Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum

Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum
January 14, 2012
Help: Professional / Personal Development Opportunity

Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum

Our need: Nine or ten counter-protestors to support constraining the harassment behaviours of Helpers of God's Precious Infants 6 mornings a week at The Fertility Control Clinic from 7:30 – 9:30am on Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, Vic

The task: to document harassment of arriving patients, while also inhibiting it in a non-harassing way.

The context: see here for detailed description. In brief:

The Fertility Control Clinic's front gate is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne. There a group of Catholic protestors meet six days a week at 7:30am to protest patients' moral rights to a legal service authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. Their protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of gods.

The challenge: to engage with the protestors at a personal level to understand their perspectives and establish relationships, and at a social level as legally misbehaving harassers of vulnerable patients; to increase your understanding and competence at dealing with your own embarrassment / shame about taking personal action in public; the protestors have been provided a rationale and action focus for our work.

Benefits for you: increased awareness of own anger triggers, control over your automatic responses and directing them into appropriate, non-violent action to reduce patient harassment; knowing you are providing a support service much appreciated by patients and clinic staff clarification of own views of life and death issues.

The commitment: one session a week for about three months in the first instance

Even if in doubt, but interested, follow Torrey up by phone or comment on this letter at the blog below. Contact is not a commitment, either way.

Hopefully,

Torrey Orton and Charles Brass
Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo
http://www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com/

The patient experience…one’s evidence

The patient experience…one's evidence
Torrey Orton
Jan. 12, 2012

A bit more than 21 grams…??¹

 

From another frontline much like the Fertility Control Clinic one, but more common – the medical frontline where the vast bulk of the patient experience is provided by body movers (orderlies, …) and nurses and food service staff and cleaners…with registered medical practitioners ranging from interns thru registrars to fully fledged doctors and the pack leading consultants far in the distance, and often hard to see even when present (they're moving so fast) and smiling so hard …


…it seemed they all went to the same faux intimacy training programs down to the modulation of lips and expression brightness with smoothly patterned discourses of their respective domains. 'Hi, I'm X and I'll be doing Y for you for the next …hours…minutes"… I was rendered "Torrey" by fiat and minded the presumption, since I know my barber better than I will ever know any of them.


Sure the dependency's different: my barber might on a bad day nick an ear (which he hasn't in 36 years), while the more present life vs. deathness of a faulty organ creates an intimacy which is too close and at the same time massively distant, especially when the actors in the hospital drama had almost no time to know me in any other than the piece of meat sense I had experienced with my first hospitalisation 10 years ago (a pacemaker precipitating one).


"Occluded" IVs
Actually every one moved fast all the time, leaving me with a sense of being in the hands of a system with somewhat less than the optimum capacity to function safely…it felt like it wouldn't be hard for an error to arise. For example, I was on a drip from 4 hours after arrival until an hour before departure five days later…sometimes two different intravenous infusions in tandem… especially post-operative². The drip monitor signalled persistently under two conditions: one, I had "occluded" the flow at the point of its entry to my body – the cannula – by moving the arm which held it (this time in the crook of my left elbow which meant occlusions abounded for days and nights due to spontaneous arm movements).


In the process of trying to rearrange my troublesome cannulations three efforts by three different nurses failed, largely due, it seemed to me, being overtired, stressed or both. One stopped after three tries saying she'd lost her "mojo". One pretender to the role arrived saying he'd try but call another if he failed. He never started because I told him to go away if he wasn't sure of himself. I guess he was offended; I was already irritated. My release from the irritation (not anger nor pain nor anything like that; I'm relatively impervious to the pricks that presage a cannulation) came from a 60 year old who did it in 32 seconds (the others were under 35, years that is, at a guess). My reverse ageism?


The second condition
But cannulations were more than an irritant. The possibility of a mix up in the drip lines were another matter. Heavy antibiotics prefaced the op by one day and succeeded it for three days. These were sent by IV, in tandem with the permanent fluid input. BUT, the two were chemically incompatible, requiring the shared mainline to be "flushed" with a chemically neutral solution preventing contamination of the one by the other, both before the antibiotic and after. In the flashlight reduced darkness of middle night I had the impression that shift nurses were not always on top of these delicacies, though the fact I'm writing this three weeks after the fact suggests I needn't have worried, but how was I to know then?


Memorables
These sorts of things are the memorables of my "patient experience" because they occupied my waking and sleeping days for the duration, interrupted by workable, and better, nurse and supporters efforts to minimise their effects. They happened in one of the best private hospitals in Melbourne which I've used before for related matters. My impression of contextual stress was not an artefact of my degraded physical defences.


I spent 4 hours waiting for a first assessment in emergency after entry triage, followed by nearly a whole day on an emergency gurney before transfer to a regular bed. This was not special treatment for me; they were full to the eyebrows. As a full fee private patient I did not get a sole occupancy private room until after the operation, another day plus later. These are system redundancy problems – ones which preoccupations with profit and profitability have removed from the vocabulary and practice of organisational competence in many of our core systems, hospitals among the most important (shortage of retail service staff really doesn't matter in the bigger scheme; it's an irritant without a serious consequence).


Such things do not matter to me a great deal; the double I shared for a day before the op worked fine, though the other guy was having a hard time in recovery from a knee reconstruction. He and I passed on my way out of Intensive Care: he arriving for more serious pain management I guessed and I departing with infection controlled and pacemaker³ unimpeded by the op electricals.


I think there was another move in there but my recollections of the pre-post op period are a little fuzzy. These are, of course, my perceptions. I am a reasonably skilled observer of behaviour, with allowances for memory fudges arising from the tiredness of the gallbladder infection I was carrying and being treated for pre-operatively. I am agile at talking to all kinds of people in all sorts of personal states about how they are finding their life at the moment. Some staff were self-immunized from that level of communication but many were accessible to observations about their apparent pressured work, explicitly confirming my impressions above.




1-As the first major loss of a body part (teeth excluded) in my medical history, my gallbladder excision on Dec. 16^th, '11 roused a wonder as to how much I'd lost, prompted a bit by the notion that a soul was a measurable 21 grams of something. Chasing down the bladder weight query went nowhere, though bilious content volume and dimension, on the average, were readily available. Midst the mild disappointment I realised that I'd already compromised the materiality of my spiritual equation by acquiring a pacemaker 9 years ago after a similarly unprovoked attack by nature on my being.
Three weeks later I got the lab assessment of the offending organ. It was rated as "gangrenous" and a day or so off bursting when the op was done.


2- The op itself was a marvel of keyhole work which, among other things, left me fully operational 10 days later and almost undetectably unwounded at three weeks post-op, plus nil internal wound pain. It took about 1.5 hours, extenuated some by the offending bladder having been "the worst we've seen in years" – made their day, so to speak, the backup surgeon opined the morning after. This led to additional infusions focussed on killing possible bugs which might have escaped from the ravaged bladder before the heavy hitters got to it with their extraction tools.


3- One risk associated with the keyhole surgery was that the electrical aspects of the process might disorient the pacemaker's little brain (it didn't). Had it done so, no worries anyway, perhaps. The techy at my most recent end of pacemaker battery life check-up said in reply to my wonder about a power down, "If it stopped now, it wouldn't make any difference to your life." How was I to know?

Learning to act right (25)… What’s harassment and why it must stop.

Learning to act right (25)… What's harassment and why it must stop.

Torrey Orton
Jan. 4, 2012

A message to HGPI* "helpers"

The Fertility Control Clinic is the everyday frontline of the lifer-choicer confrontation in Melbourne. We sit clearly on the choicer side for a number of reasons, and with a view that it's easier to inflame than it is to understand. So far we have succeeded in not inflaming a volatile setting.


We both retain a strong belief that clinic clients are being unreasonably accosted, and still want to see whether some sort of intervention might be created to address this situation. The objective in general will be to reduce perceived harassment to zero.


You are seen as harassing by many patients and by us. We know you act better when we're around, so the harassment must be even more than we see. We think the Bible encourages supporting the weak and you are harassing the very vulnerable. We also think you as a group do not understand why you are seen as harassing, and not only by us. Here's why, in two parts:

Part 1 - The idea that patients arrive already stressed so you are not aggravating it reflects a basic misunderstanding of stress. It is VERY clear that stress is cumulative, both through multiple stressors at one time and/or sustained stressor(s) over longer periods. A highly stressed person requires slight additional stress to push them over their personal limit. Anything anyone does which increases the stress of already stressed people who cannot defend themselves is understood in law as harassment. Patients are understood in anyone's church to be unusually vulnerable.

 

Part 2 - Harassing behaviour in the FCC context is any continued offering to patients and their families who have refused an initial offer by HGPI members. Continued offering means following the patients beyond the point of first contact and refusal towards the FCC gate and saying things like "You'll be a good mother / father." "Don't harm your beautiful baby", etc.

We would like you to understand this, and here's how we propose to try:

1- This document specifies a publically understood meaning of harassment (Part 2 above)

2- It also assumes a standard conception of stress as cumulative (Part 1 above)

3- We will present it to you and discuss the meanings of 1 and 2 for clarity

4- Then, we will begin to document violations of those 2 understandings and confront you in various ways with the evidence

5- In the process of step 4, our way of confronting you may elicit feelings of guilt and shame and anger from you, which is what harassment elicits from some patients.

6- We will do all of this in ways which do not add to patient stress.

Regards
Your pro-life pro-choicers,
Torrey Orton and Charles Brass
Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic


*HGPI = Helping God's Precious Infants

Appreciation (41) … I thought this was beyond me

Appreciation (41) … I thought this was beyond me
Torrey Orton
Dec. 7, 2011

Ungloved, two-handed catch

The waitress leaned across the small three-seater to recover a finished starters plate. On the way back she tipped my half full, long-stemmed glass of fine Hunter rose towards me from the middle of the table. I can't remember how my hands got to catching it in mid-fall as if it were a cricket ball being gloved by a wicket keeper. I didn't drop the catch but a few drops splashed the table between Jane and me without threatening cuffs or shirt fronts in their flight to the table cloth.


I was, till that moment, mostly renowned for doing the glass tipping myself and having to sop up large wine puddles across tables and floors at home, not counting those glasses – short stemmed and long - smashed irretrievably in the sink : around 1 every two months or so. There's something invigorating about finding a natural skill that had seemed lost forever, though I can't actually remember how my hands got from where they were on the table to the appropriate catching position. Reflexes improve momentarily; short term memory slides even further?? Compensation before capitulation.

Appreciation (40) …Old man’s prayer

Appreciation (40) …Old man's prayer*
Torrey Orton
Nov. 28, 2011

In sight and out of mind at the FCC

Saturday was the monthly prayer vigil against abortion day at the clinic. On our side were a measly 8 or so holding a large banner and chanting moderate offenses at the 100+ followers of Helpers of God's Precious Infants massed across Wellington Parade. I was there to show support (until sunk by a persistent downpour which left me swimming in my shoes) and collect potential players for an enlarged weekday presence in the face of the Helpers.


I was involved in collecting the last name and email when an old guy approached from the back seeking my attention. I turned enough to say I'd come talk to him when I finished. And so I did 3 minutes later, noting that I was approaching a guy short of my height and even shorter of my weight, but longer in days. He was clothed in an almost twin of one of my sports jackets (Germanic hounds-toothy sort of thing to compliment tans and such), trilby hat and wire-rimmed glasses of faintly 80's and a hand hold on a string of rosary beads.


As I came up he started to ask if it was OK for him to pray here. I said fine with me but I couldn't authorise him; he'd have to ask the others…and he volunteered to pray for me, too, as well as the souls in the clinic. I thanked him for the offer. Probably it was my fairly lurid red waterproof, relative towering over the herd on our side and my fairly clear age advance on the rest, too, which drew him to me.


Anyway, he started up walking back and forth in the neutral zone between the roadside white line and the clinic gate soundlessly working through the beads. Of our side, holding the banner and chanting, no one noticed and no one interrupted him. And there we were, infiltrated in broad daylight. As far as I know, prayer doesn't gain or lose power as a function of distance from its objects.


The real story here is power: that there's this power vacuum just waiting for users to appear with enough daring to claim it for themselves, as Charles and I originally did. The proof of its opportunity walked up and down until I left 15 minutes later – in sight and out of mind. The unsqueaky wheel needs no foil.


* A 'prayer' in Fertility Control Clinic security-speak is a pro-life protestor who only prays, as distinguished from protestors who pray and harass patients in moments of prayerful lapses.

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action
Torrey Orton
Nov.16, 2011


A moment in the FCC defence frontline…


I lost it…my temper that is! About 8:30 last Wednesday morning I looked down the footpath towards the city just in time to see a couple coming along, the woman crying uncontrollably; her partner just behind her and a protestor ( "Purple Shirt" as she was called in TheAGE four days later) looking the woman in the face, seeing her crying and gesturing her away, and continuing to follow her towards the clinic gate with the standard "Save your little baby; you'll be a good mother" mantra beating on her back. As she almost always does to every patient. A perfect example of harassment of a visibly vulnerable patient.


The keyword is harassment – a perception of being persistently, repeatedly, verbally and visually attacked by another. I harassed back, stepping up to her (all 191cm/105kg to her pudgy 155cm) and pointing out as I came from 3 metres away "that is harassment; she was crying all the way and you saw her and continued anyway…" I can't remember how it ended but the whole sequence from go to no was 15 seconds. I became aware that I had been sucked in by her offense…enraged briefly, close to physical assault… and almost as the awareness arrived I was turning back from the protestor to see her colleague approaching…


In talking to the protest leader, David Forster, seconds after the event (which had drawn him towards me as if he were going to defend the harasser from me) I pointed out that she had harassed the patient and knew it, knew that the patient was already crying, had said no and been followed up by her partner in doing so. He started to run the Helpers of God's Precious Infants party line on the evil things done behind the clinic walls (which justifies their offer of "help" over any other consideration) until I interrupted with these facts. David accepts that this is harassment, knowing as he does that another male protestor has clearly drawn back from patients who arrive in tears. I also wondered to him: "Isn't harassing the weak unchristian?" to which he nodded assent with the scrunched look of a logically forced agreement.


Charles thought the elapsed time between my seeing the harassment and taking action was a couple of minutes…I thought a few seconds. Charles and the guard, Edward, had seen the same scene unfold, the guard more fully because he had noticed them coming before they got to the protestor…that the woman waited for her husband to catch up and was already crying, he having been completing a mobile call. TheAGE columnist Suzy Freeman-Greene's version appears here. It was built out of her own perceptions, and some of our three, gathered at the moment described.


I am surprised to re-learn (assuming I ever did really learn this) how unreliable my perception of live events can be, how open to multiple interpretations; how filled with material lacunae such that a report of the event would be more holes than whole. My contribution sprang from my interpretation of harassment, amplified by my lifetime revulsion at any bullying, but especially of the weak. I was perhaps able to pull back from my spring by a borderline awareness that I was about to bully the bully ("Purple Shirt") and so earn a placeholder status in my own ethical bestiary.


How easy it is for my reason to fly off in a rage where my righteousness rules the moment to moment equation of time seeking justification in worthy action. I'm speaking only of myself in this accusation. If it fits, feel free to join it.

Preface to a counter protest – observations on power and perception in public places

Preface to a counter protest – observations on power and perception in public places
Torrey Orton
Nov.7, 2011


The FCC protest site is a miniature power vacuum which allows and facilitates our access. It's almost as if we did not have to intervene as such…just show up. Which is what we did… to be received with slight apprehension / wonder by the occupiers of the two lane pathway. We had no authorisation other than our interest in the daily dramas played out there. We did, though, have an encouragement from a senior FCC staffer as a jumping off point for our fronting up the first day four months ago now.

We came to do a job we did not know, which did not exist and, for whatever it turns out to be, we could easily be blamed and quite likely not congratulated (it seemed at the time). The only certainty still is we will not be paid. We really did not know what we were doing. We did know we wanted to do something to reduce patient harassment by protestors. We created the job somewhat by a default to our personal role preferences – me somewhat more combative and Charles somewhat more consultative.
The human scale of this theatre made our entrance moderately and manageably threatening to the others and us*. We talked to people immediately person to person, face-to-face (unmediated by banners and territories). Our starting place was wonder about what is going on there…how they all see the daily drama. We could see it but not interpret it without their perspectives and meanings. The personal entry level allowed close examination of all their behaviours to test the polarised interpretations (of each's perfidy in the other's eyes, of course) which leapt out first.

We started from a clear position that we side with the FCC. This became more explicit as I tended to spend all my time with the guards and Charles all his with the protestors, especially the one most open to our interest in understanding their experience. I have a workable relationship with him but not as deeply founded on hearing his views or putting mine. I did test with him the potential impact of a shaming threat I was considering if necessary to balance the patient harassment equation on the Wellington Parade footpath stage. Its potential impact was big enough.A few regular passers-by (local inhabitants mostly) inquired who I was in the play, or more sharply, what I was – 'lifer' protestor or 'choicer' FCC patient rights supporter. I eventually ported a small badge saying: "Pro-child, Pro-family, Pro-choice" on a white background. Another badge - "My Body, My choice" against a half green, half blue background - captures my personal concern about euthanasia but isn't so clearly relevant to Wellington Parade. It rests for another day.

Seeing patent harassment from both points of view is an essential achievement for our intervention. It cannot be read from a book or even watched in a video of a harassment event. It takes at least a minimum of two different and independent viewpoints to establish a video fact, as it does a judicially respectable one, and hence a successfully prosecutable one. Further, the most important meaning, that of the patients, has to be inferred much of the time. To enquire directly as they pass through the two lane pathway would only intensify whatever negative pressure they already feel from being watched / harassed.Harassment by protestors and guards of each other across the same pathway is driven by unrequited righteousness on both sides. The "lifers" have the Word in their hearts, justifying anything that comes to mind in seeming contradiction to their perceptions of its meanings. The security services have historical injuries of the Word's church school renditions from which they are still recovering and the daily animosity of the protestors…injuries easily re-primed by the "Lifers" persistent patter ("Please save your little baby", "You'll be a good mother", etc.).

All this becomes more instructive when contrasted with two recent massed protest events – (1) the monthly Saturday appearances of large numbers and varieties of prayer protestors who set up across Wellington Parade for an hour from 10:30 to 11:30am approx. and (2) the Victorian Parliament steps launch of the 40 days of protest against abortion on Oct. 14, 2011. Such events are dominated by loud voices and large posters / banners. They are totally speaking at, not with, events. The boundaries on the launch day were marked by "scuffles". On the monthlies they are policed across 20 meters of streetscape by two bunches of Vic Police, one assigned to each side of the street. Little crosses the street but air and hard looks.The more recent ejection of Occupy Melbourne protestors shows how quickly things in larger scales can move from dominance to violence, even though early violence inducing initiatives may be the products of very small numbers of protestors and police provoking each other.

We, Charles and I, are a small force in numbers and proven persistence – the real denomination of interpersonal power and engine of virtue. The protestors' forces are both larger in the street and proportionally massive in the background (members of active "lifer" organisations, catholic and otherwise). And, their persistence quotient is seriously impressive (18 years at this site for one leading player, who is also present five mornings a week minimum). So, unless we can achieve a systemic shift in the rules of the daily theatre we will be worn down by their moral dominance in effort. They will still be here in a year, or five. I haven't got that long.If we were to move to active intervention against the protestors – turning the threatened threat to their self-esteem into an action program which made it so uncomfortable for them they would retreat – it would be fun but hard to do without causing as much new trouble as the old it was meant to punish. Patients would be in danger of being harassed by our anti-harassment campaign. Not a good look or touch!


*While at the same time much less threatening to me; I have a distinct aversion to potential shaming, and a thin skin for deflecting anything I can construe as an allegation deserving my shame; on reflection here, however, I think my aversion is more to being posted on the other side of an imaginary fence of inclusion…but then being on the inside is shameful in some things, such as being in the community of "lifer" protestors. Being a lone member of a non-existent group alerts my aversive side just fine.