Poetry at Work, Chapter 14: The Poetry of Interpersonal Conflict

A conflict in the workplace is not uncommon. A workplace conflict battled out on Facebook, however, pulling in co-workers and the company, is not something you see every day.

It happened at my company. And Human Resources asked that my team, the corporate social media team, do something about it. The fact that it was happening outside business hours was a complication. 

It was a nasty fight. Things someone would never say in an office setting were erupting on a daily basis. Friends and family members were egging the two combatants on. At the time, social media were relatively new, and this was something new on social media. Twitter trolling parties were already common, but I’d never seen two fellow employees arguing on Facebook.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Saturday Serious Reads: What is Happening Here?

I’ve published this blog for more than four years now, and the one subject I’ve largely (if not completely) avoided is politics. Opportunities to talk about politics abound, but I prefer to let others seize them. An argument can be made that the state of American politics has almost always been abysmal, even if today we seem to be searching for new depths. And I’ve generally avoided the subject.

It will be no surprise that I lean to the conservative side. I used to lean a lot more to the conservative side, until the inept response of government at all levels to Hurricane Katrina. People died because of that inept response. And then to learn that the ineptness had been a disaster waiting decades to happen – poor construction of so many of the levees – well, it was more than I could stomach.

I didn’t think the ineptness of Katrina could be surpassed.

Then came Syria.

What my government was preparing to do in Syria – after so badly mismanaging what had come before, not only in Syria but also in Libya and Egypt – compelled me to write letters to my two senators and my congresswoman, urging them all to vote against military action. We’ve demonstrated we don’t understand what’s happening in Syria, and why we believed military action would solve the problem we didn’t understand in the first place was beyond me.

And we still don’t understand the problem. What is happening in Syria is not the good guys versus the evil government, but some good guys (we’re not sure who they are, though) and some bad guys (remember al-Qaida?) sometimes fighting the government, and sometimes each other. And caught in the crossfire are both innocent Muslim civilians and innocent Christian civilians as well. (And here's an interesting note: Christians are being killed and churches destroyed, and not by the Assad government.)

Of all the things I’ve seen and read, what’s made the most sense to me are some comments by Christian speaker and apologist Ravi Zacharias. And it makes the most sense because all we have right now are questions and uncertainties, and no real understanding of what's happening in Syria, or why.

Top photograph: Wounded civilians arrive at a hospital in Aleppo, Syria, October 2012; photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Poetry at Work: Workplace Challenges and Problems

The workplace, like the rest of the world we live in, is a mixture of the good and bad, of nobility of purpose and unbridled ambition, of supportive encouragement and backstabbing politics. Someone once told me that if you get more than two people in a room, you have the ingredients for conflict, politics and factions. Working in high-pressure workplaces only intensifies this tendency for conflict (additionally fueled by intra-office email).

To make sense of this, and sometimes to seek a resolution, I write poems. From what I hear from friends and colleagues, this could become an entire genre of poetry – the poetry of workplace conflict.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.