It's subtle bullying, what I'm getting, mostly, hidden almost completely, and brings up the whole intent/impact debate. I feel it, but in this era of gaslighting, I second-guess myself and wonder if indeed I am too sensitive. I've used the tactic of letting people know about it, calling it out sometimes in person, and also just telling myself I have to power to ignore it, rise above it, and not let it get to me. Working on grounding techniques, trying to toughen up. Feeling old and forgiving myself for that.
All of those techniques work to an extent, but it remains that bullying tactics work. We certainly see it in the macrocosm, that coupled with propaganda they work really well. I hold faith that they reflect so badly on the perpetrator that over time, they will be defused, but everything moves so rapidly nowdays, (see, the word has even lost a vowel...) that much of it is just gotten away with.
In our microcosm, I hesitate to even call it out. It seems better to just keep moving with promoting change, just keep working on it. If it is right, it will happen. People who are good still respect the same things as before, hard work, honesty, integrity, clear communication. The problem is that the bully will use any tactic that is useful, while integrity hobbles the just-working people.
Last night someone framed something as progressive/conservative, which is true enough, but I cringed, because I fear it will fuel the fire. In my microcosm, progressives dominate, but every time I dial out I am unsure if people even recognize their conservative attitudes. Or would admit them.
I mentioned the hierarchy last night...that those on the top don't see the hierarchy. If they did, and could see they were on the top, they would work to bring others into equality, at least over time if not immediately (as if that were possible.) I consider myself at OCF as one of the privileged. Not that I haven't earned things by hard work and dedication, but the whole "grandfathering" and Booth Rep system gave me a position at the top of the hierarchy which is in my personal interest to maintain.
I see that position driving a lot of us to be defensive, but we need to get over it. We're the people who got the free land grants in the homesteading of the west...we came to occupied land that looked open for grabs, and we took a piece, and we hold a deed to it now. It's up to us to decide how to give up that deed or work to hand it off to our descendants. We can see it as owned, or just borrowed for a time. We built value, but not by ourselves. We did it with the cooperation and approval of our system, but we have been the primary beneficiaries. Not that what we worked to create didn't have a lot of mutual benefits, but not everyone is able to get what we got. We Booth Reps are only a third of the total number of craftspeople...there are around 800, and we are around 250, so less than a third, and most of the two-thirds participate without certainty. It's not as uncertain as fairs that jury every year, or otherwise select, but we enjoy being able to plan. So in short, our latest guideline changes asks Booth Reps to step up and plan more thoroughly for OCF, not just themselves. Find someone who can really do the complex job required to navigate our wild and unscripted event, or let go and let the system find that highly qualified person. It's our position that five years is the minimum required to learn the ropes, and indeed, we consistently find out that people don't know much outside the things they have been in direct contact with. One of our guests didn't know about the .net site, and quite a few Board members did not know their own guidelines. I threw that ball back at all of them. The communication piece is not all on me. I have tried and then some.
Let it be said that my plan is to give up my deed when I no longer want to maintain my property. I'm speaking metaphorically to a degree because we don't own our booth spaces and through our system, if I can't stay in compliance, I will just lose it through the guidelines, but in our setup, there are various ways I can finagle to keep it even after I die. I'd no doubt feel differently if I had a kid who wanted to keep it intact, but I've asked him, and he doesn't think he will want to go through all the steps to do that. My Fair family is loosely connected to our property even though we have held it for over thirty years. I don't need it to be a monument to me. I do want to use it until I feel I can or have to retire, but after that, I think it would be kind of fun to see three new crafters in my capacious space.
I am not in the majority of our BR subset of crafters, by any means. And there will be some grief I expect, if I toddle by "my space" and don't recognize it. But as someone pointed out last night, pretending we are not going to get old (and DIE!) doesn't mean it won't happen. Fair is a ton of work. My plan needs to include a lot of working less. So while I have some strategies for that, the plan I like best is just stepping away and gifting what I have built. When I am ready.
So I am not a conservative willing to defend the system as working just fine. It is working for us at the top of the hierarchy. If we're progressive and want to admit it, we have to embrace change, even if it doesn't directly benefit us. That mindset takes work and time. But that is indeed my position.
Not that we want to make it political. But it has been made political, and some less-than-ethical tactics are in play, both intentionally and not. A reminder that it is actually not ethical to share emails without asking permission (but I am okay with you sharing this blog if your intentions are in my support.)
I think good process moves into ethical realms, but that position has a lot of fine lines in it and I've crossed a few in my time, so I don't want to fight a lot about it. I would say using inflammatory terms like "committee overreach" when you were just informed that there was committee collaboration is bad process. Personal attacks, of course, should be off the table completely for our organization, but things get thrown around loosely and I'm wary of having them directed at me. I spent a lot of time worrying I would be yelled at last night, which didn't happen. It went better than I expected, actually. When I went to the Board meeting, my stomach was in knots for three days, one before, the day of, and most of the day after. I plan to watch the video because I suspect it wasn't as bad as it felt. It was hard though, until it started to make sense. There was a bit of a blindsiding tactic in play, but I kind of got hip to it as the meeting progressed.
Progress toward system change is slow, no matter how much we want it to speed up. And it should be slow, and careful, because we do involve ourselves in people's livelihoods, but in our microcosm we have the power to craft solutions that fit, within our guidelines even, if people are willing to address their rights and responsibilities and not just try to play their privilege. It feels like it will be a long, messy process as people start paying attention to something they have not felt to be important for the last many years. I personally started working for change in our system about ten years ago, maybe longer...and there were a lot of stages.
For me it started with the angry reactions to things like increased fees, being left in the mud, and the age-old us vs. them, but after working on it this long, I don't even see the us vs. them anymore. I don't think it really exists, at least not in simplistic terms like that. I got wise enough to not send the angry letters, but instead, to try pitching in with the skills I have and see what happened. That worked. I signed myself up for a lot of volunteer hours, but I built relationships and knowledge and could think a lot more clearly about the big picture and was not so limited by my fears and imaginary grievances.
Last night in our guests I saw myself in the beginning, in the middle, and in the now part of that process. Reflected in the several individual guests I saw it dawn on each one that they had some of their assumptions off track, that they were right about a few things, so were heard and validated, and that their real challenge was whether or not they wanted to pitch in, and if so, what skills they could bring. Plus, what tactics they would use. I'm glad to say that no one seemed to want to do anything unethical. And no one yelled at us. It wasn't easy, but we got through the meeting. We'll have another on March 11th.
We didn't get any work done on our agenda items. We had to go over our well-travelled ground, but it is useful to do that sometimes, and anyway we do that a lot as our natural (and mostly dysfunctional) committee process. I have fortunately learned that writing things down is one of the best services I can offer. So I wrote things down (11 pages of notes, horrors) and I will share this one with all of you. It's not a complete thing, it's a work in progress like all the papers I tend to generate. Nobody voted on this or told me what to write on this particular list. I pulled it out of what I have learned. But think about this as you ruminate on what can be done for our collective futures. Add to my list or help identify when these values are not being served. And yes, I know, committees don't craft policy, we just recommend it to our policy-making Board. That's what we were trying to do: recommend. It kind of got caught up in a lengthy examination of intentions, with a few bad process tactics thrown in. Let's do better. And please, don't yell at the volunteers. Nobody should have their stomach in knots.
When crafting policy, these are our goals:
- Fairness (both in the sense of Fair and fair)
- Equal treatment (of everybody!)
- Transparency (no intention to hide anything)
- Accountability (particularly providing a structure for people to be able to be accountable without personal risk)
- Clear communication (no obfuscation! but big words are okay with me)
- Respect (unconditional, and it shouldn't even have to be on this list)
- Honorable intentions (will generate positive impacts)
- Consistency (so we don't get so confused or set up loopholes)
- A clear path from past to future (because the future is coming whether we want it to or not)
