A Prayer for Little Children

I wonder how to protect you

keep you safe from uniforms

with men inside 

who have pledged to follow 

orders in prisons 

where doors are locked

so I can’t get in and you

can’t get out even though

all you want is your mother

or brother or sister 

and the crying of other children

warns of danger as if 

there was anything you

could have done different

and the uniformed bodies

are not smiling but hard

and I suspect your infant heart

beats louder than your screams

sensing that something

you can’t name has gone

terribly wrong.

But these words are merely

a stranger’s attempt

to do something, anything

like send a card with butterflies

that opens to a nursery rhyme

to make the terror go away

knowing she can't.

The Essential Cleavage in Society

"The heartlessness of that is mind-boggling. It seems to elude the administration and its cheerleaders that this is not about crime or security, but about the most elemental human values; that ordering armed border guards to cruelly and needlessly rip children from mothers — in one case, while she was breast-feeding the child — goes against fundamental American values and undercuts its standing in the world." Seizing Children From Parents at the Border Is Immoral. Here’s What We Can Do About It. The Editorial Board, NYTimes.

"This is the platform Mr. Trump ran on, after all: a platform of xenophobia and corruption. This is the culmination of the dictatorial ambitions and dehumanization of immigrants that smug journalists and officials told people to take seriously – but not literally. For Latino immigrants, demonized from the very day Mr. Trump launched his campaign, it was always literally." Sarah Kendzior (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-unspeakable-cruelty-of-trumps-child-migrant-camps/)

There are those who were raised on a silent current of spite, mostly unspoken, but usually delivered to those who are powerless. Like the schoolyard bully scouring the playground for someone to pick on. When asked to talk about this bullies are silent - they often have no words. Children who were abused can find themselves meting out the same actions that caused them the pain they could not name.

Anyone who thinks about culture and human nature are familiar with the habits of people they know and love and how it relates to their history and our history.

But how many come to the conclusion that collectively, we know so little about life other than war and violence. How many of us witness a change in the personality of a child when she crosses the river of longing to the acceptance of reality as she has been dealt it.

There is a dark river running through our minds and veins, and spite is a sign of it. When people feel empowered because babies and toddlers are snatched from those who have less power than they - there is no reasoned argument to support that and the only conclusion is that there will be a political response which will punish most if not all people.

Trafficking ideas and outrage

"Self-regulation works well in a commons – a resource controlled and managed by a community. But the streets are not a commons. They are a state asset, that is treated as a free for all. When the state owns a resource but won’t control it, the community has neither the right nor the power to regulate its use. All that is left is voluntarism. The efforts of those who try to defend the common good are undermined by free riders. Without regulation, the most selfish and anti-social people dominate." George Monbiot

What will it take to bring the world back into the hands and minds of humanity and away from the obsession with wealth and power?  

I am trying to offer a space for positive life-affirming ideas, but first we need to tackle the vomit of contempt rolling down the mountain from those who hold positions of influence but who have no interest in leadership.

We need to find a way to work together for the greater good.

When a child is born

If we are privileged enough to live in a community that protects and values life, we come in contact with friends and relatives who have a new life to celebrate.

When I look at a new born I am in awe again with the beauty of it. The tiny hands and fingers, the flesh that looks almost transparent it is so delicate. I am taken away from the world of power, politics, strategy and cynicism.  And what I am looking at is a mystery in the flesh, a potential that hasn't revealed itself.

This new life could become a peace maker, a defender for justice, or a billionaire who spends his or her energy selling arms to terrorists.

This new life is going to be affected by the stories she or he hears, the varied ways his or her parents nurture whatever shines through in her personality. This new life will be diminished or held in care by the environment.

To think of all that could go right or wrong is overwhelming and brings me back to my own choices.

Four Lessons on how to Change the World

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho left her career in banking to lead the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, which focuses on security and development policy. In her TED talk she gives us four lessons she learned while tackling the violence around issues of drugs and guns in Brazil.  Carvalho's experience contains an important message for us all – we can challenge big issues and achieve change.

The four lessons she learned in the process are: 1. change the narrative, 2. never underestimate your opponents, 3. use data to drive your arguments, 4. bring together odd bedfellows

What would this look like for those of us who want to change the current political narrative? Below are the thoughts I have wrestled with.

1. change the narrative

We are not nations or religions competing for the most of what each of us want. We are sentient beings trying to survive the cumulative effects of a global hierarchy that enables mass starvation and violence to sustain the power of a few.

The conflict is not between right-wing and left-wing, capitalism and socialism, Christianity and Islam, the conflict is between power and life.

The Operating System has moved beyond tribal competition for territory and is now in the stage where power is valued only as a wholly separate construct from human nature. This requires a structure that upholds, defends and worships the non-human measures of  our culture such as money, technology, numbers, formulas, ideologies, celebrity (not the person but the image), and ideas.  Which also requires a consistent doctrine.

The doctrine tells us that life is not valued because the world is over-populated. Life is a threat to order and must be managed, categorized, brainwashed, dehumanized and reduced through organized war, disease, starvation and addiction. Authorities create fear, insecurity and misery, and make it appear that we ourselves have chosen the conditions we live under.

Hierarchical power requires a rationality that is free of sentiment,  compassion or reverence for life. Any progress that has been made in the last two hundred years is that sophistication and application of purified power and its increasing contempt for anything that breathes. Entertainments must be pornographic to uphold this regime. Food must be genetically modified to its meanest elements. Civil society, art, community must be destroyed for these are the elements of power from within and are difficult to manage. Community is reduced to a shopping mall restricting human interaction to the impersonal , where all other human emotions such as compassion and empathy become a  means to the end of a business transaction. Here we become willing consumers of our own self-hate.

Corporations are the controllers, government are the police and media are the instructors who must continually promote the notion that life in itself has no value, and the more things we possess the more contempt we feel for earth's unpredictable and uncontrollable forces. Social intercourse celebrates and promotes consumerism through the adoration of new gadgets, rare and expensive foods, new trends and sophisticated technology. The household that possesses the most up to date fashionable stuff can congratulate itself as the winner.

Our darkest nights understand that once a weapon of mass destruction is invented that will kill most of the people without destroying the elite playgrounds on earth, it will be used. But it won't solve the problems humanity faces because all, including the elite, are oppressed by the doctrine that power must eat life.

This is the narrative of post-modern literature - Wells' Time Machine, Orwell's 1984, Monty Python, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and other classics that have warned us.

This is a narrative that makes sense of all that has happened socially and politically. It's not the only narrative but it is one that puts us in the centre of the problem.

2. never underestimate your opponents

First we need to identify who our opponents are. Are they the one-percent, the corporations, the governments, the media, the ideologies? Are they the sum of our apathy, greed and ignorance? Is it our reluctance to examine life?

Many empires have come and gone throughout history so we can’t pin the blame on a singular tribe or a political system. It has been an endless return of revolution and corruption.  That's the force of power-over.

Is the opponent our own ego which separates us from the cause and effects of our habits? Is it the way we try to hide from our inherent malevolence, or inability to see ourselves as the earth sees us? Is it the ruling elite who manipulate us? Is it always the other who is incapable of self governance?

What if we were able to reclaim our human family, to embrace and acknowledge our power from within, through dialogue and reflection. What if we listed all the tricks we use to deny our involvement and responsibility in the evolution and care of this planet? What if we nurtured our world and loved nature? What if the imagination could bridge the small things we can do with the large movements for change?

Our opponent is really our own ignorance on how power is used against us, and how easily we slip into the narrative provided by our oppressors. As we have learned to write, read, decipher symbols, understand metaphors, we can also learn how to recognize power in all its forms.

3. use data to drive your arguments

You can find data in many places. Mainstream media sometimes includes it but other news sources and websites developed by concerned citizens are available.

The Gun Violence Archive; Amnesty International; Humanist and Liberal Religion that celebrates the human experience through diversity; news sites that defend social justice; those who acknowledge the complexity of society and its problems at the cost of making their message less slogan-ready; thought leaders who seek wisdom and do not rely on power-over to influence others; poetry; statistics.  And our own level gaze.

4. bring together odd bedfellows

What and where are the odd bedfellows of this issue? Members of the Gun Club, members of Tax Payers Federation, workers within community services, managers of the CBC, the homeless, the working poor, MP's within all political parties, police chiefs, scientists, environmentalists, artists, writers, philosophers and deans of the academy – all who are willing to talk and listen.

Bring together different narratives of how the world works, different personalities from different faith groups (including atheists and nihilists). Make it clear that their views are important and that everyone has a voice, but the point of the voice is not to be right, but to open doors. 

The future, if there is to be one, must embrace and hold up the reverence and dignity of all.