Let us talk about speech. Not “free speech,” nor the "right" to free speech, which are simply abstractions. We wish to "talk" about speech in the sense of “having spoken.” It is not abstract. To have spoken means someone has heard and understood. Without that, one simply duplicates the proverbial tree falling in the forest, etc.

We will be "talking" here about "speech" in its political incarnation. There will be a proposal about it at the end of this essay.

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There is a strange pro forma routine practiced in city government procedures (Councils, Commissions, etc.). it is frivolously called “Public Comment.” When people avail themselves of this, they get two minutes. That is their “field ration.” If ten or more people show up to speak on an item, then each gets only one minute. That is their “K-ration” (in WWII terminology). These are combat rations, the first referring to food carried during extended operations, and the latter to provisions for intense short-term engagement with the enemy.

Most people have gotten used to these time limits. They have long since ceased to be considered a travesty of democratic principles. They pretend to permit everyone to get their word in. Yet they form part of rules of engagement, on this field of battle for democracy between the necessities that bring people to speak versus council’s eagerness to curtail speaking time. The sense of humiliation, or of being disparaged, means there are casualties. 

Why do people have to come to council to speak?

Many people look askance at long Public Comment lines on controversial topics. They think that people are only there to complain, or to be self-important, or to hear themselves talk. And sometimes it might appear like that when people sound vaguely repetitive, or making bland or emotive statements. Insofar as what speakers say rarely gets included in council’s thinking, one might conclude that the comments have little importance for them. It is as if council subjects itself to the process to maintain a façade of democratic procedure. It is in tune with the notion that democracy can be summed up as simply the right to vote. The implication is, for those already elected, they have merely to oblige people by granting them the right to speak. But this is a very superficial view of democracy. The speakers are not recognized as having spoken. 

The Fundamental Principle of Democracy is that those who will be affected by a policy should be the ones who articulate the issues at stake and decide on the policy that will affect them as people with respect to those issues. 

That means it is more than just having a vote. Indeed, if all one has is a vote, one ends up voting on things other people have said or done, without real involvement in them. 

When City Council passed a law controlling sleeping in an RV in city streets, were any of the RV dwellers, who were to be affected by that policy, included in the process of writing it? No. Not one. When council passed a mean little ordinance requiring homeless people to keep their possessions in a 9 square foot area, were there any homeless people involved in writing that? No. Not one. When council decided to stay inscribed in the Urban Shield program, were any of the researchers, who opposed it on the basis of extensive study of its politics and technologies included in that decision? No. Not one. When the city hired a consultant to research racial bias in police department operations, and police use of force against peaceful demonstrators, were any of the victims of police tear gassing or harassment included in making the decision on what the consultant was to do? No. 

Do you know where all those people end up politically, those who live in RVs, or on the street, or who organize anti-war and anti-militarism demonstrations (not mention those who abstain from complaining about police harassment out of fear that it could lead to retaliatory harassment)? You know where they end up? On the Public Comment line. They write letters, distribute petitions, call councilmembers, organize meetings, etc. But the closest they will ever get to City Council, where policy is made about these things, is the Public Comment line. They are the ones who know the problems, who are up against survival, who do the research, and who can offer real solutions. But all they get is one minute each on the Public Comment line. 

It’s a form of exclusion. It is not a corruption of democracy that restricts them to one minute of speech. It is an absence of democracy that puts them on that line in the first place. 

Do you remember when black people didn’t have a vote? Once even unenslaved black people didn’t have citizenship (the Dred Scott decision). After the Civil War, the various levels of government broke civil existence into separate parts and wrote different laws for each one. Who made all the decisions that black people were to be denied a vote, or citizenship, or integration. And who make all the decisions that black people would be given the vote, made citizens, and sometimes able to gain admission to educational facilities. White people. Sometimes black people would make speeches, talk about Constitutional logic, and comment on what the white people did. 

The exclusion of those who will be affected by a policy from participation in making that policy is not a detail of US politics. It is the center, the engine of everything that has gone on in this country. 

Berkeley is an educated and liberal city. The population of this town and this area contains people educated at all levels of social existence. Higher education is only one form. Industrial experience and street experience are also forms of knowledge. Those who listen to Public Comment carefully are aware that the majority of speakers on controversial issues not only know what they are talking about, but they constitute a vast outpouring of knowledge, descriptions of problems, narratives of injustice, support for humanitarian approaches to people, proposals for the resolution of problems, etc. Those who come to speak about controversial issues often know a lot more about the issues and its background than the council members. 

Speakers line up to raise issues of policy because they had been excluded from participating in it. When they speak from having been excluded, they are speaking in a critical voice of the way policy is made. They are speaking to become part of the public record. 

It is not because they have small thoughts and make repetitive statements that they suffer time constraints. It is the constraint on time imposed on people with knowledge and experience that has forced their thinking into narrow, repetitive, and sometimes self-serving statements. They make repetitive statements because they have been shoe-horned into that time limit. 

One minute is not enough to formulate complete thoughts. But it is perhaps all council wants to hear, as an extension of a more profound exclusionism. 

 

Public Comment is about imparting knowledge to both council and the public

There is a huge difference between speaking at council and writing a letter to Council or just visiting a councilmember’s office. In letters, one can develop complex arguments, or describe the logic of situations. But what one says in a letter remains in the letter, withdrawn from or even unadmitted to public discourse. To speak in council is to present ideas and narratives to public discourse. When people come in large numbers, they are also there to educate, to bring a mass of experience to the thinking not only of council, but to the people themselves. 

City Council constitutes a center at which people can not only express themselves, and share their knowledge, but also meet and exchange ideas with each other about the issues that city government is addressing. It is not just for the edification of council. They speak to impart their knowledge to all, City Council and the listening public (the audience). It is to create dialogue among the people, as well as with councilmembers – dialogue that should have been at the core of all policy making. To speak in public, and on the public record, gives political existence to people. And that should be recognized. Yet representationism violates that political existence through its focus on procedures. 

When Council addressed the issue of single use plastic utensils, over 70 people lined up to speak their minute, most in support of the measure. The importance of the knowledge they presented was enormous. If those statements had been collected, transcribed, and edited into a coherent document, it would have been a powerful indictment of corporate despoliation of the planet, of society’s use of plastic, and of the plastics industry. They had a lot to add to the knowledge and wisdom of the city, far beyond what City Council had the heart to put together in its ordinance. 

We know that such knowledge exists among the people. Along with the technicians and professors, all have something to add to the way in which this city and this society deal with critical issues. This is a knowledge base that City Council has available. But rather than cultivate it in the interest of social discourse, it gets silenced through procedure. It lurks underneath the time truncations that obstruct how one makes a point. The fact that something is missing at the hands of time constraint is discernible in just about every public comment made. That absence is the sound of silencing. 

We the people are being deprived of this knowledge, and short-changed in our political thinking by the one-minute rule. 

Efficiency must not be made the primary determinant of government operations. 

 

The question of bias

What is implied, by this inversion – that time constraint is not the result of speaker banality, but its cause – is a question of bias. Bias against public speakers. They are disrespected, first of all, in having their time so severely constrained. They are disrespected in councilmembers not listening, just letting people go through the motions of speaking. Council indifference about what the people are bringing to them creates the impression that what is being spoken is without importance and without social critique. It creates an aire of disdain. It says, “you are secondary, you don’t count as much as we do, you are something we simply need to get through as fast as possible in order to look democratic.” 

People who get on the Public Comment line feel that disdain. They feel that sense of inferiority. Though we elected these councilmembers, we are somehow placed in a position of being responsible to them. When we speak, we are seen as just taking up time. That means they wish we would cease because we appear as obstacles to governing. It is like the xenophobe wishing the immigrants would get out of the way and go back where they came from. 

Any pretended interest in what the people bring to that comment line gets falsified on two grounds, first, by the time constraint, and second, by the fact that Public Comment goes first before council says anything about the issue at hand. The public is left at sea about council’s thoughts and feelings, with only the written agenda to go on. 

But the real person who steps up to that microphone is speaking to councilmembers, not to an agenda. As a real person, one speaks in the hopes of speaking to real human beings who can give one a sense of participating in making policy. 

Instead, council wants Public Comment to go first, to get it out of the way. 

That sense of inferiority clouds a person’s thoughts sometimes. One becomes self-conscious. More often it germinates as anger. Yet these speakers are the people of the city, the ones that city politics are all about. They are made to feel like interlopers, taking up council’s valuable time. 

Yet it is council that practices exclusion. And then practices disparagement by reducing speaking time to a segregation divided by signs that say "us" and "them," dialogue spoken here, and only monologue over there for you people. There is a subtle bigotry in it; “how could all those people have anything useful to say.” 

Thus, Council procedure inferiorizes the people who come to participate. 

And what does it really mean that people who will be affected by a policy might be disparaged for thinking they should have had some form of inclusion. How familiar is that? 

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Proposal: Speakers should have 4 minutes each. They don’t have to take the 4 minutes, and someone on the council can warn them when they ramble or repeating themselves. But the 4 minutes would be a serious gesture of faith in the people. 

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The ProDemocracy Project will be talking about this and other proposed changes to council procedure at the Pittman Library (@ MLK and Russell St.), on Thursday, January 30, at 5:30 pm, in the Community Room. All are invited.