What does it mean?

What does it mean to be marginalized

 illegal, homeless, a blight on the landscape?

What does it mean when we risk polluting 

our water and food source for the economy?

What does it mean to destroy the air

we need to breathe?

What will our future be if we are willing

to sacrifice our home for quick solutions?

What if this planet is ruled by extortionists 

who silenced these questions

so that our taxes can pay even more tomorrow 

and the next day until there is nothing left

but solid rock glowing in a distant universe?

What does it mean when we are offended 

by people who have nowhere to wash

yet welcome those who hold all life as ransom

for the glory of their personal ego?

The Field Mice: a Folk Tale for Adults

(Originally posted in 2014)

Long ago in the olden days, field mice knew the meaning of life: to gather nuts and seeds no matter how cold or wet, how hot or windy, and to bring them back to the nest.

Were they happy? Who knew? There were seasons. There was birth and there was death, but no time to contemplate and no philosophers in the field.

Then came the hyenas across the river, hidden by long grasses, salivating at the sight of tender fresh meat. And these were not your common or jungle variety. These were a new breed who could plan, who saw ways of making the larder last longer.

In the river were beavers busy building dams. They looked too dank and tough to eat but the hyenas saw that they could be useful and entered into a contract called The Trans-River Deal which promised greater status for the beavers and wealth for hyenas.

Ah, a new way of seeing the world thought the beavers and they called it “The Economy”. Congratulating themselves on their ability to analyse and re-frame reality, they found ways of influencing the field mice, and to make capital from their labour.  

And so it came to pass that the beavers entered into the field with their blueprints. Luxurious nests with running water, separate bedrooms and indoor toilets in exchange for all the nuts and seeds they could gather which would be processed into cakes and preserved.  A vision of progress, bright futures with eight hour work shifts and time for leisure.  

At first everyone was happy.  Mice were comfortable, beavers were smug, and now there was time for parties and feasts. Sadly this didn't last forever because the hyenas across the river, which the mice had never seen and did not know about, were waiting to call in the debt.

“What debt?”, asked the beavers. They and the mice had provided the labour and the ideas – and the hyenas had contributed nothing. 

The hyenas reminded them of the deal they signed and were therefore obliged to provide the agreed-upon returns. If they did not comply there would be snakes in the rivers, rats in the field, storms and plagues, and the beavers would get the blame.

“For what ends?”, asked the beavers. All their profits would be destroyed and no-one would gain in the long run.  

The hyenas laughed and ridiculed the beavers for not understanding how power works. “Create a conflict among the mice, pit neighbour against neighbour with a manufactured crisis – be creative with the truth, divide and rule”, advised the hyenas, who were clearly above such sentiments as fairness. “As soon as we have everything we want we shall move on to the next field down river.”  

“What about the suffering, the misery and death you will cause”, asked the beavers.

Again the hyenas laughed. “We deal only in power. Life is fragile and finite whereas power is eternal and everlasting.  You have no choice and now you must go back to the mice and demand they do your bidding.”

Shaken and troubled the beavers wondered whether they should invent a crisis or tell the truth about the hyenas and the coming threat of snakes, rats, and plagues.  Should they defend their field or cave in? Should they train the mice in the art of war or the natural laws of justice?

They didn't know what to do so they told the mice the truth and after many hours of deliberation they all decided to have a party and enjoy life while they had it.

Eventually, after battles won and lost, they all died and their stories died with them. Their luxurious nests, their running water and indoor toilets, their BC ferries, their schools, their hospitals, their hockey teams, museums and libraries all crumbled into dust – and all that remained was silence, because politics never had the insight to see, that it too, could not live without life.

Thoughts on Etiquette - gleaned from Facebook

When Should You Inquire Whether Your Friend is Pregnant?:

The only time we need to ask personal questions, such as: when is the baby due? is this a boy or a girl? are you married? when do you plan to start a family? how much do you earn in a year? ... is when your profession depends upon the answer. If you're a nurse, a doctor, a minister, or a lawyer you might be required to ask those questions - otherwise it's none of your business. This is good to remember then you can avoid embarrassment. And if you are not embarrassed by anything, ask away, so that people know what you are - an innocent who just wants to be friendly but who will likely become lonely. But not to worry - it's not your fault. The blame lies entirely on a culture so obsessed with jobs and the economy, it threw out all conversations about sustainable civil societies.

Beyond Politics of Anger - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Hope is not optimism. It begins with a candid acknowledgment on all sides of how bad things actually are." So says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks after the election of Trump.

Sometimes I feel I am drowning in the weight of hopelessness, a global system that has thrown humanity under the economic bus. But we need a prophetic voice that looks beyond this moment to a future we can invest in.

Jonathan Sacks provides a wisdom that brings us to where we are now and reminds us of a way through."We need a new economics of capitalism with a human face."

This is the crux of leadership - to not choose contempt for humanity, to not sink into a worship of power that has been extracted from humanity, to not strip the tears, pain and flesh off the world and lock up the gold.

"We have seen bankers and corporate executives behaving outrageously, awarding themselves vast payments while the human cost has been borne by those who can afford it least. We have heard free-market economics invoked as a mantra in total oblivion to the pain and loss that come with the global economy. We have acted as if markets can function without morals, international corporations without social responsibility, and economic systems without regard to their effect on the people left stranded by the shifting tide. We who are grandparents know only too well that life is harder for our children than it was for us, and for our grandchildren it will be harder still." (Jonathan Sacks)

Amen.

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.

Plutonomics

"Ajay Kapur, global strategist at Citigroup, and his research team came up with the term “Plutonomy” in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and Australia." Robert Franks. 

Read more here.
Read Edward Fullbrook here. 
Or rational wiki here.

In France, the U.K., and the U.S., the share of total income currently appropriated by capital is thirty per cent. The top 0.1 per cent of income earners own twenty per cent of wealth. The top one per cent own 40 per cent. The top ten per cent own 80 to 90 per cent. The bottom 50 per cent own a mere five per cent of wealth.

Al Engler - Capitalism actually widens economic disparity, rabb.ca.

Desire, Design and the Operating System

It appears to me that human history and all its inventions dwell within a circle of power.  The glorification, the use and abuse of power interacts with our human endeavours mostly beyond our control. There are nations and people who possess power but not forever.  Anyone who has had power over others or things fears they cannot hold their control forever.  As individuals and institutions we create laws, culture (media) and ideology in order to maintain an illusion of control, to protect ourselves from chaos.  If I were to say this is the truth - it would be my attempt to wield power over this instant.  If I were to study philosophy, science, law and culture to the breadth and depth of my capacity it would be in order to influence the world.  It's too late in my life to attempt this even if I could, and even if I achieved it (500 years after William Shakespeare), it would be for a brief moment in time and place, and it would be a call for the next player to deconstruct this theory.

As news stories appear daily about our prime minister, the mayor of Toronto, or the president of the United States as they play out the extent of their given powers while they can, some may believe they possess powers beyond their position and that all they have to do is manage it well. But all political leaders must negotiate with the ever changing directions of power in their lives - the interests that support them and attack them are like tennis balls on a court which they must hit and send back to their opponents.

All that we desire and design is negotiated with other desires and designs which we cannot see or even plan for. There is always the pressure of the operating system projecting and sabotaging our strategies.

Our human history has led us to believe that we possess the power to control the world and we give those willing to stand up as leaders our loyalty, as long as they convince us they can protect us from the chaos of invading interests. But when our leaders break or reveal cracks in this promise we sack them with derision and ridicule.

This is a very violent game - to the senses of all who are involved.  It seeks scapegoats and sacrifices.  It allows millions to suffer starvation, genocide, indignity and madness, mostly because we cannot see power as something beyond our will, that no matter how much we worship and strategize, we can never control.

Because we are addicted to our own sense of entitlement we believe our leaders hold the key to our security through some kind of magic.  The esoteric rites are for high priests only, who are trained to keep the secrets of their submission to powers we cannot name or see.

So how can we live free of oppression? First by understanding that the oppressor is not a person or party or nation or corporation - it is a co-dependent game of denial.   They play their part sometimes well, sometimes appallingly, but the news reveals they are exhausted.  Even the largest corporation treating civil society like an obstruction to their goals, installing  puppet governments to do their bidding, can only maintain their illusion if we keep believing in it.

If power is within and beyond us then we must learn how to negotiate with power as we would with nature - that it belongs to history and the future, to our ancestors and our great-grandchildren.  This requires a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.

Mental Health of a Species

Having been conditioned to believe that great empires are measured by the number of other nations it has conquered, and great leaders are equal to the destruction they leave in their wake, we witness the many victims of those values today.  They come in the form of six rapists mutilating a young woman on a bus in Delhi, a young man entering an elementary school in Newtown with an assault weapon and killing twenty unarmed children along with six adults, and the NRA proposing that all schools should have armed guards rather than gun controls.

Is it enough to say that those who seek power, whether it be in business, government or media, are psychopaths who have wrought this dystopia upon the land where the unnamed must duck and sweat in the hope of surviving? Or have we all been made sick and sorry creatures? Is there anything healthy that can come of us if our minds have been invaded by this power imperative?

As long as 40 percent of those who live in "democratic" nations believe they shall be spared by siding with the biggest bullies, they will never know who they are and who they can be through their own potential. As long as they feel part of the club through race, gender or religious identity, the sickness will become more severe and difficult to treat.

How can we say that killing is caused by the dissociated ego when the popularity of Presidents and Prime Ministers supposedly increases (as revealed through dubious polls) when they send their nations to war and organize the killing of millions? How can we be afraid of someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder when we blindly follow ideologies that come from the planning departments of arms industries? How can we expect our children to grow up healthy, when we think we build our economy by purchasing stuff that will be thrown out within a few years, yet dare not invest in the future of people?

Fortunately, many of our young minds have diagnosed the sickness, as have the marginalized who have been abused by it.  This is most tragically illustrated by the protest of Chief Theresa Spence.  She is saying to Canadians and Canada ~ here is your system: here is how life means so little to the structures of power, that your prime minister cannot spare a few minutes to stop the dying of a woman. See how quickly the media and its professional trolls, will dismiss her as manipulative. See how many people will blindly deny this has anything to do with them.

See.  Look.  Hear.  Feel.  This is your home.  This is your planet with its rivers and mountains. This is your family. It calls to you again and again, day after day, with its brave attempt to heal itself by reclaiming the power of life as its own.

Power Without Responsibility is War Against Humanity

The UK riots being the current media focus right now, I happened to hear a taped conversation between two self-acclaimed rioters on the CBC radio. 

Many people may have lost their livelihoods because of the destruction and looting of small businesses in the cities where the riots were held.  In today's economy they may not get much back on their insurance policies, never recover their losses, and be forced out of business.  The large companies of course will survive and may fill the vacancies, which means less choice for shoppers and more influence for big business to pressure government for further tax cuts. This, as well as those whose houses were burned down, is a crime against the people of this nation.

The two rioters, drinking a bottle of stolen wine at 9:30 am, said they were 18 years old. They felt really good about their role in the looting.  One of them claimed, to the agreement of the other, that this proves they can do what they want.

Well, no dear, you can't.  Because the power you are using is not going to offer you a future any more than the power that is used against you.  For a brief description of that I go to an article by Michael Moore published in Straight Goods.

It began centuries ago, but most recently on August 5, 1981, when Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union who defied his order to return to work. They had been on strike for two days.

"Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D Roosevelt started — a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person."

His ideology was closely followed by Margaret Thatcher.

Since then we have seen a growing gap between haves and have-nots and our capitalist societies in the UK, Canada, and the US, have become more volatile, as jobs left the nation for places where exploitation had no competing infrastructure called "human rights". There is more hatred, despair, corrupt business practice by employers and employees, more reported issues of domestic violence, road rage, mass murderers, and more wars.

In short, what has happened to our civil society is that it has crumbled under the fierce competition for power and influence over others. Generally people will avoid blaming those who have orchestrated this break down, and instead vent their frustration on people and things that have less power than they.

For thirty years, big business with its instruments of "democratically" elected governments and media, have become the ruling party. They are instructing the people, through media persuasion and obfuscation, what to think, feel and buy.

The wisdom and morality that helped us evolve into civil societies, with law, education and health care, has eroded, and been replaced by fear.  Fear stokes the lower human qualities of greed, envy and hate.  We are continuing to spiral down, while a few elite are getting greedier and more despotic in their actions.

Michael Moore is direct in his observation of what happened in America, which trickled down to events in Europe, "those in power ... destroyed the middle class of our country and, in turn, have wrecked the future for our young people."

Moore acknowledges they had the money, the media and the cops, yet the people numbered 200 million. Only twenty percent support the Tea Party, which has thrown a wedge into the nations' bid to survive.

Linda McQuaig (also in Straight Goods) points out, "when Washington embarked on a frenzied search for ways to reduce the massive US deficit, a tax loophole that allowed hedge fund managers to pay tax at the exceptionally low rate of 15 percent certainly seemed like low-hanging fruit..." with polls indicating that Americans support "higher taxes on the rich as a way to reduce the deficit."

"Cancelling the loophole would save the treasury $20 billion over 10 years, and the public would surely be unmoved by the pain inflicted on hedge fund managers — the top 25 of whom took home an average pay last year of $880 million each."

Social programs for the middle class, the needy and the desperate, that have been cut could benefit from this $20 billion. A just society is a less fearful place to live in. But Republican Tea Party extremists, took control by cleaning the table of tax increases. McQuaig reports "All deficit reduction was to come exclusively from government spending cuts, hitting the middle and lower classes hard."

The future for us, our children, and grand-children, is debilitating poverty and chaos. We might be okay now, but in the war against humanity, we will surely be victims, as the uber powerful compete with one another to gain the most control through economic power.

Unless we wake up and see who the major looters and rioters are, we will be living in a polluted, devastated, bleak and violent world, such as Dickens illuminated in his stories of squalor. We can hardly expect our youth to be moral if our rulers are blatantly ruthless. And we can hardly rest at moralizing the rioters if we are not going to challenge the power currently operating and replace it with the human revering, power from within.

What we can do is nurture our youth, nurture their understanding of how power works, so that they learn how to re-create a sustainable and just future.  It has taken thirty years to completely undo the social justice values their grand-parents were raised on. We musn't expect our youth to learn how to rebuild it in a few days.