Agree to Disagree

There is a phrase that ends conversations before they finish.

You have heard it. You may have said it. Agree to disagree. It sounds like maturity. Like two reasonable adults deciding that some things just aren't worth the fight.

Sometimes that's true. Reasonable people disagree about renovation choices, parking habits, whether the new landscaping looks better. These are matters of taste and preference, and taste doesn't require resolution.

But there is another use of the phrase — one that has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with power. When someone says something false about you, and the response to a request for correction is let's just move on — that isn't resolution. That's a transfer. You absorb the damage. They keep the narrative. The social contract of agreeableness means you're not supposed to say so.

We have been asked, more than once, to accept that transfer.

We're writing today about why we won't.

The Privilege Behind "Go Away"

At recent meetings, the board president said plainly that he wanted certain neighbors to go away and not participate.

Going away doesn't make someone stop existing. It doesn't cancel their mortgage or dissolve their membership in this association. It doesn't transfer their rights to someone more convenient. What it does is relieve the person making the request of having to reckon with the challenger— their questions, their documentation, their presence at meetings, their votes.

"I want them to go away" is a request for the privilege of a community edited to your preferences. 

It assumes that belonging can be revoked — that if someone makes governance uncomfortable enough, the solution is their absence; rather than to answer to their questions.

The Cost of Agreeableness

Agreeableness as the condition of belonging does not work, because there will always be such a thing as not agreeable enough.

When compliance doesn't protect you, when correction requests are met with we don't talk about that, when a volunteer who has done months of documented work is told she shouldn't participate — then what's being enforced isn't community standards. 

It's the comfort of people with enough institutional backing to define discomfort as the problem.

We don't think that's what any community is supposed to be.

A neighborhood association exists to serve its members — all of them, including the ones asking hard questions, including the ones who lost an election, including the ones who show up to meetings with notebooks and documented research and requests that false statements be corrected.

Those people don't stop belonging because they're inconvenient.

What We're Not Going to Agree to Disagree About

There are genuine matters of opinion in this community. How to prioritize maintenance spending. What the right pace of bylaws revision looks like. Whether a given rule serves its purpose. These are worth debating, and we welcome that debate.

There are also matters of fact. Statements were made during the election that were false. We have individually, outside of meeting time, approached "REAL" Friends of Ken Lake candidates to ask for corrections. The response was: we don't talk about that.

That's not a difference of perspective. That's a choice about whose experience of this community gets to be real.

Agree to disagree is not what you say when someone asks you to acknowledge something that happened.

People who live here get to live here — with their full voices, their documented concerns, and their right to name their own experience — without being told that the price of belonging is silence.

That price is too high.