Long Past Hope But Don't Give Up

 Change the focus. Instead of arguing over who is right and who is wrong, try listening, caring, supporting - the fragile child within by acknowledging we are not in control.

There is nothing that will switch from this to an ideal world. The need now is to care, to listen and connect.

How can you connect with a voice printed in a newspaper or magazine, an ego that has a large vocabulary, a politician that is afraid of losing her seat?

We could begin with the wisdom of my yoga teacher "everyone suffers" and we cannot see what problems our adversaries are dealing with. They are gripping the bar to stay on it.

As Gabor Mate has pointed out in his books, the trauma that has caused our fragile state is beyond our recall and we are just reacting to the way it hurt us. We feel the pain but not always the source.

The everlasting problem of our lives is - how can we humanize our world? How can we welcome the future, nurture and care for it? What can we win if everyone is anxious, afraid and opinionated.

I Love My Body

 

Yes it’s true. It is not pretty.

The middle is too fat.

My neck is too thick.

My eyes are droopy.

The corners of my mouth curl down

I see this every day.

I cannot walk without support.

Slowly I tell my left leg

lift up, move forward a few inches

and it reluctanctly will do an inch.

I have a diagnosis that’s complicated.

Non pressure Hydrocephalus

There is no cure

but it sounds aristocratic, special, unusual

— it makes me feel unique

It’s not Alzeimer’s

not Parkinson’s

its the body I was born with

but worn out

resentful of my demands

after all my brain decided

it wanted a divorce from my body

and now

hurt and resentful

it tries to ignore me

but I still love it

still need it

has been with me since conception

within my mother’s womb

Thank you Mum for teaching me

to care for my body

how I dress it

how it appears to others

how it needs posture

loves to have a bath

loves to be fed and watered.

Some years ago there were gifts

and pleasures.

This body carried three children

and now

I have four grand-children.

I remember walks in the forest

my body taking me down

trails by fir and decidious trees

their perfume, their shade

their strong trunks and hidden roots

my body 

walking 

one foot in front

of the other

this body also went on a couple of cruises

down the Danube, Italy, Sweden

flew to London where it was born

It has been on protest marches

climbed mountains

swam in the River Thames

and Lake Huron

I love all those bodies 

who cared for the land before I arrived

and who will care for as long

as their bodies live.

This is the best article I have read on Alberta Oil

 

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/05/24/Only-Path-To-Change-In-Alberta/?utm

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust (With Lyrics)

Political Parties, Popular Trends, Beliefs, Come And Go

 

We have not yet invented a way to live forever, but one feeling really saddens me. The focus on power as a "proof" of success.

This, I think, is the major threat to human survival. Yes various empires have risen to power, mostly by destroying their competitors.

This has led to schools teaching students the way to success is to compete for top marks in a class of about 30 others.

I remember feeling a failure because I never had top marks in anything except a test of knowledge about music. It was not announced. I never got applause but the teacher said to me, I was the only pupil who got 100 percent, in the entire school.

This was not a time for fanfare. There were no certificates as far as I can remember, no medals or anything. What I did learn throughout school and later as an adult student in University, was - learning is a way to improve the world by using knowledge to create justice.

I continue to meet and learn from people who have achieved wisdom and status by being fair, friendly and empathic. They don't seem to want badges and applause. Why?

Would it be because living in a just world, or at least where fairness exists, is the best reward, and it is incumbent upon all of us to contribute to that goal.

The British Empire wrought terrible cruelty on the most innocent when they "discovered" Canada. The United States of America has created injustice, wars, and poverty throughout the world. The White Man creates mythologies about his achievement while denying justice to those who are not white males. And still seeks to hold power-over while living in denial for the cruelty he has caused. Even now as we see climate change wreak havoc in Northern areas.

That said, so many men who are white, have tremendous capacities to achieve social cohesion. Men who see through lies, who change their ways, no longer the egocentric conqueror, who dedicate their lives and strength to save others, like firefighters, doctors without borders.

I no longer see groups identified as Christians, Jews, Muslims, white, black, rich, poor, athletic, winners or losers. I don't see a nation that is GREAT anywhere. I see people gifted at caring, creativity, sports, politics, engineering and who are vulnerable. Men who get tired, feel taken for granted, feel sad, and sorry for the pain caused by inequality.

I see the prioritizing of power to the neglect of empathy as the cause of failure. Great nations get to a certain height in self-congratulation then fall apart, it is because their addiction to power blinds them to possible solutions.

We cannot survive on a planet we have raped to near death. Well who would want to really?

Truthout - Book Banning

 "What we are witnessing in the form of book banning by conservative politicians and parent groups is a pedagogy of fear, which is fueled by a form of right-wing populism/nationalism that resists change, that rejects the unfinished and the yet to be. The banning of books is consistent with a world that is seen as fixed, where Socratic questioning is marked as a form of danger to those who fetishize ignorance and praise anti-intellectualism. It is not just the soul of the U.S. that is at stake, as President Biden said, but also its mind."

Joe Feagin: "Historically, banning books has always been about suppressing accurate public memories and the critical probing of oppressive U.S. pasts and presents — always in the pursuit of creating greater ignorance and subservience in elite-ruled populations. A central aspect of advanced human rights civilizations is the ability to remember correctly those oppressive societal realities and to react energetically to their deep and continuing legacies in the present and future."

George Yancy: In his informative Truthout article on book banning, Chris Walker shares that, “PEN America, a nonprofit organization that promotes free expression and human rights, found that 1,648 titles have been banned by schools across the entire country. A lot of these books had LGBTQ themes, featured Black or Brown characters, or explored themes of feminism.” I am reminded of the warning issued by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana back in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I like Santayana’s use of “condemned,” as it implies the sense of being doomed, which implies destruction.

https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-we-resist-book-bans-this-banned-author-has-ideas/?utm

God, Naomi and Doug

Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein?

Wouldn't it be lovely if AI defended the good rather than the profitable? "But what does it profit a man if he has gained the world and lost himself." https://biblehub.com/mark/8-36.htm

Wouldn't it be great if the voice of God boomed over all the false information with the truth? Or the AI transmitter boomed "Er, no, that's a lie" whenever the programmers put in false beliefs. 

I asked Hey Google - what is truth? She said truth is usually held to be not false, or other misinformation.

How can the world be saved from poison, climate, hate and greed?

Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail wrote about the Republican People's Party Leader  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. "His party has fought and lost four national elections as Mr. Erdogan has changed the constitution to disempower democratic institutions, turned courts into instruments of his will, crushed protest movements, seized control of most national media and imprisoned critics and journalists."

Wouldn't it be even better if all of us wanted truth more than fame, money and sex.

Thank you to Naomi Klein and Doug Saunders for not giving up on the world. 

It's Not Justice or Conservative Values - It's Life or Death

There are various political views in a democracy, but it comes down to life or death in the end.

In authoritarian countries women are stripped of any value and the acts that are encouraged are strength and power. There is no such thing as personality or beauty. Men are given absolute power over their wives and children.

Women live in fear keeping their feelings under wrap, pretending they do not think because to admit to feelings besides gratitude to their brothers/husbands/fathers is to endure beatings and death.

When life is so simplified by power there is no other reality. Kindness is needed but not recognized or given. Life is black and white. Like the residential schools enforced on Indigenous societies. 

Usually we talk about the benefit of having power over others, making everything the same, uncomplicated, well-ordered, but when we have thirty years of records, we understand that the system kept the majority silent, obsequious.

Another way we turn away from justice is when "traditions" dictate the hierarchy. 

I remember my own family where my mother did the cleaning, cooking and caring for the babies, and my father went out to work so he could afford to pay rent and feed us.

My mother didn't talk much about life beyond survival.  I had to "get a man" in order to survive. It meant making sure I maintained my "femininity". Keeping my figure and keeping my mouth shut.  No-one ever came out with that but I learned it throughout my life. The problem was I "was just like my father". Quick to express my opinion, to talk about how the team can get along together, how we might succeed. My mother's family would often say "I will never amount to anything" if I don't tidy up, do the dishes or iron clothes.

I wandered the world thinking about why and how human societies fall to fascism, how WWI became WWII, and how we allowed the murder of 6 million Jews? How did our world dissolve into preferred ignorance, Auschwitz, and a broken Europe? An age of broken dreams, fear and hatred?

Then I wondered how we became so shallow as to fall for capitalism's pull towards isolated egos. We had faith in leaders until it was clear there were no leaders, just bidders fighting for the top spot where they could do what they want (as long as no-one knew) and everyone else would fall into place.

Then I realized we kept our feelings out of public space or we annoyed the hell out of everyone else.

Eventually we were shaken out of that dream by Donald Trump (an example of power run amok)  and Gabor Mate (an example of how the innocent have suffered when power destroys all other sensibilities) from the abuse when we let our world be with the eventual help of media and the voice of women.

Our world had become used to warriors, wars, hockey and celebrity. We could forget our fears as long as we were entertained but forgot 1984 and The Roman Empire. As long as the voice of women was sectioned away from the world into the tidy department of domestics.

But women's world has not been pretty. https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/it-took-e-jean-carroll-to-bring-him

Surely we can see how justice recognizes humanity, listens, learns and allows itself the pain to understand that suffering is not just the unintended consequence of failing societies but ultimately the end of life on this planet.

A #NatureNow message from Greta Thunberg.

Chris Hedges on Everlasting War

 

"America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another. The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”"

Chris Hedges

The Whitening of the Planet

 

In the beginning there was rock, ocean and mountain. I doubt they all arrived at once but I suspect they arrived before the White Man.

I am not a historian, or a scientist, so if anyone has greater clarity on what came first, please do comment. In fact I am muddled at which species, nations and animals came. I have heard the dinosaurs were here before two-legged creatures. 

I am aware that there were black skinned people in the place now known as UK. And we all know about the British Empire whitening the Americas and Australia. 

What do I mean by whitening?  According to Merriam-Webster to make or become white or whiter, such as skin or teeth, or white-washing the walls of a house.

What is the origin of "White Supremacy?"

"While white supremacy culture affects us all, harms us all, and is toxic to us all, it does not affect, harm, and violate us in the same way. White supremacy targets and violates BIPOC (black indigenous people of colour) people and communities with the intent to destroy them directly; white supremacy targets and violates white people with a persistent invitation to collude that will inevitably destroy their humanity." https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html 

Anyone who wants to critique my knowledge of history and politics please go ahead but I may consider it as part of the habits of white people in respected institutions.

What I am interested in, is justice for all, fairness, the availability of people to survive without owning a gun or joining a hate group.

I don't like hate but I know there are some things I hate - like pain or discomfort or hierarchy that teaches us to not feel others' pain so we may blend into a more privileged position.

For example, hardening the ability to feel so we don't cry in public, turning away from others' suffering, pretending whatever is normal is okay.

It's what I call "whitening" the world. Making normality comfortable for the majority of people in place. Although I also believe most people don't want others to be hurt and are uncomfortable hearing about all the violence in the news or in studies of history.

I was born in England and although I have lived in Canada longer than the UK I still have a bit of an English accent even though I tried to rid my opinions of a know-it-all air, and I suspect that has caused others to dislike me. I still prefer to pronounce consonants and vowels. I am sympathetic to people who don't like the British because it reminds them of the colonial administrators and teachers who ruled without sympathy. I was guilty of that when I first arrived nearly fifty years ago. 

Having confidence is not expressing superiority. It all comes down to being fully human. Feeling the pain of those who are hurt, listening with empathy, protesting against injustice even if you are not among the harmed, even if you are privileged.

Blaming is a weapon but less injurious than guns, knives and bombs. Blaming allows me to understand anger, to know others are hurting and to have a sympathetic conversation with those who are hurting. And to appreciate feelings.

The Western Hemisphere has been influenced in habit and culture by the white habits and opinions of white people. The King James Bible, philosophy, science and arts has established the norms of white history and habit and it would be childish to pretend it hasn't hurt anyone. We don't help ourselves by turning away from the harm done by the status quo. We are strong enough to feel uncomfortable and help this planet re-arrange its habits for the greater good of all.