The reason why Corina had so much time to be destructive of the group is because she is unemployed and is supported by her boyfriend. Corina must have so little going on in her life that attacking me was worth:
- Facing legal action for libel.
- Destroying relationships with over 30 group members.
- Destroying the ten year relationship between our group and our meeting space.
- Destroying my friendship with her.
My crime against Corina was that I wrote her an email that she did not like. In that letter I stated the Pittsburgh Philosophical Self Inquiry Meetup group is mine and not hers. This is true because I paid for the Meetup, and I restarted the group after Corina and other group members decided to end it.
Because the group is mine, I wanted to review emails before they are sent out to group members. And I went on to suggest that if Corina wanted to have her own strict Self Inquiry group, she could use my Meetup site and we could alternate our use of the meeting space. I thought that what I wrote was reasonable, however Corina clearly disagreed.
Another person might have written an email back in disagreement. Another person might have called me on the phone to talk about it. Yet another person might have wanted to meet with me in person to discuss the matter. What Corina did was to attempt to destroy the relationships surrounding the Pittsburgh Self Inquiry Group rather than attempt to reach any form of compromise.
What Corina did was write an email containing lies about me and send it out to every Philosophical Self Inquiry group member. Corina then deleted almost every group member from the Meetup site, providing me with no way to contact them again the future. Then Corina proceeded to deface the Meetup site, renaming the group and posting libelous statements about me for other group members to read.
After Corina sent out her vicious email against me, I sent out a conciliatory email to the few group members whose contact information I had. A few emailed me back and supported me against Corina’s hurtful email. And a few of these members have rejoined the group.
In retrospect, it is clear that Corina intentionally created a conflict that she could use against me if she needed it. One of the contributions that Corina made to the group was to negotiate the continued use of our meeting space. Then, having destroyed the group electronically, Corina went to the meeting space and told them that the group was disbanded. She also somehow managed to polarize the meeting space staff against me personally.
There is a gap in Corina’s logic for why I should be banned from the meeting space for collecting money for the Meetup dues. Corina argues that the group was hers. If the group were hers, and she knowingly broke the rule that we were not to collect money, then shouldn’t Corina be banned from the meeting space and not me? Corina cannot claim that she did not know that I was collecting money, because she contributed all three times. Then, if I am running my own group separate from Corina’s wouldn’t I now be starting with a blank slate regarding the meeting space?
One group member told me that he thought Corina acted the way she did because she felt that I was threatening her power as leader of this Self Inquiry group. Although this explains Corina’s actions, it also demonstrates how naive I am. I viewed this Self Inquiry group as a minor social activity that I enjoyed attending. I felt that the practice of Self Inquiry had enough value to restart the group, even after the other group members had disbanded it. But I only saw value in the group for the social connection that it offered. I view that running a Meetup group is a service position not a power position. Whenever Corina attended I was happy to have her facilitate the meetings because I felt she could provide the service of Self Inquiry better than I did.
In my email, I did assert that the group was mine, like the two other Meetup groups that I run, but not to assert my power, but only because I thought it would reduce Corina’s stress. I thought that if she felt that she did not need to take responsibility for the group, she could relax and would treat the group members better. I don’t see that there is any power to be had in running a Self Inquiry social group that meets only four hours a month. Corina’s life must be very empty if she felt that she needed to so aggressively defend what she saw as her position in this little group. As time has gone on I feel more sadness and pity for Corina then anger at her actions against me. Based on Corina’s behavior, and in her email to the group, I cannot imagine anyone attending her Self Inquiry group as announced on her Facebook page.
Corina still maintains a MySpace page, and she writes on that page that “All of my goals are spiritual.” I have studied spiritual practices for many years, and I do not know of any practice involves being so petty. In the most forgiving terms, I can only describe Corina’s behavior as unenlightened, this despite her claim that she has more right to use the term Philosophical Self Inquiry than I do. It seems to me that destroying a group dedicated to philosophical practice is movement away from a spiritual goal, not towards it. I would also like to say that if being destructive to the relationships of people around you is part of Corina’s spiritual practice, then I don’t want any part of it. Corina and I had talked on the phone only about a week before. She had my phone number. If Corina disagreed with what I had written then why couldn’t she just call me?
Finally, I see Corina’s behavior with our meeting space as not only offensive against me personally, but destructive on a larger scale. All of the meeting space staff are women, and the impression that I get is that somehow she convinced them that I was a male aggressor trying to take away her group. This was never the case. In my email I suggested decision by consensus and compromise. For Corina these were not acceptable options. What Corina did was make false accusations against me. This is destructive because it puts the accused on a trail of public opinion. This is also destructive because when the lie is found out, it weakens the claim of every person who has then been legitimately attacked. And Corina was willing to do all of this to defend her claim as leader of a philosophy group that met every other Monday for two hours at a time.
As far as I am concerned, Corina’s acts of using a libelous email to destroy the relationships with the members of the group, her destruction of the group database, and the use of lies to end the group’s ten year relationship with our meeting space, makes her ineligible to ever be employed.
I ran a customer support business for over twenty years, and I think about how bad it would be if one of my employees made attacks against my business as Corina went after this group. The heart of any business is the relationships that it has with customers, staff, and vendors. I can imagine the effects of Corina sending out a mailing to all of my customers, falsely accusing me of financial impropriety. I can then imagine her going on to alienate my staff members until they quit, as she did with long-term members of this group. I can also imagine her going on to destroy all of my databases of customers. Finally I can imagine her telling whatever lies were needed to destroy my relationship with my vendors, in this case, our relationship with our meeting space.
Now after what Corina has done, the only employment I could imagine she would still be eligible for is where she has no contact with customers, no co-workers, no information about vendors or service providers, and no access to databases. It is hard for me to imagine what kind of work that might be.