This is a story of failure. I consider failures opportunities and not necessarily the end of a story. So, this still could lead to a variety of outcomes. That said, failures are painful & sometimes traumatic.
When last I wrote, it was about the very challenging General Assembly wherein Occupy Boston processed a proposal regarding how the community would engender safety against sexual offenders. That General Assembly was nearly two weeks ago. It wasn't pretty.
Since then, we've had three more General Assemblies wherein this proposal has been processed. I was a lead facilitator for the second & third sessions. Ultimately, the proposal was blocked. Several people attempted blocks. The final, successful block came from Paul Shannon who has never participated in Occupy Boston before this proposal came forward and who did not identify himself as a leading voice for an organization called Reform Sex Offender Laws and a documented supporter of NAMBLA.
When the block was successful, about 30 people stood up, mic-checked a statement and walked out of GA. More people, who hadn't been at the GA joined them at the ensuing gathering of solidarity. The people remaining at GA proceeded, as though they still had quorum and passed a different, related, proposal and then promoted that via social media as "good news". Some went as far as to whitewash the Occupy Boston Facebook page by removing entries which referred to the failed proposal. And then to falsely blame that on one of the people who had joined the walk out. Interestingly, there was no livestream of this GA. I can't recall the last time we had no livestream.
There are so many levels of offense & failure in all of this, that I don't even know where to begin.....
Do I start with my own feelings? I've had a lot of them over the last several weeks. They are in response to both personal offenses I have endured and serious concern for the relational integrity of Occupy Boston. I've been pointing out that we need to address these issues ever since the "Summit", yet there has not been a collective will to stop and tend the cohesiveness of the community, even at working group level. Will we stop now? If last night is any indication, no they won't. (Yes, the change of pronoun was purposeful.)
Do I analyze things? I see how our process feeds dysfunction. I see how distrust stops us from working in a spirit of creative collaboration. I see how fear stops us from embracing the very things we say we value. I see how a group of thousands of people, many of whom didn't know each other three months ago, would naturally run into something like this.
But, I sense that if I dive into all of that right now, the primary need to address will be ignored. I will be overwhelmed. The writing will never be done. So, perhaps this is a multi-part piece of writing. Perhaps that can keep things focused? Maybe I need to facilitate the discussion here, a bit.
I'm going to speak to one aspect of concern in this diary. I ask for a protocol to be observed here. Per the ethos of Daily Kos, as stated by Markos himself, if you're in this diary, I'm the hostess of the house. If you don't respect my house rules, you're being a "dick". (His word, not mine. I don't like gendered epithets.) So here are the house rules:
- Please stick to the topic of discussion I've focused on.
- Suggest topics for another diary by posting a comment with the words "topic request" in the title and nothing else. Put the topic in the body of the comment.
- Do not reply to "topic request" comments. Or any comments which are not focused on the topic at hand. If you do, it will be considered threadjacking and HRs may ensue.
Thank you for your respect and consideration.
I submit that if a group of people were in a kitchen preparing a communal meal together and someone cut her finger, someone else would stop and say, "oh, you're hurt do you need anything?"
No one would want her injury to go untended, nor would they want blood in the food.
If she replied, "I'm fine. It's nothing. Just need to rinse it out." Everyone would go on their way.
If she replied, "It's really bleeding, I need a bandage." Someone or a couple of someones would tend to her.
If she cried out, "Oh my god, I've cut off the tip of my finger!" Likely most in the room would stop what they're doing and scramble to get her to the hospital. At this stage, whether the meal preparation would continue at all is questionable, but it might, because the cut was a mundane accident and she might still get back from the hospital and join the meal.
But, if someone in the kitchen, in a fit of upset, started waving a knife around and slashing other people in the room. The meal preparation and all thoughts of having that meal together would halt immediately. The knife wielder would be subdued and removed from the scene. Ambulances would be called. Triage to assess how many and what levels of injuries have been inflicted would take place. Even without intention, the knife wielder could have severed an artery or two and the room could be filling with blood. (Have you ever seen how quickly vast amounts of blood can stream out of a body?) If anyone needed to go to the emergency room with serious injury, likely most would go to the hospital and join the vigil in the waiting room. A few might stay behind to clean up the mess and make the space emotionally safe to return to. But even they would likely join their friends at the hospital.
I simply can't imagine in that last scenario that anyone in the room would suggest, after the ambulances left that they have enough people to finish the meal and could tend to the wounds of those who went to the hospital while doing so.
Intentional or not, the way people handled the subject matter of this proposal wounded a lot of their supposed comrades in the room. Fellow members of a community came forth crying out, "we're wounded and we're asking you to tend to us." They might as well have been holding out arms with severed hands and begging for triage until the long-term care of their wounds could be enacted. The response was, "we don't care what you think you need, we're going to tell you the only way we're willing to tend to you, if at all." Because what people who were rejecting the proposal were more concerned about tending to were socio-political principles, rather than the people sitting in the room with them. And they were doing it in some of the harshest ways possible.
In some instances, those who were clearly crying and shaking and telling us that they were being hurt by the conversation were yelled at, spit upon and mocked. Those who are begging for boundaries so that they can feel safe were being told that concern for the rights of people who have been known to grievously breach boundaries are paramount to their need for safety.
Occupy Boston operates with a codifed understanding that any proposal which is passed is subject to future amendment, stoppage or replacement. So, the community could have put aside all their principled opposition in the name of showing care and concern for the human beings in the room with them. Anyone who felt that the proposal had issues could have generated a new proposal and brought it forward for consideration as a replacement. If the community did not reject the first proposal those who brought it and supported it might be more open to hearing about alternatives.
Who would have been hurt by a short-term policy which may have had language some disagree with? In the next few weeks, who would have been hurt? By not passing it, at least 30 people in the room and more within the movement were hurt. What principle says that's good for the movement? Blocks are supposed to be because you think that if a proposal passed it would damage the movement. Its not about your personal principles. Its about a principled reason to believe that the movement would be damaged. Given that other Occupations have consented to proposals which included the same language and the movement hasn't been hampered by that, I don't see this proposal fits that. Particularly given that better policies could be put in place later.
So, it begs the question: why, when so many people are begging you to do this for them and you know that it will result in a huge splintering of Occupy Boston if you don't, would you deny them this?
When people breach boundaries, trust is breached. Trust can be nearly impossible to regain. The first step in redemption, in regaining trust, is admitting your offense and being accountable for how people likely won't trust you now. And for how long it may take to regain their trust. It becomes incumbent on you to be hyper-vigilant about boundaries and to not try to make others feel guilty for putting up huge ones. You must live with and face the loneliness that comes from that. If there are those who can reach out to you without fear, you are lucky. But those who can should never be used to then try and force others to drop their boundaries when they're not ready to.
Let's say that in some wild fit of pique, I grap an axe from my toolshed and attack my neighbor. Lets hope that I get prosecuted for that crime. (I'm not endorsing our current system of prosecution, conviction and punishment, by the way.) In a beautiful world, my victim would be tended to with all the care in the world. I would also be tended to, to see why I did what I did and if anything can be done to ensure that I would never be pushed to that again. If I haven't the ability to control those kinds of impulses, I hope people would ensure that I'm never in a position to hurt someone like that again. I couldn't psychologically bear the burden.
But, let's say we find out that a doctor gave me some meds which have horrible side effects. We get me off those meds and we all recognize that I wasn't myself and I would never do that again. Still, my neighbor may never feel safe in my presence again. Even without accepting "blame", I can accept that that would be a natural reaction. If he's so scared that I realize even living next door is filling his life with anxiety, the compassionate and accountable thing to do would be to move, so my neighbor can get his life back. I wouldn't go around ranting about my rights and how I'd done my time and that I deserve to be able to just move on. Serious damage was done. And I have the ability to reduce someone else's suffering. That would be the most humane set of priorities.
Occupy Boston is not the all-encompassing world. We can have boundaries. We can determine, based on what our existing members state that they need, what those boundaries are. We can reasses over time and change those boundaries, later. But setting boundaries at Occupy Boston isn't cutting people off from living. They can get food elsewhere. They participate remotely. If the presence of one person, makes half the people present too uncomfortable to participate, how is that inclusive?
If people tell you they are upset, there are a few things which are never helpful. Don't tell them to "calm down". Its offensive. Emotions are real and they are part of our internal guidance system. Sometimes they need to dominate that guidance system. If they have risen up to dominate there's probably a damned good reason and they won't diminish their power until the reasons are addressed.
Don't tell people what to feel or why they feel it. Inquire and accept their responses as their truth.
When someone is upset and keeps telling you she is upset, don't say, "But, I did this. You should feel better now." Again, you're invalidating her feelings. More than that, it's patronizing to assume that without her participation you can resolve her feelings. She needs to be part of the development of the resolution. Anything else is continuing the very oppression her feelings are rising up from.
I have focused on this piece of the puzzle, because nothing can happen to heal the breach at Occupy Boston until the feelings of those who have cried out are acknowledged; until their continued cries of "you're still hurting us" are acknowledged; until the offense of continuing after they've walked away and bringing them the "good news" of how you've "resolved the issue" without them is acknowledged; until the focus of the dialogue is not, "what solution works for me" and becomes "how can we address your needs?"
There are many other things to discuss about how all of this went down at Occupy Boston, but there really is no Occupy Boston until this is addressed. It's been coming for weeks. We've denied the very real need to stop any time an offense is committed and tend to it. The level of tending will depend on the level of offense, of course, but every single offense ought to be tended. Each one ignored is like ignoring the woman who cuts her finger in the kitchen. Even if its a minor wound, not tended she continues bleeding into the food and the wound festers. The longer it goes untended, the worse the ramifications of the wound. Eventually, she will die from the toxicity of the festering.
We've let far too many wounds go for far too long. We've hit an existential crisis. We need to stop all GAs and tend to this. We can decide to this in a healing way - make it the first piece of business at the next GA to call a halt and commit to tending - or we can do it in a dysfunctional way. Which path will we choose?
PS: I would like to note that Occupy Boston has been committed to transparency. This means letting the world see how messy things can be. Because we are not hierarchical, we can't sweep issues like this under the rug by having top-down imposed "rules" which suppress voices of dissent or victimhood. We're a new body of people and we're working through one of the most divisive and emotionally charged subjects in the history of human kind. The fact that rates of sexual offense are so high in this country tells us that we, as a society, have not figured out how to ensure that no one becomes so emotionally or psychologically tortured that they could even commit such an egregious act against another person. And, yes, our "justice" system only breeds further offenses. It is racist and it serves the oppressive systems of the elite class. I note this because anyone who wants to use this subject as some reason to denigrate Occupy Boston, its commitment to horizontal democracy and its political goas wholesale would be deemed disingenuous by me. You know, the ol' glass houses reference.... Occupy Boston wouldn't be facing this issue at all if society-at-large had already done so. Don't place a larger burden on us than you do on yourself. And "calling the police" isn't the answer. Grrr.
Again, the House Rules:
- Please stick to the topic of discussion I've focused on.
- Suggest topics for another diary by posting a comment with the words "topic request" in the title and nothing else. Put the topic in the body of the comment.
- Do not reply to "topic request" comments. Or any comments which are not focused on the topic at hand. If you do, it will be considered thread-jacking and HRs may ensue.
Thank you for your respect and consideration.