The NorthEast Regional Convention

Last weekend, a number of us went up to Harvard for the Northeast Regional SDS Convention. We came to work on our regional unity, to get certain matters of business taken care of, to get in touch with the other people in our region who we don't usually get a chance to meet up with, and to have fun. Those who could took cars, but most of us took the china town bus.

On Friday, when we arrived at the palatial campus, there were break out groups in progress. We participated in these by exclaiming greetings to our friends who we had not seen in a while, and to our friends who we were just then meeting. We eventually settled down and got broken up into other groups to talk about sexual abuse and a culture of support in SDS. Some of our groups turned out to be inspiring and deep discussions about male privilege and our personal culpability in the social scenes we find ourselves in, while others tended toward dogma and platitudes. Later on there was an open mic which devolved into heavy socializing and an attempt to crash some Harvard parties which turned out to be awful.

The food was constantly edible and available in mass quantity throughout the convention.

On Saturday night, there was a very long discussion about the discussion of privilege and race/orientation/gender, and afterwards there was a valiant attempt at that actual discussion. Most people seemed to grow weary of the talk fairly fast, partly because the facilitation was not clear, and partly because people consistently failed to completely understand one another. It did become clear by the end of the night that we in SDS have no common language or even a common set of concepts for discussing these issues. Not enough of us have done enough reading on (or asking about) the struggles of our friends and co-organizers, and not enough of us have been brave enough to question our own privilege to the point where our own self-image is the same as what would be seen by someone with less privilege than us. However, those who were not as wearied by the length of time it took to come to no conclusion at all felt that the discussion was a vital first step if we are ever to seriously tackle and take down these issues. And we must deal with these issues head on if we are ever to create the truly Democratic Society we want.

Earlier on Saturday, there was an Info Share about those national working groups which are up and (at least mostly) running. There must have been about 20 or so, with things like creating standard welcome packets for new chapters, a better newspaper, better relations with other social justice groups, fundraising, and training some mobile chapter-starting people. Particularly of note were the chapter census and the welcome packet people, who informed us that we were growing at an alarming rate and they were worried because we don't have enough people to properly attend to all the new chapters which are forming up all over the country.

The convention dragged on and the agenda needed more and more adjustment as presenters and conventioneers were less and less punctual. That talk on Saturday night was supposed to have happened in two separate sections earlier the same day. People began speaking to one another in slightly pleading tones, and taking extended cigarette breaks under an arched brick entryway which channeled echoes. The only proposal brought up during the convention was brought up on Sunday, after most of the chapters had left. It concerned a reading list for the topics implied from the discussion on Saturday night. It was eventually tabled, which was not even an action provided for in the official convention rules of order. Many of our crew were exhausted from an exceptionally hard night of partying the night before, and thus, the convention dribbled to a close.

A declaration was delivered at one point by the delegate from Los Angeles (which is not in fact in the Northeast, but he's a friend of ours) to those who happened to be in the room. 'We have a long way to go,' he said something very much like, 'but we are moving very quickly. The new SDS has only been around for three years, and it's getting new chapters at a rate no one could have foreseen at the beginning. At this time next year, will either be a force to be reckoned with on a national level, or we will be irrelevant. Only time will tell, but we have incredible potential here'. We also have a lot of work to do.