Dear America

When I came to this continent I met Ralph Waldo Emerson

and society as a home built by friendship 

and barns built by community.

Jobs for and with people — but you were awed by capitalism 

the transcendence of economy above sentiment, 

fantastic things, celebrity, the remaking of men 

and woman — a toy to play with

that only a few souls could influence.

The universal church of screens, talking heads and red lips, 

new words for new meanings, crash and bang 

you made it up and presented us with Jesus the superstar 

and Trump the christ — in the new world anyone can be 

a balloon floating on air and who needs real people 

when you can turn it on and turn it off again

but we cannot escape the meaning of this wizard who replaced 

shamans, kings and emperors with prisons for profit.  

Let them eat candy floss.

While the great fascists of Europe were fed oil and gas

you were singing in the rain and loving Lucy and we 

lapped it up like cream and sugar allowing Albert Einstein 

and Hannah Arendt to teach truth which nearly caught on
until the next economist came out with new puffs

and by then we were marshmallow chums

singing kumbaya around the campfire

more fun than British Bulldogs

(bobby sox were not for the stiff upper lip)

and those hippies knew how to put an end to war

until the neo-liberal economy crossed out

every living thing from the Amazon Forrest

to the orca whale and all that remains

is the lizard brain and far-sighted raptor.

Neo-nazi’s, I suspect,  are supported by two camps 

those afraid the people will create a new future

and those traumatized before they met tenderness.

Now the continent must be returned

to the earth and its inhabitants

or wordless bonfires without borders

will finish the game.

THINGS FALL APART: America and Liberal Democracy

Ideas at 9 pm Friday May 10th. 

James Kloppenberg, professor of history at Harvard University, traces the long and tortuous tradition of American liberal democracy. He argues the United States has arrived at such a precarious place in its political evolution that the very underlying culture that makes democracy possible is under threat. Kloppenberg says unless Americans are willing to move away from destructive tendencies like self-righteousness and dogmatism, then democracy itself may never recover.

Listen to Ideas with Paul Kennedy on CBC.CA

Republiku

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. The word comes from haiku no ku meaning comic verse. The English haiku is usually three lines about a brief observation. For fun I call these verses Republiku - the first part refers to the Republic (nation or politics) and the last syllable refers to a poetic form.

NY Times report

facts don’t matter

anymore

🌳

Truth is truth

but we are 

above that

🌳

Americans held hostage

by their president

and money

🌳

American veterans

salute president

for protecting them

🌳

A poet wrote

when the world doesn’t make sense

rewrite from scratch

🌳

Class Background, Unitarian Universalism's Hidden Diversity

“As the national polarization gets ever more bitter, we must work all the harder not to stereotype those who disagree with us according to their race, class, income, or other demographic category, no matter how closely such traits may correlate with ideas we oppose. The more tempted we are to write people off without a hearing, the harder we should be working to understand them.”

Doug Muder (contributing editor and columnist for UU World. 

What I really want is dignity, to be respected as a whole yet flawed individual who is trying with all she has to make life kinder to those she meets, and I suspect that others also feel like this. That we get scared, get angry, get defeated, and tired at times, and say things we regret, is part of our nature.

However we also have the capacity to bring back to the fold, our compassionate reason, and to acknowledge those who do difficult work. Fire fighters, police officers, ministers, parents, sons, daughters, social workers and teachers are tested every minute of every day - to do the best they can under the circumstances.

Going forward we anticipate that mistakes will be made. As the organism we know as society, we can appreciate the trained and innate skills of others and learn from their experiences.

At times when this society is in crisis I can look to those learned skills for some answers along with my own awareness and observations.  This is where much of our wealth lies. 

Orthodoxy of War

On Canada’s military contribution to the campaign against Islamic state, Peggy Mason of the Rideau Institute said:


"We’re playing a symbolic military role, [within the context of ] a very short-sighted military strategy, when what we could be doing is playing a much more meaningful role in the broader political strategy that must be put in place if we are going to have anything other than a very long conflict, a quagmire."


Why would that be? Why would the federal government want to play a "symbolic" role instead of attempting to bring peace in such a dangerous area. How would we or the government of Canada benefit by this? What are we trying to attain?


William Astore in The Nation lists seven reasons why America will not be ending war anytime soon. That is to say that Washington intends to keep the war going on for as long as it can.

The reasons given in this article, are the privatization of war, embrace of the national security state by both major parties, "Support Our Troops” as a substitute for thought, fighting a redacted war, threat inflation, defining the world as a global battlefield, and the new "normal" in America is war.

We have seen how our federal government is eager to support Washington wherever it can.

The purpose of war is not to defend the people of a nation but simply to enable the war industry to get rich while the citizens, or taxpayers, pay for it with money and the lives of their children.

Andrew Bacevich writes in Tom Dispatch from his book How Washington Rules:


"By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor."

Rather than a global threat Peggy Mason reminds us that we are fighting civil wars in other nations and: "The way you end these civil wars [is] not through a military victory …[but] through the negotiation table. There is no solution here without dealing with Assad, and the only way to deal with Assad is to negotiate with him."

Which do we want? For the future of our children and the future of our planet? Peace or the threat of oppression by the centralized power of the arms industry.

How Oppressive Power Needs Its Own Mythology

Gary Younge, in his recent Guardian article, titled  The world as seen by Republicans, in a land of myth and amnesia lists the mythologies that drive the Republican political movement in the US.


Younge points out many conservatives believe the problems of America are caused by foreigners or foreign influences. "For a core group of Republicans "foreign" has become an epithet – a slur willfully blurring the distinction between non-American, un-American, liberal, non-Christian and non-white."


Onlookers, including Gary Younge, understand this is part of an election strategy to beat the Democrats by targeting Obama's right to be president.

"This is of course a proxy for race made popular by the birthers, who, despite all the evidence, insist Obama was born in Kenya. In a world where direct racial attacks are out of bounds, "foreign" becomes a useful metaphor. This man, it says, is essentially not like us or even from us. 

Branding him Muslim, as though this too were in itself an insult, has the same function. A recent poll revealed the proportion of Republicans who believe Obama is Muslim has doubled since 2008 and now stands at almost a third. The trouble with these dog whistles is now that everyone can hear them they are scarcely worthy of the name."

But the end result has a much more ominous outcome from a nation whose Foreign Policies have dominated the rest of the world since World War II, when another party almost dominated Europe by creating mythologies and branding scapegoats.  The whole structure of European societies were destroyed almost beyond repair.


Just as the Nazi's segregated the Jews, who had been part of European societies for centuries, the Republicans are segregating African Americans as being un-American.


After the defeat of the Nazi's, tremendous energy was put into rebuilding civil society, which then helped to bring about freedom and a better standard of living. Which then tragically funneled into  consumerism.


Centralized power controls global business, media and government, and is in the process of destroying civil society absolutely, because it is the enlightenment and education of global citizens that hold the greatest threat to their absolute domination. 


It is at this point where power no longer needs to pretend it takes care of, or protects the people, because life itself becomes redundant.  But once we deconstruct the mythologies of leadership and power, we can construct new mythologies that revere the power of diversity and the means to our survival.