The Importance of Policy
A policy is a guideline for action for a person or a group of people. In and out of Co-Counseling, people come up with many different policies all the time. There have been and will be good policies that make people feel angry. There have also been and will be bad policies that make people "feel good." The goal of a policy should not be to make people feel a certain way. The goal of correct policy is to move a person or a group of people forward. The best policies get people discharging and thinking better. A counseling direction is a type of policy.
A Co-Counseling leader gathers the best thinking available and decides what he/she thinks are the best policies for the group that he/she leads. It's important that we get good at creating correct policy and backing other leaders in creating policy. Leaders have the right to create policies without being attacked for doing so (see the Policy on Attacks and the Policy on Criticism and Gossip in the Guidelines). Each one of us has the responsibility to stand up for the right of leaders to create policies (whether or not we always agree with these policies).
All of our policies are draft policies. This means that we continue to put them under the microscope of discharge and re-evaluation. One of the special things about our organization is that we have opportunities to discharge, so we are thinking better today than we did yesterday. Nobody is required to agree with a policy. It is fine to disagree. We are expected to keep discharging on the policy and re-evaluating so as to participate in the continual revision of our policies. Thus our policies get more and more correct. It is important that we aim for correctness and not for making people happy. Our organization is about rationality, not about feeling good.
We can discuss policies, but this only makes sense if we continue to discharge. We must beware when we are discussing to not discuss the person who created the policy. She/he is not the issue. The policy is the issue.
When leaders set policies people often get restimulated. There are many rules that were unfairly decided for us by older people when we were young. These rules and the young people's oppression that hit us were unfair. Things are different now. We are no longer dependent on someone older than us for our survival. We need to discharge about these old rules.
Ayana Raquel Morse
Oakland, California, USA
excerpted from her leaders' letter as International Liberation Reference Person for Young Adults