Of course, some of the signs at the Region were uncouth and unquestionably disrespectful. It was certainly not the way I would choose to address council or staff, but the signs should not be a pretext to limit democratic freedoms and exclude people.
Politicians need to be reminded that we must to go farther and do better when it comes to inclusion. It might be necessary to sacrifice comfort or other easy reward to make space for others whose perspective, learnings and individual experiences are being ignored or overlooked.
Once again, inclusion has been denied to those who most painfully experience the bite of exclusion. It is too easy to silence those who are loud, unreasonable, and aggressive. The resulting procedural bylaw yielded the easiest and the most predictable answer.
We do not need to help, fix, change, or agree with or disagree with speakers, but we can at least be fully present to engage with the speaker’s experience to be able to recreate that experience more powerfully in ourselves.
It is easy to skirt any real sense of culpability or responsibility for excluding others. We campaign against exclusion and we form our committees, so how could we now perpetuate or empower exclusion?
A better question might be to ask, “Who is not here, who needs to be here?”
We should be asking who is at this table and who is not.
Have we tried to share space, or have we occupied space that we should not have, and left or crowded others out, more often than we should have?
Having a voice is related to being invited. We need to re-centre this conversation. Council has chosen a reaction which has limited their power and freedom to create more inclusion. There is now a need to restore possibility and reduce the feeling that nothing can change. Faith in each other can still unite us in a common sense of purpose and possibility. In the words of person of considerable reputation and notoriety:
The reasonable man adapts himself to surrounding conditions. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.
—George Bernard Shaw
Wayne Olson is a Pelham Town Councillor representing Ward 1.
