Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Scaling up

William Ury writes about a protracted workplace conflict divisions growing over time into deeply divided camps with tensions at a boiling point one day when one of the workers, a young woman, arrived late carrying her little baby, explaining the impossible circumstances of her day and why she had no choice if she were to show up for this crucial meeting except to bring her baby. She took her seat and placed the sleeping baby on a blanket in front of her.

"Everyone looked at the baby, who had fallen asleep. I suddenly realized that the baby, lying there in the middle of our circle, was the third side, the symbol of the whole, the newest citizen standing for the future of the country. The baby was a silent witness who, without a word, had reframed the conversation, reminding people of the bigger picture. For a moment, it was no longer 'us against them.' It was 'all of us together'" (Ury, 2024, p. 240).

This is not to make a generic claim that babies will bring peace in from their third side. Ury saw it in that moment, but the third side is Out There or In Here in every conflict, he seems to be asserting, if we are conflict-alert, third-side-observational.

Babies were not the third side in the European Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, slavery in the Americas, the theft of the Americas from the Original People--other conflict work might have stopped those genocidal, extractive conflicts, we will never know. But when cases like the Liberian women discovering the third side in the middle of their godawful war, they stopped it and gained democracy for their beleaguered country. I would suggest the third side there was the unity that Muslim and Christian women perceived as possible, then doable, then the power the combative men and boys did not anticipate and which won for everyone. 

The third side, I posit, is what might be the key to winning for all. It may never be identical to the third side in any other conflict, thus requiring us to be open to what might be identifiable as that third side and then working to hold it up for all to consider.

References

Ury, William (2024). Possible: How we survive (and thrive) in an age of conflict. Harper Business.

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Conflict transformation principles and street activism

I use Fisher, Ury, and Patton's Getting to Yes 3rd edition in my Introduction to Conflict Resolution course. Decades ago, when I took my first Conflict Resolution class in the 1980s, they had a skinny 1981 first edition, which gave me new language and organizing principles in my activism (I was a professional community organizer in those years). I began to bring forth a concept I called enlightened self-interest, which helped me and my fellow activists foreground cause, effect, and sustainable gains. We stopped the US Forest Service from spraying pesticides and herbicides, we helped the Anishinaabe regain their treaty rights, we forced Rio Tinto Zinc to mine in the strictest environmentally safe way, we stopped two proposed nuclear waste dumps, and we shut down a US thermonuclear command base in Michigan and Wisconsin. We had so many close relationships that we became a highly functional regional crew really strengthened by evoking that sense of enlightened self-interest, so that we could partner with hunting groups to stop some environmental threat even though people like me had their land posted No Hunting. 

A key phrase re: the 2020 BLM uprising is public opinion and policy change. I have asserted for decades that each decision by the organizers should run through a filtering question, "How will this affect recruitment?" because in nonviolent social movements, size matters. Rioting will turn public opinion against any group, as a fair bit of research documents, so the most functional approach in my experience is to let rioters know that those actions are not part of the campaign, and if they occur in the context of the campaign they will be denounced. 

Failure to do this is failure to win. I'm an old white man so I was there in the summer of 2020 in person a bit but gave up on any nighttime actions as dysregulated dysfunctional failures. It was not my place to try to correct that as an ally, not a leader, but I was unimpressed by local African American politicians, and I was similarly unimpressed by the African American ministers who refused to act as any corrective. Sure enough, local Black politicians were beaten in 2022, the Defund the Police campaign has been completely reversed by a public demanding more cops, and any "victories" were ephemeral at best. 

References

Fisher, Roger; Ury, William; Patton, Bruce (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Penguin. 

Monday, November 18, 2024

Table that motion or move to new tables?

"Be entrepreneurial. Identify groups and organizations that are interested in community organizing and community building. Find new tables to sit at that help you see the connections that exist in your community" (Ohmer & DeMasi, 2009, p. 306).

We are all busy people with great big lives and so most often resist getting involved in yet another group, taking up another cause, helping another struggling person, and all the new ways to take what little discretionary time we have each day, and each week. 

Organizationally, however, consensus organizers can likely do this by using those new connections to make their other work more efficient. Asking someone to step up and help with something you are doing so that you are free to make a new potential partnership connection with another group is empowering in multiple ways. 

The person you asked to help out with something you are already doing in your organization feels the confidence you have in them and frequently does their own adjusting to find the bandwidth to help. They hone skills or develop new ones, strengthening their own toolkit while they strengthen the organization. 

You investigate potential partnerships with another organization which has strengths your organization may not, while you may bring them organizational assets they lack. 

Perhaps it works out or perhaps it doesn't, but without sitting at that new table, it certainly won't.

References

Ohmer, Mary L. & DeMasi, Karen (2009). Consensus organizing: A community development workbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Fool's Choice vs Possible

"Break free of the Fool's Choice that's made you feel helpless to choose anything other than going on the attack or staying silent" (Grenny, et al., p. 100).

"Beyond the two sides, there is a third side. It is the side of all Venezuela--the side of your children and their future" (Ury, 2024, p. 224).

Ury was in Venezuela speaking in a large hall to a mixed crowd of chavistas and anti-chavistas. It was seeming as though civil war was likely. He helped convince at least some enemies to enter into dialog to help prevent war, to understand that the third side was more helpful than either positional devotion to one immutable side. 

This acceptance of much more choice beyond the Fool's Choice is at the heart of the last best response to existential threat. We know about flight, fight, freeze, abject surrender, and posing (well, hopefully we know about more than fight or flight at least). The only other choice, the only other response, is the illimitable power and capacity of human creativity, imagination, and the art of the possible.

References

Grenny, Joseph; Patterson, Kerry; McMillan, Ron; Switzler, Al; Gregory, Emily (2023). Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high. 3rd ed. VitalSmarts.

Ury, William (2024). Possible: How we survive (and thrive) in an age of conflict. Harper Business.

Saturday, November 16, 2024

Backfire

All violence backfires. Police kill Black people and the citizenry reacts against police. If that reaction gets violent, the public disapproves of both.

And now, more than 400 days into Israel's retributive war on Gaza, backfire is operating in all directions and in ways that will sully the public reputation of those committing it. 

For example, in Eugene, at the U of Oregon, spraypainted swastikas and other hate defacing vandalism are emphatically not saving any children in Gaza. Instead, "pro-Palestinian activists" are causing increasing public apathy about what Israel is doing. 

Smart activism--and there is some being conducted by Palestinians--uses the tenets of conflict transformation, not conflict exacerbation. Any identity slurs will alienate the public and the public will decide if peace in the Middle East is a priority. 

If Americans who claim to care about Palestine would use nonviolent methods, including advocating for those Palestinians on the ground anywhere engaged in nonviolent resistance, we might see effective pressure on our own government to stop arms transfers to the region, and we are by far the biggest source for those arms. 

Friday, November 15, 2024

Labile electorate (apparently gender-dependent)

Trump won (2016 vs Hillary Clinton), Trump lost (2020 vs Joe Biden), and Trump won (2024 vs Kamala Harris). 

While the margins of victory and loss were slim, they are meaningful. In the educated environments Trump was given no chance of victory in 2016. While the university president where I teach had some very different views than I did, he chose to sit next to me at a summer dinner in his presidential manor backyard with approximately 35 others sitting at various picnic tables on his huge deck. It was July, 2016, and I said, "Looks like Trump might win." He scoffed, saying, "No chance of that." Of course he listened exclusively to very educated people in his political and social ecology. I was a professor, yes, but also a street activist who interacted every day with working class folks in many ways, including trips to the lumberyard for my many home projects. While Trump had no chance in Portland, Oregon, I knew from many working class and activist connections in southern and eastern Oregon that the pulse of the working class was not favorable to Hillary Clinton, exacerbated by her term for the violent supporters of Trump at his rallies: deplorables. And the majority of those who were driven hard by sexism were going to vote for Trump. 

Another white man is apparently the only thing that can beat a racist, misogynist, toxic nationalist like Trump in racist, misogynist, toxic nationalist America. So Biden did, in 2020. America will put aside some of its focus on racism and toxic nationalism, as we saw with Barack Obama's great successes, but apparently the gender question is a bridge too far for at least a slim majority of us.

That Trump picked up percentages of women from 2020 to 2024[1] shows deep levels of internalized oppression as well as susceptibility to an onslaught of fake news and lies about the economy--both from rightwing candidates and spokespeople but also from Russian digital placement of stories and articles full of lies. As all independent analysis of the Biden-Harris economy showed amazing strength in virtually all categories--stock market, unemployment, recovery from covid-caused inflation--Trump lied about it all at every turn, often parroting fake news[2] planted by Russian sources.

Putin got his wish again. Ukraine will be forfeit and we will see about other free former republics of the Soviet empire. Watch this space.



[1] https://apnews.com/article/election-harris-trump-women-latinos-black-voters-0f3fbda3362f3dcfe41aa6b858f22d12

[2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-russian-active-measures-disinformation_n_58dd49c0e4b08194e3b8320e


Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Kent Shifferd: An appreciation

Aside from my Dad, the person who influenced me and mentored me more than any other human is the late Kent Shifferd, a peace historian and educator. I heard Dr. Shifferd give a talk at a small regional peace conference he organized at a college about 75 miles from where I was living on a pretty 40-acre forested site in my solar cabin with a lovely little river--a tributary to the St. Croix river, which itself was a tributary to the mighty Mississippi river. I was moving from there to Hayward, Wisconsin because my son wanted to live in a town, not in the woods, and I was working as a community organizer for Waging Peace, a collective of three of us--a former national AFSC organizer--Madge Cyrus--and a pastor's wife, Jeanne Larson. 

Hearing Kent planted a seed. Within a couple of years I sold my home in Hayward and moved to Ashland, Wisconsin, and started taking classes from him. His teaching content and style were revelatory, extremely engaged and engaging. His Ph.D. was in History so his Peace & Conflict Studies degree was history-centered but much more along the lines of those historians who bring the lessons of history straight into the news of the day. 

Kent also introduced me to the synthesis of peace and environmentalism, something I had come to on my own in a generalized fashion as an activist, but he turned it toward an academic melding of cause and effect for many of us. I recall one of my brilliant peace classmates (and my girlfriend for those years), Nikki Goldstein (now Nikki Main) writing a leaflet that we copied and handed out that she titled, Can you be a militarist and an environmentalist? It was before many were thinking about that connection and, in our case, it was an outgrowth of some of Kent's talks. He was even gracious enough to invite me to be a co-presenter of a workshop on exactly that at an academic conference when I was just a lowly undergraduate. 

Kent thought in structural, systemic terms and helped all of his students begin to do the same. Indeed, after he retired he wrote a great book that did all that exceedingly well, From War to Peace (Shifferd, 2011). I used it for several years in my Peace Studies class. 

Kent fired up the thirst for knowledge in his students--it certainly did so for me. I graduated from college top of my class, summa cum laude (back before there was Latin status inflation, so I was the only one of them in my graduating class). This was despite graduating in the bottom half of my high school graduating class and was largely due to Kent and his intellectual inspiration. 

Remarkably, Kent continued to boost my future even after. He co-created a blockbuster course, Dilemmas of War and Peace, offered through the University of Wisconsin Extension--distance learning in the pre-digital age. He succeeded in getting them to hire me to teach it as I was earning my masters degree, which broke a lot of rules and yet he did it. It furthered my education as I read the mammoth texts right along with students. Teaching an upper-division course with only a bachelor's degree was only possible because Kent created that opportunity for me. 

He didn't stop there in his profound effects on my life. When my resistance partner, the late Donna Howard and I did a Plowshares action of direct disarmament, Kent testified at our trial and set it up so the jury of 12 northwoods citizens understood how much I knew about the thermonuclear command center that we partially dismantled. The jury acquitted us on the major charge--Sabotage--thus obviating the potential for an extra decade in prison. The lesser charge, Destruction of Property, had no defense, we were convicted, and went to prison on a three-year sentence. 

So being part of our defense that succeeded in keeping us out of a long sentence was still not the end of Kent's powerful effects on my life. When I got out of prison, still on parole and wearing an ankle monitor, Kent called and said he was going to take a fall term sabbatical to do some writing and would I like to teach his Peace Studies course. Wow! Hells-yeah! I was super-excited and super-prepped because of not only taking that course from him but from teaching the amazing Dilemmas of War & Peace class he co-created.

So, one underpaid term as an adjunct--it was so enriching, so validating, so in line with what I wanted, but just temporary. Then, right in the middle of the fall term, my one and only semester, the college offered senior faculty a one-time early retirement payout and both Kent and Pat, his wife and Sociologist, took it. Kent called again, told me, and said he recommended to the Dean that I be hired on an ongoing basis until a national search could replace me. The Dean agreed and Kent basically handed me the Peace and Conflict Studies major and minor that he had created years before--the first one in Wisconsin.

Yes, my father shaped me most of all, but Kent was a close second. And, like my father, Kent kept friends on all sides of all questions except those that dealt with basic human rights. He modeled that for all his students, and it was no wonder that former military were avid peace students of his. 

Kent Shifferd, Ph.D., lived an examined life, standing up for peace, for people, and for the Earth. 


Shifferd, Kent D. (2011). From war to peace: A guide to the next hundred years. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.