[Peace-discuss] Re: [Peace] Re: Memorial in Champaign-Urbana

[Heather Ault]

Thanks everyone for your passion and ideas!!! This memorial is an
incredibly important time for solidarity around human rights and social
justice and I look forward to coming together as a community. Democracy
Now has devoted two days this week to Dr. Tiller and abortion rights,
and worth a listen/watch.

Here's quote from Dr. Tiller: "We’ve given war, pestilence, hate, greed,
judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try, and it failed. We need a new
paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect
in all our relationships."

So, here's my suggested plan, since we need to make a few commitments.

1. Let's have the memorial at 10am at the United States Courthouse
building - 201 S Vine St at Elm in Urbana. Flyers to be passed out at
the Farmer's Market beforehand.

2. Tonight, I will work on an announcement/press release (with
collaboration, I hope!) and send it to you for distribution sometime
tomorrow. Wayne Johnson has offered to write an article, any other
writers who can help with this?

3. Let's meet on Thursday from 7-8:30pm at the Women's Resources Center
to discuss flyers, posters, and other plans for Saturday. It's located
at the corner of Wright and Green (703 S. Wright Street) on the second
floor above the bank on the corner. My phone is 707-845-0572 if you have
trouble finding it.

In solidarity with you all!

Heather


On Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:01:43 -0500, "Bob Illyes" <illyes at uiuc.edu> said:
> Neil makes some good points. He just convinced me that I should show up
> at 
> the memorial.
> 
> I should say a few things about Laurie's prediction of the end of AWARE.
> 
> AWARE is a group of anti-war (and anti-racism, but this has always taken
> a 
> second place to war) people who differ on other issues radically. This 
> didn't matter initially, because AWARE was run more on the affinity-group 
> model, and AWARE meetings were just coordinating meetings for a number of 
> autonomous activist groups, some AWARE working groups and some not.
> 
> This works very well. Problems arise only when consensus-bullies threaten 
> to stop all action unless AWARE takes or does not take certain positions. 
> The usual resolution is that AWARE as an organization takes few
> positions. 
> This is good. The working groups can and do take positions.
> 
> This is how affinity group collaboration works. The main problem in 
> affinity groups is the consensus bully. They always show up, sooner or 
> later, and commence to drive people out who aren't sufficiently 
> "ideologically pure" as they see it, or unfortunately in too many cases 
> just people that annoy them. AWARE has a so-so record in dealing with
> this 
> problem, as do most of the progressive groups in town that use consensus. 
> If AWARE is brought down, it will be by not dealing with bullying
> effectively.
> 
> Bob
> 
...
Heather Ault
MFA Candidate, School of Art and Design
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
www.heatherault.org