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luckydawg -> RE: The Alinsky Way - NYC Abortion Billboard (2/27/2011 9:47:19 PM)
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Basically the idea goes something like this: An organization (such as a school district) has already decided what it is going to do, but it wants to avoid the appearance that it has acted without public approval. So it schedules a public meeting which is advertised as being held for the purpose of soliciting community input. In fact the organization has no desire to solicit opinions; rather the real intent of the meeting is to give the community the impression that input was solicited.
The meeting goes like this: Everyone arrives and sits down. After an introductory talk, audience members are told that they are going to be divided into N groups (N might be any number depending upon the audience size). So everyone is asked to count off from 1 to N going up and down the seated rows. Each person is then directed into a group whose name is the same as the number that he or she counted off. So for example, if you counted "2" when the count came around to you, then you go to Group 2. There are, of course, N group leaders who then carefully direct the discussion of each group. Each group leader controls the format and, to a great degree, the content of each group's discussion.
Toward the end, group members are asked for inputs, which are then listed on a big sheet of paper by the group leader. At the end of the meeting, everyone reassembles. The sheets from all the groups are posted around the room and each group leader reads the list of suggestions that are on his list. Unpopular or unusual inputs are glossed over and downplayed, while the majority of attention is focused on those ideas that are generic enough that almost everyone would agree to them. At the end a summary is delivered and everyone goes home.
The purpose of the countoff is to split up anyone who came in together, so that each of the N groups will most likely consist entirely of people who have never met, and almost certainly will not contain any two or more like-minded individuals who may have come in together. Once everyone is split up in this manner, the group leaders can then easily control the group conversations because dissenting or outspoken individuals are generally alone in each group, and such people quickly discover that they have little or no support from other group members.
It is a radical perversion of the spirit of Democracy
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