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Meeting to Discuss – A poem for the Charlottetown Forum

Tanya Davis - May 2025

We’ve been here at this forum, which is by definition a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. I like this definition. I like the potential inherent in a forum.

I think we need more of them.

Of course, it’s not that simple or else we would be doing it already.

Forums require accessible spaces, more affordable locations, less Facebook. Though I suppose Facebook is also a forum, with its own unique standards of what constitutes decorum.

Speaking of decorum, if we’re going to host more forums we’re going to need more moderators and the means to employ them. Because surely we won’t all agree, if we’re doing forums correctly.

If we’re doing forums correctly, there will be some opposing opinions. I love an echo chamber as much as the next person, but a good forum should be discordant, in moments at least, like a bridge with an uncomfortable key change right before a crowd-pleasing chorus.

Going forward, we might want to improve our conflict resolution. More forums will bring more disagreements. We might need mediation. And since that is a complex skill (and conflict is a tense situation), we either need some good training or else we all need more patience.

And that takes time. Do we have time? For patience?!

We’re busy people, the pace of life is fast, the pace of world collapse is faster.

This is a dramatic statement or else totally accurate. Either way, we need to gather.

We need the strategies that come from putting heads together.

It’s just that… putting heads together is hard. Like literally, our heads are… hard. Maybe instead we need a symposium of hearts—something softer, something more porous.

For now, here we are, at this one particular forum having conversations that have been deemed important—pressing national issues, in fact.

And they are that. They are pressing on our health and our voices, putting pressure on our rights and our homes and our communities and our choices, pressing pause on some of our goals and accomplishments in the process.

Meanwhile, our democracy is getting caught up in the dialogue—it’s getting lost in the cacophony and so are we.

Important conversations are difficult, and noisy. Still, here we are,

working hard to have them—and that speaks volumes about our commitment to problem solving,

or our penchant for awkward small talk and circuitous dialoging.

Forums are gatherings of people—as such they are idealistic, as such they will have their flaws.

Can we fix our existential crises over coffee and cookies? Will a Q&A ever go smoothly? Can a panel solve a problem, truly?

Not exactly—but let’s keep trying anyway because the point is not conclusion.

Just as life is dynamic and always moving, democracy is a living thing and its shape is ever changing—as are we, with our shifting desires and old and new needs—we must meet to discuss them.

Here, say, at this very forum.

Right here, where many years before people gathered for their own reasons—such as the need for protection from annexation.

I guess some things change, some things remain the same.

For instance, we also would like large amounts of champagne—but we will settle for cans of Bubly. Still tasty, still effervescent.

At previous and historical meetings, people discussed a need for an island-wide train. That was a good one. It was a lot of work—so let’s not tell them that we ripped up the tracks and took the trains away.

Some change is misguided.

Our colonial desires can override care for our climate—otherwise known as our home—and now we struggle to live inside it.

We need to reconcile with our inability to reconcile. We need real talk and disruptive kindness—as in disrupt supremacy’s process—and mistrust token notions of inclusion and politeness.

Let us look closely at decision-making tables—to see who was, and who was not, invited—and then let us flip those tables over when our anger is warranted.

We can make a fire from the sad and gnarly wood. We can warm our hands with it, and then put our hands to work on something good.

Let’s go meet outside, where we are not just cerebral, head-based people, segmented into fragments and factions online.

Let’s be in the air, where it becomes clear that we are also animals—vulnerable to the weather—not separate and dominant, but tethered together and affected by all of it.

If we listen to Indigenous teachings, we might know more reciprocity and welcome the responsibility that it brings.

We are all stakeholders because we all live in this place, so we need to be accountable. This world calls us to respond.

We have to, there is a lot going on—for example, we are under coordinated attack by something known as bots.

Bots are attacking us, and we are too busy and distracted to even call them by their full names.

We are waylaid by the snail’s pace of institutions, caught up in unfulfilling but addictive algorithms, lost in a loneliness so consuming that misogyny is surging and fake news is blooming.

Fake news is old news, but YouTube is new truths, and all views are in use to call you and me to battle.

What are we battling about? It doesn’t matter.

Our power-over culture has been pitting us against each other. It’s not real, but the more we talk, the more our opinions solidify, and our divisions grow.

What if we met not to agree but to understand something? Could be the complexity of humanity. Could be what our neighbours ate for lunch. Could be where the loneliness has been coming from.

Tanya

We have agency—but we can’t see the forest for the trees because the trees are blowing over in the storms. Even though the storms warned us they were coming, we didn’t listen—because we misused the funding and we trusted the wrong systems—or we neglected to see how we all belong to the same systems.

All issues connected, just like the threads of our lives—like a bridge to a chorus—like a cacophony of voices, noisy but together, even so.

It’s hard to be together though, in dialogue especially. So let’s make room for silence. Let’s make way for play. Let’s make room for dinner—how was your day?

Let’s gather for our health and our mental states, for the resilience of our communities and the struggles that we face. Let’s meet in person, where we have to confront our humanity, come up against the complexity, find the grace, find the humour, find ourselves enraged, find our way through it.

What happens at a forum’s conclusion? If we discuss enough, will we discuss ourselves out of the need to discuss?

Probably not. It is to be concluded—ongoing it remains. So let’s just say goodbye for now, until we meet again.

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