For presentation to the Feb 21, 2015 meeting of the UNA SF Bay Area Council of Organizations meeting.
The world is in transition. It is clear to thoughtful people everywhere that we must develop our sense of common humanity so we can deal intelligently with the global problems that we ourselves have created by our expanding population and increasingly powerful technology. We love our nations and religions and are not going to give them up, so our task is to persuade them to cooperate. How can we do that?
The Gender Crosstalk is a global online exchange between the genders. It is sponsored by the San Francisco Chapter of the United Nations Association and is just starting up. It is our idea how to persuade the nations and religions to cooperate. Each lunar month, participants will write a message on a topic of their own choosing. The messages are traded around and rated by other participants. Two messages are chosen each month, one written by a woman and rated highest by the women and similarly for the men. These two messages will be posted prominently so everyone will read and respond to them for the following month. It is a bottom up process so we cannot be quite sure where it will go. The expectation is that we will get a generous, intelligent and suspenseful conversation going between the genders.
We are starting the process by electing two messages addressed to the Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. We have a way to get the messages on her desk, but as of yet no promise that she will respond. The first two messages will be chosen at the new moon of March 20, 2015.
The topic of your message is for you to decide, but clearly, since we are sending the first two messages to Dr Mlambo-Ngcuka, something related to gender issues would be appropriate. No more than 150 words, including the salutation. As the discussion proceeds, the expectation is that the topic will open up and not be focused only on gender related issues.
The global Women’s Movement has a huge role to play, I believe. I like to say that the Women’s Movement is humanity’s best asset! The women already transcend the nations and religions, while the men, I have to say, do not.
The Women’s Movement can use the Gender Crosstalk as a tool to bring the men in on a shared journey to a human unity with gender equality built in. The Crosstalk, if we can get it off the ground, will create a common consciousness and a kind-hearted sense of unity at every level from global to local. That common consciousness and heart-felt sense of unity is what we need to underpin an orderly transition to a world of ten billion people, coming soon, we better hope!
Will the genders quarrel? The UNA Gender Crosstalk is designed to unite humanity. Yet it does so by establishing a collective dialogue between the Women and the Men, thus seemingly dividing humanity instead of uniting us. But no, the genders will not quarrel, because at the collective level, each gender is mindful of the children, and for them as well as for many other good reasons, both genders have the interest of humanity at heart. Still, there will be some suspense!
By March 20, the Crosstalk technology will have a geographic slider so we can easily move from global to national to state to metro levels and have a discussion between the women and the men at each of those levels. That means we can have a gender crosstalk discussion here in the Bay Area as well as globally. That brings it home, I expect. What if we could bring the NGO crowd in on this in the Bay Area? All of a sudden we would all be on the same page, with gender equality built in. This is where I see the Gender Crosstalk as a tool for the COO.
If every group, at its meetings, would have a brief discussion of the latest Gender Crosstalk results at both the world and metro levels, then that would create the common consciousness that we need, bringing everyone onto the same page, both globally and locally. I would like to propose that for our next COO meeting we take ten minutes for that discussion.