Difference, Conflict & Love: How Family Can Lead Us Home

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The article, Difference, Conflict & Love: How Family Can Lead Us Home by Kathy Eckles was published April 2016 on Public Conversations Project blog. In the article, Eckles shares some of her family’s history regarding dialogue and the desire growing up to have had other alternatives communication with her family, especially when it came to harder issues. She gives 3 steps for improving communication skills with family, even when differences and conflict arise.

Below is an excerpt from the article and you can find the original in full on Public Conversations Project blog here.

From Public Conversations Project…

3 Steps to Improved Communication Skills

Step 1: Build Emotional Sturdiness
Stretch your comfort zone. Break old patterns. Say ‘yes’ to opportunities. Learn new things. Build trust in yourself as you strengthen your emotional capacity to listen, speak, create, succeed, fail, give, receive, lead. There will be moments of awkwardness, but you’ll survive them and, with humility and good-heartedness, they can even be endearing. You’ll likely wish for a few ‘do-overs,’ too, but you will grow.Step one: live your life beyond what you already know.

Step 2: Understand Self & Others
Ask why do I do what I do? What motivates each of us to be so different in how we communicate, lead and interact in relationships? What are my gifts and challenges? How can I be more accepting of myself and others? How might acceptance, appreciation and knowing more about how to meet people where they are impact our relationships at home and at work? Would we be happier and more productive? One of my favorite resources is the Enneagram. It’s helped me be more compassionate, appreciate differences, and relate more effectively. Step two: know thyself. Appreciate. Diversify. Respond, not react. Communicate in ways that make sense to the receiver.

Step 3: Develop Communication Skills
…Expand your conversation toolkit beyond news, sports, weather and the 140 character comment to include how to: listen and ask genuine questions to have a conversation that’s rich with curiosity and connection; unlock stuck conversations through mutual understanding; feel more grounded in your own voice; communicate across different cultures, personalities and contexts, and develop everyday tools to resolve or transform conflict. Step three: expand your quality communication skills. Practice every day.

This is an excerpt from the article, to find it in full, go to Public Conversations Project’s site.

About Public Conversations ProjectPCP_logo
Public Conversations Project fosters constructive conversation where there is conflict driven by differences in identity, beliefs, and values. We work locally, nationally, and globally to provide dialogue facilitation, training, consultation, and coaching. We help groups reduce stereotyping and polarization while deepening trust and collaboration and strengthening communities.

Follow on Twitter: @pconversations

Resource Link: www.publicconversations.org/blog/difference-conflict-love-how-family-can-lead-us-home

a welcome talk for college interns newly arrived in Washington

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I’d like to welcome you to Washington. I’d also like to welcome you to DC.

To my ear, “Washington” means the official city, the nation’s capital, the seat of power. It’s also the destination for about 20 million visitors a year, because they come to see the sites of the official city: the National Mall, the museums, the monuments, and the great buildings that house our national government.

On the walls inside the Capitol, the courts, the executive agencies, and the Pentagon, there must hang 10,000 oil portraits of former office-holders. Sometimes under a portrait of an obscure ante-Bellum Senator, you’ll see unionized teachers shaking hands with their current, conservative US rep., or teenagers in a huddle trying to figure out where they need to go next. Official Washington is a magnet for all kinds of Americans.

To my ear, “DC” means a mid-Atlantic city of about 700,000 people, plus the inner-ring suburbs where many of the residents have roots in the city proper. DC’s population is just under half African-American, and many of the most deeply rooted DC families are Black.

It’s a city of brick row houses, fall leaves crunching underfoot on a hot and humid day, official buildings shimmering in the smog at the end of long vistas, knots of people in suits with government ID’s hanging from their necks, soldiers in desert fatigues, and the Metro coasting quietly between stations with–in the summertime–payloads of interns.

There are other cities here, too. The international city of embassies, the World Bank and IMF, the global press corps, and 10,000 diplomats. The military city of the Pentagon, the Naval Hospital, myriad defense contractors, and Andrews Air Force Base–with the Naval Academy just up the road. A tech-industry hub that pays relatively little attention to politics and government. A city of scholars and artists. These different cities come together–sometimes uneasily and coolly–in places like the Metro, Nationals Park, and a summer concert at the Zoo.

Washington is a youthful city that depends on talented 20-somethings who can go “all in” for their boss, whether on a political campaign, in a newsroom, or in a tech startup. DC is full of people who came here in their 20’s to do good and ended up doing well. Now they live in spacious houses on tree-lined streets in Cleveland Park or Georgetown, but their years of greatest impact were in their youth, and even today they could get nothing done without their 20-something staffers.

Every year, a new batch of idealists arrive who say, with Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s version, “I’m past patiently waitin’. I’m passionately smashin’ every expectation, every action’s an act of creation! … And I am not throwing away my shot.”

Like Hamilton, you can be idealistic and ambitious, your ambition spurring you to make a better world and be known for it. You have a shot; don’t throw it away.

I’d encourage you to appreciate DC, the mid-Atlantic city, with its neighborhoods and restaurants, its distinctive accents and traditions. People sometimes say that DC is a transient city, but they are thinking about politicians, diplomats, generals, and staffers. DC is also an old and stable city of school teachers, bus drivers, food workers, busboys, and a few poets.

I’d also encourage you to appreciate Washington, the seat of the republic. I know that few Americans are fully inspired by it right now. Some see Washington as a sink for their hard-won salary money and the source of regulations that impinge their liberty. Others behold a militaristic, corporate power center dominating the world, a neoliberal death star. Just four percent of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in Congress. Most Americans also say that they distrust their fellow citizens. Since Washington represents the whole country, we each see a city that answers to a lot of other people we don’t much like

I spent my own twenty years in this city trying to be a reformer, often with anger in my thoughts and even in my voice. I understand the critiques and share some of them. Yet I would urge you to be open to the grand narrative of the official city.

Take a walk, for instance, up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Look from there onto the National Mall. Chained people were brought there daily to be sold across from the Smithsonian Castle until 1850. The Capitol Dome, however, was completed during the Civil War, and the crowning statue of Freedom was erected there in the same year as the Battle of Gettysburg.

Inside the temple to Lincoln, take a moment to read the Second Inaugural carved into the walls. It’s just four paragraphs long. The third and by far the longest argues that slavery “was the cause of the war.” The speech ends, “let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In 1963, 250,000 people stood before the Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, listening not only to Dr. King’s “Dream” but also to Bayard Rustin lead a tribute to “Negro Women Fighters for Freedom,” Mahalia Jackson sing “How I Got Over,” and the grizzled civil rights veteran John Lewis give a major speech at the ripe old age of 23. The program notes from that day, saved by my friend Harry Boyte, reminded everyone, “In a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words, and even hot insults. But when a whole people speaks to its government, the dialogue and the action must be on a level reflecting the worth of that people and the responsibility of that government.” I imagine the 250,000 women and men who stood there on that day as ghosts on the Mall, still reflecting the worth of our people and still speaking eloquently to their government, which is still our government. We can stand with them.

As we have continued our common story, we’ve added to Washington’s obelisk and Lincoln’s temple vast free public museums of history, art, and industry, monuments to the fallen in several wars and to peace itself, and buildings documenting the Holocaust, Native American history and culture, and African American history and culture.

Every nation-state is problematic. It sets boundaries, excludes people, and exercises power. But a nation-state is also a tool for making the world better and for accomplishing great things together. It becomes what we make it become.

What we have made of the United States so far is quite literally etched in the stone of Washington DC. We are still building it, whether we happen to be American citizens or not, literally and metaphorically.

Young people have always played a disproportionate role. Coming here to serve is a privilege. It’s a learning opportunity. It can be fun. It puts you into the story of tragedy, crime, sacrifice, and redemption that is this country.

Hamilton did more than any founder to found Washington, even though he’s the only one without a monument on the Mall. In the musical, he sums up his life. “I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me. America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me. You let me make a difference.”

You follow in his footsteps. Make a difference.

NHS Citizen

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Case: NHS Citizen

Jun 8 '16
Author: 
Leah
Beginning in 2013, NHS Citizen was created to give citizens could a more active role in the NHS decision making in England. Now Assembly Meeting are held twice a year in order to deliberate over citizen-generated issues and discuss with the NHS England board.

A Moment in History

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Last night, Secretary Hillary Clinton made history by becoming the first female to be the presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party.

Republican commentator Ana Navarro commented on Twitter, “Confession: Thought woman thing wouldn’t mean much to me, but yes, feel something I can’t quite articulate seeing 1st woman nominee #History”

Among my own circles, I saw mothers and fathers alike thrilled to be able to share the moment with their daughters. Who watched with pride and hope as Secretary Clinton declared “tonight’s victory is not about one person. It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”

It’s a historic moment for women in this country, and I’m glad that many are finding it so moving and powerful.

But, for me…it feels oddly flat.

Ezra Klein posits that many have met this moment uninspired because Secretary Clinton is “winning a process that evolved to showcase stereotypically male traits using a stereotypically female strategy.” Or, more generally, “there is something about us that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement.”

In Klein’s view, the strength of a candidate is traditionally measured by how rousing their speeches are; how fiery their rhetoric. But those aren’t Secretary Clinton’s strengths. Not only is she “not a natural politician,” but – as a woman – she would be socially penalized for being too loud; too outspoken.

Instead, Secretary Clinton’s strength is that she’s a relentless coalition builder; “arguably better at that than anyone in American politics today.” This relationship-building is a critical political skill, but it’s also what makes her seem so establishment. She seemingly had the primary locked up before it even began – establishment, perhaps, but the result of decades of painstaking relationship building.

Klein argues then that if Secretary Clinton’s victory feels hollow it is because of the norms we’ve imposed – because we undervalue the traditional feminine skill of relationship building while overvaluing traditionally masculine oratory.

This argument is intriguing, but still somewhat misses the mark. I’m skeptical of Klein’s gendering of rhetoric and relationship building – do those really break down as a masculine/feminine dynamic?

Of course, this in part is what makes patriarchy so intrenchant – the nuances of sexism and double standards are so subtle as to be commonly overlooked entirely. The biases are so pervasive that I honestly couldn’t tell you how these misguided norms warp my own view.

Yet, as I reflect on my own dispassion for Secretary Clinton’s victory, I like to think that it’s neither personally nor politically motivated. Indeed, I have a great deal of respect for Secretary Clinton.

Instead, as we mark this historic moment, as Americans declare their pride at finally selecting a female nominee, I’m reminded of the many, many, many women who have served as heads of governments and heads of state around the world.

Despite what several articles have written, Secretary Clinton is not the first woman to be nominated by a major political party – rather she is the first in the U.S.

Not to downplay the significance of that achievement, but I suppose I’m having a hard time feeling the thrill of a liberal victory when the fact that we’re just now getting to this moment highlights just how painfully un-progressive our country can be.

As Steven Colbert cleverly quipped, electing a female candidate “is something you could only see in a sci-fi novel…or any other country in the world.”

So while I suppose that later is better than never – this momentary breath of parity seems like little to preen ourselves over.

And while there may be important symbolism in this moment, I can’t help feel that symbolism does me little good if nothing really changes.

Just last week a white man was given a light six month sentence for the violent rape of a woman while the perpetrator’s father complained that even that minimal sentence ruined his son’s life for “20 minutes of action.” You can read the woman’s own powerful statement here.

And this story is just one of far too many incidents of rape and sexual assault which occur regularly across this nation. RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) estimates that 1 in 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. And nearly 2 out of 3 rapes go unreported.

So forgive me if I find myself unmoved by symbolism; if I want more from my country.

Following the election of President Barack Obama, there was much hope that entering an era where a black man could indeed become president meant we had entered an era where we could truly confront and dismantle our country’s deep racism.

Unfortunately, over the last eight years the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, and far, far too many other people of color show just how little progress we have truly made. There is so much work to be done.

I am satisfied with the nomination of Secretary Clinton, and I am optimistic that come January we will finally have a woman in the white house. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this moment means as much as we would like it to mean.

This is a historic moment, perhaps, but one that is scandalously far past due. And with the deep, entrenched and often violent misogyny unrelentingly still faced by women in our country today, it is a moment which highlights not how far we have come – but how shockingly further we still have to go.

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the nerds and the community organizers

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(Amtrak) I’m on my way home from a meeting with my friends at Cities of Service and their network of mayors and city officials. I’m struck by how many of these people are uniting two traditionally opposite strands of government reform, not only in their important work with Cities of Service but in their other projects as well.

One strand is all about efficiency, transparency, measurement, and data. It goes back to the Progressive Era and agencies like New York City’s Bureau of Municipal Research, founded in 1907. Its ambition is to bring science and/or business practices into municipal government. That basic impulse has been constant for a century, but the tools and techniques have grown more sophisticated.

When you consider how much good you can do for people and the environment by measuring and tracking, it’s clear that this agenda remains essential. For instance, we heard a great presentation by Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Minor about my hometown’s use of remote sensors to identify where water is leaking and pipes are about to break, thus saving the city millions. Searching for her work, I instead came across a 1922 article entitled “Measurement of Water Supply by the Pitot Tube in Syracuse, NY.” The author, a Mr Starbird, begins by lamenting the failure to install measurement tools in the city’s intake pipes, which would allow Syracuse “quickly to detect any considerable loss that might occur in the conduits between these points.” Nearly a century later, Syracuse is dropping censors into water pipes and sending the data into “the cloud.” The agenda is the same; the need remains urgent.

The other strand of municipal reform is more populist, little-“d” democratic, and concerned with diversity. It begins with the recognition that many of the people who are most affected by city government and urban issues aren’t asked what they think about these issues, let alone empowered to address them. Teenagers struggling in high school, seniors in retirement communities, and homeless mothers are just some of the groups who lack voice and power. So the municipal reformer seeks to consult them, or better, to engage and empower them.

These two strands tend to appeal to different kinds of people. Metrics sound exciting to nerdy people who often have backgrounds in business or science, who are comfortable with math and technology, and who typically have attained advanced education. Popular engagement sounds good to community organizers, grassroots leaders, and some elected politicians who have roots in the marginalized neighborhoods of a city.

But the two impulses can go together. The great populist, democratic educator Jane Addams was also responsible for Hull-House Maps and Papers, a compendium of rigorous, plot-level data, subtitled “a presentation of nationalities and wages in a congested district of Chicago, together with comments and essays on problems growing out of the social conditions.” According to the title page, the authors of the book were “Residents of Hull-House.” Maps and Papers was a sophisticated presentation of data produced by, as well as for, the poor residents of a 19th century slum in partnership with some college-educated women who lived with them.

Indeed, these two impulses must go together. Efficient, data-driven management will do little good unless the public supports the city’s use of data. Municipal governments can’t solve problems unless they get help from other organizations and from active citizens. Data can help autonomous organizations in civil society to coordinate their efforts.

Besides, all data is value-laden, and people have the right to make judgments about what to measure and how to interpret the results. Data also confers power, and unless you trust the government implicitly and permanently, you should want diverse citizens to produce and use data so that they share power over it.

At the same time, because data is power, grassroots organizers and networks need it. They can’t afford not to be efficient, effective, responsive, and cognizant of precise costs and benefits. Strengthening democracy is not about replacing data and businesslike practices with raw popular voice. It’s rather about sharing the power of data.

See also this post on “smart water“; the rise of an expert class and its implications for democracy; what would Jane Addams say?; empowering citizens to make sure the stimulus is well spent

Call for Proposals Open for NCDD 2016!

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NCDD’s 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation is coming up this October 14-16 in the Boston area.

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NCDD conferences bring together hundreds of the most active, thoughtful, and influential people involved in public engagement and group process work across the U.S. and Canada. Our last national conference (DC in 2014) had 415 attendees, and we hope to beat that number this year!

If your work involves dialogue and deliberation, or you want to get involved with this work, you’ll love this conference. Imagine spending three days with some of the most amazing leaders in this field, forming new relationships and reconnecting with old colleagues and friends, hearing about innovative new approaches to the challenges you’re facing, and exploring together how we can shape the future of this important movement, all while using innovative group techniques… there’s really nothing like it. (See our 2014 Conference Storify page for quotes and pictures.)

Today we’re announcing our call for proposals for our concurrent sessions for NCDD 2016. We’re interested in finding creative ways to highlight the best of what’s happening in public engagement, group process, community problem-solving, and arts-based dialogue — and we know you have lots of ideas!

Check out the Application for Session Leaders now to see what we ask for, and start cooking up those great proposals we’ve come to expect from our network! If you’re looking for ideas and inspiration, look over the comments on this blog post, where we asked the NCDD community to share what they’d like to see happen at NCDD 2016, and peruse the fabulous sessions offered at the 2014 and 2012 NCDD conferences.

Please note that the deadline for proposals is Friday, July 8th. We look forward to seeing what you’d like to offer!

Here is some guidance for those thinking about presenting sessions at NCDD 2016…

IMG_5569Our theme for the 2016 conference is Bridging Our Divides, and we invite workshop proposals that in some way build upon or engage the ideas around this theme. NCDD 2016 is taking place a month before the 2016 Presidential election, and in light of the extreme rhetoric and partisan rancor in this election cycle, we want to share stories about healing the partisan divide and about creating and implementing strategies that will help us move forward together in addressing our shared problems.

But the divide between left and right politics is not the only divide that we as a field need to help our country address – the Bridging Our Divides theme is an invitation for us to address the most persistent of our gaps in our society. We want this conference to lift up stories and strategies about people working together across our race divides, our religious divides, our economic divides, our divisions around gender, orientation, and expression, our generational divides, our divides between government officials and everyday citizens, and others.

We invite session proposals that will highlight work being done to bridge divides on all levels – from organizations, to neighborhoods, to cities, to the whole country. We also invite sessions that have a special focus on the role of media and the press in bridging our societal divisions, especially through partnership with the dialogue & deliberation field. Your proposal will be evaluated, in part, by its relevance to our theme and goals.

Some advice for potential session leaders:

  1. Identify great co-presenters.  Most workshops at NCDD conferences are collaborative efforts involving multiple presenters from different organizations and universities. Have you thought about who you can co-present with? Now’s the time to contact them to see if they’d like to offer a session with you! (Use the NCDD Discussion list and the comments below to put out feelers for potential co-presenters if you’d like.)
  2. Look over past workshop descriptions. Peruse the list of workshops from NCDD DC to get a sense of the kinds of sessions the planning team selects. Sessions focused on innovative solutions to common challenges, ways to take this work to scale or to new audiences, and deep dives into great projects (and thoughtful explorations of failed projects!) are especially welcome.
  3. Be innovative with your session.  NCDD attendees are usually not too impressed with traditional panels or long speeches. Get them engaging with you and each other! Think about how you can get them out of their seats and moving around the room. And think about what you’d like to learn from them (not just what they can learn from you). Challenge yourself to run a session without relying on PowerPoint.
  4. Share your stories.  NCDDers prefer hearing your stories to getting a run-down of your organization or methodology.  People are interested in learning about what you did, what you learned, and how they may be able to learn from your experience. Stories about bridging divides are a key part of this year’s conference as well!
  5. Share the latest.  What’s the latest research? What are the latest innovations in the field? What new challenges are you facing? What are your latest accomplishments?

IMG_1562Not quite ready to draw up a proposal yet? Use the comment field (and/or the NCDD listserv) to float your ideas by other NCDDers and members of the planning team. We may be able to match you up with potential co-presenters who can address the same challenge or issue you’re interested in focusing on.

Look over the comments on our engagement of members around what they would like to see at the conference, on the blog and the listserv. There is a wealth of ideas and insight in those results!

Deadline for submissions
To be have your session proposal considered, we need you to submit the session application by the end of the day on Friday, July 8th. Members of the conference planning team will review the proposals and respond by email to the first contact listed in your proposal by the end of the day on July 22nd.

Portmanteaus

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I have a strong and general dislike for portmanteaus – words which have “two meanings packed up into one word,” as Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

I mention this definition because it was the first use of “portmanteau” for this purpose. An origin which is particularly amusing when you consider that our egg-shaped friend was clearly bloviating and most likely invented all the definitions he elects to confer on poor Alice.

But I digress.

At the time of Carroll’s writing, a portmanteau was most commonly known in English as a suitcase which opened into two equal sections. Thus a single word such as “slithy” is a portmanteau – in Dumpty’s reckoning – between the two component words “lithe” and “slimy.”

The word comes from the French porte-manteau, from porter, to carry, and manteau, cloak.

To be clear, I don’t have a distain for all portmanteaus. A word like ‘smog’ – smoke/fog – for example, seems to be appropriate name for something we wouldn’t otherwise have a word for. It is neither smoke nor fog, but we experience it as some novel combination of the two.

Other words, such as ‘sitcom’ – situational comedy – or ‘motel’ – motor hotel – seem like reasonable abbreviations for phrases which would otherwise be antiquated and somewhat nonsensical. Fine. I will accept these into my lexicon.

But a broader persual of English portmanteaus reveals a long list of cutesy words which are not nearly as amusing as I imagine their originators think they are. Please. Just stop it.

I suppose that this is the natural course for a living language, though. People will create portmanteaus which will be trendy for a time before most fade from use altogether. The useful ones will last.

Interestingly, portmanteaus are common in languages around the world. In French, this is described through the back-translation mot-valise (‘word-suitcase’) which subsequently became Kofferwort in German. I’m not aware of a specific Japanese term for this, but its linguistically common to combine and contract words.

While I’m in no position to comment on the worthiness of portmanteaus in those languages, the broad existence of this trend in human language seems to indicate that there is something to be said for the practice of smooshing words together and seeing what comes out.

But mostly, they just annoy me.

Because usually, we don’t need a term for whatever the portmanteau intends to convey. And if we don’t need some cutesy, made-up name for some thing that may or may not even need to exist, let us, please, just stick with the real words we already have.

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Ice Cream Trucks and other Drug Dealers

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There’s a lot to love in this New York Times profile of the Mister Softee/New York Ice Cream feud:

“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. ” Every truck has a bat inside.”

Mr. Vega, 41, said that if he comes across a rival on his route, “I jump out and say, ‘Listen young man, this is my route, you gotta get out of there.”

Battle lines being drawn around ice cream sales in Midtown Manhattan is the kind of story meant for a Disney movie. Or maybe something R-rated, just for the bravado of “Every truck has a bat inside.”

I’ve always hated the local ice cream trucks, which are really trying to overcharge my for ice cream by training my daughter to have a melt down if I force her to eat store-bought ice cream instead of the overpriced stuff being advertised with a racist tune. (Well, maybe not. But still…) And now it turns out that they really are scary:

“If one of my drivers goes to Midtown, they’ll bring their trucks in and surround them — a bunch of guys,” said Peter Bouziotis, who runs the Softee depot in the Bronx, which covers Manhattan. “They’ll start banging on the windows.”

In various spots, I’ve seen this bad behavior tut-tutted and blamed on capitalism. But I suspect that this particular case (as well as most of the cases like it) actually has very little to do with capitalism and everything to do with the fundamentals of a non-capitalist economic system: common pool resource management.

This kind of social norm enforcement through threats and violence is a fairly common way of organizing property regimes when social or legal factors prevent privatization and legal exclusion. The technical definition of a common pool resource requires that the resource be rivalrous (able to be used up) but non-excludable (it can’t be locked away.) Tourists are both, even though they don’t think of themselves as resources or property.

The commons is precisely not “private property.” It’s commonly held. This caused many modern economists to argue that there was a “tragedy of the commons” whereby commonly-held goods would be used up rather than stewarded: each user would have an incentive to maximize–privatize–as much of the common-pool resource as possible, and so the commons would be ruined. These economists argued that only private property–and thus capitalism–could save the earth from overuse. Thus, for instance, we need to have “cap-and-trade” regimes so that corporations will maximize the profit to had from their privately-held shares of pollution, and this is supposed to be better than taxing pollution or simply regulating it away.

But in practice, the economists were wrong, as Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington Workshop showed: commonly-held goods can be protected and managed as effectively as privately-held goods, and under conditions where private ownership is impossible to enforce. Unless the community is heavily disrupted (for instance by imperialism or police occupation) common-pool resources aren’t overused because users are understood to have a “share” by communal norms rather than legal title: exceeding one’s “share” is punished by the community of users.

In common-pool resource management systems, social norms take the the place of physical exclusions, and these norms include the ability to sanction–often physically sanction–potential interlopers. Crucially, this requires all sorts of negative emotions and actions that liberals such as myself don’t like: shame, resentment, contempt, us-v.-them tribalism, and even violence (on the small-scale “get the bat” variety or large-scale “revenge-killing” variety.) Common-pool resource management requires insiders to sanction poachers, and that’s what New York Ice Cream is doing here:

“From 34th to 60th Street, river to river, that’s ours,” he said on a recent afternoon, moments after handing a chocolate cone to a delighted-looking little boy. The vendor would not allow his name to be published for fear of losing his job.

Look at Maine lobstermen (cf especially Acheson’s The Lobster Gangs of Maine) or fisheries management in Taiwan or Chile or water rights on the West Coast and you see the same behaviors emerging organically. We also see it in drug distribution, it’s true. Recall Vanda Feldab-Brown’s work on illicit markets and violence:

It is not inherent that illegal economies, including the drug trade, are violent. There is great variation. But there are other factors apart from the quality of law enforcement, such as the central balances of power within the criminal market. Are there few groups that have developed a balance of power and defined territories, or many small groups that constitute a slim market of mom-and-pop types of enterprises that do not have the capacity to trigger or generate any violence?

Violence is a tool for exclusion. That sounds like a universal evil, but it’s not; it’s just as much a tool for the maintenance of contested common pool resource systems as it is a tool for more deeply problematic exclusions. My own preferences are for a violence-free world; but this of course just means that my taxes pay others to credibly threaten interlopers for me, as well as actively utilizing violence on my behalf.

Now, many people object when I use the explanation for the violence in the illicit economy that leads many of our students at the prison to be incarcerated. And indeed, I don’t think that all of their behavior is defensible in this way. But it’s important to understand just why illicit markets are violent: participants lack access to legal title to their businesses and to legal conflict resolution mechanisms. Largely because of racism and racist educational systems, they are unable to participate as equals in the legal labor market. They’re thus thrown into the grey and black market for labor, where they cannot access police and courts. Under those conditions, where none of their property is protected, participants in the illicit market are thrown back onto traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, which emphasizes honor and uses credible threats of violence to enforce property and contract rights.

If anything, New York Ice Cream is like the ideal of labor organizing; they were working for Mister Softee and tired of being exploited by licensing fees–payments to capitalists by laborers for the privilege of laboring–so they expropriated the means of production and locked the bosses out of the factory, that is, out of Midtown. Then, they made life difficult for the scabs:

The rift between New York Ice Cream and Mister Softee goes back to around 2013. According to court documents, Mr. Tsirkos held at least a dozen Softee franchises at the time, mostly in Midtown. Several of his drivers said that he was upset at high franchise fees and inflated prices for supplies. So he took his trucks (they are owned by individuals, not Mister Softee), added sprinkles and a waffle cone to the logo, and struck out on his own….

Ironically, the one place we don’t see poachers sanctioned is in heavily-policed high-oversight free-market property regimes (aka capitalism) because that’s where the rich are able to control things using rules and courts instead of social solidarity. In those situations, they often use the ideology of fair competition to force insiders to compete with poachers and scabs.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing drug markets, or even beating up your food truck competitors. But I find it strange when ordinary human behavior–often the laudatory kind that is responding to a larger abuse of power with small-scale violence–is pathologized by my fellow liberals who recognize the small-scale violence but ignore the larger abuses.

New York Ice Cream’s drivers have bats; Mister Softee’s drivers have been slashing tires, making death threats, and now the owners have the court system extracting six-figure judgments from the people doing the work and giving it to the people who hold the private right to the intellectual property:

Mr. Tsirkos has been ordered to compensate Mister Softee for his misdeeds. Last week, a federal judge ordered him to pay Softee $287,858.44 in lawyers’ fees, bringing the total he owes to over $767,000. (So far, Mister Softee’s lawyers say, Mr. Tsirkos has parted with only $2,426.)

So my expectation is that this short-lived Paris Commune of frozen dessert distribution will soon come to an end.