At 08:03 AM 4/12/99 -0400, Richard Rice wrote:
>Japanese organizations take a long time to arrive at a decision, but once
>they do, implementation is relatively smooth and rapid.  The process of
>ideas circulating througout an organization to gain input is called
>nemawashi, or root-binding. We need this at UTC now more than ever.
>
In my culture we call this grass-roots organizing, or listening to concerns
of ordinary people, or just plain democracy.  Prof. Rice is correct,
however, when he says we need it now more than ever.

Prof. Rice is to be commended, IMHO, for his efforts over the past few weeks
to organize a public meeting on short notice, to develop a petition, to
respond to suggestions on the petition and to generate interest through this
forum.  This  process should have been followed six months ago; or nine
months; or a year.

Sadly, the process we follow here uses a different model, one which appears
to go something like this:

First the Politburo makes its irrevocable decision.  Then some hapless
commissar selects a committee of apparatchiki (identifiable from their
record of party loyalty) who are instructed to write a policy in strictest
conformance with the decision.  The public is invited to express opinions,
but the deliberations of the committee are closed, and outside opinions go
unanswered and unacknowledged.  The policy goes to a quasi-representative
assembly to acquire rubber-stamp approval, and then to the general
electorate for a vote.  Voters are reminded that this is the work of their
friends and neighbors in our big happy family, and warned of dire
alternatives should they fail to vote approval.  In the rare eventuality
that they vote the WRONG way, the election is declared invalid, either
because the voters were too ignorant to know what they were doing, or
because voting was influenced by agitprop activities of a tiny minority of
counter-revolutionaries standing in the way of inevitable progress.

Fritz Efaw,
Emma Goldman distinguished professor of
Political Economy and Inorganic Psychology.

[log in to unmask] Tennessee's post-educational
omnivarsity for the third millennium