Proroguing Parliament - open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Photo by Montrealais

Rt. Honourable Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Prime Minister of Canada

80 Wellington Street

Ottawa, ON

K1A 0A2

Dear Prime Minister

I write to you today because I am really concerned about what is happening in Canada. 

Since coming to Canada in 1965 I have learned a great deal about civil society. It is the spirit of caring that has enabled me to move beyond cynicism and apathy, and that spirit which also makes me really concerned about our future.

Every day I meet well informed Canadian citizens who love this country, who work hard to do their job to the best of their ability, who spend hours contributing to community, for the greater good. Among friends, colleagues and acquaintances I have observed an ethic of citizenship and social responsibility which has inspired me to think beyond my own self interest. Or better yet, to see that my self interest is located in the interest of all.

For people to be the best they can be, they need a society which inspires and acknowledges this spirit of care and concern for our fellow citizens. But many events of late indicate that Canada as a nation no longer exists. What we could so easily believe if we allow ourselves to be influenced by mainstream media news, is that this land is merely a petro state or an opportunity for foreign profit. When we as individuals and as a society believe the only thing that matters is the economy then we cease to care for life itself.

When you call for parliament to be prorogued for the third time, I wonder if you are acting as an employee of a large corporation rather than the prime protector of our nation. It allows cynicism to grow just as the events around Lac-Mégantic, the shooting of Sammy Yatim, the senate scandal and so many other news headlines, make us wonder what happened to the ethic of good government. Where are the standards we thought were realized through centuries of struggle towards human rights, and our responsibilities in a democratic society? Where are our philosophers, our healers, our teachers in parliament?

I believe they are there in Ottawa and in the Canadian conscience – but these voices must be allowed, must be heard. Please do NOT prorogue parliament in September.

yours sincerely

Janet Vickers

Interrogating the White Race

Trayvon Martin, Reza Aslan and Jesus are linked, not just because they have been in the news lately but because there seems to be, thanks to Fox News, a lot of noise around race, religion, good and evil. Most of it a disconnected framing of beliefs built on prejudice.

Rather than moving away from bigotry, right-wing media seems to want to inflame it. Is this a strategy to keep public fears and prejudices chained to hierarchy and oppression?

Christ with beard (Wikimedia commons)

In an article titled Who Owns Jesus? Tasbeeh Herwees interrogates the interview between Fox News' Lauren Green and Reza Aslan. Tasbeeh says "The insinuation underlying Green's questions was that a Muslim writing about Jesus was not just outlandish, but inconceivable without some kind of hidden agenda."

How dare Aslan write about Jesus when he is not white? That would be the question among many people who are informed only by popular propaganda.

Who knew, without having read Herwees article, that middle eastern people were found to be white in a 1915 court case when Syrian immigrant George Dow fought to overturn a ruling that proclaimed him ineligible for naturalization because he wasn't white. A federal appeals court ruled in his favour because of Jesus!

Aslan remained patient and rational throughout the interview as though he were explaining something to an eight year old.  Perhaps because "Aslan, like many Muslims, faces this kind of suspicion in his everyday life - by policemen, TSA officers and passers-by who find his dark skin and foreign name threatening" says Herwees.

Where did the term "white race" come from?  It entered the "European languages in the late 17th century beginning with the racialization of slavery at the time, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and enslavement of native peoples in the Spanish Empire", says Wikipedia.

In this context it could be argued that economics required this category so that the "white man" could, with a free conscience colonise America, India and Africa.  But it seems it was not enough.  Scientific studies had to be pursued to support the white man's entitlement to exploit and abuse other people for profit.

Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) created Crania Americana (1839), An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), and concluded that "the ancient Egyptians were not African but white and that Caucasians and Negroes were already distinct three thousand years ago." (Wikipedia)

After centuries of the white man's savage treatment towards aboriginal peoples it seems like some are desperate to hold onto the notions of white supremacy, long after the survey of human mitochondrial DNA (Cann, Stonekind, and Wilson. Nature. 1987), points out that "all mitochondrial DNAs stem from one woman" who lived 200,000 years ago in Africa.

Or more to the point, it seems like capitalism requires a global state of injustice and structural violence in order to maintain its hegemony. But this can only be maintained while we, the majority of people, remain in a state of preferred ignorance and apathy.

Prison Industrial Complex

The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman, is only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has criminalized poverty. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to$40,000 a year. This use of the bodies of the poor to make money for corporations fuels the system of neoslavery that defines our prison system.

                                                                                         Chris Hedges

The Economics of Blood

If we look back at the development in the twentieth century, the most devastating cause of human suffering, of deprivation of human dignity, freedom, and peace has been the culture of violence in resolving differences and conflicts. the challenge before us is to make our new century of dialogue and of peaceful co-existence.
- Dalai Lama

Found on the Charter for Compassion email newsletter.

With Zimmerman, the Scandal Is What’s Legal (Andrew Rosenthal - The New York Times Taking Note)

...  because  in Florida you can carry a gun in public, follow an innocent stranger and then stand your ground.

Can this happen in Canada? Is it possible that some time in the future the laws here will be the same as in Florida? What will make it easy for gun laws such as this to be entrenched in law? What can we do to avoid it?

A reply from Bob Lane ...

1. Yes,
2. Possible.
3. Vote conservative.
4. Vote Green. Pay attention. Be diligent.

Elizabeth May: this is what a leader looks like

May taken National Day of Action, Electoral Reform

The leader of the Green Party is an example of what a leader is. She focuses on the issues. She informs Canadians about what she is doing, what needs to be done, and why. Visit her website for well written and easy to read articles.

There is so much trivial noise created from various interests that the really important issues don't get the coverage they deserve.  But if you want to find out more about why things happen, their causes and what we can do about them visit the sites that inform.

A good leader knows that our collective survival is built on social justice not popularity.

Other leaders include, David Suzuki, Council of Canadians, staff at Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives , Karen Armstrong, and Thomas Mulcair.

The New Bourgeoisie

Is the new bourgeoisie a rising middle class who will bring about creative destruction - turning the world away from capitalism toward environmentalism?

The shocking images of rail cars full of petroleum blowing up and burning down the town of Lac-Megantic in Quebec, as tragic, and scary as it is, is only a fraction of how unregulated capitalism has wiped out the common wisdom of social responsibility for the extreme wealth of a few.  

In other words, work safety, living wages, health, social costs, justice, and standard of living, are all irrelevant arguments because life (nature) is irrelevant in the current pursuit of profit.  To care about humanity is naive and sentimental.  The mainstream media daily provides us with an inventory of examples. 

Weather, once the topic of polite society, has become political, with every extreme event being an indicator that we are not in control. Heat waves, cyclones, droughts and floods threaten to end the Anthropocene.  Yet the anthro-hyenas refuse to pay attention.

After centuries of class restrictions, the brave entrepreneurs of nineteenth century America were not going to let tradition get in the way of a new world dream.  The economy and the market place became the opiate of the people, and although the rest of the world applauded its inventions and has benefited from unbridled enthusiasm - now when this nation is the only remaining super-power, the American people are not the recipients of this wealth. (But neither were the British people when Britain "ruled the waves".) 

Chris Hedges has identified "sacrifice zones" where "Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed".

Humanity is the sacrifice to this current fundamentalist 'religion', because wherever nature is not taken care of, where people are not allowed hope, dignity and worth, life ends in violence. Perhaps suddenly or slowly and painfully. 

Witnessing the destruction of eco systems is a mental health issue.  How can we be reasonable, nurturing and creative people when all the signs point to pollution?

Power-worship is the most devastating, debilitating mental illness of all when it threatens our survival, and prevents us from seeing what is in front of our noses.

Our governments are deluded. Britain's "former energy minister John Hayes described concerns about the rainforests of Malaysia and Indonesia – which, with their tigers, orangutans and thousands of unique species, are being destroyed to grow biofuels – as “bourgeois views” writes George Monbiot.  

This is the Orwellian new-speak we were warned about in 1984 - that something as essential as stewardship of the earth should be trivialized with words that mean the opposite. 

So those of us whose love of the natural world is a source of constant joy and constant despair, who wish to immerse ourselves in nature as others immerse themselves in art, who try to defend the marvels which enthrall us, find ourselves labelled – from the Mail to the Guardian – as romantics, escapists and fascists. That, I suppose, is the price of confronting the power of money. (Monbiot)

So let us be the new bourgeoisie. Let us agonize over how we, as individuals and collectives, can creatively redesign the operating system so that diversity and abundant nature is given the dignity it deserves.  Let capitalism represent our creativity as it did among the shop keepers of old. Let socialism represent the well-being and health of all. Let fundamentalism be the domain of roots so that vegetables, fruit, trees and families can thrive. Let the salons begin.