Reflections on a "weaponized" culture

So much talk these days about the manipulation of the media by this U.S. president!

The anatomy of the dynamic goes like this: the president rants (never mind on which platform!) and the media rushes and gushes as if his every word was their latest and most important career nourishment supplement, really a steroid to which they are addicted. Changing the channel, changing the meme, shifting the klieg lights from whatever is the president’s latest moral and ethical tragic and ever so public failure to the next “tweet” has, through the complicity of the media, injected the same “steroid” into the American soap-opera. And the reporters are partially responsible.

However, their executives, themselves addicted to the latest Neilsen ratings as their “empirical measure” for determining their industry advertising rates, the empirical measure for their investors’ dividends, and not incidentally, their own share portfolios and their chances for promotion, transfer to another company, their access to venture capital should they wish to strike out on their own (via podcast, for example). And feeding this “food chain” of the media oligarchs, of course, is the president’s complicity, nefarious and eminently strategized and tactically targetted rants.

Chris Hedges, among others, regularly rants about corporate media collusion with the corporate-political-military-pharmaceutical-fossil fuel-insurance-intelligence behemoth.

However, while I do not disagree or defer from Hedges’ analysis, it is the underlying “sell-and-win” narcissistic culture, mind-set, propaganda, education system and “state of the union” in the U.S.. Too big for our modest human minds to integrate, assimilate and digest, this “mountain range” of information, now supplemented by both macro and meta-information, from both the “deep state” and the allegedly “public and political” state inevitably gets broken down into mini-bytes, like those Kellogg Mini-Wheats that have supplanted the old Shredded Wheats of our youth. Nano-second sound bytes of the latest gossip, career implosions, legal evidence of collusion, obstruction, groping, homophobia, racism, and other scraps of “political pornography” titillate millions, as it substitutes for and actually replaces legitimate discourse and debate of substantive and potentially lethal issues (global warming, nuclear missile development and deployment, mass incarceration, judicial wrongful convictions, gutting of public education, and corporate welfare as examples).

And instead of relegating such political pornography to the tabloids, the media has morphed into their own versions of the tabloid model. Joe Scarborough (MSNBC’s Morning Joe) articulately posits the differences between the “ground noise” and the “signals” to which all military generals have to pay attention. Trouble is, as he acknowledges, the media is committing the ultimate failure to distinguish between the two, “my (Joe’s) name at the top of the list of those media”!

Language, mere words, may finally be rising to the heights of its merited public, survival significance….words frame each and every one of our ideas, perspectives, opinions, ideologies, strategies, tactics, alliances, enemies, (now “”frenemies in another of our ‘cute’ hybrid addictions), and another “alternative facts” (courtesy of Kelly Anne Conway).

Depending on when and where the “words” are used, they may have application from one field to another: for example, from quantum physics to political culture.

In Quantum physics, Superposition is known to be the uncertainty of a particle (or particles) being in several states at once, while quantum Entanglement occurs when each possible state of two particles depend on each other’s state. It would seem, at least to the feeble and somewhat overwhelmed mind of this scribe, that a political “Quantum Entanglement” and “Quantum Superposition” are playing themselves out on our television screens each and every day.

Schrodinger’s Cat first came to public attention in the news coverage of the Kawai Leonard period of “limbo” when he was considered to be “staying” in the Toronto with the Raptors and “leaving” for greener pastures, likely back in California. According to Wikipedia,

Schrodinger’s cat is a thought experiment sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian  physicist Erwin Schrodinger in 1935….The scenario presents a hypothetical cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

If we were to consider the Schrodinger’s cat experiment (the cat is conceivably both dead and alive) to be one end of a continuum of thought, and the absolute, concrete literalism to be the opposite end of this continuum, political culture could hypothetically and imaginatively be “positioned” at some likely moving point on the continuum. In his seminal work introducing the Jesus Seminar, Robert W. Funk posits literalism as a significant impediment to the seminar’s search and research for the historical Jesus. Funk writes these words:

“Literalism has created what Northrop Frye has termed the “imaginative illiterate.” This product of the ascendancy of the empirical sciences, who can understand things only literally, dominated both high and naïve levels of culture. It doesn’t seem to matter that the literalist understands the literal in different senses on different occasions. At times, the literalist takes literal” to mean the descriptive, true-to-fact assertion; at other times, he or she understands the “literal” to mean the conventional, what everybody takes for granted. When used to mean what everybody takes for granted, the “literal” sense may thus also include the nonliteral. For example, everyone knowns that there are no real oats in “sowing wild oats,” and there is neither iron nor curtain in “the iron curtain.” Yet these popular expressions are understood to refer “literally” to youthful indiscretions and an impenetrable political boundary….

The physical science and preoccupation with the literal have nearly killed the imagination. That does not mean that I want to give up my refrigerator and modern medicine, both of which owe their efficacy to the sciences. But it does mean that refrigeration and surgery do not cover all the needs of the mind and the spirit. There are some things that cooling and lancing will not cure. The ability to perceive the nonliteral dimensions of our world is the victim of our inclination to exchange a refreshed sense of the world for a mess of technical pottage.” (Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.51-2)

Playing off the empirical/conventional dichotomy, sliding seamlessly from what some consider true-to-fact to the convention, is a technique the current occupant of the Oval office has mastered proficiently, to his short-term headline-generating benefit, while at the same time, energetically (and we presume deliberately and consciously) imposing a scorched earth obliterating approach to the common set of facts to which we were all previously in accord.

And the media, given its cultural belief that it writes and speaks to an audience of “sixth-grade readers/listeners,” falls imperceptible and tragically into the trap of conflating the conventional and the factual. It also, invariably, couches its headlines in the most blatant overused, cliché-ridden language of phrases like “sowing wild oats” or “the iron curtain”.

Supporting a devolution to minimal literalism, the legal profession too is drowning in the precise and limited/limiting definitions of words, reinforced by case law based on the interpretations of those sitting on the bench. “Hate speech” for example, is defined as speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of protected attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. (Wikipedia)

And yet, everyone knows, deep and profoundly in his/her gut, what constitutes offence, disdain, disrespect and alienation, without having to resort to a legal definition. Insults, name-calling, verbal bullying and taunting, the kind of verbiage that saturates social media (often even leading to both successful and attempted suicides by victims) are a “norm” which is forcefully and deliberately underscored, enhanced and vigorously disseminated by the current occupant of the Oval office.

The conflation of the “factual” with the “conventional” along with the etherization of the imagination leaves public discourse, the street vernacular and the expectations of every young person observer reduced to such a “trash” level, emblematic of a national culture devoid of even the basic levels of education. It is not only a dynamic that robs the discourse of its “table manners” and its “creativity” and its “nuance” and its minimal expectation of compromise, healthy interaction, the search for a common “truth” as well as for a common and unifying and uplifting “goal”.

Reports in The Guardian today point to a U.S. Congressman’s letter to the Pentagon asking for a report on the potential “weaponizing” of ticks with the Lyme disease germ, for the purpose of enhancing military objectives. “The House approved an amendment proposed by a Republican congressman from New Jersey, Chris South, instructing the defence department’s inspector general to conduct a review of whether the U.S. “experimented with ticks and insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.” Currently, some 400,000 Americans are affected by Lyme disease each year.

Effectively, through a combined impact of the conflation of “literal” and “conventional”, and the effective scorching of the American (and other western countries’) individual and collective imagination, it is not only the prospect of “weaponizing” of insects that disturbs. The weaponizing of words, for the purpose of political and personal narcissistic ambition and gain, in the extremely short term, is another impact of the endangered “species” of imaginative, expansive, collaborative, co-operative and language and the mind-set that provides the garden for such a language.

Transforming the political culture into a battlefield, through the abusive, dangerous, lethal reduction of language into coded bullets, in both naïve and ‘high’ levels of culture is an impediment, not only for Jesus Seminar scholars, but also for anyone seeking to imagine, design and grow a dream that focuses on the protection of human and all other flora and fauna species.

Literalism, combined with the military manufacturing behemoth, the pharmaceutical vulture, the starving “egos” of political leaders desperately clinging to power, not only imitates but also emulates the modus operandi, the desperation and the determination of those identified by terrorist organizations against which the “establishment” claims to be protecting us. Linked to this cultural “ethos” of course, is the notion of the “binary” as a cornerstone of public discourse, personal thought, digital devices and transactional interactions. “For us or against us” as  articulated by George W. Bush immediately after 9-11, even if it had minimal relevance in that moment, is not a state designed to sustain a family, a community, a nation or a planet.

The words of Maya Angelou, as a poetic antidote for this potentially lethal culture of “weaponization”, ring out this morning as a solo, ubiquitous and lyrical melody struggling for an audience amidst this psychic and political embattlement:

You may shoot me with your words

You may cut me with your eyes

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Ode to Seamus, the butcher

 tall, lean, ball-capped and white-coated

          his calm voice told me

‘we have the same things over there

                                        in the freezer’

     when I attempted to circum-navigate

                         his loaded cart

           in search of frozen hamburgers

‘thanks! there are so many choices today’

                                I blurted

surprised even to be noticed at eight

                                             in the morning

                in the supermarket

        ‘you almost need logistics….

                                     I studied along with politics

at university’

                             I heard him mutter

                ….  my head snapped around

                 like a shark’s spotting prey

‘did you say you graduated in politics?’

                                     ‘Uh huh!’

‘and what would you really like to be doing?’

                                  ‘keeping this butcher job…..

                   they are cutting and cutting…and

                                I’m scared of losing it!’

‘which aspect of politics grabbed you?’

                             ‘political theory’...

‘please don’t give up or in…

                     we need people like you more than ever’

             ‘I’ve been thinking podcast…. maybe there

                        is a way to make some money there’

            ‘please, please never give up on that!’

                                                his woolly fingerless glove

clasped mine, “I’m Seamus, glad to meet you!”

                                 emerged from his tongue

                                                                   and his friendly eyes…

                   pushing my cart past the eggs and butter,

I wondered, ‘was the next Aristotle or Burke or Hobbes

                                                           or Will or Reich or Fukuyama

                 stocking the

                                         frozen meat bin?’

Challenging cultural 'norms'

Have you ever watched a hockey game in which one player drove his stick into the groin of an opponent without attracting notice of an official followed immediately by that “victim’s” slash of the perpetrator prompting a referee whistle and an immediate penalty?

Retaliation, reprisal, any act of pay-back, and revenge is so prevalent that many of the initial acts go under-reported and clearly under-remembered given the disproportionality of the reprisal. On the global political stage, Al Qaeda terrorizes New York on 9-11 (that’s 2001) and retaliatory wars continue to this day, June 21, 2019. Eighteen years of retaliation, with the accumulated loss of human lives numbering 500,000 (Iraq and Afghanistan) could well be considered disproportionate to the initial event.

Retaliatory acts, especially committed by those charged with public trust and accountability, often far exceed the proportions of the precipitating event. While we can agree that revenge seems to be part of our human hard wiring, it does seem significant that the representatives of “order” are inordinately enmeshed in excessive force, limited if any due process, and manipulation of the ‘facts’ in their pursuit of their own innocence.

Police screaming at a mother and her children, ordering them out of their vehicle by shouting vulgar and demeaning words and thereby terrorizing a four-year-old child, because that child had “taken” a doll from the shelves of an adjacent store, is just one of many recent examples of retaliatory police abuse. Of course, the mother and her family are black and statistics prove blacks are far more frequent targets of law enforcement retaliation than whites in the U.S.

Similarly, employer retaliation for worker whistle-blowing, now ranks at the top of the list of frequent legal cases in workplace law. We have a culture, formerly demonstrated to be dominated by the warrior/victim conflict between men/women, now characterized by an additional application of this archetypal conflict: employer as warrior versus worker as victim. Similarly, the warrior archetype is readily and appropriately applied to the Republican Senate majority, retaliating against the bottom layers of the economic, cultural, racial and educated demographics.

Retaliation, too, can be inferred from the results of the 2016 presidential election, in which angry white men, mostly without university educations, put the current president in office. What were these men retaliating against?

The short answer includes the erosion of jobs, income, dignity and political status resulting from the amorphous multi-headed monster including: high tech, tax policies that incentivize moving jobs off-shore for slave wages, freedom from environmental protections and the absence of labour rights and responsibilities. Probably also implicit in their vote is their own unleashed racism, following the two-term presidency of the first black president. (See: Malcolm Gladwell’s moral licensing: after doing something virtuous and boosting our own self-image, we let ourselves indulge in more unseemly ones) It can be argued that this moral licensing is just another form of retaliation, given license, by a one-time “act of virtue.”

Iran is now complicit in complex acts of retaliation against the U.S. withdrawal from the Nuclear Accord and the imposition of muscular sanctions by firing on two oil tankers and shooting down an American $100M drone in the Strait of Hormuz. And, predictably, prompted by Iranian retaliation, the U.S. is now actively engaged in further retaliation to “counter” the retaliation by the Iranians.

Just this week, the Republican Senate voted to block the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, the president’s geopolitical ally, in retaliation for the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Kashoggi by the Saudi leaders. That act of murder itself  is arguably another act of retaliation for the criticism of the Saudi regime by one of the regime’s most vocal critics, in a highly respected American daily, the Washington Post.

Retaliation begets retaliation… begets retaliation… begets retaliation…..in both the political and the personal realms of our lives. In spite of the demise of the Soviet Union, the Cold War “enemy” status continues unabated in the U.S. with respect to the Kremlin, incubating the “Mueller Report” into “foreign interference in the presidential election of 2016…leading to the indictment of Russian operatives, the imprisonment of trump campaign officials and the continuing investigation of the potential commitment of “high crimes and misdemeanours” (Impeachment Inquiry) on the part of the occupant of the Oval Office.

Politics as currently practiced particularly in the U.S.  has become a melodramatic series of retaliations, tragically leading to the erosion of the American “leadership” mantle in sustaining the world order of the last three quarters of a century.

Considered as a restrained response to an offensive act, reprisal finds unlimited expressions in the political, the corporate and the legal world. Generally, there is a buffer of “judges” or objective actors between the two opponents, rendering limited actions more feasible, more likely and, of course, more preferred.

On the personal level, however, revenge is a much more subjective, impassioned and direct “act” perpetrated by an individual who considers his/her reputation, honour, dignity, respect and even perhaps safety to have been infringed. Obviously, the higher the level of emotions, the greater the likelihood of acts of revenge. And when these acts occur under an umbrella of an organization, or a public law enforcement, when the intense emotional cauldron encounters the “official” establishment, there is an collision of models: the legal and the personal.

It is not surprising, for example, that town and city law enforcement officials literally hate to get a call from a “domestic violence” occurrence. These are all “he-said-she-said” incidents, perhaps stretched over weeks, months or even years. Ferreting out the core issues, the motives and the concomitant charges is a task worthy of the most highly trained ‘sherlock holmes’ investigators. He retaliates because she has been unfaithful or precisely vice-versa. She retaliates because he has been fired, or persists in drinking, or gambling, or an addiction to video games.

And once again, when the personal and the organizational intersect, for example when the personal relationships that inevitably arise inside an organizational environment then all “systems” of order and hierarchical administration seem to wilt. Not incidentally, their inevitability is assured by human nature, and is not and will not be retrained by their banishment. In fact, it is both reasonable and credible to posit that the “rules” banishing personal relationships inside organizations, including those based on mutual consent are a perverse provocation of the continuing incidence of these relationships. The argument for those rules usually takes the form of a “power imbalance” based on the implicit trust in the “authority” figure and the implicit “inferiority” of the other party. What the rules do not wish to acknowledge is the legitimacy of authentic, responsible and comprehensible relationships between consenting adults (of both genders, and of same genders) within an administrative, hierarchical structure, between those charged with responsibility and those as colleagues, clients, students, co-workers.

Naturally, the adult-child model appropriately recognizes the innocence and the responsibility of the adult to “protect” the child in all circumstances from any hint of inappropriate behaviour on the part of the adults. However, to extend that adult-child model to the adult-adult world, especially when it addresses the adult male-adult female encounter is a stretch too far. That stretch assumes that, by nature, the  female is “weaker” and more “vulnerable” and the male, by definition is “stronger” and more “dominant.” Nothing could be more divorced from both the facts and the healthy implications of the future ideal of equality of the genders.

To posit that all females are “inferior” in any supervisor (male)-supervisee (female) relationship, (the reverse is also true) is simply unwarranted. Adult females are every bit as competent, responsible and integrous to make authentic decisions around the implications of any human relationship as are any men. Similarly, adult males, even in positions of responsibility are also competent, responsible and integrous to enter into relationships with their female colleagues, regardless of the apparent “power imbalance.”

It could well be worthwhile to require a measure of disclosure to the organization of the existence and/or termination of such relationships within organizations. However, both the secrecy and the presumption of “weakness” stereotypically of the worker to the supervisor, regardless of the gender of each render a perpetuation of both the curtailment of integrity and the presumption of a gender inequality that does not comport with the authentic equality of men and women, irrespective of their hierarchical and organizational status.

So, adults who consent to relationships, cannot and must not be permitted, by law or by cultural convention, to resort to reprisals for their decisions even if those relationships are terminated, irrespective of the agent of the termination. It is long past time when, for example our culture accepted the profound truth that a termination of a relationship (whether married or common law, between same or different genders) is not “caused” by the “third party”. The dissolving relationship was dissolving long before the “third party” arrived. The “dumped” party’s invariable penchant for retaliation has to be regarded not as either normal or acceptable, but as tragic and self-sabotaging. Like the referee who missed that “shot to the groin” and caught the victim’s retaliatory slash, the cultural response needs to shift its focus from the retaliatory act to the initial act.

In the case of the broken relationship, the act (s) of retaliation by the dumped party must be given barely token acknowledgement and certainly not respect and honour by those in authority. Such retaliation has to be considered under the rubric of the motive, rendered toothless, unless and until it constitutes physical or fiscal harm and then it has to be prosecuted for its legal, ethical contraventions.

We have to take significant steps to transform our perceptions of those who commit acts that we consider illegal, immoral and unethical. To start with a finite and highly defined “charge” rather than a lens of tolerance, compassion, empathy and a diligent exploration of the background of the “hurt” that has been experienced by the person in question is a cultural act of sabotage. In fact, such a perspective breeds additional empowerment of a disproportionate “authority”…and social and cultural “super ego” as an embodiment of deep and debilitating social and cultural fear.

It is precisely that deep-seated and debilitating fear that is at the root of the social and cultural and political power imbalance in the macro, mega, meta and historic landscape of the human narrative. Fear of the loss of control, itself, resides in almost if not all, public decisions, public legislation, social and cultural norms and clearly religious morality and ethics.

This starting place is not only unsustainable; it is a threat to civilization. Rather than enculturating a society of open and responsible and self-respecting selves, so that we are also open and responsible and respecting of the “others” who share the planet, we are incubating a cauldron of distrust, disrespect, dishonour and presumed abuse..and then growing an army of “thought” and “action” and relationship police to keep things in order.

And how is that working for us?

Can the Green Party "break-through" in Canada?

 Why are Canadians giving the Green Party a second, third and final look in their search for a political party in 2019?

We all know that the human assault on the fragile eco-systems that provide life for plants, animals and humans endanger all of us, and not in the distant future.

We also know that the tug-off-war (vacillation) between continued exploitation of fossil fuels and clean, accessible land, air and water, the essential ingredients of life has been tilted for centuries in favour of the fossil fuels….and that the field has to tilt in the opposite direction, and now.

We also know that any turbulence in the “comfort” of major corporations dependent on fossil fuels sends tidal waves of lobbyists, campaign cash and resistance to any miniscule move to make the shift in direction the shared climate requires.

We also know that political parties, like churches, are by far the most resistant to change, the most vociferous and animated when confronted with their complicity in historic cultural norms that are demonstrating their lethal impact on life in all of its forms. Power, by definition, seeks power; it seeks to acquire power, it exists to acquire power; it then seeks and strategizes to hold onto that power, and the longer it has power, the more tenacious is its grip on power. In order to acquire power, power needs the support of other “resources” of power: cash, cash, cash and endorsements.

Paradoxically, too, ordinary people who mostly live from pay-cheque-to-pay-cheque, do not have stashes of cash to pour into the coffers of agents of change who have seen, integrated and even adopted a visionary and idealistic perspective on the need for change. Read: huge corporations have those vaults of cash, especially in an economy that has been developed by their clones, their sycophants and their puppets and they traditionally funnel those cheques into the traditional political parties, in the U.S. that means the Republican and Democratic parties, in Canada, that means the Liberal and Conservative parties.

“Fringe” parties, like “fringe” (read: new, unconventional, threatening, radical, socialistic, scholarly) ideas and the people who espouse them, by definition, try to gather the “crumbs” that fall from the board tables of the mega-corporations onto the social, cultural, political “floors” of their campaign offices.

Tobacco companies, for decades, secured the complicity of their political puppets, by denying the causal relationship between cigarettes and cancer; the political class in Michigan, so far, has mostly escaped jail, following their fatal and tragic irresponsibility in poising the water supply in Flint; the Ontario conservatives under Michael Harris, similarly, faced public outrage in the water contamination at Walkerton, following the budget cuts to oversight of the system; similarly, Ontario roads have never recovered following their “trashing” under the budgetary cuts by that same Harris government. Politicians too often escape the tragedies and the follies they inflict, given their short life “on the hog” while in office. The current Ford government in Ontario, too, is imitating the Harris gang, by cutting cash for such programs as autism support, while puffing their own shifts by offering beer in corner stores. Pandering to the masses, like the Romans with their bread and circuses, comprises a cornerstone of short-term, narcissistic, political electoral success. And that pandering often includes massive commitments to deception, diversion, exaggeration, dissembling and denying real facts and responsibilities.

Acknowledging the “science” of the climate dangers has climbed the totem of public discourse so far that CBC’s The National is, this week, dedicating a series of mini-documentaries on the evidence facing us today, not even pondering the impacts of another dozen years of this inaction, under both Liberals and Conservatives in Canada, and also under the Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Impact Insurance CEO tells us that homes are literally in danger of becoming “uninsurable” given the threats of increased intensity, frequency and predictability of floods, even in North Toronto.

Reporter Susan Ormiston documents the visible impact on northern towns of the melting of perma-frost, the rising oceans and the need to move houses back from the eroding shoreline. The scientific prognosis says that eastern Canada will see a 20% rise in rainfall, while western Canada will see a 20% rise in drought, according to Ormiston’s report earlier this week.

Today, the Trudeau government will likely announce the commitment to build the Trans-mountain pipeline, in order to transport Alberta crude to the west coast, and then to off-shore markets. And in their decision they will enrage environmentalists, and mollify their energy-sector corporate funders.

The Toronto Star reports on the Green Party climate plan, dubbed “Mission  Possible”:

·        Double Canada’s emissions reduction target to 60 percent below 2005 levels by 2030

·        Halt all new fossil fuel development in the country,

·        pursue a nationwide shift toward non-nuclear renewable energy

·        create millions of jobs by retrofitting all buildings in Canada so they are carbon neutral over the next 11 years

·        create a “survival cabinet” of members of all parties to direct climate action of the government

·        maintain the Liberal government’s carbon-price plan, which imposes a minimum levy on fuel equivalent to $20 per tonne this year, rising to $50 per tonne in 2022, and hike it each year beyond that

·        cancel all new fossil-fuel development, including already approved projects like the $40-billion LNG Canada export terminal set for construction on the coast of B.C.

·        ban fracking, a method of extracting natural gas from the ground that many environmentalists oppose as destructive and too emissions-intensive

·        improve upon a cross-country electrical grid so renewable energy can be transmitted from one province to the other. This parallels Canada’s stopping the import of fossil fuels like oil and gas, and builds new refineries to consume the fuels the country needs as it transitions completely to renewable energy.

·        Pledges to expand rail service and ensure all internal combustion vehicle engines are replaced with electric models by 2040

·        Install a “cross-country vehicle charging system”

That seems like a mouthful of policy proposals too large for a semi-interested, marginally-engaged, electorate suffering from both information and anxiety over-load. Is it to large and too complicated?

That really depends on how serious each of us considers the threat of environmental catastrophe. Into this North American context we have to insert the climate deniers, corporate cultists on the fossil-fuel side of the equation, people like the president of the U.S. who has systematically dismantled the Environmental Protection Agency, sold huge amounts of polluting coal to developing economies like China and India, and made it far easier for corporate polluters to continue to spew toxic gases into the atmosphere. Also in the political equation are people like Michael Bloomberg who has donated millions to the counter-push against the “official” U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. American town and city mayors, too, have taken significant steps toward ameliorating environmental erosion. Cities around the world have joined the “Blue Communities” project initiative by the Council of Canadians, banning plastic water bottles, as another initiative to help stave off the ravages of climate crisis. Jay Inslee, the Governor of Washington State, has declared his candidacy for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party and focused his campaign almost exclusively on protection of the environment because he argues, if we do not do that, the rest of the issues wont really matter that much.

For the Green Party of Canada to break through the ceiling of public consciousness, and fly into the “stratosphere” of the polling booth, where the next government’ profile will be determined, people like the CEO of Impact Insurance will have to acknowledge that his company’s survival, like that of the country and the Green Party itself, are inextricably joined, and offer sizeable cash to mount a national advertising campaign for the Green Party. Similarly, environmentally-committed artists, musicians, dancers, film-makers and thought leaders will have to be recruited to host public events, concerts, films, art exhibitions, and “gift” the revenues to the Green Party. Similarly, all of those environmental scientists, like the one from Carleton University who appeared on CBC this week, will need to speak out from whatever platforms they have available, in order to mount a tidal-wave of public information, reliable, credible, authentic and life-sustaining information.

Bill McKibben, one of the prophets who have been speaking and writing about these issues for years, would be another public “figure” to invite to Canada to paint a picture of the future we face if we continue to do as little as we have been doing to leave a safe and healthy environmental legacy for our grandchildren.

And none of these initiatives will be enough without the emotional, intellectual and political awakening of the Canadian public, from our perspective, on behalf of the Green Party of Canada. This week’s two-million-strong celebratory parade in support of the NBA championship won by the Toronto Raptors could be duplicated for another national shared “cause”: the legacy of clean and fresh land, air and water for our grandchildren and their kids. Another pipe dream? Probably.

Toronto Raptors win NBA championship after 24-year struggle

There is a tidal wave of pride reaching across Canada, given the 59 ‘jurassic parks’ that sprang up in cities across the land, with thousands cheering for the victorious Toronto Raptors, winners of the Larry O’Brien trophy as National Basketball Association champions for 2019. Easily affordable as a school yard, even driveway, sport and as an elementary and secondary school sport for young men and women, basketball offers kids the chance to learn specific shooting, passing, dribbling, blocking-out, rebounding, defending individual skills, with the added benefit of razor-sharp decision-making at a high pace, and the gestalt of both organized and drilled offensive and defensive “plays” or strategies played on a relatively constrained court with other team mates.

After 24 years in the NBA, looking back on what seem to be too many examples of ‘coming up short’ in playoffs, and too many departures of players who were stars and became even more famous and successful elsewhere (Vince Carter, Chris Bosh, Tracey McGrady as examples), after multiple coaching changes, even the firing of “Coach-of-the-Year” winner Dwayne Casey last season, the departure of the treasured ten-year veteran DeMar DeRozan in a trade with the San Antonio Spurs for Kawai Leonard last summer, the current roster, this edition of the team finally reached the ‘finish line’. So, the road to the championship has been paved with many set-backs, pot-holes, trashed hopes and dreams and the trend-line of fair-weather band-wagon fans.

Building around the seven-year veteran, Kyle Lowry, graduate of Villanova, and best friend of DeRozan, Team Manager Masai Ujuri, himself from Nigeria and previously from the Denver Nuggets, risked the wrath of Toronto fans in trading DeRozan for Leonard, especially given the risk evident in Leonard’s history from last year’s schedule in which he played only nine games for the Spurs because of injury to his right quad. His dubious relationship with the Spurs provided additional fodder for the sceptics in the Toronto fan base.  Doubt about Leonard’s agreeing to sign with the Raptors and about his physical condition led to a new term in basketball team management, “load management” after he did indeed agreed to sign. Summoned by team trainers, the term points to the agreed need to blend Leonard’s need to practice and play in league games with his generally eroded physical health and strength. At no time during the season did Leonard play in both back-to-back games, providing opportunities for the other team members to find their performance levels in both wins and losses without his “leadership.”

Having been named Most Valuable Player in the 2014 Spurs win over the Golden State Warriors in the NBA finals, Leonard was, if healthy and in the right frame of mind about coming to Toronto, the potential “final piece” of a complex and evolving chemistry of a team desperate to emerge from the wilderness of failed play-off entries. Bonding Lowry and Leonard as a first and essential step in developing the current version of the team was clearly a prime goal of new coach, Nick Nurse, promoted from assistant following the departure of Dwayne Casey at the end of last season.

 Integrating new-comers Serge Ibaka, born in Republic of Congo, from the Orlando Magic after stints with Oklahoma Thunder and before that the Spanish national team, Danny Green, also from the Spurs in the Leonard trade, and Cameroon native, Pascal Siakim who played for New Mexico State, with Fred VanVleet from Whichita State, Marc Gasol, born in Spain and  newly arrived from the Memphis Grizzlies in mid-season, Normal Powell, formerly a UCLA Bruin and OGAnunoby previously of the Indiana Hoosiers. Also added late in the season was veteran Jeremy Lin, a member of the 2012 New York Knicks championship team and graduate of Harvard.

Basketball watchers find special magnetism among the plethora of statistical numbers that accompany each player’s performance in each game , each quarter, and each time-out…so rapid and accurate is the new software in both collection and storage, and then in obvious comparisons. Stats around the percentage of 3-point shots attempted and made, the percentage of free throws attempted and made, the percentage of field goals attempted and made, the number of turn-overs, fouls, rebounds, blocked shots, technical fouls read like a report card for each player, and for the team generally, especially in comparison to the same stats for their specific opponent.

The social demographics of those hundreds of thousands of “spectators” both inside Scotiaplace Arena in Toronto, and in those dozens of “jurrasic parks” indicate a broad range of cultural, ethnic, linguistic and racial groups. In short, basketball, much like soccer (European ‘football’), is embraced by people around the world, although it has only a single footprint at the professional level in Canada. Invented by a Canadian, James Naismith in 1891, basketball has become a long-standing Olympic sport. Naismith also wrote the original basketball rule book and founded the University of Kansas basketball program. So, there is a kind of “complete circle” in the historic moment of this 2019 NBA championship’s victory by a Canadian-based team for the first time.

Canada is the “home” of hockey, a very different game and culture from that of basketball. Played on ponds by Canadian kids from every hamlet and village, hockey’s required skating skills, hand-eye co-ordination to manipulate the round  hard rubber puck at the end of a stick and tolerance of the extreme temperatures in Canadian winters (at least for the better part of the last century), hockey embraces  a much more physical even somewhat brutal pursuit of the puck. Body-checks, both in open ice and against the surrounding boards, the occasional fist-fight (although far reduced in number in the last decade), faces cut by rising sticks, eyes grazed by flying pucks (more recently somewhat protected by visors) and serious bruising injuries from stopping 100-mph shots on parts of the body not protected by equipment are all considered normal in hockey. Also rising up the corporate (National Hockey League) and player association (NHLPA) agenda is the issue of player concussions resulting from the impact of hard shoulder pads in collision with the crania of opponents, some accidental and some deliberate.

On the other hand, basketball, played without body protection excepting stable and non-slip athletic shoes and mouth guards plus the occasional face mask following an injury to nose or jaw or cheekbone, witnesses turned ankles, torn Achilles tendons, and torn muscles of various kinds. Physical body-checks, as celebrated in hockey, are virtually precluded by the rules of basketball, although a skilled “block” of a driving dribbler, or a “charge” by a driving dribbler (depending on the timing and positioning of the encounter) can provide considerable excitement both on and off the court. Ball control, however, very different from the bouncing of a frozen chunk of vulcanized rubber, is much more in the hands and in the hand-eye co-ordination of the players. Without players assigned specifically to “guard” the basket, all basketball players have both an offensive and defensive role, whereas in hockey the “goalie” is the last line of defence, heavily padded and conscripted to a crease immediately in front of a net, framed by iron posts and cross-bar.

The development of the two sports in North America seems to be a mirror image of each other: hockey was more popular and played by more kids in Canada historically, while basketball experienced the reverse numbers in the United States. And the irony continues in the two championship teams in this year’s finals in both the NHL and the NBA. The St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup, emblematic of NHL supremacy, while the Raptors won the O’Brien trophy. Thirteen Canadian men are members of the Blues, a much higher number than the number of Canadians on their opponent, the Boston Bruins. In the NBA, however, a slowly growing number of Canadians, this year 14, are being recruited both by U.S. colleges and universities, the primary training ground for NBA aspirants. We all know that it will be some time before the Canadian National Basketball team will challenge the U.S. national team at the Olympics, given the dominance of American-born players on the American team, all of them members of professional NBA teams.

Nevertheless, for those of us Canadians who have harboured a passionate commitment to the “hoops” for most of our lives, there is a high level of both pride and national satisfaction that we are watching a significant growth curve of participation among Canadian boys and girls. And this latest win will only inject cultural and societal steroids into that wave. Who knows, some day the Raptors may have a majority of Canadian players on another NBA championship team. And then, doubtless, the American contingent of NHL teams will aspire to a full complement of U.S. born players, and a Stanley Cup win for their side.

It is not only that $2 billion in grade crosses the 49^th parallel of latitude every day between our two countries. We also have a lively and contested relationship in our professional sports teams, whether their respective rosters have a preponderance of players from either country. And the fan interest, the advertiser sponsorship, the player salaries will continue to compete and to mirror each other, as the tax schemes and dollar values continue to vacillate making the work of attorneys and accountants and player agents only grow more technical, more complex and more costly.

And given that two tickets for the last game of the Stanley Cup finals in St. Louis cost $6000, and the cheapest ticket for the last home Raptor game came in at $1600, those prices will continue to price out the vast majority of fans and spectators. Hence the derivative of the “outdoor” parties, with the monster TV screen and the suds sales.

Inside is morphing into outside, and outside into inside, as American and Canadian are each morphing into the “other” whether we really like and appreciate that shift or not.

Christian roots of "plantation" and "colonization"

From the United States, we hear much talk about what has been termed “plantation” theology, while in Canada we hear much noise about something termed, colonization. In the former, blacks and whites have been locked in a cultural box of how power is exercised, deployed, and abused. Whites, being in charge of the plantation, have been boxed into their “superiority” role and mask, as blacks have been boxed into their “inferiority” even slave role and mask seemingly for centuries. And the church’s responsibility for both the theology and the resulting tragic implications has never been either acknowledged nor atoned for.

In Canada (and elsewhere), colonization, too often based on the Christian churches’ marketing (read evangelizing) objectives, has generated boxes in which indigenous people have been categorized as “savage” and “uncivilized” and “heathen” by white explorers settlers and land and governance officials.

And then, in all human cultures, including both the American and Canadian, what was at the beginning “shall be henceforth forever” not merely sacralised and stabilized but also fossilized as ‘normal’ and ‘conventional’ and the ‘status quo’. God, in whatever form and guise s/he might be conceived, was thought to, even believed to, preside over this status quo,  as if it were engraved in marble, just as the millions of tombstones were so engraved.

“Fitting in” with the “established order” of things, depended on a significant dose of both insecurity, obedience, and “freedom from anxiety” so that the stability of the society could and would be maintained. Nevertheless, just as the tennis racket’s mere shift of a miniscule degree sends the ball in directions that respond to that angle, so too the religious/ecclesial/theological/ethical tennis rackets of plantations and colonizations were very difficult to change their directions. And  the longer the “foundations” “held” sustained and proselyzed by the “establishment” (in both Canada and the United States, that means the “white” Europeans), the more rooted and permanent and resistant to change they became.

Entrapment in insecurity, neurosis, and “sin” (as Paul writes, “We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God”) has generated a myriad of social, cultural and, dare we say, economic and political tragedies, not the least of which are being enacted in the headlines on both sides of the 49^th parallel.

In Canada, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, both by thousands of indigenous families, and much later and more shamedly by governments, a national commission on the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls was established by the Trudeau government back in 2015. After several resignations, and several bruising headlines of mismanagement, a report issued from the commissioners grabbing the headline that the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls amounts to “Genocide”. Of course, such a word was inserted in what has to have been a deliberate calculation of the commissioners, so that their report would be “noticed” in the public debate.  Ironically, even paradoxically, it is the word “genocide” itself that has served to magnetize the public discussion and to divert attention from the deep and persistent reservoir of grief, loss, anger and even hopelessness that clings to each indigenous family touched by the deaths and disappearances of these over 1100 women and girls.

And yet, not a single story of who committed even one of these horrendous acts has been uncovered by the commission. It is  legitimate to bring the “stories” of the persons and their gifts to the light of day, so that that light might eventually prompt some public squirming among law enforcement, and among the public about what kind of contributing conditions are needed for these stories to have become part of our national narrative and identity. And yet, it would also be relevant, and perhaps even potentially transformative if the commission had had as part of its mandate, the project of digging into the forensics of at least a sample of these unsolved cases. We already know that racism runs through some law enforcement detachments. How significant is that cancer in preventing the needed detective work that would and could unpack many of these files? We also know that “colonization” by the white culture has been held as the normative model for centuries over the First Nations peoples across the country.

 And the sinews, the percs, the attitudes, the beliefs and the basic foundational perceptions (of colonization) by white men and women toward indigenous people, both conscious and unconscious, comprise the very nature of the ground on which we all walk.  Occasional “remediating” initiatives, in local schools, have helped to shift the perceptions of those students and teachers to a degree of enlightenment and perhaps even an enhanced sense of responsibility among those communities. Similarly, the rising tide of indigenous undergraduate and graduate students in post-secondary schools and colleges signal a significant shift in perceived potential both for those individuals and for the potential harmonizing of race relations between colonizers and the colonized.

In the U.S., too, although too many headlines carry the burden of dead black men at the hands of too many white law enforcement officials, there are peeking shoots of recognition, and acknowledged responsibility in some quarters that portend the slow even glacial erosion of the plantation mind-set, and the contemptible superiority that flows through the veins and the arteries of millions of whites. Articulate, educated and brilliant men and women of black and Hispanic heritage appear daily on national television, write daily in national publications and teach in both undergrad and grad schools across the country. They also sit on the bench of many courtrooms, even though the ratio of blacks (and Hispanics), like that of women, has a long way to go to come close to approximating their respective population percentages.

And, once again, both to repeat and to underline, the Christian theology of the “original sin” of the “Fall” in the Garden of Eden, following the eating of the “forbidden fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge has undercut the healthy self of literally millions of people to the detriment, and hopefully not the demise of the culture that theology spawned. Extreme unctuousness, modesty, obedience, and even servility, to the “reigning” power of the ruling class, (in both Canada and the U.S. that means the white European ethnicity) is the dominant tumor in the body politic.

And, it is not incidental to note, with shame, that the Christian “establishment” has neither acknowledge nor atoned for both the sins of commission and the attendant sins of omission that have accompanied and accumulated under the “cross” and the “altar” and the hierarchy. And, not surprisingly, nor even tragically, the Christian church, like most of the traditional institutions of state and political and economic and legal power are experiencing a significant erosion of their traditional respect, authority, power and trust. To have virtually neglected what many have called the traditions of ‘wisdom’ theology, by focusing on the depravity and sin of man, at the expense of his capacity for responsibility and the trust in the creature fashioned in the “imago dei” (the image of God) is to have led millions into a dark place of no return.

And, then to have narrowed even further the definition of “being a Christian” to such constricted and heavily enforced obedience to rules generated by the imperfect mind of humans (mostly men), and then superimposed a hierarchical and dogmatic structure for those seeking baptism, confirmation and ordination, in order to sustain the “faith” has become a narrative confounded by the sabotage of its own design. Hollow utterance of “respect” and “dignity” for all human beings, as encased in the phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these  are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” (as per the U.S. Constitution), overlaid on the religious and theological premises of sin and white racial superiority, will not stand the test of rigorous and accountable application. The separation of issues of faith from those of state, too, will not stand the test of reason, critical examination nor social and political utility.

We humans live in the world, the secular world; and in that world we incarnate  certain attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and we engage in specific decisions and acts. And while we are capable of being trusted, and Wisdom theology as argued eloquently by William Brueggemann*, posits that man is indeed both trusted by God, and considered capable and worthy of that trust. Our lofty, idealistic holy towers of both cathedrals and psychological and social superiority, especially among North American Christian “whites”, the generators and perpetrators of both colonization and plantation cornerstones of the respective cultures on both side of the 49^th parallel.

And without a significant seeding of wisdom theology, challenging both the reign of the fundamentalists and the ‘high church,’ and the opening of the option of bridging both the sacred and the secular in our daily lives, beliefs, attitudes and human encounters, we will continue to contend with abuses of power that continue to erupt among indigenous, blacks, Hispanics and colonized women and girls. And we will continue to attempt to shed the baggage of religious servitude while blind to its theological sources. The church has to be an integral and operating partner in this social, cultural, political and economic re-birth.

 And so long as the secular culture remains in denial, and the church hierarchy in avoidance, the bridging of these forces will remain incomplete and our division against ourselves will exacerbate.

 *Walter Brueggemann, In Man We Trust, John Knox Press, 1972