ACTS-CNY

Friday, February 20, 2009
SEAN KIRST
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST

Mike Kruglik is a rumpled guy. Before his talk Wednesday at the Living Water Church of God in Christ in Syracuse, he grabbed some cheese and crackers from a snack table in the meeting room, then shot the breeze with the Rev. Nebraski Carter, pastor of Living Water.

Noticing how Kruglik made good use of his napkin, Carter remarked on how the napkin has special significance within some religious faiths.

“Well,” Kruglik said, “I think it’s better than using my shirt.”

They both smiled. That is Kruglik’s way. In similarly unadorned fashion, he proceeded to offer what was undoubtedly the most insightful take on Barack Obama that we’ve heard in Syracuse. Kruglik knew Obama in the 1980s in Chicago, when the president was young anddealistic and dreamed of mobilizing communities around civil rights, as Obama recalls in his book, “Dreams From My Father.” Kruglik, a community organizer, helped Obama get started on Chicago’s struggling South Side, a time that Obama has described as profoundly influential in his life.

Wednesday, Kruglik spoke in Syracuse to about 40 city and suburban clergy of various faiths who represented ACTS - The Alliance of Communities Transforming Syracuse. Andres Kwon, lead organizer for ACTS, brought Kruglik here to offer more than a stew of memories.

Kruglik was here to give his impressions on the way Obama operates. Back in the 1980s, he’d drink a beer or two with Obama at Chicago Bulls and White Sox games. He still sees his old friend from time to time, and he does not believe the president will abandon the principles he honed in Chicago. As Kruglik puts it, that’s when Obama first “drank down the mother’s milk of understanding political power.”

During the campaign, Kruglik helped organize Obama volunteers, particularly before the landmark victory in Iowa - a triumph achieved by keying on the strengths of workers in small communities.

Kruglik fully expects that strategy to merge into presidential style. Obama won the

During the campaign, Kruglik helped organize Obama volunteers, particularly before the landmark victory in Iowa a triumph achieved by keying on the strengths of workers in small communities.

Kruglik fully expects that strategy to merge into presidential style. Obama won the general election by zeroing in on the collapsing economy, an overwhelmingly communal issue. But “the core of the man” remains devoted to civil rights, said Kruglik, who maintains Obama dearly wants to change the conditions that lead to violence, crime and grief in Syracuse.To make that happen, Kruglik said, demands basic action in the neighborhoods. He seemed to be calling for a passionate, street-level movement that would spotlight the suffering in our cities a movement that would not leave it to the president to bring about real change, but would instead surge toward Obama under its own momentum.

I asked Kruglik if he thought the guy in the White House is the same guy he’d known in Chicago. “He’s never the same guy because he’s always growing,” Kruglik said. But if you put the question a little differently, if you ask if Obama’s central goals remain unchanged, then Kruglik’s answer would be: Yes.

Wednesday, he wove his talk around Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A lot of people like to hang pictures of King and Obama side by side, but Kruglik said the link is as much strategic as philosophical. King changed America by organizing millions. He succeeded in wiping out legal divisions based on race, although Kruglik said King’s next mission was more difficult:

He wanted to alter entrenched racial patterns in the North. In Kruglik’s words, he “had the holy vision and the guts” to challenge segregation in a city like Chicago. King was murdered in 1968, in the early stages of that effort. People celebrate a national holiday in King’s honor, but they rarely speak of how Northern cities remain racially divided, a far cry from King’s “beloved community.”

If Obama tries to tear down those walls simply as a charismatic figure, he will fail. He needs support from the bottom up to even contemplate the thought which is why the clergy, from city and suburb, loom as so important.

No one in the room disputed Kruglik’s basic point. They were all aware that too many young men have died on streets not far from Living Water. But one or two suburban clergy, as they left, spoke to a quiet challenge. With families outside the city confronting their own lost jobs and steeper bills, it can be hard to feel a connection to the heartbreak in Syracuse.

The bridge may come back to the old notion of self-interest. Booming metropolitan areas are almost always built around a prospering city. Beyond all else is a universal truth: Despair unchecked spreads like a cancer, drawing more neighborhoods into the same abyss, a process of astronomical social and economic costs.

Kruglik seemed to make a simple point. Obama really believes in this whole idea of moving forward by reaching out, and he will not embark on a notion, no matter how idealistic, if it is strategically predestined to fail. He knows the chances are better when the impetus comes from the bottom up, which raises the stakes for those who chose to vote for him.

Pulling the lever, if you look at it that way, was just a start.

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