ACORN: A misunderstood organization

Last week, a charming fellow named James O’Keefe was arrested for an alleged attempted wiretapping of Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone lines. As you may recall, O’Keefe was the dashing investigator and impersonator extraordinaire who dressed up as a pimp. Along with his “ho” Hannah Giles, he sought to expose the presumed dirt and corruption beneath the surface of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN. In 2008, for those who may not recall, ACORN went from being a relatively small group of social activists to a vile utterance among conservatives upon news breaking of alleged voter fraud. To clarify, this news wasn’t entirely true; the real non-story was that of two incompetent employees submitting fake voter registration forms to get paid without doing any work.

But ever since then, Republicans have used ACORN as one of their dirty buzzwords that, somehow, links to President Obama. This is along with “Ayres,” “socialism” and other words that are phrased to sound like they crawled out of a dreary Soviet alleyway where Rod Blagojevich lives in a dumpster. Perhaps the most telling moment was in the 2008 presidential debates, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., insisted that ACORN was “destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Really? A bunch of dirt-poor community organizers succeeded in undermining the greatest Democracy in the world?  Highly unlikely.

Look, ACORN isn’t perfect. I do not condone “aiding and abetting with prostitution” — as conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart put it — or any kind of tampering with voter registration. But what those individuals who have been foaming at the mouth over ACORN do not understand is that the faults of individuals are not representative of the organization as a whole.

The majority of ACORN employees really do — to borrow a phrase from Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein — “God’s work.” Employees — whom in many cases select ACORN over a lucrative corporate profession — choose to set themselves up in the poorest of inner cities. They put themselves in danger of violence and financial instability to help provide affordable housing, better schools and more active communities. If corporations truly are the gears that turn America, then would not community organizers and others like them provide the grease in between?

Just to point out their hypocrisy, how would the anti-ACORN crusade have reacted to, say, the government’s funding of an organization that killed innocents? Exactly that happened with Blackwater — the group of military contractors with a doctrine of starting a holy war, sent to Iraq by the Bush Administration and paid for with taxes. They recklessly harmed American soldiers and killed Iraqi civilians. Has there been the same furor over these crimes as there has been over ACORN? While there have been talks of cutting their funding since 2007, the bill to defund an organization whose primary purpose is to help people was rushed through Congress thanks to all the generated hysteria.

Prostitution and voter fraud are both wrong. But so is trying to provide a roadblock for those who try to help others. I know that in a perfect capitalist society, no private enterprise would need funding from the federal government. But that isn’t the case here. If you really hate ACORN with a passion, consider this: if we all did our part in assuring equal democracy for all, it simply would not be needed.

Isaac Stone is a sophomore in the School of International Service and the College of Arts and Sciences and a liberal columnist for The Eagle. You can reach him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).