities’ inhabitants. Because, at the end of a year or two or five, almost all of us will go back to the cozy confines of Ann Arbor, Kenwood, Ill. or some other place away from the hurting community that we so often, and arrogantly, claim to be a part. Might not that air of arrogance be what the Republicans find so funny?

A famous Michigan man once said that, “Those who stay will be champions.” Such is the case with our communities. Those who stay with their hands to the plow, year after year and decade after decade, those are the community organizers we should herald. Their work is not funny and seldom fun. But you probably won’t hear that from them, because they’re busy working while the majority of Ann Arbor is still flabbergasted that an ignorant conservative from Podunk, Alaska, would dare make a joke about The One.

Joshua Birk is a Law School student.