Contracts

My group got hijacked last night. That is a great event. I asked the question, "What happened in the last week that challenged your positive attitude?" And we began discussing the refrigerator.

It seems that one man had eaten a salad and a glass of juice from his own resources, and had gone out to have a smoke. When he got back, someone had drunk the rest of his juice and put the empty container in the cooler. When he complained, no one admitted guilt, but several complained that they, too, had lost food. My question took the lid off the simmering anger he felt, and the resentment the others felt that he was accusing them all and treating all of them as the guilty party.

I was able, before the session ended, to lead them all to an agreement that he had a legitimate gripe, lead him to apologize for taking it out on everyone, and for them all to understand that there is a contract amongst them, as part of their agreement with the House, to respect each other's property rights. They understood that the Counselor and the house manager would be convening a business meeting to decide how to enforce the rules of property.

The discussion was how people react to violations. We discussed avoidance, blindness, aggressive resistance and pro-active generosity. We discussed gluttony, disrespect and loneliness and even ignorance as motives, too. We did not solve anything, but I was flying high as I left.

On the way home, one of the comments we didn't follow through came back to me. "I feel just like the folks who moved to Webster; I want to put distance between myself and this stealing." I thought about suburban sprawl and the escapism of white flight. The media have been full of stories and opinions about the causes of the City School District's failures, of the high crime rate in the City, and so forth. I wondered about the unexplored motives of people leaving the City starting right after WWII. There was the appeal of home ownership and clean healthy suburban life, but how much avoidance of the responsibility of city citizenship was there, underneath? Finding and moving to a good school system instead of making the one you are in better? Of taking responsibility for reporting crime and making sure the legal system worked rather than fleeing the crowding and the crime? Of learning to get along with "the Other" or avoiding the possibility of having to cope with diversity on one's own block?

The halfway house/transition house system is designed to help people learn how to fit in to society as they are released from institutions. But what the heck are we teaching? I concluded once again that I can't be an activist in just one little area, I can't limit my opinions and mission to one topic. There are only a few degrees of separation between aftercare for a parolee and suburban sprawl, between a recovering addict and the no child left behind system.