This is stupid, Yoshie, and you are not stupid. It is also arrogant and insulting. Working people with families like liberal dem proceedings with Robert's Rules because they mean that things actually get done in a reasonable about of time, allowing them to feed the kids, get them to bed, and get to bed yourself in time to get to work. This reflects alienated conditions of nuclear families and wage labor, blah blah, but that is our reality. And I will thank you not to condescend to me and other working parents for being brainwashed when we are trying to cope with the difficult conditions of trying to do something about the alienated conditions while trying to put food on our families, as W so eloquently put it. If that is the way you approach it, no wonder that working parents keepo a million miles from your organizations.
I will add that the group Janis and I co-chaired in Ann Arbor in the 1980s was the longest latest town-gown organization I ever knew of. We were able to keep working parents involved because we were sensitive to their needs, including brisk and efficient meetings, and we didn't assume that they were zombies complicit in their own oppression, unlike us superior folk who had no bedtimes or morning (or, in many cases, night shift) jobs to worry about. We had nurses, med techs, and autoworkers, among others all with children involved in a disarmament group over a period of six years. Not too shabby, huh?
--jks
In a message dated Tue, 20 Jun 2000 9:58:18 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> writes:
<< furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:
> << Doug asks what I would prefer. At this point, I'd say that decisions
> had better be made by the majority rule. >>
JKSCHW at aol.com:
> Yeah, early in my political career I became a great fan of a somewhat reduced
> Robert's Rules. Working people with families have no time for this
> anarchochildish consensus bullshit. When I chaired meetings we started on
> time and finished our business in an hour and a half at most. Three cheers
> for liberal democracy!
There's no particular reason to believe that liberal democratic procedures in themselves will lead to better racial or cultural balance, however. What they seem to do in the outer world is lead to a sort of public legitimation of a constitutional dominant or ruling class who acknowledge some sort of debt to the unwashed while ruling them -- a bourgeoisie, one might say. Historically this class has admitted representatives of the lower orders not through internal procedures (usually) but when some activist, trouble-making external group has broken the general consensus on which the arrangement rested. The new are then made like the old.
Imitation of this sort of thing, the liberal State, by radical groups seems to lead to those depressing public meetings where Important People on a dais hector the multitudes gathered below them, after which everyone goes home and nothing much changes.
Unfortunately, it's not surprising that people under oppression ("working people with families") favor arrangements which comport with their oppression. There's only so much you can fight at once.
>>