Tag: conflict

Disobeying Orders

The state park employee walked slowly with a small tank and a squirt nozzle he aimed onto each unwanted bit of vegetation on the playground. I hoped he was only getting rid of silver nightshade. It’s prickly and toxic, though it has pretty flowers. But there wasn’t much of it. There were many tiny, tough yellow flowers.

I asked the man with the tank how he chose which plants got to stay and which plants had to go.

“They all have to go,” he replied.

“All of them? I like the little yellow flowers. I just watered one of them.” Encouraging its survival in the desert heat, I’d given it what was left in the water bottle I take on runs.

With an air of apology, he added, “We don’t do weed control except in the developed areas.”

Of course not, because a wildflower isn’t a weed in the wild. I didn’t say what I thought, but he kept explaining while he squirted. “If we let them go, they take over.”

“Yes. You’d have a meadow.” I smiled at the memory. One year, the flowers did take over. There were so many, I sometimes accidentally picked them with my five-fingers running shoes, snagging yellow blossoms between the toes when I crossed the playground to stretch on the equipment.

He kept squirting. I felt sad for the flowers, but finished stretching and went home. A few days later, I was back, and all the flowers were gone, sprayed to death and shriveled away. Except one. He saved the one I’d watered.

 

Dialogue and Discomfort

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This isn’t about writing dialogue in fiction, although it’s related in a way. In fiction, an author has to sustain conflict. In real life, we have to resolve it. Keeping the drama up can be engaging for readers, but it can be destructive when people actually need to hear each other. Contrived and exaggerated conflict is the meat of reality TV, but that’s not reality. And we’re not on TV.

My college, like many across the country, has a Dialogue Club. Students are trained to facilitate conversations on difficult topics. These conversations give students a method for expressing their experiences, opinions and feelings without attacking, blaming or accusing. The participants learn to listen without arguing back. The purpose is not to persuade anyone, but simply to understand each other.

I had already planned a Dialogue Club activity in my freshman seminar this week, and the timing was right. We talked about the topics my students had chosen in advance: Black Lives Matter, and athletes who kneel during the national anthem. And then, once we had practiced our skills in civil discourse, I asked if they would be willing to share their thoughts on the election in the same way. They did. It was amazing. My class found this dialogue process valuable enough that they want to do it every week. This is so promising, I’ve volunteered to part of an upcoming campus-wide dialogue about the election results.

The origin of dialogue clubs, to my knowledge, is with a group of women in Massachusetts who had pro-life and pro-choice views and were tired of the anger and even violence that had arisen in disagreements about abortion rights. Their purpose was to hear each other, and they found that there were not just two sides. If there were ten people in the room, there might be ten sides to the issue. Venting to our like-minded friends is a relief, of course, and we all need to do that. But then, we need to move out of our comfort zones, our echo chambers. Reducing our stress often begins with raising it—by doing what makes us uncomfortable. Getting involved in anything controversial (in a role other than audience) can make most people uncomfortable, unless they are the type that thrives on conflict. The rest of us need to be as engaged, or even more so, than the people who enjoy being angry.

Dialogue clubs have been used not only on college campuses. They have been effective working through national conflicts, in places like Rwanda. Talk doesn’t replace action, of course. What it does is do is give people the courage to become part of the public conversation, the first step toward peaceful, constructive action.

The Sacred Lands

New Mexico’s Native peoples have sacred places on their land. The idea that the earth itself is a holy thing may resonate with people of all cultures—especially once they’ve experienced the spaciousness and silence of the desert. I often blog about the joys and beauties of the Land of Enchantment, but of course there are conflicts and challenges here as well. The hardest choices are not those between good and evil but between two goods. Between short-term benefits and long-term preservation. Between much-needed money today and clean water and untainted land in the future.

The following article from the Santa Fe Reporter describes the effect of fracking for oil and gas in Navajo communities—places that some of you may know personally and that others may know through Tony and Anne Hillerman’s books. I usually write about things that that move toward the positive—whether through the enjoyment of an experience or a good book or through the practice of mindfulness—so this topic may seem like a detour, but I don’t see it that way. Sometimes, moving through conflict constructively is the only way forward. I felt admiration for Daniel Tso when I read this story and wanted to share it. It takes courage to speak up and bear witness.

http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/article-10976-fractured-communites.html