Conflict Resolution

So a former white racist speaker, a founding member of the National Congress of Black Women, a former FBI agent & the National Field Director of the Christian Coalition walk into a bar....

...How these people and others came together and were able to harmonize a solution, and how you can too in your daily routine.

Source:
The Michigan conference

Let us now turn our attention to a gathering in which the space of harmonization was longer lasting – and where the released energy of the group could be applied to shared problems, leading to surprising outcomes and breakthroughs in mutual understanding. This conference, “Democracy in America,” was held at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in June 2004. Mark Satin, editor of the Radical Middle Newsletter was a participant, and he wrote about the conference in the May–June issue of his newsletter. Except where otherwise noted, the citations in this section are all taken from that article, which is archived at: http://www.radicalmiddle.com/x_fetzer_conference.htm

Mark quotes from the conference literature:

“The purpose of this gathering is to [initiate] a new kind of public conversation that moves us beyond polarization so we [can] effectively address the issues we care most about…

“We all share the same ‘boat’ called the United States of America. It is more essential now than ever [that we] begin to learn how to row with, rather than against, each other…”

The participants were from all across the political spectrum, including a former FBI agent, the National Field Director of the Christian Coalition, a founding member of the National Congress of Black Women, a board member of the National Rifle Association, the president of a left-leaning legal-issues organization, former Weather Underground supporters, and former speakers at white racist gatherings.

Clearly, the people who set up this conference share my views regarding the political importance of harmonization, and the necessity of overcoming factionalism. And they set themselves quite a challenge by bringing in such radically diverse participants. They jumped directly into the lion’s den: if they could achieve a space of harmonization here, they would demonstrate that harmonization is possible with almost any group of people. From such a radically diverse conference one might expect fistfights and shouting matches to emerge, rather than any kind of agreement or consensus. Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute, who was a participant, expressed his misgivings prior to the gathering this way:

“Using Google, I researched the people who were coming to the conversation. I read articles by the conservatives and listened to their radio talk shows – and I got triggered by what they said. I reacted with anger, frustration and rejection of who they were. I thought silent counterarguments and felt the rise of adrenaline. Friends warned me to be careful – or couldn’t even imagine going to talk with such people.”
—http://co-intelligence.org/polarization-Fetzer.html

Mark describes the first evening’s activities this way:

On Friday night, we broke into three groups (of eight participants and one facilitator each) to discuss such questions as, “What did you understand about being an American when you were 12 years old? How have you experienced political differences and how did that affect you personally?”

It was impossible to participate in that exercise without coming to see (and feel and know) that every participant, whatever their politics, was a complex and caring human being.

We can see here that from the very beginning the facilitators focused attention on people and their experiences, and we can see that a space of harmonization was reached early on. Regarding an afternoon’s conversation later in the conference, Mark reports:

Someone tried to classify participants’ approaches as “left” or “right.” Someone on the right took umbrage with that, feeling that the qualities cited as “right” were insulting stereotypes; and that pressed many people’s buttons; and round and round and round we went, and the afternoon shadows grew longer.

But the end result of that conversation is we all realized – I mean, we all really “got” – how misleading and even infantilizing the old political spectrum had become.

Here we can see the space of harmonization expanding, as people dig deeper and pull out more of their concerns. Not only are they accepting and respecting one another’s contributions, but also they are beginning to understand the futility of labels and factions in general. This expansion continued in a later session, where the participants were asked to tell about each of the key decisions they’d made in their political lives:

Everyone stared, some of us open-mouthed, as various “left”-wingers and “right”-wingers, former Weather Underground supporters and former speakers at white racist gatherings, shared the incidents that shaped their lives.

And revealed without even trying that every caring person is a brother or sister under the skin.

And that our values are at some deep level fundamentally the same.

At the end of the conference the group came up with a remarkable declaration:

Before leaving, we all signed our names to a document titled “We the People.” Many of us signed with flourishes, as if we were signing something akin to the Declaration of Independence. Here are the key passages:

“We respect our differences and recognize America needs every one of our viewpoints, ideas, and passions – even those we don’t agree with – to keep our democracy vital and alive;

“We recognize that meeting here and across our land for dialogues across differences builds trust, understanding, respect, and empowerment – the conditions necessary for freedom and democracy to live in us and around us;

“And, therefore, each still grounded in our own considered views (conscience and convictions), we commit ourselves and our communities of interest to foster dialogue across the many divides in America, in large and small groups, to build trust, insight, and inspired action toward the more perfect union we all desire.”

Mark’s final statement about the conference:

For the first time in many years, I feel enthusiastic enough about an incipient political movement to want to put my shoulder to the wheel.

In this Michigan conference we can see examples of the kind of breakthroughs that can occur when a space of harmonization is maintained for an extended period. This diverse group of people, with radically different viewpoints and agendas, actually achieved a sense of solidarity and community, which they expressed in this “We the People” declaration. And this was not simply an intellectual experience for the participants; there is an obvious passion and commitment in the language of their declaration. They could see from their own microcosm experience that harmonization could help eliminate factionalism in the macrocosm of the larger society. And they understood that the process is about trust and dialog, not about any particular platform or program.

“Consensus does not mean unanimous agreement. It means we create a forum where all voices can be heard and we can think creatively rather than dualistically about how to reconcile our different needs and visions.”
—Starhawk, “Lessons from Seattle and Washington D.C.”
End Source

This is a great book freely available online. So far the book has been about solutions to restoring our world back into something great. He covers, how the current form of democracy we have is not able to speak for the common people, and that it is also setup that way. He mentions this is due to the fact of the systems roots in history, a competative approach to ruling / leading. This approach always leaves someone unhappy to say the least.

Although I have not finished reading this book, I feel it was worth sharing this excerpt, given the authors means to his goal, and his goal in mind.

Im looking forward to reading the last half.