Broadbent Institute: The Deterioration of Education in Ontario.

"Premier Doug Ford marked his first year in government by cancelling the much needed update to the health and education curriculum, shirking on commitments to reconciliation, increasing class sizes, and mandating four (now two) credits of e-learning, all of which will trigger the loss of thousands of teaching jobs and the proximity of students to caring adults." Broadbent Institute.

Read more here: https://www.broadbentinstitute.ca

The Disease that Threatens the Survival of Our Planet

"I’ve never been a member of any political party, and have no party loyalties. I know the Labour Party is imperfect. But what I see is a group of people genuinely seeking to solve our massive problems – environmental, political, economic, medical and social – rather than appeasing press barons and queueing at the notorious revolving door between politics and money-making." Monbiot. Power Failure.


The problem with our planet, as I see it, is that species, so clever, manipulative, greedy and self-congratulating that it is willing to corrupt and destroy the fragile mind of all, for the sake of their own interest. 

What is Loving Kindness?

Buddhists teach that everyone suffers. Even those who appear to be cold behind their sense of wealth and superiority. Even those who work in offices where they are expected to police the law. Even those who are hired to torture prisoners.

Given power in civil society is an added stress and loving kindness makes it a kind of torture in itself.  For example, a surgeon or medical doctor learns what causes pain in his or her patients. A prison guard is expected to keep people in their cages. A drug dealer sells a different kind of prison to his customers. Strategists plan the destruction and killing of people they haven't met.

When you look at it deeply, politics and business demands a separation from emotion, sympathy, compassion — for the sake of profit. We call it rationality. Winning the profit margin means selfishly planning your days around meeting your goal, getting more, convincing others to give you what you want, paying attention to how you look, what you wear, how you sound and smell. 

According to brain development a crocodile doesn't have the capacity to feel pity towards the food it eats as it rips the flesh of its meal. But humans are born with the capacity to consider the pain of a fish with a hook through its face. 

Empathy comes early in the life of a human unless it is shut out — consciously or unconsciously. Any animal that gives birth must care for its young by caring what happens to it and is given the "gift of stress" along with brain development.

In civilization, social practices either nurture the awareness of empathy or cut it off. A society run by those who have no connection to caring for others, tends to design its business to separate us from our natural empathic brain signals. 

Big business (not small proprietor owned storefronts), including politics, is run mostly by those who have succeeded or who never developed the capacity to feel connection to another, to feel their pain, or to observe the face of grief.  They are called psychopaths or sociopaths. Their brains are wired to bypass concerns or feelings for others.

What pain does it cause a CEO to cut thousands of jobs in the country they live, in order to plan more profit, and to keep doing it because it's his or her job to do that? When does the signalling for success get turned off?

Examples of dead fascists like Stalin and Hitler reveal millions of deaths are not enough to satisfy. Slave owners willingly organized public displays of brutality to make their point.

Business demands that its practitioners cut off their senses if the only thing that registers, the only feedback, is a number on the bottom line. Pressure wipes out whatever your brain measures in order to take it back to the reptile. 

You cannot see or feel what you're doing to the planet, to your children, to your pets, or even your property — you must consistently keep your mind occupied on that fraction of who you are in order to play the game. Act faster, be more cruel, more alienated, lonely and ultimately swallow that learned contempt on yourself as you do to all life.

At what point would you feel the loving kindness you once possessed? How far back would you have to go to call on that? 

Loving kindness may be an ethic discussed in various religions or beliefs, but it's part of human capacity and could save our lives.

Here's one reason why psychopaths dominate positions of power

"The justification for early boarding (school) is based on a massive but common misconception. Because physical hardship in childhood makes you physically tough, the founders of the system believed that emotional hardship must make you emotionally tough. It does the opposite. It causes psychological damage that only years of love and therapy can later repair. But if there are two things that being sent to boarding school teach you, they are that love cannot be trusted, and that you should never admit to needing help." Monbiot. The Unlearning.

Imperialism and the ruling elite have created humans who can bully while smiling.  Children learn from an early age that they are responsible for anything bad that might happen to them and they see victims as weak and stupid.

Conversations around social justice, rather than being seriously discussed, elicit the "boohoo" from others who have not been given the means to analyze their own views, who are fixed on the notion that becoming a success is a material financial thing. 

Gabor Maté has spent his life dedicated to understanding the root causes of addiction which destroys so many lives.  His study has indicated that trauma is silenced, unacknowledged among families and support systems.  

“With rising inequality and all the other problems there are right now,” he says, “people are having to question how they live their lives.”

We all have brains wired for pleasure, for happiness, but trauma broke the narrative and so we look for simple explanations.  

Women and men are trying to be what they have been told is best. Women, soft pliable and sexy, and men tough, smart and unbreakable. Capitalism has done a thorough job of presenting fantasy "heroes" to emulate.  Those who rise to the top are still that little child crying in the corner afraid of what might happen next. 

Our larger society avoids serious discussion about what we need and how we can achieve it. Too afraid to change  we hurl ourselves towards a fate built on hate and fear. 

“Because it takes a lot of work to wake up as a human being, and it’s a lot easier to stay asleep than to wake up.”  

Remembrance Day 2019

The celebrity who accused nameless immigrants for not wearing a poppy is not just a  bigoted curmudgeon. He is a trope puppet to keep men in line through a generalized accusation.

I am an immigrant who came to Canada from England in the sixties, made it my home, got married, had children, became a Canadian citizen, and do not wear a poppy.  I make a donation to  the poppy box but do not take a poppy.

The reason is a practical one — if I put a poppy on my jacket it falls off and I would rather leave it in the tray.

When I think of Remembrance Day I think of my grandfather, John Jackson, my grandmother, Rachel, her first and only son who was killed in his pram while he slept, my mother's first husband, and my half sister who never met her father. I think of all the families I know who lost loved ones in WW1 and WW2.

I think of the courage of young military personnel who join the forces, who mount the discipline and carry through their duty.

Then I think of the rulers who plan the strategies and the rulers who plan the social systems that lead to conflict.

As much as I would like to think with clarity about the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys' I come away feeling uncertain and unsure.  War demands that we all become loyal to our tribe regardless of whether our 'leaders' have the common good at heart or not.

I am remembering without wearing a poppy. A poppy does not make you loyal. It is a symbol of remembering which is an emotional state of our species. 

I am also remembering the history that celebrates killing and being killed. And most of all I am remembering the propaganda that keeps us all divided. I am remembering my life in England where we were well trained by our culture to judge others. For their gender, their class, their good manners, the colour of their skin, their nationality and their language. I was part of that spitfire 'we' spouting beliefs as though they were laws, and also part of that group who wanted desperately to be accepted by others. I tried hard to do, say and think 'the right thing'.

So I would suggest that you don't have to wear a poppy or make a public display of remembering. You have to decide how you will remember war, those who were sent to war and those who create war. There are no rewards or outward signs that you are doing this, but it would help to save your world from unthinking violence caused by unreasonable manipulation.

What does it mean?

What does it mean to be marginalized

 illegal, homeless, a blight on the landscape?

What does it mean when we risk polluting 

our water and food source for the economy?

What does it mean to destroy the air

we need to breathe?

What will our future be if we are willing

to sacrifice our home for quick solutions?

What if this planet is ruled by extortionists 

who silenced these questions

so that our taxes can pay even more tomorrow 

and the next day until there is nothing left

but solid rock glowing in a distant universe?

What does it mean when we are offended 

by people who have nowhere to wash

yet welcome those who hold all life as ransom

for the glory of their personal ego?

13 years of brain pickings by Maria Popova

13 Life Lessons - a healing thought for those of us who were born idealists who have been criticized, lambasted and dismissed.  This is a very helpful post. Thank you to Daily Good for posting it. My favourite lesson is this: 

"Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society."

Thank you Maria Popova.

13 years of brain pickings by Maria Popova

Happy Hundredth Birthday Dad

Victor Arthur Leonard Mead


November 2nd, 1919
Dad: you were born in London, England.
You died suddenly before your 60th birthday.
Wherever your spirit rests I hope there are grassy hills, still lakes and an audience for your humour.

With love, your daughter, Janet

New Goddesses

Brene Brown talked of the power of vulnerability. She is a researcher-storyteller and I really appreciate the walk back to my humanity as I listen to her TED-talk. 

Jody Wilson Raybould, the truth-teller publicly scolded for not obeying the SNC Lavallin directive (I know it was neo-liberal capitalism, if not Trudeau who was to blame, but the elephant in all the rooms are special relationships between political parties and big business).  She recently got elected as an independent after being tossed from the Liberal Party.  This is no small feat and indicates her power of focus and dedication to her beliefs.

Christine Blasey Ford who is in hiding since accusing Kavanaugh and his friend of rape when she was 17, has illustrated what happens to women if they report sexual assault against a powerful man. She is a hero because her story illustrates powerfully what happens when power is centralized and victims have no recourse to justice, regardless of how educated they are.

They are not so new but one day we will see these women for the heroes they are. Either that or our society will silence women forever in a world such as The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood - another candidate for Goddess status.

We the people are very ready for the sacred servant who challenges our habits and belief, as we always have been just before fascism marches over the land with its contempt for integrity.