Quebec’s niqab ban: just how small can we be?

"As a Muslim woman who chooses to cover her h​air​ but not her face, I am not personally affected by Quebec's new law banning face coverings while receiving public services such as taking a city bus. It would be easy for me to ignore the law's broader meaning. ... (but) it has stirred and jolted me out of complacency. We must speak out against this so-called religious neutrality, and see Bill 62 for what it really is: politicizing and fear mongering toward an easy target." Idil Issa, Globe and Mail

The question is - what is happening among the halls of power that some Canadians become so small?

What are we mindful of when talk about what other people should do, wear, believe or belong to?

Where is our power to form the natural government of what is acceptable, what is decent when it's not about 'us' but always about 'them'. Are we allowing the right people to dictate what we should tolerate?

Are we really willing to tolerate oppression of the poorest minority to allow the richest minority to alienate us from democracy?

From the San Franciso Board of Supervisors (Bay Times November 24)

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently passed a resolution, introduced by Board President London Breed, in response to the election of Donald Trump. The resolution reads as follows:

 WHEREAS, On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected to become the 45th President of the United States; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That no matter the threats made by President-elect Trump, San Francisco will remain a Sanctuary City. We will not turn our back on the men and women from other countries who help make this city great, and who represent over one third of our population. This is the Golden Gate—we build bridges, not walls; 

There are ten other resolutions which can be found on the San Francisco Bay Times website here http://sfbaytimes.com/san-franciscos-official-response-to-the-election-of-trump/ regarding women's rights, LGBTQ rights, Religious Freedom, Black Lives Matter, climate change, universal health care, internationalism, will remain a Transit First city, nor bullied by threats to revoke federal funding, and that they condemn all hate crimes and speech.

This is a gift worthy of inclusion in our Mind and Heart Advent Calendar because it is such a resounding confrontation against the fear mongering and hatred that has been broadcast over the last few months. Thank you San Francisco. Your words are truly poetic.

Women Who Have Made the World Better - A List You Won't Find in Mainstream Media

"I am those 66 million girls who are deprived of education." Malala Yousafzai. Nobel Lecture, 2014 Peace Prize

Malala Yousafzai 2014 Peace Prize 

Optimism of Petals

Svetlana Alexievich 2015 Literature
Youyou Tu 2015 Physiology or Medicine
May-Britt Moser 2014 Physiology or Medicine
Alice Munro 2013 Literature
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 2011 Peace
Laymah Gbowee 2011 Peace
Tawakkol Karman 2011 Peace
Elinor Ostrom 2009 Economic Sciences
Herta Muller Literature 2009
Elizabeth Blackburn 2009 Physiology or Medicine
Carol Greider 2009 Physiology or Medicine
Ada Yonath 2009 Chemistry
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi 2008 Physiology or Medicine
Doris Lessing Literature 2007
Wangari Maathai 2004 Peace
Linda Buck 2004 Physiology or Medicine
Elfriede Jelinek 2004 Literature
Shirin Ebadi 2003 Peace
Jody Williams 1997 Peace
Wislawa Szymborska 1996 Literature
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard 1995 Physiology or Medicine
Toni Morrison 1993 Literature
Rigoberta Menchú Tum 1992 Peace
Nadine Gordimer 1991 Literature
Aung San Suu Kyi 1991 Peace
Gertrude B. Elion 1988 Physiology or Medicine
Rita Levi-Montalcini 1986 Physiology or Medicine
Barbara McClintock 1983 Physiology or Medicine
Alva Myrdal 1982 Peace
Mother Teresa 1979 Peace
Rosalyn Yalow 1977 Physiology or Medicine
Betty Williams 1976 Peace
Mairead Corrigan 1976 Peace
Nelly Sachs 1966 Literature
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin 1964 Chemistry
Maria Goeppert Mayer 1963 Physics
Gerty Cori 1947 Physiology or Medicine
Emily Greene Balch 1946 Peace
Gabriela Mistral 1945 Literature
Pearl Buck 1938 Literature
Irène Joliot-Curie 1935 Chemistry
Jane Addams 1931 Peace
Sigrid Undset 1928 Literature
Grazia Deledda 1926 Literature
Selma Lagerlöf 1909 Literature
Bertha von Suttner 1905 Peace
Marie Curie 1903 Physics, 1911 Chemistry

See the whole list here http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/other/womens-day-2016.html

Rape Culture

Sleeping Lion

With the current focus on the Ghomeshi trial and the way victims are being branded through the courts, it would be logical to believe that choking and penetrating someone is far more violent, far more guilty than smiling and being nice.  But in rape culture the purpose of everything is to normalize rape as a way of being. To make every living entity a victim or a conqueror. In rape culture it's far more shameful to be a victim.

We are sent to the forum as gladiators whether we want to be or not. We learn that in order to win, somebody must lose. Everything on the earth is here for the purpose of being conquered by the glorious conqueror.

It's not that we are inherently evil or good.  It is that we have been, through the experiences of our ancestors, traumatized.  We have learned how to hide who we are in order to survive.  We have learned how to entertain ourselves with games that we might win so we don't address the depth and breadth of this oppression.

So it comes down to this - am I the rapist or the raped? Am I the winner or the loser? Am I the user or the used? Will I challenge what I know is wrong or recede behind the door of my home - the only sanctuary where I am allowed to be me. Will I lock those doors so no-one can get in?  Will I allow my children to enter school and the work place to be psychologically raped every time they are compared with sluts, idiots or monsters? Will I learn how to be well adjusted in this world, or if not entirely adjusted, will I survive?

The proof of this rape culture, this acceptance of violence as normal human behaviour, is the way the legal system works and media's acquiescence to power. It is not the rapist that is on trial, examined and interrogated, who must prove he is innocent, but the victim who must prove they never uttered a word, stood, sat, smiled or fluttered in any way that could be perceived as "a come on".

The purpose of rape culture is to blame the victim, to heave contempt on the tender shoots of life, and to turn innocence into powerlessness, to brutalize every diverse expression of life into silence or submission.

Cultures of rape see women as walking wombs, walking threats to man made power. Cultures of rape see men as instruments to serve the system - soldiers, CEO's, policeman, drivers, strategists - they must serve without question - and those who do question will be crucified and forgotten. Human nature is the menace and it must be reduced, ridiculed and discouraged. Misogyny will end when science has created the means to make eggs and sperm in a lab without using what nature has created.

This is the world of psychopaths who have made themselves slaves to the system so that ultimately they might make the world a playground for their egos.

This lion of justice is sleeping. Rape is not about the minds and hearts of men and women at all.  It's about the absolute triumph of the system with all its purchased institutions, over the whole of nature.

The World in One Paragraph by Chris Hedges

"Extraction industries, like wars, empower a predominantly male, predatory population that is engaged in horrific destruction and violence. Wars and extraction industries are designed to extinguish all systems that give life—familial, social, cultural, economic, political and environmental. And they require the obliteration of community and the common good. How else could you get drag line operators in southern West Virginia to rip the tops off Appalachian mountains to get at coal seams as they turn the land they grew up in, and often their ancestors grew up in, into a fetid, toxic wasteland where the air, soil and water will be poisoned for generations? These vast predatory enterprises hold up the possibility of personal wealth, personal advancement and personal power at the expense of everyone and everything else. They create a huge, permanent divide between the exploiters and the exploited, one that is rarely crossed. And the more vulnerable you are, the more the jackals appear around you to prey on your afflictions. Those who suffer most are children, women and the elderly—the children and the elderly because they are vulnerable, the women because they are left to care for them." Chris Hedges

This just about says it all of our age and our society. I have long suspected that all our species' problems have arisen out of misogyny. Seems there are others also leading to that conclusion.

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.

Misogyny

But, said Tahir, militarism and its impact on women is “not specific to Pakistan.” Even the U.S. Pentagon’s own report found that violent sex crimes committed by active U.S. Army soldiers have increased by 50 percent, reflecting a rate that is far higher than in the general population. “When Pakistani men commit such crimes,” said Tahir, “it’s called ‘honor killings,’ and we condemn entire cultures for it.” But “when it’s Western men who commit such crimes we tend to look for psychological explanations.” So, the Isla Vista killer, Elliot Rodger, was described as a “troubled kid with high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome,” and U.S. soldiers committing sex crimes are seen through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder from the battlefield.  

Sonali Kolhatkar, Truthdig