November 1st Community Judicial Board Hearing - DLWC Opening Statement
Opening Statement - Molly Stuart, Jay Saper, Jenny Marks, Amitai Ben-Abba, Sam Koplinka-Loehr
Hello, Friends and Community Members. We are the Dalai Lama Welcoming Committee. We have been asked to discuss our activism from October. We’d like to start with a quote from the late Senator Paul Wellstone. He said “If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.” We appreciate being heard together, as a group of students who have worked in a deliberative and consensus based process to do our part in honoring the words of the Dalai Lama.
Clown Monkey on a different kind of performance. Only during the hearing it occurred that what we did was a version of Augusto Boal’s idea of “invisible theatre”, designed for an audience that doesn’t know it is participating in a play for situational purposes aimed at shifting the discourse. A bunch of people came up to us in the end and said they were different people six hours beforhand, with entirely different opinions on activism and the idea of divestment from the destruction of human beings and Earth. Words, words, words are powerful.
I’m looking at taking courses at a public university in town for the upcoming semester to work on a similar campaign but have lots of questions; do you or others at Middlebury that have been working on divestment for awhile have any open source documents on applied tactics? Answers to FAQ. Primers, that such. A place to start for those of us who don’t have the Dalai Lama coming next week?
Thanks and solidarity.