July 8, 2009
The Difficulty of Changing Minds
To settle a disputed matter, a person has to have a change of mind and here's where the problem starts. As Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it."
This is why mediation exists. But just because no one ever said it was supposed to be easy doesn't mean it can't be annoying. Sometimes that frustration has to find expression. Below is the most astounding expression of irritation and frustration and rage I have ever read.
"I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Who said these words and how close to a myocardiac infarction was he at the time? Actually, it was Oliver Cromwell and he was not anywhere close to a heart attack because he lived another eight years. He put these words in a letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650. But he reserved even more spleen-laden words for the English Parliament as he dissolved Parliament and turned them out of doors:
“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice...Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. In the name of God, go!”
This was Oliver Cromwell, a passionately religious man and soldier without peer, with a wonderful way of expressing his anger. But not a great negotiator. The task of negotiating religious tolerance and constitutional government fell to others after his death.
June 21, 2009
Featured negotiator is Dena Sticky Flower, a young New York poet who appears 23 minutes into Russell Simmon’s HBO episode
“Brave New Voices.” (video also posted below)
http://luvmnw.blogspot.com/2009/04/beat-em-til-they-blue.html
Ms. Sticky Flower learned negotiation from her mother, but through her poetry makes it very much her own. Her negotiation technique is simple:
“BEAT ‘EM, BEAT ‘EM ‘TIL THEY TURN BLUE”
Mama, all the kids tease me at school and I don’t know what to do; Then she says: "Child, let me tell you…; Beat ‘em, beat ‘em ‘til they turn blue; Beat ‘em ‘til they stop talking shit about you; I mean, what else could you possibly do?
Commentary:
The principal negotiation is always with oneself. That is why, in a mediation, the parties hardly feel it necessary to talk with the other side but instead spend nearly all the time talking privately and send the mediator to and fro carrying messages. It's because they are figuring it out internally and the reason for this is explained by the wonderful novelist Louise Erdrich:
“Each of us has an original, you see, living somewhere underneath the shadow of our daily life. That life we live in the moving world is the dream life of the copy.”
(Louise Erdrich: Four Souls)
Ms. Sticky Flower's poem refers to her negotiation style with other kids, but she uses the same style on herself. She is a pretty tough negotiator but the principal object of all her negotiation is herself. That is why she writes poetry, because through her poetry she is learning to treat herself better.
