When I heard that a major part of Barack Obama’s resume included a stint as a “community organizer,” I asked myself what the term meant.

It’s sort of like “activist.”

I had always wondered what the job description for “activist” was. How do you apply? Where do you apply? It was unlike any of the jobs I had had, whether it was pouring beers, serving fish fries, cleaning toilets, pruning in snow-filled vineyards, or marking grammatical errors on freshman essays. The people I had grown up with worked with blow torches, trowels, and brooms, or stooped over sewing machines all day. If you made it, you were a secretary or supervisor at Kodak. If you were really ambitious you went to the community college or state university and became a nurse or an engineer. You could ask your cousin to put in a good word for you with the supervisor at Kodak or General Motors, but whom would you ask to become an “activist” or “community organizer”?

I imagine if someone like Barack Obama had come to Beach Street in Rochester, New York, in the 1960s where my neighbors relaxed on their lawn chairs on front porches and stoops after a hard day in the factory, and said, “Hi, my name is Barry Obama, and I am a community organizer,” the unanimous response would have been, “A what?”

“A community organizer. I’ve come to organize you, your community.”

This would have immediately raised suspicions.

While her husband went upstairs, Mrs. Tischenko would have said, “Our grass don’t need no cutting.”

Mrs. Shulman would have said, “We don’t need you’se guys to tell us how to organize ourselves.”

That certainly would have been the opinion of Antonio who owned the one-man barbershop at the corner and Otto who had half the market for the candy trade for Carthage School #8. “Are you telling me how to run my business?” each of them would have asked. The Schmidts’ brindled mutt would have made his way off their porch across the street. “Demon,” as he was called, a sneaky cur around adult strangers, especially those in suits, would have walked stiff-legged across the street while Barry made his speech on social justice and equitable distribution of goods, until he was interrupted by the sting of canine fangs in his calf.

Barry would have been sent running, which would be a good thing for him because right about that time Mr. Tischenko would be coming downstairs with the rifle.

So the term “activist” was a foreign one for me. I only started hearing it in graduate school in relation to what we as teachers of freshman composition were expected to do: train our charges for “social activism.” They said that right there at the orientations and in the books. We were to pass on the tradition of the tenured professors who themselves had been “activists” in the day: burning draft cards, carrying placards, trashing deans’ offices, giving inflammatory speeches, and sometimes throwing bombs. They would speak proudly about how they brought about “social justice.” They did this by inspiring many who lived in “ghettoes” to make their own neighborhoods and adjacent neighborhoods look like the wastes of devastation the activists charged they were in their speeches. So inspired, the masses set about to achieving social justice by smashing windows, looting stores, and overturning police cars. Once the buildings went from being plain or rickety to burned down, these communities needed the help of “community organizers,” which apparently is the job of Harvard-trained lawyers.

Ghetto-child Barry Obama, facing the slings and arrows of racism that all who have the color of his skin suffer in America rose from the depths of poverty, neglect, and hunger through his brilliance and sheer determination and got a law degree from Harvard.

Not.

We all know his story: private schools, a nurturing (white) mother and (white) grandparents, solicitous professors. In addition to the official government affirmative action programs and private school minority scholarships, I can tell you from sixteen years in academia that liberal professors and administrators practically genuflect in front of any articulate black male, even today, more than two decades after Obama’s own academic career.

Barry Obama had many such academic mentors and one namely is Bill Ayers, a white guy from a wealthy family who in his leisure time (of which he had much, not having to mow lawns or deliver newspapers) liked to throw bombs in order to bring about “social justice” as a member of the Weather Underground.

Well, rich kids don’t know much about munitions, so occasionally “bad choices” are made in the design, building, and detonation of bombs, like your girlfriend and buddies getting killed, which happened in Ayers’s case. Continued...