How to Fight Terrorism

I am republishing this due to anxiety felt as we witness a change of politics in the country to our south. The refusal to concede defeat from the Trump Administration and to plan to disrupt with violence from  various supporters (white supremacist groups), is, in my opinion, terrorism.

How can we fight that instinct to keep blowing up the blown apart?  Invest in peaceful, healing initiatives that make violence redundant.

1. Invest in mental health services to give those at risk the help they need before their illness isolates them from society.

2. Re-establish the primary needs of people - shelter, nutritious food, education, living wages and time for family.

3. Support families by providing health services, family planning, women's reproductive education.

4. Sex education that covers the real experiences of young men and women on top of the scientific knowledge about human sexuality.

5. Encourage children to develop a social conscience by listening to what they think, to honour their ideas and to talk about the world of economics and politics in a way that helps them grow into engaged citizens. This can be done at dinner times or other regular times that the family is together.

6. Value life before profit and power. Look people in the eye, take time to listen, take time to care no matter how small the offering may be.

7. Welcome refugees - they are in crisis and people in crisis can recover if others help them find peace. The earth is more than just real estate - it is home.

8. Give up the notion that competition is the only way we become better people. Competition might help us improve at sports, and certain skills but a life dedicated to "winning" is limited to egocentric obsession and narrows the world view.

Terrorism begins with  the idea that power is a zero sum game. That the intrinsic value of our lives depends on proving ourselves. Proving to be capable is worthy but when society is written out of our experience we learn to see our worth in comparison to others, in how much we earn and what we own. If being great depends on oppressing others who have less power, or making more money or up-selling products, we have disposed of our human values such as art, music, analysis, care, nurture, problem-solving and the building of sustainable futures.

The Depth and Breadth of White Supremacy

Because the media keeps reporting on the events, utterances and activities of broken men, I think concerned citizens must jump in to offer a different view.

We are vulnerable to fashions and movements that cause tremendous suffering, such as the Thirties in Europe.

Using Hitler's playbook we know that human nature can be misrepresented and conditioned into robotic bodies to serve a political fantasy such as racial superiority. Using different words I might say the men of Europe were asked to give up their reality, their health, their livelihood, their intelligence, for an imagined glory, which meant death.

Nations of people starved so that money could be invested in global killing machines. The mental health of these "Aryan" people was battered by trauma. We lost limbs and lives, husbands and sons, fathers and mothers, wives and daughters, for the glory of war.

It meant that arguments, doubts, conversations and worry about the future were temporarily wiped out for the beat of the goose step. It meant that people no longer had to solve human problems because they could hollow out their minds and replace them with propaganda. There were only two choices to make - obey the rules and die, or be tortured to death.

Does that look like highest attainment for humanity? Does that feel like a celebration of life?

This either/or scenario didn't begin with Hitler or the Nazi's and the social conditions that were causing men to give up hope and turn to hate, began through other men who had power over the people.  Those who dictated the rules of austerity were not the ones who would go hungry.

You don't have to be a scholar to know that glory is about sacrificing life for power. Life is presented as a burden, and the only true achievement is the ability to control the lives of others.

This is not new and has been said more profoundly by Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, and millions of poets whose work is mostly ignored.

The culture of Europe was destroyed in politics, wealth, life and health while a few got rich. Now this hate has been ignited by North American opportunists to defend capitalism against the human conscience.

What did Hitler achieve for the world? A brutal example of how low humanity could sink and the proof of our capacity for cruelty. But also a warning to us all about what it is we need to fight against. Not the stranger but the shadow in ourselves.

White supremacy is about turning human souls into vacuous puppets in order to destabilize and destroy civil society and ultimately create a smooth path for megalomaniacs to do as they please without criticism or obstruction. Is this what we want?

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.

Naming the Disease - Social Atomization

Henry Giroux writes in his recent Truthout article titled "Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age" of Leo Lowenthal who warned back in the forties about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear. "What he understood with great insight, even in 1946, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible."

This confirms my sense that we are trying to fight a social disease with rational arguments while the supporters of fascist movements just want a messiah who will deal with the big problems so we don't have to, but who have no idea of the danger in giving unconditional power to a single ego. A functioning democratic society can be annoying and tiresome but it has many conditions that challenge power.

In a free and democratic society that pays taxes for education, justice, and social protections for the most vulnerable - we are continually being updated with facts that challenge assumptions of how we can instinctively know the leaders we pick will protect us. That we have social standards that can't be broken. Or that we will be okay as long as the economy is okay. Or, even that we have progressed and would never push a woman in front of a train because she was wearing a headscarf.

In the fifties and sixties I was given an education based on social justice. It wasn't in headlines but it underscored all that I learned. It didn't guarantee fairness or security but assumed we had a responsibility to care about one another. We didn't read Giroux, Lowenthal or Arendt, but we knew of Socrates and Orwell.

Yet many who graduated from this era were quite happy to throw it away because it wasn't perfect.

Now we are at such a stage of civil entropy we shrug while finance capital rules and public benefits are eroded. Those at the bottom are left without a means of earning a living wage, without hope, continually ground down by endless poverty and denied human dignity.

"Mass fear is normalized as violence increasingly becomes the default logic for handling social problems." Giroux writes.

If we stop to read this age and condense all the hostility around us, we will see that life itself is the enemy of fascism. Fascism silences conversation, it wants unquestioned obedience, human sacrifices, the glorious sunset, robotic armies.

Totalitarianism wants power without the human stain, without competing organisms, without reflection or question or thought. It is the muscle without a brain, The sperm without the egg. The knife without flesh. The future without compassion. The masculine without the feminine.

The corporate media keeps telling us this over and over again, in a thousand different scenes and sound bites.

Self-Esteem

I remember hearing something on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, about or from a teacher, who said that marking students' work is fraught with conflict and difficulty because they feel entitled to get good marks from the institution their parents support with their dollars. The school, in an unregulated capitalist society is a commodity, and the teacher is a servant. Following this idea another comment claimed that self-esteem is something to be earned - that it was not a right or an entitlement.

So in this brief discussion where I cannot remember the program or cite the source, and for which I apologize, it seemed that entitlement and high self-esteem were linked. Maybe just by me, but the thought has remained even though the source has been forgotten.

Does high self-esteem threaten the quality of education and other social institutions? Certainly billions of dollars are spent in entertainment and advertising that tell us we are special and we deserve the best. And we are surrounded by devices–little genies that pop out of laptops, cell phones and electronic games, whose purpose in their short lives, is to please us. We learn how to press the  buttons to win. Millions of imaginations in the western world can easily believe, in the privacy of their small rooms, that they are in control. Millions of egos who watch endless examples on TV, internet, and game-boys, of how to succeed, without ever having to deal with other people, may think they already have all the answers.

Civil society is under threat from many things but I don’t think self-esteem is the biggest.

Do those who have the drive to lead others always have high self-esteem? Do those who have learned the tricks to get ahead, to come out on top, who are well groomed and good looking, have high self-esteem? Do celebrities have high self-esteem? In short, do the people we hold up as good examples of success have a grounded sense of their worth beyond beauty, money and status, so that when they wake at four in the morning, they feel satisfied?

It seems to me that the drive for material success is more an instinct of survival, in a hierarchical society that marginalises those who don’t play the win or lose game. No room on this planet for the ones who don’t consume. Who refuse, as Reggie Perrin says, to hand their balls over to the corporation. Even the meagre shelters that enable these souls a bed and a toilet at night are closing down for lack of funding.

Commodities really are a cosmetic application to self-esteem that is continually under threat from the competition. Self-esteem has to arise from a sense of worth that comes from being loved and wanted as a child, to loving as an adult, and belonging to community.

It’s poor self-esteem that is destructive. The inner voice that abuses the conscience after any achievement. The bully who endlessly looks for someone to hurt because she is unable to acknowledge the abuse received when she looked for love. The addict who keeps looking for his chosen fix because he can’t find that permanent intrinsic worth.

In reality, the commercial world assigns no intrinsic value to us. In the hierarchical, political realm  there is no esteem for the self because life has no value. No more than a global virus, we serve or die alone.

Self-esteem doesn’t exist outside of the self’s participation in a community that is radical enough to love life more than power and profit.