January of ‘09, Socialist Alert: Don’t look now, but your Oak Park neighbor may be a socialist. Pass it on. Plus a series of electoral upheavels. Turmoil.

He or she won’t look like one of those bomb-throwers in page-one Chicago Tribune cartoons of the 30s and 40s, with hair and beard shooting in all directions. No, he will look like your other neighbors. It’s scary.

Take Ron Baiman, who headed the recently abandoned effort to get wireless technology mothballed in Oak Park schools. It was in part a project of the Greater Oak Park Democratic Socialists. Baiman was its spokesman.

He and Oak Parker Tom Broderick -- a prolific Wednesday Journal letter writer -- described the schools effort in the Democratic Socialist publication New Ground of January, 2002. In the same issue, Baiman had “Ode to a Fallen Comrade,” a eulogy of his friend and fellow socialist Joe Powers, Sr., who had recently collapsed and died while jogging.

Currently, Baiman has a provocative essay at FreePress.org and other Internet sites arguing that our recent presidential election was with “little doubt” not “free and fair.”

Take also Jean Darling, another Oak Parker, who recently addressed a small gathering at Democratic Socialists of Chicago headquarters on Milwaukee Avenue in the city. Darling, a Unitarian minister, has started a church in a West Side union hall - a free-lance effort, the sort her denomination frowns on, she said. In it she is pursuing a vision of non-coercion, or as she puts it, non-violence.

The vision stems from her lifelong opposition to muscling people argumentatively, she said in her talk, what her father did to her less educated mother in their family’s version of “class warfare.”

Such coercion occurs in her Unitarian-Universalist denomination, she said. where “oppressive” use is made at meetings of Robert’s Rules of Order to “run over minorities.”

At a Madison, Wisconsin, gathering, for instance, she said, demonstrators yelling “You killed Rosa Luxembourg” -- a communist organizer killed in Germany in 1919 -- were “undemocratically kicked out.”

She envisions a church that abhors such coercion, that embraces “non-violent strategies” and rejects society’s “domination system.” For her own small congregation of eight to 10 worshipers, she is trying to devise such strategies, looking to the day when it has a “socialist Sunday school.”

She is concerned that American “working people are voting against their own economic interests” and that “the spiritual values of the Left are in eclipse.” She says “thousands of years are operating” to thwart these values, including “from Calvin to Wal-Mart.”

Echoing a common complaint of socialists, she rejects mere reform of society, which she considers “the impulse to fix things just enough” so as to prevent more sweeping change. In any case, “non-violence is essential,” she said.

In discussion following her talk, I asked if religious socialism is not a contradiction, having in mind dialectical materialism, “opium of the people,” and all that. But before I could say Karl Marx or pie in the sky when you die, I was handed a copy of Volume 28, number 3 of the Democratic Socialists of America publication, “Religious Socialism: The Journal for People of Faith and Socialism.” Among its writers, were Princeton philosopher and Dissent magazine editor Michael Walzer writing on the good life and one of its own editors, Commonweal magazine contributor John C. Cort, reviewing books.

I was impressed but should have known better, having encountered another anomaly as a visitor some years back at Third Unitarian Church, on Mayfield Avenue in Austin, where believers in God were challenged in a discussion to come out of the closet and none did. You can lead Unitarians to church, apparently, but you can’t make them believe. Whether you can make them bend or abandon Robert’s rules, as Jean Darling would prefer, is another question.

Five years later, Tom Broderick was still propounding socialism, in his and three others’ letter to the Wednesday Journal of 4/21/2009 promoting a “living wage” ordinance for Oak Park. It was a follow-up on the advisory vote in the previous November general election in favor of such an ordinance, whose fate was for the moment in the hands of the village’s Community Relations Commission, which had been charged with researching and making a recommendation to the village board.

It would be “an anti-poverty tool that works,” argued Broderick and the others, citing target groups as named in the referendum — village employees (already paid enough, they said) and employees of those doing business with the village and of organizations receiving a village subsidy. Especially in hard times such as the present, they argued, a mandated wage “makes sense.”

“Fight poverty, right here, right now” had been their message to the village board, in the “Yes we can!” spirit of the Obama campaign. So too was their confidence in promoting a non-market solution as shown in their bold self-identifications, in two cases Socialist -- Broderick with the Greater Oak Park Democratic Socialists of America and the others respectively with Young Democratic Socialists, the Oak Park Coalition for Truth and Justice, and Unity Temple Social Mission Committee.

Village politics heated up in ‘05. Perennial winners were wiped out in the spring election.

The columnist (this writer), asked, “Who lost village hall?” . . . Twenty years ago, when Oak Park’s Village Manager Association (VMA) lost its first election in thirty-some years, licensed sociologist and past and future school, township, and village government office holder Galen Gockel voiced a trenchant opinion in the matter.

“It was social class,” he said in a guest essay in the Wednesday Journal, adding, “Money. Occupation. Prestige. Status.”

The outs were saying, “We’ve been ignored.... The local elite is imposing its agenda on us,” he wrote. “Oak Park’s dominant liberal group” was deciding things.

Enough voters felt left out to swing an election, though not so completely as last April’s, when no VMA candidate survived but the veteran village clerk.

That was then. What does Gockel say now? Readers are advised: This is an exclusive. The VMA slate, failing to grasp voters’ “hunger for change,” never had a chance, in Gockel’s opinion.

Too many disagreed with major decisions, from the Whiteco (development) subsidy to the non-ban on smoking. There was extensive umbrage-taking at “arbitrary and unforgiving parking enforcement... chronic building permit delays,” and other annoyances and indignities emanating from Village Hall. From unpopular decisions came a zest for “new leadership,” a phrase shrewdly incorporated into the opposition’s name, New Leadership Party.

From annoyances and indignities came a “coalition of the offended.” New leaders and the offended gunned for the incumbent party.

These were pegged as mere “nay-sayers” who would find out on election day how wrong they were. But “citizen unhappiness was wide and deep, and the local (VMA) elite . . . didn’t understand that.”

VMA candidates would have had to disown major board decisions of the previous four to eight years, when VMA people ran things. They didn’t, and voters themselves became nay-sayers. VMA had done the foul deeds, and VMA paid the price.

— to be continued —

— more to come from A Short History of Oak Park, Volume 1, 2004-2005 —