Space Invader at the Inviters Meeting

[Douglas D. Germann, Sr.]

Hi--

How would you handle this?

I have hand delivered the invitation below to many people in our community.
In a nutshell, this is an OST for folks who want to use 9-11 as an impetus
to create projects in our community to make this a better place, to give us
a better future. The theme is "What Good Can We Make of 9-11?"

The invitation and the newspaper article both made it clear that the last
thing I want to come out of the meeting is a statue for people to visit: I
want to promote a living memorial, project to involve people.

This evening we had our first Inviters Meeting. This was a meeting of
people who are going to invite other people to the OST on 2002/09/11. It
was announced by way of a news release published in our local paper, and
personal invitations.

There were 5 people, plus me. The only one to come solely as a result of
the newspaper article was a person known as influential in our community.

After I announced the theme of the OST and described a little about the
process of the meeting, he jumped in.

"Well, I don't want to stop your project, but we have a project to which
many hours and many Dollars have been committed already, and we should not
scatter our resources, but rather concentrate them behind this sculpture of
the Twin Towers we want to erect at one of our park entrances," he said,
proceeding to tell us about all the money raised and efforts in that regard
and the need for memorials so people will remember, etc.

I thought, "Here is a pure Space Invader." I worried about intervening, so
resolved to keep my mouth shut and see what happened.

When he started into the details of the kind of steel to be used in the
construction, I said something to the effect that of course we need
memorials and it is a fine project, but people have many different
interests, and those who want memorials can come to your group at the
meeting.

He said something to the effect that "You can't do any project without
money, so it's fruitless to try," and similar things.

Needless to say, he brought the energy in the room way down to start.

Finally, someone else asked a question and started to turn the conversation
back to where we needed to be. It was a fruitful meeting, but I sure am
tempted not to invite him to the next Inviters Meeting!

How would you handle this sort of invasion, seeing that there was no other
meeting going on to which we could all use the law of two feet?

                              :-Doug. Germann

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