[Peace-discuss] growing pains?

[Randall Cotton]

I've not included an agenda item on the MAP proposal in this week's agenda.
(But, of course, if someone says they'd like to add it, I will).

As I've mentioned - I do object to it in its current form. However, I think
deliberation on this will benefit from a delay in bringing it up again at a
meeting and I suspect there's no need to rush it.

Actually, I think there's a much bigger issue here that should be addressed
before we deliberate further on the MAP proposal anyway. Specifically - how
should AWARE handle "collective approval" of proposals that directly impact
the entire group when there is dissent?

We have a mechanism that would work for proposals that do NOT directly
impact the entire group - the "working group". Folks that are interested or
impacted get together and do what they want in the way they want to. But the
issue at stake here could potentially impact any member/participant of
AWARE. We're talking about what will happen if an arbitrary AWARE
member/participant gets arrested, among other things. A "working group"
doesn't apply here. In fact, any self-selected subset of AWARE would be
inappropriate here.

There is no defined mechanism for this. I'm not sure it's come up before.
Does one person dissenting block approval? Should a single, solitary
dissenter be bypassed? How about two? If an attempt to resolve the dissent
is made, how should that be done? Should it be hashed out in a full AWARE
meeting (I would argue not =8-). Should interested folks try to resolve
things with the dissenter(s) off-line, feed the result to the proposers and
resubmit a modified proposal at a future meeting? I certainly don't claim to
have the answers.

It seems to me the group has hummed along rather swimmingly as long as we
all had an urgent, grand unifying cause, namely "preventing the invasion of
Iraq". We were all pretty focused in a very narrow beam on a universally
understood target. There was little dissent, partially to avoid compromising
this cause. I could be wrong (my view, as a dissenter, may be distorted),
but I think what may be starting to happen now is that without such an
urgent unifying cause, there is more dissent. This might turn out to be a
general trend in the group.

I'm not proposing we take action on any of this now. I'm interested in what
people on this list have to say about it. I do feel, however, that resolving
the issues that gave rise to the MAP proposal may not be possible (or may,
at least, be very difficult) unless we address this larger issue first.

R