Only One Thing Matters To The Oligarchy

"It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery — and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth." Chris Hedges. The One-Choice Election

Later in the article Hedges writes a list of what should be done. There are choices for humanity. Try to survive. Help others survive. Create places that acknowledge the various gifts of people who have had their self esteem shorn by the no-choice theory.

This is not a to-do list but a non-duality of purpose beginning with the question: to what do I wish to dedicate my life?

Requiem for a miracle planet

"Who are those who would sacrifice us on the altar of global capitalism? How did they amass the power to deny us a voice, to insist that the earth is an inert commodity they have a right to exploit until the ecosystem that sustains life collapses and the human species, along with most other species, becomes extinct?" Chris Hedges, The Age of Radical Evil, Truthdig

By some miracle this planet is made of more than rock. We have oceans, soil, trees, sun and rain. We take this for granted but without this climate our ancestors would not have survived. However, we did. It was never without pain or conflict—now we are ruled by values that seem to have transcended life altogether. Money and inequality is about to make us all redundant.

White men and women have been complicit in the colonization of this planet from the beginning of radicalized evil:  to conquer other nations for the purpose of capturing resources, including slaves, then building a global structure of rape. Raping humanity, raping the oceans, raping the land, the air — of all dignity while creating a new god.

The very least we can do is to admit the full purpose of racism is to dehumanize us all so we can dismiss the violence and carry on playing.

Unfortunately racism is not enough to keep the oligarchs unfettered by social justice and common decency, so hate groups must be whipped up by fake news paid for by "anonymous" sources.

The earth is pretty much a dump for the system drunk on greed. Factories of ideology from farms to cities, economics to education, philosophy to politics, progress as technology and weapons, presenting "the real world" of healing as naive.

Radical evil has turned our species into zombies ready to lap up the latest novelty to keep us from getting depressed by the state of our world.

The question is — will you keep investing in, "isolated units competing for the most of what each of us wants?" Are you ready to see society as a means to support the dignity of your life?

Chris Hedges on the useful propaganda of war

"Military studies have determined that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of those who survive will have become psychiatric casualties. The common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities." 

Chris Hedges, Peter Jackson's Cartoon War, Truthdig. 


An excellent piece, as always from Hedges. Worth reading and re-reading.

This is how capitalism managed to turn humanity away from its sensitive intelligence, toward the shallow workforce for profit - the man-made god.

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."

Open Letter to All Leaders

Dear Leaders please be aware of the war we are waging, between profit and sustainable life.  

"The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare, slavery, genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago, and saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. Chris Hedges, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth. 

Then there is this report by Guy Dauncey: BC's Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response and Twelve Solutions We Really Need: 

1. 100% Renewable Energy by 2040, 
2. 95% Green House Gas Reduction by 2040, 
3. Legally mandated annual carbon budgeting,  
4. Province wide public engagement, 
5. Stand firm against the pipeline, 
6. All new cars to be EV's by 2015, 
7. Massive support for urban cycling, 
8. Huge expansion of Transit, 
9. All new buildings to be zero carbon by 2024, 
10. Building energy labelling, 
11. No oil-heated building by 2025, 
12. Climate test for all new industrial projects, and zero carbon by 2040.

So, just in case you are wondering, like I am, why our powerful interests wish to keep sending us back to the end of the Roman Empire with its brutality and toxic machismo - ask yourself where has even one of these things been achieved or is seriously attempted? None?  Then ask yourself what is the common theme in the solutions to save the planet.

Life perhaps?  Has it come to this, that ruling powers are afraid of life, love and all the energies and information that shows a reverence for life? Does it look as though any political candidate who wants to save our world is going to be first tossed out by a group sabotage?

The Coming Collapse by Chris Hedges

Echonomix

Hedges is a journalist who has refused to soften his message. His world view is dire and he crunches all the horrors he has seen into one tidy paragraph:

"All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions."

Read the article here: Commondreams. Chris Hedges. The Coming Collapse

The Ever Growing Global Tapeworm

"The corporate elites, which have seized control of ruling institutions including the government and destroyed labor unions, are re-establishing the inhumane  conditions that characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries." Chris Hedges, The Gig Economy is the New Term for Serfdom.

At first we celebrated social media thinking it was a means to express the views and values of the people, but now we know how this too has been corrupted by money. Confronting our own complicity we wonder if we should exit Facebook. Rebecca Solnit advises "Use them. Try not to let them use you. Remember to disable Platform, which is how they pimp your data, use Adblock and Ghostery, don't click on the ads, and say as many bad things about FB as you can on their platform (and cheer their stock crashing). The time may come when we can say goodbye to a destructive and amoral corporation without saying goodbye to each other."

"Many users are waking up to the fact that what they don’t know can hurt both them and the democracy they take for granted, and now want to limit the exposure of their data to Facebook." writes Irwin Oostindie in the Tyee. "People are increasingly recognizing that data gathered by third party apps was used to help prepare targeted fake news to help elect Donald Trump and promote Brexit."

I am reminded here that the cheapest "deal" is often something we shall pay for down the road, as the ever growing global tapeworm of capitalism grows bigger, crushing the life it exploits.

Where is all this heading? It depends on what we are willing to stand up for. If conversations on social justice bore us, then we shall soon be the new refugees.

Ultimately it will not be how much money we have to bolster our positions, it will be the values we honour and build.

What Does Life Want From Me?

 Reading Rabbi Jonathan Sacks "Judaism's Life Changing Ideas" I was inspired to ask a question that he posed, through the work of Viktor Frankl who survived Auschwitz and who turned his experiences there to create a new form of psychotherapy based on man's search for meaning.

"His view was that we should never ask, “What do I want from life?” but always, “What does life want from me?”"

Woman's and Man's search for meaning  is upstaged by family needs. The task of caring for one another is really what life most wants from us all even though it is not mentioned in the main cultural arguments.

The shallow commerce of our hyped up consumer society is best revealed in Chris Hedges article "Faces of Pain, Faces of Hope.

"Popular culture celebrates those who wallow in power, wealth and self-obsession and perpetuates the lie that if you work hard and are clever you too can become a “success,” perhaps landing on “American Idol” or “Shark Tank.” ... The vast disparity between the glittering world that people watch and the bleak world they inhabit creates a collective schizophrenia that manifests itself in our diseases of despair—suicides, addictions, mass shootings, hate crimes and depression. Our oppressors have skillfully acculturated us to blame ourselves for our oppression."

What would this world want from me? Hope for a better world?

Hedges writes "Hope means walking away from the illusion that you will be the next Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian." 

Most of us who are older than 40 have already learned this. So I know that life does not want  another self-absorbed  "famous" ego. I know the celebrity cult is as man made as Halloween Candy. I have learned that "the maniacal creation of a persona" is more than just irrelevant - it is toxic. Like all the other devices that tell us we are powerless and that meaning can only come through a certain kind of power.

Reading Hedges reveals to me the despotic power of capitalism gives no value to your life or mine.

Reading Sacks reminds me that I have work to do for the sake of life and that loving life, nurturing the wounded, listening to the lost, expressing gratitude for those who have cared for me - is the only thing worth living for. 

Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" reminds me that the only power I have is one flight.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

The Great Flood

How can we clean up a flood or restore our community after a fire? These questions are great metaphors for the survival of civilizations. 

We are flooded with all the reminders of our mortality in these crises, even if we are not directly affected by them. 

When fires burn our homes, farms, flow charts and plans, how will democracy or capitalism rebuild our world? 

The future requires more than a lego set or blueprint. It requires  a Restoration story we can all relate to, says George Monbiot.

Chris Hedges notes in his article "The Great Flood"  that civilizations in fits of despair and anger  "have unfailingly squandered their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris." 

The ruins of great empires litter the earth, says Hedges, as corrupt leaders  "driven by greed and hedonism, retreated into privileged compounds ... and hoarded wealth as their populations endured mounting misery and poverty."

Channeling anger into wars, the people are without knowledge because the wisdom they learned from a civil society don't apply. The worse things get, Hedges reminds, the more we retreat into magical thinking.  

We tell ourselves through social narrative that we have no agency. Everything is tied to the system which controls and punishes us if we don't believe their ideology. And  those who offer new stories are often burned at the stake or nailed to a cross, then worshipped as martyrs and messiahs after they die.

George Monbiot in his blog - tells us, what we need is not just facts, science and knowledge, but a cohesive narrative, where our agency is required. Where we are needed.


"The narrative we build has to be simple and intelligible. If it is to transform our politics, it should appeal to as many people as possible, crossing traditional political lines. It should resonate with deep needs and desires. It should explain the mess we are in and means by which we might escape it. And, because there is nothing to be gained from spreading falsehoods, it must be firmly grounded in reality."

For clarity I have itemized the instructions embedded in this paragraph:

1. transform our politics to include humanity and not just economics
2. appeal to as many people as possible, crossing traditional political lines
3. create the story to resonate with deep needs and desires
4. explain the mess we are in and means by which we might escape it
5. ground it firmly in reality.

Yes it is a tall order, but without long term intentions we are soon pushed off the road. 

We Don't Want Prosperity or Justice

Usually, all it takes is 30-40% of the population to determine the outcomes of our democracy. Less than half the population who have  chosen gadgets and toys above clean water, clean air, or good health. 40% who are not interested in equality, because, if they look closely at their preferences,  what they (we) want is superiority.

Superiority is a fantasy of being part of a tribe, race or nation that is wealthier, more intelligent, of good breeding, who are entitled to control others.

Political parties who claim to want equality have to be so careful how they phrase that. The word itself diminishes the hope of "getting ahead", "being on top", "control". Equality is a threat to the  massaged ego looking for any opportunity to win. How can anyone or anything prove itself in a world that values all?

There are many literary references to this ego. Othello, Death of a Salesman, and countless TV dramas.  George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, among many others, have offered the cautionary tale. Public intellectuals and journalists such as Chris Hedges, Noam Chomski, Naomi Klein, write about the cost of inequality, elitism and abuse of power.

Yet back in the early sixties Tommy Douglas managed to get medicare for the Canadian public, and CBC managed to broadcast the voices of ordinary people across Canada.  This was not too long after WWII where the call for equality and social justice was seen as a way to avoid the horrors of fascism that feeds off the vulnerable isolated people, in a world that values power more than justice and sustainability.

All that we have is under threat because of the ambitions of men and the rising gap between haves and have-nots. The battle is between the personal fantasies of our elite and the masses who have been robbed.

Trump's ability to win an election was because he had money, contacts, and a lack of conscience as he used every trick to divide and conquer the masses who are competing for survival.

To the ego that is so badly damaged through poverty, abuse and neglect, this feels like somebody will fix it all. This is what got Hitler elected and the result was death, torture and the destruction of an entire continent. The cost was millions of lives, herculean battles against despair, humility and cooperation.

Here we are facing this threat again and people can't be reached through facts, reason, justice or debate. As we look upon another election that threatens to return more power to large corporations, in a business climate that shows no conscience, willing to destroy the planet for the sake of profit, it appears as though we are ready to hand the reins again to the exclusive promise of jobs and the economy.

"Jobs and economy" has now moved away from living wages and healthy families, and is now shorthand for selling all of creation to the bottom line, sacrificing humanity to the tricksters of greed. We shall get sick in body and mind, angry and alienated from family and neighbours, in our pursuit of wealth.  We shall be starved of joy and peace, in a continual state of homelessness where violence and crime destabilize police forces, health care and education. And those human values dismissed as naive while politicians and business people think like lizards to compete for your vote.

How can we reach the emotions and integrity of those for whom politics is either an entertainment, irrelevant or a mystery?  How can we get the disenfranchised to care about what is really happening so they can see how their vulnerability is played against them?

For justice to find its voice, we have to care enough to read against ourselves. To find a way of resisting against the swamp like arguments and resurrect hope, compassion and cooperation for the greater good.

If I Can't Rule the World I Shall Destroy It

This is the cry of the authoritarian narcissist, and those who support him or her. It's a cry of despair from the minds of those who believed that reason and justice ruled the world and now realizing it's the opposite, feel betrayed but cannot see their part in it. In denial and without humility they sink into the dark hole of revenge. 

The trouble is we confuse ideology or the power of ideology with right and wrong. "Ideologies may be viewed as societally defined ideational structures that exist in order to permit latent dimensions of the psyche to become manifest in the external world." says, Richard Koenigsberg in his essay "Why do Ideologies exist".

When someone says "the real world" what they mean is the "ideational structures" that we have taken for granted as "truth". What we often call human nature is the "psychic functions" that permit certain desires and fantasies to be projected onto "reality".

The ideational structure I am most affected by is the notion of control. Raised in a nation who preached progress and who embarked on racist, colonial brutality, we argued about how to rule the world but not how to care for it. 

The male head of the household made decisions for members of his family whom he viewed as weak and childlike, who needed his strength and protection.  When things didn't go as planned the ones who failed were those who could not live "up to" the patriarch's laws.  

In authoritarian cultures, the sons learned to shut down their emotions and daughters learned how to keep silent.  Love became duty. Empathy and compassion died. 

We are born into a set of beliefs that our parents and teachers assume are right, and since we need approval from our society to survive, we learn how to adjust ourselves to an external view. It works to oppress and make obedient the people who live under its power.

I grew up believing I was good and those who behaved and thought like me were also good, and if we all thought the same there would be peace. Prejudiced and privileged, I must now swallow how wrong I was. Thanks to the Republican party in the US, I see how corrupted the white colonialist is capable of becoming. I see the harm I have caused by believing I must be in control, by holding on to control and blinding myself to the effect it has on those who have less.

The more I age, the more I lack confidence in talking about big issues. How to create or be part of an inclusive and just society is beyond my control. Things are changing. There is so much I cannot know - even on my own street. I am a stakeholder in this thing called humanity but not its ruler.

When despotic opportunists threaten what little bit of civil society remains, I feel absolutely lost. Outraged that we vote for hate rather than deal with our own discomfort because we are not in control.  You and I can't rule the world. Yet we commit endless acts of violence to support the delusion that we can. Nations are not great. And we are destroying the world because we can't rule it.

Fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930's, according to Hannah Arendt, recruited support from the masses dismissed as being too stupid for the other parties.

Chris Hedges, in his article The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism. writes there is only "one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around (Donald) Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the country." 

In short,  we must declare war on our addiction to power-over and use our power to care for and heal our world in any way we can.  

Preparing for an uncertain future

I see a few posts on Facebook that indicate people see our future as being decided by the Harper government. I use that term because the Conservative party and Canada's democracy have been destroyed by this PM who proudly bragged we would not recognize Canada when he finished with it.

We were warned by so many quotes that he would turn us into a Republican branch plant - a petro state that Chris Hedges describes as intentionally destructive:

Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good.

Jennifer Hinton describes the Greek Crisis as being the result of a parasite which "… comes from the surplus of the system (profit) being taken out of the real economy (the economy of physical goods and services) and put into the financial sector to generate more wealth for people who are already wealthy. This requires the economy to continually grow to compensate for the extraction of profit, which is essentially the extraction of the economy’s surplus."

So the economy in this case no longer serves the society that creates it. If Capitalism destroys societies how will it sustain itself? And is it really fascism in sheep's clothing?

A quote attributed to  Tommy Douglas, says "Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.” 

Democracy and the kind of social responsibility which enables our freedom is clearly under threat in Europe, the US, Canada and other nations. But a percentage of the population will not see it that way.

Perhaps I am over simplifying - but it seems to me that Harper's base are those who have lived under the canopy of several absolutes:

1. that the white man is inherently superior, 
2. that men are more reasonable than women 
3. that religion is necessary to maintain morality
4. that punishment is required to keep people on the right path
5. that capitalism is the natural vehicle for our economy
6. that Canada is a Christian country. 

For these beliefs to sustain themselves a mind must avoid straying beyond these tenets - to explore is dangerous, to think is heresy. 

Christianity has been usurped and corrupted as a kind of manufactured spiritually-gated community to support the power and privilege of a ruling elite. In these cases it is no longer about Jesus and his teachings, or the insights of Biblical prophets.  This is not Christianity at all. It is not about good orderly direction in the Universe. It is not about virtue or humanity. It is a means to control minds and to keep the masses living in fear. It was the instrument that Hitler used, and that South Africa used to sustain apartheid. It is the way that war and violence has been glorified for the ambitions of colonial and imperial states.

As Chris Hedges, who is also a minister of a Christian church, reminds us: "There is nothing inevitable about human existence except birth and death. There are no forces, whether divine or technical, that will guarantee us a better future. When we give up false hopes, when we see human nature and history for what they are, when we accept that progress is not preordained, then we can act with an urgency and passion that comprehends the grim possibilities ahead." 

It is time to act, not simply accept the status quo. There is a responsibility we have to find a way to contribute to the future with the particular skills we have. To use our knowledge and art to present a different way of being. To pool our resources so that these skills are offered as an extension of our selves within our society. This is the way we contribute to our survival. We do what we can and if we are not sure we can we try it.

Judging, shaming and blaming is a waste of energy unless it leads to our action to fix that which we see is wrong. There is no righteousness in texting or twittering if we can't ask ourselves what can be done about it.
We are not required to change the world tomorrow, but let's not dismiss our capacity to meet and talk sincerely with one another about what and how we can apply our knowledge to the problem.

Voting, protesting, marching, carrying banners all have their place in revolution, but there is another step beyond that. Becoming the piece in the puzzle to support and sustain what is life revering. It means offering alternative views without name-calling, insulting and de-humanizing others.

It means researching the right information, questioning our own prejudices, interrogating our own privileges.
It means compassion. 

Canada poised to pass anti-terror legislation despite widespread outrage

Guardian:

Widespread protest and souring public opinion has failed to prevent Canada’s ruling Conservative Party from pushing forward with sweeping anti-terror legislation which a battery of legal scholars, civil liberties groups, opposition politicians and pundits of every persuasion say will replace the country’s healthy democracy with a creeping police state.Prime Minister Stephen Harper is looking forward to an easy victory on Tuesday when the House of Commons votes in its final debate on the bill, known as C-51. But lingering public anger over the legislation suggests that his success in dividing his parliamentary opposition may well work against him when Canadians go to the polls for a national election this fall.No legislation in memory has united such a diverse array of prominent opponents as the proposed legislation, which the Globe and Mail newspaper denounced as a a plan to create a “secret police force”.


Megan Drysdale, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression:

Here are six ways that Bill C-51 could affect your day-to-day life:

1. Your private information will no longer be private

2. Innocent words can be interpreted as terrorism

3. Online posts will be censored

4. Protesting could put you under government surveillance

5. Your travel may be restricted without explanation

6. Your material possessions may be seized

Here is our world according to Chris Hedges:

Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good. How else could you get drag line operators in southern West Virginia to rip the tops off Appalachian mountains to get at coal seams as they turn the land they grew up in, and often their ancestors grew up in, into a fetid, toxic wasteland where the air, soil and water will be poisoned for generations? 

And the more vulnerable you are, the more the jackals appear around you to prey on your afflictions. Those who suffer most are children, women and the elderly—the children and the elderly because they are vulnerable, the women because they are left to care for them.

The World in One Paragraph by Chris Hedges

"Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good. How else could you get drag line operators in southern West Virginia to rip the tops off Appalachian mountains to get at coal seams as they turn the land they grew up in, and often their ancestors grew up in, into a fetid, toxic wasteland where the air, soil and water will be poisoned for generations? These vast predatory enterprises hold up the possibility of personal wealth, personal advancement and personal power at the expense of everyone and everything else. They create a huge, permanent divide between the exploiters and the exploited, one that is rarely crossed. And the more vulnerable you are, the more the jackals appear around you to prey on your afflictions. Those who suffer most are children, women and the elderly—the children and the elderly because they are vulnerable, the women because they are left to care for them." Chris Hedges

This just about says it all of our age and our society. I have long suspected that all our species' problems have arisen out of misogyny. Seems there are others also leading to that conclusion.

Beyond Pessimism and Optimism

Chris Hedges - Wikimedia Commons

Chris Hedges is a brilliant journalist, activist citizen and father.  He took President Obama to court over "section 1021 of the National Defence Authorization Act, which permits the U.S. military overturning over 150 years of law to carry out domestic policing on American city streets, to seize American citizens who "substantially support" the Taliban, Al Qaeda or something called associated forces -- another kind of nebulous phrase -- strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities."

In this interview with H.G. Watson (uploaded to rabble.ca) Hedges warns Canadians about Bill C-51.  In fact he is concerned enough that he was making his way to Toronto to participate in the protest.

"We can't talk about free citizens in the state where everyone has all of their electronic forms of communication not only monitored, but stored in perpetuity in government computers. It doesn't matter if they're not using it. History has shown that if the government feels threatened or they seek greater control -- and I think that is the trajectory of the corporate state -- they will use it. The goal of wholesale surveillance, and something that Hannah Arendt wrote about in The Origins of Totalitarianism, is not to discover crimes but to give information to the government that it can use if it decides to arrest a certain category of the population. I think this is extremely grave."

There is a great deal of information on the many ways the Harper government is eroding civil society in what we believe is, or was, a democracy.  Hedges is concerned that most of us are not responding to these events or the total effect of them.  Why is that? Why do we not seem to be up in arms? Why are most of us not out on the streets protesting?

The core of the crisis appears to be that we are losing the freedoms and choices that have taken centuries to install so that we don't become victims of fascism.  We suspect the frog is being boiled and is not aware of it yet, and we are generally busy trying to keep our personal lives together - caring for family, for our jobs and our community.

The media will not let us have peace. But does it help to simply broadcast one crisis after another without the contextual information? They are not in business to educate the citizens just as the government is not there to look after the people of Canada. What is clear is that we have been abandoned by the institutions who our ancestors built through blood, sweat and tears. The message we are getting is that we are powerless.  That power is held in the hands of a few corporations because they have the wealth to purchase think-tanks and governments, and who view people as a resource or nuisance.

The message of Chris Hedges is not just to tell us how bad things are but to get us to think beyond that.  The question is - what is it that we must do?

The "must" is another imperative and when it is told from one person to another does not inspire us to be creative, to act.  But when we ask ourselves this, we can apply the skills we have to do what is best based on the knowledge we have.  

For change to take place we can't afford to be pessimistic or optimistic - that requires a huge perspective that is vulnerable to so many competing messages.  We can use our perspective based on experience of what has worked for us, using our accumulated wisdom.

But what if we are influenced by propaganda on things we cannot access or understand?  Most of us are not lawyers so we don't know how Bill C-51 really works. We don't know what Stephen Harper thinks about every minute of every day even though his actions and speech give us a broad sense of his intentions. Most of us are not scientists so we don't really understand how climate change works. But who does?  Who is absolutely sure they are right? And how much do the experts really know?

We need (I believe) to get together those who have great confidence in their own knowledge, those who second guess everything, those who have ideas that seem to come out of nowhere, those who have scientific minds and those who are philosophers, those who are artists, writers and musicians, those who are open and loving and those who are risk averse.

People such as Chris Hedges, George Orwell, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Elizabeth May, Hannah Arendt, Edward Snowden, and all the other voices of conscience - have already paid so much in terms of risk and pain - we can at least help the future unfold with our serious and reflective engagement.

What's Happening Here

TragiComic Masks

May 14, 2014
Dr. Robert Buckingham, a tenured professor, Dean of the School for Public Health was fired and escorted off campus for publicly criticizing a restructuring plan at the University of Saskatchewan. Crawford Killian, The Tyee.

May 19, 2014
Cecily McMillan was sentenced to 3 months in prison. The Occupy activist was grabbed from behind by a plainclothes policeman, and responded by elbowing him in the face. She was severely beaten and handcuffed to a hospital bed, by police. Chris Hedges. Truthdig. 


May 20, 2014
New research shows more than 20 million people worldwide are working as modern-day slaves and generating billions of dollars worth of illegal profits annually. Jacqueline Nelson. Globe and Mail

May 21, 2014
Amnesty International reveals legal scholar and human rights activist, Xu Zhiyong was sentenced to four years in jail for organizing "Same-city Eat-drink gatherings". Amnesty International

May 22, 2014
Effective Monday, May 26, BC Government will dock 5 % of teachers pay for participating in stage 1 of job action. 10% if teachers launch their rotating strike next week. CBC News

May 22, 2014
Tim Hudak pledges to eliminate 100,000 service jobs if he forms the next government. Duncan Cameron, rabble.

Chris Hedges on The Power of Imagination

Othello and Iago

"Shakespeare portrays the tension between the premodern and the modern. He sees the rise of the modern as dangerous. The premodern reserved a place in the cosmos for human imagination. The new, modern, Machiavellian ethic of self-promotion, manipulation, bureaucracy and deceit—personified by Iago, Richard III and Lady Macbeth—deformed human society. Shakespeare lived during a moment when the modern world—whose technology allowed it to acquire weapons of such unrivaled force that it could conquer whole empires, including the Americas and later China—instilled through violence this new secular religion. He feared its demonic power."
Truthdig May 11, 2014

Extracting the Poetry from Power and Politics

There are some writers and journalists who have the ability to extract the essential character of events and express it in one paragraph.  Chris Hedges is one such writer:

The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down.

Read the rest here: The Folly of Empire.

And another poetic observer, George Monbiot, alerts us to the threat of an empire poised to take it all for free through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership:

They want it; they’re getting it. New intellectual property laws that they have long demanded, but which sovereign governments have so far resisted – not least because of the mass mobilisation against the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act in the US(11) – are back on the table, but this time largely inaccessible to public protest.

Read Elite Insurgency here.

But the question that comes to me, time and time again, is what can be done, and more importantly what will I do about it?  The most eloquent answer comes from âpihtawikosisân and you will find her wisdom in what a revolution looks like:- here.

Design the Future Based on the Truths that Nurture Us

Yesterday’s shooting at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin is only 16 days after the shooting in Aurora at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie.

Whether you believe this is part of an elitist conspiracy to break down civil society by brainwashing unstable men, or whether America is being punished by God for allowing liberal views, or that the invisible hand  (the economy) is creating despair – one thing is certain – the  violence that has been glorified for the colonization of other countries and the exploitation of the masses for the profit of a few, has been brought home. No-one is spared.  No place is safe. No prayers or ideology will fix this until most of the people on this planet realize we are all in this together.

Chris Hedges notes this day in 1945 when “the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished”.  This was the bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki three days later. Hedges calls it “an act of mass annihilation” when the Japanese were about to surrender.

War does not bring peace, not a better standard of living for the masses, or an example for establishing workable communities – what it does achieve is social and cultural alienation.

I see the age in which we live (modern age) as being an age that succeeded in separating  power  from life.  Every century has defined and re-defined the war between a reverence for and the degradation of life.

We live in a time where power has been so centralized and violence so internalized that the distinctions between war and peace, duty and civility, wealth and poverty, truth and lies, have no meaning in the public sphere at all. We are the victims of our nations’ foreign policies.  We live in the theatre of other powers’ fantasies.

What can we do to defend life? 

First we must organize on the principles of a life sustaining power-from-within.  This means we design the future based on the truths that have nurtured our lives.  Love, support, health, nutrition, rest and freedom from violence. It’s not rocket science, it’s not fireworks and it’s not entertainment.  But we are the stewards of that which we value.

We could give up the notion of power over others, of superiority, and consumerism. We have no need to compare ourselves with others or to compete – these are instruments of propaganda to alienate us from our own worth.

The life we want is the life we make, and we are on the bridge of the next age. 

Reverberation: power from the personal to the global

Whatever we value most in life is more than just a cause for celebration, it can lead us to the tools of our collective power, as long as that power is life affirming. But using any tool requires some skill and the more we use it the more skilled we will become.

The Toolbox

Interrogation – who benefits?

Every issue, change, policy, initiative, ideology must interrogate its own value by asking who benefits by this? And if it doesn't those who are affected by it must.

Naming, Unmasking, Engaging:

In his column published in the Guardian, George Monbiot quotes Walter Wink ... "challenging a dominant system requires a three-part process: naming the powers, unmasking the powers, engaging the powers."

I would extend this exercise to all social interactions from family to neighbourhood to community to national. To assume that social relationships do not use power can lead us blithely into relationships where power is abused. Domestic violence certainly puts a strain on challenging power beyond the home. Abusive power in community undoes benefit of community.

Progressive Thinking:

In a Straight Goods article, George Lakoff writes "a robust public is necessary for private success, about all that the public gives us, about the benefits of health, about a Market for All not a Greed Market, about regulation as protection, about revenue and investment". These are all assets our ancestors gave their lives for. Lakoff warns against accepting systems that are not in our best interests. Such as those that allow corporations to get rich by keeping wages low. There is nothing morally right about centralized power that enables oppression, because it always seeks to punish not the causes but the victims of it.

Civil Society:

Yes this gives the individual the power to move freely in the city. Marilyn Hamilton writes that civil society occupies "the We and Heart of the Integral City . . . the pulse of cooperatives, credit unions, foundations, institutes, not-for-profits, NGO’s, social enterprises and other agencies who invest in cultural and social capital". We give and take in society. We have a responsibility to it and gain protections from it.


Education:

I am talking about more than certificates and accreditation here – of course those enable us more choice in our future. But I am talking about the lifelong learning that enables us to participate in systems of power that arise from our knowing and our imaginations. In order to do this we have to let go of the beliefs that comfort us. As the Bible says "the truth shall set you free". But first it will make you miserable as you read the horrors that humankind has imposed on its earthly home.

Contraction:

Every outward act will return.  Whatever we do to others will be done to us. Whatever we send out we will bring back.

In an interview with Michael Moore, Chris Hedges explains the system that currently rules the planet – unfettered capitalism, turns everything into a commodity, even human beings. It exploits and extracts the essence until it is emptied of itself, exhausted and destroyed.  Built into capitalism is a self-destructive ideology that deeply disrupts societies. Imperialism is a disease and the tyranny it imposes is also imposed on itself.

Here then is the warning we must never forget as we struggle to create a better world – we are in the throws of a "giddy intoxication" of an illusion that we can impose our will on the planet; and in the process, we have set in motion the final death of our unborn seeds.

The difference between Hedges, Moore, and myself – is that (I believe) the cause is not capitalism, communism, fascism, or religious fundamentalism – the cause is unfettered power.

We can use our power without harming or controlling. We may send out our desires and receive our limitations. We may work on hope and be discouraged. We may bring peace and be killed for it. We may knit garments of justice and watch them unravel. But work on what sustains life, no matter how futile it may seem, is the natural power we have been given.