Mental Instability creates Political Instability

Invasive Weed

"On Monday, Maxime Bernier sent out a string of tweets attacking Greta Thunberg, the student environmental activist. The leader of the new People’s Party seeks to bring to Canada a poison afflicting many democracies: the collapse of convention."

John Ibbitson, Globe and Mail. 

People: please don't confuse political trends as public voice.   Watch for the tricksters who create public consent. They are in politics, education, business and media of course. (I am not saying these institutions have failed but propaganda is an invasive weed.)

People of integrity who value peace and social justice know how all things must be weighed and considered in our choices — how we react, who we vote for, who we believe, and who we can see through.

Does anyone believe that Trump, Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson are working for the greater good?

Yes they do but you have to check their particular interests. Why do they hate environmentalists, women, refugees and those with different religious faiths? Because their livelihood depends on maintaining a state of self-interested ignorance?

Conversely why do some feel absolute contempt for politics, education, and humanity in general — they are willing to invest in guns, violence and hate?

Setting up barricades against public conversation and engagement, is not a trend, it's a manipulation of public sentiment.

Greta Thunberg has single mindedly used her will to act in a way that gives us an example of how humanity could take back the future.

Misogyny

After reading The Preludes to Assaults by Jane Eaton Hamilton I was compelled to post this poem on here.

Forget history, culture and knowledge. Break free

of your hoarding of facts, dates. Forget right and wrong.

Nothing means what it intends. The opposite is true

until we recognize it and then it becomes a lie.

The ideologue is the great virus, scourge of this planet.

He climbed down from his tree and turned it

into toilet paper. He tore open his mother’s flesh

to mine for gold.

Hated his kind, moulded it into a sword

made of his mother’s blood and slew his brother.

Sold his children into slavery and called himself

Ruler. Warrior. God.

Gaia is a whore and man is her pimp.

Our laws, our art, our songs, can’t rid her

of this storm, this swarm, this pandemic

this era of man who descended

from the awe and beauty bestowed upon him

by a power he could never deconstruct

this creation larger than his knowing

the stars he couldn’t reach, so instead

he sought revenge and created the order

raping every vessel of hope, each womb

of enlightenment, churned our mother’s milk

into grease, a war to be won.

So when we talk of misogyny as though

it’s simply the fear and hatred of woman

remember – it is the seed of homelessness

entrenched so deeply we blame nature

say it is natural law, say boys will be boys

corner them by two converging walls

of a doctrine so bricked no light can enter

no doubt allowed to breathe

trapped in the construct even she defends

his privilege by love’s failure to disarm

the earth he has littered with weapons

against the distant bird singing at dawn.

published in Eyewear Blink September 2015

Locating the Soul

- glosa  on Jan Zwicky's poem "If there were two rivers"

If there were two rivers.

If their water were clear gold.

If it were a flood, a homecoming, and where they joined,

a standing wave, its crest of white.

“If There Were Two Rivers,” Jan Zwicky

What if the soul could be found

if it were a place, a destination

or a mark on a map to say

this is where we are from

this is where we began, before bones

were covered in skin, before altars

were built on balanced stones

words like wings imagining form that conjures

a rod, line and hook used by fishers.

If there were two rivers.

What if the soul could swim

like a catfish suspecting the bronze hook

purposely baited with its own end game

just as a fable knows the ending before

it shapes a beginning like a rod and line

something hard, smooth and shiny to hold

the old stomach’s memory of hunger

perceived, understood and told

floating in currents fast and cold.

If their water were clear gold.

What if the soul were a glacier melting

into the unseen river. Not the one used

to baptize the innocent, to carry our warriors

and waste to the sea, where fish are farmed

and trawlers give up their catch for tankers

a teeming current, water purloined

— but the other one flowing through veins

beneath the bank recounted and coined

as something owned. And what if it were a flood,

a homecoming, and where they joined,

outlying peaks merged beneath a pink sky

the sun rolls down like water, behind

those mountains, in protest against tectonic plates

that fought and caused the earth to quake

the dusk air curls and softens hard edges

fading, departing, almost dissolving but not quite.

Then a fleeting tease asking why you came

like an urge that lies silent, timeless, polite

and in that distant diminishing sunlight

a standing wave, its crest of white.

Even the Prophets Are Human

O blessed Lovelock, son of Gaia

even with all your science and vocabulary

you failed to wake us up until it was too late.

Global warming is irreversible and all we can do

is wait for the terrible thing to happen

the desertification of Europe, the sinking of London

the famine, the epidemic and the mass migration

of hope.

What can we do if there is nothing we can do

if earth’s reflective organ is too vain

if our power turned too much to outward aggression

punishes the inward nurture of the most delicate

new green shoots emerging above the soil?

Now we shall weep and weep as those great

sky penetrating towers fall

and we perish under their mute walls.

Such a prophecy is not new

there have been others who knew

by the way the warriors went to battle

thrusting their swords into Gaia’s children

that we would not last long

yet we believed linear logic was our sword

of immortality.

And since you are our most recent prophet

why don’t we blame you for not doing

what never worked anyway

—shaking us out of our delusions.

(from Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)

What is it that I must do?

 We, the sentient creatures, are in this time and place where we are informed on many levels, that there is danger and it is urgent that we do something about it, even though we don't have the power to fix all that needs to be fixed.

Not even the President of the United States can fix it. The trauma and the structural violence of many centuries have put the human heart and mind in the centre of a large maze and whichever turn we make will not lead us out of danger.

The problems we face now cannot be fixed by authoritarian agendas or weapons of mass destruction. Yet there is a churning inside and an anxiety that is difficult to endure.

There are things I can do about the economy, politics, climate, the level of fear but it won't fix the world. So I ask myself - who do I think I am that I should worry about the big picture. And yet if I don't what will inform me on what is important and what isn't.

This quandary is not about my ego. It is a message like the rustling of leaves in the wind. It is the silence, the radio, the books and the television programs that circle my consciousness.

It is like a moment's awakening. The words that come just when I am about to fall asleep. This epiphany, vague as it is, will be lost come morning.

I am assured in a quiet way that I am here for a reason and for as long as I live, there is something I must do, something I am here to do. Not something fantastically huge but something that is needed. Something like an energy wafting out of an open window.  Something that whispers across the garden and the pond. Something that comes through me but not of me - to paraphrase Kahlil Gibran. Something that I can do because of my particular history and my particular circumstances. Something that is authentic, without fanfare or crashing cymbals or a gun. Something that will not harm anyone.

I don't yet know what it is but when the time comes I must do it. And this thing that I must do which I will know when the time comes, is a comfort to me now, and when the time comes I will trust it.

This goes for you too. There is something that you can do, before you leave this place. Something that will help to heal this battered planet.

This is not a call for war, or the use of force, not an authoritarian dictate - although we might feel tempted because of  high levels of anxiety. We can offer what might ease the fears of other beings, not tell them what to do.

Oil versus Life

Notley versus Horgan or Oil versus Humanity?

The power of oil is absolute.  It's based on money. If you have enough money to buy lawyers and politicians the outcome is predictable.

If the social climate is indifferent to injustice and to the environment, if we are unable to care about what sustains and what threatens and we are simply in awe of new gadgets and fashions we have traded our family for novelty.

If we are unable to see the dire prediction we are in we are addicted to diversion wherever we may find it. The Olympics, TV dramas, Netflix, gambling, alcohol, sex and drugs.

News headlines may present different arguments for saving the economy or saving the environment, from different experts, and may run to mass shootings, bombings, cruelty and evil deeds, but it all comes down to the same thing: do we care enough to be engaged.

Do we care if so many bad news stories indicate the madness of our so-called leaders versus the vulnerability of courageous minds attempting to defend justice?

Would we rather sound clever, knowledgeable, powerful, in our conversations rather than admit to our vulnerability?  Would we rather laugh and cheer on the bully that cannot lose rather than admit we are part of his/her dinner?

Council of Canadians has offered changes to the NAFTA agreement that doesn't protect the rights of the oil industry over and above the rights of the people who live near the pipelines. Here's your own toolkit https://canadians.org/nafta.

Why the City of Burnaby Opposes Kinder Morgan's Pipeline Route

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZnQNpDbJ3E&feature=youtu.be

If you have 20 minutes to watch this video you will understand why there is such strong opposition to Kinder Morgan's Pipeline. It is easy to understand and the video is well done.

What is on your Holiday Gift List?

"The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists."  taken from "Too right it's Black Friday: our relentless consumption is trashing the planet." by George Monbiot.

So what would you really like for Christmas? What would you like for your grandchildren or the planet?

What I would like is leadership that has integrity, that refuses to trivialize relationships between us and the environment.  We are turning our world into a dollar store.

A Found Haiku - sort of

Please conserve water

do not feed the deer

pick up after your dog

(found on Salt Spring Island)

This is more an instruction than a haiku. To attempt to make this more poetic would make it less urgent. 

Tomorrow there will be a haiku by Basho that may give you some idea of what a haiku sounds like.

Doing the right thing

What does that mean - to 'do the right thing?' The 'thing' we need to do generally is something life changing – affecting us personally – or the lives of others in close relationships with us. Or, it involves a broader social & political decision that will effect the entire planet – in the spirit of Hawking's warning: “[Humanity is facing] a number of [real and existential] threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses.” Perhaps the right thing that needs to be done will consist of the sum total of all of the smaller 'right thing' decisions of people like us – decisions which taken together and across the entire planet could really effect world change.

Russell McNeil, PhD (Physics)
Presented November 20, 2016 at First Unitarian Fellowship of Nanaimo

Infinite Power - a book of poems

Image: Heroic Journey by Paul Grignon Infinite Power, in Vickers eyes “is not a zero sum game  but a journey / a stone thrown in a lake / circular ripples emanating outward” and the danger of our age is that we have lost contact with that power, made it something to possess  like a personal bank account. In writing these poems she  hopes for a reconnection to that sacred universal relationship. Janet Vickers’s book of poetry, entitled Infinite Power,  has such an accurate title for this is an important, brave and,  indeed, powerful gathering of poems. She is on a search, a  compelling search, that draws the reader along with her as  she questions accepted concepts, ploughs through mankind’s  inhumanity and even tears nature apart in her quest for a core of hope amidst despair. “The distant bird singing,” as she puts it. This need to give reason for continuance is evidenced in  Vickers startling fresh and demanding metaphors and her  piercing questions. Hope comes in the last few words—“love  everyone, hate no-one, move to the edge.” It takes profound insight to come to such a seemingly innocent answer. ~ Naomi Beth Wakan, inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo These poems are at turns thought-provoking, accusatory, or playful in their exploration of topics such as climate change, extinctions, greed or incidents from her own past. The thread always running throughout Janet's work is her commitment to honouring all that’s sacred, whether that might be in the world of nature or in the realm of the human heart.

~ Heidi Greco

This is Janet Vickers’s second trade book of poems. Her first book, Impermanence was published in 2012, also by Ekstasis. Her poems have appeared in anthologies in Canada (Down in the Valley, Ekstasis 2004) and the UK (Refugees Welcome and The Poet’s Quest for God, Eyewear 2016), in literary journals and online magazines. Janet is active in the community on Gabriola Island where she lives with Tony, her husband of 46 years.

To order go to Ekstasis Editions

Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans - Suzuki

"Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can be triggered by pesticide exposure. When we consider the vast array of chemicals spewed into air, water and soil, predicting those that may interact with each other and our genetic makeup to create health problems is difficult if not impossible." David Suzuki, Science Matters. A Healthy Biosphere Means Healthier Humans 

Profit must include more than just dollars.  We need a spreadsheet that measures peace, happiness, health and hope for the future.  In order to get this we need to recognize the power that has been forgotten.

Real power is what we have when we have choices and often we cannot see the power available to us.

For example, a young mother may not feel powerful when her newborn infant keeps waking at night, crying for attention.  She will feel drained and at the mercy of her baby. A young father will not feel powerful because the needs of his children exhaust his days.  But caring and loving children really teaches them about what is worthy of our attention .  Loved children often grow up to be responsible, creative adults, who have the tools to raise their children with empathy and good guidance. These families are capable of being functioning citizens who are then able to imagine how to contribute to a healthy society.

Where the emphasis in a family is about punishment and control rather than an observation of their childrens' needs they grow up blind to the powers of sustaining life.  Adults who were abused as children often cannot see how they are abusing their loved ones, and by extension cannot imagine how to create peaceful societies.

There are those who have survived brutal childhoods and still have learned about loving kindness as a social adhesive, but so many will fall under the false promise of power-over. It becomes a mindset of dedicated denial of the infinite power of life where great conquerors walk a thin tightrope in a spiritual vacuum.

Healthy humans learn how to use their power wisely.

The Leap Manifesto

This post is uploaded from The Leap Manifesto - put together by a group of Canadians including David Suzuki and Naomi Klein, to address the looming crisis of environmental and social breakdown.


Sign the Leap Manifesto:

"The leap must begin by respecting the inherent rights and title of the original caretakers of this land, starting by fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The latest research shows we could get 100% of our electricity from renewable resources within two decades; by 2050 we could have a 100% clean economy. We demand that this shift begin now.

No new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future. The new iron law of energy development must be: if you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard.The time for energy democracy has come: wherever possible, communities should collectively control new clean energy systems.

Indigenous Peoples and others on the frontlines of polluting industrial activity should be first to receive public support for their own clean energy projects.We want a universal program to build and retrofit energy efficient housing, ensuring that the lowest income communities will benefit first.

We want high-speed rail powered by just renewables and affordable public transit to unite every community in this country – in place of more cars, pipelines and exploding trains that endanger and divide us.

We want training and resources for workers in carbon-intensive jobs, ensuring they are fully able to participate in the clean energy economy.

We need to invest in our decaying public infrastructure so that it can withstand increasingly frequent extreme weather events.We must develop a more localized and ecologically-based agricultural system to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, absorb shocks in the global supply – and produce healthier and more affordable food for everyone.

We call for an end to all trade deals that interfere with our attempts to rebuild local economies, regulate corporations and stop damaging extractive projects.

We demand immigration status and full protection for all workers. Canadians can begin to rebalance the scales of climate justice by welcoming refugees and migrants seeking safety and a better life.

We must expand those sectors that are already low-carbon: caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media.

A national childcare program is long past due.Since so much of the labour of caretaking – whether of people or the planet – is currently unpaid and often performed by women, we call for a vigorous debate about the introduction of a universal basic annual income.

We declare that “austerity” is a fossilized form of thinking that has become a threat to life on earth. The money we need to pay for this great transformation is available — we just need the right policies to release it. An end to fossil fuel subsidies. Financial transaction taxes. Increased resource royalties.
Higher income taxes on corporations and wealthy people. A progressive carbon tax. Cuts to military spending.

We must work swiftly towards a system in which every vote counts and corporate money is removed from political campaigns.


This transformation is our sacred duty to those this country harmed in the past, to those suffering needlessly in the present, and to all who have a right to a bright and safe future.
Now is the time for boldness.
Now is the time to leap."

The Leap Manifesto

"We could live in a country powered entirely by truly just renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.

We know that the time for this great transition is short. Climate scientists have told us that this is the decade to take decisive action to prevent catastrophic global warming. That means small steps will no longer get us where we need to go." The Leap Manifesto

Sign The Leap Manifesto

Four Lessons on how to Change the World

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho left her career in banking to lead the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, which focuses on security and development policy. In her TED talk she gives us four lessons she learned while tackling the violence around issues of drugs and guns in Brazil.  Carvalho's experience contains an important message for us all – we can challenge big issues and achieve change.

The four lessons she learned in the process are: 1. change the narrative, 2. never underestimate your opponents, 3. use data to drive your arguments, 4. bring together odd bedfellows

What would this look like for those of us who want to change the current political narrative? Below are the thoughts I have wrestled with.

1. change the narrative

We are not nations or religions competing for the most of what each of us want. We are sentient beings trying to survive the cumulative effects of a global hierarchy that enables mass starvation and violence to sustain the power of a few.

The conflict is not between right-wing and left-wing, capitalism and socialism, Christianity and Islam, the conflict is between power and life.

The Operating System has moved beyond tribal competition for territory and is now in the stage where power is valued only as a wholly separate construct from human nature. This requires a structure that upholds, defends and worships the non-human measures of  our culture such as money, technology, numbers, formulas, ideologies, celebrity (not the person but the image), and ideas.  Which also requires a consistent doctrine.

The doctrine tells us that life is not valued because the world is over-populated. Life is a threat to order and must be managed, categorized, brainwashed, dehumanized and reduced through organized war, disease, starvation and addiction. Authorities create fear, insecurity and misery, and make it appear that we ourselves have chosen the conditions we live under.

Hierarchical power requires a rationality that is free of sentiment,  compassion or reverence for life. Any progress that has been made in the last two hundred years is that sophistication and application of purified power and its increasing contempt for anything that breathes. Entertainments must be pornographic to uphold this regime. Food must be genetically modified to its meanest elements. Civil society, art, community must be destroyed for these are the elements of power from within and are difficult to manage. Community is reduced to a shopping mall restricting human interaction to the impersonal , where all other human emotions such as compassion and empathy become a  means to the end of a business transaction. Here we become willing consumers of our own self-hate.

Corporations are the controllers, government are the police and media are the instructors who must continually promote the notion that life in itself has no value, and the more things we possess the more contempt we feel for earth's unpredictable and uncontrollable forces. Social intercourse celebrates and promotes consumerism through the adoration of new gadgets, rare and expensive foods, new trends and sophisticated technology. The household that possesses the most up to date fashionable stuff can congratulate itself as the winner.

Our darkest nights understand that once a weapon of mass destruction is invented that will kill most of the people without destroying the elite playgrounds on earth, it will be used. But it won't solve the problems humanity faces because all, including the elite, are oppressed by the doctrine that power must eat life.

This is the narrative of post-modern literature - Wells' Time Machine, Orwell's 1984, Monty Python, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and other classics that have warned us.

This is a narrative that makes sense of all that has happened socially and politically. It's not the only narrative but it is one that puts us in the centre of the problem.

2. never underestimate your opponents

First we need to identify who our opponents are. Are they the one-percent, the corporations, the governments, the media, the ideologies? Are they the sum of our apathy, greed and ignorance? Is it our reluctance to examine life?

Many empires have come and gone throughout history so we can’t pin the blame on a singular tribe or a political system. It has been an endless return of revolution and corruption.  That's the force of power-over.

Is the opponent our own ego which separates us from the cause and effects of our habits? Is it the way we try to hide from our inherent malevolence, or inability to see ourselves as the earth sees us? Is it the ruling elite who manipulate us? Is it always the other who is incapable of self governance?

What if we were able to reclaim our human family, to embrace and acknowledge our power from within, through dialogue and reflection. What if we listed all the tricks we use to deny our involvement and responsibility in the evolution and care of this planet? What if we nurtured our world and loved nature? What if the imagination could bridge the small things we can do with the large movements for change?

Our opponent is really our own ignorance on how power is used against us, and how easily we slip into the narrative provided by our oppressors. As we have learned to write, read, decipher symbols, understand metaphors, we can also learn how to recognize power in all its forms.

3. use data to drive your arguments

You can find data in many places. Mainstream media sometimes includes it but other news sources and websites developed by concerned citizens are available.

The Gun Violence Archive; Amnesty International; Humanist and Liberal Religion that celebrates the human experience through diversity; news sites that defend social justice; those who acknowledge the complexity of society and its problems at the cost of making their message less slogan-ready; thought leaders who seek wisdom and do not rely on power-over to influence others; poetry; statistics.  And our own level gaze.

4. bring together odd bedfellows

What and where are the odd bedfellows of this issue? Members of the Gun Club, members of Tax Payers Federation, workers within community services, managers of the CBC, the homeless, the working poor, MP's within all political parties, police chiefs, scientists, environmentalists, artists, writers, philosophers and deans of the academy – all who are willing to talk and listen.

Bring together different narratives of how the world works, different personalities from different faith groups (including atheists and nihilists). Make it clear that their views are important and that everyone has a voice, but the point of the voice is not to be right, but to open doors. 

The future, if there is to be one, must embrace and hold up the reverence and dignity of all.

Murray Dobbins - a prophet for our times

I really appreciate the way Murray Dobbins observes and analyses what is happening in Canada.

He reveals how the neo-liberal market ideologies have diminished our democracy through corporate funded think tanks.  We have had " four decades of systematic assaults on the liberal/social democratic state". This began with a series of complaints of an “excess of democracy”.

Now we live in a time of  "democratic deficit" and "a decline and erosion of democracy that should be the most important focus of critics and citizens alike".

A major study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre reports that this erosion of democracy "has put western civilization on a track to irreversible collapse. The study focused on population, climate, water, agriculture and energy as the interrelated factors that determine the collapse or survival of civilizations going back 5000 years."

You can find many more on Dobbins blog here: Murray Dobbins' Blog

Five Reasons B.C. Should Say No to the Site C Dam

1. It's bad business.
2. There are cost-effective alternatives.
3. The power isn't needed.
4. We can't afford to flood farmland.
5. The Peace has paid its price.

visit the post by Emma Gilchrist on Desmog Canada

And from David Suzuki:

(Credit: Gerry via Flickr) www.davidsuzuki.org

"B.C. First Nations chiefs recently travelled to Ottawa to urge the federal government to pull the plug on the costliest infrastructure project in the country. At an estimated $7.9 billion and growing, the proposed Site C Dam on the beautiful Peace River in northeastern B.C. has been criticized for spiralling costs, questions about whether the electricity it would produce is even needed, and concerns about the environmental and social impacts of flooding thousands of hectares of prime farmland, irreplaceable cultural sites and wildlife habitat. The government is expected to make a decision in October."

Broken Ground

image from frackingcanada.ca

"Canada lacks environmental protections enjoyed by similar nations around the world. We’re at or near the bottom in many rankings of wealthy, industrialized countries, placing 24th out of 25 on environmental performance indicators in a recent survey of Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries."  says David Suzuki, brokenground.ca

His article about the families who moved to Alberta reveals the sudden changes to their lives when oil drilling began, and within three years found themselves and their farms and homes surrounded by more than 100 rigs - without any stakeholder engagement. 

Globally the nightmare is magnified. Michael Klare writes in Twenty-First-Century Energy Wars (which first appeared in TomDispatch and now appears on Bill Moyers' site) "Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, South Sudan, Ukraine, the East and South China Seas: wherever you look, the world is aflame with new or intensifying conflicts. At first glance, these upheavals appear to be independent events, driven by their own unique and idiosyncratic circumstances. But look more closely and they share several key characteristics — notably, a witch’s brew of ethnic, religious and national antagonisms that have been stirred to the boiling point by a fixation on energy." 

Klare points out that "control over oil and gas ... translates into geopolitical clout for some and economic vulnerability for others." 

So our hunger for power has made us pawns in the wars over non-renewable resources and we may end up like those nations breaking under brutality and injustice, siding with whichever tribe we identify with for the spoils. If we continue to believe that "jobs and the economy" means jobs for us and a better economy for us, we only have ourselves to blame. 

Sheila Malcolmson running for nomination for the NDP Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding

May 2005 photo by David Borrowman

“After 12 years in local government where I’ve been really happy and honoured to serve Islanders, I’m seeing more and more where a lot of the barriers to implementing the kind of protections and society that we want to hang on to is being thwarted at the federal level – whether that’s pipeline approvals and gutting environmental protection regulations, killing public input opportunities, gutting affordable housing and co-op funding – so much flows from the federal side, and that’s where I’m called to serve right now.”

Sheila Malcolmson in The Flying Shingle, March 24, 2014, in answer to the question why she is running for the nomination of NDP in the Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding.

Ten Tips on How to Save the World

photo from NASA/Wikimedia

I’ve used popular jargon for the title, because, as you’ll notice below, this is not political science, or any science at all. This is a riposte against the endless hours of brutal entertainment that suggests only might makes right. To save the world might be a heroic endeavour but I don’t believe it requires a Napoleonic campaign. It does, however, require the engagement of an alert mind and open heart. 

The instructions are simple. Learn from the bees, use your caring mind to gaze at the world, reclaim your power, reclaim your nature, hold onto curiosity, celebrate your creativity, give up blaming, live from a place of love, acknowledge your political self, and honour your spirit.

1. Learn from the bees.

Marilyn Hamilton, CEO of Integral City, told a children’s story not long ago, that is easy to remember.  Three key strategies enable bee hives to survive, which can teach us how to sustain the human hive  – take care of you, take care of others, take care of this place. Our ancestors learned how to do this but sophisticated social systems have alienated us from our own capacity to manage the hive. However, world crises shows we must re-engage in the process now.  

2. Use your caring mind to gaze at the world.

Look closely at the operating system, or the ‘apparatus’ as Simone Weil put it. Read ideas and opinions wherever you can find them. Ask yourself who benefits? Expand your gaze beyond your own immediate interests. Prepare to be disturbed but not defeated.

2. Reclaim power.

Power and all its parts: politics, wealth, language, science, economics, institutional religion, is not evil. What is evil is the way institutions have been corrupted from their original purpose – to serve civil society – into clubs of privilege. Good leadership is the conduit of responsible power which demonstrates humility, vulnerability, and serves the greater good.  Good leaders spend their powers to affirm and highlight the power in all. Infinite power is not a zero sum game, it is natural, inclusive and intelligent.

3. Reclaim our nature.

We are resourceful workers and stakeholders in our society. We are not a resource or a job description. We are not left, right, conservative or liberal – we are organic, politically mobile beings.  Labels are assigned to influence and control masses. We have courage, fear, anger, love and wisdom but they are not commodities, they are strengths that emerge and hide. The deadliest weapon of oppression is that which turns humanity and all of nature into a thing, a resource.

 

4. Hold onto Curiosity.

This is what keeps us exploring, examining, interrogating the conditions we live under or in. As long as curiosity is alive we shall never be content with serving an oppressive and corrupt social order.  

5. Celebrate your Creativity.

Music, theatre, farmers’ markets, poetry, gardens, maps, new political parties, conversations –  are the means of expressing and sharing our humanity.  Art is the what, where, how and who of our species as it yearns and evolves.

6. Give up blaming.

Blaming is not problem solving and the problem is not what other people do.  To solve problems we need to re-engage our power to care creatively, with curiosity and love.

8. Live from a place of Love

Love breaks apart the structures of false hierarchies. It demands attention to suffering and violence, and calls for healing. It insists on life as the source of knowledge.  Love is what drives great minds to take courageous stands outside of their particular disciplines for the greater good. Love is the openness to pain that makes injustice, corruption, cynicism and oppression unbearable.

9. Life is political.

You are an integral, intelligent, reflective part of a larger organism. Whether we survive as a species depends on protecting our earthly home from a system that enables a few egos to hold this planet ransom for the sake of temporary profit. There is no escape from politics. Its apparatus has been built on a grandiose delusion that refuses to see the natural world as sacred, and ourselves dependent upon its health. To be apolitical is to be a doctor standing at the bed of a dying patient, refusing to be involved because the disease is dirty. To dismiss the world stage and our part in it is to lobotomize the future.

10. Honour the spirit

The spirit is our energy. It imparts our intentions before we see them. It allows us to dream and care for the world beyond our own life span.  Imagination and love is the immortal  legacy we leave for our great-grandchildren.

These are just my thoughts.  What are yours?  What would you list as the top ten tips on saving the world?