I attended the Park Slope Food Coop general meeting

Never Done: I attended the Park Slope Food Coop general meeting

The Park Slope Food Coop has 16,000 members, and each of us does a monthly work shift that lasts 2 hours and 45 minutes -- unless you do a maintenance shift (2 hours) or a really early morning receiving shift (2 1/2 hours.)

16,000 members. When I was growing up my entire hometown had 2000 people in it. Now it has 6000. My hometown was governed by open Town Meeting -- a form of democratic rule in which most or all members of the community (residents of the town) come together to legislate policy and budget for the local government. I used to love to go to Town Meeting with my parents and watch the Town Moderator (first Mario Barba and then Dick Cronin) keep the meeting civil, respectful, and somewhat efficient. As a little kid, I think I loved it most when that townsperson that everyone has -- the one who has an issue that they are going to bring up no matter what the actual agenda is -- the one who gnaws at that issue like a dog gnaws its bone, no matter what verbal and non-verbal clues they get from the Moderator and an entire auditorium full of people -- I loved it most when that person got up to talk.

People would shift in their seats. The people in the back would get up for water or a bathroom break. My mother, who would be covering Town Meeting for the Harvard Post (town newspaper at the time), would lean over to explain to me who this person was and what they really were on about, while discreetly (?) rolling her eyes to her friends nearby. I loved it. Drama! Conflict! Inappropriate public behavior! But in a context of community that transcended the conflict. A sense of community that says, "they might be the town fool, but they're OUR town fool."

I don't lack conflict and inappropriate public behavior in Brooklyn, but I do lack it in a small-town way, so imagine my delight when early in the proceedings in the ornately wallpapered room at Congregation Beth Elohim, two candidates for Coop Board of Directors spoke to us, and one of them was one of those people. Here he was, running for a seat on the Board, and all he wanted to talk about was how the Coop is a sham of a democracy. I felt the shift happen -- people got it that he was a little nuts, but nobody heckled and everyone listened while he spoke. One person even got up and asked him a question -- Could you give us specific examples of ways the Coop is not a democracy? -- and his answer was that the Coop's entire history is a specific example. And still, if people thought he was a little Looney Tunes, they didn't show it publicly.

I myself split my time between paying close attention to the general meeting, working on a writing project, and gabbing (until the woman in front of us asked us to stop whispering) with Tony Fanning, the boutique realtor who found us the apartment we're living in. I was most interested in a heated conversation about Membership Point of Sale Integration, which (and I quote here from a yellow flyer) will enable a person's member status in the Membership System to "talk" with the POS system, prohibiting members who are suspended with expired grace periods from purchasing groceries or making member payments.

The deal is, you have to work in order to shop. If you miss a work slot you have to do a make-up before your next regularly scheduled work shift. If you fail to do that, you might get two make-up shifts. People fall epically behind in their work shifts, and end up suspended from shopping (but still able to work themselves out of the hole.) But the thing is, people get around this all the time. They're supposed to be stopped at the entrance, but it's easy to get into the Coop some other ways. The way things are now, if you're suspended, the computer will still allow you to purchase food if you can convince a check-out worker to sell it to you. The new system would not allow the checkout worker to override the system.

Reactions were strong. We can't allow technology to override humanity at the Coop. It is unfair to would a person to come in and shop and get all the way to the checkout before being told they cannot. The onus is misplaced -- checkout workers, ill-equipped to deal with angry, frustrated, confused people, and facing lines of people waiting to check out, shouldn't have to deal with this. There are thousands of Coop members who do the right thing, so why shouldn't we get a system that deals with the ones who don't? In essence -- this was an ethical debate about privacy, technology, humanity and responsibility, with the membership overwhelmingly opposed to the new policy. I found myself somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, for a Coop with 16,000 members to function, we actually do all need to do our work shift, and I go to great lengths to do mine. (For years I commuted from Hoboken to do my Coop shift.) On the other hand, I don't think a mechanized solution is necessarily better than a human one, except where it might be. Could a mechanized system remove bias from the process? If you are suspended, you are suspended -- no matter your race, charm, or hotness. And it's not like the Coop has been immune from charges of racial bias.

But I didn't make my opinions known. Instead I sat in the back and listened, and read over the minutes from the last board meeting. Minutes that started with the wonderful summary: "A member raised a question concerning how price fluctuation affected the Coop and a question about kelp." The Coop might be the town fool, but it's MY town fool.