Is it possible to create radical change without violence?

(first posted August 24, 2016)

"The climate crisis is here, now, but a compromised, corrupted media doesn’t want to know." says George Monbiot (The Purse is Mightier Than the Pen)

Who controls culture? Is it media, public opinion, or money?

Culture is starved of wisdom if we abandon it to the authority of the purse.  If leaders are mesmerized by money they will follow trends. They will believe they have no choice, and what has happened to western culture is the wholesale sacrifice of life to the altar of profit.

The Library of Social Science researchers and scholars have hypothesized a law of sacrifice in six ways, the first of which is "Cultures invent or create ideological concepts that they elevate into “absolutes”— worshiped as the essence of society. But how do people persuade themselves that the ideas their society has constructed are real? "

Propaganda is very sophisticated, and we often can't see how we are being persuaded if not manipulated. Our own desires are reconfigured to lead us to accept horrible outcomes. Like war, for example - do we leave our home and family to slaughter strangers or let the enemy slaughter us?

We are raised to fit into the community, to trust the authority of parents and teachers, who help and protect us, and who will punish us if we don't obey.

But what constitutes  a well functioning society? One that makes clear the rules and laws and where the masses are seen as stakeholders. It's not fear that preserves this but social responsibility and integrity.

The radical change comes from the actions of an observant citizenry that is informed, educated on history and politics, who understands the principles of fairness and the power of inclusion. Those who watch and listen to what is going on around them and weigh that against media headlines. Those who ask who benefits and who choose the greater good, and who do not trust an institution just because it has power.

This would be the seed of the radical - that we practice citizenship and refuse ideological absolutes.

Often what is presented as radical is an invasion of hostile ideologies that persuade us to sacrifice our lives for God, country, communism or capitalism. These require violence and human sacrifice in the thousands because they are a transfer of power.

Whatever is worth defending is that which asks our input and attention, our care and help - to live for it, not to die for it. 

Plan the next 30 years

What is happening today was possibly planned 30 years ago, by many, thinking in their own board rooms, how to achieve their best outcomes. Along the way these plans would be adjusted, changed, some would have failed, but some came through well.

In her post "Message From Meg", Meg Riley of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, suggested that we, the stakeholders in our society, ask ourselves some difficult questions, before we plan the next four years:

1. How will you take care of your body in hard times
2. How will you take care of your spirit in hard times?
3. Who are your people?
4. How will you resist oppression, your own and that of others?
5. What would be the worst thing you could imagine yourself doing in this time?

I think these questions are required after any election but the recent one in the US is devastating to many who have worked so hard for inclusive justice.

Her message looks deeply into each question and is worth reading and thinking about. For the 30 year plan we might need to imagine how the world will look and then to write a future/back history.  How did it get there? What pressures caused what events? What visions empowered new movements for social justice, for the economy, for health, for the environment? 

Then to look into how we could organize a preferred future.  This would be a good exercise for a group, a family, a congregation.  You can read more about Imaging the Future (Elise Boulding) here. 

Being a citizen is not easy. It requires time, conversation, the patience to listen, the courage to speak, and a sober acknowledgement we are all in this together.

Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans - Suzuki

"Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can be triggered by pesticide exposure. When we consider the vast array of chemicals spewed into air, water and soil, predicting those that may interact with each other and our genetic makeup to create health problems is difficult if not impossible." David Suzuki, Science Matters. A Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans 

Profit must include more than just dollars.  We need a spreadsheet that measures peace, happiness, health and hope for the future.  In order to get this we need to recognize the power that has been forgotten.

Real power is what we have when we have choices and often we cannot see the power available to us.

For example, a young mother may not feel powerful when her newborn infant keeps waking at night, crying for attention.  She will feel drained and at the mercy of her baby. A young father will not feel powerful because the needs of his children exhaust his days.  But caring and loving children really teaches them about what is worthy of our attention .  Loved children often grow up to be responsible, creative adults, who have the tools to raise their children with empathy and good guidance. These families are capable of being functioning citizens who are then able to imagine how to contribute to a healthy society.

Where the emphasis in a family is about punishment and control rather than an observation of their childrens' needs they grow up blind to the powers of sustaining life.  Adults who were abused as children often cannot see how they are abusing their loved ones, and by extension cannot imagine how to create peaceful societies.

There are those who have survived brutal childhoods and still have learned about loving kindness as a social adhesive, but so many will fall under the false promise of power-over. It becomes a mindset of dedicated denial of the infinite power of life where great conquerors walk a thin tightrope in a spiritual vacuum.

Healthy humans learn how to use their power wisely.

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.