This week I am in Denver at a different kind of Health Care Reform rally. Community Health Coalition activists from across the nation are meeting with one another and with the bureaucrats who write and enforce the regs. We are learning how health care reform regulations will be rolled out, what they will mean for our country, and how to incorporate them into our organizing practice.

For years, Rio Arriba County has been the butt of jokes about its high overdose death rates and its supposed lack of coordination between providers. But on August 25, over 350 people showed up at my office (a huge crowd for a working day in Espanola!) to celebrate our town’s health care reform success. (More)

Affordable housing, increased funding for public transportation, healthcare for all, gay marriage — we all have our pet issues, but many of us work on our issues because we see them as part of a larger systemic transformation. We are hungry for an alternative way of doing life, a way characterized by mutuality, deep relationships, love for all forms of life, joy, honesty and wonder. In other words, we are hungry for a way of living outside the systems of empire characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, hoarding, defensiveness, and extreme self-interest.

By focusing on individual pieces of this larger transformation, we miss the interconnections among them. As Pastor Lynice Pinkard likes to say, we are pulling at the individual bootstraps of the boot of imperial domination. In doing that, we not only miss that there is a whole boot there, but we inadvertently work at cross-purposes to each other, competing for media airtime, funding, and the public’s attention.

You and I know the most basic thing we could do on the mortgage crisis. We could go and stand with a bunch of neighbors outside people’s homes when the police come to evict them, and refuse the police entry. We know we could be doing that, don’t we? They did it in the 1930s. That was a major reason FDR changed the banking rules.

I mean, whatever else we dream of in terms of a banking system that serves the people and the biosphere, we know it won’t happen simply through the good heartedness of policy wonks in Washington DC. It will only happen if there is a huge groundswell of people who won’t put up with the scams perpetrated by the mortgage lenders.

The simplest, most heart-to-heart thing to do is stand with our neighbors who are being evicted. If every church stood with its members who face eviction, if every workplace, union, baseball league, knitting circle came out to stop the evictions, the groundswell would be under way.

I know that. I just have many reasons why I can’t do it. I don’t have time, don’t know who is being evicted when, am not on the right listserves.

So this time I actually read a listserve run by members of a church I am going to, and learned that the sheriff was due to evict a family in Oakland this morning, and could people show up at 6 am to stop it happening?

There was a small crowd there. Journalists–including a guy with a big camera from AP–made up maybe one in five. They know this is, or could be, critical. People were busy putting signs in English and Spanish up all over the small drab house. It was organized by Acorn. The homeowner is a foster mother and grandmother with a steady income, who succumbed to predatory lending. The newspaper today said California was the center of all subprime mortgage lending in the country. A teenage girl stood on the porch in her pajamas holding her tiny dog.

We stayed for an hour or more, talking with protesters, mainly with a man who is still in his home because Acorn rallied people to come out and prevent entry, just like this. Now he had showed up here. He said he was learning not to be so private about his private life: his housing troubles were not just his private problem.

Later: victory!