Indifference is chain-stokes breathing of human civilization

There is so much ink being poured over the various economic indicators, the GDP, GNP, Unemployment percentages, Wall Street and Bay Street indices, dollar trading figures, trade numbers in percentages and comparative with both exports and imports from various countries being marched in Sousa-style across our retinas. And then there are the "poll" numbers for political parties, and also for individual candidates, and the millions/billions of dollars spent pursuing public office, and numbers that pile countries and cities on top of each other according to some index of living standards and rate of agreeableness to human life....and then there are the numbers of university graduates, especially in mathematics and science, as comparisons between countries, and the tax rates in various countries, especially corporate tax rate comparisons, in order to attract new industrial development in order for politicians to generate both increased tax revenues and higher public opinion poll numbers for themselves.
And then there are the numbers of prisoners, especially black and minority male prisoners, and the crime rates...all of them grist for the sociologists and the journalists and, of course, the politicians either to dodge or to shout out, depending on the size and resonance of the numbers within their respective communities.
It is as if we have become drunk on our own capacity to gather, store, transmit and even digitally analyse all manner of statistical data, now including mega-data and meta-data, the mountains of information on which social policy makers and politicians gorge.
Occasionally, in our prep-packaged diet of digital data, newscasts will insert a "human interest" story about a hero who, at ninety-five, just jumped out of an airplane, as one last item to be ticked off his or her bucket list.
However, there is another side to these limited and highly skewed portrayals of "reality" that does not gather much public traction either in the media or through the dialogue between and among the political and the thought leaders.
And that side has to do with the as yet unmeasured and steeply climbing graph of insolence, insensitivity, rudeness, insouciance and even barbarity...without remorse and more dangerously, with complete indifference.
We live in a period of history that our grandchildren will have to pause to digest. With all of our techno-accomplishments, including new medical interventions, new ways of communicating, new ways of researching all forms and genres of data, of generating images both photographic and virtual, we are quickly bestowing on our offspring a legacy of violence, of barbarism and of pride in the release of that side of our natures.
Four rabbis at early morning prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue are not merely murdered, they are butchered. And although their assassins are shot, their Islamic community immediately gives out sweets on their streets, as a sign of pride in the accomplishment of their colleagues, the assassins. Palestinian voices, although mouthing to their English audience the expected sadness and horror at the atrocity, nevertheless utter rather opposite messages within their own communities. Medical aid workers, even one who converted to Islam, following his tour of duty as an American soldier in the Iraq war of 2003, is beheaded by ISIS, as another sign of the sheer unmitigated and insufferable violence that comprises the heart of the Islamic terror campaign, as the content for their ensuing media blitz, demonstrating a level of cryogenic corpuscles that have to be flowing through their veins as well as through the veins of the rabbis' assassins.
And, of course, in both instances, violence is being perverted into a religious act, as if there were some deity or some sacred text that both condoned and encouraged such violence. Praying rabbis, expecting to be left alone in their silence and in their attempt to visit with God, are no match for butchers with machetes, cleavers and the usual guns. Nor is the human conscience linked as it has been, we believed, to the human poetic heart, capable of integrating such violence into its "vocabulary" or into its 'digestive' system, as one must attempt to digest meaning from events one encounters in one's life.
And so, there seems to be a growing divide, not merely at the level of the blatant terror...those recruited and evangelically over-committed to the cause, and those of us who simply find the whole movement repulsive, inhuman and indecent. And even between those numb to violence and hate and those of us who continue to be outraged, despondent, and despairing.
Madame Defarge was portrayed as knitting into her yarn the names of those to be executed in front of the guillotine while she fed the pigeons, in what has to be one of the more gruesome scenes from the literature of the French Revolution. A fictional character in Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge represents one aspect of the Fates. The Moirai (the Fates as represented in Greek mythology) used yarn to measure out the life of a man, and cut it to end it; Defarge knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed. Defarge also symbolizes the nature of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution in which radical Jacobins engaged in mass political persecution of all real or supposed enemies of the Revolution who were executed on grounds of sedition to the new republic through the guillotine, particularly targeting people with aristocratic heritage. (Wikipedia)
In what was really a class war, the aristocrats versus the people, this Revolution was pointing to a new relationship of power in France, while exacting violent revenge. And there are other equally heinous and violent murders, including beheadings by British monarchs whose lives were worthless, apparently, without their having absolute control of everything including the procreative powers of their female partners. We cannot and must not absolve ourselves of our own history of violence and our capacity to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear when ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands in Ruwanda, for example, or Kosovo, or more recently in Baghdad and Nigeria, march in italicized red ink across our collective conscious. And we have to wonder what such stories did and continue to do to our collective unconscious.
And we also have to ask, "Do we really care?".... as we stampede through turnstiles turning Black Friday into another form of violent mayhem, trampling human life in our compulsive and addictive demand for things, baubles really, to match our neighbours, to impress our kids, to smooth over broken relationships, and to "keep the economy healthy" as if that health were the holy grail.
It was John Donne who reflected that he liked and even admired individual humans, some he even loved, but had contempt for the crowd, the mob, the mass....and when the mob is running headlong, like an army of Leningen's ants,  into the seductive arms of the phony empowerment that comes from being literally armed even while living inside gated communities, that comes from having "the most stuff" and/or the biggest office, the most expensive BMW, the most exotic vacations, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to disagree with Donne.
And the more we collect, compile, store and worship our "audience data" as if that were our purpose on the planet, the more blinded to our need for collective and compassionate education, employment, spiritual experience, and both poetry and music we become. Our souls and our spirits, from all faiths as well as from none, are starved and parched, living in this dessert of the angry, listless, hollow and empty lives that it is our duty to live in the pursuit of living encounters, breathing moments filled with beauty, and with new discoveries and with travels to all of the living models of many different civil-izations....And yet, one is prompted to wonder, if all of this steely, shark-like behaviour and attitudes, including rigid and unshakeable ideologies (certainly not belief systems) can or will generate anywhere, new models that could still wear the name "civil"-izations, proud of their continuing contributions to the arts, to music, to dance, to literature, and to empathy, compassion, and also to enriching the human capacity to hope and to dream and to create....and not to worship our capacity to destroy.
And when we will develop a meaningful and respected scale to measure our willingness to reject violence and hatred and indifference that makes the first two inescapable?

Reflections on Gorbachev's warning that we might be heading into another Cold War

\reflectRussia has reportedly agreed to  build four new reactors at Bushehr, an existing Russian-built power station, and four at another site, (from The Economist, November 15, 2014)  in Iran. Reports out of the former Crimea indicate that "Russification" has proceeded very rapidly. Putin has whined that economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the EU against the Kremlin will hurt global trade. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has told the world we may be entering a new cold war. Reports from eastern Ukraine indicate that Russian tanks and troops are continuing to foment trouble in that region. All these headlines while the world also celebrated the 25th anniversary of the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, that most odious of embattlements that segregated East and West Berlin during the Cold War.
Are we truly entering a new cold war, and if so, what might it look like?
First, while the original Cold War pitted two super powers like behemoths poised both with nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union seeking expansion with the U.S. pursuing a policy of containment. Bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, these two superpowers were engaged in a very dangerous conflict of wills, national ambition, national pride, scientific competition (The Soviet space ship, Sputnik was launched in 1957, unleashing a scientific competition that resulted in President Kennedy's proclamation that the U.S. would land a man on the moon in the ten years of the 1960's.  Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Cuban missile crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, the Czech revolution, plus the construction of the Berlin Wall itself....these are some of the high points of the Cold War.
Today, the world is very different, and yet there are striking similarities. Russia, having experienced the dissolution of the Soviet Union, seeks to re-establish herself as a world power under Putin's leadership. China, rather than forming a Communist-axis with Russia, continues to modernize and court the favours of the United States, Russia, Brazil, India, and especially the continent of Africa. The former cluster of non-aligned nations, that once included Egypt, India and others, seems not to occupy a prominent place in world dialogue, nor does the Trilateral Commission, once alleged to be the driving force behind western (especially American) foreign policy. Today, the world is a far more trade-centric place with fossil fuels dominating that arena. Economic and industrial output and dollars of both imports and exports tend to dominate the world's conventional wisdom along with increasing evidence of cyber-conflicts among the major powers and also into the affairs of private and public corporations. The nuclear club, while holding at five, continues to magnetize others like North Korea, Iran and potentially other Middle East countries, especially if Iran does in fact develop a nuclear weapon and especially if she does so in secret (with or without Russian assistance and cover).
Continuing to haunt the nuclear weapons debate is the overwhelming evidence that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, courtesy of the United States, thereby rendering her position within the Middle East as a potential bully, although she has steadfastly resisted deploying these weapons, and continues to remain "mum" even about their existence. Palestinians, Muslims generally, and other countries whose allegiance and alliance is sought by both Russia and the United States, not to mention China, wonder about the wisdom of turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to those who decry the Israeli nuclear stockpile. Loose nuclear weapons are reported to lie unprotected in many places, especially in the hinterland of the former Soviet Union, all of which weapons have become the 'holy grail' for the Islamic jihadists.
What is clear, at least, when attempting to discern the degree of validity in Gorbachev's warning, is that Russia, China and the United States have yet to announce publicly that they are united in their condemnation of Islamic jihad. They have also not announced a joint commitment to aggressive measures to contain and reduce carbon from the atmosphere, although the U.S. and China did this week make an announcement of some kind of agreement, beginning for China in 2030, with the U.S. increasing her commitment and actions prior to the end of this decade.
So long as Putin remains silent and uncommitted to the eradication of the Islamic jihadi threat everywhere, along with his Communist colleagues in Beijing, and so long as Putin continues to actively and aggressively support Assad in Syria and the pursuit of nuclear power in Iran while pretending to provide evidence that Iran does not seek nuclear weapons, and so long as Putin's invasion of Ukraine continues unchecked either by NATO or by Ukraine with the aggressive and comprehensive support of the west, especially the United States and the European Union (which is far more restrained, dependent as it is on Russian fossil energy for heat and industrial production), and so long as Russia makes no move toward addressing the global threat of climate change and so long as Russia continues to hold fast to her short-term bargaining power through the threat of cutting off those fuel pumps...the world has a gordion knot in the Kremlin, one that Mr. Gorbachev understands better than contemporary western leaders. And so long as that gordion knot remains tied, and refuses to disentangle or to be disentangled, the world does have an impending disaster incubating under Putin's direction control and agency.
And while Russia is not nearly as powerful as the former Soviet Union, Putin is neither following in the pattern of Gorbachev nor Kruschev, but is more aligned with his tsarist compatriots whose extremes in retribution, in hegemony and in repression of the Russian people knew few limits. Parading Edward Snowden as his token puppet testimony to the free flow of information only exaggerates Putin's complete addiction to secrecy, to allegiance to his dependent oligarch serfs, to his absolute dominance of his Russian military machine, and his growing hubris in the face of the world's pre-occupation with the Islamic jihad, with Ebola, with the recovery from the self-inflicted collapse of the U.S. and western economies in 2008-9. Putin's opportunism linked to his Tsar-like control within Russia, coupled with the world's self-seduction that the Cold War ended thereby rending Russia no longer a serious threat.....all of these factors contribute to a potential stealthy threat from a new self-appointed Tsar.
And Gorbachev's warning must have been as much to his own Russian comrades as it was to the rest of the world, as he visited Berlin as part of the anniversary celebrations of the Wall he eventually "tore down" as Reagan pleaded with him to do.
Vigilance, in world affairs, is no longer confined to close scrutiny of a single important relationship. Vigilance, and through vigilance safety and security now depend on a multivariate calculus that warrants a highly trained foreign affairs cadre as well as increased attention  by the public and private news organizations leading to much better informed and much more critical citizenry in all countries and regions, in order that stealth and ambition mixed with nuclear power (a threat Putin used when pushing back against the west's protests over his invasion of Ukraine) and hubris at the national level, as well as on the terrorist front do not combine to generate the unthinkable, a spontaneous spark that ignites a flame against which there are no antidotes, nor protections, nor global agencies or institutions to add leaven to the toxic mix.

Refections on Remembrance Day, 2014

November 11, 2014, a day in Canada when everything has changed, and yet, as the Rabbi reminded us in his Benediction, nothing has changed. We are today a peaceful, respectful, law-abiding and trusted country among the world's medium powers as we have been for the last century-plus. We are also emerging from a series of events in the last three weeks that have shaken us all. The assassination of two of Canada's military personnel in cold blood, one by an auto the other by as assassin's bullet as he stood guard at the War Memorial in the centre of Ottawa, has left us newly charged with both appreciation for our military and the role they play in our lives, and also newly wounded in our perception of our country and our realization of the way the world has changed forever.
Both assassinations were perpetrated by radicalized Canadians, albeit troubled, dedicated to the cause of Islamic terrorism. Just today, we learned that our CF-18's had dropped their first bombs on ISIS targets in northern Iraq, following  a formal decision by the Canadian government to join the campaign against this venomous scourge. It was only yesterday that we learned that a suicide bomber had detonated his body device, disguised as a student in a northern Nigerian town, killing some 49 young men, and wounding another 80. According to reports, the assassin in this case was a member of Boko Haram, (translated "western education is evil") another arm of Islamic terrorism, inflicting its poison whenever and wherever it can.
Officially, the military does not like to disclose casualties, as we learned from one of Canada's Generals involved in the Iraq mission explained on CTV's Question Period this past Sunday, just as Matthew Halton Canada's reporter from the front was forbidden from reporting casualties in the First World War, documented in his son David Halton's new book, Dispatches from the Front. During that war, the Canadian government did not appreciate the Senior Halton's "gloomy picture" of what he was witnessing in the European theatre, preferring a more glossy and sugar-coated version of events than Halton was willing to present. Today, however, with 24-7 reporting, embedded reporters in the war theatres, some facing beheading at the hands of the terrorists as they pursue a relentless campaign of fear and recruitment of the most fragile and seducible of young men and women from western countries are delivering hour-by-hour reports on the most deadly events.
The world has grown considerably smaller, at least in the time and distance as well as the volume of information flow that darts at lightning speed into every laptop and I-pad and smart phone on the planet the instant something happens. This is another of the ways everything has changed: we all have instant access to such a range of information sources from many countries, that we could easily drown in the bile of news-flow that discourages and even suffocates our spirit and our hope.
On the other hand, some 50,000 Canadians turned up at the War Memorial in Ottawa today, and the Canadian Legion sold some 20 million poppies, more than ever in history, all of this a defiant statement of the Canadian strength of will and solidarity (not solidity, as CBC commentator Brian Stewart called it in his comments on air) sending a message of determination to those troubled current and potential recruits to radical Islam that we will not be undermined, nor will will become victims of our fear.
For seven decades, I have held what could justly be called a detached view on Canada's military, sliding too easily into comfort with many comedic views that are summed up in the line, "In which war has Canada's contribution made a difference?" Mostly out of both ignorance and a distaste for killing, for guns, for top-down authority my life path veered further and further away from all things violent, including the military.
When I taught grade ten history to "tech boys" in 1967, in the midst of the Viet Nam war, as I have stated in this space previously, one student boldly asked in the middle of a class in Canadian History, "Sir, would you go to fight in Viet Nam if you were drafted?" I responded, "Only if I were permitted to teach, and not if I were required to bear arms and kill the enemy."
I have often wondered silently and recently more publicly why there is no graduate school offering formal academic training in peace negotiations, especially at the Canadian military universities. When I learned just yesterday of the sale of "white poppies" in British Columbia as a movement to promote peace, I wanted to purchase one, recognizing that some people who espouse the sale of red poppies find this initiative offensive and competitive with their tradition.
Is there not room for both red and white poppies to be sold in a Canadian context?
Another way Canadians have not changed, in spite of our recent parliamentary vote to send fighter jets and military personnel to Iraq to fight ISIS, is that we are a country of 33 million who by a large majority prefer peace to war, prefer conflict resolution to blood-shed, negotiation to fisticuffs, and even walking away to bullying. When I was in grade ten, a classmate had a dispute with me over what I considered a trivial matter, yet one he considered a matter of honour. As I departed school, carrying my books, I was accosted just inside the school fence by my tormentor who began to pound me with his fists, as a crowd quickly gathered. Without putting my books down, and without engaging him with my own fists, I suggested we both pay a visit to the principal's office to settle our dispute. Of course, that was the "chicken way out" in the mind of my opponent, as he continued to pound away, only to look up and find the principal coming to break up the fight. Whatever punishment he received I have no idea, to this day; I do know that he eventually enlisted in the Canadian Navy and likely served an honourable career. The principal, for his part, however, showed his colours many years later when, having been asked, after I completed a master's degree, for a letter of reference to a doctoral program in education at an Ontario university, by this scribe, secretly wrote that this candidate is not emotionally mature enough to be considered a candidate for a doctoral program in education. Finding out who our friends and enemies are is neither a simple nor a second-long process; it takes decades to learn the colour of one's character, and while I may have taken the "chicken" road in grade ten, I have often wondered what road that principal was taking some seventeen years later. On reflection, like too many of his "leader-peers" in education, he preferred controlled appearances to somewhat unpredictable and uncontrolled reality, and was ready and willing to step over a professional line of judgement of one of his former students, good enough to have been invited to 'teach' the French class in which he was then substituting for the ill French teacher but apparently not good enough to enter a doctoral program in education.
Today, Canadians know that ISIS is a serious threat, an unequivocal enemy, and a force to be eradicated by whatever means necessary. Today, conversely from my previous seven decades, I would consider it an honour and a duty to engage in the fight against this scourge. Today, the barbarism that rages like a tsunami across the globe, incubated albeit too often by injustices incalculable and inexcusable, nevertheless, requires both a deep and profound searching of our collective unconscious, as well as our 'western' history, without in any way apologizing for or amending our healthy education of men and women for an unchartered future of diminishing life-sustaining resources. There is no principal who is charged with refereeing our growing conflict with radical Islam. There is no organization capable of reining in this monster. There is only the collective will, imagination, courage and spirit of each Canadian and each citizen of every other civilized country, including especially those committed adherents to a moderate and respectful practice and interpretation of Islam, whose active participation is essential in neutralizing this toxic human chemical, reducing it to its smallest and least toxic precipitate and then euthanizing that precipitate from our shared future, without being ready or willing to endure a lasting radioactive residue.
Today, we remember, for as the rabbi reminded us, without memory there is no continuity and there is no identity. And he also reminded us that thanks without action of support is hollow. We are now all soldiers in the unchartered and unpredictable winds of war that are raging in too many quarters through suicide bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, beheadings, propaganda videos, theft of residual arms from previous conflicts, and the linkage of previous Bucca prison camp inmates with former trained military personnel from the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
And on this Rememberance Day, 2014, we all know the restricted capabilities of the military; we all know that eventually talking will have replace bombs, missiles and hard power and then, the degree of our collective commitment to the termination of this current scourge, as well as our willingness and courage to deter the threat contained in Mikail Gorbachev's recent warning that we are entering a new cold war, as well as our collective commitment to collapse the canyon that has grown between the have's and the have-not's will be necessary if our grandchildren are to enjoy the scope and degree of freedom that our current generations have enjoyed, resulting from the bloody and traumatic and courageous actions of our grandparents and their grandparents.
And we will have to grow our tolerance for "gloomy pictures" at the official level if we are even to being that long and arduous process to peace and security and stability that everyone seeks and yet this madness of violence continues and grows.

An apology for empathy in all of our human encounters

In the most recent edition of The Atlantic, Megan O'Rourke write a piece entitled, "Doctor's Tell All...And it's far worse than you think"....in which she references a recent book by Danielle Ofri, (an internist at Bellevue Hospital in New York) bearing the title, What Doctors Feel.
Documenting the development of both detachment and a cover-your-ass mentality in American medical practioners, O'Rourke points out a startling piece of information from the Ofri work:
The rate of severe diabetes complications in patients of doctors who rate high on a standard empathy scale, Ofri notes, is a remarkable 40 percent lower than in patients with low-empathy doctors.  There are not a plethora of different or difficult meanings of this piece of information: Empathy in doctors plays a significant and positive role in the process of reaching and retaining health among diabetics....and conversely, diabetic patients whose doctors score much lower on the empathy scale suffer more serious complications.
Perhaps you might think this piece of information is obvious to the most basic common sense. Unfortunately, while that may be true, most of the current indicators of cultural emotional values point to a gaping vacuum of empathy not only among medical doctors in America, but among too many professionals in too many offices, board rooms, court rooms, and especially classrooms. We are witnessing instead, a rise in prominence of human traits like competitiveness, objectifying the other, reducing the 'other' to a transactional actor on whom to "operate", from whom to gather information, on whom to pour the advertising, from whom to elicit the cash in the marketplace, over whom to pour the compliments in order to "establish the relationship" that will keep on giving thereby enhancing the reputation and the resume of the business executive, and ensuring him or her of a rapid climb up the proverbial ladder to the top....whatever that looks like.
Ironically, through empathy operating in full force in the relationship between the doctor and the patient, it is not only the patient who benefits; the doctor's health improves as well.
And, if that is empirically verified in the practice of medicine, is there any reason to doubt that it would also be mutually beneficial to the client and the professional in all other personal, professional and even marketplace encounters?
And yet.....everyday we read about, listen to and watch the drama of human conflict in all of its many faces, shapes and forms. The purveyors of technology apps, for example, now compete to generate the means both to cheat on one's partner and to detect such betrayal. The purveyors of video games compete to generate the most violent of encounters, thereby seducing billions from the bank accounts of millions of eager purchasers. The corporations and the universities are  engaged in providing a fertile incubator for fiscal profit and personal hubris respectively, as if they were engaged in the pursuit of the optimum values needed in both the board room and the lecture hall....occasionally dropping a few morsels of "empathy" if and when a crisis erupts that cannot be dealt with without such dollops of this "triviality"......as it is too commonly defined in conventional society.
I recall, in a past life, when I served as a secondary school English teacher, encountering a machismo mathematician from Glasgow, well over six feet tall, and brilliant in his intellectual capacity, hearing these words pointedly directed to the English teacher: "You are much too liberal and far too close to the students!" In the same school, during the same former life, I met the art teacher as I conversed with a student, while passing him in the corridor: "There goes Atkins dishing out soul food!" he blurted with a large smirk on his unforgettably mobile face.
Befriending an alcoholic, without knowing the depth of the hold the disease had on the victim, befriending the spouse of another alcoholic desperate for support in extricating herself from the deplorable enmeshment in which she had lived for a quarter century....there were not wise or mature decisions on my part, nor were they conventional in the corporate and politically correct manner imposed on most professionals....and perhaps they gave proof to a previous "slur" thrown by a peer that "he is kind to a fault" in reference to this scribe.
The medical profession is not alone in its determination to eradicate all empathy from the professional lives of the people it admits into the fraternity. The legal, education, accounting and certainly the business and political culture so denigrate empathy, unless and until there is an obvious trauma, that the world has come to expect empathy to be an exception to the encounters in the public arena. And it is not only an exception but it is a dangerous display of a human emotion that risks overturning those established situations that are often barely hanging by a thread. Empathy could lead to its reciprocal return; it could lead to a loss of objectivity and a potential medical misdiagnosis, (as if there were not a long list of misdiagnoses already without empathy in the mix); it could lead to seeing the other as a full human being with all of the narratives of successes and failures that comprise the biographies of each of us.
On the television, somewhat synchronistically, the American movie, The American President, with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning is playing, a movie in which the widowed president actually seeks out a female friend, an environmental lobbyist, whom he dates, to the public and political contempt of far too many, both friends and foes.
Empathy could, and often does, lead to intimacy.....as if that were the greatest evil into which one could succumb. And, when set beside many of the conventional alternatives, like spending $4billion on television advertising in pursuit of personal and narcissistic achievement of public office (in both Senate and House of Representatives in the election completed this past week), or the conventional pursuit of hegemony in neighbouring territory, or in raping the resources of crippled countries unable to set boundaries that protect national self-respect in the face of  such corporate and political invasion, or....jealously and dishonestly protecting one's turf in the face of some invasive strategy or tactic of a current or potential competitor....empathy looks rather attractive.
We denigrate empathy because we know we cannot adequately police its consequences and implications and behind such fear are many, if not all, of the religions communities which have, for centuries, over-rated human sex and sexuality as demons to be avoided. Controlling empathy produced popular Victorian novels without sexual intimacy, yet simultaneously millions of babies. Repressing empathy is not only costing billions in a health care system that has so "sterilized" its culture (much as it sterilizes its surgical instruments to prevent the spread of bacteria)  without pausing to reflect on precisely what it was doing.
Let's re-think what we have done to repress emotion in our professional and public cultures, especially the emotion of empathy between practitioner and client....let's re-examine the implications of just how far we have gone down the road to our own unconsciousness of how we so distrust our deepest emotions.
If empathy is to re-emerge as a legitimate component in our personal and our cultural lives, we are all going to have to resist the urge to repress empathy in our own lives, both personal and professional. And that will be very threatening to the establishment in all of our corporations and our professions...and that danger will prove to be worth the discomfort and the discombobulation that will ensue from the release of emotion from its repressed vault, the heart that beats in each of our chests.

The United States government has just been purchased by the rich....and the world will reel from the change

The American political system, indeed the American culture, the American environment and even the loudy touted "American Freedom".....they are all for sale!
And the price, in this round of elections, was approximately $4 Billion....that is the amount that was spent by both parties in advertising, now that all limits on personal and corporate donations have been thrown out by the Supreme Court's decision commonly known as "Citizens United".
Republicans now control both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Republicans were the very ones who blocked all attempts to pass legitimate legislation ever since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Republican leaders met on the very night of his first election to plan how they would sabotage everything he tried to do so long as he occupied the White House. Some of the spill-over from this electoral defeat of the Democratic control in the Senate include the likely passage of a bill to give the green light to the Keystone Pipeline, proposed to convey tar sands oil, unrefined from Canada to Texas for both refining and export from there. Environmentalists will be appalled, given the extent to which they have committed to campaigning against the project.
The real question then seems to be, "Will the president veto such a bill?"
There will likely be proposals from the Republicans to up the ante in military terms against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, in spite of the evidence that emerged this week indicating that the American prisoner of war camp Bucca in Iraq, as part of the second Iraq war, was the location for incipient jihadists met, planned and became enraged against America and then joined with the disbanded Iraqi army trained and operated by Saddam Hussein. This new  merged force combines intense anger with professional competence and discipline to create a force that has just this week captured high powered anti-tank weapons left by the Americans in support of the Syrian rebels who have  been fighting against the president of Syria, Assad. The Syrian rebels surrendered to the ISIS jihadists, and their weapons were immediately commandeered. That single and simple incident is a warning sign of things to come.
The Koch Brothers, one of the more prominent sources of Republican candidates, along with a right-wing agenda, will now cash in their 'chips' at the expense of the middle class, the environment, the labour movement, and the social security network, as privatization rises to the top of the political agenda, thereby enhancing the commodification of not only American products and services but also American values.
We are watching the sell-off of those things considered integral to the American "progress" over the last two centuries, fostered and nurtured by Republican and Democratic presidents and politicians. Remember when it was reasonable, and even fashionable, for political leaders in both parties to consider the whole population when considering legislation, to consider the long-term future of the people and the nation, when it was considered prudent to protect the rights of workers, including the right to unionize and to bargain collectively, to ensure that poor children were well fed and well educated as part of the national pursuit of scientific, artistic and professional excellence among the nations of the world, to ensure a woman's right to choose, to provide ready access to all American children to a college education, to ensure that workers were entitled to reasonable remuneration, as well as some stability in their employment future.....these are all now threatened.....unless the Democratic movement rises from the slough of this current political climate and takes both both houses of Congress as well as the White House in 2016.
Of course, that is merely wishful thinking on the part of this scribe....but today is a day when the honour and the political reputation of the American electorate have been squandered on votes for a party whose recent history demonstrates dangerous trends that could hollow out the core of the American middle class even further, rape the remaining health of the environment, dismantle the historic right to organize and bargain collectively and impose a set of tax laws that inordinately
favour the rich.
How long will it be before the vast majority of the American electorate wakes up, takes to the streets and demands the termination of Republican/oligarchic attitudes, debates and even legislation?

Political disease of narcissism infecting both Washington and Ottawa

There is a political disease that seems to have crept into the body politic in both Canada and the
United States...oh it has been here for a while now, and periodically someone rails against it, almost as one would a spike in abdominal pain from an unknown intruder, and then, after some antibiotics, the pain subsides, and whatever caused it, the urgency of the problem dissipates with the pain.
Normally, with a medical pain, lodged within a single human abdomen, and carried along the spine to the brain, the individual ponders the potential, walks with it for a few days or weeks, until it returns and then, (perhaps sooner if the patient is a female) decides its time to ask the doctor to help find the source of the pain.
However, in the case of the body politic, there is no single 'brain' or consciousness that considers the problem anything more than symptomatic of a cluster of potential causes....there is no specific test to determine the degree of severity of the political disease. There is no literature that would take into account the kind of political culture that has bred this disease. There is no doctoral research grant from a funding philanthropy that consider the problem worthy of the expenditure of making a grant available for a vetted research candidate. The media thrives and depends for its very survival on the
"pain spikes" that provide opportunity for their reporters to write the headline-grabbing story of a single angry political candidate, or even a single angry political pundit. Sales of newspapers and ratings for television news, and even U-Tube viewings...all spike, predictably a few days following the rant, as others climb on the "band-wagon-of the-day" as if that were a legitimate and responsible response from a serious and engaged citizen, especially in a democracy that depends for its very vitality and survival on such people. The needs, however, of a serious democracy are quite literally antithetical to the needs of the news corporations whose scribes (fewer and fewer) are deployed to provide the "fault line" between the two vector forces: government and shareholders who demand dividends.
The democracy requires reporters who are willing to risk the wrath of their editors, and their boards of directors, when they uncover information that suggests the body politic is severely ill. It also depends on the candidacies of men and women whose primary and almost single goal and purpose in letting their name stand for election is to generate information, debate and discussion in the public arena about the merits and demerits of specific proposals without regard for their own political careers.
However, over the last three decades, although conceivably longer, we have witnessed a stream of political candidates whose political life, but certainly not their public utterances, demonstrate a single-minded commitment even compulsion to seeking, acquiring and sustaining their membership in the elected portion of the government.
We are watching on both sides of the 49th parallel, a charade that demonstrates this theatre of chicanery.
In the United States, Republicans running for election (or in most cases re-election) have decided and declared that the real enemy is Barack Obama, the same president whose policies they have derailed (except the Affordable Care Act, passed with the Democrats had a majority in both The House of Representatives and the Senate) and now they decry his "failure of leadership" as the mantra by which to seduce their voters into turfing whatever Democratic candidates they are running against. Republic Governors seeking re-election, some of them eyeing the White House as the next step in their political careers, even use the Ebola epidemic of West Africa, as another example of the incompetency of the Obama administration, and impose quarantine restrictions on returning medical workers, when there is no evidence of symptoms, and no scientific evidence that those workers are a danger to anyone.
Good politics, perhaps, if you are bent on gaining personal power, but clearly another of the many scare-tactics that they deploy to compound the angst that is already so extant in the hinterland, for so many other reasons, including an economic recovery that still has not addressed the minimum wage issue nor the gaping and growing gap in income disparity. When asked if in the election upcoming on Tuesday of next week, upon being re-elected himself and the Republicans took control of the Senate in addition to the House of Representatives, Senate Minority leader McConnell would work to undermine everything the president tried to get accomplished in his last two years, McConnell responded that he wanted only to "work for the American people". Nancy Cordiss, the CBS respected and highly professional reporter asking the questions, let McConnell off the hook and did not press him for a more specific and detailed (and clearly not forthcoming) response.
It was that same McConnell who declared when Obama was first elected, that his goal and that of the Republicans in both Houses was to "make Obama a one-term president"...a goal that he and the Republicans failed to achieve. Republicans, however, are clear that they would, if given power in both houses, declare a "green light" to the Keystone pipeline, so eagerly and narcissistically sought by their financial backers in the oil patch, thereby vacuuming even more cash from the pockets and vaults of those backers for this election.
In Canada, a different and perhaps even more "crass" strategy has just been announced by the Prime Minister, one full year ahead of the next federal election. He has announced a child support payment for all children up to age 6 of $160 per month.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has unveiled a package of family-focused tax cuts worth nearly $27-billion over six years that will shape the political debate heading into the 2015 election campaign.
The combined measures are worth about $4.6-billion a year and include income splitting for families with children under 18 and an expansion of the Universal Child Care Benefit, which delivers monthly cheques to families.
The Universal Child Care Benefit was a key pledge of the Conservatives’ 2006 platform, and delivers $100 cheques every month to families for each child under six. The government announced on Thursday that the monthly amount will rise to $160. Also, parents with children aged 6 to 17 would begin receiving monthly cheques worth $60 for each child in that category. (Harper boosts monthly child benefit, unveils income splitting plan, by Bill Curry and Steven Chase, The Globe and Mail, October 30, 2014)
Having fought with the federal bureaucracy, cutting well over 10,000 jobs and gutting some essential services in information gathering at Statistics Canada and environmental protection, using the argument that austerity is required to recover from the financial crisis of 2008-9, while all the while feathering the consulting job opportunities for Conservative-government acolytes, Harper is now facing a sizeable "surplus" at least half of which he is now spending to seduce Canadian middle class families into voting with the government in October 2015. His and his government's retaining of power is the agenda that drives this announcement and all other announcements that will flow forth like the hot lava threatening a small town on the main island of Hawaii, threatening the survival of the democratic organism that attempts to continue to pulse in Ottawa.
And the shape of the debate that Harper has imposed is one that has to respond to his proposals, reducing the opposition parties to keeping the cash-cow "giving the milk of political largesse" in order to compete on a playing field that the politicians need for their own narcissism, rather than the country needing to improve the lives of our people.
This argument is not to denigrate support for child care, especially when too many parents make wages that do not permit them to afford high-quality, reliable, trustworthy child care. However, the Madison Avenue gurus of slick and targeted advertising have so seduced their political clients of the benefits (to those very clients) of such measures, that they too are part of the gravy train that is blocking the flow of healthy political oxygen at the heart of the democracy. Between the K-Street lobbyists (most of them retired or defeated members of the Capitol Hill Club, and the Madison Avenue gurus, now linked to and enmeshed with the social media whiz-kids, funded by their corporate cheque-writing financial mentors, who are effectively running both countries.
And we all thought Russia was and has been for decades one of the most corrupt governments on the planet. Rich oligarchs have made off with the cookie jar, following the demise of the Soviet Union, and the results have not been "pretty" for the Russian people who do not have gigantic offshore bank accounts or real estate holdings. And the vote is clearly much more rigged in Moscow than it is in either Washington or Ottawa. However, how far behind are both North American countries?
As citizen participants in our own governments, we have to wake up to the chicanery and the blatant and manipulative strategies, words, actions that we are being fed by our political class, tell them it is less nourishing and more dangerous that a steady diet of Big Mac's and Coke, and let them know that their personal political futures are not the most important issue facing either country.
We are going to suffocate in our own Carbon Dioxide, lose our coastlines and our capacity to grow food, and slide deeper into the slime of the menus of the politicians if we are not courageous enough to purge both their agenda and even their names from the elected "oligarchy" we are quickly generating in both our capitals.
 

Education about the role and status of women key to resolving the conflict betwen Islam and the west

It was David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist just returned from the Middle East, and appearing on CBS's Face the Nation with guest host Charley Rose this morning, who warned of the ticking clock in the attempt to secure the support of Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq to join what amounts to a Sunni National Guard force of some 5000 to fight ISIS in Iraq. Ignatius reports that there is growing impatience in both Lebanon and Jordan, with the apparently protracted time line evident in the U.S. delivery on its agenda to train and develop an indigenous Sunni force to counter the ISIS Sunni threat.
Ignatius made an even more important and timely observation when he strongly advocated a U.S. allocation of resources to fundamentally change fundamentally the education of young Muslims from one in which they are indoctrinated with contempt for Jews and the "west" to one that seeks to develop an appreciation of both among young Muslim children. While noting that the "fight" with bombs and missiles and technology and training is important, Ignatius also cautions that without a profound change in the education, attitudes and beliefs among young Muslims, the fighting itself, even including "boots on the ground," will not be adequate to defeat this scourge.
Also appearing on the same Face the Nation, CBS Middle East reporter, Clarissa Ward, noted that recruitment of new terrorists by the ISIS leadership is no longer generated by Imams working in Mosques, but rather is being accomplished through internet connections with people already deeply engaged in the ISIS ideology and committed to its growth. One of the implications of this private and highly secret radicalization, including the fact that parents frequently do not and will not know their children are being transformed into terrorists, is that intelligence services, too, will find it very difficult to learn about who is becoming radicalized, and what that radicalization is likely to lead to in terms of actions planned at home or abroad.
Clearly, nations like Canada, where broad daylight assassinations of two military personnel took place this week, one using an auto as the murder weapon, the other a 30/30 Winchester rifle, are struggling with the question of both surveillance of potential terrorists and intervening to prevent actions not yet committed and perhaps not yet even planned. We learned this week, from excellent reporting by Adrienne Arsenault of CBC, that the RCMP and the Canadian Intelligence Service both consider the removal of a Passport as a sign of failure, because when the situation has reached that point, with the potential terrorist having approached the final decision to leave the home country and join ISIS in Iraq or Syria, and now having been discovered and having the Passport revoked, the young radicalized terrorist wannabee is angry and  has no place to go. What he does with that anger and that "restriction" is potentially quite dangerous.
The broadcast of the turbulent background of the Ottawa terrorist wannabee, including his frequent encounters with the law, his rejection and dismissal from an Islamic mosque, his life of illicit drugs, and his grasping whatever parts of the Islamic ideology that served his purpose of holding his life "together" would, one might hope, point a light into the kind of ne'er-do-well who turns to radical Islam and terrorism as a way of finding an identity, when most other paths have failed to achieve that goal. Unemployed, confused, desperate, penniless, friendless and without either direction or purpose, this man could  become the poster-child for what not to do with one's life, including not permitting the overtures of ISIS recruitment agents to seduce him into a life of violence and hate.
It was a group of women activists appearing on SunNews Television in Canada last night, as part of the premier airing of a new documentary entitled, "Honour Diaries," who shared their experiences as women in the Islamic world. One notable comparison comes from Iran, where according to one of the women activists, a woman is literally considered precisely one-half as valuable as a man, and her testimony in court is also considered to be of only one-half the value of the testimony of a man.
The documentary outlined the incidence of Female Genital Mutilation, a tribal tradition in Africa that has been imported into the Muslim faith in many countries. Arranged marriages to young girls is another of the human rights issues these women are trying to bring into the public consciousness as a beginning of a process to put an end to them. There is little doubt that at the core of the many issues that divide the world's population around the headlines generated by the radical Islamic jihadi movement is the role and status and the human rights of women: whether they are beaten, covered, accompanied in public, educated, mutilated, or even considered fully equal members of society with men.
This documentary exposed the failure of the western feminist movement to align with the women activists whose work has generated this documentary: "We have never been approached by western feminists offering support for the cause of women's human rights," were the words of one participant in the discussion that accompanied the airing of the documentary. One potential reason for this failure to support is that western feminists do not wish to be considered Islamophobes if they offer support for Muslim women in their pursuit of what the west considers normal human rights. And so, fearing for the loss of their own reputation, they abandon the opportunity to join a legitimate struggle courageously undertaken by mostly Muslim women who refuse to be shackled by their male cohorts and who are willing to risk considerable punishment for their bravery in openly confronting this issue.
If the attitude, and the failure to join these Muslim women activists, on the part of western feminists is or can be an analogy for the potential of western governments to engage in an even deeper and more threatening transformation of the education of Islam's millions of young people (threatening that is to the status quo and the misogyny it upholds) then we will wait a long time for governments like that of the United States and Canada to begin to pour human and financial resources into a campaign that would seek, as one of its primary results, the moderation or even the termination of misogyny and the triumph of equality and respect for the 51% of the Islamic world's population that is female.
This is not a religious ideology that seeks to bring about equality between the genders in global society; it is, certainly and without question, a human rights issue, and not merely a women's human rights issue, but one that confronts both men and women everywhere. It is not a political ideology that seeks and espouses gender equality in all countries; it is not a military ideology, nor an economic ideology, because in the first instance, ISIS welcomes female recruits and in the second, the emancipation of women from the chains that shackle them to their male "masters" (first their fathers, and their brothers, and then their husbands, and finally their sons) would inevitably result in the unleashing of an economic and political force that would, without doubt, generate tidal waves of both political and economic activity still hidden in the caves of the minds of millions of Islamic men.
And so, just as ISIS is giving a very bad name to Islam, so bad that Imams were filmed at the War Memorial in Ottawa yesterday laying flowers and decrying the actions of the terrorist in murdering the Canadian soldier and being embraced by Canadians who found the moment emotionally moving and reassuring, so too are the Islamic terrorists giving a very bad name to the male gender.
And as men interested in the achievement of gender equality in real and verifiable terms, (not in the terms that tip the pendulum so far to the feminine that the men become "mist" in the distance,) western men too have to speak out against the view of both men and women from the perspective of the radical Islamic terrorists and to those among any faith community that continues to perpetuate a superior/inferior view of men to women, including those among the right-wing in the Christian community. Male superiority, male dominance, male exclusivity, male power .....these are all matters for deep and profound reflection among all nations and peoples of the world.
No longer is it viable, nor was it ever, to argue that because Jesus was a man, and his disciples were all male, that women are barred from activity ministry, from holding clergy offices including priest, bishop, and even Archbishop and Pope. No longer is it viable, nor was it ever, to argue that because women are the "weaker sex"  all sexual encounters between men and women are primarily or even normally determined by the male, the bearer of "excess testosterone" as many angry feminists would have it. No longer is it viable, nor was it ever, for a woman who heartily consents to a sexual relationship, to cry "foul" and publicly demand punishment for the former partner, when that relationship ends, regardless of which party initiated the termination. Women, if they really seek gender equality, have to accept their full responsibility for all sexual relationships to which they consent. No longer is it viable, nor was it ever, to argue that women are the automatic victims of all sexual encounters, when we all know that western men have been socialized and "educated" into the belief that a woman's "No" means just that!
It is a very small minority of men who contravene that belief, and they are to be rightly judged and punished for their abuse. However, just as the Muslim world has enshrined the pendulum's swing far too far to the side of men, and the abuse that that brings, so too the Christian world has much to account for and to atone for in its too easy and ready compliance with the "weaker" gender theory, which is after all, little more than another form of patronization of women.
If we are to strive, legitimately, for full and responsible equality of the genders, in Christian, Jewish and Muslim relationships, as well as those relationships between men and women of no faith belief, then the question of the relationship between men and women will have to be critically examined, openly debated and both negotiated and legislated from a basis of full and equal participation in the narrative that undertakes that goal. And the Christian segment of the world's population will have to make fundamental and transformative shifts in the current acceptable "unequal" relationships enshrined in its phoney protection of the "weaker" female gender, as will the Muslim world have to examine critically, openly debate and change the power structure in its homes and communities in the other direction.