The Darkness of Evil Denied in Gainesville, Florida

In a climate of fear, hate-mongering and sensationalist statements from the right wing of the political spectrum in both Canada and the U.S., someone who calls himself "pastor" has decided to burn the Qur'an on the anniversary of 9-11 in Gainesville Florida.
It may well be that this man, like so many other "christian" leaders, has more than a few screws loose. It may be that his fifty-something congregation (size not age) agrees with this decision. His assistant, wearing his pistol on his hip, appeared on Chris Matthews last evening trying to suppport drawing a line in the sand against Islam.
As the "pastor" says, "When do we stop accepting the violence of Islam?"
Well, for a little man, with little faith, in a little church, he has certainly stirred the international "pot" of political and religious leaders from Petraeus to the Pope along with Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and even Defence Minister Peter McKay in Canada. By noon today, both Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon had come out against the burning.
Silent are the Republican leadership; silent too is former presidential candidate John McCain, along with former president George W. Bush. Still silent is Colin Powell as is Condoleza Rice and Carl Rove and Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, a presidential hopeful in 2012?
Sometimes the news is in the silence, not in the headlines. Just as, sometimes the real art in the canvas is in the "dark spaces" not only the "spaces of light".
In this case, the darkness of the mind and heart and spirit of the "pastor" is where the evil lurks, and he is projecting his denied evil onto the backs of the soldiers in Afghanistan. It is one of the most nefarious moves to be made under the banner of christianity in the last two weeks....and the results could be explosive.
But he is waiting for "God" to give him clear directions, if he is to change his mind...
Was it God who directed him in the first place?
Some God! Some direction! Is it the same "God" who is giving directions to Ben Ladin?

Seduced by short-term fixes...leaving long-term deep-ression

McGuinty's corporate tax cuts, reducing tax rates already lower than in the U.S., are linked to wage cuts at the lowest end of the wage scale. "Robbing Peter to pay Paul" is an old axiom; only recently, however, using the Bush model in the U.S. "Peter" has become the poor and "Paul" has become the rich political benefactors whom no politician wishes to offend.
It used to be, not so long ago, that if a politician of any political stripe wanted to get elected, s/he paid attention to the needs, wishes and aspirations of the poor for the simple reason that they were by far the largest block of votes. Of course, there were the rich donors to the political war chest, but they also recognized and even supported the principle that poor votes meant as much as rich votes, when they were dumped out of the ballot boxes on the counting room tables.
Now, it seems the pharmaceutical companies, and the oil and gas companies, and the military hardware and software companies, and of course the banks, and (especially in the U.S.) the insurance companies are "buying" the politicians with impunity, immunity and even public nonchalance. And the politicians are not even ashamed of this nefarious development.
Democracy has devolved into a virtual oligarchy, with the corporate interests wielding a huge stick, and the politicians cowering before their masters. It is demonstrated in the "smaller government" and the "law-and-order" agenda and the tax policy, in Europe the raising of the retirement age "to pay for the deficit in the social security net,"  adn in the U.S. with the abondonment of the public option in health care reform.The governments seemed to have entered into a secret marriage ceremony with the corporate interests.
And then we hear the political cry, "It is the small businesses that are the engine that runs the economy, and they are the ones that will do the necessary hiring to get us out of the enemployment slump." And, for those of us who are trying to decipher this logic, we are wondering if even those small business owners are getting the same political favouritism being extended to their "big brothers" in the corporate board rooms.
The universities have become the recipients of those corporate interests seeking research that complements their mission statements, from neophyte scholars whose research puts them on track for the holy grail of the "earned doctorate" especially in the maths and sciences, the electonics and the pharmaceuticals. And now we have to conduct research on the sources of funding for all research in the sciences because knowing the source of the funds will help to determine the objectivity, and the reliability of the research. Omitting such funding documentation leaves the other students who might access the research in the dark.
And then there are the governments seeking to fund the kind of research for which they wish to be known...in the case of the Canadian government, that means science, engineering and technology is currently living under a halo of extra funding while arts grants are much more scarce. After all, there is much more "sex appeal" and thereby political capital to gain from funding hardware and technological processes than there is in funding historical or literary research that discloses the secret documents of a specific regime (for example the Harris government about which many would like to know the full story) or the unique insights of the kind of literary scholars like Northrop Frye whose literary criticism has become a much used and much appreciated piece of scholarship around the world, to Canada's long-lasting credit.
We are a ship driven, it seems, by money toward the acquisition of more money, for those whose hands are already "drunk" with cash while, at the same time, we are becoming drunk ourselves on moving in this direction without so much as a "wait-a-minute" and "could we hit the pause button and re-think our course."
There is no pause button on this machine and no re-think button and no apparent "fools" willing to put their neck out and look silly in the face of the tsunami of conventional-robotic-nonthink....
This process demeans poverty in favour of the rich; it elevates technology at the expense of critical thinking; it debases human individuals while shining halo's on big cash grabs, and big tech-advances, and big-drug-'discoveries' and reduces the feasibility that the process can or will be even slowed, certainly not stopped.
We are driven by short-term thinking (which incidentally sinks most small business entrepreneurs) and short-sighted visions, and short-term health fixes by a mind-set of instant (if superficial and non-substantive) gratification...
And we think and some even believe that we have matured, into health adults over the last half century!
That's a bad joke!

Sabre-rattling by Iran against Israel, again

From MSNBC, September 6, 2010
Iran's president said Sunday that any Israeli attack against his nation would mean the destruction of the Jewish state.

The two nations have exchanged numerous threats and warnings in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear program, which Israel, the United States and other countries believe is aimed at developing weapons, despite Tehran's denials.
"Any offensive against Iran means the annihilation of the Zionist entity," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a visit to the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. "Iran does not care much about this entity because it is on its way to decay."
He said he doubted Israel or the U.S. would dare to stage such an attack because "they know that Iran is ready and has the potential for a decisive and wide-scale response."
Everyone, everywhere realizes that this man, while apparently speaking for the regime in Iran, is bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. This is just another of his many threats against the country. Listening, yesterday to a different voice, a radical Islamic cleric in London, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN's GPS, I witnessed the same kind of contempt for the existence of the state of Israel.
Tony Blair, in his recent interviews with both Christiane Amanpour (ABC's This Week) and Peter Mansbridge (CBC's The National) commented that the balance of power in the Middle East would be forever altered if and when Iran acquires  nuclear capability. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic poses a rather impending time line for an attack by Israel against Iran, should all other attempts to move Iran away from development of a nuclear weapon fail, probably sometime around May, 2011.
There are those in the U.S. who speak of "war fatigue" among the American people, thereby reducing the coverage of the termination of "the war footing" in Iraq to a minor blip; however, one has to wonder if, given  credibile evidence of the actual development of those nuclear weapons by the Iranians, coupled with the urging of several of the Arab states in the Middle East for the Americans to "do it" (to undertake the strike against Iran) if those same American people would not accept a U.S. military offensive against Iran.
There are certainly those in the Jewish community who believe that, after all the attempts to stop Iran from nuclear capability fail, the Jewish government will itself take the necessary step of "self-defense" and strike Iran.
That poses a dubious, perplexing conundrum for the U.S. president. If he does not declare war on Iran's nuclear installations, Israel most likely will. If he does make the decision to attack Iran, the blood of the attack will be on his hands and on the hands of the American people. Wiping Israel off the map, the declared intention of the Iranian leader, is not an option for the West, particularly for the U.S., Israel's strongest ally.
Would Canada be asked, and if so, would we agree, to join in a U.S. attack against Iran?
Will the sanctions, albeit more stringent than those of the past, be effective against Iran? There is much legitimate skepticism about their potential effectiveness.
Will Iran see the "insanity" of its position? Not likely.
Will the Israeli's step down from their "self-defense" posture? Unlikely.
Will the U.S. step into the breach? Given the long history of the U.S. favouring military action on so many fronts? Highly likely.
Will the rest of the world sit on its hands, and let the U.S. act alone? Once again, highly likely.
Will  the U.N., including the IAEA, find an acceptable solution to the potential for war over Iran's nuclear capability? Again, unlikely.
Is military action (whether nuclear itself or more likely conventional) the only way for this dilemma to be resolved? And, will such action truly "resolve" the problem of the hatred of the Iranian government for the state of Israel? NO!
What can the ordinary people of the world do in the face of such heinous prospects? Very little, it seems.
What will be the geopolitical, military, economic consequences of such an attack on Iran, or of Iran's potential attack on Israel?
What will be the account in history, if either, or both attacks actually occurs? Who knows?
This is not a precipice from which there is an open, visible path back...UGH!

Release from Denial of Shadow?

In the September 3, 2010 edition of The Globe and Mail, John Allemang asks a very serious question:
Can the liberal arts cure jihadists?
His penetrating, comprehensive article quotes from a Family Medicine curriculum designer at McMaster University who attempts to balance the technical aspects of medicine with the teaching of empathy. He also refers to the graduate doctor from McGill who, as a former contestant on Canadian Idol, is awaiting trial on terrorism charges in a Canadian jail. Mohammed Atta, the 9-11 leader, graduated from engineering in Germany but was unsuccessful in securing work in his field in his homeland of Egypt.
The idea of "putting oneself in the shoes of another character" while reading both literature and history is run-up-the-flap-pole in speculation that such intellectual activity might provoke and enhance empathy in its students. And certainly there is some greater liklihood that such readings could conceivably imprint the mind-and-heart of the student differently than the pursuit of technical expertise and skills, especially in a culture that has reduced the definition of success to the most hollow of models: the acquisition of material goods, possessions, and status of both acquired possessions and the "glow" that comes from that acquisition.
However, Allemang also points out how empty and conflicted and reductionistic that "dream" actually is, by its objectifiying of its pursuer.
While all the recent spate of pieces eulogizing the humanities and the liberal arts are commendable and worthy of our reflection, there is a depth of investigation, and self-awareness and self-disclosure that comes from the writings of the novels, poetry and dramas of every culture. It is the disclosure that we find in the new biographies of both Gzowski (a secret son) and Trudeau (a near-marriage to Streisand and a brutality as a husband combined with deep affection for his sons) that takes us beyond the extrinsic, the social and political, and into the psyche, or as Jung has it, the Shadow, that is truly revealing.
And to think that jihadists are the only creatures "with a Shadow" is like thinking "only males are violent".
It is, in a word, ridiculous!
And all societies, it would seem, have a deep-seated fear of the disclosure of our Shadow, whether that is individually or collectively. And the deeper the fear (and the accompanying denial) of the Shadow, the more power and influence it will have on the individual, the family, and community and the culture.
And any religion that espouses the denial of the Shadow, (as John Sanford so eloquently reminds us in Evil: The Shadow side of Reality) will find itself enmeshed, impaled and eventually destroyed by the consequences of that denial.
So let's listen to the spiritual leaders who "want their coffers and their pews filled" by only those clerics who can be considered "successful" in the eyes of those leaders and, as Sister Mary Jo Leddy writes in her spiritual autobiography, "Say to the Darkness, we beg to differ." But in order to be in a position to differ, we have to acknowledge the existence of and the specificity of that "darkness" of our Shadow.

• We are a culture that denies the gift of death.
• We are a culture that worships at the altar of the perfect public image.
• We are a culture that prides itself on its liberal democracy, as compared with the various nefarious forms of tyranny, oligarchy, plutocracy and oppression.
• We are a culture that permits its politicians, and its university research scholars to be funded by corporate interests whose cash carries the rope of mendacity and loyalty to the corporate "beliefs" and the corporate protection of that belief, that is the harvest of the sales that made those research dollars available.
• We are, as a result, the victims of the skewed nature of the publication of those many research projects, while we honour the protagonists of those many hours of dedication in their laboratories, the new monasteries.Yet the difference is that those early monasteries were virtually unfunded, in their relative purity, and their relative simplicity and their relative integrity. Such is not the case with either today's politicians or today's academic scholars, especially in the scientific fields.
• We are also a culture that places a very high premium on the appearance of material success, so high in fact that we have binged on purchasing to the degree that 75% of our economies depend on consumer purchasing, while our individual and collective debt far outstrips our incomes.
• We are also a culture that champions the advances of women in academia and in the professions and in the arts, while stategically placing their nude or semi-clad bodies on every advertisement for virtually every product we seek to sell, knowing intimately that such images will magnetize the eyes and thereby the dollars of all viewers.
• We are a culture that champions, in our words, the achievement of peace, while spending more on the design and purchase of miltiary weapons than all other cultures in the world, and all other cultures in history.
• We are, in short, a culture of accomplices to the denial of our own hypocrisy....and such denial can and will be seen and exposed by our enemies.

And we have to wonder if those enemies hates us for our profound self-deceit.
And we also have to wonder if those enemies are free from their own self-deceit.
We would have to start from the position that the answer to the last question is "No!" because there is no reason to suspect their superiority and their immunity to their own unconsciousness as compared with us.
And  any religion that seeks "world domination" is drunk on its own self-deceit of narcissism.
Only if and when all humans, in every culture and every religion in every corner of the globe can and do come to the place where such "mask" (Persona) is removed and we are all exposed by our own enantiodromia (when the mask and the ego are fused) will the potential of full equality and full vulnerability render us as ONE.
And then, perhaps, the pursuit of peace, and of justice and of fairness will be at least visible, if not immediately attainable. And that will likely mean that we have endured at least a century of radical shifts in our school curricula and our family "truth-telling" eclipsing our worship of our own iconic images our own form of narcissism.

Michelle: Happy Birthday, 2010

Sometimes nerves go necrotic
masking daily events
with pain shooting into
nerves remote from
the source
like a
metatasizing
tumour, reaching into
places without leaving
traces
of their chosen route,
while replacing
normal sensibilities
with a shortform of
narcissism
and a date to remember
is forgotten
leaving only
hugs of embarrassment and sadness and shame
encountering
her own hugs of receptivity, gratitude and
humility
in Trousdales,
canadasoldestgeneralstore.com
among the costume jewellery
and the soaps and kitchenware
and woolies
on an earlwindy Saturday
afternoon only
fifty-plus years after
a documented Lawrence Kansas
birth
of a daughter to
engineer-pianist parents
whose legacy of
detailed, meticulous and
fastidious care for her
and for their duties
joined
transit to trebled trills
and square roots with
tremolo's and pianissimo's
and Haydn Sonata's to
Colorado water rights
in leafy, fruit-growing
Arvada
where she supervised
younger brothers taking them
to movies
and tested her wings
in Winchell's
moving across the
divide to study
and later to parent
her own three
in coalmining Craig
and later
north of the 49th
in her jammed Cherokee
to KIS transcriptions
and bulletinboards of
inspired provocation
meticulously chosen and
edited
for others' growth
withorwithout
appreciation...
                     that's just her own
composition
rising with her pizzadough
in chords on a Yamaha clavicord
surrounded by books-and-pics
once again chosen, edited and
shared as seeds of
hope in her cosmic
garden
as she tends to her
flowers and family
her offspring and job
never neglecting her
grateful partner who nearly
missed September 4, 2010.

"Canary call from the coal mine!" on Health Care in Canada

From the S.E.I.U. website, August 31, 2010.
Third-Party Delivery of Medical Services touches Down in Saskatchewan

Medicare's hallowed ground, Saskatchewan, has started using a private surgical clinic for orthopedic day surgeries normally provided through the public system.
The province announced their intention back in March, but has now started booking surgeries through the Omni Surgical Centre in Saskatoon. The centre will provide knee and dental surgeries referred from the province. Omni currently provides orthopaedic surgery as well as lap-band weight loss, breast augmentation and other cosmetic procedures for a fee.
Saskatchewan's Health Minister was quick to point out that contracting out the medical services will not lead to greater privatization of care. "We're looking at all options: Expanding the public system as well as looking at third-party delivery," said Don McMorris, as reported in the Leader-Post.
This was all foreshadowed last October when B.C.'s chatty Health Minister Kevin Falcon offered fast tracking Saskatchewan patients for orthopedic surgeries in B.C. - what he termed "medical tourism". "If people have been waiting for 15 months, do they care if [their surgery] happens in Saskatoon, Regina or Surrey? I'm not sure they do," Saskatchewan's premier Brad Wall said at the time, according to the Canadian Press.
The uproar this caused - partly from Falcon's ill-considered choice of the phrase "medical tourism" to describe the deal (that he then turned around and offered to Americans) - led to Regina backpedalling on the idea, but clearly they were in the market.
No matter how independent the provinces feel they are in the provision of health care they are still obligated to uphold the Canada Health Act - ultimate the responsibility of the federal government, who also hold the purse strings. But what can Canadians expect with the free market favouring, social program adverse Harper government at the gates?
Not much when the federal Health Minister won't even address the recent Canadian Medical Association conference and the minister they do send doesn't mention Medicare even once, according to a recent Picard column in the Globe. Reminding us that Harper, while the head of the National Citizen's Coalition, once said, "It's past time the feds scrapped the Canada Health Act."
If Mr. Ignatieff needs some policy substance on which to hang the Liberal Party's electoral changes of success, here is one issue that simply will not go away. What position is the Liberal Party going to take on the future of the Canada Health Act, in the wake of rapidly rising health care costs, enhanced technological and pharmaceutical developments, a growing and aging population, and a very skittish electorate?
While there are certainly other pressing issues, Health Care is an icon of the country. It represents what Canadians consider "fair" and "just" and worthy of the people and their governments and while the S.E.I.U. speaks primarily as advocate for the jobs of its members in the health care sector (in this release), this is another "canary-call from the coal mine" of the behind-the-scenes goings on between and among the provinces, while the federal government turns aside, in order not to see, and thereby not to have to answer questions to which it may not have answers. Or, even more likely, it has those answers about their real intentions and  it knows Canadians do not want to hear them, especially if there is a election bird-song flowing down Wellington Street in Ottawa, past the Parliament Buildings.
Canadians will have some very troubling choices over the next few years, and we might wish to have a government in place that we trust to preserve the "best" our courty has achieved in this field, rather than one that openly seeks to scrap the promise of living in dignity, with access to full health care, even if that includes a reduced budget for "dramatic interventions" if and when one loses consciousness for what appears to be the last time. That is not a death panel, as the Teapartyers were and are wont to say; that is merely spreading the resources where they are most needed, and I, for one, will be happy to sign a document as part of my Living Will, to permit the doctors to proceed on a DNR (Do Not Resusitate!) basis. Will you? And will your next of kin be prepared to follow your instructions?
In the U.S., for example, some 30-40% of all health care costs are spent during the last three months of the lives of those preparing to die. While Canada is less "death-denying" than the U.S. generally, there is still a considered resistance to open discussion about the issues facing both the individual and his/her family when the end of life looms near.
Many Canadians have already signed "organ donor" cards, indicating our willingness to agree to the removal of healthy organs, should the appropriate situation present itself, where such a donation is feasible. The future of stem-cell research looks somewhat promising for the reduction, and perhaps elimination of certain diseases which now require costly care. However, we are all "in this" together and that means there will be sacrifices for each of us, provided we trust that the system is fair, balanced and administered by individuals whose compassion and ethics are, or would have been a match for Tommy Douglas's standards.
After all, it is his legacy that we are honouring in our attempt to preserve and protect his accomplishment.

A lone voice cheering on the S.E.I.U. in Ontario

By Rob Ferguson,  Toronto Star, August 31, 2010
It’s unfair that hospital and health executives keep juicy salaries while nurses and other staff get squeezed in a two-year public sector pay freeze, the Service Employees International Union says.
The union representing health workers took fresh aim at six-figure paycheques as a second phase of freeze talks continued. The freeze is part of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s plan to fight the $19.3-billion deficit.“If the province were serious about fairness, it would be asking the executives getting paid the most to do their part, not squeezing the nurses who are earning the least,” SEIU president Sharleen Stewart said Tuesday.
Everyone knows that unions, per se, have suffered nearly mortal wounds, some of them self-inflicted, in the last decade or two, in both Canada and the U.S. However, the words, thought and push-back from this specific union president, Sharleen Stewart, represents another attempt to draw a line in the sand against the gross unfairness that pervades the economy, as executives literally bully employees, their own workers, in an increasingly abusive war to cut costs on the backs of those same workers who have played a significant part in the company's, organization's effectiveness in the past.
Ordinary people, on both sides of the 49th parallel, are not stupid. And regardless of the level of formal education achieved by each individual, we all know injustice, unfairness and abuse, even sophisticated, structural and philosophical abuse when we see it, and feel it and feel powerless to make a difference in the public debate.
Just yesterday we learned that the Wall Street bullies, who have set the model for a kind of arrogance, intolerance and injustice, providing cover for their millions of "friends" (the have's), will update their bonuses for their executives this year, because they fear a pending termination of the Bush tax cuts for the very rich, thereby making it possible for those same executives to receive their bonuses without being subject to the higher taxes.
We have become slaves to the cabal, both in government and in the private sector who provide the funds for the election of their political friends, and in many ways we are watching an inevitable, and possibly unstoppable slide into the elimination of the middle class in both countries.
And one little skirmish, like the one waged by the SEIU in Ontario, in the health care sector, an arena in which all Ontarians have access and a demonstrable need for quality services, is and could become a larger line in the sand, giving a warning shot to those politicians in bed with Wall Street, corporate power and the laws, regulations and social attitudes that come with that "affiliation," that we have had enough of your one-sided selfishness, your arrogance and your sublime self-righteousness.
As Dr. David Suzuki once put it many years ago, in an argument for sustainable development, "The economy must work for us, and not the other way round." And that means there will have to be a lot of basic changes to the way we conduct our public debate, shape our public policy, and set the guidelines for our citizens, if all citizens are to be included, as "of fair value."
And only such a society where "fair value" is a fact, and not a phony cover-up, can and will be able to be termed "just."