Oregon Direct Action

So, as I’m sure you’ve read from the previous retreat reflections, Adrien, Dan and I went to a friend’s lakeside house to build a sense of team, to learn from each other, and to further focus our vision for what we want ODA to be.  This post is not going to be a summary of what happened; rather, I’m going to talk about the events that were most meaningful to me.

The first was when I had the opportunity to teach Dan and Adrien a lecture from my INTL 240 class with Professor Galvan.   Now, it’s true that I was teaching someone else’s material, but still, I did it by mashing together a group of his readings and this lecture slide, and I had to make it relevant to ODA.  It was a great experience for me.  I really enjoy teaching, and we later agreed that, as the point person for research, I should be reading and learning about more stuff than the rest of the group to have the ability to teach distilled versions of what I read to everyone else.  I look forward to this added aspect of my job description.

One aspect of this lecture was the idea that institutional imposition, or forcing a way of thinking or acting on other people, is neither a humane way to treat others nor an effective way to accomplish your goals, including goals of “helping” others through development.  Rather, the most humane and effective way help others is to work with them, to determine what they want, and to assist them in making what they want a reality.  This idea highlighted a feeling that I think was already part of Adrien, Dan and my personal philosophies and we are working now on how we can integrate this into our mission statement.

The next day, we also had an interesting discussion about our feelings on faith-based organizations.  We came to the consensus that, though none of us is highly religious, we recognize the ability of religion to create a sense of community in an area, and unite people around a common cause.  However, we don’t approve of the way some religious people seek to impose their ideas on others.  Thus, faith-based organizations that allow us to have a more intimate relationship with the community in an area (such as a Catholic organization would in a Catholic village in Mexico) would make it easier for us to build a relationship with a village so that we can understand what they want and help them to achieve it.  However, organizations that would seek to evangelize are ones that go against our core philosophy of not imposing our beliefs on others.  For the future, then, the former kind of organizations are ones we should seek out and the latter are ones we should avoid.  I felt like this was a very fruitful conversation that left us with tangible ways we could apply it to ODA.

The best part of the retreat, however, was the time spent relaxing at and after dinner.  Dan, Adrien, and I had some great conversation while making dinner (as usual, I ended up standing around and talking while the other two, mainly Adrien, cooked dinner.  I swear it’s not that I’m lazy, I just get so caught up in what I’m thinking about that I don’t think to do anything else).  We then went on to have “mind sex” (in the spirit of an open source organization, I’m practicing full disclosure, and that is what we called it) and talk about topics ranging from Ayn Rand and the nature of the individual, beauty for beauties sake as opposed to beauty in function, and the singularity.  The best part of it was that we all three agreed that such mind sex is the way we like to hang out, as opposed to talking about how wasted we got the previous night.  I think that there’s a really solid group dynamic here based on a love of thinking, and then applying the fruits of that thought to action.

That is what I see ODA being: an organization of intense thought, and then of intense action.  Such an organization would only work with members who adhered to this philosophy, and I’m pleased to see that we do.