Mediation On-Line A Newsletter from ADR Resources http://adrr.com/adr9/056.htm Volume 5, #10 (September-October 2002) From: s r marsh @ adrr . com Subscribe

Greetings:

I have been very busy, though very happy.  The every-other month routine will probably continue for a while.  I have a good essay by Gary Lilienthal at http://adrr.com/adr5/  Published with permission, but in jpeg format rather than html.  There are also new Spanish essays by Oscar Franco at http://adrr.com/camara/

This newsletter has some musings that did not make it to the stage of being essays.  Maybe when I have more time.  

At least some dear friends of ours survived their son's Bar Mitzvah.  More work than a wedding.  All we had to do was show up (and have the young man's only surviving grandparent stay with us during the week -- she was a delight).

The Recommended Books of the Month:

Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, as reviewed at http://writ.news.findlaw.com/books/reviews/20020614_herrington.html (you need to read the review as much as any book advertisement to decide if this book is for you).

Also, more directly on mediation, http://www.campus-adr.org/CMHER/Newsletter.html is a recent, content rich, newsletter.  Well worth a visit.

Interesting new Mediation & ADR (and other) web sites

• E-Arbitration-T website (http://www.e-arbitration-t.com) is an European website.  Supposed to be interactive.
• Interesting experiment going on at www.mediacioneducativa.com.ar/english/experien1.htm  
• http://students.law.umich.edu/mjrl/ is the site for the Michigan Journal of Law and Race.  They have some wonderful articles, including one on breaking into the teaching of law.
• http://www.seattle.feb.gov/mediation.htm is the Seattle Federal Executive Board, Alternative Dispute Resolution Consortium web site.
• Other than too much September 11 drivel, The Dialogue to Action Initiative website at http://www.thataway.org/dialogue is interesting.
• Consider http://teachlaw.law.uc.edu/ if you are going to teach mediation.
• http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2002/07/swain/ an interesting discussion on white nationalists.  I learned something (well, a lot, as I don't know any nationalists).  An excerpt follows (this is a side note, I thought I'd leave her direct points for you to read at the link):
  Usually when institutions of higher education talk about diversity, they're talking about racial or ethnic diversity. Unfortunately, the manifestation of that on campus is that "diverse" people come from similar backgrounds, and are almost the same person, only in different colors and shades. What I would like to see is a diversity that includes religion, social class, etc...I'd like to see a diversity that would bring different opinions and people from different backgrounds to campus. However, I don't think this will occur by using the affirmative action measures that we have in place today on college campuses
  I don't know enough to evaluate the points made, but they were interesting.
• www.uww-adr.com is an interesting gateway to Florida and points south.
• http://www.mediate.com/articles/eeoc.cfm.has the statistics on the largest mediation program in the USA.
• If you've ever dealt with a recruiter, visit http://www.mathysco.com/ for some interesting reading.
• If you've been following distance education, http://www.allianceforlifelonglearning.org/ is an interesting site.  It moves the future of distance learning in dispute resolution (and other areas) forward.  Not that it leads, but it follows with authority.
• For a job in Bulgaria, visit http://www.abanet.org/ceeli
  

Educational Programs / News and Book Reviews/Books/Periodicals

If you are interested in restorative justice circle training, send an e-mail to millsma@concentric.net (Martha A. Mills). Target date is November, 2002.  Four days, cost will be $300.00 (I'm not sure if that is US or Canadian).

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES has its first annual national mediation conference set for September.  <https://sec.cdcmeetings.com/atsdr>.

For the same weekend, the CDC has a conference.  http://www.cdc.gov/od/adr will let you register.  Same location as the other conference ...

The Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame is seeking a specialist in conflict studies.  http://www.nd.edu/~krocinst/confstud.html

Current Issues

I had a good friend whose girl friend's parents talked her into dumping because they saw an orphan of the wrong ethnic background as a terrible match.  He almost died as a result of the depression (he sat down on his couch and didn't move for almost a week).  He was then accepted on a full scholarship to a very good university in California.  While there he discovered that they were very unhappy when he didn't act "ethnic" -- they wanted him as a display item of ethnic behavior for their students to encounter, not to educate him.  He reacted with bitterness whenever token ethnic members were displayed in groups or initiatives, and that influenced a lot of my thinking.

Now it is easy for me to claim things that really do not fit me.  After all, two of my grandparents were born in "Asia Minor" (the way Greeks refer to Turkey) under the Ottomans and as Christians ran the risk of being one of the one in ten or so children taken from their families and moved into the official slave system (not to mention the black market slave trade) -- and of course their extended families suffered from that (they were both born around 1898).  My grandfather spent WWI in a concentration camp.  In some areas Greeks are badly mistreated, still.  A good friend, just after I graduated from law school, got thrown out of his fiancee's house as her father "didn't put up with N----rs of any kind" as the father put it.  My father-in-law is a quarter American Indian, my wife is an eighth.  But while her middle sister looks very indian, as does one brother, she got the blond genes.  As did I.  I am LDS and have been refused service, had job offers revoked and refused meals.

No one treats me as the relation of slaves, harasses me as Greek or discriminates against me on the basis of religion if they don't know me.  They look at me and treat me well.  Now that I'm no longer in Wichita Falls, and there are no longer ministers leading crusades against my faith, no one who knows me is likely to engage in (temporary) religious discrimination. As for the two jobs that were withdrawn, I appreciated the honesty and the apologies and think I'm better off.  I can not say that for any Black person I know (that they are better off for the jobs that were refused them on the basis of race).

So, do I care, yes.  Do I understand, not really.  Do I try, yes, but I'm not sure that matters.  As a poor kid who grew up in trailer parks, would I like to see diversity include social class and comparative wealth issues?  Yes.  Is that the right approach?  I don't know.

I do know that sometimes we need more patience.

Submissions to adrr.com

As always, I am interested in any submissions or articles anyone would like to have posted on the web -- and I am glad to be able to point them out in this newsletter.  I prefer to post material as you have written it, with no editorial changes by myself.  The above e-mail address (without the spaces -- inserted as a spam block) is the best e-mail address to use to reach me, though I sometimes am not able to check my e-mail for 3 or 4 days.

With my best regards, I remain,

Sincerely yours,

Stephen Marsh
http://adrr.com/adr9/056.htm
Additional material is sometimes included in the on-line version.
If you are curious where the term/name Ethesis comes
from, visit http://adrr.com/living/ethesis.htm

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