Reaching Consensus Can Break Some Eggs

[0:04] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. One prime value of humanism is we believe every idea is open to question, even our own. Because we question everything, we can cause some heightened emotions during a discussion. As I was reminded of at a recent meeting of my group, we also acknowledge a special accolade for a past Humanist of the Year. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:43] Music.

[0:59] I had previously mentioned before that our group, Sholey, the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, was hosting a screening of the movie The Last Class, which was about Robert Reich, the economist, professor, and former cabinet member in the Bill Clinton administration. And I was really apprehensive whether or not, because the way we did it, we did it through this program through gather, gather.com, where the film company worked with them to distribute the movie. And then we had in hosting it we had to arrange to have it shown at a theater or we could have had it on demand somewhere but we chose the theater outlet and charge and charge tickets and we had to have a certain amount of tickets and I was apprehensive because we’d never done this before and I didn’t know if it’d be successful and it was more successful than I ever imagined And we started out, we had to sell 60 tickets in order to confirm the movie that it was going to be shown. And with a week left until the deadline that we were given…

[2:21] We had only sold 40, and I’m thinking, we’re not going to make it. Everybody in my group bought one that could buy one that was going to go, and we put it out into the different local groups in their social circles. We shared it. It got a write-up in the Toledo City paper. And so within that 10-day period or seven-day period before the deadline, fine, we sold enough with a few days to spare, with a couple of days to spare to confirm it. So I was like, fine. And then it just kept snowballing. More and more tickets were getting sold, more and more. And we had to, we eventually got sold out of our original allotment. And so I had to go back to the gather people and say, can we add more seats? They added more seats. And those people went through that. And before it sold out again, they added, the gather people added more seats without me even asking. So in the end, when it finally went off on Tuesday, September the 23rd, we had sold 161 tickets. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked.

[3:42] And it wasn’t just humanists. It was like Toledo Troublemakers, Toledo Persists, people from their group, and things like that. It was a little bit older, older audience, but we, you know, there was hardly any seats left in the theater that they set us up in. And it was a great experience overall. And I would encourage humanist groups or any local group that is looking to raise a little bit of money, You can do it that way, too. We didn’t make a lot of money off of this. That wasn’t the point. It was mainly about getting our group some advertising out there, get our name out there, and doing a positive thing in the community, which this was. And knowing that there was, I mean, we probably could have had another screening. We could have hosted another screening, but I didn’t want to go that far because who knew? I didn’t want to get stuck with a major bill having to pay off with my group having to pay it off. And so it was a very successful program and we really enjoyed it. And I recommend that humanist groups that are looking for something to do for the community is to look into what’s available with gather.com.

[5:04] Music.

[5:14] At the time that this episode is being recorded, we’ve just gone through a bit of a traumatic period in this country where a podcaster by the name of Charlie Kirk was assassinated or shot and killed at an event in Utah. And the Christian nationalist right-wing people have been soaking that up and using it for propaganda purposes, which also included Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian, late night host, being suspended from his show for a week.

[5:52] But I’m not going to talk about that. I talked about that in my political podcast that I do separate from this one. And so if you want to hear me, talk about that issue, check out Secular Left, where you get your podcasts. And I also put a link to that episode in the show notes for this episode, because, you know, I have just a personal personal aversion to talking about this guy, and I don’t want to waste more time than I’ve already taken. So what am I going to talk about initially right now? Well, found out a couple of days ago that Bill Nye, the science guy, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And I think that that is just great. He had some people from his comedy days in Seattle.

[6:53] Say a few words, Joel McHale, the actor Joel McHale from a community TV show and Animal Control that’s currently on Fox. He’s a good friend of Bill. They were on the same show. I don’t think they were on the same show together, but that’s how I first learned about Bill Nye was on this show called Almost Live. And it was a locally produced comedy sketch show in Seattle. It started out as a parody of talk shows, and then it turned to sketch comedy and video parodies. And they had a, they showed a series of episodes on Comedy Central in the early 90s. And by that time, Bill Nye was already had left the show, but they showed like older episodes. I got to see him on there. And then, of course, then he had his show in the 90s, Bill Nye the Science Guy, where he would explain he was a science communicator. And see, what’s funny about it is he’s not technically a scientist.

[8:01] That’s not what he does for a living. He was an aeronautical engineer. He worked for Boeing Aircraft for many years, left in the mid-80s. He worked on the 747 jet airplane. And I think last time I read about it, he has a patent or two in his name from that work. And what is ironic about it was that he, for fun, he started doing stand-up comedy and going to open mic nights at local comedy clubs in the Seattle area. And then he met the people that did Almost Live and encouraged him to work with them on that.

[8:44] And so he is very well known for being a science communicator. He’s also debated people in the past about science topics, particularly like creationists. I think he’s debated a couple creationists before. He’s also done some public speaking about it in various venues.

[9:08] And so he’s very smart, very intelligent, and he knows his stuff. Even though he’s not a working scientist, he doesn’t make his living from it. He knows enough that he’s able to. And then because he’s not an academic, he knows enough about how to explain it to regular people like me, who does not always, you know, slow on the uptake, put it that way sometimes on scientific topics.

[9:39] So he got his Hollywood Walk of Fame for television. It was something like the 240, no, 2,400 and whatever change star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And they had this big, big shindig. And like I said, they had guest speakers. And then they take the, they have a little star thing and unveil it. And then they have a plaque that they give to him. And they take pictures with it and everything. It’s really, really great to see that. And the other interesting thing about Bill Nye is he is the 2010 Humanist of the Year for the American Humanist Association. He is a humanist and he supports humanism and science, obviously, he supports science. And like I said, he’s debated creationists and other religious people about science.

[10:43] And the other interesting thing, too, is that he’s always game to show up. I think he was on the Big Bang Theory a couple of times. He showed up as his Bill Nye character. Bill Nye is a science guy character. And he was also in a music video for a band called Palmdale that didn’t last very long. The lead singer in Palmdale was Kay Hanley from Letters to Cleo from the 80s and 90s, from the 1990s, Letters to Cleo. And the reason why Bill Nye was in the video was because he was her neighbor in Los Angeles. And they knew each other socially and they needed somebody to fill in for this part in the video. And they asked him and he agreed to do it. So I thought that was pretty neat.

[11:38] But I really appreciate Bill Nye, his work. We need more of that. We need more science communicators, not necessarily academic scientists to explain things, but everyday people. And, you know, I wish I was better at it. I’m not that great at it. If I have some preparation, I could probably do it. But off the cuff stuff, I don’t have a clue. So if you get a chance, I think there’s still videos around for Bill Nye the Science Guy if they aren’t playing on a streaming service. I had read something about Disney owns the show, but it’s not on Disney Plus because of some kind of contract dispute with Bill Nye over revenue sharing. But there might still be some clips on YouTube or something like that. And I would advise you to check it out. So that’s a good thing that’s happened this week, is one of our own gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[12:44] Music.

[12:53] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[13:02] Music.

[13:13] This fall, I will be starting my 30th year being a leader in the humanist movement here in the United States, here in Ohio, as a matter of fact. And having that much experience under my belt, I pretty much have seen everything. I’ve heard everything. I’ve been involved in all kinds of different internal debates about things. I’ve seen schisms happen. And I’ve seen people leave the movement because of the disagreements. And I’ve seen people write nasty articles about the schisms and et cetera, et cetera. I’ve seen it. I think I’ve seen it all.

[14:06] And so when I moved to the Toledo area and I decided after talking to my partner that I wanted to start a humanist group, one of the things that I intentionally did was I brought over the group discussion guidelines that we had used in the humanist group that I was involved with in Columbus, the humanist community of central Ohio. Because when I first got involved with that group in the mid-90s, we could have some pretty contentious discussions during meetings. It didn’t matter what the topic was. It could be an innocuous topic. You know, the sky is blue. And then it would devolve into all these little fractures that you would see. See, that’s the thing.

[15:02] I know this sounds terrible. But one of the things that I admire about the right-wingers and the Christian nationalists is that they pretty much march in lockstep with the same message. They may have different ideas on that message, but you never hear them talk bad about people that are in their movement. Usually you don’t. But my experience with a humanist group, we got that on some occasions. The main divide was between people that attended the local Unitarian church, the Unitarians. At the time, and this is in the mid to late 90s, they had this make-your-own-theology and build-a-bigger-tent church.

[15:55] And so basically what it was at the time was they were interested in growing their congregation so that they wouldn’t demand conformity to a certain viewpoint, put it that way. So you would have Buddhists in this group. You would have people that, for lack of a better word, worship stones.

[16:20] They had a vibrant pagan and Wicca subgroup in that Unitarian church. And they even had some Christians who were ultra-liberal and didn’t agree with the teachings in more conservative churches, but they still believed in a God, but they found a home in the Unitarians. And that was one of the reasons why I’ve never been a Unitarian, because I’m a militant atheist. I don’t have any interest in going to church on a Sunday, and I know a lot of people do, and it’s taken me some time to get over that and not to judge people who do, and I don’t. And I have many friends who are Unitarians, who attend Unitarian Church. One of our initial members who helped support us in the early days here in Toledo was Reverend T.K. Barger, who is the senior pastor at the Toledo, the first Unitarian Church of Toledo on Glendale. And he’s a friend, and I’ve asked him questions. He’s spoken at our meetings.

[17:31] And you know, when you’re with friends, when you’re with friends and family and you love them and you want to maintain those relationships, sometimes you don’t talk about contentious stuff, sometimes.

[17:43] Unless you really know, unless you’re in a real secure place. You know, you’ve seen those old sitcoms where the family would get together for the holidays and somebody would say something nasty and things would go awry and people would storm out. I grew up that way, in a way, when I was a young kid. But you try not to do that. You try to be diplomatic. Even if you disagree with somebody and you’re in a leadership position, you don’t want to basically poo-poo what they’re saying. Even though you don’t agree with it, you might deflect it or not minimize it or trivialize it, but acknowledge that they feel this way or that they say this thing and try to work it back into the humanist consensus. If it’s outside the consensus.

[18:42] So like I said, I’m used to contentious discussions. And so in our humanist group in Columbus, we had this guideline that we’re going to treat everybody with basic worth and dignity. We’re not going to take things that people say personally. We’re not going to attack the person. We’re going to attack the idea. And one of the principles, humanist principles that I do live by is that we examine all points of view, including our own, because we could be wrong. And I think that’s an important point that people, a lot of people, especially in our polarized political situation these days, is they don’t realize they could be wrong.

[19:27] And so they doubled down. That’s where you get that idea of doubling down on something or, you know, talking about some falsehood and you don’t agree and you think it’s fake news if it’s something that you don’t agree with, that sort of thing. And so when I started the group here in the Toledo area, I brought some of those guidelines and I put it on the website. And since that time was about six or seven years, haven’t really had to refer to it. People in the Toledo group have been very good at group discussions. They’ve been kind. They’ve been considerate. They’ve had boundaries. You know, they don’t necessarily talk over everybody, not intentionally. Some people intentionally do things like that. But I’ve had a very positive experience with group discussions in the Toledo group until September the 13th.

[20:30] It was our first regular meeting of the new fiscal year.

[20:37] You know, we take a break in July

[20:39] and August, and then we come back in September with a regular meeting. In a regular meeting, it wasn’t an innocuous topic, but we were talking about divestures, boycotts, and strongly worded letters, how to live your humanist values, I think it was humanist values, without being a hypocrite. And basically, we were talking about how you would choose where to shop, you know, businesses, pick businesses, how to live your life so that you’re not supporting your money and your efforts aren’t supporting companies or people that you don’t agree with, that don’t agree with your values. And how sometimes you have to, especially if it’s the only thing around or the only place that you can buy something, like you need something, and it’s the only place you can buy it, and you wouldn’t normally buy anything from this business. We talked about shopping locally when you can, not giving in to these big conglomerates like Walmart and Amazon, but maybe buying at stores that have better values like Costco, that sort of thing. And basically what you’re doing is with your economic power.

[22:01] You’re telling these businesses that their social justice actions need to be better or improve. So we’re taught about that. And the way that I started the discussion was that we had a situation here in Lucas County. Lucas County invests money outside of the county and they put them into bonds and other financial instruments to get interest. And that interest goes back into the county’s general fund or whatever they call it for the county level.

[22:39] And so they have an advisory board and it’s made up of the commissioners, the county treasurer, and I think some independent financial consultants or something like that. I’m not sure the exact makeup. And so they advised the treasurer, the county treasurer, who’s the one that actually invests the money on what to invest and when to invest, et cetera, et cetera. So they had called this meeting recently in August to talk about the county investments in Israel bonds. Now, for those that don’t know, Israel bonds are financial instruments that are backed by the Israeli government, and they are used to support the Israeli government and development in Israel. And so, you know, we know that there’s this big kerfuffle going on in the Middle East right now, where Hamas had attacked Israel in October 7th of, I think it was 2023, something like that, killed several hundred people. And now Israel has basically done a retribution tour where they are trying to bomb Gaza into the previous century.

[24:01] And there’s been a lot of animosity about that. It’s technically, if not the word genocide, it is genocidal actions. For one example, one thing that happened recently was an Israeli, there was some civilians and some journalists on this hospital in Gaza had been bombed. And they were up examining the damage and everything. First responders went looking for people. And then a second missile came in and blew them up.

[24:38] And Israel, the government, said, you know, oops, our bad. We goofed up. Sorry. Well, it was a pattern. It’s something that they call a double tap, where they bomb something, and then all these first responders and other people show up, and then they bomb it again to kill more people. And every time they’ve done it, and they’ve done it several times, they’ve said, oh, our bad, sorry. And here’s the thing. Personally, my personal viewpoint is that I do not support Hamas. I think what they did on October 7th, that one year, and they killed those Israelis and kidnapped a few, I think over 100 people, that was morally reprehensible. And it was wrong, and that deserved a response from Israel, obviously.

[25:39] However, once they decimated parts of Gaza, that was when they should have started backing off and really trying to avoid civilian casualties. And they have not. It’s a mess in the Gaza area. And so to get back to the impetus of what I was talking about was that this Pete Gherkin, one of the county commissioners, had made a motion that the bonds, the Israel bonds, be terminated early. They’re due to expire at the end of December 2026 and not to purchase any more.

[26:26] And Lindsay Webb, who is the county treasurer, disagreed. She disagreed because there would be penalties, which obviously there would be. So Gherkin made another resolution to not buy any more Israel bonds. So to let the current ones mature and cash them in, but not buy any more. To me, that’s a reasonable solution, because I don’t think I want my tax dollars supporting a government that is committing war crimes and genocide. I don’t care how many people Hamas kills. You’re a sovereign country. You shouldn’t be killing people indiscriminately for revenge. That’s just a nonstarter for me. And so during our meeting on Saturday, the 13th, we’re talking about this, and I explained that state law allows outside investment by counties and state agencies, but that it is limited to Israeli bonds. They’re only allowed to buy Israel bonds, which I think is unfair.

[27:39] And undemocratic because you’re saying that if a county wants to invest money for better returns, they can’t do anything else but support a government that is not doing what a rational government should be doing. And I think that that’s wrong. And so we’re talking about it. And so then I start talking about divestures and how that is a way of protesting social justice issues. And we’re going on and on. And finally, one of our members, our longtime members, raised an objection at one point and said that he wished that we would stop talking about Israel and Gaza, and that we move on to some other topic.

[28:31] That took me by surprise. He didn’t go into any explanation about why he didn’t want to talk about it, but he was very adamant that we move on. And the thing is, that was not the point of the meeting. That was not the point of the topic. The stuff that I talked about, about the genocide and the war crimes and stuff, we didn’t even touch on that part. And of course, we also have another member who is very political, very opinionated. And she was talking about it for a little bit. And I think that probably set him off a little bit.

[29:15] And he demanded that, you know, we stop talking about it. Temperatures were raised during that part. And so I wanted to de-escalate everything. And so I acquiesced to his demand in a way. And I just told him, I said, look, we’re just using this as an example. We’re moving on. We’re going to talk about this. I just wanted to get the discussion started. So he’s like, okay. So we go on and we’re talking about boycotts and being able to not know where some things are manufactured. You might make a mistake. You might buy something that you didn’t want to buy from some company that you didn’t want to support. And this other member who was the politically active one with the opinion started talking about that she had bought something and there was a sticker on it and it said, Made in Israel. That’s all she said, was that it was made in Israel. And the first member just jumped up and started vehemently objecting to talking about Israel and Gaza. And that’s when pretty much all heck broke loose. People were shouting back and forth. Another member got involved, started talking about the woman, political woman, in unkind terms.

[30:43] The first member that demanded that we stop talking about Israel and Gaza threatened to walk out. And I had to put a stop to it. And I kind of lost my cool, but I had to be able to yell over everybody else that was yelling at each other. And I got to tell you, first time in about six or seven years, I seriously thought about just calling it a day and canceling the rest of the meeting.

[31:13] Because I didn’t understand, and I still don’t understand, even after talking to the individuals involved, I still don’t understand what the objection was about. I assume that they thought we were going to talk about how bad the Israeli people are, which I wouldn’t have put up with. If the political person had started talking that way, I would have shut that down because that wouldn’t be appropriate. it. And see, this whole situation with Israel and Gaza, that’s the kind of razor blaze that you have to walk on because you have one side that if you talk bad about Israel, they think that you’re against Jews, which you could talk smack about the government of Israel, but that doesn’t mean that’s everybody. That’s making an assumption that somebody’s including everybody. I would never make that assumption to start with.

[32:15] And then the other thing is that if you don’t talk about Israel, the Israeli government and their actions and how detrimental it is to the people of Palestine, then people look at you like you’re not supporting the Palestinians. And the thing is, you can support the existence of Israel and support the idea that the Palestinian people should be able to live and not be bombed out of their gourds for the actions of a few terrorists that happen to live in their area. You know, you can hold those two ideas together. And so it was very disconcerting. So I got very angry, very firm.

[33:05] And I let people know that we were not going to denigrate anybody in this room, that humanists do not do that. I acknowledge that we all can have different perspectives and different values and that they generally have of they’re generally of some value together. But I will not have and I will not put up with name calling or denigrating people because of it. And so I asked everybody if they wanted to continue because, again, I was on the fence. I was thinking about just saying we’re done and we’re just going to cancel the rest of the meeting.

[33:48] And so the people involved agreed to stay, the ones that were threatening to leave, and we continued the meeting. So the meeting concluded we everything was taking you know we got through everything the rest of the meeting we didn’t talk about israel and gaza again and so as the meeting was breaking up i talked to the individuals that were involved in the kerfluffle and it seemed okay they seemed okay, even though they still were, you know, wound up a bit because of it. And the political woman tried to talk to the first member at the end of the meeting and he forcibly explained that he was not going to have any more further discussion with her and that she needed to leave.

[34:44] So almost had to step in and take care of that because sometimes that’s the case. You know, there’s just, I’ve come across people like that where they don’t like to have their ideas or their viewpoints challenged and they get defensive and they get very angry about it. And it happens to people that supposedly are humanists that are skeptical and also believe that, hey, they could be wrong. But, you know, it’s human nature that you don’t want to be shown that you’re wrong. And so you cling to it. You double down on it. And I think that’s what happened in this case. But as I said,

[35:26] I don’t know the exact details. I didn’t get into it with the person, why they objected to talking about Israel. But I just assumed from the conversation that we had when the meeting was breaking up, that they assumed that this woman that’s very political and very opinionated was hating on Jews and Israel. And like I told them, I said, I would not put up with that if that was the case. I don’t believe it was the case.

[35:53] I also didn’t agree. I didn’t tell them this, but I also don’t agree with derailing a conversation to raise an objection like that. There’s other ways of doing that without drawing attention to yourself and making everybody else feel awful. And so that’s why we have the guidelines, the group discussion guidelines. signs. So I went back then that day after the meeting and went through them and they’re pretty much still okay. So I’m going to dust them off and print them out and bring them with me to the next meeting. And hopefully that the people involved in the kerfuffle will also show up in the next meeting, you know, cause I, that’s the one thing that bothers me about it is, you know, We had a relatively new person that was there at that meeting. What if they didn’t like what happened, and then they never come back? And then maybe the people that were involved, maybe they’re ticked off, so they’re not going to come back. And for what?

[37:02] Basically, to me, it seemed like it was a misunderstanding. I still object to somebody wanting to censor what we talk about. Sometimes we’re going to talk about stuff that makes people uncomfortable. Now, I make that a caveat that it won’t be things like mental health issues or trauma, people that get triggered by trauma events. We’re not going to revisit that stuff, but if it’s a political issue, a civic issue, a day-to-day issue, and we talk about it and somebody gets uncomfortable, the only thing I can tell you is if you’re uncomfortable, feel free to leave the room.

[37:50] Uh, reach out to me after a meeting and explain to me that you didn’t like talking about that, but give me reasons why, because I want to work with people that have an issue because I want them to come back. I want them to be part of the group. You know, we’re not, we’re not one of those people. We’re not like the right wingers where we demand that you conform to a certain viewpoint or certain world worldview, but I want to work with you and make sure that we’re trying to be as welcoming as we can and inclusive as we can to everybody. And so that was my trying weekend. It was very, very depressing for me for most

[38:35] of the day while I processed that. And I just wanted to explain how that happened and why I think it’s important that human as humanists, that we talk about things that even we might make us feel uncomfortable because we could be wrong. Thank you for listening.

[38:53] Music.

[38:59] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

[39:08] Music. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.

[39:14] Show Lee can be reached at humanistswle.org.

[39:31] Music.