What is this about?

Listening to the CBC show today about the Convoy protests: constant honking, protesters defecating in the street, carrying Nazi flags, threatening nurses, making racist remarks, intimidating others, damaging statues and other destructive acts ... I believe this is not a protest at all but an opportunity for the people who cannot find a connection between who they are and the society they live in ... so they trash it. Their disruption is a violence that has festered in their minds for years.

I am not blaming anyone other than those who trashed whatever they could. Choosing hate as a way out will further disconnect us from one another. Society represents all of us - our apathy, our pain, our symbols, our anger. For as long as I live I owe this society my voice and my choices - even if these are not heard. I have an obligation to respond to whatever our society passes into law or habit. Learning how to do this responsibly is the challenge. Speaking, writing and acting is not broadcast but that doesn't mean my voice doesn't exist, that my values are not present.

I go back to the word "power" for all its uses and abuses. How do I use my power within this moment? How will it be ignored or reverberated from now on? What about the hurts and pain that others suffer? (If you are thinking that I pardon destructive forces this is not the case. I own the regrets for my misadventures and apologize. I try not to harm anyone or anything. I try to offer care and support to all hurting souls and see that care as the answer to our current malaise.)

We are all feeling something all the time, unless we are so dissociated from our feelings we cannot see or feel the urges within until it hurts someone else. Anger is present before - we punch someone in the face, say sorry, get charged, end up in prison or fined. I have a responsibility to own that feeling. Anger is not bad. It's a message, a signal that something is wrong.

So what is wrong? The habit that we must be subjected to the power of others because of their position of privilege. Getting elected to president or police officer may be necessary for them to do their job but who will call them out when they abuse their power? When does a position become abusive and when is it ineffective? Stories of this abuse fill up TV dramas daily.

The events over this weekend didn't begin this week. Observers will note that institutions have an obligation to act with care about the wellbeing of our society. The biggest clue of our failure has been the propaganda from centralized power, the punishment of those who interrogate without fear, the acts and histories of institutions who failed to care about the morality of their actions towards the people who are forced to live under them.

Jobs have been lost, workers have been abused, the vulnerable suffer under policies created by those who don't have to live under them. Nations of people are traumatized by unethical practices and yet the sufferers do not get "air time" in the commons. Instead its their symptoms which are noticed and ridiculed.

Eventually we all become irrelevant participants and our alienation finds more and more toxic ways to exhibit the rage. The supporters of the protest, political pundits,  broadcasters and legal experts find it difficult to respond effectively. We are living under the weight of organized, funded, corruption and helplessness.

When we are not allowed to criticize our society, officials, religions or political parties ... we find scapegoats which is the most destructive habit for human societies. After 911 US policies fell apart, after WWII Germany lost its status as an intelligent nation, after WWI the Austro Hungarian Empire fell apart, after Colonialism was subjected to further scrutiny of how the original people were uprooted and tortured. It was clear the white man was NOT more civilized.

Colonial white supremacy is a mental illness which led us to believe this was civilization. We have endured centuries of abuse and are without true culture. We have become the bullies and subsequently the bullied as the arts, music, manners and values have been subjugated to the spread sheet of money, the lizard brain of power.

Please don't silence various voices by broadcasting only the worst behaviour as the purpose of an event. Please don't be impressed by violence over wisdom.

White Coat Black Art & Freedom

I was just listening to White Coat Black on CBC radio. The news is really bleak. Dedicated nurses and other medical staff, are so stressed, squeezed and anxious, the mood at our hospitals or at least the hospital in Ontario where the interview took place, indicated getting sick is dangerous if you need medical help.

Another example of our broken society.

I wonder how can I help? By focusing on small but positive actions that I can do.

Of course it's not just our hospitals that are breaking. It's a political system where our Prime Minister, threatened by protesters must go into hiding.

This is if you have been listening to radio which is also under threat of being shut down.

The conflict seems to be because of mandatory vaccines. Laws that demand truck drivers be vaccinated before coming into Canada and those who lose their job because they cannot get vaccinated. This is also life or death when we know that having a job means having food on the table and a place to live. 

Homelessness, mental illness and starvation, prior to this pandemic were not seen as crises before this. I don't mean it wasn't an issue. I mean they didn't get quite the status in news reports.

Now there are threats of war in Ukraine because Russia is afraid of being squeezed by NATO.

I suggest the money that would go to weapons for Ukraine should be spent on hospitals and homes for the homeless.  The moral obligation in my mind is to fund the system that brings food and medicine to the world so anxiety does not drown our nation, so we do not have to put desperate people into prison. We must fix what is broken.

We humans have the ability to care and to create peaceful societies. We know that fixing something doesn't guarantee immediate relief. We know that news reports are designed to make us uncomfortable and troubled. We know we are not in control and life is often a struggle for those who have empathy and wisdom.

We must try to survive the evidence of sickness, cynicism, bullying and violence of our time and be a blessing in all the ways taken for granted.

 

Mending The Fabric

 

How can we mend a world so used to status efficiency - an organizational model that allows things to slip through, things that are no-ones specific fault.

Business must make a profit. Shareholders must make money, therefore they must receive money. All departments must show a flow chart of incoming and outgoing costs. People must be hired to do the job and fired if things don't go right, regardless of whether they are to blame or not.

Life is represented by things coming in and things going out. Anything beyond that is management and management must show their bosses are not to blame. Blame must be assigned but not to whoever is in charge.

Workers must fix what they cannot control as well as what they can. The pandemic is more than a coronavirus, it's the system. The pecking order. 

The fabric of our world is torn between our sensitivity to suffering and the habit of seeing things as collateral damage, inefficiencies, reality, the system. This is like asking us to self harm and expecting we will get over it.

When the fabric is washed and worn, washed and worn, other things happen.

You are not too sensitive - you are present.

Confessions of a Conspiracy Theorist

 

"According to conspiracy theories, the world is divided into two camps: the manipulators and the manipulated, those who know (a secret minority) and those who do not (the vast majority). Conspiracy theories have a reassuring way of explaining world events in a simplistic fashion; they serve as a comfortable shortcut to justify the complexities of society. For many people who have suffered from recurrent crises–financial losses, lethal diseases, natural disasters–it is difficult not to understand the origins of such evil. The most terrifying explanation is preferable to uncertainty and mystery." My Jewish Learning. Conspiracy Theories and the Jews.

I see a different conspiracy. Between the head and the heart. When I went to school I learned (rightly or wrongly) that to be a success (that magic word) I had to compete with everyone else and rise to the top (of wherever I was). That vague sense of privilege (minority vs. majority, leaders vs. the followers, rich vs. poor, white vs. black, beautiful vs. plain, gifted vs. ordinary, strong vs. weak) ... is how societies have been ruled. When the common people (another invented group) were gaining privilege, a happier standard of living - the ruling class appeared and the theory of the 1% who ruled business and politics through money. Many quotes spouted by right wing thinkers suggested "we are isolated units competing for the most of what each of us wants".

So I kept learning how to be "a success" and found the "competing" was fraught and did not bring out the best in me. Eventually I learned that loving and being loved engaged the heart instead of the head and I felt more at home on this planet.

Then the head had to find words to explain this, living in a society divided by dreamers and leaders. Words and ideas kept inserting themselves on my body, in my mind, struggling to find "the truth". 

What I could not see was my "brokenness", trying to fit in a world that valued things more than life. Reading a little bit of philosophy, writing a little bit of poetry. Naming the problem, finding the bad guys, isolating myself from others. Weeping over the gigantic mess we have left this planet in, reading endless articles on theories. Reading the plight of our first nations harmed by colonization, the violence against African Canadians and Americans, gender violence, domestic violence ... war, violence, cruelty, killing, torture, on and on and on.

When I blogged that love is the only way out I got persistent messages questioning what that is. How do we know love is not just another thing to make the ego feel better?

I have a strategic plan which I often fail to follow: Love everyone. Hate no-one. Move to the edge. 

Useful Grockle

When you just want to win 

using determination and rage

but you don't know what it is

you want to win

just that 

you're winning

you may become a bully

to wield power over something 

to give your ego a boost 

without a new car

clothes or perfume

you become 

a useful grockle to fascists 

who know how 

to make life redundant 

on their playing field

To love life, the life of those who depend on you

those expelled from circles of celebration

those who care, create stories

about home and shelter

those who weep for humanity

who give dignity to all

it’s time consuming

but it doesn't march to death camps

All Will Be Well -- Meg Barnhouse with Lyrics

I Love You George Monbiot

 

"No wonder journalists have slated it. They’ve produced a hundred excuses not to watch the climate breakdown satire Don’t Look Up: it’s “blunt”, it’s “shrill”, it’s “smug”. But they will not name the real problem: it’s about them. The movie is, in my view, a powerful demolition of the grotesque failures of public life. And the sector whose failures are most brutally exposed is the media." Losing it. George Monbiot.

You say all the right things, you break down on TV, you do your research and you write well. 

This article reveals that you are human, not a trained AI robot. 

Please read this. Please wake up. Just because the world is broken doesn't mean there is nothing we can do.

The New Year

 

Brings hope that we are free of the problems that last year brought. Emotionally it is a breather and realistically it encourages me to look forward and to be more disciplined in my health care.

I wish for all a new window for planning a better world, not based on materialism but enabling the most vulnerable to find comfort, a home and a community.