Fear of torture too common among too many...another 'canary in the coal mine"?

Whenever we hear the words, "human rights" some of us glaze over with that askance look of an encounter with another legal brief. Embedded in language of lawyers and/or the detachment of some far-off prison in some far-off land where the legal justice system has either never truly been established or has fallen into the hands of unscrupulous operators whose only interest is their pursuit of personal power at the expense of innocent victims, human rights seems an issue open only to those with a legal background, and occasionally, when the abuses are most dramatic, a few journalists, in order to keep the issue on the front pages.
However, as the world "turns" today, there is growing evidence that human rights may well be in danger in too many places in the world, so that rather than seeming to be aberrant and exceptional, perhaps the abuse of human rights is becoming closer to normal. Those unscrupulous among us, and they live in all countries, in all religions, in all languages and cultures, will find encouragement from the latest report from Amnesty International, the organization with the barbed wire in its logo, the organization that for decades has been taking up the causes of imprisoned without cause, in every country in the world, and the organization that ahead of all others, has compiled the most complete data bank of abuses of human rights.
This issue of human rights is not merely about legalese, and a matter for only the legal-beagles among us. It is a matter for everyone to consider, when forming attitudes about how power is being executed in every quarter of the world. Human rights, in countries like Canada, have for centuries been taken for granted, not as something exceptional and only for the privileged, but as a matter of equal access to justice for all. One of our most beloved Prime Ministers, Pierre Trudeau, made his lasting reputation by writing and passing the "Charter of Rights and Freedoms" a document that the courts have ruled on now for over thirty years, and one that has become a sine qua non of Canadian public life, not to mention a guarantee for every immigrant who steps ashore on our land. And Canadians of all political stripes are extremely proud of our long record on human rights, with the glaring exception of how our political class, and consequently our culture generally, has treated our First Nations people.
Unforunately, there are a disproportionate number of aboriginal people in our prisons,  compared with the numbers in our population. And that is a black mark on our human rights record.
However, unlike too many people in the world, Canadians do not travel abroad worrying about whether they might be tortured if imprisoned or arrested.
And that is not the case for many, according to the Amnesty International Report.
Nearly half of people around the world fear becoming a victim of torture if taken into custody, a poll for human rights organisation Amnesty International showed on Tuesday.
Concern about torture is highest in Brazil and Mexico, where 80 percent and 64 percent of people respectively said they would not feel safe from torture if arrested, and lowest in Australia and Britain, at 16 and 15 percent each, the poll showed.
“Although governments have prohibited this dehumanising practice in law and have recognised global disgust at its existence, many of them are carrying out torture or facilitating it in practice,” Amnesty said in a new report.
Of the more than 21,000 people in 21 countries surveyed for Amnesty by GlobeScan, 44 percent said they would not feel safe from torture if arrested in their home country.
Four out of five wanted clear laws to prevent torture and 60 percent overall supported the idea that torture is not justified under any circumstances - though a majority of people surveyed in China and India felt it could sometimes be justified.
Amnesty said 155 countries have ratified the 30-year-old United Nation Convention Against Torture which was started 30 years ago but many governments were still “betraying their responsibility”. “Three decades from the convention and more than 65 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights torture is not just alive and well. It is flourishing,” read Amnesty’s report “Torture in 2014 - 30 Years of Broken Promises”. (Reuters, in The Nation, May 14, 2014)

Can we recover our imagination?

In one of the pivotal books of Canadian writing, The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye writes about the comparison of the language of practical sense and the language of the imagination. Central to the latter are devices like metaphor, simile and personification, all of them dedicated to the union of things that are not normally even linked together.
Unity comes through the imagination seeing, as Wordsworth reminded us in his poem, Daffodils, "into the life of things". Seeing beyond the literal, the empirical, the mere data, into its meaning, its significance and into its capacity to bridge the here-and-now with the forever, the eternal, the sacred is the singular role of the human imagination. Unlike all other animals, as David Suzuki reminded us this week in his appearance on Bill Moyers on PBS, humans can see a future, can bear witness to that future and can take both imaginative steps and concrete steps to walk toward that vision. It is our imagination that makes such visions possible.
And it is our artists, our poets, our actors and our dancers whose lives, almost without conscious and deliberate "career-making decisions," who keep the human imagination vibrant and integral to our life among the wild beasts of nature, demonstrating our capacity to interact with that "wild" and never to separate, even emotionally from that wild. There is, after all, a unity to life, human and the wild, that beats to the drum of the sacred.
The shamans, and the oracles of all tribes everywhere and always were the voices, revered and reviled, often at the same time, were and are part of that ancient theme of human culture and 'civilization' to which the poets and the prophets owe their existence and their courage. Frye's window to that world, in which "the mouse can eat the elephant" does not leave the reader/audience is  shocked or incredulous simply because s/he has suspended his/her disbelief. We can and do enter into the world "created" by the imagination of the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, and the oracles and without those voices we permit and are complicit in a world reduced to the literal, the data, the meta-data, and our own minimal selves.
There is really no separation between the sacred and the natural, and it is such a perceived dichotomy, a Manichean dichotomy, that permits and even encourages the hubris that is also innate to humans.
That separation, echoed in the most hollow words that can be uttered, "Man's purpose is to get rich!" (from Kevin O'Leary in an advertisement for the Lang and O'Leary Exchange on CBC) renders man nothing more than a function of his own narcissistic greed and ambition. O'Leary's words, like those of the original Wall Street movie, "Greed is good!" render man a victim, through self-sabotage, of his own minimalist, reductionistic gratification.
The fracture of all bridges to 'the other' and through and to the human imagination  had some of its roots in the Puritan banning of all theatrical performances to the outside of London. And through the contemporary worship of technology and mere empirical data, and the calculations and the equations required to manipulate that growing mountain of data, we have become blinded to our own imaginations, all the while fixated on the dance of those little digits on our various "screens" that so entrance us into our own potential oblivion.
We are, or perhaps already have, abandoned the pursuit of the spiritual and the sacred in ourselves and in our world, in order to achieve that worst of all possible nightmares, "dominion" over the world. We have become worshippers at the altar of raw power in the political, economic and even cultural manipulation of our smaller and smaller worlds, as if to achieve dominion, through our wealth and status, were the reason for our very existence.
And we have been blinded by our own drowning in our own hubris, from which only our imagination has the capacity to rescue us. And every day that we demonstrate what looks like a revival of the Puritan contempt for the imagination, and contempt for the voices who infuse life into that imagination, our poets, our prophets, our shamans, and our elders, as practiced in native culture, including our contempt for each other and the earth that sustains our lives, we move closer to our own annihilation.
Every time we hear of another school board cutting support for the "arts" we should all be manning the barricades of their board rooms demanding they stop.
Every time we hear of the abandonment of another music program in the public education systems, we must demand its reinstatement.
We need to ask our mega-corporations whose productions of news and documentaries saturate our lives, to focus on the role and the accomplishments of the human imagination, for example, the orchestra in Africa without instruments that toured North America, providing not only a living   but a meaning for its members.
This is a cause to which all of us can and must contribute, through our conversations, our activities and our dreams for our lives, our children's lives, and our grandchildren's lives.
In a recent piece in truthdig.com Chris Hedges writes about this theme.
Read and reflect on this excerpt:
Those who worship themselves, the essence of the modern, commit spiritual suicide. In love with himself after seeing his reflection in a pond, Narcissus is doomed, as many in the modern world are, by vanity, celebrity and the need for admirers and sycophants. Narcissists master the arts of manipulation, seduction, power and control. They eschew empathy, honesty, trust and transparency. It is a form of mental illness.
It is through imagination that we can reach the dark regions of the human psyche and face our mortality and the brevity of existence. It is through imagination that we can recover reverence and kinship. It is through imagination that we can see ourselves in our neighbors and the other living organisms of the earth. It is through imagination that we can envision other ways to form a society. The triumph of modern utilitarianism, implanted by violence, crushed the primacy of the human imagination. It enslaved us to the cult of the self. And with this enslavement came an inability to see, the central theme of “King Lear.” Imagination, as Goddard wrote, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two—as if the birds, unable to understand the speech of man, and man, unable to understand the songs of birds, yet longing to communicate, were to agree on a tongue made up of sounds they both could comprehend—the voice of running water perhaps or the wind in the trees. Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
All of the great visionaries and leaders of the Indian tribes, from medicine men like Black Elk and Sitting Bull to warriors such as Crazy Horse, in the presence of the natural world heard it speak to them, in the same way it spoke to Shakespeare, Dickinson or Walt Whitman. All elements of life, especially those that lie beyond articulation, infuse the human imagination. The communion—accentuated by vision quests, the sanctity of dreams, odd occurrences, miracles and the wonder of nature, as well as rituals that take place within a communal society—blurs the lines between the self and the world. This ability to connect with the sacred is what Percy Shelley meant when he wrote that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar things as if they were not familiar.” We are reminded at that moment of the wonder of life and our insignificance in the vastness of the cosmos, reminded that, as Prospero said, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.” Too often this wisdom comes too late, as it does when Othello stands over the dead Desdemona or Lear over his executed daughter, Cordelia. This wisdom makes grace possible. Songs, poetry, music, theater, dance, sculpture, art, fiction and ritual move human beings toward the sacred. They clear the way for transformation. The prosaic world of facts, data, science, news, technology, business and the military is cut off from the mysteries of creation and existence. We will recover this imagination, this capacity for the sacred, or we will vanish as a species. (By Chris Hedges, The Power of Imagination, truthdig.com, May 11, 2014)

David Suzuki on Bill Moyers continuing his activism on the environment, for a better world

David Suzuki appeared on Bill Moyer's PBS television show yesterday, once again offering what he himself termed an "apocalyptic" vision of a dystopian future, if more remedial action is not taken by the world's carbon emitting countries on global warming and climate change.
His only hope is that humans change their view of nature from abusing her to supporting and collaborating with her. In his view, nature is necessary to support all life, including human life, and that when we dump tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere, we are all paying a very heavy price.
As for the economic argument that resisters use to push back against measures like a carbon tax, Suzuki again almost shouts, "We created the economy, and if the damn thing is not working then we can change it!" The economy, as opposed to physics, chemistry, biology, is a human invention, and not something given by nature and should not be used as an argument to oppose strong measures to combat our outright attack on our own ecosphere.
As for the argument that Suzuki is using an apocalyptic position, one that psychologists have demonstrated is not effective in changing human attitudes, he responds that his hope lies in the belief that nature will support all our efforts to curb our emissions. And he points to countries like Sweden that has already cut 1992 level emissions by 8%, while growing its economy, as his way of demonstrating that growing the economy and creating jobs is not incompatible with taking serious steps to protect and preserve the ecosystem.
Scathing in his criticism of the Canadian government of Stephen Harper, Suzuki says that Harper is attempting to create a "petro-state" in this country, with his unqualified support for the Alberta oil sands energy project, and its need for pipelines to the west coast and to Texas, in order to sell the heavy crude that is being extracted from the ground in northern Alberta.
However, in his strong attempt to link the United States to participation in the environmental movement, Suzuki uses the "moon" project outlined by President John F. Kennedy, following the Russian launch of Sputnik, in 1957. What seems missing in our assessment of Suzuki's use of this analogy is that, different from the threat of losing to the Russians following their successful launch, the Americans do not have an "opponent" with whom to compete on the environment, as they then saw Russia. It is in competing with an external, extrinsic opponent, that the Americans can and will give an all-out effort verging on a national crisis response, to a situation that pictures a victory over an opponent.
The environment, however, is an abstract and universal and unnamed opponent, one shared by all countries and all peoples around the world, so that "winning" does not have the same kind of psychological appeal and motivation for the United States. And, coming out of two wars, and a serious economic crisis, the Americans are concentrating on their short-term goals of putting people back to work. Also, ironically, while the process of innovation is critical to the  business of generating new ventures and through them new jobs, the political process in the United States is so mired, even drowning some would argue, in loose and free-flowing cash for the people who have been elected, that their willingness to put the national interests ahead of their own personal ambitions for the luxuries of a lifestyle that emulates the "rich and the famous" is literally non-existent.
And so, along with Suzuki, we wait and watch as the White House attempts to stimulate interest in and a demand for political action on the global warming and climate change front...all the while wondering what kind of prodding it will take to wake the stubborn beast that is the American political culture to the impending threats of global warming and climate change...and wring our hands in hope of a change in government in Ottawa that will bring attention to the need to spend public money to reduce Canada's dependence on fossil fuels.
And we all know that there are jobs by the millions in new technologies and in concerted attempts to grow the economy through addressing the threat to the environment, and for that we can all thank a lifetime of activism by Dr. David Suzuki, named by his father after David the Goliath slayer of the Old Testament, who has certainly lived up to his father's expectations.

Reflections on Mother's Day, 2014

Sometimes it seems hard to reflect about mother, motherhood and the powerful, indelible imprint mothers leave on their children and families. Sometimes, such reflection seems insufficient and invasive and even impossible. Who are we to think we understand our mothers? Who are we to think we understand the mothers of our children?
We men, after all, have no clue about their inner life, unable even to catch a glimpse of our own inner life. There is no school for motherhood (or for fatherhood either, for that matter) and yet parenting is the most important role and responsibility we can find and face. There are indulgent mothers, always ready to defend their child even when s/he is indefensible. There are controlling mothers whose greatest fear is that their children will embarrass them in some way, and leave them writhing in agony in public reputation. There are generous mothers whose cooking, cleaning, gardening, sewing and bathing of their children, smothering them with kindness and joy, hope and dreams has no limit. There are mothers-general who engender a marching obedience to their every order, blindly and blissfully commanding their own mini boot-camp for little ones, so careful are they to "protect" their children from their own mis-steps, cowering behind perfection as their last and only haven of security, a faux security that they will not and cannot see. There are mothers whose own lives are their 'statement' to their children, through their careers, their canvases, their volunteering, their organizing and leading outside the home, so that their children 'see' and 'appreciate' them as public figures, not as homemakers. There are mothers who retain their perception as reality of a competition with their own mothers, all the while seeking something unattainable, their mother's public acclaim, through their own mothering. There are also mothers who act on their firmly ensconced belief that they married "beneath" themselves, and spend the rest of their lives inflicting their own embarrassment in "settling" not only on their spouses but on their male offspring. There are mothers who know they "won the lottery" in their choice of husband, and who, for the most part, reinforce that belief and perception every day, in their sunny approach to all of the many threats and challenges brought by their children and their lives, including their trophy partners.
And, in some way, each mother brings with her some of all of these "archetypes" ready, at a moment's notice, to intervene with a band-aid, a hug, a cup of cocoa, a trip to the emergency department after a child's fall, a phone call to the principal after some disciplinary action against her child at school, or even a 'lecture' on the morality of how to treat a bully. What seems common regardless of the nuanced style of each mother, is the unwavering commitment to "serve" the child under whatever exigencies in which the child finds him or herself enmeshed. And that service seems inexhaustible, like a well that never goes dry, no matter how tired, over-wrought, despondent, disappointed, depressed or angry she is.
Mothers' voices, include their sighs, and the way they hold their mouth, and the way they put their hand on their hip, the way they roll their eyes, their every gesture and response is indelibly imprinted on the memories of their children. It is their whole being that is microscopically memorized and learned as the first imprint on the child's hard-drive, forever embedded in his consciousness, and later his unconscious, as the driving beat of how the universe really works. The level of energy to plant the garden in late spring, to pick the raspberries in late summer, to smock the dress of the new baby, her own and her friend's, to clean and redecorate every room in the house, to sing the hymns on Sunday in the pew, to judge the town drunk....it is the intensity and the persistence and the eventual predictability of her person that becomes the first road-map for 'how' to be in the world.
And this road-map is very different from the map being drawn by her partner, and seemingly her map overshadows his less intense, less judgemental, less 'engaged' and at the beginning less important pattern. Only later, does her intensity become a matter of some reflection, anxiety and doubt, perhaps even fear, and his map a more palatable and sustainable path.
It is mother's intensity that masks her own insecurities, her own fears, and her own anxieties; yet, this little secret is unavailable to her young child, at least until she reaches adolescence. And in too many kitchens, these insecurities dominate as if they were the 'elephant' in the room, never to be noticed, permitted a safe place and honoured, to be shared by all, in a spirit of common human vulnerability.
Only too late long after she is gone, through relocation, estrangement, or perhaps even death, does mother find a home of clarity, appreciation and reciprocal love in the hearts and minds of her children. Only much later, when the 'dust has settled' from the intensity of child-rearing-linked to career development (given that most mothers now have at least two workplaces) does the child look back on those little gestures of support, of disdain, of encouragement and of critical judgement with both a pang of pain and an even deeper consciousness of gratitude.
For some of us, it is more difficult to find the gratitude than the resentment. Mothers, after all, know us sometimes too well, and find us sometimes too hard to handle, and sometimes resort to measures they would reject if they had been less stressed themselves in the heat of the moment. And, only after we have treated our own children less than gently, less than lovingly and less than kindly are we able and willing to forgive our own mothers for their less than gentle interventions. And, not only to forgive those seemingly unkind and painful moments, but to begin the process of appreciating the risk she took when she entered into our life with all the force of her being, because she believed deeply and sincerely in the point she was making, otherwise why would she have exerted so much energy in making it.
She could have, in those moments, remained silent, and let us find our own way, but her need to coach and to counsel and to participate over-ran her need to remain silent. And there is no other motivation to her intensity than her love, linked to her own sense of self-respect, and her dignity and worth in the act of intervention with her 'own' child, regardless of how much her engagement might or would be misunderstood, resented, resisted and even rebelled against.
It was our mothers who saw the brink that we found ourselves teetering over, and stood on that brink with us, when there was really no one else there. Father was off working, making a living, 'bringing home the bacon' as he was programmed to do. Mother was both watching and holding out a hand for us to clutch, if we chose, to hold us back from falling off the cliff, when the wind and the sheer thrill of the danger were beckoning us over.
So there is this dramatic paradox to our mothers. They know we have to find our cliff; they know they have to walk beside us when we are in most danger; and they know that they are unable to do more than be present and available when they most want to take our place in our danger. In loving us, they have to let us find our dangers, and our limits and our mountains, all the while knowing that they cannot love us out of those dangers, only through them, hopeful that we can and will emerge at least only partially scathed, and not destroyed. In such moments, they have had to rely on their previous moments of 'mothering' that prepared us for those greatest challenges and risks, and that they had an intimate and irreplaceable role in our apprenticeship as risk-takers.
So our mother's childhoods, wherever and however they were spent, become significant histories to help us understand our own development. How and when they met their partners, whom they dated, which subjects they did well and which they avoided in school, which potted plants they poured their alcoholic drinks into at the formal dances in the King Edward Hotel, while attending nursing school, which beach and rock outcropping they liked best in Five-Mile Bay for their picnics, which dinner guest they most looked forward to spending time with....these are all significant finger signs along the road to our adulthood. And we cannot forget their appearances, first as children, and later as adults, when we encounter moments that evoke those signposts.
While living in this moment, we are also intimately connected to all of those moments when our mother was "there" beside us, sometimes when we least wanted her to be there, sometimes when we most wanted to leave and join our friends, and sometimes when we had no choice. And only long after she has left us do we turn around from our seemingly interminable walk "away" and reflect on just how integral she is to who we are, how we think and do things, what we appreciate and denigrate and how and for what we dream.
There are so many empty spaces in our lives in which there might have been words, gestures and communications of appreciation, starting with our mothers, opportunities that we have missed, ignored, avoided or even resisted. And it is our failure to fill those empty spaces with our thanks and our joy and even our hurts that continues to plague us with our own incompleteness, and our own omissions and our own insecurities.
And, on this mother's day 2014, fourteen years after the death of my own mother, her intensity and her commitment and her willingness to take risks that most mothers around our neighbourhood would have studiously avoided, and did, are her most compelling and most appreciated gifts in my life. And for her part in my life, I am finally willing and able to be grateful, and let that gratitude trump all previous resentments.

Party discipline in pursuit of power versus the public good

Justin Trudeau's decision this week to screen potential candidates for the Liberal party by demanding they adopt a "pro choice" stance on abortion raises many questions.
First, it questions whether or not Trudeau is confident in the Liberal Party's commitment to a 2012 policy decision to make it a pro-choice party, given that there are sitting members whose personal conviction is "pro-life" and not "pro-choice". There is no pending vote on the question likely to come before parliament, however, and a woman's access to therapeutic abortion in all stages of a pregnancy is fairly well assured across the country through a combination of public opinion and legal and government decisions and omissions of decisions.
So party "purity" and the option to present to voters a potential government that has declared its support for a woman's right to choose what happens to her body, in addition to the "party-purity" that the leader has the right to make absolute decisions regarding how the party will operate on difficult moral questions seem to be at the heart of the matter.
And so there are really two major questions emerging from this surprise decision.
First, is it wise for a political leader of any stripe to declare party policy, based on "pursuit-of-power" needs, even though historically this matter has been one of conscience, and open to a free vote without the restrictions of party discipline? Is Canada now at the stage in our political development where matters that were once considered too important to be "ruled" by party 'whipping' (in parliamentary terms) have become the exclusive purview of the political class, its leaders and its insiders?
While the writer has declared, many times, in this space, support for a woman's right to choose, this space has also sought space for diversity, for tolerance of diversity and for a tolerance for ambiguity that lies at the heart of generating space and gas in the body politic's 'shock-absorbers'. Not governments, nor religious institutions nor social institutions, nor schools nor colleges nor universities... none of these social organs should be advocating for an absolute position on any single issue. In fact, it is the pursuit of absolutist positions that lies at the heart of much of the conflict in the public discourse and conflict.
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, in his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, once declared, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Is Trudeau's declaration worthy of being considered "extremism" or is it merely one neophyte party leader's attempt to gain control of his right flank internally, and "market" his party to the voter as a unified "brand"?
To Roman Catholics, and traditionally the Liberal Party has been and been seen to be the party to which most Roman Catholics gravitated, the Trudeau announcement has already provoked considerable protest, erupting in demonstrations on parliament hill only one day after its release. Trudeau's attempt to appear more inclusive, however, is fraught with the grafted perception that his perception of the issue as "settled" renders him naïve, simplistic and reductionistic, not to mention outright unacceptable to many hard-line Catholics, including the hierarchy.
If his decision is one that seeks to extricate the party from religious influence, and can and does succeed even to a limited degree, that would be a result worthy of the effort. However, rather than 'let sleeping dogs lie,' Trudeau may have, ironically and perhaps even tragically given rise to all of the voices in all of the political parties who seek to put an end to "state supported" abortions in Canada, through some combined initiative that crosses party lines, or some legal process that comes before the Supreme Court and somehow reverses the current status of the issue.
It is the question of the role of religion, formal religion, represented by specific faith communities on government policy that has raised its head in so many cases and places over the last decade plus. Extremists, religious zealots spring from all regions of this country, as well as from all countries on the globe. Their zealotry is often not restricted to terrorism and murder but includes many examples of exclusion and isolation and alienation and various forms of "gate-keeping" designed to preserve the "purity" of the faith, more literally, protect the faith dogma, as if that dogma represented the word of God. And for many of those zealots, it does.
Dogma, those declarations of belief that incorporate the application of belief to life decisions, especially around moral choices, has filtered down through the centuries from the pens and the pulpits of many mostly men. And, of course, in the pursuit of its preservation and protection, elaborate institutional 'extremes' have been designed and implemented, including in the Roman Catholic church the "Congregation of the Faith" in the Vatican. It is highly unlikely that Trudeau's single declaration will be more than an irritant to that "establishment" however strong his motive to separate his party from the formal and informal influence of the church.
And from a narrow 'vote-getting' proposition, with the NDP firmly committed to the "pro-choice" agenda, not from its leader's edict but from long-standing debates and decisions at the grass roots, it could be that the new home for "pro-life" voters will be the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper.
Sadly, Trudeau could have, in a single press statement, done more than all of the forthcoming advertising his party will underwrite, to re-elect the Harper gang. This issue does still have "legs" and tentacles that reach into the most private reflections of thousands of Canadians.
On another level, in attempting to project "authenticity" of the political party, Trudeau has raised the spectre that in order to "comply" with party discipline, individuals will respond to questions on "pro-choice" matters put by the party, in a way designed to meet the "party" litmus test, while continuing to maintain, in their private lives, a "pro-life" position in their spiritual and religious life. And that seeps deeply into the kind of culture and nation that permits and condones such hypocrisy.
We all know that "trust" is the currency of all relationships; and that politics is the public stage for the enactment of that exchange. To the degree that we trust our political representatives, to that degree they "earn" our votes". It was Andrea Horwath, the Ontario NDP leader, who declared that she did not "trust" the Liberals to enact their budget proposals and so she had to vote against the budget, bringing down the minority Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne/Dalton McGuinty.
“There’s a real danger here for Andrea Horwath that we’re going to enter into an election that will be highly polarized,” said Bryan Evans, a professor of politics at Ryerson University who studies the labour movement in Canada. “It could very well be that Andrea Horwath has committed the NDP to a kind of self-destruction” in which the party will be “squeezed” between two completely different visions unless it can differentiate itself greatly from the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives.
(By Sarah Boesveld, Andrea Horwath’s Waterloo? National Post, May 2, 2014)
By analogy, given that politics is one of the least "nuanced" of human endeavours, Trudeau may similarly have given Harper and his muzzled back-benchers enough new "conservative votes" (pro-life votes) to return to power, in a political culture that is equally polarized across the country.
Throwing Harper out in 2015, considered in this space a national cleansing, long overdue and long sought by millions of Canadians, will not result through a divided centre-left voting block. And Trudeau, should he really be committed to defeating Harper, might use the considerable public resonance of his and his family's persona, to form a coalition with the NDP, inspite of Michael Ignatieff's "There is only a red door and a blue door!" dictum when a formal coalition to bring the Harper government down dissipated. (The quote comes from Thomas Mulcair's lecture at Queen's University just a few days ago.)
Short-sighted, cryptic and headline-grabbing comments, such as the one Trudeau dropped on abortion, are not the sign of a seasoned political veteran, and while everyone has a learning curve, "on-the-job training" is not likely something Canadians are prepared to vote for in the election of 2015.
There is a legitimate and growing public voice being heard on the need to throw the "political class" out of power, given the nefarious and incestuous enmeshment of political operatives on the right and the left  to both big money and the support of the status quo. Trudeau's comment, while not likely intended to grow such voices and perceptions, could, nevertheless, generate more scepticism about the people from whom Canadian voters have to choose as their next leader. And that would hurt the political process, not only the Trudeau Liberals.

"Right" answers are little more than a reductionism for political power and control

This morning began with this reflection: Ukraine reminds me of the oldest child in a family of several siblings after a divorce, with both parents clinging to her as if their identities and their survival depended on her 'living' with each simultaneously. Given that there is only one "Ukraine" with several different parts, each parent is clinging to the part that they consider most important. Putin and his Russian oligarchy are determined to tear Ukraine apart, on the pretext that the 'west' including the United States and NATO are encroaching on his "domain" and luring Ukraine into their 'orbit' while the people in the EU and their governments are interested in supporting that part of the Ukrainian hopes and aspirations for democracy, free markets, access to education and health care and a legal system that is open, transparent and accountable. A political system is competing with an ethnicity for control of Ukraine, in the broadest and most blunt terms.
Politics, the apparatus through which we generate laws and procedures that demonstrate our trending ideas, attitudes, and ideologies, seems inevitably to conflict with the pursuit of individual freedoms and individual development and what Maslow so famously called "self-actualizing," all the while purporting to claim as the reason for its very existence the extension of opportunity. In presenting a "position" the political class expresses its vision of what they see as an ideal outcome, whether or not that outcome dovetails with the lives of those who carry out what the political class has 'decreed'. The people of Ukraine, quite naturally and tragically, are watching another chapter in the eternal conflict between political power and influence and their lives as a 'family' in which individuals are free to seek their own unique and different and separate identity.
The notion of an ideology, a world view, conflicting with another world view, within a family, has been around for centuries. One parent values the acquisition of money more highly than the other. Or one parent values a social conscience more than the other. Or one parent values travel and reading and exposure to different ideas more than the other. Or one parent imposes a much more harsh and cold discipline than the other. Or one parent subscribes to the pursuit of a spiritual identity as a top priority while the other prefers to live in the 'here-and-now' and concentrates on the daily routines. One parent loses him or herself in the theatre, the arts and among the people in that community while the other is more engaged with the world of earning a living and sees the arts as more frivolous and less productive. And the children are watching these little dramas unfold on a daily basis, wondering how to find their own place along the various continua of pathways they did not even know existed, until they began watching more closely the nuances of their parent's lives.
And so, if this happens around the kitchen table, it inevitably occurs also in every classroom in every nation. And as the classrooms veer to the 'right,' to the reductionisms embedded in the political class's need for re-election and continuing power, the lives of individual students are bent in the direction demanded by that "principle"....the need for power achieved through some kind of observable accountability...usually in test scores that permit comparisons, and also suggest measures of success in how the public money is being spent, in achieving something to which the political class can and will point during election campaigns.
To a significant extent, our education system, our corporate structure, our ecclesial structure, indeed our political system, regardless of the ideology of its practitioners, have all bent in the direction of simplification, and the enhancement of the power of those "in charge" without much regard for the implications of that power grab. And the results of that shift, a shift that includes the denial and the rejection of the needs of individuals and groups "under" the influence of the power brokers, is generating more conflict, inevitably, and more irritability, naturally, and more apathy and despair, expectedly in all kinds of social circumstances.
Families see parents in conflict, and have to question the underlying reasons for their breaking up. Schools too see students differently, more as pawns to the political class, than as individuals needing to be supported in the enhancement of their skills of discernment and problem solving, and not in the ability to produce 'right' answers, so that the political class can sustain its power.
So too in Ukraine, where the different voices are clanging in dissonance, as they pursue their own perception of how Ukraine should be governed, and whether it should be divided, or even remain as a country.
As a teacher for two-plus decades, I have deeply embedded images of children and families in my past, and given the evidence of  brokenness in families, of hopelessness in the stature and demeanour of the youth I see walking the streets of the places where I live and visit, and the move of all institutions to absolutes, and various forms of domination that depend on singular "right" answers to all of life's complexities, I doubt I could or would ever go back to the classroom even if the 'system' wanted me, which it clearly does not.
On the education front, a resignation letter from an eleven-year English teacher, demonstrates the significance of the political imposition of power on the learning process, and indeed has generated another "activist" opposed to the current cultural norms of acquiescence to the political class and its pursuit of its own power.
Read an excerpt of this resignation letter and weep:
I have sweet, incredible, intelligent children sitting in my classroom who are giving up on their lives already. They feel that they only have failure in their futures because they've been told they aren't good enough by a standardized test; they've been told that they can't be successful because they aren't jumping through the right hoops on their educational paths. I have spent so much time trying to reverse those thoughts, trying to help them see that education is not punitive; education is the only way they can improve their lives. But the truth is, the current educational system is punishing them for their inadequacies, rather than helping them discover their unique talents; our educational system is failing our children because it is not meeting their needs.
I can no longer be a part of a system that continues to do the exact opposite of what I am supposed to do as a teacher-I am supposed to help them think for themselves, help them find solutions to problems, help them become productive members of society. Instead, the emphasis on Common Core Standards and high-stakes testing is creating a teach-to-the-test mentality for our teachers and stress and anxiety for our students. Students have increasingly become hesitant to think for themselves because they have been programmed to believe that there is one right answer that they may or may not have been given yet. That is what school has become: A place where teachers must give students "right" answers, so students can prove (on tests riddled with problems, by the way) that teachers have taught students what the standards have deemed to be a proper education. (By Pauline Hawkins, in Huffpost, Why I'm Resigning After 11 Years as a Teacher, April 16, 2014)
Pauline Hawkins is an English instructor at Liberty High School in Colorado Springs, CO, where she has been teaching for 11 years. She also initiated the student-run newspaper, The LHS Revolution, and is its adviser; the paper is in its tenth year of publication. Read more by Pauline at paulinehawkins.com)

Will global warming and climate change finally get the respect it warrants?...we are sceptical

Although the United States has been dragging its collective feet on global warming and climate change for too long, the Obama administration has been moving along, behind the scenes, raising the mpg (miles per gallon) rate of gasoline needed to power automobiles, capping the construction of coal-fired electricity plants, and yesterday, releasing a report that puts the issue squarely in the present, as opposed to some far-off future problem.

The Republicans, lead by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, continue to sing the worn-out chorus that 'it will make no difference what the U.S. does if other countries do nothing about global warming and climate change' to their brain-dead constituents, continuing a well-established pattern of denial and avoidance.

However, it was to eight television weather forecasters from around the country that the administration made their pitch yesterday, believing not only in the trust Americans place in those talking heads, but also in their capacity to put the story out in each and every broadcast. Some have even begun to include climate forecasts in their daily weather broadcasts, as a way to grow public awareness and public responsibility for measures that can and will reduce the carbon imprint we leave on the planet.

Canada, on the other hand, continues to lag behind the United States, with Ottawa clinging to the cliché that unless and until India and China sign on to some international pact, there is no need to take global warming and climate change seriously. And reports today indicate that our fossil fuel exports have jumped some 900%, making us one of the premier "petro" economies in the world, something that environmentalists cringe to learn, as the appetite for fossil fuels continues seemingly unabated. Here is the way the New York Times framed the story about the existing evidence of deep and profound changes that are already observable, and the conclusions that the administration's report draws from those changes:

 

The effects of human-induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States, scientists reported Tuesday, with water growing scarcer in dry regions, torrential rains increasing in wet regions, heat waves becoming more common and more severe, wildfires growing worse, and forests dying under assault from heat-loving insects.

Such sweeping changes have been caused by an average warming of less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit over most land areas of the country in the past century, the scientists found. If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, they said, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century.

“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the scientists declared in a major new report assessing the situation in the United States.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report continued. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.” ( By Justin Gillis, U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods, New York Times, May 6, 2014)

Miami, a city facing a threatened rise in sea levels has already begun constructing a massive underground pumping system that, its civic officials predict will prevent one inch of sea water from invading Miami streets. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, before leaving office, was already making noises, following hurricane Sandy, about that city's need to build retaining walls to ward off rising sea levels resulting from global warming and climate change.
Yet, there are few other regions that have taken the risks seriously enough to begin to pour public money into insurance measures that would address our collective and obviously impending crisis.
As the White House Spokesman told Gwen Ifill on PBS, 'the science that supports the growing climate change crisis is already established, although in the list of priorities, American people continue to put it fairly low on their list.'
This space has dedicated considerable time and energy toward raising the alarm about this issue that not only will define the futures of our grandchildren, but also the legacy of their grandparents, insofar as our willingness to make the sacrifices needed to at least ward off the worst effects of the most nasty scenario.
While we all drag our rainbow-coloured boxes to the curb each week, in order to facilitate some form of recycling, in order to put less pressure on our landfill sites, we continue to produce much more packaging than our needs require, in order to better accommodate the corporate interests who wish to make those millions of sales. We also continue to drive cars that gulp gasoline, when we all know that the technology for environmentally friendly vehicles has been available for decades, although purchased and hidden by the auto companies. We also continue to consider public policy  based on fossil fuels to be necessary in both the short and long terms, in order to preserve "jobs" and a rising GDP, when we also know that the jobs necessary for an environmentally secure future would result in even more employment and even better GDP prospects.
We are a civilization with our eyes securely focused on our immediate and often titillating wants, as if we had no responsibility for those who will inherit both our gifts and our mistakes.
Maybe it is time for us to begin to think about what the planet will look like, smell like, and feel like if we do nothing to curb our deeply embedded appetites and began to consider the longer term futures. It may do nothing for our immediate reputations; yet it may well offer lives of some worth and safety to our offspring and their's.