Safety Security Newsletter Nonviolence

RantWoman is reformatting and reprinting an article about a recent safety and security audit from the Meeting Newsletter.  Then RantWoman will weigh in further.

With that as an intro, the newsletter article with further comments interspersed [in square brackets]

  

A CULTURE OF FEAR AND CONTROL

Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge

I am deeply disturbed by the “Security Assessment Report” and related plans brought to January’s business meeting.

[RantWoman: Speaking as someone who does resource development for many nonprofit activities, sometimes one receives such gifts as are offered. RantWoman agrees: members of other committees might have had things to contribute to the process of doing the report if Facilities committee had sought such input while the assessment was occurring, but the report is not a terrible place to start. The document is quite off-putting and includes some hypotheticals that seem beside the point to RantWoman.  As an aside, re emergency plans, RantWoman would be interested to hear where Facilities committee has interacted at all with previous disaster preparedness conversations and ARE sessions around Meeting, many of which are written up in one or another of RantWoman’s blogs.

[RantWoman would start from a different perspective about how to use UFM’s space in the changing neighborhood. But Meeting has been muddling around about some of these questions since 2010 and the end of the Year of Discernment; perhaps they fall under the purview of what RantWoman sees as ongoing work about campus discernment but RantWoman’s input is clearly not wanted right now and RantWoman  is not as patient as might be desired when people who do not get around on and experience the community of people flows on the bus just pronounce conversations about transportation changes “unnecessary detail.” ]

The author continues: I think they contribute to a culture of fear and control, instead of a culture of community care, agency, and safety. We have internalized this (American, colonial, white supremacist) reliance on fear and control to the point where our UFM leadership didn’t think that these security recommendations needed input from the Meeting.

[To be honest, RantWoman thinks you are discounting community members’ real experience and frustrations related to many changes outside of UFM.  The changes outside of UFM are too massive and consequential to more than nip at in this post. But reality can be encapsulated as follows from a recent RantWoman tweet. “The Nav Team Sucks. Lack of affordable housing and case management sucks. But please do not discount the experience of a blind accessibility lead at a major downtown employer who is tired of tripping over people’s tents, many inhabited by other people with disabilities, every day on his way to work.]

[The recommendations come from a report which I believe Meeting received FOR FREE. If Meeting paid for the report, RantWoman would like to hear that someone shopped around but if the report was done for free, RantWoman would recommend showing the value of it as an in-kind donation on our records just so Friends have some idea about the dollar value of such services. Meeting is free to accept or reject all the recommendations. I believe the POINT of a threshing session is to hear Friends’ feedback and priorities. RantWoman offers further commentaries below in addition to previous offerings https://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2020/02/ministry-of-observing-and-prayer.html ]

The author continues: Police and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba explains: “The prison and the police are in our heads and hearts, therefore this system is naturalized in a way that makes it almost impossible for folks to step back and think that it wasn’t always like this. How did people manage before?  [Before? There were a LOT of really shitty awful prisons “before.” Some early Quakers spent a lot of time in some of them. That is part of how Quakers became associated with prison reform though today Quakers hold a range of views, something that might have become apparent in Meeting’s discussion of the new youth jail.]

How might we look into the future and imagine something different? […] I think we can’t underestimate the fact that we think these institutions keep us secure.

“Security and safety aren’t the same thing. Security is a function of the weaponized state that is using guns, weapons, fear and other things to ‘make us secure,’ right? All the horrible things are supposed to be kept at bay by these tools, even though we know that horrible things continue to happen all the time with these things in place—and that these very tools and the corresponding institutions are reproducing the violence and horror they are supposed to contain.”

To me, safety means that each person’s divine humanity is respected, cherished, and nurtured. As Quakers, we uphold a testimony of nonviolence that challenges us to not react out of fear, nor try to use force to control someone else, but instead to build skills, healthy relationships, and practices of caring for one another because we know that these are the things that will decrease the amount of harm in the world.

[So, um, if RantWoman would describe  lots of turn down RantWoman’s offers of help and never ever try to work with RantWoman and get up and start to walk out of the room when RantWoman needs to speak of something to do with disability as, say, isolate and marginalize” could Friends MAYBE think of a large number of options to reduce harm and support community learning for everyone?]

Nonviolence is one path to safety. Of course, there is nothing that can be done to guarantee everyone’s safety and security 100% of the time. Many things are out of our control. However, we can build a community where we have the skills to take care of one another when threats or harm happen. That means investing in us, not in threatening signs or panic buttons to call gun-toting, racist and classist cops.

[Do UFM staff get a voice in this pronouncement? RantWoman agrees it might be possible to brainstorm some other responses besides calling the cops but as a believer in labor rights and treating our staff well, we need not to discount their concerns. PS. RantWoman rides the bus. RantWoman FULLY supports bus drivers having panic buttons; RantWoman also tries to document both appropriate and crap behavior by all involved when incidents occur.]

We know how to do this.

We have already been doing it! We had a solid relationship with Stanley before he passed that made UFM safer. We responded beautifully to angry Holocaust-deniers, keeping our people and our building from being harmed. We collectively manage (RantWoman’s) physical intrusions without threatening her with violence.

[Really?  Manage? Do you notice ANYTHING in minutes reflecting awareness of reasonable accommodations issues or specific accommodations that have been tried and not worked?  What kind of standards of ministry or mental health awareness do YOU observe in the entire community ganging up blaming all its problems on one especially vulnerable member? Perhaps you have not noticed language in the weekly bulletin or the cops driving by when RantWoman comes to pray nearby. RantWoman has noticed! RantWoman has multiple emails and comment from a Meeting leader asserting she has no right to speak in Business Meeting about a Friend who has been physically and verbally abusive to her.  Can anyone imagine how all these circumstances might NOT add up to safety and security? I mean it’s awesome to think about the larger community too, and RantWoman is thinking back to her own vehement young adulthood, thinking about how to season the fire of new quakers and hold Friends accountable  to living up to our testimonies with regard to long-seasoned advocates. Please someone explain how threatening to call the cops on RantWoman for, please excuse RantWoman’s fixation on the point, daring to speak up about disability gives anyone any credibility when asking Meeting to think about scenarios other than the approaches outlined in the security report]

  

We paint over racist graffiti. We could also do better. We could educate ourselves (more) about de-escalation. We could decide to give anyone in the community a place to pee without having to make a purchase or risk arrest. We could provide a safe option for needle disposal, so that nobody needs to choose between putting their used needles on the ground in plain sight or endangering city workers by putting it in a trash can. We could spend time building relationships with our housed and unhoused neighbors—for example, we could invite them to our potlucks! And instead of threatening to call the cops on trespassers, a sign could ask passersby to help keep our children safe and our property (Duwamish land? red-lined property?) clean, and offer whatever we can in return. There are nearly infinite options that don’t look like cages and cops

and threats and the exclusion of vulnerable people.

This doesn’t mean there is never room for locks or motion- activated lights.[RantWoman notes with appreciation conversation about research noting the existence of solar-powered motion-detector lights. RantWoman has no further info about motion-detector lights.]  But we need to act with integrity, from love instead of fear.

Editors’ Note: On February 9, from 9:30AM to 10:30AM in the Social Hall, ARE will host a threshing session on issues raised in the UFM meetinghouse security assessment report. We encourage interested readers to attend, ask questions and share their thoughts. We also welcome additional contributions on this topic.

[RantWoman: this threshing session did not occur and RantWoman will be interested to hear what comes of it. RantWoman continues to promise to be true to her Light about many matters but is completely unable to predict what being tru to her Light will look like in any given situation. RantWoman has enough experience with a sense of having contributed something important that others built on in some moments that RantWoman has to trust her Light.]

RantWoman apologizes but she is going to frame safety and security in considerably broader terms than either the safety and security report or the newsletter article. RantWoman is NOT going to apologize if this evening’s offerings read more like a tantrum than a security report, but RantWoman hopes readers can extract points to work on.

RantWoman herself has been having a dialogue with God. RantWoman has many times just relied on God in moments where, as many people with disabilities can attest, one is called to be places where one is either explicitly or implicitly not wanted. As a reminder, God keeps sending people with disabilities to live among us and recommending we all try to get along. Query for the “how can we achieve greater safety through love?” thoughts below: how might thinking about disability help inform actions to make our campus both safer and  more welcoming?

Cue Dial-a-Tirade: does anyone remember a great moment in Meeting for Business when RantWoman had the temerity to ask about wheelchair accessibility for a new tenant’s services. RantWoman’s sense of safety while asking honest questions and security would be greatly enhanced by Friends willing to have further conversation about that issue and different thoughts that rise. Oh, but we MUST go to lunch and then do everything we can to prevent RantWoman from sharing her thoughts and questions in community fora!  Silencing anyone? Gatekeeping?

How might it matter for UFM security if more members of the community were informed about what social services there are or are not around the U district. What might Friends be led to do to expand the availability of public toilets after business hours in our part of the U District?

In the next decades, Seattle is set to grow dramatically. Is it really necessary to shuffle longtime  Friends away to make room for nebulous newcomers? What wisdom and seasoning might there be among the dynamic interactions?

God notwithstanding, RantWoman would find it frighteningly easy to label her offerings “A culture of silencing, gatekeeping, and gaslighting,” not a situation RantWoman really wants to try to draw people into.  RantWoman is also clear to insert a number of comments and to ask readers to hold many things in the Light. In particular RantWoman has NO CALL to go away but is sincerely seeking paths both to deal with impinging realities and for MANY people to do better than massive screwups.

What can go better?

When screw-ups, massive colossal large-scale screw-ups occur, what are options to do better?

Hint: despite the zillions of “Shut UP” messages RantWoman hears about her blog, RantWoman HOPES she is conveying very clearly both things that DO NOT WORK and people should be embarrassed about as well as MANY things RantWoman is deeply grateful for. RantWoman would VERY MUCH appreciate hearing feedback about this. RantWoman realizes her blog is a TOUGH read a lot of the time and maybe RantWoman can go pull threads, but….

If Meeting for Business makes a BAD decision or maybe two or three or several or seventeen, what paths are there to change decisions?

RantWoman at this point is choosing to interpret every single NO she hears as “no, we are not serious about reasonable accommodations. We are NOT serious about dealing with disability or we want to talk about it in reference to everyone except RantWoman. We will find procedural way after procedural way to keep kicking the problem down the road.

RantWoman is hearing: We will assign a “Care and Accountability Committee” that had to be reminded MULTIPLE times not to schedule meetings they wanted RantWoman at without consulting RantWoman. They had to be firmly told that RantWoman will not meet in places that are physically inaccessible to people she might choose to have present.  Blindness means a LOT of new terminology in RantWoman’s life. RantWoman came away from meeting after meeting of the Care and Accountability committee with the sense that committee members’ eyes just completely glazed over. RantWoman found this frustrating for one thing because other members of the community understand the issues just fine The committee somehow thinks care and accountability can happen without dealing with disability—or, if they themselves cannot for whatever reason do what is needed to seek help from the wider community.

RantWoman is hearing We are not serious about a committee to work on this until we throw RantWoman out of Meeting first and tell her in multiple voices that she has no right even to object.  We are so busy doing other Quaker stuff that we get to send a message that would be entirely unacceptable in work life: Oh we want to postpone dealing with reasonable accommodations requests for a whole year.

RantWoman hears we don’t care whether RantWoman cares about people she might prefer to see and walk alongside while they are alive, but oh isn’t it a giant humanitarian gesture to let RantWoman come to memorials?  Then we will expect RantWoman to be grateful for separate and unequal worship opportunities.

RantWoman hears We are so afraid of RantWoman that we cannot even list her name on the committee roster for the Ad Hoc Committee on disabilities. We are not serious about dealing with ableism as a community so we are going to ask someone who already fights a lot of ableism to fight round after round of ableism on the committee. At the moment RantWoman has in mind the Worship and Ministry guidelines which RantWoman can only, testimony on integrity here, sign onto if there can be conversations about reasonable accommodations and issues that come up all the time due to blindness.   Also, “well, I am only available…”News Flash: everyone has time limitations and RantWoman is blind all the time so what can Friends learn to make RantWoman feel safe and listened to more of the time?

RantWoman is hearing from the current clerk “You are not welcome here” in a voice that does not sound to RantWoman like spirit-led discernment. Sorry, to reiterate: why do you think you are in control of God?

Then we will discount RantWoman’s experience as a blind person in multiple kinds of meetings, suggest a different blind person who has different experiences of blindness should be the authority about what works for RantWoman, pronounce upon observations without talking through the elements of business Meeting and what works or does not work. And then our clerk trainers will send a message that looks to RantWoman like continuing to discriminate is entirely acceptable and we will train 50 new clerks around NPYM in the thought that dealing with blind person in Meetings issues is optional.

RantWoman is presently in dialogue with the article’s author about many matters related to ableism and disability. If one is going to wave around words like ableism and classism, is one prepared to examine one’s own behaviors and attitudes? If the words gaslighting and gatekeeping come up, is it reasonable to ask how to share the burden, whether someone else in the community can better help do what is needed?

Please bear with RantWoman’s need to try to create mental space for new light or not even necessarily NEW Light but also Light that has been blazing for a long time. Long ago in a Meeting not very far away, RantWoman needed FOR ACCESSIBILITY REASONS to have a ministry of doing Sudoku in Meeting for worship. RantWoman survived two detached retinas and came away with a brain that wanted to see better than the eyes could see. This gave RantWoman headaches, headaches from focus issues that RantWoman was able to manage by doing Sudoku up close during Meeting for Worship.

RantWoman knows from a much esteemed car ride conversation, some Friends were not bothered in the least. This behavior drove other Friends AROUND THE BEND. One Friend in particular voiced the thought “I don’t like it (and therefore it should disappear.) SORRY, not sorry. RantWoman did not have at the time and does not to this day have a God as personal butler model of Divine presence. None of us is required to LIKE everything that comes our way. RantWoman has a versatile God who gets things done all kinds of ways and generally gives us all many different paths to learn to COPE.  Is there anything about these reflections that suggests things Friends might let go of and still feel safe and cared for in our changing neighborhood?