By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

I do all of the other chores. You should to take out the garbage.

Somerville residents and visitors should pitch in and pay inflated and unnecessary parking fines.

Chinese entrepreneurs should ignore patents and copyrights in order to create jobs and grow their national economy.

Each of these statements reflects one side of a disagreement. Such conflicts are inevitable wherever human beings live together, whether as a married couple, the Somerville body politic, or the global economic system. They exist because each of us has genuinely different experiences of our shared situation.

These experiences accumulate from birth; perhaps from before birth. Along with our genetic heritage, they are what make us unique. They shape how we see ourselves, our situations, and the world in which we live.

At some point we must take collective action, and different sets of experience commend different actions. Conflict emerges over whose experience becomes the basis for action.

One technique that disputants usually employ in their effort to prevail is to persuade us that our experiences aren’t real, that our perceptions are inaccurate. Most often they sincerely believe that their experiences and perceptions are the real ones.

We are vulnerable to such manipulation because we experienced so much of it in our formative years. Caretakers continually told us that they knew what we needed better than we did, and that their actions were for our own good. Our youthful acquaintances unconsciously adopted a similar pattern in order to win disagreements.

Within personal relationships, whose experience becomes the basis for action often depends on who is less emotionally needful. It can also depend on who brings in the money to support a household. Or who is willing and able to use physical force.

Within the body politic, this once depended on who had the largest and best-coordinated organization. Over the last 50 years it has often come to depend on who has the most money, can mobilize the most lobbyists, and buy the most politicians.

It can also depend on who is more frightened, less knowledgeable, and less in personal relationships in which they are listened to without judgment. Well-funded propaganda campaigns can repeat untruths so often and with such force that these assertions become accepted as truth by large portions of the audience.

An immediate example is the ongoing, shrill and intrusive chants that the dysfunctional healthcare reforms passed last year are socialism. A moment’s visit to a dictionary shows that this is nonsense.

Even the much-maligned single-payer system embraces capitalism in that the healthcare providers are all private institutions, not government-owned. Yet frightened, ignorant, and isolated people accept such propaganda as truth and empower its purveyors.

Because we have fought, since childhood, to hold on to the authenticity of our own experience, it’s often hard for us to remain open to others’ experience. It’s not so much that we want to dismiss their perspectives. It’s that we don’t want to deny our own. But in remaining defensive, we lose the opportunity to learn, grow, and create.

Whether for good or ill, change comes through conflict. And the most powerful and creative solutions come from acknowledging the legitimacy of the other’s experience while not denying our own. Innovations emerge when we look at the shared situation through each other’s eyes and fully understand how the other came to his or her position.

Egyptian and Israeli leaders didn’t particularly like each other. Yet they found the strength to understand each other’s experience sufficiently to produce solutions to their conflict. Although Anwar Sadat was assassinated for being a peacemaker, the agreement that he and Menachem Begin produced has served their peoples for 36 years.

If there is no acknowledgment of conflict, there is no opportunity to create innovative solutions that serve all parties. This has become the case with Somerville city government.

In past decades, the Board of Aldermen legislated. Debates were vigorous, and votes were often 6-to-5. In a number of instances the Mayor resisted Board initiatives, but the Board prevailed. Aldermen’s compensation was one-tenth of what it is now, but few elections were uncontested, and aldermen-at-large races often drew over 20 candidates.

Just between 1975 and 1985, aldermen legislated tax assessment reform, police department reform, comprehensive rewriting of the zoning code, licensing reform, contract policy with cable TV providers, condo conversion, strengthening of the Board of Health, rent control, the requirement that the mayor annually present a five-year capital improvement program, and creation of a personnel department.

On four separate occasions they debated rewriting the charter. They initiated a comprehensive sewer system study. They initiated dozens of major street and sidewalk reconstructions. They considered consolidating the Redevelopment Authority, Planning Board, and Community Development. They considered making the Community Development budget part of the larger city budget, and therefore subject to public and legislative review.

Compare those 10 years with the most recent 10. With the exception of the owner-occupant residential tax exemption, I can’t think of a single substantial piece of legislation initiated by the Board. I ask readers to point out any that I am missing.

The Board does what the mayor asks it to do. Consider Alderman Rebekah Gewirtz’s request to go into executive session when six of the mayor’s appointees to the reserve fire force were presented for Board approval. She wanted to question the mayor’s staff as to why they had passed over Sean O’Brien, who was number one on the civil service list. Only she, Alderman Bruce Desmond, and Alderman Bill White voted for the motion.

Two senior aldermen said that the Board had never questioned the mayor’s appointments before. Well, not recently. But it’s the Board’s statutory responsibility to do so, which begs the question of what real purpose it serves.

Where there is no conflict, there are no creative solutions. Where there is no willingness to mutually create solutions, there is stagnation and stalemate. Or domination.

As children we are taught to add numbers, read words, and play ball. We aren’t taught how to creatively resolve conflicts. But these skills can be learned by those who are willing.