Polluter Pays

The Leap group has a petition you can sign here. 

Along with answers to questions such as what does it mean, 
what's the problem, 
how is it currently enforced in Canada, 
how should it work, 
why can't we leave the well there, 
how much does it cost to clean up, 
how many jobs could it create?

So if you think we shouldn't bother with this or any other social activism here is what Chris Hedges writes about the social realities of today.

"The dark pathologies of the uber-rich, lionized by mass culture and mass media, have become our own. We have ingested their poison. We have been taught by the uber-rich to celebrate the bad freedoms and denigrate the good ones. Look at any Trump rally. Watch any reality television show. Examine the state of our planet."

The Truth As the Body Knows It by Lynda Archer

I know the news moves on quickly, but I am still back, as I expect some of you are also, with what occurred in the US Supreme Court a few days ago. I am sharing with you all an essay that I couldn't not write after Dr. Blasey Ford's testimony. Trigger warning for some of what I write. Feel free to share with whomever you wish. And thanks to those who have read earlier versions. You know who you are. 

Continuing from Dr. Blasey Ford’s Testimony, the Truths I Know 

I watched closely the Supreme Court events in the US and found myself becoming increasingly sad, angry and churned up with the process and the ultimate outcome. Spoiler alert. Yes, I clearly side with Dr. Ford and I will over the course of this essay endeavour to show you why. 

I am not myself a survivor of sexual assault or abuse. But at this historic moment I am reminded of all the brave women who I was honoured to treat in my capacity as a clinical psychologist and Assistant Clinical Professor within the Dept. of Psychiatry at McMaster University. As a clinician I bore witness to the words of women who were 30, 40, 70 years of age when they spoke to me, often for the first time, of their childhood sexual abuse or their sexual assaults as adults. Assaults by uncles, fathers, brothers, friends. 

This is what I want to say. This is the truth as I know it. This is what I’d like to shout to certain individuals. Twenty, thirty, fifty years later. Those women in my office remembered. Those women who were mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, wives, lawyers, doctors, artists, plumbers, Asian, African American, indigenous... women.

Those women remembered. They remembered very well.

In great detail. Every one of those women remembered ALL that was done to their bodies. They remembered the words he said to them. They remembered how he whispered and taunted, told her that she liked what he was doing. Told her how he’d kill her cat if she spoke out. She remembered that he told her no one would believe her. Those women remembered. They remembered his body odour, his cologne. They remembered where he put his fingers. They remembered the weight of his body on their own bodies. 

But what I also know to be true. All those women longed to forget. They craved that their memories of those moments would evaporate.

Those women, every one of them, all those women, wished and hoped that the memory would depart from their brains and their bodies. 

Those kind, intelligent, caring, compassionate and courageous women.

Each in their own way had worked so hard to forget. Drinking too much. Working long hours. Chastising themselves. Pretending it didn’t happen. Telling themselves it wasn’t that bad.

Denial. Repression. Dissociation. All the psychological defences were employed.
Employed for months. Years. Decades. Wonderful defenses they are. Except they only work in the short term. They don’t eradicate memory.

Those defences don’t work in the long term because those kind of memories have a life of their own. They are not to be obliterated.

They will not be erased. That’s not how traumatic memory works. The body remembers what the mind forgets. The body does not lie or deny. The body may create disguises and diversions. Depression. Anxiety. Panic disorder. Headaches. Stomach aches. Nausea. Suicide attempts. Nightmares. Sleep disturbances. PTSD. But still the memories of the abuse remain. 

The memories of the abuse remain alongside SHAME. Shame rushes in with haste the moment the abuser leaves the room. Shame fills every cell of one’s body. Shame freezes the voice. Shame tells you that you are bad, unworthy, no one will believe you.

Shame is always there after abuse. Shame is the great silencer. “Shame holds secrets like a banker’s vault. Only death does a better job.” (Tears in the Grass, Lynda Archer)

I honour all the women who have courageously spoken out. I honour all the women who might never speak out. And in the words of Maya Angelou: 

“You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Lynda A. Archer, Ph.D., MFA
Clinical Psychologist (Retired),
Assistant Clinical Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry, McMaster University (Retired)
Author: Tears in the Grass, Dundurn Press
October 16, 2018

Silicon Billionaires Prepping for the Apocalypse?

Billionaires anticipating the collapse of democracy and the nation state?  Mark O'Connell writes in a Guardian article (Why Silicon Billionaires are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand).

O'Connell quotes from a book called The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.  The title looks harmless enough, but inside it contains the recipe for what feels to me, a kind of nihilism. It preaches:

"1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.

2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.

3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity. 

4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends."

I don't know just how much influence these billionaires have, but this book reveals contempt for life as well as a hatred for democracy.   They are claiming that their money and power will help nation states collapse.  

Civil society is threatened by far right hate groups funded by dark money.

Are spills from oil pipelines accidents or intended outcomes from trans national corporations, to further the goal of weakening democracy and centralizing power? Was the postwar push to pave towns and villages with highways created to further our addiction to fossil fuels?

What will save us from this absolute destruction of all things fair and civil? What will keep fascism from destroying Canada in the way Germany was destroyed by Nazi's in the thirties. What will keep Canadians from becoming slaves to megalomaniacs? 

Well there are books like Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Klein's No Is Not Enough, imagining the many dangers of a world without morality, empathy and social responsibility. 

Are all the world's nations being destroyed to clear the way for global fascism? 

We need to be curious enough to ask the most disturbing questions when threatened by highly organized evil minds, and to re-invest in the creative community power we are capable of. 

Strategic Plan

Love everyone

Hate no-one

Move to the edge

Happy Thanksgiving

The Main Problem With My World

We are being formed and re-formed by who? The personality of cult seems to be so effective at confusing and misdirecting our beliefs and energies, that it seems intentional, planned by cunning architects.  The issue that drives all other issues is well described by George Monbiot in his recent blog - Personality Cult which you will find here https://www.monbiot.com/2018/10/05/personality-cult/ 

The Empire of Empires

In reading Common Dreams article on Arundhati Roy's take on the free market, I have imagined the following poem.

The Market

Reading the common dreams of any day

I see an image of a man, naked

starved, his skin almost transparent

his bones protruding through

and then the chair of the committee

who, needing to justify his salary

wonders what use a starving man can be?

Might the cup of rice, twenty beans 

and litre of water he consumes 

be better spent in a bank account 

somewhere 

in Switzerland or London?

If every man, woman and child

was blown to dust in a global war

except for the employable 10%

who serve their masters

might that put an end to poverty?

And might the chair

take his idea to the board

who would then advise

not to tell anyone 

not a word, a hint or question

for a hundred years

would he do as he is told?

Or would he see that starving man

every night (before he falls asleep)

for the rest of his life?