Wednesday 26 December 2012

Idle No More

Idle No More Mission
Idle No More calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth. On December 10th,  Indigenous people and allies stood in solidarity across Canada to assert Indigenous  sovereignty and begin the work towards sustainable, renewable development. All  people will be affected by the continued damage to the land and water and we welcome Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies to join in creating healthy sustainable communities. We encourage youth to become engaged in this movement as you are the leaders of our future. There have always been individuals and groups who have been working towards these goals – Idle No More seeks to create solidarity and further support these goals. We recognize that there may be backlash, and encourage people to stay strong and united in spirit.



Throughout centuries of invasion, war, racial supremacy and exploitation, we have come to a cliff where we must ask ourselves what we want for the future.  A livable society where we learn how to live creatively and inclusively, or a society of fear, dread and a slow lingering death.  

Idle No More, calls for a return to conscience, to nature and justice.  Chief Theresa Spence is putting her life on the line, so that we might wake up, pay attention to the true cost of rapacious capitalism and blind consumerism. The First Nations are teaching us to care about our home, this planet and its peoples.




Saturday 22 December 2012

The Gun - a failed symbol of power

The power of America since the second world war is indisputable. Achieved through weapons, propaganda, and money, this power is as oppressive to the people who wield it as it is towards the designated enemy.

When a young gunman enters Sandy Hook Elementary School and kills twenty children, the world grieves.  We struggle to find answers to questions, too big to grasp.

But the issue is larger than guns themselves. It is what they represent in our psychology. The phallic symbol representing male fertility has been worshiped in various ways for centuries.  Since we have learned that fertility requires more than one member, we are required to understand the complexity of nature.  So effective, healthy masculinity is no longer served by the worship of a phallus any more than femininity is represented by a uterus.  Yet phallic symbols exist everywhere in images of power.

Once power was idealized as a heavenly distant god, a monarch, a ruler or military might, it separated its true nature from the power of life.  Nature, life, became the object to conquer, to dominate, to exploit. Our sexuality became a political tool, and the feminine symbol of cycles, circles, and vessels were dropped, while the phallus was made immortal by metal. Complexity, emotion and human nature was seen as weak. A man was required not just to be courageous in defending his tribe but by immortalizing himself as part of an army, a soldier.  He had to become super-human as being human was not good enough. Later he became a sword, a gun, a bomb, an aircraft. Or a minister to the divine weapon interpreting the universe through a harsh patriarchal ruler, and was required to wipe out the realities of existence, the doubts, the humanity, through staunch doctrines that require unquestioning obedience.

I am not saying this is God.  I am not attempting to explain God, but to separate divine power from the doctrines that have ruled our societies for centuries:  the corruption of the universe to serve an ideology. So the gun as the ultimate phallic symbol destroys life at its spiritual base first and then destroys fertility, whether it be new life or creativity.

The world's great religions began with men who changed their world through insight and courage and who  triumphed over mortality through resurrection into the afterlife. They mostly preached a reverence for life, not that man should transcend it. Their messages have been corrupted too, in order to fit the ruling ideology.

Men who are born here are not gods, just as women are not goddesses. We are human and mortal. We can be harmed by war, famine, climate change, abuse, torture and broken hearts. Wealth or fame does not nullify our existence. Neither does it exalt it.

We have, for the most part, gotten over the phallic symbol.  Guns do not fertilize. They intimidate. They turn men into robots. They kill.  But mostly they kill creativity, sensitivity, empathy, reason, exploration, love, joy.  They render us powerless to be who we are or could be.  They render life redundant.

But life contains confusion, pain, sorrow.  We are vulnerable to the emotional weather this brings and if we don't receive the care we need when despair falls heavy around us, we can't process it.  Certainly not in a culture that values things more than life, that preaches we are worth the sum of our gadgets and diplomas, and are required to prove ourselves not just with an inventory of these things, but with more than everyone else.  This breeds despair and contempt for our own lives and the lives of children and all those who have less power than we at any given moment. Reason tells us that we can't all be winners. And so we can't be comforted by our mothers, fathers, siblings and teachers.

It's this despair that rots our culture and makes some of our brothers so alienated they seek validation in guns. In this delusional state we shall hasten our own demise, and ultimately the womb we call the universe shall carry on without us.

Sunday 16 December 2012

A Message from Pablo Casals




“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.” - Pablo Casals

Monday 10 December 2012

For Word Warriors

Write don't shoot.

Write your concerns about the future of Canada, to news outlet editors.

Murray Dobbin has published a list of emails to editors across the nation.

Other than filling up the inbox's of busy editors it will not damage the environment.  It will not cost anything other than some of your time.



Saturday 8 December 2012

The Power of Public Opinion


David Suzuki informs us that almost "all species that have existed  are estimated to have gone extinct within an average of a few million years." We are an infant species, "a mere 150,000 years old" who have adapted and survived deserts, tundra, rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges. Furthermore, "we’ve accelerated the rate of cultural evolution far beyond the speed of biological or genetic change."

Can we survive a million years? Will we be around in a few million or the next hundred years?

George Monbiot warns that "Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address."  By the late 1980's, it became clear that our world "was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine" as it also became clear that climate change was man made.  This political doctrine makes conversations about planetary health obsolete. It claims only profit and greed counts in ways that would be morally wrong even to elementary school children.

The news is not so much the news but an inventory of violence, and you would think that Socrates, Jung or Arendt had never existed. An alien visitor would think that there is no such thing as intelligence, reflection or wisdom. They might suspect that mothers never loved their children and had tossed them out of their cribs to the machines of war before they could speak.

What so many crises suggest, is that we are ruled by a nameless monster whose tentacles have spread throughout earth's surface and our neural substrate.

Some call this monster plutocracy, or capitalism,  or hegemony, or institutionalized religion. I would name it media.

Media according to the dictionary is "the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely."  It is filled with intelligent design and people who are well meaning. But it is powered one way - from a wealthy elite down to the living rooms of the common people. It behaves as though we are all involved in what spins out, and represents our best interests, but it cleverly omits most, if not all, of the diversity among its citizens.

There still exists outlets that inform, such as CBC radio, Knowledge, TVO and PBS. There are online outlets that give contextualized reports such as StraightGoods, TruthDig, Rabble, and others. But all of these are funded by the people who care about civil society. Their budgets are minute in comparison with the mainstream media who have learned how to create entertainment instead of truth, for profit rather than humanity.

Gandhi believed in a truth force just as many activists do, who have dedicated their lives to creating change. That these activities don't get broadcast frequently is really a testimony to their authenticity.  After all you don't see million dollar advertising campaigns for needs, only to create new "needs".

So signs of public opinion can be found, but in smaller print, in smaller presses and in community halls. Sometimes they reach places of influence.

Joe Oliver, at the Canada Energy Summit hosted by the Economic Club of Canada, said  “If we don’t get people on side, we don’t get the social licence — politics often follows opinion — and so we could well get a positive regulatory conclusion from the joint panel that is looking at the Northern Gateway, but if the population is not on side, there is a big problem”.

Susan McCaslin, an award winning poet, organized a protest by hanging poems on trees in McLellan Forest east of Fort Langley, to protect the land from being sold to developers. She got over 200 poems and coverage in a national newspaper.

There are many other stories like this. Many activists working for the greater good who use their powers of logic, foresight, compassion and communication.  They stand on the side of a future for our grand-children that includes rich and poor, not just an elite.

Whether we survive for the next hundred or million years depends on this kind of commitment.

A second chance for humanity

 The Biblical story of Adam and Eve has been used to support male dominance over female.  Eve is the temptress who is curious even though &q...