Boomers taking their own lives at spiking rates....

Baby boomers, on the other hand, have struggled more with existential questions of purpose and meaning. Growing up in a post-Freudian society, they were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. (from "Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Why?" by Tara Bahrampour The Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 4, 2013, excerpted below)
We learned a new vocabulary, learned a new perception about how to take responsibility for our own meaning and purpose. In an oral examination in a graduate program in education, I was asked to define the existential moment: that moment in which an individual becomes consciously aware of his/her own meaninglessness...and thereby must take responsibility for seeking and finding that meaning and purpose.
Responsibility for meaning included, at least in my case, responsibility for any degree of authenticity, integrity, a searching through reflection for whatever might be hidden behind the appearances in the fullness of the reality underneath... and that all was enabled and enhanced through the exercise of both reading and writing. Did the fact that I had a golden opportunity for such exploration each day of the week in an English classroom of adolescents between 16 and 19? Of course!
Did the fact that I also had an opportunity to conduct face-to-face interviews with local, provincial and national political leaders as a free-lance journalist provide additional insight into the motives and the various perceptions of those thought leaders?  Of course.
Did the fact that after twenty-plus years of teaching and coaching, I was afforded the opportunity to enrol in a seminary to prepare for the role of a cleric offer additional interactions, reflections, readings, papers and internships provide additional insights into both my own inner reality and glimpses of the emotional lives of many others, in real time? Of course.
Did the opportunity to work in both urban and rural environments in both Canada and the United States, as an intern, a counselling student, and as a neophyte cleric provide additional glimpses into how the institutional church operates in both countries? Of course.
And did the time line that links these experiences also link a developing self-awareness plus a self-confidence that was almost totally missing when the journey began, and parallels a growing sense of outrage both at my early compliance and conformity with all the many dumb impositions of authority by supervisors, bosses, even the occasional professor and also at the many absurdities and incongruities that parade before our eyes, ears, noses and consciousness daily? Or course.

Yamaha V-Star-950

That is part of the reason that within the last twelve months, I have taken up a new 'sport' of motorcycling, in which I am required to focus on the situation in which I am riding with an intensity that seemed never before to be required or accepted or expected. Every line in the pavement, every pothole, every wandering squirrel, chipmunk and swooping hawk, as well as every dusting of dirt from the tires of farmers' tractors that covers the asphalt....these are all part of the ride, not to mention every gust of wind, every drop of rain and every other vehicle, and the driving habits of every other driver....it is a full-time, fully magnetizing experience in which one loses all consciousness of whatever it was that bent the mind or the heart prior to turning the engine on....and I am so grateful for this new opportunity, that my wife and I can explore the rural regions of our province and others, when we are ready...in a manner foreign to our "cabin-ed" travel of previous years.
Writing, reading, interacting with others about things that neither of us might have considered previously...and riding...these are some of the ways I have found to occupy my time, in the hope that I might retain some connection with those activities to which I have grown familiar and comfortable, even though the experiences themselves need not be without challenge or some discomfort.
Each of us has our own road and our own story about entering the seventh decade of life on this planet....that is a minuscule part of mine...in the hope that others will take the many opportunities that do not cost an arm and a leg and continue to live a robust, vital and engaging life making those contributions where invited and offering those insights where opportunities emerge....
As others have said so often, "This getting old is not for the faint-of-heart!"

Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Why?

The highest rates were among white and Native American and Alaskan men. In recent years, deaths by suicide has surpassed deaths by motor vehicle crashes.

By Tara Bahrampour The Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 4, 2013

To those growing up in the 1950s and '60s, America seemed to promise a limitless array of possibilities. The Great Depression and World War II were over; medical innovations such as the polio vaccine and antibiotics appeared to wipe out disease and disability; the birth-control pill sparked a sexual revolution. The economy was thriving, and as they came of age, boomers embraced new ways of living — as civil rights activists, as hippies, as feminists, as war protesters.

"There was a sense of rebelliousness, of 'I don't want to live the way my parents did or their parents did,' " said Patrick Arbore, director and founder of the Center for Elderly Suicide Prevention at San Francisco's Institute on Aging. "There was a lot of movement to different parts of the country. With that came a lot of freedom, but there also came a loss of connections. It was not uncommon to see people married three or four times."
How did a generation that started out with so much going for it end up so despondent in midlife? It could be that those very advantages made it harder to cope with setbacks, said Barry Jacobs, director of behavioral sciences at the Crozer-Keystone Family Medicine Residency Program in Pennsylvania.
"There was an illusion of choice — where people thought they'd be able to re-create themselves again and again," he said. "These people feel a greater sense of disappointment because their expectations of leading glorious lives didn't come to fruition."
Instead, compared with their parents' generation, boomers have higher rates of obesity, prescription and illicit drug abuse, alcoholism, divorce, depression and mental disorders. As they age, many add to that list chronic illness, disabilities and the strains of caring for their parents and for adult children who still depend on them financially.....

Baby boomers, on the other hand, have struggled more with existential questions of purpose and meaning. Growing up in a post-Freudian society, they were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. But that did not necessarily translate into an increased ability to cope with difficult emotions — especially among men.
Women tend to be better connected socially and share their feelings more freely — protective factors when looking at their risk for suicide. And African-Americans and Hispanics tend to have lower rates of suicide than whites, possibly because of stronger community connections, or because of different expectations.
Combine high expectations with a faltering economy, and the risk goes up.
"We know that what men want to do is work — that's a very strong ethic for them," Arbore said. "When their jobs are being threatened, they see themselves as still needing to be in that role; they feel ashamed when they're not able to find another job, or when their home is being foreclosed on. . . . The idea that so many of us in this country have been brought up with — that you work hard, you get your house, you get your American dream, everything is rosy — it hasn't worked out. A lot of these boomers aren't going to earn as much money as their parents did. They aren't going to be as secure as their parents were. And that's quite troubling for the boomers."

(2) Time to abolish military and quasi-military organizational structures

To argue for their elimination, is not to argue for anarchy.
It is rather to propose a system of decision-making that includes all people in the organization, on all issues, for all departments all of the time. The proposal would not only lop the CEO head off the top, along with the mega-bucks that CEO's have come to grab, but it  would also start with a different premise: one that begins with the notion that all people, given the full amount of information available and the trust that they can make sense out of that information, including both the organization's history and culture as well as the precedents that have preceded the current decision-making points. It assumes that there are very few "guru's" and that organizations dependent on the kind of CEO that Steve Jobs has come to represent are extremely rare, and that their unique mind set are more appropriate for research laboratories, and certainly not for managing organizations.
With the almost complete demise of the labour movement, at least in North America, it is time to rein in the galloping "eliteism" that is threatening to ruin, those organizations that are built on the premise that the "chief" knows best, whether that 'chief' is a man or a woman, thereby literally and metaphorically infantilizing all the underlings to serfs, in the feudal model. Furthermore, the workers have little if any input into the company's direction, given that those large decisions are in the hands of another elite, the investors, whose only claim to fame and power is the possession of their accumulated wealth.
We have to separate wealth from brains, from power and return the power to the ordinary workers, whose expertise has never been more acute, more fully developed and more underdeployed.
Not only do we have an unemployment crisis that is threatening to twist the leading national economies as well as the global economy into another virulent serfdom, or worse, as the rates of poverty, hunger, disease and violence continue to climb exponentially, we also have an underemployment crisis that threatens to, if it has not already completed this mission, rendering workers into robotic 'tools' useful so long as they are producing a profit that is measureable, and disposable like the used tissue in the waste can, following a single sneeze.
We are in danger of letting the elites in every organization, and in every country's government and in every country's civil service and military turn the world into their plaything, leaving the rest of us both gagged and cut off from the very wealth that our efforts are generating.
Governments no longer speak and act for their constituents; corporations no longer, in general, care about the future of the planet and the politicians responsible for making laws that would protect just the environment, to take only one example, are so deeply 'in the pockets' of those same corporations who spend billions lobbying against the very regulations and laws that would make them accountable for their 'carbon footprint' and their careless about both their workers and their workers' planet.
Decision-making, left to an elite individual, or a group of people who consider themselves "superior" is the medicine that has poisoned the very system we now have to take back. And we have to take it back in every corner of our respective cultures.
Replacing 'executive power' with worker power is nothing less than a political revolution; it need not be a violent revolution, so long as those in power do not physically, legally or fiscally resist. And that is a very tall expectation, perhaps in too many cases, a pipe dream.
Nevertheless, if schools can and do take the time and the cost to train their students to serve as peer tribunals in the case of student discipline, as a workable alternative to suspensions and expulsions, then surely our organizations can begin to train and to deploy all levels of workers in all levels of decision-making. The initial costs may be somewhat troubling; however, the long-term impact of such approaches as 'restorative justice' throughout our daily lives far outweighs the initial costs.
Turning our best and brightest people into "truly our best asset" means that those best and brightest people are not only permitted to taste power, anecdotally and incidentally, but on a regular basis. They have to be put in positions where they share responsibility for decisions, in decision-making circles, akin to juries of the common people, with others from different departments, on a regular basis. The learning organization, if we can borrow a phrase from Peter Senge et al, must lead the way in developing cultures of inquiry, of information sharing rather than hoarding, of circles of decision-making, submitted for sober reflection to other circles of decision-making, and a system of concensus has to guide the organization's eventual moves, not some hidden arguments in either the executive suites or the investors annual meetings. All workers have to become investors, as part of their remuneration, and workers everywhere have to resist the latest 'fantasy' from the Harvard Busines Review, dubbed "tours of duty" in which the authors propose that workers are hired for a specific project, with detailed objectives to meet, but with no commitment on the part of the corporation beyond the termination of tht project. The time frame could extend from two, or three or perhaps four years, after which both worker and corporation would be free of any obligation to each other, and depending on the 'track record' of the worker, an option to return for another project might be offered.
The theory of the proposal is that the best workers are really entrepreneurs, ambitious, eager to perform and eager to seek and to find the best opportunities. The writers of the proposal have emerged from their caves in silicone valley, where people have been reduced to digits, dancing on the screens of other digits, for so long as there company is afloat. The issues of benefits, including health and pensions, in their words, as guests on NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, have not been reckoned with as yet.
And when confronted with the concept of two-tiers of workers, they agree that not all workers are really equal, that some perform more effectively than others already, that companies can no longer afford to make long-term commitments, given the volatility in the global market place.
However, it is precisely at the time when global volatility is so volcanic, erupting and subsiding with tsunamis of human greed, human abuse of power, human irresponsibility and human unsouciance, that excludes the pawns from participating in the chess game that is owned by the rich, that stability and mutual commitment are most in demand. Quality work, with quality incentives, including sharing of the power of decision-making within each organization, the dissemination of all relevant information for the purpose of those specific decisions, is not only more feasible but it is more sustainable premised on the notion of inclusion rather than the concept of exclusion.
Native peoples have been developing and deploying the 'circle' for decision-making for centuries; their experience and their willingness to share their wisdom are a community resource everywhere from whom the business community, including the political community, can learn many valuable lessons.
Not only do Native Peoples have respect for each other, they also have an abiding reverence for the planet, something that the rest of us have to learn, if we are to survive the next several decades.
Our capacity to seek and to adopt new structures, based on different foundational premises, starting with inclusion and power-sharing would go a long way towards reinventing our attitudes to each other and to our attitudes to our land, water, air and the growth and development of active, engaged, fully participating workers, citizens, learners and teachers.
We have to put the human being back into the centrality of our social planning, our governments' perspectives, our corporations strategic plans, our schools, colleges and universities, and replace the pursuit of dollars, and all the associated costs of such a reductionism, with that human focus, if we are to regain the power over our very institutional life, including our relationships with those institutions.
This is a very small "boat" beset by very stormy winds on seas that are increasingly contaminated, even to the point of the decimation of hundreds of species...and unless and until we are all pulling on the oars, with a more inclusive, universal and compassionate and mutually accepted goal of helping to do our part to make this planet a more 'user-friendly' place, including our work places, our community organizations, our universities and colleges, and our dying religious places and opportunities of worship, our tiny buffeted skiff is going to run aground, dumping all of us into an unforgiving watery tomb.....and that kind of rhetoric is no longer apocalyptic!

(1)Time to abolish the military and quasi-military organizational structure in public and private organizations

This is going to ruffle some feathers, especially among the power elite in various organizations, in both public and private sectors. We are all extremely conscious of the obsolescence that is built into too many of the products we all buy. It is a marketing, and a business model calculated to generate more sales when the product wears out, breaks, falls apart or merely loses "fashion".
What we are not generally as conscious of is the obsolescence of the kind of organizational structure that permeates our western culture, that of the hierarchy, the military, quasi-military, pseudo-military, and hybrid-military organizational structure.
It is time to bury all the evidence of its long and checkered history in the museums that are dedicated to the relics of western culture. And if that means we have to create more museums for the purpose, then so be it.
Consolidating power in a single person, or a small group of people, may be highly efficient in terms of simplifying the decisions that must be made, in order to facilitate the operation of the organization. However, we have learned too much about human nature, about the capacity to contribute when offered the opportunity, about the capacity to learn and to observe in whatever unique manner we each bring to the situation, and about the failures of the "military" model to continue to subscribe to its continuing deployment.
The local mechanic, operating his/her own shop in a small village, for example, is almost invariably endowed with a kind of insight missing from most organizations, given their addiction to the hiring of the slotted "experts" whose titles appear on the organizational chart. We have thrown this baby of common sense out with the bathwater of the generalist whose capacity to express both innovative and edgy or risky recommendations in practically all organizational situations. And, in so doing, we have lost the capacity for trust, and the capacity for most organizations to communicate with their various constituencies.
A former White House and Hillary Clinton speech-writer, Jon Lovitt, in addressing the graduates of Pitzer College in Claremont CA, (from NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook website, June 3, 2013) touched on one aspect of this issue of obsolete organizations when he urged graduates to speak up even if and when they were wrong, so that they would more likely grow a deeper discernment for judging when to ignore their inexperience whether they were 'right' or 'wrong' in their view of the situation.His counsel was so refreshing as to be verging on the absurd in a politically correct straight-jacketed culture.
It is the military organizational structure that demands a level of obedience, verging also on the absurd, in the light of the dominance of the "organization's command structure" over the personnel who serve in that structure. Those in power are right, absolutely, always, in all circumstances, and their power and authority is never to be questioned by those "underlings" who serve under them. That is a political, sociological, cognitive and common sense disconnect that renders both those in power out of touch with both a wider reality and the full reality of those who serve under them, and those "under" to a form of infantilism. Following orders, as is the expected response for all serving in such organizations (and most have adopted this model to a greater or lesser degree) when such orders conflict with the individual's conscience, belief system, larger knowledge of the context in which those orders are being disseminated and even when to do so will inflict irreparable harm on innocents, is about as absurd as the kind of cover-up that ensues when some inevitable "casualty" of stupidity, ignorance, lack of discipline or attentiveness on the part of the person(s) in charge. The organization simply must never be seen to be "wrong" or to have made a mistake, or to have broken some wider and more cogent set of rules under which the whole of society operates, and those in power will and do go to great lengths to white-wash, to cover up, to throw under the bus, or under the carpet anyone or any report that indicates the organization has failed to accept what common sense would indicate is its responsibility.
A cogent example of such a situation (documented in another place in these 'pages') is found in  Dr. Scott Peck's search through the Pentagon for the individual or group of individuals who were responsible for the Mi Lai massacre. He recounts, in his book, People of the Lie, that he could and did find no one, and no group, who was responsible, and yet we all know, as did Peck, that someone had to issue the order to conduct that debacle.
Ford Motor Company, just today, issued a recall on several thousand vehicles, indicating that a malfunction could result in fire in the vehicle, although reports indicate that "no fires have been reported". It is called "damage control" if and when a situation emerges in a military or quasi-military organization and the "damage control experts" are rushed into the situation to 'manage the message'. After all millions of Ford owners, investors, bankers and employees are counting on this recall not to devastate the company's reputation. There were likely dozens or more reports from various sources indicating that trouble was emerging from these vehicles months or even years before today when Ford could no longer "contain" the story, without the recall.
Let's go a little further in unpacking this Ford story. In a military operation, there are shop foremen and women, inspectors and line workers, designers and engineers all of them performing a designated task, and all of them "dedicated to quality as job #1" as the Ford sell line used to say. However, as each of these segments of the car's development are discreet, separate from each other, except when the whole comes out the finishing end of the assembly line, there is little likelihood that the whole car's design, construction, part composition, positional relationship to other components, sequencing of the assembly so as to provide opportunity to examine in detail the potential 'hot spots' that might emerge, that previously have not been in the files. There is also little likelihood that any single person, or department is or will be held responsible for whatever the glitches are that have led to this most recent recall. In short, while the public face of the company is in damage control, the plants in which the vehicles were designed and assembled, continue much as before, with the possible exception that some tweeking will result in one or more segments of the assembly.
Of course, there will likely be a "Suggestion Box" of some level of significance in the plant, and there will also likely be an incentivized program to generate enhancements, and some workers may have actually participated. However, it is also highly likely that such upward communication, except on working conditions, is capped for many reasons, most of them having to do with efficiency, productivity cost-benefit analyses, expert opinions sought and required from those with both training and a history with the company and the line of authority which dictates where responsibility and authority intersect, "where the buck stops" in other words.
The problem is that "where the buck stops" is merely another of those top-down decisions that flow from the executive suite, linked to the salary grid, and the lines of authority/responsibility that will hopefully parallel each other, and, depending on the political relationship of each executive to the power structure, that "buck-stops-here" sign moves to accommodate the hidden political alliances.
So,within the military structure, there are really at least two "organizations, the formal and the informal, and whoever chooses to work within must become intimately acquainted with both.
Oh, I hear the howls of protest, "How can you even contemplate an industrial, or even an informational organization that is not operating as a military hierarchy? Someone has to be "in charge"....
To which I say, it is not adequate any longer for a single person to assume such authority and responsibility given the complexity and the pace and the multiple factors in the calculus of any organization, including the largest and the medium and even the smaller organizations. Organizations operating in the military-model, with a top commander, are guaranteed to self-sabotage, because there is too little oxygen and blood, that is honest and complete information, flowing into a single office, board room, or executive committee. The potential obstructions to the legitimate, necessary and full flow of both formal and informal information into a single "hub" are legion, and are never really fully unblocked, providing a full disclosure of the detailed contextual realities from which the various decisions of each department and the organization as a whole emerge.
Individual motives of all those who wear the company logo, as employees, overlaid with the expectations of supervisors, peers, competing individuals and departments,  the culture within that has  set guidelines for what is appropriate to talk about and what not to mention for both the formal and the informal operation of the organization, not to mention the latest curves in organizational performance...these all play a role in shaping the quantitative and the qualitative flow of  internal 'big data' on which decisions have to be based. Cutting through that maze, without a literal machete as if slogging through a jungle, is impossible and that makes whatever does flow 'to the top' suspect.
Ironically, every person in the culture, both those working inside the organization and those not employed by it, is (at least metaphorically) hooked to a communication device that makes it possible for everyone to know what a specific group of people thinks about a particular issue.
That technology, at least conceptually, makes it possible for an organization to mine the thoughts, observations, visions, fears and 'danger signs' from every device throughout the organization. And such mining exercise is not only available through formal surveys, like political plebiscites, but also through conversations across all department and organizational boxes, as an integral part of the organization's modus operandi.
Just a few moments ago, we received a phone message inviting us to attend a 'town hall' conducted by a non-profit, with the opportunity for a Q & A to specific leadership...on a national, as well as a provincial basis. Such opportunities have been available for some time, but their costs have dropped and the ease with which they are accomplished has risen significantly.
I recall, from another life-time, being asked to 'vote' on the question of whether or not to name a senior student to an end-of-year secondary school committee in order to make the student's input available to planners for the following school year. The vote had to be held at least six times, before a majority of the 75+ faculty finally agreed. Tokenism, then, can and must be replaced now by authentic listening to all constituents in all organizations, as an expectation and a right of inclusion.
In the private sector, workers have almost completely lost their worker protections, including their collective bargaining rights, as corporations race to the bottom of wages and employee benefits, even to moving millions of jobs to the third world, where neither wages nor benefits are negotiated or monitored and where working conditions are usually deplorable. And yet, it is possible, given the kinds of communication technology that is available, for those third world workers to "report" their abuses to legitimate information collection and dissemination agencies, in the locations of the head offices of those companies, in order to bring to light the abuses under which too many have to work.
The International Labour Organization could initiate a project to enlist the names of all workers, the conditions of their work, including their health benefits, and provide opportunities for those workers to submit their real-time stories, without fear of firing, or other forms of punishment.
Inside major organizations, too, the ILO could provide an information line, documenting working conditions, benefits, etc. of workers in all sectors, and then make that information available to the media where both head offices and major groups of shareholders reside, in order to bring public attention to the plight of those workers.
Further, each organization, following a major shift in leadership training on all continents, in all graduate schools producing future organizational leaders, could being to adopt an approach that would ensure the regular and incentivized opportunity for all workers to contribute to the most wide-ranging and most micro-details of the organization's goals and objectives.
It is time for the inclusion of all, in the organizations that wish to generate profit or public service, in order that their methods of operation and their internal formal and informal communications reflect a more complex, and less plastic and protective veneer of mascara and perfection...in the pursuit of both healthy workers and healthy workplaces.

Ignatius: China-U.S. meeting truly "historic"

U.S. officials say they are looking for a strategic discussion rather than a “deliverable.” (from "Xi Jingping and Barack Obama: A summit worthy of the name" by David Ignatius, Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 3, 2013, excerpted below)

Relationships, at least the healthy mutually supportive and beneficial ones, take time, diligence and persistence. "Deliverables" are required by those who see everything in short-term transactional terms..."you scratch my back and I'll scratch your's".
Sovereignty over islands in dispute with Japan is not an issue in which the U.S. wishes to become involved, although the treaty with Japan could force their hand.
Athorough discussion on macroeconomics, however, is something both countries have a huge vested interest in conducting, and perhaps even drawing some pencil outlines for futher consideration. However, with China acquiring resource industries in the west, including pork in the U.S. and natural gas in Canada, as well as 8% of the U.S. Treasury Bills, there is a growing imbalance yielding to China in global economic power. The U.S. has squandered too many dollars and far too many lives in military conflict over the last decade-plus, with very little to show for their expenditures putting Mr. Obama in a severely secondary position when it comes to macroeconomics, notwithstanding the veneer of recovery that includes a galloping stock market and rising housing prices, but still lacks the kind of employment recovery that is sustainable.
However, it is on the cyber-war-front that the U.S. has both demands and a solid position of strength from which to negotiate...it has been China that has committed the hacking-bullying of military and corporate "systems" in their obsession with winning the "race to the top" of world supremacy against the U.S. And it is the American military superiority that has for too long been the chief jewel in the crown of U.S. hegemony around the world. Now that the Chinese have infiltrated and even brazenly stolen many of the U.S. secrets systems, Obama has no option but to secure a commitment from China to "cease and desist" on this front.
With many more people, a controlled central government, a burgeoning industrial capacity, an expanded interest in trading with the rest of the world, China is, without doubt, the emerging country on the world's stage, seeking parity with or even eventually dominance over the U.S.....and that is where Obama has to be most cautious. He cannot return to Washington from this conference empty-handed even though "deliverables" are not the primary purpose of the meeting.
The U.S. media, fixated on and addicted to both conflict and immediate "deliverables" will put considerable pressure on the administration to "bring home the bacon" from this conference, and that pressure could be enough to sabotage the entire meeting, given the need for some immediate results in what is a multi-century-long relationship, both past and future.
There are two different time-frames: the U.S. in nano-seconds, for deliverables and the Chinese, in centuries for long-term supremacy....guess who is more worthy of a successful bet?


Xi Jingping and Barack Obama: A summit worthy of the name


The next week will test whether Chinese President Xi Jinping intends to play a more engaged role with America and the world.

By David Ignatius, Washington Post, in Toronto Star, June 3, 2013 ....
The Chinese also want a partnership in managing the global economy. Vice-Premier Wang Yang told visiting U.S. national security adviser Thomas Donilon that the two nations should “strengthen macroeconomic policy co-ordination, and jointly promote world economic recovery and growth.”

Beijing has come a long way from its skepticism during the depth of the Great Recession, when American capitalism seemed like the god that had failed. In a speech at the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, then-prime minister Wen Jiabao chided “inappropriate macroeconomic policies” and greedy banks, and called the American model “unsustainable.” The Chinese have changed their tune, thanks to solid economic measures by the Obama administration. Now they want even more free-market policies, on the American model.
The toughest nut will be cyber issues. Here, Chinese behaviour has been egregious, stealing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. technology over the last decade, including many of the most secret U.S. weapons systems. Donilon said in March that the U.S. wants three things: a Chinese recognition that this is a real and urgent problem; a Chinese commitment to investigate; and agreement to co-operate on a framework for cyber protection. That will be the agenda at Sunnylands, but U.S. officials say they are looking for a strategic discussion rather than a “deliverable.”
The U.S.-China relationship is the biggest play on the board of international relations. This is an area where Donilon’s hyper-organized approach, which sometimes annoys his colleagues, has paid dividends. The U.S. has been building the groundwork for a new relationship with Xi for more than a year, and Donilon rightly says it could be Obama’s “signature achievement.”
U.S. officials stress in every speech about China the paramount need for military-to-military dialogue. Perhaps history would have been different if Spartan and Athenian commanders had been friendly, though I’m not sure. But given the stakes, this week’s summit meeting between Obama and Xi actually deserves the term “historic.”
David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist. davidignatius@washpost.com

Access to water MUST be a PUBLIC RIGHT....not if Nestle gets its way

From SumOfUs, a world-wide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy, June 2, 2013

Nestlé's Chairman and former CEO once infamously declared that "access to water should not be a public right." And now his company is putting into practice its belief that every resource should be commodified and sold off. Nestlé is sucking up water from a Canadian watershed during drought conditions -- to bottle and sell it off.


Nestlé has won a permit to drain an Ontario aquifer whenever it likes. Meanwhile, the surrounding communities which rely on the aquifer have by-laws to restrict their access to their own water during dry conditions in the summer. This just isn’t right, and Maude Barlow, the Council of Canadians, and Ecojustice are fighting back against Nestlé and the Ontario government office that handed out its permit. It shouldn’t take a legal proceeding to force Nestlé to do the right thing. Let’s tell Nestlé that a community’s access to its own water supply is more important than any company's profits.

Tell Nestlé: Stop bottling Ontario’s water source during drought conditions.

Currently, Nestlé has a permit through 2017 to take about 1.1 million litres of water per day from Hillsburgh, Ontario for its bottling operations in nearby Aberfoyle -- even during drought conditions while there are by-laws on water use for households. A number of groups are fighting back. “Ontario must prioritize communities’ right to water above a private company’s thirst for profit,” says Maude Barlow, National Chairperson for the Council of Canadians.

Nestlé has been in the news a lot lately for attempting to profit from our natural resources. Last month, over 220,000 SumOfUs.org supporters signed our petition against Nestlé's greedy effort to patent the fennel flower, a cure-all medicinal remedy for millions of people in impoverished communities across the Middle East and Asia. Several days after we sent out our petition, a video emerged showing Nestlé’s Chairman claiming that the idea that water is a human right comes from “extremist” NGOs and that water should have a market value. Nestlé has dealt with NGOs and lost before -- the years-long boycott over Nestlé's dirty tactics to get mothers to stop breastfeeding and use baby formula -- which resulted in thousands of infant deaths from water-born illnesses -- was a historic success in corporate campaigning.

Nestlé’s appetite to commodify water and natural remedies is a recurring strategy by a corporation with a pattern of seeking to privatize and profit from traditional knowledge and our natural resources. By speaking out against the draining of our watersheds, you will be taking a stand against Nestlé’s strategy to profit off everything in nature.

Demand that Nestlé stop commodifying everything in nature. Stop draining Ontario's watershed to bottle water.

More information:

Council of Canadians raises climate change and drought concerns in Nestlé case. Council of Canadians, Apr. 23rd, 2013

The Privatization of Water: Nestlé Denies that Water is a Fundamental Human Right. Global Research, Apr. 20th, 2013

The corporate church needs a radical reformation in how it grows disciples

There is something antithetical to the christian church's pursuit of dollars and seats in the pews, as if it were another profit-driven corporation, given the individual human need for deep, safe and sustainable relationships with God and others, beyond those inside the nuclear family. Such relationships are more likely if and when the circle of believers exposes itself to the fears inside the group, the anxieties inside the group's members, the hopes, dreams and even the illnesses within the circle. They are not necessarily enhanced through the triumphal criterion of being "bigger" or "richer" or of a "higher status" in the 'establishment' of a specific urban centre. In fact, it can be argued, (and is being argued here!) that the churches with the largest membership lists are conducting something akin to "paint-by-number" theology, as in formal greetings, formal liturgies including formal readings, singing and fund-raising, formal homilies, formal eucharists, and formal farewells. God, it would seem, to an outside observer, must really appreciate formality! What kind of God most appreciates such formality? Is it a God who is unhappy perhaps even displeased with human casualness, human relaxation, human meditation, human doubting and questioning? And who is there to question such an approach, given the stability and the durability of such a process, that to us seems utterly superficial, both in attempting to establish authentic relationships with God and with each other. Certainly, such formality provides a kind of social security for any who might venture inside the sanctuary from the outside, looking for a road map for how to "behave" while entering something called the 'worship of God'. More importantly, such formality also provides security from exposure of the frail and anxious and shy and withdrawn and the reticent who might be in those pews.
Yet, does formality, as in the formality of a manuscript of a concerto, or an oratorio, provide a culture in which God's hand, eye, touch and even awesomeness can be better appreciated than in an informal setting like a seminar, for example, or a discussion group, or a film followed by a guided discernment of the issues?
The Puritans are renowned for their pursuit of moral purity, through hard work, self-denial, self-discipline and the rejection of anything that smacks of idolatry. The cliche "cracker-barrel" aphorism that evil is more likely among 'idle hands'... elevating industriousness to a holy grail, is also a gift from the Puritans. In North America, there is a very high dependency on the teachings of the Puritans, as if they had an "insight" into the mind, heart and soul of God, and thereby bequeath such insight to those in the pews.
So if we combine both the pursuit of numbers with the industriousness of the Puritans, in the effort to evangelize, to develop new converts, we see a religious institution that is driven by the "sales" component of the largest corporations. In fact, one silly woman once was heard to comment, to a group of christian church members, quoting Og Mandino's pablum, "Jesus was the world's best salesman!"...
as if Jesus was then, or could today, be reduced to the  best salesman of human history. The how of what a church does is as important, if not more important than, what a church body believes, and confesses in its life together.
And the how of the many faces of the twenty-first century christian church has to include too many churches that depend on some extrinsic model of "growth", dependent on the flow of bodies and dollars through the doors to the sanctuary. Marketing, the pursuit of "sales" quotas, the strategizing around how to "keep the ship afloat" in a world gone secular in the extreme....these are the rallying cries that are ringing across North American christianity, as if the corporate model is the one most promising to keep the church alive, while all signs point to its eventually demise. One clergy even ventured to predict that in five years one of the most 'established' christian churches would disappear from the urban Canadian landscape.
Time for a modest wake-up call?
Well, it is not difficult to see the dilemma of the attempt to recruit people in, while the sword of bankruptcy hangs over the threshold. And much of that sword is of the church's own making....not merely the rising costs of heat, building maintenance, pensions and salaries, choir gowns and music, youth outreach programs and their staffing....these are all what might be called somewhat fixed costs.
Certainly, clergy are not unionizing for more money, nor are choir members or their organists, nor are youth leaders nor are church educators. In fact, the reverse is true: no organization has depended on the generosity of its professional work force, to its own detriment, more than the christian church, on both sides of the 49th parallel. If accountants were to calculate the per diem, or per hour rate of pay for the average clergy, the figures would literally astound most observers, analysts and even laity leaders.
However, it is not in the corporate "look-and-act-alike-ness" of the church to the corporation that the recommendations can or will be found.
It is conversely in the opposite model: the small home-based, struggling and searching, reading and praying and reflecting groups in which deep and mysterious and deeply personal truths of all kinds, from both genders, and all generations, are shared in the assured safety and security of both confidentiality and complete respect from one to another, including all within the circle...that we are more likely to find a spectre of spiritual support, growth and experimentation not either available or desired in the larger, impersonal, mega-churches. And, in order for such a culture to take root, there has to be a radical shift among all those who aspire to church leadership, to church leadership education, to church leadership development and to church membership education and development.
The christian church has to shift its focus from the study of its sociology and its accounting crises, to the process of growing disciples of that same Jesus who walked the narrow paths of non-conformity among the outcasts in Nazareth, Bethlehem and elsewhere. Growing disciples takes considerable time, even more attention than the average fruit and vegetable, certainly an intimate knowledge and awareness and insight into the human potential for living a life dedicated to the unfettered, unobstructed, apolitical, and certainly non-corporate ways of both being and becoming a follower of Jesus Christ Resurrected.
And such a growth and development process is completely at odds with the process of filling a role in a corporate structure that is and has for too long, sacrificed its purpose and its meaning to the corporate model.
Believers, as Luther reminded us, are not believers who believe what the church teaches them to believe. Believers come to their beliefs through a searching, questioning and committed relationship to an alignment with what they perceive and consider to be God's will for their lives. That process would have to include close and mutual relationships with others, a small number, who have voluntarily, openly and unreservedly committed to their own spiritual growth to follow a similar path, to serve as both guide and critic of each other, to support and affirm both the questions and the however tentative answers that might emerge from short and long periods of silent meditation, small conversations, readings, prayers, writings and even other forms of personal discipline that enhance the fullest development of each individual.
These processes, for the most part, do not cost a lot of money; they do, however, cost a great deal in terms of commitment, sacrifice, tenacity and perseverance, and risk, especially of being different.
They do not necessarily mean a monastery, although there are clearly things from the monastic life that would be well incorporated into the process. They also do not mean turning each group of believers into a mini-seminary, although there is clearly a place for some of the more solid and contemporary research findings from all academic disciplines that belong in such a vision of human spiritual development.
There is, and could be no place for a spiritual guru, given the unique and diverse needs, attitudes and talents among the members of the spiritual circle, although there would clearly be times when, by concensus, a decision to seek input and guidance from a wise disciple would serve both the individuals and the circle's growth to another level.
There is and could be no place for mere gossip, something that plagues every christian church denomination and parish, and it would require a universal commitment from all members in the circle to eradicate it from the culture of the group.
There is and could be no place for a theology of "triumphal" growth in the sense of acquiring new members, and here the Jewish model, of resisting more than recruiting new members, would be more appropriate.
A neophyte cleric, called to attend a meeting with a bishop and his executive assistant, by the EA, "because I have been trying to get the bishop to listen for nine years without success, and thought perhaps you might be able to get through," found the bishop, in the meeting, asking him "Why did you call this meeting, demanding the time of the bishop and his assistant?" realized that he had been 'set-up' for the political purposes of the assistant, and decided to turn the meeting around, when he was later asked by the bishop,"What do you want from us?"
His reply went something like this: I would respectfully like a relationship with the larger church, the diocese and the bishop....
As I beaver away in the little mission to which  I have been assigned, I find myself in a small row-boat, with a few people in the boat, each with a different 'rowing' instrument, paddling each in their own respective and undirected and random way, and the boat merely turns round and round....and when  I look up at the bigger picture in the regional church, both the diocese and the national church, I see replications of a similar picture...everyone paddling with a different 'oar' in a different time and direction and I wonder why I am unable to make headway in attempting to get the boat to benefit from the combined paddling of all inside the boat....and then I can see that there is no agreed direction, but only an agreement to work hard paddling, in whatever direction and pace each individual chooses.
To which the bishop responded, "Nice poetry, but I still do not know why you called this meeting!
For this moment, I rest my case.....having been the neophyte cleric in that long-ago meeting.

The church's inferential 'gift' of sacralizing the past

From NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook website, May 30, 2013
Two interpretations of “move the meeting forward” and what it says about your relationship to time:
It divides people absolutely half and half. And so if you say to people Wednesday’s meeting is being moved forward two days — what day is it now? People will often say, “Oh, I always get this wrong.” And they don’t actually get it wrong; what they mean is they’ve had situations where other people say the other answer. What this does represent, your answer to this question — and people can answer it very instinctively and very fast — and your answer does show how you see time. So if you answer Monday to that, it’s that you stay still and you see time coming towards you. The summer’s coming, the vacation’s coming, Christmas is coming. If you answer Friday, then you see it the other way around; you see yourself as going off forward into time. I’m going towards the summer, I’m going towards Christmas. And this does seem to split people in a really interesting way. And there are times when it changes. So if there’s something that people are dreading, like the dentist or exams, then they’re more likely to seem them as coming towards them. But on the whole, people have this very set view of the way that they see it.

This piece of information, what some may consider mere trivia, is fascinating!
Time "coming at one" or "one's going forward into time"...
there are so many implications of both the roots of these two perceptions and their differing impacts.
First Roots:
Time coming at one....has to be a state in which time is perceived as some kind of moving entity, bearing down on the perceiver and generally exacerbating that person's anxiety....deadlines, meeting those deadlines, bring the question to a head, bringing the issue to a resolution....under the pressure of that moving "object" time....
This perception co-ordinates with, and possibly even corroborates the notion that many people live a life of tension, of various kinds. And such a notion is embedded into the earliest teachings of the Christian church, anxiety of disobeying some part of the 'rules' that God has laid down, fear of going to Hell, as punishment for such disobedience, fear of 'getting caught' in the act of doing something declared evil, by one's family, community or religious organization.
The celebration of history, as compared with the 'lip service' paid to both the present and the future, is embedded in western culture, also a 'gift' from the Christian church, whose theology sacralizes the past, especially the life of Jesus as 'recorded in the New Testament. Since it was considered "imperative to do, or not to do," something in the tradition of the christian church, then it must be imperative that contemporary followers subscribe to the same "ethic" or rule. Because something has been around for an extended period of time, is a quality that too many people believe grants "legitimacy" to those institutions, simply because they have survived for a longer period that other organizations in the same social, political, economic, academic and religious arena.
It is not merely the specific "rule" that one might have broken, it is the more general and more abstract notion of favouring the past over both the present and especially the future that warps the perceptions of too many people, especially in such 'revered' organizations as the church, toward what comes dangerously close to worship of the past, for its own sake. In North America, certainly, and possibly in Europe, in both of which locations the christian church has planted its feet firmly in the culture of the various countries, how often do we hear, "Oh, if only we could return to the good old days!" as if the past is overwhelmed with better experiences that the present, and certainly than any perception of the future could possibly be. The morality of young people, especially, is one target of such cliche perceptions. The simpler life, without the plethora of technological interventions, is also something many people, particularly the elderly, long to return to, as if to say, that past time is a more reverential, God-centred and ethically pure than contemporary time or 'future time'.
Paradoxically, 'moving the meeting forward' is also a play on the word 'forward' or the word 'up' which is also used in the experimental question, moving the meeting forward (up). "Up," the preposition that generally points to things "heavenly," another of the many 'gifts' of the christian church, designing the universe in a belief that God would naturally "be up there" in heaven, while Satan would, also naturally, be 'down there' in some form of Hell. Evil is consistently associated with the concept of 'down' and 'backward' whereas 'good' is associated with 'up' and with 'forward'. This notion of prepositions that lead the very young language learner to unconscious complicity in these their literal and their symbolic meanings, is another 'gift' of the christian church, leaving little room for either objection or for doubt.
It is not surprising that many, at least one half, of people respond, "Monday" to the question of the Wednesday meeting being moved 'forward' or 'up'. For those of us who, without hesitation, answer, "Friday," there is a qualitatively different approach to the question of time. It is not bearing 'down' on us and causing us to have increased anxiety, something that the christian church considers as legitimate given our "falling short of the glory of God" and yet.....
Too often, the approach that we find most "natural" conflicts with the keeping of tradition, honouring the past, honouring the parents and the grandparents, and the caution that hauling all of the mistakes of the past into our consideration of today's questions is more responsible than to move forward confident that the future is not necessarily any more or less fraught with danger, evil and menacing probabilities than was the past.
Further, it is through an approach that answers "Friday" that we are able, willing and likely to move toward some kind of imaginative pictures, both positive and negative, that comprise the heart-beat of all literature. As Northrop Frye reminds us in "The Educated Imagination" (the Massey Lecture Series on CBC) literature consists of two dreams, a wish-fulfilment dream and an avoidance dream....the former generates  utopia, comedy, and lyric and romance, while the later generates tragedy, irony and distopia. Certainly, this is not to declare that writers will only and always answer, "Friday" to the experimental question...but that the basis on which the story emerges will to a considerable degree comply with the Frye parameters.
The christian church also suffers from a deficit of the prophetic voice, that voice that can see 'forward' into the fog of uncertainty, and the fog of unwritten time, and the fog of beaches yet untrodden and speculates, prognosticates, theorizes, imagines what might be....without worrying about rigidly adhering to the rules, the habits and the attitudes of the past.
In many ways, the church is its own best self-saboteur, in this regard. Memorializing things past, as the most revered and treasured inklings of the thoughts, desires, wishes and aspirations of God, the church has pushed to the side, (some would say denied) the present and the future, as the model of natural human discipleship, and healthy spiritual living.
Instantly, and irrevocably, that reduces those prophetic voices to the sidelines, as outcasts, the penal colony, as rogues, as heretics, as apostates and the voices never to be trusted. Kierkegaard, Matthew Fox, and how many others who wrote, and thought and prayed and argued with the leadership of the church suffered one or more of the church's favoured punishments, including beheading, being thrown into a dungeon prison, hanging, ex-communication, ostracism, social and political rejection by the hierarchy of the christian church, in any of its many forms. Wrapping themselves in the "tradition" (the teachings of the past) of the church fathers, the church hierarchy affects a pose of infallibility.
The church has spent much more "time" engaged in a virulent process of punishing the wayward than it has in pursuing new thoughts, new perceptions, new technologies, new musical forms and themes, new dramatic forms and languages. It has also embedded a social acceptance, even reverence for the past, in all of its liturgies, hymns, calendar celebrations, hierarchical structures and the obedience to these "hard forms of power" as tests of the sincerity and the authenticity of any new recruit, either to the laity or to the clergy.
And, even if only inferentially, the church has cast a kind of universal 'halo' around the past, while putting walls of resistance, even exclusion, of thoughts, insights, forecasts, foreshadowing on its own future, that its eyes are too readily fixated on the rear view mirror to be able to openly, willingly and equally reverentially examine its current circumstances, and adapt to the legitimate findings of those examinations.
These thoughts are not a derision of those individuals who perceive the answer to the original question to be Monday; they are, rather, some reflections on how the past gets, for too many hierarchical church leaders, a kind of sacred status, especially when compared with both present and future.
And the psychologist, Claudia Hammond also reminds her audience, through the On Point program with Tom Ashbrook, that those people are happiest, it seems, if and when they have a balanced perception of past, present and future,
Perhaps if our psychiatrists were educated in her findings there would be less need for pharmacology's tsunami into our culture, generating another tsunami of profits for the corporations that generate these chemical compounds, some 85,000 of which are registered in the U.S. with only five being restricted.
But that's a story for another time.