I've gotten way behind reading my mail, so I just read Sherri's initial
message and the long thread that followed; while it was all interesting, I
think I'll just stick with my reaction to the initial message itself:
Sherri Malouf writes:
> BTW -- my neighbor started this several months ago and just called two
> minutes ago. We have lived here two years and I have never talked to the
> man. Not unusual in a rural New England town. He said he wants us to talk
> before this comes to blows. He wants to give us the 50 cent tour and to
> take us up in a plane and show us the approaches and where our house is.
> We have been lied to by the local building inspector and selectman when we
> made inquiries. Our neighbor is a local policeman. We never called him --
> I don't know why. Maybe we felt if someone is impacting us they should
> approach us? We were never approached so we didn't approach?
> We have a system here which is incredibly complex in what it is intended to
> achieve and I believe it falls very short. Our culture of individual
> freedom surely needs to be changed somehow to include respect for others
> and taking care of others in the pusuit of our dreams. We are not a
> community and we are not a democracy....and it is a great disapointment to
> me.
Wow! This message brought a bunch of stuff together for me:
- The messages about Simon and Garfunkel's "I am a rock, I am an island".
- Simon Buckingham's deconstruction of formal organizations, and his
reservations about the importance of trust.
- At de Lange's progressive revelations of his model of emergences and
immergences.
- Ben Compton's descriptions of the dysfunctional Novell community, and his
attempts to change it.
- The quotation in the signature below.
To me, the nexus of the situation is expressed following the "BTW" above
and the last sentence of the citation. I don't believe that a democracy
can work (at least not well) without being built on a community. Do you
suppose that things would have come to this pass if you'd had each other
over for dinner occasionally? Maybe you'd feel better disposed toward him
if you took him up on the plane ride invitation and got a sense of his
love for aviation; maybe he'd feel better disposed toward you if he spent
some time around your place appreciating the peacefulness, then sat with
you while one of his family buzzed your place for a few minutes.
Or not, but it couldn't hurt to try, even at this late date. Most
confrontations are best handled by community, not democracy, and are best
resolved by being dissolved.
Please don't take this as being preachy or judgmental; in your situation,
I don't know if I'd think of "deconfrontation", or be able to apply it if
I did. From here, though, it seems like the best solution if it can be
made to work.
Don Dwiggins "Man can make System great,
SEI Information Technology but System cannot make Man great"
ddwiggins@sei-it.com -- Confucius
P.S.: a few more quotes that come to mind here:
"Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve
to get it good and hard" -- H. L. Mencken
"There's nobody here but us; there never was" -- from a poem posted on this
list
"It's hard to live together; every one of us takes a good deal of forgiving"
-- me
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>