Activity there began with the education of Freedmen and their families during the American Civil War, continued with meetings led by Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights movement to last weekend when the 14-year-old SC Progressive Network held its fall retreat.

The afternoon was taken up with workshops on civil rights, environment and energy, gender issues, LGBT priorities, voting rights, labor and the Death Penalty. Tactics have changed over time.  Over the top demonstrations aren’t the tactic of first resort any longer.

Finding opportunities for positive engagement and reasoned discussion have been the emphasis for several years.   

You don’t really need conservatives in the room to get a lot of debate when you have 100 liberals sitting in a circle.  There was plenty to argue about and plenty of argument.  Everyone tries to stay positive.  It’s clear that the problems of the economy, environment and government require material sacrifice.

South Carolina remains committed to the belief that the solutions to problems is in restoring something lost in the past.  

We have a 50-year gap between what a lot of people here want and what the world is going to demand.

The gathering was lead by some of South Carolina’s most determined progressive activists, 60s radicals who have mellowed to the point that they can have a civil conversation with the elected officials who tend to ignore them. There were also a big cadre of younger “come heres” who accepted tech jobs in South Carolina after corporate shakeups elsewhere and discovered South Carolina wasn’t Portland or Boston.

They told me the high tech firms SC does recruit to our state can’t fill the jobs they bring from the local talent pool.  As soon as the Internet is on in their new buildings, they’re ordering talent from elsewhere, if they hadn’t started that project from a Starbucks the previous week.  Actually, the “where” of what those people do isn’t anything like the where of a 1960s textile plant.

When the Penn Center WI-FI didn’t connect to the Internet, our plans to put the entire weekend on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook evaporated.

We hoped to validate the newer parts of the organizing model, but had to sit quietly while the Civil Rights people described the importance of mailing handwritten letters to congressmen while laptop cursors blinked uselessly.

A dinner, an evening’s talk, breakfast and some singing later, we were done.  

There was a new agenda of meetings, political actions and goals set.  The massive challenge of fitting South Carolina’s political culture of conservative denial to the accelerating agendas of a performance driven globalized culture and economy is an expanding stretch.  

Most of the population is in social and economic shock, ripped from their expectations. It’s never been tougher to organize when something complex, sensitive and fast is called for.

There’s no certainty it can be done in time.

However, last weekend at Penn Center, some people were trying.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’OnVillage. )