“…who controls the natural resources and are they privately owned or a community resource?“
What have we learned so far as we get ready for Parts 6 and 7 of the NHListens session at the Meredith Plymouth Senior Center this past Thursday? Seems like listening isn’t what it used to be, I guess – especially if the circle is stacked. Again “and remember that number 10!“. If you start with 10 seats and
- A strictly controlled meeting agenda of questions and issues
- A division of the prospective audience / attendees into “circles” consisting of about 10 people (remember that number)
- Paid “Facilitators” and “Scribes that are to guide the “conversations” and to “take notes” – in this case, paper easels
- The “Enforcer” – tasked with being the person who would argue with anyone that was challenging the narrative.
- The Enabler(s) – those folks that dribble in “talking points” during the discussion usually at the most opportune times to be “slick and smooth”
five of them are seemingly “in” on it, it tends to drown out what seems to be the REAL disenfranchised citizens in all this. Five seats taken in a 10 person?
There certainly were the advocates for the poor and for organizing as John Krebs said in the Intro:
For those of you who normally come to these kinds of meetings, planning board meetings, Board of Selectmen meetings, you probably notice that most of us see each other in a lot of meetings, so they wanted us to reach out beyond the normal people we hear from and try to find out what the disenfranchised sector of society, what they have to say. That includes rural areas which we all do, people of color, low income people, elderly people…and to that end, we have gone to Food Pantries, schools, and try to find out their opinion is”
When it comes to these kinds of things, you know who gets left out – the ordinary working person who can’t attend these meetings, or the meetings that “most of us” go to during the working day. Didn’t hear much mention of those folks during the meeting – who DOES advocate for the folks whose standard of living is decreasing as those driving and pleading Government to do more for others and that it is just the price of civilization to take more and more from these folks – what is the morality in that (legalized theft)?
Part 6:
- The observation was made about who is going to “advise whom” – and who came up with the issues that were on the handout sheets? Once again, the Facilitator briefly addressed the question but deflected to “move on” instead of listening to the concern of the non-Facilitor, non-Enforcer, non- Scribe, or non-Enabler (even as the Scribe came to his defense). Effectively, they shut this senior citizen down.
- I have to laugh – and then get rather disturbed when the Scribe flatly declared “this is the bottom up! <cross-talk> Let me finish, let me finish! In any community forum that you have that and you have invited people into this forum, this IS how you do a bottom up process.” and then tries to shame the senior citizen.
Got it:
- Feds come up with a social engineering plan to rewire local zoning rules to support that social engineering
- Bribe the target State with its own money – using a non-elected non-accountable level of government to do it
- Feds come up with all of the paperwork and goals
- The Regional Planning Commissions hire NHListens to manage these conversations – with paperwork supplied by the RPCs
- Stack the deck in the listening circles and “manage” the notes.
- Report back to the RPCs, from the sense of what I am getting from this, that the questions asked on the sheets turn out to be the answers (interrogative to narrative).
- The RPCs will do…something to earn their pay from the Feds
A PERFECT definition of “bottom up”!
Which is to get the local towns to screw over their townfolk. And in some cases, it is the unelected and unaccountable town employees that are signing the docs (usually the Town Planner) that now legally commit the town to stuff that no one else knows. As Action Media, the PR firm hired to help out, says, it is “to neutralize the opposition“.
“..a diverse setting” the Scribe continued to say as part of the shame act. Yeah, that was last straw – when I heard this the first time, I figured that no longer was I going to be just a private citizen and it was time to blog this. Bring out the Flashlight!
- I did chuckle when the Facilitator (after communing with Molly because the senior citizen went off script and wanted his concern addressed) said “if you are going to participate in this conversation to please participate
with our scriptalong with the guide – that’s how we are running this conversation (how else can we control things?). Yes indeed, that is how they run their conversations. - I love this Obama-like shift-the-blame game – this is supposed to be a NHListens event, but the Molly is from UNH Cooperative Extension (where the Carsey Institute is co-located with NHListens) – so, let’s do that old meeting trick of blaming the folks that aren’t there! Perfect!
- I thought it rich that one of the Enablers was going to bring this info back to her Planning Board, even as she has been one of the major speakers of the group and it is easy to tell what she has been in favor of (and not).
- Silence, impertinent one! Molly – “What I am hearing from the Group is that we should stay on task and move through the Agenda”. So we have two that wants their concerns met and the Scribe, the Enabler, and the Facilitator want to MoveOn. Gotcha (yes, I’m getting grouchy and curmudgeonly) a 3-2 disagreement means the whole Group wants to MoveOn.
- We are not developing local energy resources to make ourselves “locally self-sufficient” and more conservation
Part 7:
- Lack of energy resources – carbon based vs renewable / variability of cost of the latter. Windmill, use wave power (instead of buying a foreign nation (even as we think Canada is friendly to us))
- Lack of snow is hurting tourism (Climate Change!)
- Make your economy sustainable by going “local”.
- The Enforcer thinks that a State Tax supported University completes a sustainable economy (er, that would be a government sustained economy, yes?)
And the discussion is continued to the next post…
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