No more rhetorical orgies (commentary by Roland S. Martin)
on March 21st, 2005 at 3:29 amWhen I attended the Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference in Dallas last year, there was all of this talk about getting involved in the political process and providing funding to campaigns. I stood up and said, “Stop saying what should happen and just do it. There are 1,000 folks in this room who have the ability to give $1,000 each to a political campaign or political action committee. That’s $1 million. So, what are you going to do?” Folks looked at me like I was a nut. I guess when you tell folks to put up or shut up, most do the latter instead of the former.
I told the head of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation the same thing. While playing in a golf tournament, I told him that I thought it was nuts that 30,000 attend the CBC legislative conference annually, yet I’ve not gotten a single piece of correspondence or an e-mail on issues of interest between meetings.
Whether it’s Tavis and his gatherings, or the CBC, NAACP or any number of other organizations, what we can learn from our past is that we were able to effect change by establishing an agenda and then ORGANIZING. Having a meeting only to plan another meeting doesn’t create an agenda. That’s a waste of time. (more…)
