Searching for God # 135

 Today we are all Gazans, Ukrainians, migrants, homeless, victims of preventable disease, preventable environmental disaster, hungry, hopeless, confused, angry and to a degree never before witnessed in decades, impotent and dismissed by those in power around the world.....Of course, there are exceptions, but the larger picture nevertheless holds. (From the last post in this space) 

To many it may sound, appear and actually be a highly presumptious assertion to stretch the imagination to embrace all of the various, scattered, victims who are being openly, blatantly and imperiously abused by forces beyond their control. Some of those forces are deemed to be natural, and thereby not ‘man-made’. We reject that categorization for the simple reason that with all of these forces, a human causative element can be found. In many cases, that human element is beyond a single individual stretching into a whole society and culture. 

The media luxuriates in naming trump, putin, netanyahu, kim, and others of their choosing as the culprits, and in that obsession, they are collectively committing a professionally negligent error, in reducing the ‘cause’ or ‘agent’ of horrible acts of lethal proportions to a single male. And yet, for each of those ‘men’ and others who would inflict harm, there are invariably many others, sometimes even millions who have made it possible for them to hold power, and to hold onto that power far beyond any legitimacy they may once have had. 

As corollary to that reductionism, the public is given the escape hatch of holding the perception that ‘others’ are responsible for bringing these men to justice, and to stop their horrendous actions, based on even more despicable motivations. And so, the abuses continue, seemingly unabated, and beyond the scope of the collective to rein them in. These men, and others emulating their nefarious motives and measures, continue their destruction, devastation, while the public often turns either or both a blind eye-and-deaf-ear, or an insouciant detachment that leaves the playing field free of forces capable of, and charged with responsibility, to bring the abuses to a tolerable minimum, if not to eliminate them. 

The quote above, however, rejects the blind-eye, deaf-ear, and insouciant detachment of the millions of ordinary people who know, ‘in their heart’ (irrespective of their ethnicity, history, language, theology, academic and literacy levels, economic status, and age, for the moment excusing the young children) that only in and through a tectonic shift in how power is shared, distributed, perceived and acknowledged, can a collaborative, muscular, international, classless, voice of unified, sustained, and legitimate clarity bring the perpetrators to their knees. 

How could such a monumental initiative even be worth trying to imagine? 

There are many around the world, for example, who have made a determined decision to refuse to purchase any single product or service from America. That process, extended into the corners of the globe is a worthy first step. Opening minds, imaginations to alternative ways of collaborating to meet community needs could borrow from a pioneering age when small communities pooled their resources and needs both to enhance their options and to reduce their costs, (on the Canadian prairies, they were called co-operatives). Hard times are quite remarkable in focussing the mind on the essentials....and for millions these are decidedly ‘hard times’ on a global scale. Slightly shifting the focus of some of the philanthropics from the actual basic provision of food, water, education, health care including maternity care, to include ‘leadership’ development training within refugee camps, migrant camps, both in under-developed situations as well as in more developed sites, to beginning to open the blind-eyes-and-deaf-ears of the establishment to the capabilities of these ‘victims’ and ‘abused’ and ‘dispossessed’ and ‘alienated.’ 

As a culture, worldwide, we have a history of conventionally legitimized ‘prejudice, bigotry, dismissal, denial and attitudinal alienation' of those whom we consider to be beyond ‘worrying about.’ That kind of attitude, prevalent if not dominating in establishment cultures, irrespective of religion, ethnicity, language, or national and community/local customs, is only going to give way to a ‘two-way’ freeway of respect, if and when the millions of currently voiceless, impoverished, illiterate and desperate, gather their courage, wisdom, confidence, pride and begin to make proposals to those within ear-and-eye-shot to change not only the details of the manner in which they are being treated, but the actually ‘condescension’ that undergirds those details. 

The West speaks, writes, debates and allegedly pays considerable attention to what they call ‘natural resources’ for the purposes of operating their corporations, their industries, their armies, navies, air forces, and political structures. At the heart of that argument is the primary resource which in so many situations is divided into proficient, profit-making, holders of marketable skills. We have, collectively, perhaps even somewhat unconsciously, managed to define the millions of victims we are collectively generating as worthless, costly and dependent social outcasts.  

In some quarters, (think the U.S.A.) there are now some 70,000 American inhabitants who have been abruptly abducted, forced to leave their homes, families and in many cases their employment, and then driven, flown, or loaded onto trains and transported thousands of miles into internment camps, really prisons, some within the U.S., others in central Africa. Some of these mostly men might very well die or be expelled from those camps, if the country into which they have been dumped decides it no longer wants them in their territory. Those blatant, yet highly secretive, acts are committed on the strength of executive orders, buttressed by billions of public dollars approved by Congress, to carry out these atrocities, under the faux ‘purpose’ of ‘getting rid of the evil ones’. 

No one among those thousands, with many more thousands to come, can ever be considered as evil as, or more evil than, the man who issued those executive orders, nor those who carry out those orders. He outstrips them exponentially in both his capacity to inflict evil and especially to imagine and concoct additional evil measures. Evil has now attempted to take on the papier mache facade of ‘national security, crime-busting and prevention,' or the even more reprehensible deception of ‘cleaning up our communities.’ It is not only the ‘lies’ and fabrications that require dismantling, burning as if they were contaminating viruses, but the mis-apprehension held widely among the public, that ‘law-enforcement’ agencies, like the police, the courts, the Congress and the media will conduct themselves so courageously, and so honourably, that the only act the public will have to participate in is to mark a ballot on some fixed election day....and even the public trust in that process has so eroded, by the determined efforts of those same thugs who have created ICE in the first place.  

In other parts of the world, drones, missiles, and military battalions are being inflicted on innocent men, women and children, by other ‘men’ whose values, motivations and determination are similar to, if not more nefarious, than those of the American despots. Refugees, migrants, homeless, destitute and hopeless people (breathing, hungry, often ill, confused, under-educated, and very needy) are crossing borders of nations whose social, health care, education and public security resources are already stretched to their limit. And there is a growing divide between those who wish to reach out a helping hand and those who seek to construct walls to prevent this growing surge of homeless from entering. 

There is, so far visible from this vantage point, no collaborative, collective, international, funded, authorized, supervised and sanctioned program to deal effectively with these now millions. And that omission, at the international level, although there are undoubtedly some specific localized projects to address portions of these waves, continues as another ‘blighted blind-spot' of certainly not ignorance, nor of incompetence, but of willful negligence. 

Like the rising temperatures, rising number and seriousness of devastating storms, fires, droughts and insurance both claims and defaults, all resulting from a serious, international collective refusal to pick up the baton that waits for international leadership, only to be dismayed that, again, only pin-sized, localized and nearly imperceptible initiatives have been mounted to address this monumental crisis. 

It is as if our capacity to wrap our collective minds, hearts, arms and consciousness around problems, issues that are shared without any real boundaries, has not yet kept pace with the circumstances which we have all participated in creating. That includes the malignant and cancerous leaderships we have installed, the innocent and insouciant public impotence that we have participated in both birthing and sustaining, and the manner by which we conceive, and then inculcate those values that perpetuate an individually-based, profit-driven/obssessed, isolationist, and compassionless, empathless, and scurrilous arrogance, pride and collective insouciance that is already proving to be unravelling everything we have taken for granted for centuries. 

It is no longer merely a cliche to say that ‘we are all in this together’...It is a matter of not only the survival of the establishment, and, of course, those already threatened with extinction, but the scene, as depicted here and elsewhere illiustrates, embodies and incarnates not only systemic evidence but also mounting burials albeit of many who remain unknown, out of sight and out of mind. The argument that ‘we can do better’ is plagued with mediocrity, when mediocrity and moderation, 'go-slow' and keep thinking are signs of irresponsibilty....a shared, shameful irresponsibilty. 

It is not only a trade war, or a montage of despots, or an environmental fog of lethal gases to which we have to direct our shared, collective, collaborative, international, immediate and urgent attention....we have to decide whether, individually and collectively, we actually wish to continue to inhabit this ‘blue planet’ that everyone who venutres into space, calls the most beautiful image they have ever witnessed. 

Are we, individually, as well as collectively, prepared to protect, preserve and defend ourselves and its future? 

This is integral to our shared ‘search for God!'