[Peace-discuss] Tonight's meeting

[C. G. Estabrook]

Here's something that a woman thinks, Al.  Laura Nader, a professor of
anthropology at UC Berkeley (and sister of Ralph) speaks of "coercive
harmony," which she describes as "basically a movement against the
contentious in anything, and it has very strange bedfellows, from people
with various psychiatric therapy movements, Christian fundamentalists,
corporations sick of paying lawyers, activists who believe we should love
each other.  We are talking about coercive harmony -- an ideology that
says if you disagree, you should really keep your mouth shut."  (Nader,
Laura. 1995. Coercive harmony - The political economy of legal models.
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. 25 p.)

Regards, Carl


On Sun, 25 Apr 2004, Al Kagan wrote:

> That was a pretty intense meeting tonight.  We have been working
> together pretty smoothly these last two and a half years. I think we
> can congratulate ourselves on that.  One of reasons for our success is
> that we have respectful discussion.  For whatever reason, what
> happened tonight was an exception to our rule.
> 
> We must provide an environment where people feel free to speak.  I
> think only a small number of the folks in the room spoke tonight, and
> unfortunately I think that is usually the case. So we need to work on
> that a bit.
> 
> I think that the men tend to speak more than the women.  Perhaps we
> (the men) need to be more sensitive to that, especially when we are
> discussing questions having to do with women's rights and sexism.
> 
> We also need to be sensitive to the facilitator.  We need to make that
> job easy, not difficult.  We need to give the facilitator some help in
> encouraging everyone.  Likewise we need to support the facilitator
> when someone goes on too long or speaks too many times in a row.
> Everyone should remember that effective meetings will not happen when
> people think they have the right to speak for as long as they think
> they should.  We have to trust our facilitators to put on the brakes.
> 
> I would especially like to hear what the women think about tonight's
> meeting. --
>