Manners

So I have moved to Portland, OR and started working for a new company. (Hopefully most of you know I am not really in Portland). I will write about all that later, I wanted to write about a public meeting I went to today.

It was about taking a public parking lot along a popular shopping district and turning into a park/plaza. The lost parking would be made up 200 feet away by closing a street that is not needed and turning it into a parking lot. Seems like a no-brainer to me. But, this is Portland, so of course it is controversial.

The meeting was totally disfunctional. A bunch of merchants are opposed to the change because they want the parking to remain directly in front of their stores, not two hundred feet away.

The organizers proposed breaking into small groups. The merchants wanted to stay in one large group and have speakers. After lots of shouting, the organizers agreed to stay in a large group. 20 speakers got up and said their piece either pro or con the new park/plaza.

Every time the merchants disagreed with someone, they would make cat calls and try to argue with the speakers and overall behaved like children.

(My favorite was the person who got up and went off on how the shopping area was good enough and "we don't want improvements." He kept rehashing that phrase, "We don't want improvementsm" for two minutes." As he finished and people clapped. I yelled, "DOWN WITH IMPROVEMENTS!"

(I got up and said, "I just rent here and I can't afford to buy here so I will be moving at some point. In other words, I have no dog in this fight. The shame of this whole argument is you agree about the goals. Everyone wants the local business to stay, everyone wants more trees, everyone wants it to be clean and safe. Seeing as you want the same thing, you should be working together to find ways of improving the situation rahter than fighting." That was my piece.

I returned to my seat and the immature behavior continued. At one point, I turned to the bratty group of people to my left and said, "What's the matter with you. Why are you being so rude." I didn't thing much about my remark. Afterwards, they came up to me and were quite upset that I thought they were rude.

"Why do you think we were being rude?" they asked. (It was a little hard not to laugh)
"Cause you made cat calls and interupted the speakers," I said.
"But you don't understand. They have been rude to us at many other meetings," they defended themselves.

At this point I realized that they really cared about my opinion. I gues is a bit of a blow to one's ego to have an impartial observer say, you're behaving poorly. It's almost like a judge saying, "Party X is right and Party Y is wrong." In any case,

I responded, "I don't care if they were rude first. It's no excuse. You are at public meeting and there are children here, you should be polite. No matter how rude they are to you, it is no excuse. You should be polite. I mean, if you get frustrated and lose your temper and say a rude thing, ok fine, you're human, it happens, but really you should try not to. You should try to be civil."

Then they said, "They weren't going to let us talk. They wanted to make us go into the small groups."

I said, "You know what, I was actually OK with you guys having a little revolution and insisting on staying in the big group. It's important to make sure your voice gets heard. But you can't do it rudely. And you all continued to cause trouble after you got your way,"

They said, "You have to understand that there is a six year history to this...."
When they were done with the recounting of past sins, I went back to, "OK, I hear that that is frustrating, but if you are going to come to a meeting, you should not be rude. Don't come if you don't want to, but if you show up, don't be rude. Be civil."

It was actually a somewhat comical argument. Here they are trying to convince me that it is ok to be rude and nasty. I kept saying really, there is no justification.

By the end, after five minutes of me repeating, "I understand, but really, rude is rude and you should not be it," I think they kind of got my point. I am sure my victory for manners will be fleeting, but it still felt nice.