Same Old, and Also Brand New

Jell-O Goes Gold

I shared a seven-year-old post FB sent me, because it said a few things I have never stopped saying. Being engaged so much in crafting the elegant solution with so many people, lots of things don't change, and all of us, including me, need to keep reminding ourselves of how we get there.

It does matter what our process is. We do need to bring our best selves to every meeting. One person having an off day or engaging in self-serving behavior, or letting their fears overcome their manners, can have a devastating effect on people who are volunteering their time and energy. Every time someone goes off, everyone else goes home with the task of self-examination, checking on their own thought processes and priorities, and working on their skills and internal processes, just to get back to where they started at the beginning of the meeting. Careless words and actions are what drives volunteers away.

My two main membership organizations (Saturday Market and Oregon Country Fair) are full of visionaries, hard workers, practical planners, and dreamers. Our whole impetus starting out so long ago (hard to grasp the fifty year lifespan, already) was to create a better life experience, to share our talents, to work together without self-interest for the common good. Many of us were in our twenties and thirties, and if you were there, you remember why we needed an "alternative society." Mainstream reality was grim. Our generation of young men was being wiped out in Vietnam, brutally involved against their wills in a corrupt and terrifying war of imperialist domination (we had the draft and the lottery for it.) The government was clearly crooked and grasping (we had Nixon and then Reagan) and we had been collectively traumatized by the murders of our visionary leaders, the two Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr, and many of the Black Panther leaders, who were trying to feed children and protect the lives of their community. Our country was described as divided in two, and everyone was fighting, even at the family level. It always seemed manufactured and phony, and what stuck in our minds was the advice to The Graduate: "Plastics." What a metaphor.

My cynical perspective sees everything differently than I did then, as history repeats itself but in ever-darker ways, but we have learned a lot over the years, and we have taught our children well. In my little corner of the alternative society, we're well established in experienced process, we practice peace, and we value self-assessment and education, and there's a lot of wisdom in every gathering. Some among us are excellent at cutting through the crap. One of my friends nailed it at a difficult meeting when she pointed out an absence of something basic, personal responsibility. We live with that every day as self-employed people, with our survival on the line with each action we take.

We aren't as flummoxed by bullies and gaslighters as we were in the past. Collectively the whole world is much less willing to tolerate coercion and negative framing and divisiveness, and people are much braver about speaking clear truth and leaving their fears and confusions outside the room as they focus on actual problem-solving. Crafting the elegant solutions comes a little easier now. Not that it isn't a constant challenge.

Facebook discussions have both facilitated and destroyed process but reading so many threads that are open to everyone has me convinced that on balance, these rather warped forums of participatory democracy are helpful. We can identify behavior patterns, illogical arguments, trolling, and inspiration. When people turn the conversation with positive framing, you can almost hear the cheering. When someone comes to trash things, they rarely succeed. Ranks close and their comments are either argued down to shreds or they sit like a turd on a platter at the end of the thread. People reveal themselves in ways that wouldn't happen in a live meeting. We can edit our comments when we say something that doesn't sound right. We can drill down into the issues and bond or identify areas we have to work on.

It can be too much. We still have to get in the room together and be vulnerable as we take step after step toward naming and solving the actual problems. But often the myths we carry are shown to be such, in the online process, and we can share that perspective and re-right the ship. We're more in charge of our own process than ever, at the same time being more bombarded by distraction and intentional obfuscation than ever.

Country Fair, with it's larger population of stakeholders and many more FB pages, does a lot more of this online processing then we do at Market. We actually do ours on Saturdays, since we meet there so frequently. Sometimes you could frame it as gossip, but I see it as the informal process that facilitates the formal process. We tend to stay away from online processing, (and I'm grateful for that) as our population is smaller enough to interact more in person throughout the year. You don't necessarily have to be a committed volunteer who goes to meetings to share your perspective with your friends and neighbors. I am convinced the networking that goes on during the day on Saturdays is invaluable to our work. We get discussion time and we reach a lot more of us who aren't online, including both the new or infrequent sellers and the regular every-week members on the Park Blocks. I especially like the morning set-up time and the 3-5 afternoon time for the easily shared communications that we can do ongoing during the season.

Of course the offseason is a different story. A lot of us go into retreat mode and turn our energies to other things, and the core group of people who are working on Market issues is smaller. But still, when we come together to work on our tasks and decisions, people bring skills. We slog through things that take time and care. We can't always be efficient and quick with how we work things through. Like with Fair, our event comes up quickly, faster than we are ready for it, and at the same time we can hardly wait for it. We feed so deeply on the actual gatherings. There's a thread right now on an OCF page where people are writing what they are looking forward to doing at Fair. It's as diverse as the population and illustrates well how many kinds of contributions there are, and how they all fit together to make the others possible.

Sure, there are always going to be people who cause other people to do make-work around them, who don't pull their weight, who complain and blame and make mistakes. Plenty of people try to eliminate process to just get the job done. It was easier when we were pioneers creating things for the first time, when individuals could exert more personal power and get approval for it. We have to be more careful now to create group buy-in, to get consent, to stop from acting long enough to make sure it will be the best way to get to the solutions. It can be frustrating, but we still have to do it, or pay the price by doing things over or repairing the damage.

We have always valued consensus, but it takes time. Now we lean toward it, but we don't always take the steps to find it. We increasingly go to majority rule, which is flawed in so many ways, and furthers division, to my mind. It fosters coercion and domination. It short-circuits the careful decision-making process. It forces the consensus-building out of the meetings into the informal networks, the FB threads, the Market neighborhood discussions. It's the way it goes. It makes our experienced, traditional leaders more important than ever, and it's unfortunate that they are often aged.

Young or old, people with developed skills at building consensus to make morally right, thoughtfully crafted, fair and equitable decisions should lead the process. Loud and demanding voices have their place, but it shouldn't be at the head of the table. Change can come, but not at the expense of what has been so carefully built.

Everybody has their fantasy of what our shared reality is like. All of the many thousands of Fair-goers have their perfect Fair in mind and they try to experience it every year. Everyone who comes to Market has a vision of what it is that serves them in whatever ways they need it to. None of these are perfectly correct for all of us, none of them are perfectly the truth.

But in the collective reality, they each play a part. Each of us has the task to envision the best possible practices and the best possible experience, and work toward it. We do this with amazing power and force, and each event is an explosion of this manifestation of love. Every Saturday, every July, we are stunned by the beauty and joy we create together. Sometimes we have to slog through some mud to get there, but our collective vision remains clear and bright. I am so grateful for that, and so in awe of how many people try so hard to create it.

It's not easy to make a beautiful vision come true every day. Now in our traumatized political state, it's harder than ever in my lifetime. But it's happening, and happening harder and harder as the daphne and violets bloom and the weeds take off. I'm thrilled for myself that I have the Jell-O Art Show as my annual vehicle to illustrate that. I hope you have something similar and a way to express your creative and dramatic self that includes some silliness and some hugging and some singing and some brilliantly colorful ways to clear away the grime. I'm excited that my vision is still refresh-able.

I had been feeling a little old and in the way. It's kind of a default forced on us as we wrinkle and our disks degenerate inside us. We slow down. But this has its important place. We have more time to reflect, and take in the wisdom of others. We have the undeniable advantage of historical perspective that can so enrich the enthusiasm and energy of youth. We get to support instead of lead. We get to sit back and be satisfied, and embrace joy and contentedness instead of just acting and doing. We get to set the example and bring forward what we've been taught. We're part of the continuum in a new way.

We're all playing a part in this drama. Make them laugh. Make them cry. Touch their hearts. Watch them play. Applaud. What a world! Thanks for staying in it, even when you feel discouraged.