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.

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.

Hope and Optimism

Hope and optimism requires our attention to the current state of affairs. The dark side of power.  That is, we need to look at the events that normally disturb the comfortable and lead the disturbed to despair and pessimism.  We need to address this relationship to our world, our place within it and find a way of being that challenges injustice.

Ish Teilheimer of Straight Goods,  reporting on a study that reveals a psychological difference between rich and poor (indicating that the rich don't see a need to help others, whereas the poor understand that they depend on mutual support) goes on to say "It's good to be loving, hopeful, and optimistic, but it's also important to point out that many of the bad things happening to people today are happening because some very wealthy people wanted things that way."

Wealth is power, and those who have power-over sometimes feel more secure by creating systems that make it very difficult or impossible for the masses to gain a healthy standard of living.

"The export of good jobs to sweatshop countries, for instance, was their idea. It's not unfair or overly negative to ask about new ideas in politics and government "Does this help everyone or just the rich?" and to consistently expose the shameless voices of wealthy self-interest."

History is full of examples of how brutal some are willing to be in order to maintain power in their zero-sum game. It was wealthy interests who supported the Nazi's murder of millions of Jews, gypsies and others, causing a war across Europe that destroyed hope and optimism for most. It was wealthy interests that plummeted the lives of Africans into despair and alienation during apartheid.  It is wealthy interests that prop up despotic military governments in the Middle East and Asia.

It is wealthy interests that have destroyed the most powerful nation in the world by creating a dysfunctional hysteria among its citizens. Michael Moore in his 2003 Academy Award acceptance speech said "We like non-fiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons." 

For expressing his opinion he received incredible harrassment and publicly televised death threats.

America, the self-promoted defender of democracy and human rights is currently being crippled by an old strategy - divide and conquer and divide, divide, divide.

So it's apparent that the atrocities that have become familiar in our collective sub-conscious are not caused by the masses as much as they are designed and organized by a powerful few for their own benefit, not ours. However, they have been enabled by a majority who have kept silent for fear of being punished, or have given up on their own perceptions for fear of gazing into the monster.

The trouble with this 'analysis' is that it leaves us feeling powerless, in despair, pessimistic, putting us into the blaming camp of us and them. The observation itself removes any inspiration to respond by anything more than apathy.

While facing up to the fact that most of the globe's economic interests have been gathered into a very small gated community, leaving the masses without much to hope for, we need to invest in something else and rebuild the world by the natures we possess, that have not been corporatized: to witness change as it unfolds, wherever it unfolds, and ask ourselves how we can influence that change.

Hope and optimism without effort may be naive, but getting our selves engaged in the process of evolution is hard work. Hope and optimism ask us to invest in them, they don't promise us happy endings. Hope and optimism need us to be honest with ourselves and one another. Hope and optimism rely on our search for truth and not just the many generalizations trotted out by institutions and heresay.  When it comes to the truth of our lives and our future, even statistics and science need not stop our questioning.

The future we are destined to endure depends upon what we feel, and how we interrogate our feeling with thinking, and how that guides what we say and what we do, and the societies we build from character and vision.