Long Past Hope But Don't Give Up

 Change the focus. Instead of arguing over who is right and who is wrong, try listening, caring, supporting - the fragile child within by acknowledging we are not in control.

There is nothing that will switch from this to an ideal world. The need now is to care, to listen and connect.

How can you connect with a voice printed in a newspaper or magazine, an ego that has a large vocabulary, a politician that is afraid of losing her seat?

We could begin with the wisdom of my yoga teacher "everyone suffers" and we cannot see what problems our adversaries are dealing with. They are gripping the bar to stay on it.

As Gabor Mate has pointed out in his books, the trauma that has caused our fragile state is beyond our recall and we are just reacting to the way it hurt us. We feel the pain but not always the source.

The everlasting problem of our lives is - how can we humanize our world? How can we welcome the future, nurture and care for it? What can we win if everyone is anxious, afraid and opinionated.

I Love My Body

 

Yes it’s true. It is not pretty.

The middle is too fat.

My neck is too thick.

My eyes are droopy.

The corners of my mouth curl down

I see this every day.

I cannot walk without support.

Slowly I tell my left leg

lift up, move forward a few inches

and it reluctanctly will do an inch.

I have a diagnosis that’s complicated.

Non pressure Hydrocephalus

There is no cure

but it sounds aristocratic, special, unusual

— it makes me feel unique

It’s not Alzeimer’s

not Parkinson’s

its the body I was born with

but worn out

resentful of my demands

after all my brain decided

it wanted a divorce from my body

and now

hurt and resentful

it tries to ignore me

but I still love it

still need it

has been with me since conception

within my mother’s womb

Thank you Mum for teaching me

to care for my body

how I dress it

how it appears to others

how it needs posture

loves to have a bath

loves to be fed and watered.

Some years ago there were gifts

and pleasures.

This body carried three children

and now

I have four grand-children.

I remember walks in the forest

my body taking me down

trails by fir and decidious trees

their perfume, their shade

their strong trunks and hidden roots

my body 

walking 

one foot in front

of the other

this body also went on a couple of cruises

down the Danube, Italy, Sweden

flew to London where it was born

It has been on protest marches

climbed mountains

swam in the River Thames

and Lake Huron

I love all those bodies 

who cared for the land before I arrived

and who will care for as long

as their bodies live.

This is the best article I have read on Alberta Oil

 

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/05/24/Only-Path-To-Change-In-Alberta/?utm

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust (With Lyrics)

Political Parties, Popular Trends, Beliefs, Come And Go

 

We have not yet invented a way to live forever, but one feeling really saddens me. The focus on power as a "proof" of success.

This, I think, is the major threat to human survival. Yes various empires have risen to power, mostly by destroying their competitors.

This has led to schools teaching students the way to success is to compete for top marks in a class of about 30 others.

I remember feeling a failure because I never had top marks in anything except a test of knowledge about music. It was not announced. I never got applause but the teacher said to me, I was the only pupil who got 100 percent, in the entire school.

This was not a time for fanfare. There were no certificates as far as I can remember, no medals or anything. What I did learn throughout school and later as an adult student in University, was - learning is a way to improve the world by using knowledge to create justice.

I continue to meet and learn from people who have achieved wisdom and status by being fair, friendly and empathic. They don't seem to want badges and applause. Why?

Would it be because living in a just world, or at least where fairness exists, is the best reward, and it is incumbent upon all of us to contribute to that goal.

The British Empire wrought terrible cruelty on the most innocent when they "discovered" Canada. The United States of America has created injustice, wars, and poverty throughout the world. The White Man creates mythologies about his achievement while denying justice to those who are not white males. And still seeks to hold power-over while living in denial for the cruelty he has caused. Even now as we see climate change wreak havoc in Northern areas.

That said, so many men who are white, have tremendous capacities to achieve social cohesion. Men who see through lies, who change their ways, no longer the egocentric conqueror, who dedicate their lives and strength to save others, like firefighters, doctors without borders.

I no longer see groups identified as Christians, Jews, Muslims, white, black, rich, poor, athletic, winners or losers. I don't see a nation that is GREAT anywhere. I see people gifted at caring, creativity, sports, politics, engineering and who are vulnerable. Men who get tired, feel taken for granted, feel sad, and sorry for the pain caused by inequality.

I see the prioritizing of power to the neglect of empathy as the cause of failure. Great nations get to a certain height in self-congratulation then fall apart, it is because their addiction to power blinds them to possible solutions.

We cannot survive on a planet we have raped to near death. Well who would want to really?

Truthout - Book Banning

 "What we are witnessing in the form of book banning by conservative politicians and parent groups is a pedagogy of fear, which is fueled by a form of right-wing populism/nationalism that resists change, that rejects the unfinished and the yet to be. The banning of books is consistent with a world that is seen as fixed, where Socratic questioning is marked as a form of danger to those who fetishize ignorance and praise anti-intellectualism. It is not just the soul of the U.S. that is at stake, as President Biden said, but also its mind."

Joe Feagin: "Historically, banning books has always been about suppressing accurate public memories and the critical probing of oppressive U.S. pasts and presents — always in the pursuit of creating greater ignorance and subservience in elite-ruled populations. A central aspect of advanced human rights civilizations is the ability to remember correctly those oppressive societal realities and to react energetically to their deep and continuing legacies in the present and future."

George Yancy: In his informative Truthout article on book banning, Chris Walker shares that, “PEN America, a nonprofit organization that promotes free expression and human rights, found that 1,648 titles have been banned by schools across the entire country. A lot of these books had LGBTQ themes, featured Black or Brown characters, or explored themes of feminism.” I am reminded of the warning issued by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana back in 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I like Santayana’s use of “condemned,” as it implies the sense of being doomed, which implies destruction.

https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-we-resist-book-bans-this-banned-author-has-ideas/?utm

God, Naomi and Doug

Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive. https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein?

Wouldn't it be lovely if AI defended the good rather than the profitable? "But what does it profit a man if he has gained the world and lost himself." https://biblehub.com/mark/8-36.htm

Wouldn't it be great if the voice of God boomed over all the false information with the truth? Or the AI transmitter boomed "Er, no, that's a lie" whenever the programmers put in false beliefs. 

I asked Hey Google - what is truth? She said truth is usually held to be not false, or other misinformation.

How can the world be saved from poison, climate, hate and greed?

Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail wrote about the Republican People's Party Leader  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. "His party has fought and lost four national elections as Mr. Erdogan has changed the constitution to disempower democratic institutions, turned courts into instruments of his will, crushed protest movements, seized control of most national media and imprisoned critics and journalists."

Wouldn't it be even better if all of us wanted truth more than fame, money and sex.

Thank you to Naomi Klein and Doug Saunders for not giving up on the world.