Glenn's little ugly blog

I went to see Laurie Anderson perform her latest work, "Delusions," on Thursday night. It was fantastic.

There's a really nice review of it on the Straight website. You can also read a Q&A with Laurie Anderson on the official Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad website.

One of the funniest parts of the performance was a little section that dealt with names. Women's last names in particular.

I can't remember the exact wording, but she pointed out how women lose half of their name as they marry, divorce, and remarry. And the funniest: your mother's maiden name is so secret, so unknown, that you can use it as a security question for banking.

I've always been confused by the tradition of women changing their last name to their husband's when they get married. My mother did it, but I also knew women who kept their last name. As a man, I would just find it strange for someone to change their last name to my last name. I mean, what does that imply? That I own my wife? That I have subsumed her family identity into my own?

I recently learned that Chinese tradition is that women don't change their last name. My mother-in-law has the same name in Chinese that she was born with, but her last name in English is her husband's last name. Of course, more of her life is merged into her husband's life, whereas here in Canada it seems that the taking of the last name is more symbolic than anything else.

I'm still surprised when anyone I know changes their last name after marriage. I wonder if it is becoming less popular to change your name or if it is the same? And what does it mean to the people who do change their name? Do men feel somehow emasculated by a wife who refuses to change her name?

Photo by Leona Shanana

Here's a crazy idea: What if the city of Vancouver and VANOC had officially sanctioned dissenting views and activist events?

It would be a pretty strange and delicate move to make, but I wonder what it would look like if activist events had been included in the Olympic plans. Delicate because they would need to legitimately give the activists the space and respect to reach a real audience, without being deliberately pushed off into a corner somewhere.

Just imagine if VANOC had listened to protest groups and sat down with them to coordinate promotion and safety for their events. They could have included the protests and other activist events in the official event listings, bringing a bigger audience to the events, legitimized them, and made them a safer and more fun time.

I definitely don't mean an allowance for dissent through the use of "free-speech zones" or other schemes that hide protests so far away from the rest of the event that the activists are only talking to themselves. That's what usually happens, and only exacerbates the frustration felt by activists. I also don't mean a government-sanctioned PR presentation of some of these issues.

This idea is probably crazy, and neither group would have likely agreed to it, but sometimes crazy ideas work.

Communities that exist because of geographic boundaries (like a city or neighborhood) are composed of many different people who think and feel many different ways. The residents of Vancouver are not all patriotic sports fans who drink Coke and eat at McDonald's. Even making the slightest effort to present the fullness of Vancouver would have gone a long way to making the Olympics more interesting and true to who and what we really are.

I mean, the protests and events are going to happen anyway. Couldn't we make something more positive out of them?

Photo by NevynNoir

Today I took part for a while in a march to try to being some attention to the tragedy that is the Canadian Seal Slaughter. When the march turned into a vandalism spree by kids in masks, we rolled up our banners and went home.

I don't see much point in destructive protests. They don't really convince anyone of anything, except that you're willing to break things to be heard.

But what I'm interested in is why people become destructive as a means of protest.

There are probably quite a few reasons why marches like this turn violent. One quite obvious one would be that it's fun. The rush of adrenaline is exciting. It's the same as doing anything physical and dangerous, like playing hockey or football.

Quite probably many of the people who knocked over newspaper boxes and smashed windows today did it because it was exciting. They may have felt like they were doing something and standing up against a greater power. Many of us have respect for the underdog who takes on the mighty, against all odds. It's what most action movies are based on, not to mention sports movies and even a whole lot of our favorite history stories.

It's important to note here that I am not trying to justify anyone's actions or excuse them. I feel strongly that we are all personally responsible for the choices we make. I have had trouble trying to discuss this issue because people appear to feel that I am justifying the protesters' actions, but I'm not.

Calling their actions "infantile" is counter-productive, I think, because it simply continues what I see as a real root cause of the violence: not being heard.

There is a huge difference between being allowed to speak and being listened to. We have a great deal of freedom to speak our mind here in Canada, but what we don't have as ordinary citizens is much of a way to ensure that we are heard.

From the local level to the federal level, politics dismisses a great range of perspectives and voices. We are allowed to send our petition to the government, we are allowed to speak at city council meetings, but we are not made to feel that what are saying is truly heard or considered.

It would be strange for protesters to risk arrest for such large amounts of property damage, so I would assume they are acting out of personal conviction (unless they were planted by the police or VANOC to instigate confrontation, which is somewhat doubtful, although possible).

They may have been trying to intimidate people into agreeing with them, but considering the scale of the Olympics I would more readily think that they were trying to get their message out, and chose tactics that would send a message to the Olympic sponsors and organizers that would be heard. If you want to reach the heads of corporations, what is more effective than a message that costs money?

Again, I don't agree with the tactics, and I have nothing to say about the goals or objectives of the protesters. What I am interested in here is seeing some real discussion of the reasons for such actions. How are we all complicit in the vandalism and threats of violence? How are we complicit in systems which let people speak but don't give them a real voice to be heard?

Here are some links to coverage of today's madness:

• Miss604: Vancouver 2010 Protests on Day Two
• Straight: 2010 Heart Attack disrupts Vancouver on day two of Winter Olympics
• NowPublic: Vancouver Olympic Protest February 13 2010 Turns Violent
• Vancouver Sun: Seven people arrested in police protests

So many industries depend on having our minds clouded with conflicting ideas. They need us to be incapable of processing the "information" they spoon feed to us. They throw ads and reports at us – information designed to deceive – and design a myth of choice in our lives.

I don't think it's any surprise that critical thinking skills are taught less and less in school. If our government and educations systems really intended to mold us into capable and productive citizens, they would teach fundamental critical thinking skills.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking aims to build critical thinking into our culture.

This is something we sorely need if we hope to survive into the future. Animal agriculture, consumer products, automobiles, consumption, consumption, consumption – critical thinking may just be the antidote.

After being occupied for so long with planning Animal Advocacy Camp, I was suddenly left without a big and pressing project. Normally this would be a time to relax and spend some time at home, maybe watching some movies or reading a bit.

But, somewhat strangely, I actually felt down, maybe even a little depressed. It was like I was crashing after a high of some kind.

Keeping strong emotions in check is a bit tough. Managing my thoughts and feelings to keep them within a range that doesn't lead to me feeling like I'm lost or completely bored or frustrated is important.

It's in my best interest to reflect regularly on how involved I am becoming in the projects I am working on and how much of my own self-worth is tied up in the success of those projects.

Of course, these feeling always pass and I find myself planning new projects, deciding on next steps, and moving forward.

I think I'm also a bit tied up in outcomes from the Animal Advocacy Camp. I feel personally invested in the potential outcomes for each of the attendees, even though that is something I have no control over and really can't be responsible for.

My learning: do what you can but be prepared to let go of the outcome.

The circle (photo by Amanda Daniell)

Last Saturday I hosted my first Open Space event. It was a gathering of people from the Vancouver-area animal advocacy community. I've also written about the event on the Liberation BC blog.

Looking back after a week, the event seems to have been a success. I suppose the real success of the event will be if it has made the community stronger and if any benefits to the community come out of it. A big challenge will be developing from this single, possibly quite isolated event into a culture of collaboration.

It's nice to come together and be in a room with lots of people you pretty much agree with. You can talk openly about what you believe, you can really "talk shop" without boring anyone, and you feel understood.

Even if that's all this event did was let people feel good for a day, that itself is valuable. People working in this area often don't feel supported by friends, family, and co-workers, and coming together with like-minded people can serve as an important reminder that we are a community, that there are other people working on and caring about these issues.

But, an event like this becomes really valuable when new connections are made that carry on into the future. It becomes valuable if it opens up the web of connections and enables us to more easily and readily work together for common goals.

Looking over the feedback from the people who attended (about half of the people who attended responded to the online survey asking for feedback), they seem to have liked the Open Space format and being empowered to choose and lead their own discussions. I think that doesn't happen enough in any part of the animal advocacy movement. So often we go to conferences and hear from experts, we get asked to take action as part of some big organization's campaign, we are enlisted as supporters and we don't "own" any of the decisions.

If we can build collaboration into our local activist community, can it potentially make us stronger and more able to respond to the complex challenges that working on behalf of animals presents?

Many of the issues people had with the event had to do with logistical elements of the event, such as the level of noise in the room and the length of breaks. The next time I plan one of these, I think I will make sure that there are breakout rooms, rather than having multiple small circles in the one large room. Also, I hadn't set aside an actual lunch break, but I think a break from intense discussion midway through the day would have helped everyone relax and renew their energy for the afternoon.

Some people expressed concern that the people leading the sessions may not have been experts or "qualified" to lead a discussion. My only answer to that would be that with complex questions, often passion and willingness to take the lead can be more important than expertise or knowledge.

Some of the attendee comments about what could be improved for next time included finding a solution to the noise level of the room, more breaks so that the day is less hectic and there is more time to absorb what was just discussed, more efforts to include minority communities, a shorter time frame, and putting attendees in contact with each other through a shared contact list or online forum. (A forum has been set up on the event website for anyone to use.)

I think that there were some people who were uncomfortable with the dispersion of control over the event. We all come to these sorts of events with our own ideas about what should happen, about what we want to get from it. But, not everyone is going to see it the same way as us. With a "normal" conference, we go to listen to people speak and we know the agenda before-hand. It has been set for us. Being uncomfortable with that normalcy being pulled away is completely normal – and actually healthy. Getting through the discomfort to where we are comfortable with being open to what happens, to exploring and listening, leads to a healthier and more vibrant community. And a stronger one too. But it is uncomfortable.

Of course I had my own agenda in organizing this event. I wanted to empower people to take the lead in their own activism and in working together towards becoming more effective individually and together, as a community. I deliberately framed the event as "animal advocacy" because I wanted it to be inclusive of all people working for animals – whether or not they agree on everything. My goal is not to get us all to agree, but to know and understand each other better and, if possible, find ways to work together.

One of the really interesting aspects of organizing this event was finding a way to create an open and inclusive event that empowers people to find their own voice and learn from each other while still meeting my own goals. It is difficult to resist the urge to control the event, to influence the sessions posted by the attendees, to exert some sort of structure to the agenda, to move sessions around to fit in with my own ideas of categories.

Now, going forward, how can we keep building community while working to become more effective and powerful? Many people want to do more events like this, and I'm going to be meeting with people in the next couple of weeks to talk about what they need and want. Some smaller, more focused events around specific issues might be interesting, or possibly a world cafe focused on animal rights and visions of goals. Really, the next steps should form out of what the community wants and needs, and the community really just means all of us.

If you have ideas or suggestions, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Just a few more days to go before Animal Advocacy Camp. I'm really excited to see how this experiment turns out.

We're bringing together around 100 people from the local animal protection community for a day-long Open Space meeting. I have no idea what will come out of it or what exactly will happen.

I am very anxious about it. I even woke up in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago completely panicked about food and other details, including what I was going to say during the opening.

My role will be to open the space, guide people to create the agenda, and then stand back and just be there helping through the rest of the day, until I convene the closing session.

If this one turns out well, we'll have to see about planning a larger, 2-day event for next year. I'm looking forward to it!

I've been having trouble organizing my thoughts around Adam Kahane's new book, Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. It could be because it is more subtle of a topic than his first book, Solving Tough Problems. Or, it could be because I have not been working and thinking in terms of growth. Instead I think in terms of change, of getting other people to see and think like I do. Of protecting animals and defending their rights against people who harm and exploit them.

But can radical social change happen like this? What does growth mean in this context? If a society where all sentient beings are free to live free from human exploitation is the goal, how do we grow to reach it?

Solving Tough Problems, Kahane's first book, dealt with openness, listening and talking openly. By opening ourselves up to others we can connect and work together, generatively.

Power and Love outlines what Kahane found lacking in the first book: growth. He writes:

Power and Love picks up where Solving Tough Problems left off and reports the second discovery. In order to address our toughest challenges, we must indeed connect, but this is not enough: we must also grow. In other words, we must exercise both love (the drive to unity) and power (the drive to self-realization). If we choose either love or power, we will get stuck in re-creating existing realities, or worse. If we want to create new and better realities—at home, at work, in our communities, in the world—we need to learn how to integrate our love and our power.

Love and power aren't opposites. Instead, they are two fundamental drives that complement each other. Without love, our power changes from liberation to oppression. Without power, our love changes from nurturing to stifling.

Kahane uses the metaphor of walking to illustrate how we balance power and love. If we choose one or the other, we fall. If we manage to uneasily balance the two, we stumble. If we get it right, we walk. He refers to this as "dynamic balance."

When we stumble or walk we move forward. And only by moving forward can we grow. We need to move forward together in order to solve the tough challenges that face us.

Animal rights is one such challenge, a tough challenge that is dynamically complex, socially complex, and generatively complex.

A challenge is tough when it is complex in three ways. A challenge is dynamically complex when cause and effect are interdependent and far apart in space and time; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed piece by piece, but only by seeing the system as a whole. A challenge is socially complex when the actors involved have different perspectives and interests; such challenges cannot be successfully addressed by experts or authorities, but only with the engagement of the actors themselves. And a challenge is generatively complex when its future is fundamentally unfamiliar and undetermined; such challenges cannot successfully be addressed by applying "best practice" solutions from the past, but only by growing new, "next practice" solutions.

There is no easy solution to the problem of animal rights, and thinking about it in terms of these three forms of complexity is daunting. I mean, how can we involve all actors in solving the problem? What would it even look like to bring people together who are so deeply opposed to each other and find ways to work together to succeed, together?

But, we can certainly start to cooperate with allies and partial allies. One of the ideas in Solving Tough Problems was that open listening and open talking can create generative dialogue, where new ideas are generated not by any one person, but by the group. It is groupthink in the most positive sense possible, where the group is greater than the proverbial sum of its parts.

Cooperation doesn't mean that we relinquish our own interests and ideals. We can't give up our power in the service of unity, or else we will fall. But fighting for our own interests with no concern for unity will also cause us to fall.

This is where the idea of generative dialogue intersects with love and power: we can be creative in finding solutions that balance unity and interests, solutions that each of us may not have thought of before, solutions that come out of the collective working together.

Having these varied perspectives and ideas is what makes us strong, and the more varied our perspectives the more chance we have of finding truly novel and viable solutions.

So I have come to understand that—contrary to my training in answering, controlling, and solving—social change work never produces final, ticked-off failure or success. Some social change efforts I thought were making progress later stalled, and some stalled efforts later made great advances.

How can we build collaboration and dialogue into our social change movement? Can we employ our differences together to find new solutions and new ideas? in other words, can we balance power and love?

Kahane writes: "We must step forward."

If we hope to succeed, we have no choice but to step forward, together.

I've just finished up the courses for the SFU Certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement and am now beginning my practicum – the final piece of the certificate. I've written a bit about this program before, but this seems like a good time to recap as I am planning where to go from here.

What I learned:

Course #1 (Amy Lang): What is dialogue? A language and frameworks that enabled us to talk about and evaluate dialogue and planning processes.

Course #2 (Vince Verlaan): How do you plan an engagement process that is representative? The importance of powerful questions, framing, and invitations. Commitment to dialogue and engagement and the importance of advocating for participatory processes in many areas. Don't be afraid to kick the door open, but also be aware of the softer and nurturing side.

Course #3 (Charles Dobson): We need to be effective and build grassroots capacity for action. It is difficult to sustain activism and community engagement, and we need to pay attention to sustaining them beyond crisis situations.

Course #4 (Peter Boothroyd): Planning participatory processes. Plant little participatory practices that can grow and influence other processes. By working together we can collectively achieve more than we can working individually.

Open Space and World Cafe Workshop (Chris Corrigan): Incredibly useful and two great tools that I will use as I plan future events. Circles are powerful, and as we talk ideas come out that none of us thought of on our own. The group is greater than the sum of its parts.

What happens now?

I am beginning work on my practicum project, which will likely be a participatory process that will plan and hold a series of engagement events in the Vancouver area animal rights community. These events will be collaboratively planned, and may have as their objective the articulation of the community goals and objectives for animal rights. I'm still early in the process of talking to people and mapping out the possible perspectives. We may work towards possible scenarios of animal rights, or perhaps a map of goals and a visualization of where our goals overlap. All of this with the purpose of making us more effective as a community and a movement. If you are interested or have any ideas about this, please get in touch.

This project isn't about pushing my perspective or my goals on to the community, but rather about creating a stronger and more effective community through a participatory process. I guess I am somewhat pushing my perspectives about the value of collaboration and strong community, but I am not pushing for any particular perspective about the goals of animal rights or how we can get there.

There may be increased energy coming out of Animal Advocacy Camp, which I am hoping to build on and carry forward into these next events, at the same time as we can work to embed collaboration and shared vision into our work.

Let's build a new world together!

5 or so years ago a colleague of mine recommended to me that I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I was going through a particularly difficult period of my life – what with being unemployed, having just moved across the continent to a new city in a new country, facing the repercussions of excessive drug and alcohol use – and the idea of getting my life organized at a very tactical level seemed like a great idea.

Most of us have felt the anxiety of having a lot to do but not knowing where to start and worrying about not remembering everything. It’s one of the major roots of procrastination, and people who have developed systems that enable them to quickly see everything they are working on and know what they are neglecting and why very seldom procrastinate. And when they do procrastinate about a particular task, very often they get a whole lot done – and are conscious of the process, leaving them less anxious and with a greater feeling of control.

I mean, let’s face it, a lot of us have very little control over our lives. We are handed work to do, other people disrupt us, things go wrong. Having a system in place to handle all of this information frees up our brains to handle the chaos. That system (Getting Things Done proposes a particular system) can give us some control over our lives, and lets us more flexibly adapt to the changes and disruptions.

Anyway, way back then, after I read Getting Things Done, I signed up for David Allen’s email newsletter, “Productive Living.” The most recent newsletter has his recommendations for doing a review of the past year and making a list of accomplishments and projects that have been completed.

DAVID'S FOOD FOR THOUGHT

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE LATELY?

I mean, what have you actually finished, completed, and accomplished? If you haven't made a list in the last year, I would highly recommend that you take a few minutes and capture that.

It has always intrigued me how much a less-than-conscious part of me can still have energy wrapped up around activities and projects, until I acknowledge that they're done, to myself. Kathryn and I have made an annual exercise, at year-end, of making the list of major completions and accomplishments. We've even been saving that list in a Lotus Notes database for the last few years. It's really quite a healthy, cleansing completion in itself. It includes everything that we can think of—from projects like launching a new product, to adding new staff, to trees planted, to new places visited, to family deaths handled, to old business completed, to new skills and tricks learned. (Source)

I am really terrible at finishing projects. I left our entryway door unfinished for 5 years. I think it might have something to do with excusing a possibly bad job. I mean, if it’s not finished no one can complain about how bad it looks right?

But, in an effort to counter this tendency, here’s my attempt to list out everything I’ve accomplished in 2009.

• I finished the entryway door – including paint, trim, and threshold.
• Goodstock.
• Ripped out the old kitchen cabinets and countertop and installed new cabinets and counter. (Still have some finishing touches like the backsplash and sealing some gaps to do before the whole kitchen is finished.)
• Did a talk on internet activism as part of the Let Live Activism series.
• Presented 3 times at the Let Live Conference.
• Organized an Earth Day vegan cupcake giveaway which was a great success.
• Put together and organized the designing of Liberation BC’s new environmental leaflet.
• Helped to start Vancouver’s Meatless Monday project.
• Organized a letter from several local groups to Vancouver’s Greenest City Action Team which got us on the cover of 24 and interviews on CKNW and Talk 1410.
• Made a real effort to bring groups together on projects and open communication between disparate groups.
• Learned how to use Twitter and met some amazing people through it.
• Wrote an article about “cruelty-free” eggs for the Granville Magazine blogs.
• Started this blog.
• Blogathon.
• Fundraised enough to get Liberation BC into some big shows (EP!C, Eat Vancouver).
• Tabled for Liberation BC at a bunch of events over the summer, some where we were the only representatives of the animals.
• Managed the design of a new Liberation BC logo.

Decided to take SFU’s Certificate in Dialogue and Civic Engagement.

I think that’s about it. It’s not a whole lot, but still a decent amount that I can feel good about. Maybe I’ll manage to finish more projects this year.