Searching for God # 148

 The following excerpt appeared in the Toronto Star, October 1, 2026: 

OTTAWA, Ontario, Oct. 01, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — As humanitarian funding declines, conflicts proliferate and high levels of forced displacement persist, the World Refugee & Migration Council is launching a new international initiative to build a global coalition of donor and hosting governments, multilateral institutions, local authorities and those displaced long-term by conflict. The initiative aims to reshape how the world responds to protracted forced displacement. 

With almost 70 percent of the world’s refugees displaced for five years or more, often for decades, protracted displacement has become the norm. Strategic Responses to Forced Displacement: An Opportunity for Collective Action will bring countries and institutions together to develop a practical blueprint for responding to displacement crises that now routinely last for decades. The initiative seeks to shift the global response beyond an overstretched emergency-aid model toward coordinated, practical solutions for displaced people and the communities that host them. 

“We need to preserve the important and valuable work of life-saving humanitarian assistance,” said Ninette Kelley, Chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council. “But we also need to recognize that emergency assistance alone cannot provide a roadmap for people who remain displaced for years or even decades. Those long-term crises are what we are seeing now more than ever in countries like Bangladesh, Chad, Jordan and Uganda. Without a longer-term strategy, protracted displacement responses will continue to be dominated by short-term interventions, allowing situations to deteriorate and ultimately increasing the human and financial costs.” 

Thinking, strategizing, planning and fund-raising not only for the crisis of the moment, but for the longer-term reality of displacement crises that last for years or even decades. There is a very encouraging sign in this recent shift; there is also a resignation and a profound sadness that the forecast not only anticipates a protracted, persistent, never-ending kind of humanitarian tragedy. Are there really no signs that, with the appropriate, muscular, creative and even radically imaginative re-visioning, the primary causes of these displacement crises cannot and will not be addressed, ameliorated and perhaps even minimized? 

For centuries, the ‘good Samaritan’ model has motivated religious pilgrims, to the point where the archetype has become embedded in the culture, at least of the West, and probably of the globe. Interventions to help those in crisis, always altruistic, generous, heart-felt and even courageous and challenging, go only so far. They address the presenting problem, the immediate symptom of thousands of men, women and children who, for many complex and seemingly intractable reasons, have become displaced, and, as we see from the above report, are likely to remain in those conditions perhaps for the rest of their lives. 

The seeds of their own demise, however, are ingrained in such good-samaritan projects. The impulse to act to serve those in need, by its very nature is a short-term impulse. It rarely carries over for decades, within the same people, no matter how profound their commitment, dedication and depth of kindness. It is also based on a short-term feel-good-gratification for the aid worker, who, given an appreciation of the depth and profundity of the displacement, likely knows that whatever is accomplished today, may either not last beyond this month, or perhaps will be extinguished by conditions that continue to worsen. The recipients, too, are likely possessed of many of the deep and intractable reasons for their displacement and, for many, they already sense, intuit or perhaps even imagine that their fate has already been sealed. 

That is not to suggest that hope has already ‘left the project’! However, and this proposition applies not only to the growing tragedy of displaced persons, irrespective of their classification, need, disposition, or geographic location, the world, especially those institutions like national governments, and even provincial/state governments, have to shift their collective perspective from resolving immediate, pressing needs with band-aids, interventions, palliatives, and the headlines those measures garner for the politicians whose ‘bread-and-butter' in addition to the cheques from fat-wallets, are the manna that keeps them going and ultimately may even return them to office. 

No longer can any of us say, or even perceive or believe, as was once the case, that whatever happens, for example, in the Middle East, or in Africa, or in South America, or in the Far East, has no meaning, impact or interference in the lives of those in ‘my’ jurisdiction. It is no longer acceptable for a local politician to refer to a letter from I-can, the organization dedicated to the global elimination of nuclear weapons, seeking municipal support from the local council, to refer to such a request as ‘virtual signalling’! Like displaced persons, environmental disasters, nuclear weapons, pandemics, war, drug cartels, despotism, tyranny, terrorism, and access to basic human survival needs, are all human issues, and also humanitarian issues, universally experienced, universally predictable, universally costly and universally threatening. 

Parochial, provincial, NIMBY, and self-serving attention to public issues only scratches the surface of most of those issues. Even regressing into ‘ten commandments on classroom walls, is a profoundly myopic, narcissistic, parochial and fear-driven political reaction, which models, teaches and demonstrates to children in those classrooms, that only our ‘neighbourhood’ matters. Only our religion matters. And we can all rest comfortably, as Paul Simon reminds us in My Little Town: 

In my little town 

I grew up believing 

God keeps his eye on us all 

And he used to lean on me  

As I pledged allegiance to the wall 

Lord, I recall my little town..... 

And after it rains there’s a rainbow 

And all of the colours are black 

It’s not that the colours aren’t there 

It’s just imagination they lack 

Everything’s the same in my little town 

Retrenchment, isolation, indifference, detachment, and resistance to the dynamics of a world that has changed dramatically...these are not ‘lessons’ we need to inculcate in our children. Indeed, they are precisely the counter-intuitive approaches, attitudes perceptions and connections we need to imbue. While we are all an integral part of a local neighbourhood, community service club, church, employment address, we are also inherently integral to the direction the world is taking....whether we are comfortable with that direction and our apparent powerlessness to change it. 

The current geopolitical climate, besotted as it is with the rising tsunami of billionaires, corporately privileged, environmentally insensate, legally protected from opposition, not only by their fat wallets, but more importantly by their oligarch-sycophants, is effectively and deliberately attempting to eradicate the power of governance generally, and absorb that power unto themselves. We are a very long way past the ‘turning of the tables in the tabernacle’ for excessive usury, and yet, only the dimensions of the nefarious motives have changed, as have the size of the numbers. 

While not having done the exhaustive research of the authors, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, for their new book, “End Times Fascism,” we share their perception of the dangers of this threat. Here is a quote from the Penguin Random House Canada website, about the book they have published: 

Scathing investigation into the apocalyptic thinking of the Christian nationalists, tech-bro reactionaries, and populist survivalists who increasingly define the contemporary right---and a recipe for how to fight them. The planet burns and shared reality melts, a new iteration of the far right is on the march. How can we understand this dangerous new development, and what resources can we draw on to resist it? In their scathing assessment of the contemporary scene, (the authors) explore how the religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists, and ethno-nationalists who make up this apocalyptic alliance share more than one might think: they are united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether through the manifestation of messianic prophecy, the rampages of a resource-and-job consuming artificial intelligence, or the purported existential threat of immigration and cultural replacement. 

Without plunging into the prophetic remedies and strategies of Klein and Taylor, this scribe would like to offer a glimpse into what might be considered a significant, remediable, yet glaring gap in the public consciousness: the retreat, atrophy, neutralization or perhaps dismissal of the creative imagination, including the capacity to see beyond the literal, the empirical, the immediate and the need for personal, instant, entitled gratification. People like Hillman will write that the American ‘god’ is money. Others will argue that it is power/war/the military. Still others will propose that corporate unfettered capitalism is at the core of the American psyche.  

How power is shared, distributed, needed, obsessed over, pursued, rewarded, ‘given-up on,’ in a society, a culture, a nation, and a world is a question to which each of us has an obligation to face fearlessly, and never more so that in the cauldron of these times. How much power are ‘we’ individually as well as collectively, prepared to assign, consign, hand over, relinquish and then monitor in the administration of that power? And while engaged in that question, how much trust can ‘we’ individually and collectively expect our elected leaders to comply? And more importantly, what mechanisms, besides the democratic vote, are available to us as citizens to caution, impact, influence or even to protest a decision by an elected body. 

Patterns of government leaders refusing to answer legitimate questions about the details, for example, of their government’s handling of public monies, or about secret deals between and among elected or appointed persons with their corporate benefactor-friends abound. Public discourse about almost any subject has been reduced to mere morsels mostly of deception, denial, manipulation and the ultimate abuse of power. And if these dynamics are playing out in full view in so-called developed, democratic and previously trusted governments, imagine the depth and the degree of irresponsible malfeasance where accountability is completely absent. 

And wherever accountability, whether through an aggressive, and courageous press, or a coalition of press and academic research, or from the (power-complicit) courts, another sign of a limpid if not eroding transparent, accountable and responsible governance, is being eroded, we can bet that the abuse of power especially against those considered enemies of the state, the voiceless, the poor, the racially and ethnically despised, will only continue to mount. 

And, unless we wish to model the church during the Third Reich, and stick our heads in the sand, we risk the tsunami of despotic, narcissistic, rule and norm-defying power-grab that threatens to ensnare us all in its clutches. 

It is not only the LGBTQ+ community or the immigrant community, or the Jewish or Muslim communities in developed and previously peaceful and apparently racially integrated societies, or the unemployed or underemployed, the idle and the thousands who have either lost or given up hope in the midst of excessive wealth and opportunity who are at risk...and the world needs now the consciences, the consciousnesses, and the wills of those who ‘see’ and who are willing to become activists in the fight against these heinous forces, many of them profiting from their investment in firms like Palantir* (think Peter Thiel). 

*Palantir is an American software company that builds data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for governments and large businesses (from AI) as well as the military.  

To be continued.....