Happiness Reconfigured

Once upon a time, not so long ago

happiness was a product of something else

—to be free of pain, to be warm and fed,

then it became a by-product of profit,

six figures to nine figures, the numerology

of ego and greed, the politics dividing us into

a sixty-forty handicap where a minority

of the certain out-vote the majority

who suspect that low taxes and the economy

have written us, happy or not, out of the future,

who refuse to die in a car crash or overdose,

who question the mathematics of chaos.

Have we become homeless puritans again?

Casting our bodies on the ocean in search

of a new world and finding instead

an old one that was here long before us?

How radical would it be to find happiness

in thoughts moving like fingers scaling

an imaginary piano, or a feeling,

a brief sensory perception of hope?

Suppose these small things moved us away

from the dark resources underground

to the centrifugal forces of our mind

terminally wondering what we can do?

Not as an exclamation of despair or apathy

but a quest, an inquiry into nature, a timeless

question on waking each morning—where did

happiness begin? The big bang?

(published in Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)

Plan the next 30 years

What is happening today was possibly planned 30 years ago, by many, thinking in their own board rooms, how to achieve their best outcomes. Along the way these plans would be adjusted, changed, some would have failed, but some came through well.

In her post "Message From Meg", Meg Riley of the Church of the Larger Fellowship, suggested that we, the stakeholders in our society, ask ourselves some difficult questions, before we plan the next four years:

1. How will you take care of your body in hard times
2. How will you take care of your spirit in hard times?
3. Who are your people?
4. How will you resist oppression, your own and that of others?
5. What would be the worst thing you could imagine yourself doing in this time?

I think these questions are required after any election but the recent one in the US is devastating to many who have worked so hard for inclusive justice.

Her message looks deeply into each question and is worth reading and thinking about. For the 30 year plan we might need to imagine how the world will look and then to write a future/back history.  How did it get there? What pressures caused what events? What visions empowered new movements for social justice, for the economy, for health, for the environment? 

Then to look into how we could organize a preferred future.  This would be a good exercise for a group, a family, a congregation.  You can read more about Imaging the Future (Elise Boulding) here. 

Being a citizen is not easy. It requires time, conversation, the patience to listen, the courage to speak, and a sober acknowledgement we are all in this together.

Naming the Disease - Social Atomization

Henry Giroux writes in his recent Truthout article titled "Donald Trump and the Plague of Atomization in a Neoliberal Age" of Leo Lowenthal who warned back in the forties about the atomization of human beings under a state of fear. "What he understood with great insight, even in 1946, is that democracy cannot exist without the educational political and formative cultures and institutions that make it possible."

This confirms my sense that we are trying to fight a social disease with rational arguments while the supporters of fascist movements just want a messiah who will deal with the big problems so we don't have to, but who have no idea of the danger in giving unconditional power to a single ego. A functioning democratic society can be annoying and tiresome but it has many conditions that challenge power.

In a free and democratic society that pays taxes for education, justice, and social protections for the most vulnerable - we are continually being updated with facts that challenge assumptions of how we can instinctively know the leaders we pick will protect us. That we have social standards that can't be broken. Or that we will be okay as long as the economy is okay. Or, even that we have progressed and would never push a woman in front of a train because she was wearing a headscarf.

In the fifties and sixties I was given an education based on social justice. It wasn't in headlines but it underscored all that I learned. It didn't guarantee fairness or security but assumed we had a responsibility to care about one another. We didn't read Giroux, Lowenthal or Arendt, but we knew of Socrates and Orwell.

Yet many who graduated from this era were quite happy to throw it away because it wasn't perfect.

Now we are at such a stage of civil entropy we shrug while finance capital rules and public benefits are eroded. Those at the bottom are left without a means of earning a living wage, without hope, continually ground down by endless poverty and denied human dignity.

"Mass fear is normalized as violence increasingly becomes the default logic for handling social problems." Giroux writes.

If we stop to read this age and condense all the hostility around us, we will see that life itself is the enemy of fascism. Fascism silences conversation, it wants unquestioned obedience, human sacrifices, the glorious sunset, robotic armies.

Totalitarianism wants power without the human stain, without competing organisms, without reflection or question or thought. It is the muscle without a brain, The sperm without the egg. The knife without flesh. The future without compassion. The masculine without the feminine.

The corporate media keeps telling us this over and over again, in a thousand different scenes and sound bites.

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.

Why You Can't Sleep at Night

George Monbiot, the columnist and blogger, revealed that he went to a boarding school where boys of well-to-do families go.  This gave him insight into how ruling elites think. The purpose we might think is to give their children the kind of education that will make them leaders. We hope they might turn out like Ghandi or Bishop Tutu, but a few decades earlier "the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’ attachment to their families and re-attached them to the institutions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture." 

I believe this is how all institutions operate - to create citizens to defend their corporate mothers.  Real mothers and fathers also raise their children to be successful in the world in which they were raised, with the hope of upward mobility. 

Now, however, we see upward mobility as unlikely.  In fact, rather than think about how to raise our children in a world that looks brutish and bleak, we seek escape through entertainment and shopping. You can hardly blame us if we feel we have no power to change our world.

We (that body of anonymous humanity) know we are not Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr.,  or even Naomi Klein.  We are just trying to make ends meet, to be decent. We have not been trained to believe we have something to offer the world, never mind something special.  And those who might exhibit some charismatic or visionary features we tend to be suspicious of. We have been programmed through the entertainments we consume, to believe that people who seek power are self-aggrandizing or psychopathic. 

Even the Occupy and Idle No More movements, from a distant media filtered view, reveal a hostility towards those in power, the elite.  Even those of us who dip our toes into the ocean of alternative news and documentaries will feel that repulsion towards those invisible officers of control. While there are many examples of its abuse, we eschew responsible power at our peril. 

The corporate media with its focus on the big stories, make every movement, effort, discipline or courage appear futile.  The lens zooms to the end before the story begins. Any little good news story ends with defeat not because every effort is defeated but small successes are not sensational enough to be reported. 

Dr. Warren Bell, in a response to hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline Project, points out a threat not just to the environment but the health of our species.  Thankfully his insight and wisdom was reported by Linda Solomon in The Vancouver Observer.

He observed, while still in medical school,  that many of the most important influences on a person's health derive not just from medicine or patient choices but from broad trends in the community – from the neighbourhood to the planetary environment.

The systems that have led to the pipeline project, which he calls "structural pathology", has caused some of his younger patients to suffer anxiety, fearing the future for their children.

When the majority of people feel powerless, overwhelmed by the structural violence designed and perpetrated by institutions they can't trust, civil society breaks down.  First by individual acts of terror, then war between factions, and war between nations or even continents. 

While the ruling class will have already found an "enemy", the future for citizens looks bleaker  and we are still left so anxious and uprooted we are unable to plan, to love and to nurture what is good. In the meantime, those bright boarding school boys, carefully trained in guiding the masses, are planning the future for us.

These pathological systems need to be intervened by the power of an educated and activated citizenry.  Dr. Bell has provided four imperatives to change the power systems without killing anyone. You will find them at the end of this article: Doctor describes Harper government "pathology" at Kelowna JRP

You may or may not agree with this prescription, but if you find a civil way to engage with the system, you will at least learn that you do have the power to make changes without using hate or violence.  We can learn that the power we use will be the power our future will be built on.

WHO World Cancer Day

A few days ago I received an email asking that I say a small prayer "Dear God - I pray for a cure for cancer. Amen" and then to forward to all my friends.

Since I don't do chain letters I thought I would write this blog post as a prayer to the universal mind for a cure for cancer and by finding the causes of cancer. Not just the many small details of toxic substances, but the overall cause of cancer - that resistance towards embracing the whole world and nurturing the best possible health for it through our work, our practices and our goals.

This takes more than looking to others to find magic cures. Sure we need the researchers and medicine, the scientific experts and world leaders to do what is right, but they are not magicians. We are all the stewards and agents of good health for the mind, the body, the community and the work place.  These are all connected.

Cancer is not just a single disease, it is the symptom of a very sick system that promotes oppression and greed through ignorance, fear and hatred for humanity on many levels.  Such a system doesn't care for people - it pays lip service to ideals but seeks only to exploit. It does the talk and punishes those who do the walk.

We are micro-units of that system which only has as much power as we invest in it. May we find a way to reconnect to the healing practices we are capable of by living as though health is profit.