America 30 Jun 2007 01:53 pm
Strange Bedfellows
Today is the last day of the social forum workshops. Since I’ve been “off duty” both in terms of tech stuff, and in terms of doing workshops, I’ve been wandering around to different workshops. I went to a good workshop I’ll talk about in more detail in the next post. It’s been very interesting - a quite intriguing mix of people and perspectives and attitudes about social change.
One of the fascinating things that is going on is that the USSF is overlapping at the Westin with a National American Miss pageant. Specifically, they will be crowning Miss Georgia … (pre-teen, etc.) So, at the same time as all of these activists in birkenstocks and piercings and casual clothing are walking about, there are this perfectly coiffed mothers and daughters wearing extremely excessive amounts of pink. It reminds me of the year I went to the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Oklahoma City, and we were overlapping with the national cheerleading camp.
The elevators in the Westin have been a challenge (too many people, and too few elevators) - but the mix of people at and in the elevators today has lead to some awkward silences (in comparison to earlier, when almost everyone was from the Social Forum, and there were the standard “so where are you from” exchanges while waiting for elevators, which takes forever.)
It is an opportunity, I think, for practicing compassion for people who are choosing to live very different lives, rather than derision, which, I have to admit, is my first impulse.