In short, if you think about what you eat, how it got to you, and the issues of nutrition, morality, politics and spirituality come with it, it is paramount that you encounter what The Vegetarian Myth has to offer.

My full review continues:

Keith‘s central point is that in order for you to live, something else has to die.  While it may seem like a simple enough statement, it may become pretty controversial pretty quickly, especially if you’ve tried to build your diet (or any part of your life, for that matter) around the avoidance of killing other creatures for food or otherwise.  She essentially says that not only are the practices of vegetarians and vegans misguided in their effort to help us lead a more sustainable and just life, they actually often propagate a harmful cultural story about food and the relationship we have to it.  By necessity, I won’t even try to support those statements in this review, as the whole substance of the book is about doing that meticulously; please don’t ask me to summarize her thinking for you.

Given how much being a veg*n becomes a matter of identity for so many, Keith acknowledges right off that these assertions are painful ones to make, let alone to hear and receive.  The potentially biting nature of her premise can only be alleviated by her willingness to explore it so thoroughly and sympathetically, and to share about the close relationship she has to the subject matter.   She tells her personal story of being a long-time vegan, and how she journeyed from an approach to diet that inherently required malnutrition and delusion to one that led to health and awakening.  She knows what’s it’s like to question the foundation of the choices we make about food because she’s been doing it rigorously and relentlessly for much of her life:

I know what you want to be true, vegetarians.  You want to open the circle of concern to everything sentient.  With all your hearts, you want us humans to be meant for cellulose or seeds or berries or anything that you believe can’t feel pain.  And I’m telling you the truth: it doesn’t work.  What you are made of — bones, blood, brain, heart — needs animals.  This is not the universe you wanted.  But it’s the way the world, always alive and always hungry, works.  You can try to live on those other things — the cellulose you can’t digest, the seeds that fight back, the berries and their sugar.  If you’re like me, you’ll do it until you’re half dead.  If you’re smarter than me, you’ll learn.  You want to open that circle, but in fact there’s no way out of it. We’re all of us, seeded and feathered, rooted and furred, already in it.   (p. 243)

Despite her empathy, Keith is still ruthless in her exploration of modern thinking on food.  She tackles, chapter by chapter, all the reasons that one might have for being a vegetarian or vegan: moral, political, nutritional.  She turns the writing of food scholars like Peter Singer, Frances Moore Lappe and Jim Merkel on its head, calling out the flaws in the thinking and research that is so often held up to support commonly held viewpoints around veg*n lifestyles.  She does make extensive use of other recently trending writings by authors like Michael Pollan, whose books The Omnivore’s Dilema, The Botany of Desire, and In Defense of Food provide a great conceptual framework for Keith’s particular messages.

Of course, the question that naturally arises when one encounters material “attacking” a given approach to make the world a better place is “well, what does she suggest we do instead?”  It’s important to note that Keith is not at all suggesting we stand down from the calls issued by the veg*n communities and many other kinds of concerned citizens about stopping the horrors of CAFOs and industrial agriculture, and the book is not just a permission slip to eat meat without consideration of how it came to be dead on your plate.  To the contrary, she asserts that she wants an even more full accounting of our thinking about food production and the values, morals and assumptions that are behind it – an accounting that goes beyond turning to soy, or raw foodism, or other kinds of well-intentioned alternatives to a carnivorous diet.  As she notes in her concluding chapter, Keith doesn’t just want an alternative to mainstream thinking on food, she wants us to build a new approach that is self-consciously opposed to the dominator culture that fuels that thinking.

Despite my request above to avoid trying to summarize Keith’s work, I will provide a few of the questions she suggest you ask in considering what you eat (p. 248):

1. Does this food build or destroy topsoil?
2. Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers?
3. Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?

She also offers three strong recommendations for those interested in personal solutions:

1. Refrain from having children
2. Stop driving a car
3. Grow your own food

(I list these here in hopes that they make you want to understand more about why those questions and recommendations are relevant; again, please don’t take them out of the context of the larger book, or ask me to defend them here.)

If I can offer any criticism of The Vegetarian Myth at all, it’s that the book is so dense with information, and Keith often takes such a significant amount of time to make a point from multiple perspectives and with multiple supporting arguments, facts, etc. that it almost becomes overwhelming.  I fully understand the necessity of this approach given the resistance her arguments are sure to encounter, but it makes the book unsuitable as a starting point or introduction to these issues for someone who is not already exploring them in some form, or for whom there isn’t already some deep cracks in their own previously solid thinking about their veg*n lifestyle.  (In fact, I’m sure many vegetarians and vegans will be insulted by her statements and find her condescending, despite her great care to note, “hey, I was just like you once.”)  I don’t think Keith intends the book as said introduction, so maybe that’s just a fair warning to readers of this review, instead of anything wrong with her text.  But, at the risk of over-simplifying what is definitely not a simple topic, perhaps a future project could include a version of Keith’s book that can get the core assertions and arguments across in a shorter form, with pointers back to the full book and related resources for those wanting to know more.

For me personally, The Vegetarian Myth was a great unpacking of a phrase that I heard Daniel Quinn use many years ago to describe the practice of those who choose not to eat meat: “Kingdomism.”  In other words, discriminating against one kingdom of beings in the taxonomy of life in favor of another.  Lierre Keith does an excellent job of making the case that by practicing such discrimination, we deprive ourselves of and disconnect ourselves from the cycles of life in which we were designed to participate.  Some of the ideas were not new to me, but I’m still figuring out what this means for my own diet and food politics, as it was just this past January that I started trying to eat less meat, a project that has withered as I’ve turned the pages of this book.  And as with every experience that transforms our thinking, I’m left somewhat disoriented and full of questions, but also set on a new and exciting path of exploration and challenge.  As Keith kindly inscribed in my copy of The Vegetarian Myth, “First the Fight and then the Feast.”

(I linked to the Amazon.com product page for the book above, but if you buy it from Lierre Keith directly, she gets the most compensation, and you have the opportunity for a personalized inscription too!  If you’re in Richmond, you’re welcome to borrow my copy.  You can read the first 14 pages of the book online.)

Updated, from the comments: I should add that I find this book important and useful because of the important questions it raises and the challenges it offers, not because I can personally endorse every conclusion made. By no means have I followed all the primary research, and there are certainly people out there who offer the possibility that much of it is incorrect or misleading.  -Chris

Updated 8/3: In a private e-mail exchange after this review appeared, Keith noted that “many reviewers are focusing on my suggested personal actions, when I tried to be so clear that there are NO personal solutions. What we need is a serious political resistance movement–that’s the *only* solution. We need huge institutional change, and have been sold a useless bill of goods by both corporate America and liberalism as to the efficacy of personal consumer and lifestyle choices.“

Here’s a list of 5 business values that I think I learned via Earlham College:

1. You can do good and still do well. While it hasn’t been as black and white as Mark and I may have thought it would be when we started Summersault, we have found that it is generally possible to make ethical decisions and still make money.  When you do make ethical decisions and still make money as a result, it tends to feel better than other approaches.
   
2. It’s okay to fail. Traditional business culture sometimes tells us that failure is to be avoided at all costs (see: AIG bailout).  I’ve learned that experiencing failure – even deep, gut-wrenching, not-sure-I-can-do-this-anymore failure – is an important part of learning how to succeed, and while it may be difficult and even embarrassing to fail, it doesn’t have to be shameful.
3. Honesty and integrity is always the best policy, and isn’t to be taken for granted. I know it’s a bit cliche, but we’re still surprised at how often we encounter forms of dishonesty in the business world – through outright lies, subtle omissions, or other tactics – and so I try not to take it for granted when we meet someone – a client, potential employee, or vendor – who is honest through and through.  By the same token, no matter how difficult or awkward a business situation is, I’ve found that being brutally honest and taking responsibility for my part is the only way to get through it with integrity and relationships intact.
4. You don’t have to detach yourself from the humanity of doing business. Businesses are just groups of people sharing in some common activity or mission.  Those people have emotions, flaws, difficulties, struggles, nuanced joys and irrational, complex driving forces in their lives.  You can’t run a business and expect to ignore or detach yourself from these considerations, and in fact you may have a much better experience if you embrace them.
5. The universe will have its way. Some people think that good business is all about controlling every last detail of every process involved.  Believe me, I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work – the universe will throw things at you that you cannot control, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes you don’t know.  The alternative to trying to control everything that seems to work is to do really good planning, and then be ready to adapt and change (sometimes dramatically in a short period of time) and try not to take it personally.

Not all of these things were taught directly by Earlham (the panel today is in part to help convince students that it’s OK to make money – only at a small liberal arts college ), and maybe I’ve even figured some of them out in spite of my time there (I majored in Computer Science, not Management).  I’ll also note that I’m not by any means claiming to be perfect at living out these values all the time!  But I’m confident that had I not had that educational context and transformative four years, I would be a much different kind of businessperson today.

For now I’ll skip over last year’s resolution – which failed miserably – and bring you to my 2009 resolution, which is to eat less meat. Specifically, I’m trying to eat meat at no more than two meals per week. This is a revised plan of attack from past attempts to try an all-vegetarian diet, which I eventually decided wasn’t tenable for me.

Without getting too far into the food ethics involved in meat-eating (which are nonetheless important and deserving of further treatment), I thought I’d note why I’m doing this, and how it’s going so far:

I’m eating less meat because:

1. There are myriad statistics and resources showing that eating less factory-farmed meat is a good thing for my body, and for reducing the harm I cause to the planet and the life on it. Since most of the meat I have convenient access to is factory-farmed, I should eat less of it until I can change that reality.
2. I don’t want to give up all meat. I don’t want to practice “kingdomism,” and I recognize that having some meat as a part of my diet is important to me for a variety of reasons. I also didn’t want to take an approach that puts friends and family in an uncomfortable position when they’re cooking for me, or that precludes me from eating meat that was brought to the table in an ethical, humane way. (I fully realize that there are plenty who say there is no way to humanely eat the meat of other beings, or that the discomfort of the cook is far outweighed by the discomfort of the animal being eaten.)

How’s it going after a month? Well, mostly so far so good, but definitely with some complexities:

• Handling leftovers remains an interesting point of debate. If I eat at a restaurant and have meat at a meal there, and end up having leftovers, does it “count” as one of my two meals to eat those leftovers the next day? I think it’s mostly about intent – if I make a batch of meat-filled lasagna that lasts me all week, that’s definitely a major violation, but if I happen to have some leftovers, it seems within the spirit of the resolution to give myself some leeway, right?
• Despite eating almost no meat at home, I’m still not conditioned to hone in on the meatless dishes in some settings. I was at a catered event last week where I got a bowl of soup that looked vegetarian, and only found after I was eating it that it had meat in it…should’ve asked. At a Chinese buffet I found myself mindlessly putting a dish with meat in it on my plate as I’d done in the past, even though I’d fully intended to not eat meat there. So there’s definitely some mental adjusting still to be done, all worthwhile I’m sure.
• Vegetarians everywhere will roll their eyes at how obvious this is, but of course the whole experience is reminding me how hard it is to go against any given cultural norm when you’re in the minority, e.g. trying to avoid meat in a town that has more steakhouses than grocery stores, and where saying you’re vegetarian still prompts the question, “but you eat chicken, right?“

To be clear, I’m not at all prescribing vegetarianism or any particular diet as the right or wrong thing for anyone else, I’m just talking about what’s right for me.

As Jim C. noted two years ago, I have to be careful of “quitter’s righteousness” here, and not let a month of relative success go to my head. That’s partly why I’m blogging about it – if you dine with me or see me on the street, feel free to ask “how’s that meat twice a week thing going?”  I will hopefully give you the thumbs up sign, but I also might pretend I didn’t hear you and avoid eye contact.

If anything, this resolution is helping me to balance an increased attentiveness to what I eat (and the health/environment/social implications of that) with a desire to remain a little more flexible than quitting cold-tofurkey, and to try a personal change of habit that’s not so dramatic I can’t sustain it.

I’ll keep you posted.

Must we really become the change we wish to see in the world?

As I try to work in my life and community to create a peaceful and sustainable existence, these are questions that churn in my head daily.

On a personal level, I think a lot of us struggle with living out the values we hold – we have aspirations and ideals about ourselves and the world we live in that can seem hard to enact, even when the path might feel clear.

But when you start to talk about how the rest of the world could be – even should be – the conversation goes beyond issues of self-discipline, time management, or having sufficient support and encouragement. When we talk about sharing a message with others about how we want the world to be and perhaps suggest they change their behavior to get there, it becomes a question of whether there’s a practical or ethical obligation to already first be living out that existence well as the messenger.

Some people say you have to transform your own life first before you can expect others to transform theirs at your suggestion. Do we?

In Favor of Evangelistic Integrity

There’s certainly an issue of credibility that comes with bringing a message of change or new ways of looking at an issue. If you can’t demonstrate that your suggestion is working well for you, how can you expect others to follow? If you don’t follow your own advice, how can you speak with any authority? This is probably why we subject our spiritual, political, and community leaders to such thorough scrutiny and hold them to a “higher standard” – if they’re to lead us in these critical areas, we think their levels of purity and integrity should be above and beyond ours.

Further, people generally look up to other people who model choices and lifestyles that they want to achieve themselves. When someone has fought a demon or barrier that we’re fighting, and we see that they’ve won, it gives us hope and inspiration. Just as we might only expect true solace in the loss of a loved one from someone else who has experienced a similar loss, we tend to open ourselves more to the teachings and suggestions of those who have gone down the path we’re on now and found something good.

As a practical matter, you can get a lot of useful information from practicing what you preach (depending on the topic). If I’m to encourage people to use a rain barrel to collect rainwater for re-use, it helps a lot if I’ve actually set up a rain barrel and put it to use, as opposed to having just read about it on the Internet. I can still offer the initial suggestion, but when they ask “how will I attach it to my gutter system,” and I give them a blank stare, my utility in the conversation is limited.

Against Requiring That You Become the Change First

Why might we not need to practice what we preach? What could possibly justify this seeming lack of integrity?

For one, we might have a sense of urgency about the changes that we’re suggesting, and the overwhelming number of things that need to be changed, such that we don’t think we have enough time to really become the change we wish to see. If it takes me three years to figure out how to be an expert on growing my own food, should I really wait that long to start talking to others about how they grow their own food? If I know that a community tool shed might benefit a friend’s community but I haven’t had time to start one up in mine, should I wait to suggest it? I’m not sure that there’s enough time for such delays.

Another big one for me: if the positive impact you can have by being a hypocrite is greater than the positive impact you can have by demonstrating total integrity, why stand on principle? Doesn’t the practical nature of the need for changes in our culture dictate an imperative to act, even as hypocrites?

Former Vice President Al Gore is a great example of this question in action: the lifestyle choices that are implied in his “Inconvenient Truth” talks would probably suggest that flying around the world using fossil fuels to visit hundreds or thousands of audiences every year is not sustainable. But, if Al Gore didn’t do those things, awareness about climate change would be much lower than it is now. Some have criticized other parts of Gore’s lifestyle – where he lives, what he drives, etc. – but I think it would be hard to deny that he’s significantly reduced the collective carbon footprint of so many people that those concerns fade away, from a purely quantitative standpoint.

I think about this with some the historically environmentally harmful processes that are involved in the production of the high-tech equipment that powers our Internet connected existence. Lots of people, myself included, use that Internet every day to lobby for more sustainable production processes (or name your other favorite social justice/environmental concern), and the irony can sometimes be hard to swallow.

There are myriad precedents for flawed human beings creating significant and lasting positive change, sometimes even in the areas where they were flawed. There are the pastors who guide families of their congregations through moral crises while quietly abusing their own spouses or children. There are the civil rights advocates who changed the world but struggled with inner demons, the political leaders who spread messages of hope and peace while ignoring their own pessimism and violence. It’s hard to suggest that any of the figures who have shaped our lives for the better while failing in some other area should have withdrawn from their messages of change, though perhaps they should have been more transparent about and aware of their failings.

Lastly, living out a certain model of change or personal transformation sometimes requires being surrounded by others who are doing the same, perhaps even in such quantities as to trigger a tripping point before the actual transformation is possible. If I want to get around town by bike more instead of car, I might encourage others to do the same, but I might not actually live that desire out until my community becomes more bike friendly. As much as we can desire change, speak about change, advocate change, sometimes we have to be a part of a movement of others changing at the same time to actually live it out.

Tricky Areas

Some especially tricky areas to think about:

• What kind of a model do we present for our children? Do we encourage them to favor practicality over integrity or vice versa? Will they know where to draw the line?
• The question of the use of violence often brings up these dilemmas. Can I harm or kill one person in order to heal or save the life of another? If I seek peace and abhor war, how do I respond when corporations and governments and polluters conduct war on my community, my water supply, my environment? What does practicing peace look like then?
• We must be careful not to construct such duality in our lives that we can justify any lapse of integrity. Our sense of self and the values we stand for does seem to matter quite a bit in terms of happiness, ability to connect and love others, and more. There may be some joy in preaching successfully, but it’s hard to imagine a fulfilling existence that is only about spreading the word and not benefiting from it.

Conclusions

So, those are some thoughts that fly around in my head when I try to answer that question about practicing what I preach. My conclusions? I don’t have any solid ones to offer, but here’s where I’m at right now:

• I think we can educate and create change from a position of aspiration, without achieving personal perfection in a given area.
• We must be transparent about and vulnerable to our hypocrisy and its impacts, sometimes asking for forgiveness.
• We must respect those who do want to stand on principle and only speak out from a place of successful personal transformation, and they will hopefully reciprocate.

The change I wish to see is bigger than me and my personal struggles with integrity, but all we really have is what we do with our time here…I’ll be content to be remembered as one who struggled, but acted anyway.

Since then, I’ve used a few other handles that were more appropriate and cool (to me, anyway), but lately, I’ve decided that the handle that best represents of my personality online is the same one that represents it offline: my real name. And in most cases, I’m of the opinion that we should all use our real names when engaging in online discussion and community-building.

It’s sometimes a suggestion that makes people uncomfortable, so I want to provide some additional reasoning to consider and discuss:

Participating in a healthy public life is an important part of the human experience. Online discussions are now a part of the public sphere, and when used well, can bring people together in ways that complement and enhance real-world community.

To truly participate in public life, we must do so as ourselves, with our identities revealed. Part of the usefulness of the public conversation about issues that matter to us is the accountability that it demands. If we really want to make a certain neighborhood better, then we need to hear from people who live in that neighborhood and know that they speak from experience. If we really want to flesh out the best ways to approach sustainable economic policy, we need to know who is at the table and what resources, interests, and agendas they bring. If we just want to get to know each other better, we need trust and intimacy before we can form any real bonds. As Duc Francois de La Rochefoucauld wrote, “almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we resort to to hide them.”

The corollary to the great accountability that comes with real names, as Amitai Etzioni notes, is that “people who use aliases are on average much more abusive, unfair, and intemperate than those who disclose their true identity.” I’ve found this to be true in 100% of the online communities I’ve participated in. When you can dismiss or berate someone’s views without any real accountability to them, it is likely to happen more often (even at the hand of those who wish to be accountable). When you can attack an institution or business or person or idea from behind the shield of a pseudonym, it is so much easier to take off the gloves of civil interaction and dialogue that most of us wear and trade them for sharp words, hyperbole, and points made only to harm, not to inform or improve. When we do not have to consider the impact of our words on another, even if only through a facial expression or grunted response, we can be reckless with their hearts.

I hear some recurring responses to the suggestion that we user our real names online:

Bad people will exploit my vulnerability and come after me. If I am a woman, I will be stalked. If I am a liberal, Bill O’Reilly will have FOX security drag me away.

Maybe they will. In all my years of having personal information posted on the Internet, I have never had a problem where the voluntary online availability of that information was itself the cause for some sort of personal invasion of privacy. Anecdotally speaking, this seems to be true for the Internet as a whole; in the “nightmare scenarios” you hear about, either the perpetrating party already had it out for the victim, or the victim disregarded advice like “don’t trust strangers with the pass-code to your life savings account.” We are rarely targeted for just “being somewhere” in the real world (where not only might our names be available, but our appearances, habits, and quirks), so why do we expect to be targeted for just “being somewhere” as our real selves, online?

I can’t fully point out the faults of my employer/family/government/neighbor if they know who I am – the possibility for retaliation demands anonymity.

In some cases, perhaps. I find that any system which cannot stand up to the criticism of those who participate in it, or any relationship which does not permit respectful and faithfully-engaged conflicts, does not deserve to survive. If you’re at the point of wanting to enumerate your grievances in an online discussion, then presumably you’ve already gone through the standard approaches – direct confrontation, letter writing, reporting concerns to the equivalent of an ombudsman of an organization, etc. By that time in most cases, everyone who would care about finding out your identity because of what you say online should already know your point of view anyway.

It’s just too uncomfortable to use my real name online.

Of course, if you’re uncomfortable using your real name, don’t. I’m not saying we can’t have authentic interactions as anonymous parties, and in most cases I would rather we participate in the conversation as an alias than not at all. But in doing so, I hope we reflect on what we’re withholding from those around us, and what we’re missing out on as a result.

Different people have different degrees of comfort with what they’ll reveal online, even when they are trying to use their real identity. For some, a full name is as far as they’ll go, while others will post intimate details of their daily routines, love lives, financial doings. There’s certainly a line we can cross from “being ourselves online” to exhibitionism.

There are plenty of times when it is appropriate (or more fun) to use an alias online. For example:

• The subject of discussion or the existence of the discussion itself is illegal or ethically vague (assume that your communications are being read by an NSA analyst or even your local law enforcement)
• The discussion centers around revealing information where sources need protection (e.g. journalistic or crime solving endeavors)
• The quality of the exchange is enhanced by abstracting online personality from real-world personality (areas where discrimination has traditionally been present, or where power dynamics would typically prevent authentic conversation)

My hope, though, is that where possible, we will tend toward being ourselves in our online personalities. The world is complicated enough and we’re isolated from each other enough that anything we can do to make the world a little smaller, including using our real names, is for the better.

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and
hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives
of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods
of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”
–Elizabeth Cady Stanton

But Jackson conveniently (though perhaps unintentionally) omits a few key factors from his soliloquy on credibility, and the most key (in my opinion) is that he and the Pal-Item staff get to choose how the fruits of their important journalistic endeavors are presented to the public, and in ways that almost completely determine how the information will be processed and used by their readers.

The size and font of a headline. The tone and connotations of the words used to sell and introduce a story. The photo that accompanies a story – how is it lit and cropped, what is the caption, how does it present the subject. The amount of column inches devoted to a story and its impact, and where in the publication they are placed. The quality and length of the quotes from sources that provide “balancing” viewpoints. The opinion pieces that accompany a major story, and if/how they blur the perceived line between reporting facts and editorializing on them. How many follow up stories are done. Whether or not a special section of the Pal-Item website is created to draw more attention to a series online. And so on. All of these variables could ostensibly be said to have little or nothing to do with the “truth” that they help deliver, but all of them make up the all-important framing of the information and how it will be received.

Just as the majority of the public may not have the time to do the research and uncovering that the Pal-Item admirably takes on, the same majority does not have time to follow up on the sources or the research quoted in the resulting articles, and cannot necessarily, then, create for themselves a balanced view of a given issue without significant time and resources that most do not have to spare. And so they rely on what’s available: the Pal-Item and the few other limited news sources available. I will certainly agree with anyone who says it is the public’s responsibility to verify the information from first hand sources if they are going to act on it (or perhaps even spread it), but we all know that this isn’t how public opinion is formed in this town or most any other. People see headlines from afar, gossip about what they might mean, and at best bits and pieces of articles are skimmed and extracted for further digestion. The implications of a story, and the emotions and thoughts its presentation evokes, become the story itself. Any good journalist or page layout editor or news staff member knows this, too: framing trumps truth. (If you want to know why and don’t want to take my word for it, I recommend Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.)

Jackson notes that if the Pal-Item ever did make a factual mistake or some other error that required addressing, there’s always the great rectifying tool, “the correction.” But we all know that unless you’re scrambling to make things right in the wake of your own Jason Blair scandal, corrections don’t get front page headlines with a full page photo, and they very rarely contribute to refining the framing of an issue. How do you publish a correction apologizing for the size of a headline? And perhaps that’s why no one has sought corrections or clarifications from the Palladium-Item on these difficult issues: they feel that it really doesn’t matter in the end, when the principles of fair and balanced reporting on a given issue have already been superseded by printing what sells papers. Maybe that’s the Pal-Item readership just not holding up its end of the bargain? Maybe we need more Letters to the Editor about how the Editor spends his or her time? You’re reading mine.

I admire Rich Jackson and his staff, and I think that on the whole they do an excellent job of balancing the difficult requirements of being the only local printed news source in a town where news sometimes comes hard (see: every front page weather story they’ve ever had to write). And I admire that at least some there subscribe to some greater notion of objective truth that every citizen in our community has a right to access in some pure form. But I don’t think they should fool themselves – or their readers – by denying that they have (and often exploit) the ability to present the different sides of that truth while also significantly shaping how it is received, and what people do with it. If they ignore that truth, no triple-checking of facts or Code of Ethics will restore their credibility as a journalistic entity.

But whatever their troubles, to imply that Don Holbrook is the sole reason for them seems unfair. To do so by bringing out questions about his education and employment history, and to identify specific spending choices he made (e.g. “the large, multi-sectional, desk that he bought for $8,000″) out of the context of the organization’s internal affairs, seems outright malicious. Whether it’s the EDC board members or some other political players or the Pal-Item’s own news editors that are driving this effort, I hope they’ll consider stepping back and reconsidering how they want to present this information to the public.

What Wayne County does *not* need right now is further erosion of public confidence in the overall hope for economic development in the area. If certain staff or board members need to go, or if budgets need to be tightened or re-thought, so be it – but the people who decide those things should be having those conversations together and reporting on the results, seeking public feedback through their own channels, not through the Pal-Item opinion page. To have those conversations on the pages of the newspaper is disrespectful to Don, to each other, and to the public who deserve better from officials working on taxpayer time.

Wow. If I understand their position correctly as derived from their various published statements, the only kind of disagreement that is proper or fair is no real disagreement at all. It’s sad and scary that a local institution that is theoretically so much a part of facilitating free speech and dialogue about the community – even when it involves acts of protest – seems to so manifestly misunderstand those opportunities, and the vehicles available for engaging in them.

In every good conversation, the participants ideally exhibit a mutual desire to communicate their thoughts, share their ideas, and help the other participants to understand what they are trying to say. The conversation takes place because all of the participants recognize the significance and benefit of engaging in conversation with the other participants to communicate but also for the sake of conversation itself. The conversation is able to take place because all of the participants recognize that the other participants share the desire to engage in conversation.

In every good argument or debate, the participants ideally exhibit a mutual desire to convince the other participants that one view on a particular issue or series of issues is more appropriate, suitable, correct, or right than another view on the same issue or series of issues. The participants in an argument attempt to achieve this goal by explaining and detailing the point of view that they support in the context of opposing or refuting the points of view of the other participants, or sometimes affirming some parts and opposing other parts of a generally opposing point of view. Arguments and debates take place because participants recognize the opportunity to gain from discovering or acknowledging a particular point of view as more appropriate, suitable, correct, or right than another, whether it be the gain of personal knowledge, argumentative victory over another participant, or some other form of gain (not necessarily a positive gain).

Arguments are able to take place because participants recognize a need or desire to engage in the process of attempting to determine a more correct or appropriate point of view on a particular issue. This need or desire can arise from external pressures, personal passion about the issue or the argument itself (sometimes leading to physical combat), mechanical process, or any number of other sources. In all cases, participants recognize one or more of the other participants as being worthy of engaging in the argument or debate; they accept that the participants have a valid place in the process of argument, they recognize that the argument or debate has the potential to benefit themselves and possibly the other participants, and acknowledge respect (or present a façade of respect) that the other participants are suitably equipped to engage in the argument.

In every protest or act of civil disobedience, the participants making the protest or committing the act of civil disobedience exhibit a mutual desire to express an opinion about a particular issue or series of issues. The nature of protest and civil disobedience do not necessarily require that the parties holding, authorizing, enacting, or maintaining the views being protested against voluntarily participate in the event or even recognize the event as a valid “conversation” or “argument” as they were defined above. In this sense, it is not a conversation between two or more willing participants, but only an act of expression by participants representing only one point of view, directed at the parties holding, authorizing, enacting, or maintaining the opposing views.

This may be the case for several reasons. The opposing party may have refused the request of the participants to engage in a conversation or debate on a particular issue. The participants may have previously engaged in a conversation or argument that did not reach conclusion satisfactory to one or more of the participants. The protesters may desire to surprise or intimidate the opposing participants by initiating the protest or act of civil disobedience without advance notice. The protestors may not feel that they have available to them appropriate means by which to engage in a conversation or argument with the opposing parties, due to various power structures, logistical concerns such as time and place, or other factors.

By engaging in protest or acts of civil disobedience, these participants do, however, make the opposing parties a part of the conversation or argument, albeit unwillingly, in the following manner:

1. The protesters imply a degree of responsibility for engaging in a conversation or acting lies with the opposing party;
2. The protesters acknowledge that the opposing party is the most suited for taking on the role as an authoritative participant in a discussion on the issues in dispute;
3. The protesters acknowledge the opposing party’s authority or right or obligation to deal with the issues in dispute.

There are negative consequences associated with this approach to a conversation or argument. Because the opposing parties may not desire to be unwilling participants, they may react to the acts of protest or civil disobedience unfavorably. The structures (governmental, social, or otherwise) of the location in which the protest takes place may require or facilitate that the protesters` actions be halted or oppressed. Protesters or persons performing acts of civil disobedience may be subject to immediate consequences such as incarceration, injury, and death, or long-term consequences such as social displacement, internal conflict, or others.

In the sense that some participants are brought in unwillingly, protest or civil disobedience happens because the protestors recognize the potential for their actions to directly or indirectly impact the views and actions of the opposing parties. By participating in protest or civil disobedience, the participants exhibit a degree of respect for the opposing party to recognize, process, acknowledge, and act as a result of this impact. While the protesters may not necessarily place all responsibility for such processing and/or action with the opposing party, the notion of expectations between participants (be they willingly so or not) does arise.

Protest or civil disobedience are appropriate, then, when the potential for this impact on opposing parties outweighs the potential negative consequences of action. Protest or civil disobedience is successful when the opposing parties become willing participants in the conversation or argument about the issues at hand because they have recognized the nature or depth of the impact on them.