Panic Mode and an Intro

Yep, it's already starting to set in. I'm just trying to push through and keep writing, even though I just realized I left my outline and other sundry things I now think I need in our apartment which is 1280 miles away from where I sit typing this. I can't get my hands on those things for a month. I'll I've got is my own brain. Scary, right?

I've been having a difficult time figuring out how to start this thing. I've written a half dozen intros and considered another half dozen. I can't seem to figure out how I want to start, what I angle I want to go at this from. The problem is that I researched too long and too wide. What I really want to talk about doesn't fit within the scope of this kind of project. With paralysis setting in, I find myself taking advice (so if you've got some, please offer). I mean, that's what advisers are for! So here's the first part of my intro...for now.


I’m not sure what I was thinking the weekend I came home from college wearing a piece of muslin with the screen-printed words “no war in Iraq” tied around my bicep. I don’t think I did it to rile my mother—although it could have been some form of latent teenage rebellion. And I don’t think I did it mischievously intending to incite uproar around the Limbaugh-loving dinner table. I think I wore it out of conviction, or at least out of relief that I had a conviction, a side that I was finally, after much deliberation, on.
“Deliberation” wasn’t over, however. My mother argued passionately, emotionally, from what she saw as the truth, from deeply held values, the same values I hold. It is no exaggeration to say that she saw my position as betrayal, my armband as evidence of a failure on her part as a parent. My dad’s role in the discussion/argument/conflict was more subdued, nearly entirely made up of factual interjections and clarifications: “Well, yes, but-” or “Now remember that-” or “Well, actually-”. My younger sister stared in disbelief, then dismissed my armband and me as she does all things she deems too stupid to engage, and remained silent. My brother was enjoying the display and took part with gusto arguing both sides alternatively. In the meantime, I escaped to the kitchen where my dad found me later. Although entirely shut down, my dad played the part of my apologist, coaxing me back onto the common ground we shared. But I didn’t go back to the table.
My house has always been a deliberative house. Our favorite and frequent pastime is discussing various issues, principles, and ideas. When my armband and I came home that weekend, I fully expected to share the reasons behind my conviction while sitting at the table. I expected to be vigorously challenged, but not blasted and excluded to the kitchen. The tradition of discourse, the environment of inquiry I trusted, the deliberative house around me collapsed, making the question about war in Iraq moot. At that moment, standing in the shambles, I began to wonder just what had happened to cause this collapse and how to prevent it. Was it simply my position that forced me into the kitchen? Are some issues just too hot? How and where do we argue passionately from our principles, especially when we disagree, without excluding those that oppose us? What does that space look like in groups of different sizes and different degrees of solidarity; in homes, classrooms, communities, academia, politics, and between countries?
Since then, I have both shied away from argument and become fixated on it. As a teacher and student I have become something of a structural detective determined to discover how to bring our deliberative houses up to code. And yet I keep one foot in the kitchen, bracing for the next collapse, hesitating to fully engage. Prerequisite to my returning to the table is answering this question: How do we reinforce discourse and buttress inquiry into the structure of our deliberative spaces?