Naked Harry

It's easy to believe you can trust your friends when you've had a drink and you're all having a good time. Easy to believe they share your sense of ethics and would not sell their pictures to the sleaziest press, even if you are naked.

The frog in this rose is also naked and wouldn't mind at all if the gardener uploaded this image to a blog, as long as owls and raccoons can't see him. So why do we get excited over a prince being naked? Or rather, how many of us besides the press, are excited?

The man is 27, good looking and rich.  He loves fun. The sight of a healthy naked body doesn't hurt anyone else, as long as its among a group of consenting adults. War, on the other hand, hurts millions.

Perhaps there is a Freudian statement about getting naked. Perhaps we all secretly long to reveal who we are, to be uncovered, undressed, natural. Perhaps Harry feels he is entitled to be himself, a regular guy, in the privacy of a rented room.

I have three adult children who have probably done things I will never know about, because they had a few drinks and felt safe and free for an evening or two.  If I was shown pictures of them naked and having fun, some years ago or even yesterday, I doubt I would lose any sleep over it.  However if they were brandishing a gun I would be very alarmed.

Publishing pictures on the front page of a newspaper does do harm because that is the intention: to humiliate and exploit. This story is about opportunism, to gain (money, superiority, smugness) at another's expense. All those who participate in promoting this image should be ashamed (except Hadley Freeman whose narrative, embedded within the context of the celebrity industrial complex, indicates the part we all play when we purchase the gossip), while so many other stories cry out to be told.  Stories such as children going hungry and governments slashing vital programs to the  most vulnerable. Interrogations of structural violence and injustice.

But then look at me grabbing a few crumbs of righteousness by writing this post even though I know finger wagging never works with anyone over the age of seven.

The Age of Integrity

What has become very clear to all who are interested in global issues, revealed through mainstream and social media, is the absence of true leadership.  The ways in which absolute power corrupts absolutely are being revealed day by day. The young are more affected by this because they  weigh the meaning of their lives with what they observe from the outside.

Because the power of rulers is mostly about control and intimidation, the world for them is not a place of texture and diversity. Everything must be managed and dominated.  Even those who instill systems of justice live under the constant threat of being dethroned. The rulers who stay in power longer, it seems, are those who have behind them the military, the media, other superpowers, and the determination to do whatever they must to stay in power, including killing their citizens.

War may appear to be about land and resources, but is, if we look deeper, about something else. It is about controlling the imagination and creativity of human nature.  It is about ideologies that keep people in fear and doubt about their own power. There must be war to interrupt the capacity for people to organize and gain knowledge. Hatred and fear of femininity, of homosexuality, of the poor, of social justice, is inflamed in order to keep us suspicious of our nature - the means to be fully engaged humans.

The war is against humanity, the environment, and nature. The war is against the future, against hope, against love and compassion, and against the capacity we all possess to change our world.

If we fail to find the integrity to create justice in our communities, to fight injustice, then we shall feel Orwell's 1984, and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, very intimately.  We shall live in the trenches of WWI, in Sarajevo, in Syria and all the other places of siege.

Integrity is not a political party or a club.  It requires our conscience to question our representatives, those given positional power, our community, our church, and our selves. It requires mindfulness, diligence, and most of all - insight.

There are no instructions on how to lead a life of integrity.  Our friends and family will not applaud. The subject won't be made into a Hollywood blockbuster. There will be no Nobel prizes for those who build the world for the good of all. (Nobel winners such as the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela are two who have been recognized but most of the integral work is done by millions who are never recognized.) It will go unnoticed by mass media - in fact, blacked out, just as any sign of civil engagement is intentionally censored there. All we have is our determination to seek and act upon truth, to do what we believe is right, and to live in love and compassion.

However, if this age of integrity doesn't come to pass in thought and action, life will not be worth living.

I think the most important thing to remember though - is that the terror and destruction our world has endured is not accidental.  It is not simply through ignorance and the failure of humanity to live in peace. It is the strategy of abusive power to keep the masses powerless through chaos and violence.

The point is not to kill those who have power but to replace their power with our own power - that which loves our grand-children, and is integral to the survival of life on this planet.

Design the Future Based on the Truths that Nurture Us

Yesterday’s shooting at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin is only 16 days after the shooting in Aurora at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie.

Whether you believe this is part of an elitist conspiracy to break down civil society by brainwashing unstable men, or whether America is being punished by God for allowing liberal views, or that the invisible hand  (the economy) is creating despair – one thing is certain – the  violence that has been glorified for the colonization of other countries and the exploitation of the masses for the profit of a few, has been brought home. No-one is spared.  No place is safe. No prayers or ideology will fix this until most of the people on this planet realize we are all in this together.

Chris Hedges notes this day in 1945 when “the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished”.  This was the bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki three days later. Hedges calls it “an act of mass annihilation” when the Japanese were about to surrender.

War does not bring peace, not a better standard of living for the masses, or an example for establishing workable communities – what it does achieve is social and cultural alienation.

I see the age in which we live (modern age) as being an age that succeeded in separating  power  from life.  Every century has defined and re-defined the war between a reverence for and the degradation of life.

We live in a time where power has been so centralized and violence so internalized that the distinctions between war and peace, duty and civility, wealth and poverty, truth and lies, have no meaning in the public sphere at all. We are the victims of our nations’ foreign policies.  We live in the theatre of other powers’ fantasies.

What can we do to defend life? 

First we must organize on the principles of a life sustaining power-from-within.  This means we design the future based on the truths that have nurtured our lives.  Love, support, health, nutrition, rest and freedom from violence. It’s not rocket science, it’s not fireworks and it’s not entertainment.  But we are the stewards of that which we value.

We could give up the notion of power over others, of superiority, and consumerism. We have no need to compare ourselves with others or to compete – these are instruments of propaganda to alienate us from our own worth.

The life we want is the life we make, and we are on the bridge of the next age.