Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Political diversity - Confession (#2)

['Judith Wisdom (wisdom]

'Judith Wisdom wrote:
>From wisdom Wed Jun 19 09:05:03 1996
From: "'Judith Wisdom" <wisdom>
Subject: Re: Political diversity - Confession (#2)
To: coho-l [at] mountain.org
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 09:05:01 -0400 (EDT)

This is a p.s. to my first response to Tony Rocco's confession:

While I care too much about freedom of speech and also believe in the 
importantce on not being self-righteouse as well as the ability for 
people to change and grow, I must say that even after I wrote my first 
response earlier I remained upset and concerned.  So while I would be 
opposed to having Tony Rocco thrown off the list as HE feared/or wondered 
about (unless he violated specific list rules--and that's a matter for 
the listowner), here's the additional issue that struck me and bothered 
me that I wanted to mention to Tony:

I have always up till now even when I disagreed with a listmember's 
beliefs or position assumed that what they said was in fact genuine and 
authentic.  Now that Tony has admitted to having posted what is virtually 
a lie about himself (in the interests, he thinks, of scientific inquiry 
or the search for the truth) he has raised the spectre of people 
dissembling when they post.  Hence what you did Tony is not just a 
reflection on yourself but it affects group trust.

And while I don't think I'll have difficulty telling what posts are 
genuine expressions of true positions what you have done is demonstrated, 
maybe as a favor to us all, how one person can have impact on a group, 
like a cohousing community.

Maybe that's the imprtant effect of what your "experiment" did, speaking 
to the fact that our actions have impact on the groups we're in, and why 
responsibility to others;  If you learn that then maybe what you did is 
worth it.

Judith Wisdom