Monday, September 29, 2014

Making money is not the sole purpose of the public broadcaster nor of the individual

It was Adrienne Clarkson, Canada's 26th Governor General, and former University of Toronto English professor, as well as former host of CBC TV Arts programs, interviewed this weekend by Peter Mansbridge, who commented on the CBC itself, "The purpose of public broadcasting is not only to make money".....
She referred to her "numbers" of only 400,000 viewers for her arts program as not being adequate for the administration of the national broadcaster, with a sardonic and ironic smile, as if those numbers were not sufficient to justify the existence of the program. Nevertheless, she also noted the account of one of Canada's ballerinas, who first was exposed to ballet as a little girl through the CBC program Clarkson hosted, as one of the important purposes of the national broadcasting service.
"We all need to learn and the public broadcaster, if it is doing its job well, can expose us to things we need to know, and need to learn"....
It is the commodification of the national broadcaster that is putting it under a potential surgical reduction, if not potential elimination under the scalpel of the Harper "philistines"....(my word not Clarkson's). If the Canadian government is willing to spend millions on military hardware, it certainly can spend money to support and sustain and even enhance the mandate and the professional functioning of the public broadcaster, and then to monitor how well it is doing its job in ways that are not restricted to balance sh eets, and the degree to which it sustains itself through the sale of advertising to corporate sponsors.
Not all public services should be judged, as they are increasingly, through a lens of the accountants' cost-benefit analysis, based solely on the numbers of dollars taken in as revenue, and the actual cost of operating the broadcaster.
This idea of not reducing the public broadcaster to a self-supporting institution has application to other institutions and relationships in our culture. Universities, secondary and elementary schools, libraries, and hospitals, while having to monitor their spending of public dollars as an integral part of their operation, are nevertheless a feature of the Canadian tradition and culture worthy of the allocation of public dollars. Providing equal access to the services available at all of those public institutions for all Canadians is another feature of the "Canadian ethos" in Clarkson's view.
Pushed further, the concept of the public good includes the notion that not all transactions between human beings must be commodified. Not all relationships and encounters can be reduced to fiscal transactions, rendering both parties either consumers or providers. In fact, it is the erosion of that principle that infects too many of our 'human' encounters.
In transforming human beings into agents of the economy, through both the earing of wages and the spending of those wages on consumer goods and services, we risk the participating in the nuanced and toxic development of the definition of meaning and purpose to "making money"....and the top five employers  preferred by recent graduates from American universities are all financial services corporates. We are in danger of sending the wrong message to our young people, that they will have value and respect to the degree to which they earn a large salary...and the dangers of that message are already being felt.
We are not and never will be reducible to the kind of statistic that renders human beings as mere agents to a false cultural and economic and political mythology as serfs to the profit-motives of the corporations. We are not, and never will be reducible to the agents that are merely focussed on serving the consuming needs of other human beings. We do not live solely or even primarily for the purpose of generating ratings and income, the larger of both, the more "status" we merit.
In fact, it is this very core perception that risks our experiencing a kind of minimalist perception of what it means to be a human being.
We see parents competing for their child's seat in the platinum brand universities; we see executives competing for the largest houses in the most "chic" neighbourhoods, as if only those with the biggest houses, and the largest number of BMW's in the garage, and the largest vacation homes  in the Muskoka's and the Caribbean are to be emulated. We are witness the replacement of the arts, traditionally a less lucrative and therefore less pursued vocation, with an exaggerated swarming of young people to the highest incomes, as if this were the best direction for the lives of our young people.
And it is our elevation of the corporate "needs and purposes" to our highest priority, both in our personal and in our public lives that leaves too many people wondering if and how they might fit into the new world.
There is, however, considerable hope in the "Global Citizen" movement featured recently by MSNBC in their broadcast of the concert in Central Park to  shine a spot light on the initiatives for health and poverty elimination that have provided meaning and direction and purpose to many lives of the next generation. Similarly, the Clinton Global Initiative, at the 'upper end' of the world's culture, commits high profile individuals to the execution of promises that are dedicated to saving and/or enhancing the lives of those less fortunate everywhere.
This kind of initiative, rather than the pursuit of employment in the top five financial services corporations, deserve to be the focus of all those charged with the role of coaching and guiding young people into their futures.
There will always be enough of the best and brightest for the top income positions in finance; there will not always be enough of the best and the brightest for those positions, equally if not more important to the levelling of society's playing fields, that truly serve and that are not primarily or exclusively dedicated to making money, and the more  of it the better.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

An international mercenary force* to fight Islamic terrorist cells?....needs serious consideration

I never thought this space would mention the Fox "opinionator" Bill O'Reilly in a positive light.
Nevertheless, he has made a recommendation that first garnered the support of Former Secretary of State, and Head of National Security, Dr. Henry Kissinger, and may eventually gather "legs" in the vernacular of the news business...
O'Reilly has proposed an international mercenary force to seek and destroy all cells of Islamic terrorism.
Good ideas need to be free of the baggage of their originator. There is no need for or benefit from a perspective that dismisses the idea, because of the ideology of its generator. This is a conflict, a long-term struggle, for the whole world, far beyond the capabilities and the purview of the United States, Great Britain, France, and a few Middle Eastern Sunni governments. And, the marketplace would certainly attract men and women, with percs like considerable remuneration and enhanced reputation, to fight this cancer.
Clearly, the Islamic terrorists are non-state actors, morphing as the circumstances change into whatever strategy and tactics are required, funded by black-market sales of oil, ransoms of hostages, and recruits streaming from all countries in the world, especially from those countries desperate for their own survival. A mercenary coalition, too, would be a non-state actor, depending on the funding and the political support of several countries willing to permit recruits to join such a force, stripped of all ideological baggage. They would not be a Sunni force, nor a Shia force, not a Christian or a Jewish force....not even a force with any religious ideology, just another agent of the money from governments which could then acquire the political wall of protection, when seeking election.
The model of outsourcing government responsibilities, including military responsibilities, is well established in Blackwater, the mercenary force under contract to the George W. Bush administration in their fight in Iraq, begun in 2003. They were outside the purview of Congress, outside the purview of the international media, operating as they did in virtual secrecy, unless and until their actions were discovered, by accident, by media dedicated to their exposure. Only the bare facts of their numbers and their invoices, paid for by Congress, were available for public scrutiny.
The Islamic terrorist cells operate outside the Geneva Conventions of War, and a mercenary force too would be exempt from such conventions. Whether or not such a mercenary force would have access to the most advanced military technologies of all countries, requiring considerable training and experience to operate, is an open question. The relations between the military establishments of the various participating countries and this mercenary force would, of course, have to be negotiated, considering the support such established forces could provide especially in intelligence.
The model of outsourcing government responsibilities, especially when governments sought deflection from public criticism, has also been deployed increasingly in the United States, to operate hospitals, schools and other social services.
This specific application of the outsourcing model, to a force that would be a creature of multiple governments, would remove government commitments to "boots on the grounds" because all who volunteered would, in effect, be only those willing to risk their lives, for remuneration, to eradicate this cancer. As a consequence, no politician would suffer from the public contempt of having committed their country's youth to a complicated and murky military and quasi-military adventure for which there is very little literature and history from which to draw the parameters.
Nevermind that O'Reilly was one of those proposing the idea.
All options, from all quarters, in this struggle, need to be seriously considered, if we are to defeat and defang this metastasizing tumor.
*From Wikipedia:   
A private military company (PMC), private military firm (PMF),[1] or private military or security company, provides armed security services. PMCs refer to their staff as "security contractors" or "private military contractors". Private military companies refer to their business generally as the "private military industry" or "The Circuit".[2][3] The hiring of mercenaries is a common practice in the history of armed conflict and prohibited in the modern age by the United Nations Mercenary Convention; the United Kingdom and United States are not signatories to the convention, but the United States has stated that describing PMCs under US contract as mercenaries is inaccurate.
The services and expertise offered by PMCs are typically similar to those of governmental security, military or police forces, most often on a smaller scale. While PMCs often provide services to train or supplement official armed forces in service of governments, they can also be employed by private companies to provide bodyguards for key staff or protection of company premises, especially in hostile territories. However, contractors who use offensive force in a war zone could be considered unlawful combatants, in reference to a concept outlined in the Geneva Conventions and explicitly specified by the 2006 American Military Commissions Act.[5]
The services of private contractors are used around the world. P. W. Singer author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry says "In geographic terms, it operates in over 50 different countries. It’s operated in every single continent but Antarctica." In the 1990s there used to be 50 military personnel for every 1 contractor, now the ratio is 10 to 1 (Singer). Singer points out that these contractors have a number of duties depending on who they are hired by. In developing countries that have natural resources, such as oil refineries in Iraq, they are hired to guard the area. They are also hired to guard companies that contract services and reconstruction efforts such as General Electric. Apart from securing companies, they also secure officials and government affiliates. Private military companies carry out many different missions and jobs. These include things such as supplying bodyguards to the Afghan president Hamid Karzai and piloting reconnaissance airplanes and helicopters as a part of Plan Colombia.[6] [7] They are also licensed by the United States Department of State, they are contracting with national governments, training soldiers and reorganizing militaries in Nigeria, Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Equatorial Guinea.[8] The PMC industry is now worth over $100 billion a year

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Reflections on Cohen's new album, Popular Problems....

Leonard Cohen's latest album, Popular Problems, includes one song titled, Born in Chains, in which we find these lyrics:

I've heard the soul unfolds
In the chambers of its longing
And the bitter liquor sweetens
In the hammered cup

Let's try to tease some of the ripples evoked by such words.
An unfolding soul, like an opening petal of a rose, finds its voice, meaning and coloration only in its searchings, its hopes and its painful pursuit of whatever it turns itself to seeking.
There are no maps for this unfolding; there are no instruments to foretell the pathways or the snags or the turbulences of the winds to be encountered in listening to the rhythms and the melodies of the longing. As we seek out the weather to plan our days, and then shape those plans to fit into that weather, we form a perception that we are 'fitting into' that natural flow of temperatures and winds and degrees of light or dark.
Our longings, conversely, fit no weather, comply with no natural conditions that make them appropriate and simply emerge like crude from the depths of our being....like emotional energy that needs neither pipes nor pumps for its extraction.
Chambers of longing, like the pipes of the organ, generate sounds of dreams, sights of visions, hours of hopes that contain within their essences all the seeds of all of our tomorrows. They are the pulses that drive our bodies, our imaginations and our encounters. Just this week, on re-reading something I wrote when I was a mere pre-teen, I found words, written completely in innocence and naivety, that have served as one of many beacons that have provided direction and even motivation in all of the activities and reflections for the subsequent many decades. Are there others whose early thoughts and observations now seem to have been the seeds of many of the paths undertaking in the decades and in the meetings and in the projects that followed?
Does the bitter liquor (really) sweeten in the hammered cup?
I have a colleague whose sister had planned to give her a hand-crafted chalice as commemorative gift upon the occasion of her ordination to the priesthood. When the chalice emerged from the oven of its forging, it was profoundly bent, rendering it inappropriate for the original gift purpose. However, she nevertheless decided to offer it, and later replace it with a "perfect" one.
The recipient, my colleague, refused the second "perfect" chalice, preferring the bent one, as a much more appropriate vessel for the Eucharistic wine, given the "bent" (or "hammered") reality of all of our lives.
Needless to say, the bent chalice found its way into the sanctuaries of many churches, as other clergy learned of its existence. Did Cohen hear the story? Or did Cohen learn the same truth from difference sources within his circles?
Whatever the source, Cohen continues to give lyrical release to many of the kernels of insight of the "people of the past" whose lives included "singing" unlike the lives of many today....
If you have not yet found the new album, you will not be disappointed....it will haunt your "unfolding soul" as you set aside all the busyness and really LISTEN....allowing your unique and bittersweet wine to sweeten and find its voice.


Counter Extremism Project brings additional resources to fight the terror of extremism

The first time I heard about the Counter Extremism Project, former Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate, Joe Lieberman was explaining it on television. As one of the several "heavy hitters" providing non-partisan leadership to the new group, Lieberman, himself Jewish, is eminently suited as spokesperson for the initiative.
Here is the Mission Statement from the website of the new project:
The growing strength of extremist groups threatens the peace and stability of nations and the security and core values of people everywhere.Whether their gains are achieved by force, terror or politics, by undermining modern pluralistic societies, or by creating extremist states, these groups impose an insidious ideology, give sanction to violence, reject basic human rights, and suppress economic and social progress. By using modern communications, social media and business practices extremists are spreading their ideology and recruiting support across the globe, posing a complex and urgent challenge that cannot be redressed by governments alone.The Counter Extremism Project will expose the architecture of support for extremist groups and their ideology and combat their spread by pressuring their financial support networks, countering the narrative of extremists and their online recruitment, and advocating for strong laws, policies and regulations.The Counter Extremism Project will:
  • Expose, degrade, and stop the financing and other economic support of global extremist organizations;
  • Build a best-in-class clearinghouse and database of extremist groups and their supporters, mapping the social and financial networks, tools and methodologies on which these groups rely.
  • Assemble a global network of experts to promote our collective security, and the universal values and interests that are threatened by extremist ideology, recruitment, and practices.
  • Oppose the spread of extremist ideology by advancing compelling counter narratives, and by stemming the recruitment of support as these groups take advantage of at-risk communities, and youth to promote their ideology and power.
By employing these tools we will join the fight against extremism, build support for the fight around the world and serve as resource for governments, the media, NGO’s, academia, businesses and the public. - See more at: http://www.counterextremism.com/mission-statement#sthash.kaOqnWWW.dpuf
Representing the Canadian perspective in the project if former Liberal Cabinet Minister, Irwin Cotler.

Clearly, it will take more than bombs, missiles and drones to stop the flow of political and economic and military "transfusions" to the many extremist cells that are infiltrating too many communities around the world. This ideological movement can and will morph into whatever form and shape are required to elude the most invasive counter-terrorism opposition. Likewise, all the world's best minds, and most sophisticated resources will be needed for the foreseeable future.
Remaining free of ideological entrapment, including religious institutions, political alliances and corporate take-overs will be one of the most significant hurdles guiding the path forward of this new initiative. Former ambassadors, homeland security specialists, representing  both Democrats and Republicans. comprise the majority of the leaders. And through these men and women, the project will be able to open doors to discussions and decisions, without generating 72-point headlines, that could effectively dry up the flow of all resources to the extremist cells. Naturally, as one cell closes, another will open.
So this project, like that of the military of several western and Middle Eastern countries, will have to persist far into the future, including drying up funds that support the schools teaching hatred and fomenting bigotry in many quarters, thereby providing a fertile recruiting hothouse of innocent and warped young men mostly who transition from these schools of hate to paid militias carrying, in too many cases, abandoned weapons built and left by American forces.
Americans, including the American weapons industry, do have a stake in the future of terrorism. And that stake will have to be abandoned, if these extreme movements are to be defanged. Of course, not all terror cells depend on highly sophisticated weaponry, but they clearly benefit from the residue of American hard power, the most current example the left-overs in Iraq from the ill-advised Iraq war.
Could this Counter Extremism Project also tip the scales when political leaders attempt to re-draw the boundaries of their neighbouring countries and bring some balance and some equanimity back to foreign affairs?
Even without attempting to reach such lofty aims, the project merits the support and endorsement of all those who see that extremism, in all of its many and nefarious forms, is little more than the expression of fear and jealousy and bigotry and atavism....in absolute terms. Negotiating with such attitudes, and the people deeply infused with their toxicity is not feasible.
Suffocation of all of the resources on which these attitudes depend is a laudable if somewhat ethereal objective.
We heartily endorse all such projects, in the hope that by linking this one with others already operating in other countries, we might build a global network of "moderation lobbies" that expose extremism everywhere and always.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Absolutism and Atavism* rule this chapter of Islamic history

For many months, this space has urged the Islamic world, both Sunni and Shia, to "tame the monster" within its midst. More recently, the world has watched as AlQaeda morphed into Al Shabbab, Al Nusra, and more recently into ISIS, the most virulent and most violent and most extreme of the Islamic terrorist groups. The world, for a very brief moment, glimpsed a 'new world order' birthing from the so-called Arab Spring, hopefully based on a more democratic and more diverse and more inclusive Middle East, and perhaps even beyond, without harsh dictators like Mubarak, Ghadafi, Assad, and those in charge in places like Saudi Arabia. Single "man" rulers, a holdover from history, have, in the modern world, given way to a much more diffuse deployment of political power and influence, along with the need to make public and articulate arguments by those aspiring to political office. And those offices were only available to those willing and courageous enough to offer their names for the turbulent experiment of submitting their ideas to an educated electorate where they would (or could) be examined critically in comparison with ideas proposed by opponents also seeking the same office.
However, in the last few years, the world has learned from painful experience that it may well have been those very dictators with whom the west made significant deals, for the military needs of the Arab leaders and for the fossil fuel appetite of the industrial, modernized developed world, who kept the rise of radical and virulent Islamists from exploding both in their own countries and around the world.
Egypt is a case in point, where the overthrow of Mubarak, followed by the "election" of the Muslim Brotherhood and the erstwhile president Mohammed Morsi was succeeded by the overthrow and imprisonment of Morsi by the military, with the installation of Sissi, a military general as president. A 'secular state' in which individual human rights trump all religious ideologies, permitting the practice of a personal faith along side the practice of a personal atheism and agnosticism, a condition to which most of us in the 'west' take for granted, after centuries of heavy-handed dictators, is a very complex and difficult goal to achieve. It will not be achieved in a decade, or perhaps even in a century.
Furthermore, in the process of the chaos that poured into the streets of the Middle East in the Arab Spring, opportunistic individuals searched and found allies among the disaffected to wreak violence on those they perceived as infidels, starting with the Jews their lifelong enemies, and spreading easily and quickly into the Christian world and eventually into other branches of Islam. Their campaign first used violence to attract attention and to bring about their desired change, and more recently has morphed into what looks like a state of mind that says violence is not only the means to the end, but actually sees violence as the end in itself. Inside this world have been schools and instructors where hatred, contempt, distrust and bigotry have been the menu of the curriculum, linked deeply with a view that women were never to be educated, released from the absolute control of their male dominators, in an impassioned pursuit of something lost, some distant vision of a world in which only radical Islam belonged.
This week, the world, including Sunni-Islamic states, declared war on the ISIS as well as the Khorasan sects of the radical Islamic terrorist movement through diplomatic and financial and military air strikes. Significantly missing from the world's attempt to excise this cancerous tumor from the world's body politic are countries like Russia, Iran, China....all of whose intentions will emerge over time. The president of Iran, interviewed yesterday by Charlie Rose, the dean of U.S. interview broadcasters, directly confronted the Obama-led coalition as 'the use of violence to create even more violence" and stated that it was not the road to go down to eradicate this scourge.
It is true that violence begets more violence, as history demonstrates. Revenge is an integral component of the human psyche and certainly the beheading of now four individuals, two Americans, one Brit and just yesterday one French mountain climber in Algeria are acts of revenge for the air strikes on ISIS in both Iraq and now in Syria.
Nevertheless, as Obama told the world in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, there is no negotiation with these terrorists and the only thing they understand is violence and killing.
For Americans, and now for a few Sunni nations, taking action to denigrate and perhaps even destroy this killing machine is trumping all other options, if they do in fact exist. (The Iranian president did not offer any alternative in the Rose interview, by the way.)
However, this period of disturbing and even frightening turbulence is likely to continue to see more refugees, more deaths, more dismemberments and more violence for a long time. And in the Middle East, where the old world has eroded, it will take even longer to evolve into a truly 'new' and humane and compassionate and respectful world in which human rights of all are respected, protected and sustained.
Even those who study Islam and the Middle East, have written about the roots of this virulence, within the Islamic world itself. And that is an honest and courageous dialogue long overdue. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that begins to outline the initial stages of this troubled and troubling dialogue:

The rise of the Islamic State, also known and ISIS, is triggering some long overdue, brutally honest, soul-searching by Arabs and Muslims about how such a large, murderous Sunni death cult could have emerged in their midst. Look at a few samples, starting with “The Barbarians Within Our Gates,” written in Politico last week by Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Al-Arabiya, the Arabic satellite channel.
“With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama ... is stepping once again — and with understandably great reluctance — into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down. Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism — the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition — than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.
“Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed,” Melhem added. “The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays — all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. ... The jihadists of the Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed out of a rotting, empty hulk — what was left of a broken-down civilization.” (By Thomas Friedman, New York Times, September 25, 2014)
*(Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared)

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Breaking News:Sunni Arab countries join United States in airstrikes against ISIS in Syria....what's next?

Is there anyone else who has heard what Obama has been saying about " no American boots on the ground" in Syria and Iraq in the fight against ISIS? There are so many other roles than actually bearing arms and taking the fight "man to man" on the battlefield including strategy, intelligence, training as well as airstrikes.
Even former Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has cautioned Obama to avoid "trapping" himself by repeating the "no boots on the ground" litany, given Gates' perception and belief that there will no victory without such boots on the ground.
There is a much bigger issue than the question of whether American forces will repeat the mistakes of both Iraq and Afghanistan: and one of the most important is that Obama is vigilantly and earnestly seeking a path that does not, once again, say to the world that the United States is in a fight against Islam.
This morning, we are learning that five Middle Eastern countries, along with the United States, have begun to launch airstrikes against ISIS cells in Syria. Included in the list are the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
As we learn of these new air strikes, we await decisions by both Egypt and Turkey, both of which countries, if they were to join the campaign against ISIS, would send a loud and unequivocal message to the Islamic world that this extreme Sunni version of Islam is not either tolerable or valid as an expression of Islam. The question of bringing Sunni's, moderate Sunni's, into the coalition has been one of Obama's long-term goals in his pursuit of ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups that have been wreaking havoc in so many corners of the globe.
The King of Jordan, appearing on Sunday talk shows in the U.S., was barely able to utter the words ISIS and Islam in the same sentence, so contemptuous of ISIS' incarnation of the faith he and his people have been practicing for centuries. His country, not incidentally, has tried to "absorb" nearly one million refugees from Syria, putting extreme pressure on the resources of his country. He estimates that the refugee total now living in what amounts to a tent city, now reaches approximately 20% of the population of Jordan, and equivalent to some 60,000,000, if the equation were applied to the United States.
Let's not minimize or simplify the complexity of this "humanitarian struggle," to quote the new Prime Minister of India Modi who, as a Hindu, has been excluded from visiting the United States for his previous conflict with Islam while he was governor of an Indian province, prior to becoming the leader of his country. Lifting the struggle out of merely a Sunni versus Shia context, within the Islamic community, and framing the conflict as one that threatens the peace order and good government of all countries, Modi has significantly added to the international support for the broad and appropriate goals and the agenda of the American president.
Nevertheless, having entered Syria, where the civil war has witnessed the killing of well over 100,000, in a three-year-plus conflict to overthrow the dictator Assad, no friend of the Americans, and supported by both Iran and Russia, the U.S.-led coalition is attempting to "threat the needle" in attacking ISIS, supporting the moderate Syrian rebels, and even without apology, aiming some of their arsenal at Assad's Syrian government forces. There is some legitimacy to the question of whether Obama is and has been so patient in refraining from attacking Assad directly while calling for the elimination of his chemical weapons stockpile, that he now has Islamic cover for the "inadvertent" overthrow of the Syrian dictator.
And, another question that must be asked is, "How long will both Iran, an open backer of Hamas and Hezbollah as well as Assad, and Russia (Iran's most vocal advocate in the negotiations over that country's alleged development of nuclear weapons, and Assad's source of weapons) stay on the sidelines of the military conflict inside both Syria and Iraq?" The new leader of Iraq has already asked, not exclusively rhetorically, why Iran is not being invited to join the fight against ISIS in Iraq?
It is not rocket science to wonder out loud, as did the former Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, this weekend, how long countries like Canada can remain on the periphery of this conflict...."once we're in we're in" was the way he put it in an interview on CBC radio on Saturday morning. How long will it be before many more than the initial 69 military personnel from Canada will be sent to the war theatre as combat soldiers, notwithstanding the pleas of the Canadian prime minister that echo those of the U.S. president, not to commit "Canadian boots on the ground" to the fight.
The campaign to de-fang ISIS, including the ideal goal of destroying the terrorist group, will take its "dog-and -pony show" to the United Nations tomorrow when the Obama chairs a meeting of the Security Council to bring even more nations into the effort. This event itself is almost without precedent, when a leader of a country actually chairs a Security Council meeting for any purpose.
Presumably, Obama will be attempting to put pressure on countries like Egypt and Turkey, among others, to help them to see how important they would be to the struggle to remove this scourge from the planet.
We have learned this weekend of the dangers to the health of humans from global warming and climate change, as the United Nations ramps up its efforts to bring some public attention to their campaign to bring diverse nations to an agreement to take substantive action on this front. Is anyone in some office in some university in Canada or the United States, actually taking the pulse of the impact on the health of human beings from the threats posed by the now-more-than-adequately funded ISIS? Is there any person in any city who can perceive or believe that s/he is safe from the tentacles of this radical and savage movement?
ISIS is truly a "humanitarian" threat, with a human face.
Global warming is also a "humanitarian threat" with multiple corporate faces as enemy, in their increasing entanglement with politicians to preserve their pursuit of profit, at the expense of the world's shared air, water and land.
Is the silver lining in the cloud of the war against ISIS the possibility of achieving a similar and also potentially effective coalition to fight the destruction of the planet's environment? We can only hope.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Public issues need a nuanced and articulate body politic for both action and reflection... not kneejerk reactivity

The public and ubiquitous broadcasting of the beheading of two captive hostages by ISIS ignited the United States public, along with the ordinary citizens of other western countries like Great Britain, France, Australia, Canada as well as a few Islamic countries in the Middle East. It was a step too far. However, that was the deliberate and cunning plan of the leaders of ISIS, to demonstrate their growing hubris, to enhance their recruitment efforts and to taunt especially the U.S.
Similarly, the Ray Rice punch of his then inebriated fiancé caught on casino video in New Jersey, after its release, prompted a significant change in the process of "dealing" with such behaviour also considered a step too far.
However, in the case of ISIS, their virulent violence has been imposed for months on the innocent and unprotected people of Syria, and more recently Iraq, in pursuit of an Islamic caliphate, without arousing the western public and thereby their politicians. Similarly, domestic violence has been an out of sight out of mind issue for decades, if not centuries, in many countries, including most 'developed' western countries.
What is it about an igniting "match" that finally brings about a kind of alarm and the necessary ensuing change in public attitudes, and thereby permission even demands, for leaders to take action on threats that have been extant without public rage, for a considerable time?
Have we become so inured to the parade of human tragedy, both those stories resulting from man's inhumanity to his fellow man, and those stories that depict what are perceived as "acts of nature"? Yet we all know that the line separating those two categories of stories is blurring by the minute, and after all, humans are, as they have always been, an integral and intimate component of "nature".
Are we so immune to the 24-7-365 drum beat of disasters through the deployment of the latest technologies, that, in order to merely continue to live our lives, we close our mind, heart and even conversations to our individual and our collective relationship to those "dark stories"?
Have we so cocooned our lives that it takes a "shock" of such considerable proportions that our consciousness is finally aroused? It would seem that there is something to this theory in our lagging and dangerous response to the Ebola epidemic, which some estimates now say could infect up to half a million before it is brought under control.
The government in Westminster was certainly laggard towards the threat from the independence movement in Scotland until the polls were finally so dangerously close that all three party leaders were moved to place a "VOW" in the Daily Record in Scotland promising radical change, without having to take account for the implications of their promises, just to move undecided voters towards voting "No"....and now those very leaders face increasingly loud protests demanding similar devolution of powers from other segments of the body politic of the United Kingdom, including England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and even Northern England.
The world, and this time it means all countries, has certainly been and continues to be a reluctant participant in the effort to counter the environmental dangers of climate change and global warming, once again dependent as "officialdom" is on the push-back from those corporate and government institutions which profit from the conduct of their business using processes that are clearly detrimental to the ozone layer in the atmosphere.
If there is a fire in a neighbourhood, then the people of that neighbourhood awaken to the dangers to their own homes and their lives from that fire. We send firefighters, trucks amid loud sirens to announce the emergency. If an individual has a serious spike in pain from anywhere in his or her body, similarly sirens go off in the consciousness of their family, prompting phone calls to ambulances, health care professionals, and eventually, if needed, a trip to the 'emergency' room.
"Emergencies" are regarded as a last resort, and so long as events do not rise to the level of an emergency, we muddle through, while the circumstances that will eventually and inevitably lead to an emergency continue to grow. And, embedded in that conventional consciousness is the notion that no one wants to draw attention to him or herself by making a public statement that announces a perception of real and impending danger, lest s/he be deemed to be exaggerating the danger, suffering from the disease of seeing an apocalypse in every threat, and thereby incurring the scorn, even the contempt of those in the neighbourhood by giving in to "fear"....the greatest of all public enemies.
It is our relationship to our own fear that is the thermostat,  that 'turns on' our actions, both individually and collectively.
We grow up in homes and schools which attempt to dampen our fears, often through a minimizing approach that makes most circumstances more "manageable" mostly for the benefit of those responsible. We work in organizations that have become paranoid of lawsuits initiated by those injured on the job, and hence institute training programs to "make the workplace safe"...probably more to avoid the insurance premium increases that result from legal settlements than from any altruistic motive to keep people safe. Doctors have withdrawn from performing specific procedures as a direct result of the incompatible insurance premiums spikes that occur too frequently from even the slightest glitch in those procedures. Teachers no longer hug their primary school students out of fear of discipline, including removal, following a nasty hearing that will inevitably distort whatever incident that prompted the litigation in the first place.
Politicians, naturally much more mirror than lamp in their respective districts, fear public contempt, scorn and removal, if and when they articulate threats before the public is "ready? to listen, and to support the proposed actions to the shared perception of the danger. And that means that, given the highly responsive human nerves to the immediate surroundings and the much less radioactive response of those nerves to dangers to others far away, we are in danger of failing to respond to those threats that have become universal while our collective perceptions are stuck in the NIMBY vice.
(Not In My Back Yard)
It is not only our legislative process that has not caught up to our laser-speed changes in technology; it is our very survival instinct that provides a filter to the increasingly ubiquitous radar screens and their broadcasting agencies that bring stories at the instant they occur to television and computer screens and even to phones and watches around the world. We are so intimately wired that we are overwhelmed with hourly tsunamis of negative information, the cumulative impact of which could be our digging even deeper holes of isolation and insulation, just in order to carry out our tasks.
In a memorable poem by Robert Frost, a young man severs his hand while sawing a timber in a rural home, bleeds to death, and the family, "being not the one dead," goes on with their tasks. We are perceived as, and welded to the perception and the belief, that we "must go on" regardless of the circumstances, with or without pausing to grieve. Our resilience, our tenacity and our determination have helped us to withstand and to overcome such threats as the Black Death (to which the current Ebola epidemic is now being compared), the London Blitz, the D-Day battle on the beaches of Normandy, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the growing number of nuclear disasters, the various epidemics of pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and various flu epidemics while discerning and developing antidotes to many of our biological threats.
Nevertheless, we continue to face new dangers such as the mutation of the Ebola virus, the mutation of the Islamic terror threat, the clearly demonstrated mutated Russian bear under Putin, the mounting and incontrovertible evidence that we are all participating in the pollution of the atmosphere through the release of carbon dioxide, even though there are signs that the ozone layer is recovering from its most depleted level over the last thirty years, given our agreement to detoxify our emissions of hydroflorocarbons.
There is a disconnect between the language of the daily/hourly newscasts dependent as they are on the headline-worthy, 'breaking news' seduction designed to generate audiences, and the language of political and corporate and academic leadership dependent as they are on reflective, non-emotional, empirically based observations and projections and predictions. Our water-cooler conversation oscillate between the two kind of verbal representations. We are in possession of increasingly available dishes of both kinds of "language"...and it has always been the case that "In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh".....
And that means that at the core of both our perceptions and our resulting frames on reality is our capacity to give "words" to whatever we are experiencing....and the degree to which those words reflect a capacity and a willingness to include nuance, variety and increasingly fine distinctions, devoid of the nuclear extremes on either side of "the reflective" and the "inflammatory" does have and will continue to have a significant impact on our capacity to confront and to resolve our most serious dilemmas, threats and dangers.
As I read the texts from those in the next generations, I am struck by their brevity, their succinct character and their excising of nuance....partly out of the pragmatic reality that keyboard size militates against nuance, and partly out of the busyness of our lives. However, while we may be making more frequent utterances, are we also in danger of reducing those utterances to polarities that escape nuance, because nuance is too complicated for us to entertain.
We have for a long time considered the major difference, beside ideology, between Dubya and Obama is the comfort level with nuance: Bush proudly declaring he never does nuance, while Obama swims like a fish in the oxygen and the creativity of its oceans, rendering him not only cautious but also refined in his perceptions and his policies...a framing of the American political and cultural reality that is out of sync with the simplistic and Manichean perceptions held by the news media, and their audience.
Those beheadings, including the most recent foiled plot of beheading a "random" person on the street in Australia, are beastly and ghastly and need to be prevented. However, we need to guard against a political culture than can and will only be aroused by such abhorrent acts or dangers, when the reactions too often prove to be too little too late.
Not only would our conversations be enhanced with a more awakened perception of the underlying dangers of many of the issues we currently consider far off and thereby benign, they would also be significantly enhanced by our openness and our use of words of nuance and sublety and complexity....neither the news media nor the political and diplomatic voices have a monopoly on the presentation of our reality...and we have to continue to be vigilant, articulate and impassioned in our curating of the realities presented by all the voices of officialdom....
Can we and will we accept the challenge?