February 7 to 9 Festival of Jewish and Gabriolish Art, Words and Music

Auschwitz Birkenau: Dehumanization

This article details the conditions of the death camps that murdered millions of people, mostly Jews, and how it ended. There are villains and heroes in this article, but mostly human beings who have the capacity to survive under difficult and barbaric conditions. 

We cannot afford to turn away from this history. We cannot afford to let someone else decide our values, manufacture consent, and dehumanize people in order to gain absolute control over nations. Auschwitz-Birkenau. My Jewish Learning. 

The Brain

Little cauliflower

You are my teacher
reporter, whistleblower and guardian 
without recognition.

You were the first ally

you egged me on to split 
and never stop multiplying.

You nag in the pit of my stomach

when I forget something
stored in the coils of history.

You pull at my eyelids

when I want to escape

to nocturnal pastures.

And now when it would be easy

to drift away in bed

by the window

you remind me

that life without muscle

is hard work.

Let me cry now and then
when I wake
to fuel these legs

last limbs to grow 
before  expulsion 
from the amniotic pool.

In Response to Tabloid Media Portrayal of Women

Kate

The drunken servant becomes the lord. Show him
your spirit and let him misinterpret you.
The play within the play becomes the street
outside your door and what you believe
is not important to those who want
an entertainment.

They think a woman can be successfully managed.
A defiant and beautiful Kate tamed, obedient
to the brokers of celebrity—you are their leading lady
a chattel, their household goods
their barn their horse their ox their ass
their any thing at any time
their frown or smile preserved in pixels
rain or shine.

Clowns will tell you the moon is the sun.
You must say it too. What they believe
is not important to you as you become
the princess who will learn
how to manage them.

The princess is the woman becoming her earth
her fire, her water, as the sun and moon
reveal themselves in endless play
unmanageable.

(Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)

You've Got a Friend - Gabriola Island

The Art of Listening: Eric Fromm

Listening, Fromm argues, is an art.  He offers six guidelines for mastering the art of unselfish understanding:

💜 The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.

💜Nothing of importance must be on his/her mind, he/she must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.

💜She/He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.

💜She/He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.

💜The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him/her — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to her/him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.

💜Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/05/erich-fromm-the-art-of-listening/?

How did we get to this?

First, males were trained to be soldiers who would fight to the death without ever acknowledging their pain. 

Then we trained females to crave approval from males and never mention their pain. 

Then we raised children to crave prizes for winning with slogans that said you are either somebody or you are nobody, which trained them to seek titles and status above contentment. 

Then we destroyed cultures to make gadgets and trained workers to sell them. 

Then we made up stories and movies that said people are selfish and cruel and the world is violent. 

Then we destroyed other nations to mine materials to create amazing technologies to entertain us forever so that we didn't need other people or human company. 

We were told we didn't need education, or health, or children, or parents, or lovers, or friends. 

Then we underfunded hospitals and senior homes so that staff would burn out. 

Then we donated large sums of money to create fake news and propaganda more entertaining than truth, then imprisoned journalists for leaking out truth. 

Then we were made to see that we are failures because we haven't saved the planet. 

Then we were swamped in headlines, twitter, memes, images and posts that routinely remind us we are powerless to do anything about the crises we face but we can fight each other over who is to blame.

About Progress and the Wish for a Better World

"Last December I was at Parkside Academy for the launch of some of the first $10 a day child care prototype spaces in B.C. and the families there spoke about how life changing this was for them. One parent spoke about no longer having to visit the food bank every week, another father said he would be able to quit his second job on weekends and have time to spend with his family. It was an emotional day and their stories only strengthened my commitment to see a full universal child care system implemented province wide."

Some quotes from Doug Routley's New Year Letter.

I print this because, with all the "news" coverage and power trips, how we help the people is the best way to judge what we are doing and how we are doing.

Predicting the Future

What I am learning from the airwaves of media, government and business is that greed and spite have won over humanity's survival on this planet.

It has shut down public discourse, the engagement of free minds in policy making for the future. 

Media is ubiquitous. It's voice overules the voice of individuals and small communities. It reels off violence all over the world like an endless shopping list.

Journalists who write with conscience are killed, imprisoned or shut out of the conversation entirely.

George Monbiot who writes a column for the Guardian, reports: "It is not just governments that have failed to respond, though they have failed spectacularly. Public sector broadcasters have systematically shut down environmental coverage, while allowing the opaquely funded lobbyists that masquerade as thinktanks to shape public discourse and deny what we face. Academics, afraid to upset their funders and colleagues, have bitten their lips."

But this is such a bleak platform from which to plan a future.  It seems I must prepare myself to witness terrible events just to support an absolute guarantee to imprison and oppress everything on this planet as though all of life's history and culture was established for the entertainment of oligarchs.

It is nothing short of nihilism for me to carry on entertaining myself as though things will work out.

The only way the world can be saved is when we stop being cowed by statistics, trends, wars, injustice and hate — to challenge these trends, to create new trends and to respect life by listening to those who suffer and support them by lobbying for a fix.

Humans have created community since the beginning of agriculture 7,000 years ago. Domesticating plants and animals allowed us to observe how things grow and thrive. It also created social responsibility. 

How can young minds thrive if all they faced with is tales of wars, colonialism and capitalism? How can we be fully human if any conversation that examines and supports social health is labelled and dismissed as sentimental?

How can we not see how capitalism has become a new religion when the economy is fixated on the stock market which doesn't mention the health and well being of societies?

When the most powerful nation in our world parades sociopathic behaviour and beliefs by investing most of their tax dollars on the military and wars in other countries, it follows that racism, misogyny, inequality, greed and fear - are  instruments of nihilism. The art and sensibilities of human nature become unnecessary frills while cruelty and violence is the main currency.

Caring for community is done by going to meetings that talk of solving problems, helping those who need help, supporting programs and initiatives with your time and money. Celebrating life.