[Lnc-business] 168 Emails

[Craig Bowden]

To all:

When I woke up this morning to check this email account, I found 168 
unread messages. Mostly people attacking each other over variations of 
similar beliefs with multiple individuals taking things personally and 
going after each other. I find this to be very unbecoming of our body.  
While I am not perfect in this regard, and sometimes slip myself, we 
really need to hold ourselves to a higher level of professionalism.

Unless one resigns, we have to find a way to work together for the next 
two years. This will include in person meetings. The last thing we 
should be doing is going for each other's throats.

It took me almost two hours to get through everything in the inbox. Most 
of it, totally unimportant to party business.

Do I think we can kill two birds with one stone by completing other 
tasks and working on a resolution? Yes. But this is entering the realm 
of ridiculous.

Several members of this board are active candidates campaigning on top 
of our duties. If we merely cut back on the backbiting and personality 
conflicts alone, we would have likely had half of the emails.

I have zero problem with stating your opinion in regard to a motion. I 
do so regularly. However, it is not going well in this forum. And even 
if you do not mean to go after someone personally, you cannot inflect 
tone through an email in a quip against another person's thoughts, which 
can be taken personally, and spiral from there.

In Congress, they limit the time for argument for a reason. You are 
given time to state where you stand, and we do so in our own 
conventions, but there honestly needs to be a limit to how much you are 
putting out there. I am not advocating for new rules, but we should be 
able to self-govern on this, yes?

I cannot afford to put two hours every day on this sort of thing. We are 
a volunteer board, and we all have lives outside of the LNC. The two 
hours I spent going through these emails could have been making calls 
for my campaign for fundraising, finding more clients for my business, 
etc.

I personally will only be checking this email once per day, because we 
are in the final stretch before the election. I am occupied with many 
things every day and I have to draw the line so that I do not affect my 
family life, business, or campaign any more than I already have.

Please, try to get out what you have to say in your first emails. What I 
am typically seeing is the same arguments circling, which go nowhere 
until the tally is counted. If you have already made the same argument 
once, saying it again isn't likely to advance your side any further, 
something learned from personal observation in life.

I also ask this as a point of personal privilege. I have a traumatic 
brain injury, which does cause things to process a little slower for me 
in regard to so much information going back and forth constantly.

Love you all and hope you understand where I come from with this.

In Liberty,
Craig Bowden
Region 1 Alternate