The Diversity Council attended a play, Spinning Into Butter, downtown, after work, in the Alliance Theater, in the Woodruff Arts Center, near the High Museum and Symphony Hall. Old Folks could ride the MARTA train.
The play was about a racial incident at a small college in Vermont, where
the liberal dean of students is forced to examine her own views on race, and that
of her faculty colleagues.
After the play, the cast would discuss the play
with members of the audience.
At the next meeting of the Diversity Council,
the members would discuss their reactions to the play among themselves.
* * *
Old Folks happened to sit next to an executive, upper management's representative
on the council, who knew who Old Folks was, from having met with the writing group,
to discuss quality, productivity, and customer service issues, in a frank exchange
of views.
Old Folks saw the man once a month, at council meetings, and they
nodded to each other in the halls, or lunchroom.
The man said to Old Folks,
"You know, when I am acting in my role as a director, at Suent Scientific, I
often feel I am playing a part. Like my lines are scripted, and not coming out of
me, personally."
Old Folks didn't know what to say to that.
Should he have said, "Since we are confessing, I often feel like a spy, a mole,
undercover, betraying the organization from within, a pinworm in the brain of the
monster. In fact, that's why I volunteered for the Diversity Council. To see how
bad things really were."
* * *
During the discussion period, after the play, the woman who had disrupted
Harris Sussman's presentation on the white male minority, a member of the Diversity
Council, lectured the audience, and the cast of the play, on the unmet needs of the
black female.
At the next meeting of the Diversity Council, she lectured
the council on the unmet needs of the black female, which the play had not focused
enough on, to suit her.
* * *
Old Folks saw he wasn't making any contribution to diversity, through serving
on the diversity council, and resigned.
A black man who'd been through the
diversity training class with Old Folks, a Vietnam veteran, a machinist--that is,
a represented employee, a union member, rather than a member of management, who didn't
have a union, as Old Folks was (if the union went on strike Old Folks was expected
to cross the picket lines and work as a scab)--asked Old Folks to stay. "I don't
always agree with you but I want to hear what you have to say," he said. "It
makes me think."
If they'd all been like that Old Folks would have stayed.
But they weren't.
Their minds were made up.
Old Folks was pissing
in the wind.