Reverberation: power from the personal to the global

Whatever we value most in life is more than just a cause for celebration, it can lead us to the tools of our collective power, as long as that power is life affirming. But using any tool requires some skill and the more we use it the more skilled we will become.

The Toolbox

Interrogation – who benefits?

Every issue, change, policy, initiative, ideology must interrogate its own value by asking who benefits by this? And if it doesn't those who are affected by it must.

Naming, Unmasking, Engaging:

In his column published in the Guardian, George Monbiot quotes Walter Wink ... "challenging a dominant system requires a three-part process: naming the powers, unmasking the powers, engaging the powers."

I would extend this exercise to all social interactions from family to neighbourhood to community to national. To assume that social relationships do not use power can lead us blithely into relationships where power is abused. Domestic violence certainly puts a strain on challenging power beyond the home. Abusive power in community undoes benefit of community.

Progressive Thinking:

In a Straight Goods article, George Lakoff writes "a robust public is necessary for private success, about all that the public gives us, about the benefits of health, about a Market for All not a Greed Market, about regulation as protection, about revenue and investment". These are all assets our ancestors gave their lives for. Lakoff warns against accepting systems that are not in our best interests. Such as those that allow corporations to get rich by keeping wages low. There is nothing morally right about centralized power that enables oppression, because it always seeks to punish not the causes but the victims of it.

Civil Society:

Yes this gives the individual the power to move freely in the city. Marilyn Hamilton writes that civil society occupies "the We and Heart of the Integral City . . . the pulse of cooperatives, credit unions, foundations, institutes, not-for-profits, NGO’s, social enterprises and other agencies who invest in cultural and social capital". We give and take in society. We have a responsibility to it and gain protections from it.


Education:

I am talking about more than certificates and accreditation here – of course those enable us more choice in our future. But I am talking about the lifelong learning that enables us to participate in systems of power that arise from our knowing and our imaginations. In order to do this we have to let go of the beliefs that comfort us. As the Bible says "the truth shall set you free". But first it will make you miserable as you read the horrors that humankind has imposed on its earthly home.

Contraction:

Every outward act will return.  Whatever we do to others will be done to us. Whatever we send out we will bring back.

In an interview with Michael Moore, Chris Hedges explains the system that currently rules the planet – unfettered capitalism, turns everything into a commodity, even human beings. It exploits and extracts the essence until it is emptied of itself, exhausted and destroyed.  Built into capitalism is a self-destructive ideology that deeply disrupts societies. Imperialism is a disease and the tyranny it imposes is also imposed on itself.

Here then is the warning we must never forget as we struggle to create a better world – we are in the throws of a "giddy intoxication" of an illusion that we can impose our will on the planet; and in the process, we have set in motion the final death of our unborn seeds.

The difference between Hedges, Moore, and myself – is that (I believe) the cause is not capitalism, communism, fascism, or religious fundamentalism – the cause is unfettered power.

We can use our power without harming or controlling. We may send out our desires and receive our limitations. We may work on hope and be discouraged. We may bring peace and be killed for it. We may knit garments of justice and watch them unravel. But work on what sustains life, no matter how futile it may seem, is the natural power we have been given.

Hope and Optimism

Hope and optimism requires our attention to the current state of affairs. The dark side of power.  That is, we need to look at the events that normally disturb the comfortable and lead the disturbed to despair and pessimism.  We need to address this relationship to our world, our place within it and find a way of being that challenges injustice.

Ish Teilheimer of Straight Goods,  reporting on a study that reveals a psychological difference between rich and poor (indicating that the rich don't see a need to help others, whereas the poor understand that they depend on mutual support) goes on to say "It's good to be loving, hopeful, and optimistic, but it's also important to point out that many of the bad things happening to people today are happening because some very wealthy people wanted things that way."

Wealth is power, and those who have power-over sometimes feel more secure by creating systems that make it very difficult or impossible for the masses to gain a healthy standard of living.

"The export of good jobs to sweatshop countries, for instance, was their idea. It's not unfair or overly negative to ask about new ideas in politics and government "Does this help everyone or just the rich?" and to consistently expose the shameless voices of wealthy self-interest."

History is full of examples of how brutal some are willing to be in order to maintain power in their zero-sum game. It was wealthy interests who supported the Nazi's murder of millions of Jews, gypsies and others, causing a war across Europe that destroyed hope and optimism for most. It was wealthy interests that plummeted the lives of Africans into despair and alienation during apartheid.  It is wealthy interests that prop up despotic military governments in the Middle East and Asia.

It is wealthy interests that have destroyed the most powerful nation in the world by creating a dysfunctional hysteria among its citizens. Michael Moore in his 2003 Academy Award acceptance speech said "We like non-fiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons." 

For expressing his opinion he received incredible harrassment and publicly televised death threats.

America, the self-promoted defender of democracy and human rights is currently being crippled by an old strategy - divide and conquer and divide, divide, divide.

So it's apparent that the atrocities that have become familiar in our collective sub-conscious are not caused by the masses as much as they are designed and organized by a powerful few for their own benefit, not ours. However, they have been enabled by a majority who have kept silent for fear of being punished, or have given up on their own perceptions for fear of gazing into the monster.

The trouble with this 'analysis' is that it leaves us feeling powerless, in despair, pessimistic, putting us into the blaming camp of us and them. The observation itself removes any inspiration to respond by anything more than apathy.

While facing up to the fact that most of the globe's economic interests have been gathered into a very small gated community, leaving the masses without much to hope for, we need to invest in something else and rebuild the world by the natures we possess, that have not been corporatized: to witness change as it unfolds, wherever it unfolds, and ask ourselves how we can influence that change.

Hope and optimism without effort may be naive, but getting our selves engaged in the process of evolution is hard work. Hope and optimism ask us to invest in them, they don't promise us happy endings. Hope and optimism need us to be honest with ourselves and one another. Hope and optimism rely on our search for truth and not just the many generalizations trotted out by institutions and heresay.  When it comes to the truth of our lives and our future, even statistics and science need not stop our questioning.

The future we are destined to endure depends upon what we feel, and how we interrogate our feeling with thinking, and how that guides what we say and what we do, and the societies we build from character and vision.

Power Without Responsibility is War Against Humanity

The UK riots being the current media focus right now, I happened to hear a taped conversation between two self-acclaimed rioters on the CBC radio. 

Many people may have lost their livelihoods because of the destruction and looting of small businesses in the cities where the riots were held.  In today's economy they may not get much back on their insurance policies, never recover their losses, and be forced out of business.  The large companies of course will survive and may fill the vacancies, which means less choice for shoppers and more influence for big business to pressure government for further tax cuts. This, as well as those whose houses were burned down, is a crime against the people of this nation.

The two rioters, drinking a bottle of stolen wine at 9:30 am, said they were 18 years old. They felt really good about their role in the looting.  One of them claimed, to the agreement of the other, that this proves they can do what they want.

Well, no dear, you can't.  Because the power you are using is not going to offer you a future any more than the power that is used against you.  For a brief description of that I go to an article by Michael Moore published in Straight Goods.

It began centuries ago, but most recently on August 5, 1981, when Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union who defied his order to return to work. They had been on strike for two days.

"Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D Roosevelt started — a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person."

His ideology was closely followed by Margaret Thatcher.

Since then we have seen a growing gap between haves and have-nots and our capitalist societies in the UK, Canada, and the US, have become more volatile, as jobs left the nation for places where exploitation had no competing infrastructure called "human rights". There is more hatred, despair, corrupt business practice by employers and employees, more reported issues of domestic violence, road rage, mass murderers, and more wars.

In short, what has happened to our civil society is that it has crumbled under the fierce competition for power and influence over others. Generally people will avoid blaming those who have orchestrated this break down, and instead vent their frustration on people and things that have less power than they.

For thirty years, big business with its instruments of "democratically" elected governments and media, have become the ruling party. They are instructing the people, through media persuasion and obfuscation, what to think, feel and buy.

The wisdom and morality that helped us evolve into civil societies, with law, education and health care, has eroded, and been replaced by fear.  Fear stokes the lower human qualities of greed, envy and hate.  We are continuing to spiral down, while a few elite are getting greedier and more despotic in their actions.

Michael Moore is direct in his observation of what happened in America, which trickled down to events in Europe, "those in power ... destroyed the middle class of our country and, in turn, have wrecked the future for our young people."

Moore acknowledges they had the money, the media and the cops, yet the people numbered 200 million. Only twenty percent support the Tea Party, which has thrown a wedge into the nations' bid to survive.

Linda McQuaig (also in Straight Goods) points out, "when Washington embarked on a frenzied search for ways to reduce the massive US deficit, a tax loophole that allowed hedge fund managers to pay tax at the exceptionally low rate of 15 percent certainly seemed like low-hanging fruit..." with polls indicating that Americans support "higher taxes on the rich as a way to reduce the deficit."

"Cancelling the loophole would save the treasury $20 billion over 10 years, and the public would surely be unmoved by the pain inflicted on hedge fund managers — the top 25 of whom took home an average pay last year of $880 million each."

Social programs for the middle class, the needy and the desperate, that have been cut could benefit from this $20 billion. A just society is a less fearful place to live in. But Republican Tea Party extremists, took control by cleaning the table of tax increases. McQuaig reports "All deficit reduction was to come exclusively from government spending cuts, hitting the middle and lower classes hard."

The future for us, our children, and grand-children, is debilitating poverty and chaos. We might be okay now, but in the war against humanity, we will surely be victims, as the uber powerful compete with one another to gain the most control through economic power.

Unless we wake up and see who the major looters and rioters are, we will be living in a polluted, devastated, bleak and violent world, such as Dickens illuminated in his stories of squalor. We can hardly expect our youth to be moral if our rulers are blatantly ruthless. And we can hardly rest at moralizing the rioters if we are not going to challenge the power currently operating and replace it with the human revering, power from within.

What we can do is nurture our youth, nurture their understanding of how power works, so that they learn how to re-create a sustainable and just future.  It has taken thirty years to completely undo the social justice values their grand-parents were raised on. We musn't expect our youth to learn how to rebuild it in a few days.

Gun Registry Saves Money

In a Straight Goods report headed "Gun registry saves money as well as lives", I am struck with the feeling  that saving lives needs to be justified by saving money.

"OTTAWA, April 20, 2011 – The Canadian Federation of University Women (CFUW) believes that gun control is an important measure to help prevent public violence and in particular, violence against women. Most firearm-related deaths in Canada are caused by rifles or shotguns. These are the guns most used in domestic violence."

According to this report, abolishing the registry may save us between $1.5 to $4 million per year, but money incurred as a result of deaths and injury by firearms was estimated at $6.6 billion in 1995.

We know that a registry alone will not stop violence, but we need more conversations about violence, about the cause of domestic violence to match the steady news reports of violent deaths in our nation.

Since the Harper Government has slashed funding for women’s groups that attempt to deal with this issue  and also proposes to slash the gun registry - how will they, if elected, support safety and uphold the value of life?

To what extent is violence nature or nurture and what are the socially aggravating factors that lead some people to harm their own families?