YOU DON T HAVE TO BE POWERLESS

The setting is a 1966 U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing to determine whether Detroit's car manufacturers are sufficiently safety-conscious, and Ralph Nader a young lawyer of Lebanese descent, is there to repeat his belief that they are not. To the subcommittee members, Nader presents a fascinating figure--a David to Detroit's Goliath. "Why are you doing all this, Mr. Nader?" one of the Senators asks. "I became in a sense incensed," Nader replies in the convoluted courtroom language that is his customary way of speech, "at the way there can be a tremendous amount of injustice and brutality in an industrialized society, without any accountability without any responsibility. This is a problem of individuals confronting complex organizations. It is not an equal contest."

MOST Americans would agree with Ralph Nader that the contest is unequal. Not that individuals have ceased to count. In a sense, they have never been more important, never more respected for their talents and skills Technology makes everyone a specialist whom everyone else depends, whether to fly planes, raise food or teach children. But somehow, the specialist-managers are losing touch with the specialist-citizens. Too many institutions have grown too big, remote, indifferent. Or so it seems to millions of people the world over, who have made "powerlessness" one of the chief complaints--and cliches--of the age.

To the angry, the answer lately has been protest, demonstration, not. And violence does bring a sense of power does achieve change--though more often it brings only violent reaction. There are other ways, and they work "Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down,' says John Gardner Yet even in despotic societies, good men have managed to rise against the odds and become the architects, not of revolution, but of peaceful change. This is true not merely of the obvious geniuses and unique innovators but of seemingly ordinary people.

A Strange Form of Love

A catalogue of individual American shapers would fill an encyclopedia. Margaret Sanger advocated contraception in the face of laws that branded her a criminal. Novelist Upton Sinclair sanitized Chicago's abattoirs with his 1906 shocker, The Jungle. Henry Ford wheeled a nation and established the principle of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. All these and a host of others were evolutionaries who worked change without revolution. Ralph Nader, for all his abrasive qualities and puzzling motives, is very much their inheritor.

The record suggests that many, if not most of the world's successful reformers have worked within the system that outraged them. True, they achieved their successes in simpler societies. But in a mass society, everything is so interrelated that small actions may have big effects, all of them widely reported by mass communications In short, today's individual is anything but powerless against The System. He can easily disrupt it--for good or ill.

Given such power, the disrupter for good is all the more impressive. He is the Doer, an everyday activist who resembles Camus' rebel, one who retains "a strange form of love" for the society he attacks. He wants to improve it, not kill it.

The Doer is self-starting, and constantly in motion. His ego is proof against reverses. He is likely to be a moralist rather than an ideologue--a Ralph Nader instead of a Mark Rudd. Because he combines pragmatism, idealism and creativity, he can accept life's ambiguities--and then synthesize them into surprising new patterns. In Doer, wrath at the status quo translates into useful social action. In the revolutionary, it accummulates; unable to find release, it bursts into antisocial violence.

During times of great ferment, of course, it is not always easy to tell the revolutionary from the Doer. Which of the two, for example, is Chicago Lawyer Saul Alinsky a self-styled professional radical who mobilizes slumdwellers to fight for their rights? Alinsky swears that he is a revolutionary, and yet by his own admission he works within the system. "I would destroy it if I knew of a better one," he says. "The problem is that I cant find a better one."

A Roll of Doers

How many Doers really exist? Politics is obviously full of activists. Beyond politics, a census of activists can only be suggested. Everyone knows someone who volunteers for messy civic chores, stubbornly advocates heretical ideas, won't conform to Kafkaesque organizations or autocratic bosses. Doers turn up as doctors who attack outdated treatments, teachers who think schools teach children to fail, corporate vice presidents who accuse their companies of being sclerotic, priests who say popes are fallible, colonels who accuse generals of fighting the last war. If a strictly random sampling of present American activists is drawn from many walks of life, the mixed result looks like this:

> Boston Gynecologist John Rock, despite his Roman Catholic faith, put his name to a birth-control petition nearly 40 years ago. This modest act was dictated by conscience rather than defiance. With Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. M. C. Chang, Rock went on to develop the Pill, the first really effective contraceptive device. As Pope Paul VIs encyclical made clear last summer, the Catholic hierarchy is not yet prepared to abandon a position that it has maintained for 1,770 years. When it does, John Rock's courage and example will have played a significant part in this profound reform.

> Lawyer James D. Lorenz Jr., now 30, gave up private law practice in Los Angeles two years ago to establish California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc., which provides free legal help to the state's farm workers, many of them Mexican Americans. C.R.L.A. works through the law and tackles anything from predatory salesmen who extract $500 in time-payments from uncomprehending victims for $100 cameras, to California Governor Ronald Reagan, who tried vainly last year to curtail the program's influence. C.R.L.A. has won 85% of the 4,000 cases it has taken to court. The benefits, as Lorenz sees them, go far beyond the courtroom. "If you act in groups," he says of CR.L.A.'s clients, "you can at least gam a limited sense of participation and control over your own destiny."

> Robert E Keeton and Jeffrey O'Connell, two activist law professors, of Harvard and the University of Illinois, have teamed up to research and do battle with the auto-insurance business, which in their well-documented opinion sells inadequate and inequitable protection to the accident victim (TIME Essay, Jan. 26). So far, they have won nothing but hostility and bitter opposition from most insurance companies. But their Basic Protection plan, drafted into a model bill, has been presented to legislatures in eight states.

> Donald Bourgeois, a Negro lawyer in St. Louis, was suddenly struck by the thought that every residential city block forms a potential human team to press into social action. On this inspiration he built his Block Partnership program, which unites the residents of a black ghetto block with a white civic-action group. These two sides discuss and tackle all kinds of problems, ranging from jobs to plumbing. In three months, Bourgeois' program has proved so effective that he was invited by Mayor Jonsson of Dallas to help set up the same operation there. The key, says Bourgeois, is involvement. "You establish the feeling that 'We can do it ourselves, we can chart a course.

> Sara Ehrmann has a special stake in the Massachusetts election next month, when her fellow voters will decide whether to join a national trend (13 states so far) and abolish the death penalty in their state. Mrs. Ehrmann, a cheerful woman of 73 who has worked for 40 years in this cause, is hopeful of the November out come. She has been supported all along by the conviction, which amounts to a Doer's principle, that "if people understand and are properly dealt with, they will follow an intelligent and humane course."

> Catherine Jermany, 28, is unloved but profoundly respected by the Los Angeles County Welfare system, which suspended her from general hospital in 1965. While working there Mrs. Jermany, who is black, acted on the principle that welfare recipients were no different from other people except that they needed help. She makes this point now through the 25,000-member national Welfare Rights Organization, which developed from her own similar organization in Los Angeles. "Part of our work," she says, "is giving welfare recipients the self-confidence to stand up to the county social workers as equals instead of doing whatever they say, like dogs. We make sure our members understand the welfare laws and know what's coming to them " When that is not enough, the group sues the county --and has successfully forced it to heed its own welfare rules in case after case.

> Chicago Businessman Gordon Sherman, now 41, was the joke of the auto-parts industry twelve years ago, when he began hiring white-frocked mechanics to install gold-painted Midas mufflers and act like lofty physicians in "treating" croupy exhaust systems. Now the scoffing has given way to awed silence. Last year Sherman's nationwide chain of 460 Midas muffler (and other parts) shops grossed $42 million. This triumph has freed Sherman to pursue myriad private interests--Talmudic scholarship, oboe playing, rare-bird raising, the culture of orchids--and to cure social ailments as well as autos. He is, for instance, the endower of a new school for militant community organizers, founded by Saul Alinsky. "The time for picketing city hall is over," Sherman says. "We need constructive entities to exert pressure on forces that hold back social progress."

> Lou Smith is a black militant who still digs Stokely Carmichael but has discarded revolution as impractical. "There are greater forces than violence and confrontation," he says. Smith's chosen instrument was Operation Bootstrap (see BUSINESS), a black-owned, black-managed self-help corporation that now runs two African-style dress shops, one in a white suburb, plus a clothing factory, a gas station, a printing company, and a school for pride, black culture and job training. 1 Smith, the greatest source for pride is that Bootstrap was born and now lives without handouts from a Government agency. Says he: "Change is going to come in this country, and it's going to come from the bottom to the top."

Believe--And Do

The activists at the bottom are unlikely to achieve the miracle reforms that skeptics often demand, and many a Doer crusade is quixotic--witness those largely unsuccessful if unflagging dreamers who battle against highway billboards, jet sonic booms and all-digit telephone dialing. All the same, big social explosions these days are usually caused by a pile-up of many small problems--nearly all of them soluble by small-scale activism. The fact is that democracy needs Doers at every level. How can the U.S. ensure that there are always enough to go around? Does it develop them? The answer is a highly qualified yes.

As a nation built on the right to dissent, the I cherishes the qualities of initiative, self-sufficiency and independence that embellish every page of its history. The prevailing political climate has always encouraged the Doer's growth. But even in today's permissive culture, the Doer must discover himself. It is no coincidence that many Doers find their identity in law schools, for an understanding of the law, which binds the citizen and his institutions, is a highly useful civic weapon in calling society to account.

The nearest thing to a Doer's school is probably the Peace Corps, which deliberately sets out to instill self-confidence and self-sufficiency in its volunteers. It demands performances that the trainee may not have suspected he had in him. "We may drop a person with almost no money in some community," says Robert MacAlister, director of staff training, "and tell him to hack it for three or four days. We try to get people to realize their potential The operating principle is basically that a person can do anything he believes he can do." No gauge exists to measure the effect of this principle. But it is a fact--and a significant one--that 50% of Peace Corps volunteers ultimately change their careers.

This minuscule exercise in social action (only 9,000 corpsmen now serve abroad) is unlikely to supply the demand for activists. There are other sources in U.S. institutions--families, schools, colleges, corporations. All ought to be doing more to spur individual initiative. A case could be made for pitting every teen-ager against physical hardships that build self-confidence, as in t country's several Outward Bound camps, which put boys through summer survival courses. If draft laws are ever changed, dropping out for useful social action would do wonders for jaded collegians. If more U.S. corporations imitated the smartest ones, thousands of executives woi get periodic leaves for intellectual recharging, and spend their lives in creativity rather than conformity.

The chances are that no one will ever know the exact size of the demand for Doers. How many constructive dissenters, how many self-appointed critics are necessary to keep democracy vigorous? The only answer is that the U.S. needs plenty of them, and that there will never be enough.

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