Move on, Robert:  Time for Family Rules of Order

The Friday after Thanksgiving, long after our dinner of leftovers and desserts had ended and we had cleaned up, I stuck my head into the living room to see what that roomful of family folk was doing. It was kind of quiet, which raised my antenna. I had no idea what was waiting for me. All I heard was my daughter talking calmly about ranked choice voting.

I jumped right in. “Did you know,” was all I got out.

My other daughter rose up out of her seat and said loudly, “No! No! You can’t interrupt! Sit down and wait your turn!”

I called out loudly, “Point of order! Point of order!” I was sure they would let me barge into the conversation, even though, technically, what I had was not a point of order but just a point I wanted to make about ranked-choice voting.

We all kept trying to talk over one another until the daughter I had interrupted said, “Okay, okay, what do you want to say?”

I wasn’t going to stay in the conversation for long; I just wanted them to know that ranked-choice voting was something Lani Guinier, a friend of ours, had written a lot about before she went to teach at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s.

Quiet.

Then: “That’s NOT a point of order,” said my 26-year-old niece. My younger daughter was disgusted. “You came barging in here and disrupted our system, and that was NOT a point of order!”

“Plus,” said the daughter I had interrupted, “I already told them that!”

That was when I learned about how a roomful of family members had engaged in a serious effort at self-government. You hear a lot about family arguments over the holidays. You hear a lot less about families accommodating each other by developing a system to respect everyone’s right and need to speak while tamping down those conversation-dominators who cause half the room to drift off to the bathroom or back into the kitchen. Here’s their story:

They all held strong views. They all wanted to talk. After 45 minutes of no one being able to get their points across, they established a time limit. “You may speak for 2 minutes,” was the rule devised to combat filibusterers who never seemed able to end their thoughts, their sentences, or their paragraphs. Since some thoughts weren’t as clear as they could be on the first try, rule #2 was “Interruptions only for points of clarification.” My sister, a self-appointed facilitator for a while, kept track of the order of speakers as they raised their hands. Then my niece took over. And unlike the U.S. Congress, their rules seemed geared to developing consensus, however raggedy.

They constructed the quiet I detected when I came into the room so that they could talk and listen to each other. After I got this backstory, it made me a little ashamed for violating their rules. But mostly, I was proud.

I came under Family Rules of Order the next morning at breakfast, when my ideas about what was wrong with the U.S. Senate had to wait for what my niece had to say. Listening is difficult when you think you have all the answers. But my niece and I shared equally impossible radical solutions to the problems of American government.

Imagine that.

All families have stories to tell. We are Lift Every Voice, and we do stories.

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