Troy Reeme at Open Source C[redit] U[nion] — oh the blogs I read! — reports that marketing guru Seth Godin kept calling the attendees of a major credit union conference “bankers.” Finally, one of the audience members rose and corrected him.
.. Seth responded, “I’m a consumer. It doesn’t matter what you think. I think you’re a bank.â€
Ouch. Not accurate, but close enough and the impulse behind this realization is why I’m not as much of a polity wonk as I used to be. Wonkishness is a way of discouraging new people from becoming insiders, and a big way at that.
Unitarian Universalists, like most denominationalists, are real big with out internal jargon. (A while back PeaceBang pushed back about a group effort to start talking collectively, and I’ve been thinking about this a bit since.) Parsing jargon may be important for complex theological work (which for Unitarian Universalists is almost exclusively ecclesiology) but not only will most people not care but will wonder why so much attention is given to it. When we talk about what it means to be a Unitarian Universalist and never move past first things, we do more to contrict our membership than start to expand it.
i think you are absolutely right on here Scott, this is an exclusive behavior – refusing to even engage in collective group speak, and a major frustration for the newcomers I’ve worked with. several people of color have made special note of this with me, and remarked at how it, for them, connects to the UUA remaining hostile to People of Color
I did push back? What did I say? Was it good?
More of a royal non when the discussion of a UU blog carnival came up. Lord, that seems a long time ago now.