Feel-good political opportunism no substitute for collaborative, collective poltical action on refugees and other impending threats

Just when we think that beheadings and missiles and bombs and political fragmentation and dysfunction are the sum total of the definition of our period of history, the body of a lifeless young Syrian boy washes onto a beach, is caught on camera, lifted from his watery tomb by a traumatized official, and splashed across television and computer screens across the world.
Just when we think that individuals by themselves have no influence, the human spirit is touched by yet another photo of another individual human, Aylan Kurdi, who now and forever symbolizes a tipping point in the world's collective consciousness to a story of such a complicated conflict in Syria, leading to another even more tragic mass migration of refugees both of which seem to overwhelm those charged with negotiating peace and preventing human disasters.
Why did this little boy have to die as a victim of a smuggling ring of opportunism operated by thugs?
Why did his parents have to seek asylum from a political-military-ethnic-terror-religious conflagration whose end is not in sight, nor even in the imagination of world leaders?
Why did the world waken to this specific photo, after thousands, probably millions of similar photos, some even more traumatizing, had already marched across our individual and collective mind screens over the last four years?
Is there some 'trigger' mechanism inside the human community that can and will 'go off' when the pressure of resistance to action, and the complicating rationalizations and excuses and distractions fail to push the refugee story out of our minds and hearts?
Is there also a human spirit that links every human being on the planet to respond with action when our collective conscience is so pricked, enraged, appalled, ashamed, and even grief-stricken in identification with sufferers and their families?
Is the picture of this little boy, and his grieving father, and the burial with his brother and mother in Kobani yesterday enough to push the world into a concerted and sustained initiative that will not only find beds, food, water and work for the millions of displaced refugees?
Or, are we merely assuaging our troubled collective conscience with an outburst of compassion, empathy and caring that will fade in days or even hours, after the groundswell around the world dissipates, subsides and even atrophies?
Are we willing to permit arguments of bureaucratic documentation, bureaucratic bungling, bureaucratic micromanagement to defeat what appears to be a human demand for compassion, for creative and emergency staffing of "processing facilities" and a break in the logjam of starving humans who have been living in refugee camps for months even years?
We are now told that the United Nations Food Program has run out of money to feed the millions of starving refugees living in those camps in places like Turkey and Jordan. Yet, in comparison with the resounding response to the picture of the lifeless little boy, the even more tragic needs of hundreds of thousands can easily slip behind the veil of our instant altruism to 'take in' more refugees.
Homes, churches, even city halls across Canada are mobilizing to begin, or in some cases, continue, their efforts to complete the assimilation process of another wave of homeless migrants, while governments are being pushed by public opinion, public embarrassment and even public anger and shame into actions they were apparently not prepared to take without such public pressure.
One church in Winnipeg has already completed 18 quilts, one for every member of a family for whom they have also prepared the obligatory documents to satisfy the bureaucratic and legal overseers who in turn must comply with their political masters.
Harper persists in focussing on the prevention of terrorists from entering our country and insists that while there are many refugees who are not terrorists, some may find their way through the bureaucratic filtering process that keeps them out. And yet, as we all know, there are already home-grown terrorists operating inside Canada, as bonafide Canadian citizens. And while there is a risk of opening national boundaries to more danger and more terror, there is also the potential upside of enriching many countries, including Canada, with the infusion of energy, imagination, skills and a deep and lasting commitment to their adopting country and community of people whose lives have already been shattered by their exposure to thugs like ISIS and Assad.
The outpouring of collective human emotion is not enough to guide public policy; there is also a significant need for those in power, both elected and civil service, to prepare the assessment process and to execute that process given both the legal requirements of security and the humanitarian requirements for openness, compassion and our national consciousness and identity.
These are not the "Boat People" from Viet Nam. These are not the refugees from Ruanda, nor from Serbia. These are the people from Syria, and some from Africa whose lives have been torn apart by those who would use human victims and targets for their political, ideological, military and religious purposes.
And while picking up refugees from the Mediterranean, and offering water and food in Hungary, and refuge in Sweden and Germany (two of the most receptive and welcoming countries in the current crisis) are all important acts of compassion and empathy, the root causes of this mass migration, the wars in both Syria and Iraq, and the terrorist extremes in those countries and elsewhere, and the general apathy to world events in countries like Canada and the United States, remain unattended and unresolved.
And it is the larger picture, the failure of collective world leadership, including the leadership in our own country, that must be held accountable for failing to silence the missiles and the poison gas of Assad, and for failing to bring the Syrian and Middle Eastern conflicts, including the long-simmering, often boiling-over conflict between Israel and Palestine to a peaceful resolution. Of course, the combatants themselves must be at the negotiating table(s). Of course, the processes will not be either easy nor easily monitored. Of course, the conflicting interests of those combatants will continue long after the guns are silenced. And of course, the terrorists will continue to seek soft spots as both targets and recruits, long after any resolution of the current conflicts have been achieved.
Nevertheless, the pathways to negotiations must be continually explored, tested, rejected when appropriate, and tested again....in a collective human aspiration of bringing the human community to a place where it can and will agree to live in a level of secured and monitored civil compliance with values and rules that respect the dignity and the humanity and the culture of each individual.
Conflagrations of any size will only lead to more burnings, more drownings, more starvings, and more burials....and as we all know both emotionally and intellectually, all participants are losers in the end. Nevertheless, while the process of integrating millions of refugees will take a global effort to assimilate them and given them both life and hope, so too will the process of preventing these humanitarian disasters require the extreme commitment of all governments and political leaders, including especially those leaders who profoundly disagree with their counterparts across any negotiating table.
The world may have begun to mobilize to open their doors to refugees today; it will not be long, however, before the world's collective and united voice demanding action on poverty, the environment, access to work with dignity, access to education for all, including all women, will demand that those in public office no longer hide their heads in the sands of time or denial and take collaborative action on these serious and threatening issues.
And, short-term fixes for political opportunism, like the Chinese shutting down coal-fired factories and removing half of the 5 million automobiles from the streets, just to present a blue-sky photo opportunity to the world on the anniversary of the surrender of Japan at the end of the Second World War, will be seen for what they are: a sham!
And, shams will not, cannot be, must not be accepted as substitutes for long-term solutions to real life-threatening forces.

Can we become the immune system our grandkids will need?

The modern conservative...is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. (John Kenneth Galbraith*)

Globalization is yet another approach to this pursuit. Nothing could be more clear than that those who have more want more, and they justify their selfishness by arguing, however speciously and arrogantly and however well funded their arguments and access to their proliferation, that globalization will bring jobs, education, health care and dignity to the world's poor.
Nevertheless, (globalization's) "assault on resources and the production of waste, coupled with the extirpation of cultures and the exploitation of workers, is a disease as surely as hepatitis or cancer. It is sponsored by a political-economic system of which we are all a part, and say finger-pointing is inevitably directed back to ourselves. There may be no particular they  there, but the system is still a disease, even if we created and contracted it. Because a lot of people know we are sick and want to treat the cause, not just the symptoms, the environmental movement can be seen as humanity's response to contagious policies killing the earth, while the social justice movement addresses economic and legislated pathogens that destroy families, bodies, cultures and communities. they are two sides of the same coin, because when you harm one you harm the other. They address what Dr. Paul Farmer calls the "pathologies of power," the "rising tide of inequalities" that breed violence, whether it be to people, places, or other forms of life. No culture has ever honored its environment but disgraced its people, and conversely, no government can say it cares for its citizens while allowing the environment to be trashed. Farmer writes, "More guns and repression may well be the time-honored prescription for policing poverty, but violence and chaos will not go away if the hunger, illness and racism that are the lot of so many are not addressee in a meaningful and durable fashion.**

We are currently watching, (withstanding as much as we can bear) the convergence of several events, and with each even a different chronologies of time. The dominant and most obvious is the chronology of commerce, business, the entrepreneurial spirit, that 'engine that creates all the sought-after jobs'. Welcoming innovation, adaptive to change, needing to grow more quickly than ever, they often cease to exist by failing in these endeavors. Into this chronology, we could lump the insatiable media coverage of military exploits, mass killings, stories of lab discoveries, the occasional reporting of research findings in their minimalist headlines, social media, fashion as a sector of business, and the reporting of epidemics, hurricanes, tornadoes and fires, drought and food and auto recalls.
A second time frame is culture, moving more slowly, stabilizing identity and serving as something of an anchor. Between the first two is a third time frame: governance, moving faster than culture and slower than commerce. The fourth chronology is nature, the slowest, including earth, nature and the web of life. (A more complete detailing of these chronologies can be found in Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest, p. 134)

Linking the power of the wealthy with the potential culture's time frame morphing (for their self-interest) into the commercial time frame, thereby subsuming the time frame of governance along with the complete avoidance of any public attention to the time frame and distinct demands and requirements of nature, we are in danger of losing our perspective on so many aspects of our situation.
We all know about the headlines focussing on the mass migration of refugees and asylum-seekers from Africa (several countries but predominantly Iraq and Syria), and the droughts and fires in North America and intermittently in Australia, and the economic crises in Greece (and potentially in Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Italy), along with the uprising in eastern Ukraine, and then the drop in oil prices and the collapse of the Chinese stock market....and we all feel more than a little unsettled. And we have not even mentioned the potential of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the fervent attempts to thwart that ambition, nor the "military exercises" along the border between North and South Korea, nor the expansionism of the military capacities of China and Japan, nor the atrocities being committed by ISIS and its many terrorist clones. Our "time frame" as presented by our current tidal wave of data, in "real time" simply overwhelms us. It cannot fail to do that.
There is, in our conventional conception of time, almost no past and literally no future.
We are locked in the dictatorship of the immediate nanosecond.
We are also locked in the repression of the vacuum of options, so it would seem, to make a significant difference to the crisis.
Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families know too well the demands of living in crisis, jumping, hopping or running from one to another. We become hyper-vigilant, hyper-critical, hyper-tense and hyper-perfectionistic, not to mention hyper-frightened. The selfishness of the rich and the attempts to seduce the world into a narcissistic theocracy in which only they matter and the rest of us are merely their pawns, renders us all "black" in a white supremacy, Ukrainians under Russian threat of missiles, Syrians fleeing the bombs and the chemicals of Assad AND ISIS, the First Nations of Canada and the United States oppressed under a different face of white supremacy...
Oh there are some of you who are moving away because this is too extreme, not sophisticated enough for your palate to tolerate!
However, some might hang in a little longer!
Think about how we have become locked into a time frame that considers only this moment, and takes very little time for reflection, (unless it is to lie on a Caribbean or Great Lake beach for a day or two), given the underlying structure of the time frame of commerce: there is only 'this moment' for the transaction!
And, since there is only 'this moment' for the transaction, we yield our other 'perceptions' and attitudes, and beliefs and potentials to 'get through the moment'....
Investment organizations want us to see into our retirements, but primarily for their selfish commissions, most of which are not disclosed.
Churches want us to think of the 'hereafter' because, having premised their theology on "original sin," they believe we need redemption or be thrown into a fire pit of Hell, or having been "saved" we might gain entry into the Valhalla of a heaven. Both options, apocalyptic as they are, are attractive only to the extremely vulnerable and gullible, be they Christians in the west or Islamic terrorists enrolling in their campaign for a world wide caliphate (wwc...not www.)
Those seeking political office, in both the United States and Canada, electoral campaigns are underway: in the U.S. the vote is not until November 2016, but is already dominating the news media, in Canada the vote is October 19, this year, still the longest election campaign period in our history. Time has become the master of the political class, and while they "extend" the period in which they dominate the stage, the know deeply and profoundly, while also tragically, that the time frame of governance cannot and never will keep up to the demands of the marketplace, and so when they talk of planning for the next few years, they are ridiculed for "dreaming" and those who speak of only the next few months are dubbed visionless, and those who stub their toe on a malapropism, or even a politically incorrect gaff are doomed to rejection by the voters.
Once again, the single shot (whether from a gun, or a complaint, or a criminal charge, or a headline or a tweet, or a U-tube upload) is the weapon of choice in a militarized, frightened, reactive, hyper-vigilant and micro-aggressive culture.
In the United States, for example college professors are now required to provide "trigger warnings" for words, ideas, pictures or even concepts that might offend someone in their class. This uber-politically correct campaign is to stamp out any potential ideational bruise that a vulnerable student might experience if a racial incident is recounted from the past in a history lecture, or a victim of sexual abuse might re-experience in a sociology class on sexual research. The premise is that "emotional intelligence" shapes the intellectual experience, so that no individual student will be offended in his or her pursuit of academic credentials.
And the universities have bought into this charade! (For more, see  the cover story in The Atlantic's current edition)
Not only have the shackles of the video-camera, the U-tube phenomenon, the hacking of Ashley Madison's website, and the ubiquitous access to technology robbed us of our privacy, they threaten our cultural identity, so dependent are they on the instant.
Governance also has to find a new way to adopt to the rigours of instant-gratification narcissistic voter expectations and nature needs the voices of millions who grasp its beauty, its largess and its epic gifts that need to be preserved, including its eco-systems. And we all need to take a breath from the daily diet of extremes coming from the larynx of too many people like Trump, Putin, Kim Jung Un, and the leaders of ISIS and their ilk.
We enter into and attempt to dance with all four time frames, seemingly seamlessly, yet never without stumbling as if dancing in new shoes, to a band whose music we have never heard before.
And while we all know and share the conservative's selfish bent, we also share the idealist's imagination for a world that is more influenced by our altruism, our love of beauty, art, music and nature...all of those treasures held in contempt by terrorists and their ideology. And we must become the healthy immune system to prevent the take-over of those diseases which threaten not only our health and peace today, but the very survival of our planet in the very near future.
And selfishness, and commerce and narcissism and apocalyptic headlines will not serve us well, if they are our intellectual and emotional and spiritual diet.

*Lester Thurow, American Fiscal Policy: Experiment for Prosperity (Englewood  Cliffs, N.J. Prentice-Hall, 1967) p. 125, quoted in Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, p. 115)

**Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: health, Human Roights and the NBew War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p.xxvii, quoted in Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, p. 145

Is there anyone listening or caring enough to see beyond my cheque or purchase?

Everyone has experienced the "no-response" response from the big corporations. Phone them, email them, fax them....and all messages vanish into a black hole of emptiness, with no one knowing about their origin, their existence, their importance....and you have the scenario that defines contemporary business, especially in the service sector.
We all grew up knowing our family doctor, our lawyer, our accountant, our car's mechanic, our insurance agent, our dentist, our kid's teacher and the operator of the preferred gas bar where we filled the tank in our cars. And the first line response personnel in each of those offices/organizations knew us and answered our calls or appearances with a smile, a listening ear and a deft triage decision about how to proceed although they never over-stepped with answers 'above their pay grade'.
There was a kind of fabric to our existence, a trust even with price comparisons, and a degree of ease and comprehension of at least how we might find answers when we needed them, While the level of "education" may not have reached the kind of "market data" or even the diagnostic skills and access to a bank of information respecting the patient, the client, the car or even the insurance policy options, we were engaged, served, respected and even honoured in our pursuit of customer/client/patient SERVICE.
Back in the mid-eighties, while working in Public Relations and Marketing at a local community college, I had the opportunity to host a "teleconference" from a southern university, in which  two business professors, authors of a text entitled "Service America", told audiences across North America not only how important the "service" component of their businesses/professions is but also how to reach new levels of excellence in the provision of that service.
It is not rocket science to answer the phone, to read the emails, to surf the texts or even to schedule time in a manner that accounts for both those files/customers/patients/clients that require extended time allocation, but also for those "walk-in's" who present for the first time, or for a modest need/request.
Human engagement, of the kind that formed communities through their multiple encounters among people whose status never interfered with the transactions, and even whose transactions themselves did not define the experience.
There is a profound difference between completing a transaction, collating the sum of those transactions, mining those transactions for their exclusive benefit to the organization's growth and profit potential (what additional 'products' could we unload on which prospect we already service?) and a human interaction that sees, hears, acknowledges and even wants to know the person seeking service. There is a profound difference between a focus on the profit potential of the company as a measure of "my" contribution and thereby potential for notice and promotion, and an authentic interest in, commitment to and delivery of a meaningful, purposeful, engaged and mutually beneficial exchange with the client.
The reduction of our working lives to the primary service of our careers and thus our employers results inevitably in our shaping our performance to those goals and thereby to the performance objectives set by our "masters" who give us the direction and the training and the reinforcements to perform as their pawns.
And the atrophy of the notion of relationships between the professional provider and the recipient is not only a signature of our culture; it is a sign that the "suits" have become our masters. And we have not only witnessed this change; we have essentially enabled its swallowing up too many of our ordinary experiences.
And the elimination of our being known and valued and respected has been replaced by our "preferential choices" as data for those service providers to use in their insatiable appetite for more profits and their pursuit of those profits.
A few months ago, for example, I surfed the web for a product that was not available in local stores, only to find, following my search, that ads for that product were popping up in my research for information on public issues. After a purchase, the web jumps into my face offering after-market purchases that complement the initial purchase as if not only have I been reduced to a "target market" rather than a human being, but so has the source of those ads.
We as individuals, are much more, more complicated and more interesting and more demanding than anything that can be reduced to a business transaction, a cheque, or a card insertion, tap or swipe.
We are much more than a tooth ache, an abdominal pain, a soldier trying to march to the legal requirements of a jurisdiction like a province, or a country or even a municipality that sets some mutually beneficial rules and guidelines.
We need insurance, for example, in order to protect us from catastrophies beyond our control and the costs of cleaning up those incidents. And in the process of filling that need, we also need the few minutes of a service agent's time who may not always be seeking another sale. Service cannot and must not be reduced to the provider's pursuit of additional sales. Service, when provided as a discreet provision, can and may lead to a gestalt that the customer might actually want to do additional business with that provider. Service, however, as merely another opportunity to make a sale, is a perversion of that service.
The abuse of power when viewed in so many situations, is cause for alarm, even for legal action. However, that abuse is never applied to the organizations providing clients with service, only the individual doctor, lawyer, dentist who may inadvertently make some error. Corporations are not being held accountable for their abominable disrespect of their clients/customers....the only reason for their existence. The needs of the investors in the corporation have come to trump the needs and expectations and the persons whose needs have created the corporations in the first place.
We have morphed the corporation from a service provider to a glutton whose appetite for profit and thereby reduced costs (making fewer people work longer and faster to produce more profit, without regard to the working conditions of those serfs). And those corporations are not only eager and willing to swallow our cash, but they are also willing and eager to swallow the people working for them, as if they were nothing more than "raw materials" in the production process of a factory.
Labour has been gutted by the linked forces of governments and corporations, the silencing of the lambs/innocents whose ancestors fought and even died to guarantee some respectability for the workers, who were being exploited by their employers. Now even client base is being slapped in the face with the back of the corporate hand, as if without the power of association, and without the power of embarrassment, and without the power of a consumer protection provider, and certainly without the protection that once was expected and often came from governments (now reduced to merely those incidents that cause injury or death, exempt as they are from the scrutiny that would attend the kind of expectation that accompanied our small communities where everyone knew where to get respect as a consumer.
And there are mountains of deficits to our corporate culture: the cold shoulder, the recorded phone message, the disinterested and apathetic front-line worker, the lost file, the lost email, the lost fax, and the failed transaction....but not enough to bring the corporations down. In the big picture, however, our losses are even more significant.
They include a loss of something we might call community, or even shared expectations, shared needs, and the meeting of those legitimate needs, the alienation of humans not only from families, but also from their neighbours, and the people with whom they interact as customers/consumers/clients/patients.
A family doctor, now literally an artifact of history, cannot and will not be replaced by a computer file stuffed with some numbers about our health condition. We will always need a trained professional to see into and beyond those numbers to a gestalt of our person, our lifestyle and our capacity to commit to our own health.
Our alienation and our disconnect from the world represented by the corporation, and the larger the corporation the more profound is the alienation (for the simple reason that only our cash/cheque/purchase/contract matter to the provider).
Removing the human contact, the human interest, and the human engagement from our transactions, in the service of our idols: "profit", "dividends", "promotions", "attention", and "business growth"....really all substitutes for the "dollar".....has reduced our culture to the jungle of Darwinian survival and now we all wonder why our health budgets are exploding, our police and social service budgets are empty and starving for funds, our libraries are closing and our casinos and digital gambling outlets are booming.
And we are both victim and enabler of our own reduction....victim as described, and enabler by continuing to act as if we have no power to reverse this wave of insult.

Memo to Trump:You are just what we do not need, another vacuous bully on the international stage

Those eleven million undocumented immigrants, they're outta here the first week I'm in office!

I will build the biggest wall you’ve ever seen between Mexico and the United States, and make the Mexicans pay for it!

Bomb the ISIS oil fields!

Jeb Bush’s crowd down the street, do you know what they are doing....they are sleeping, sleeping sleeping? There is no energy there!

Mexicans are bad people, perhaps a few are even good people, but there are rapists and bad people coming into our country and they have to be stopped!

Hillary is by far the worst Secretary of State in our nation’s history and she could be in so much trouble that sh may not be able to finish her run for the presidency...If General Petraeus, someone everyone liked and respected is destroyed by much less (wrongdoing), how could she not deserve a similar treatment? She might well have to spend time in a cell, not the White House!

All of the other candidates are losers!!

These are just some of the radioactive political statements by the front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination for the president of the United States.

The Donald also, evocative of Hitler’s entrance into Berlin at the opening of Reni Reifenstahl’s propaganda file, Triumph of the Will, in his bi-plane casting a huge shadow on the buildings from the sun, drops out of the sky at the Iowa State Fair, in his own helicopter, blazing his name in large letters on the side of the plane.....and having cauvght everyone’s attention, including the national media cameras, immediately offers free rides to the waiting children...as if any of them would not jump at the chance of a free helicopter ride at the State Fair!

Eugene Robinson writes a piece today in Truthdig.com asking the rhetorical question, “Can anyone out-Trump Trump?” Detailing the respective tactics of his opponents to Trump’s style and statements, Robinson is beginning to wonder if this nuclear campaign can or will be stopped. Up until now, most political observers believed sincerely that Trump would flame-out on his own sword, and for his opponents, their initial strategy was to let that happen, without raising a syllable in protest, Only Marco Rubio, taking the high road, and Ted Cruze, sidling up to The Donald are now keeping their powder dry in taking him on. Even Jeb Bush is plaintively crying ‘foul’ over his decade long flirtation with the Democrats, compared with Bush’s career as a  bonafide conservative.

As history and the political gods would have it, former President Jimmy Carter, yesterday announced that in addition to the cancerous tumor that has been removed from his liver, he has been told that there are now four cancerous lesions on his brain. Political pundits, especially on MSNBC, decry his having suffered an imposed reputation as a weak man, since his defeat by the hawkish Ronald Reagan. It is not incidental to note the for the last eight years, the Republicans have painted President Obama with the samje brush and colour they used on Carter. (This space has already been dedicated to the thesis that American presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 were each a referendum on masculinity, not on nuanced debates over policy.) In 2008, Obama presented the voters with a very different choice, especially when compared with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton who voted for the Iraq war in 2003, and also when compared with his Republican opponent, John McCain, infamous for his “bomb bomb Iran” imitation of the Beach Boys pop music.

The American people are not only frustrated over the massive job loss to Asia, and the inconclusive results of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as the Mexican stand-off in Ukraine with Putin. And then there is the seemingly interminable conflict with ISIS, with their be-headings (most recently of an antiquities scholar in Palmyra) and their massive slaughter of infidels, a conflict that no authority or agency really has an proposal to terminate (all the while uttering words like “degrade” and “destroy”).

Posturing as the real answer to Putin’s bravado, to Kim Jung Un’s sabre-rattling, to the Congressional stalemate over immigration, to the funding of ISIS through black-market sale of oil from fields they control, while name-calling his political opponents in both parties, (as if he were in a high school election for student council president) bragging about how rich he is and that he is only doing this (campaign) to “make American great again”...these features may offer the country an illicit, but not banned drug for their political obsession, their pain and the shame and embarrassment of appearing weak, but the power-drug cannot provide more than a brief, if dramatic and unconventional reprise from the obstructionism and paralysis in Washington. Manufactured in the television and advertising/marketing/public relations offices on Madison Avenue, disdainful of and devoid of all thoughtful, researched and debated public policy options, Trump is becoming what Margaret Atwood hated, a “thing” (after the fame she achieved through her writing), although all reports that outline his performances on the stump and in the television studios shout out his “real” and independent humanity, without the programming that is imprinted into and sabotaging most political candidates today.

The ironies abound. His vacuity of feasible policy options is overlooked and submerged by his bombastic magnetism; his wealth belies his poverty of political acumen, except as salesman. If Putin can and will remain in power through duplicitous deception of the Russian people, controlling as he does, the national media in that country, then how different is Trump really, given the sycophant reporters and talking heads who hang on his every word. Trump blatantly and caustically insults a female reporter for asking “rude” questions and then panders to the owner of the Fox network where she works and everything is smoothed (or smoozed) over. Fox knows a thing or two about ratings and although they expected some 2 million viewers for the first Republican debate, on their network, the viewing audience numbered 24 million. And they were glued to their television sets to see or listen to Jeb Bush, or any of the other candidates, non-entities in Trump’s mind and vernacular.

An instructor in another life reminded the class that there were two kinds of people: givers and takers. And conflicts arise when the givers, realizing how they are being taken advantage of, stop giving. It would seem that the duality of politics in the United States, could be seen through a lens marked “fighters” and negotiators...and the former are more to the liking of a majority of the voters. Hence, Hillary’s “I will fight for the middle class” sell line for her campaign. Bernie Sanders, too, is attempting to generate a revolution, fighting the financial interests of Wall Street, and the politicians whose votes have been bought by the barons of wealth, for the preservation of their narrow interests. President Jimmy Carter wistfully longed to have sent an additional helicopter to rescue the hostages from Iran immediately prior to the election of 1980. He believes today that had he made that decision, he would have won another four years in the White House but will still prefer the opportunity he had to create the Carter Center over a second term.
However, is Trump’s bullish rhetoric, larger-than-life persona, excessive hubris and contempt for his opponents, all underpinned by his $400 billion estate the only answer the American political system can come up with when the world is starving for collaborative, collegial, thoughtful, pragmatic, visionary and sustainable leadership. Stamping out all enemies may have resonance in North Korea or even in Moscow; it hardly serves the west’s attempt to stand strong. In fact, ironically, the  bully is the weakest and most frightened kid in the school yard, just as Hitler was the most neurotic figure in the twentieth century by a long shot.

As Churchill reminds us, The Americans will always do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other options....Let’s hope his prescience is still relevant....

If we find ourselves waking up to a Trump presidency in January 2017, we will all have the biggest and longest-lasting geopolitical headache of the last few centuries.

Reporting Child Abuse is a sea full of sharks....beware!

The Ontario College of Teachers’ publication for members carries, in its latest edition, a feature piece on “Protecting the Children” as a way to open the minds of teachers to their legal obligations to report any and all suspicions of child abuse. And we commend the college for its leadership on this issue.
However, (and there is always a but or a however!)  as both a retired career teacher and a survivor of child abuse in my family of origin, I am familiar with the omissions of my generation of teachers who, while we may have reported “child abuse” to the guidance department, rarely if ever did those reports find their way into the offices of the child protection agencies. It was more usual for the child protection agencies to bring child abuse to the attention of the schools and teachers, and even then the fact that a child might be in a foster home would be about as far as the information would go.
One grade twelve co-ed asked to speak to me after class one day, only to sit in her desk, crying as she reported that she had been thrown down the stairs to the basement of her home by her ‘father’ on the previous night. Shocked, I attempted (however lamely!) to comfort her in her obvious and warranted distress, asked her if she had supports to whom she could turn, did her mother know of the incident, and after a few minutes, we both departed, she in shame, embarrassment and a modicum of solace (I hope) and me in more empathy and identification than the student would ever know.
Her courage in bringing the matter to the attention of any person, in any public institution is even today somewhat remarkable, although there is more evidence of similar reportings, as well as more obvious incidents to report. It is the non-reported side of the story that requires our attention here.
Having worn long sleeved shirts and sweaters so school for most of my youth and adolescence, to cover the welts and the bruises on my arms, and to preserve the “family secrets” of what things were really like in our home, I am too familiar with the strategies and the tactics of those in similar situations. Abusive families generate children who are not only ashamed and frightened and tenaciously holding a pervasive internal question, “What is wrong with me?” or “Why is this happening to me?” or “What have I done to deserve this?”....the precise form may differ but the cracks and the erosion in self-respect and self-esteem are deep and permanent. Of course, the bruises and the welts heal and disappear, and permit short-sleeved tee’s and shirts. But long after the welts, the self-analysis often morphing into self-absorption as another route to deciphering the roots of any tension or conflict with another, continues. What never really evaporates is the imprint deep in the unconscious of the persistent criticism and verbal abuse from the parent who, as we all know intellectually much later, is projecting his or her self-loathing onto the child. And, keeping secrets, especially those sacred to the family, and the abuse that accompanies those secrets, remains as a permanent “skill” or trait long into our dotage. So it was, in my late teens that I took the family half-ton truck out, without permission, and drove it into a rock and flipped it onto its side, as an early expedition into rebellion and raging hormones and social acceptance. Three teen-aged boys visiting camp counsellors at the local YWCA, in secret, was merely the occasion and purpose of the truck. But secrets and secrecy were at the core of the incident, along with the other factors.
And now in a time when privacy is such an important public issue, with the advent of the digital web and the billions of postings on hundreds of websites, people on the other side of the world can and do know what some people ate for breakfast, whether they want to or not. And that capability does not remove or eliminate the reality of personal, private secrets, many of which will never be released to the light of day, perhaps until long after the people involved are no longer living. There is another co-relation too that may be missed in the teachers’ “protection” manual....and that is the oxymoron that most students who are “in trouble” in school are living in conditions that are not conducive to learning the socials skills necessary to navigate the school system. And once labelled, or categorized as “trouble-makers” there is little likelihood that such students will receive the qualitative and compassionate scrutiny that undergirds any and all “protection” manuals.
In order for such a seismic cultural shift to occur, enabling professional teachers to see past the “acting out” into the real problems in the students’ lives, we will need a substantial long-term, sustained and professionally designed curriculum in adolescent psychology that promotes looking beyond the empirical, the behavioural and the attitudinal. Such a curriculum needs to be offered at the Colleges of Education, the training institutes for professional teachers in Ontario. Teachers’ roles will also have to morph from disciplinarians or “cops” into mentors, counsellors and coaches. And that will necessitate a new type of recruitment plan from governments who seem fixated on budget controls, class sizes and breaking up the public education system. Nothing short of a transformation of the public education system will be required. And any and all attempts to educate teachers about their role in reporting child abuse, when they see evidence on its occurrence, worthy though they are, will fall short.
In fact, such tutorials will be little more than band-aids that serve primarily to cover the legal backside of both the professional and the school boards. We can all see, and even experience the shift in attitudes, perceptions values and the treatment of others in our culture. Where it once exhibited deep and heartfelt respect, trust and integrity, there is mounting evidence that such values and approaches are being replaced (if they have not already been replaced) with a large serving of self-interest verging on narcissism, on narrow pecuniary goals, and an accompanying disregard for the people standing in the way of the achievement of those goals. We may be setting our public sights on addressing physical abuse, as a determinant to avoid legal battles, while simultaneously disregarding the conditions necessary to foster such abuse.
Abuse, be it physical (including sexual), emotional, psychological, economic or even religious, is really about the inappropriate exercise of power and the obeying of a subservient “partner”. And the signs of such abuse are not, and will never be, evident to a probing professional who may be considered “invasive” into private affairs, if he or she probes too deeply. In fact, in order for such a culture and relationship to begin to exist, the teaching profession will have to drop its “power-tripping” attitudes and the supervision that enables such power-tripping, given that most senior administrators are, themselves, on a massive power trip of their own, attempting to climb a career ladder, by avoiding many of the very kinds of situations that present as “social” problems. Learning difficulties, however, are very different. They are readily boxed in a category that reads “needs special help” and the student is off-loaded onto the special education department where there really are, and have always been, empathic compassionate and perceptive teachers ready to listen, to develop a trusting relationship with all students, and they are the ones most likely to hear about abuse in the lives of their students.
However, let’s recall the grade twelve student from an East Asian background who came to me after report cards were issued and asked if I would change his mark from a 58% to a 66% because he was afraid to go home with such a poor result. English was not his first language, and while his oral capacity in the language was developing rapidly, his written work needed considerable improvement. Fear of going home, while sad and even tragic, was not indicative of parental abuse, although to me, he was suffering undue emotional stress. I did not alter the grade and did not hear what happened when he took the report card home where family and cultural pride were in charge. Would such a situation be reported as indicative of child abuse today?
 Another grade eleven student approached me after receiving her examination results (77%) to inform me that I had completely destroyed her future as she intended to be a writer. Was she not deserving of a much higher result on the examination? Upon re-reading the paper, (something I always offered to do, with the proviso that the mark could go higher, lower or remain the same and that was the risk they took in asking for a re-read), I concluded that the original grade of 77% was indeed probably more than I would give it on a second reading. Nevertheless, because the student was already distraught, I left the grade as it stood. I have often wondered what kind of future that highly emotionally charged co-ed found, and whether or not her early signs of emotional discomfort continued to plague her in adult life.
Is it child abuse when a peer student calls another vicious names in front of his buddies, and if so, will such incidents have to be reported as child abuse, with the perpetrator subject to legal entanglements? Is it child abuse when a grade eight, sixteen-year-old kicks in the head of a classmate, knocking him unconscious on the playground at lunch time? And will the perpetrator be required to be charged with assault and appear before a justice who can and does impose a sentence? And will the school culture be a subject for legal minds in their pursuit of “justice” for their clients when a case is filed in the judicial system?
I have thought long and hard about whether or not I would be  better off today if the Children’s Aid social workers had been called to investigate child abuse in my home, and my mother (the abuser) had been separated from the family, or I had been sent to live in a foster home.* The workers would not have been given to point to the real problem in our family: my father’s fear of my mother, and his unwillingness to step up to the plate and confront her on behalf of both his son and daughter, both of whom were abused by our mother. Spineless men, frightened men, living with dominating women, while perhaps at the root of some child abuse, is not on the agenda for investigation and reporting to the authorities. Neither is, unfortunately, the spectre of alcoholic men coming home drunk and abusing all other members of the family. Nor is the secret alcoholic mother who hides her alcohol and drinks in secret when the rest of the family is away under the watchful eye of the school authorities when they investigate child abuse, even though her behaviour is more than incidental to the family’s drama, including the required keeping of “her” secret.
And let’s not forget, or ignore the fact that many of the abusers are themselves professionals; in my case, my mother was an exemplary nurse whose patients thought she walked on water; others may be teachers or spouses of teachers themselves. Some may even be administrators in the school system itself, inflicting their illness on their family, with impunity, and which teacher is going to confront such a situation when a superior is involved? And then there are the clergy, some of whom, preach such abusive theology (as did the one in my family’s history) that adolescents who attend school dances, movies, or wear make-up or adults who prepare meals on Sunday or who consume alcohol, or who worship in the Roman Catholic chuch, are “going to Hell”...Is that kind of preaching from a pulpit in a recognized mainstream faith community not a form of child abuse? And who, pray tell, is going to take that abuse on and prosecute that preacher for his “sins”....no one!
Just as no one is going to expose the imam who preaches radical Islam to his mosque going to face the police or the Crown Attorney with charges of child abuse...
And we could go on....
Reporting child abuse is, on the surface, a seemingly worthwhile social policy goal. It is also fraught with pitfalls whose tales will lead any who venture into them into much deeper trouble than the current trouble faced by former Prime Minsterial aide, Nigel Wright, who did not expect such a public outcry from his writing that $90,000 cheque.

 Beware the good intentions implicit in the Ontario College of Teachers tutorial on reporting child abuse. There are serious sharks in those waters!

*I actually did report through a personal letter to my nurse aunts then working at Sick Children’s Hospital and Mount Sinai hospitals respectively, an incident in which my mother broke a shiny new Spalding Nine Iron I had just received for Christmas, when she learned that I had got a grade of 63% in history that term and I had hidden the report card until after Christmas Day, in order not to soil the holidays and my aunts’ visit to our home. Both aunts reported they were afraid of what my mother might do if they were to go to ‘the authorities”. And when my mother did learn of the letter, she beat me brutally for what she charged me with as “deceit”...her pride was really bruised, I guess.

The response to blatant racism needs a moral compass and leader in the U.S.

There is reported evidence of a shooting of one black man by white police officers every ten days over the last year in the United States. Public officials like to point to 'how far we have come' in race relations following the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King prior to his death. In his challenging and inspiring work, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken includes a passage from Stewart Burns' To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America*
that portrays the South in the mid 1950's as background to  the Rosa Parks' act of civil disobedience in refusing to move to the back of the bus when asked by the bus driver:
...a that time, the segregated South was a different place from what it is today. Behind the mannerly speech and outward politeness was a heightened tension that was conveyed in the body language, in the eyes, and in any number of dismissive gestures. And beneath it ran an even deeper current, one of latent and explosive violence, even mayhem. Months before, in Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had unintentionally whistled at a white woman shopkeeper (he had a speech defect from polio) and was lynched three nights later by a party led by the woman's husband. He was mutilated, castrated, and shot, his skull crushed beyond recognition. The lynch mob was arrested, tried, and set free. This incident, though highly publicized, was not anomalous; there had been on average one lynching per week in the ninety-year-period since Reconstruction.
As Hawken also reports, on December 5, 1955, the same day as Rosa Parks' court appearance, Dr. King, at a community meeting to decide whether to proceed with the boycott, delivered his first civil rights speech, after only thirty minutes to prepare. The speech, a foreshadowing of his "I have a Dream Speech" later, is worth remembering in light of the recent spate of shootings of black men by white law enforcement officers. The lynching may be gone, the mutilation and castration may be gone, but have the bullets replaced them, leaving the racial bigotry and the power imbalance untouched?
Here is a refresher on the King homily courtesy of Hawken:
 There comes a time. (long pause) There comes a time when people get tired---tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. We had no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we like the way we are being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice. (longer pause) One of the great glories of democracy is the right to protest for right. The white Citizen's Council and the Ku Klux Klan are protesting for the perpetuation of injustice in the community. We are protesting for the birth of justice in the community. Their methods lead to violence and lawlessness. But in our protest there will be no cross burnings. No white person will be taken from his home by a hooded Negro and brutally murdered. There will be no threats and intimidation. Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. We will only say to the people:
"Let your conscience be your guide." Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the word of Jesus echoing across the centuries. "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you." (The audience in on its feet shouting affirmatively.) If we fail to do this our protest will end up as meaningless drama on the stage of history, and its memory will be shrouded with the ugly garments of shame. In spite of the mistreatment that we have confronted, we must not become bitter and end up hating our white brothers. As Booker T. Washington said: "Let no man pull you down so low as to make you hate him." (The audience is cheering and shouting.) If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people--a black people-- who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." That is our challenge an our overwhelming responsibility.**
We wish and earnestly hope that in the current racial unrest, imbalance of power and unwarranted killings of black men and the ensuing protests, the United States  could find a voice that could and would emulate, echo and enhance the rhetoric and the leadership that we heard from Dr. King.

*(San Francisco: Harper, 2004, p.19)
**Paul Hawken, ibid, p 81-2, from Steven Millner, The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence and Career of a Social Movement, in The Walking City, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56, ed. David Garrow (New York: Carlson, 1989), p. 461

Fringe voices from left and right leading U.S. political polls

Trump leads by at least 5% over his nearest opponent in the Republican race for the nomination while, in New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders leads Hillary Clinton 44% to 37%.

Both Trump and Sanders are giving voice to a deep reservoir of anger, resentment and alienation among the ordinary people. Of course, there is the lingering residue from the economic collapse of 2008-9 which burst the bubble of dreams for millions of Americans, and linked to this development is the continuing bitterness directed toward the Wall Street perpetrators of those credit default tricks and the continuing skyrocketing of the Dow and corporate and investor profits. Sanders is the public voice of this anger and disappointment; as he repeats in every speech, “The billionaires cannot have it all!

Trump, the billionaire himself, is also protesting the straight-jacket of political correctness that pervades public discourse. Like a ‘white rapper’ Trump is giving the metaphoric “thumb” or “finger” to that kind of pre-programmed, focus-group-tested political persona. Relying on no ‘sugar-daddy’ (he is his own!) Trump can and does reject all forms of dullness, boredom, headaches and other snoozes he attributes to his opponents, while he “brings energy” and unpredictability and showmanship to the race for the Republican nomination. Fox, of course, loves Trump, given the 24 million viewers who tuned in to their debate last week, featuring Trump and the ‘nine dwarfs’, the mini-dwarfs having been dispatched to a smaller stage, with microphones powered by less electricity, politically and metaphorically.

Hillary, for her part, is mired in an increasingly muddy morass around her use of a private email server while she served as Secretary of State, aided and abetted by her own (and her husband’s) penchant for shaving the truth so finely that many wonder if they don’t actually ‘break it’ with their fine tuning (remember the definition of ‘yes’?). The inevitable consequence of when a message was declared “classified” is lost on many, while to Hillary, if it was not so “classified” at the time of her writing or receiving it, the her hands are clean.

Whether Trump or Sanders, both are voicing the margins of their respective party ideology: trump to the far right, Sanders to the far left.

The issue is becoming, Is the United States giving voice to a bi-polarity that has always existed in its political culture? And if so, what are the implications of this extreme expression on both sides?

To be interesting, even riveting, all drama must seize the sensibilities of the audience, through a portrayal of character, plot, setting and language that grabs the audience by the shirt collar and pushes it up against the wall, in empathic identification with the main characters. In the political theatre that United States politics as polished to an art, perhaps even tarnished to a fault, has become, without the creativity and the nuance of language of the artistic playwright, political aspirants have had to adopt the persona of a Swarzenegger in Terminator, the pose of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in his many iterations, Patton, and Evil Knievel rolled into one. In order to garner the attention of the media serfs, the “act” has to trump the substance, otherwise the substance is never heard, listened to or even acknowledged. It is a truism of politics that candidates must campaign in the primary by pandering to the base, and then revert to the centre when competing for the top prize in the general election. Another truism is that one campaigns poetry and governs in prose.

This campaign is so bereft of poetry that, if any of these candidates actually wins his party’s nomination, each will need an infusion of Obama’s literary talent even to enter the final campaign. Wrestlers, even with a hint of political gravitas, are still wrestlers in a ring of faux flips and phoney throw-downs. And, given the early stages of these two races, phoney and faux are ‘trumping’ substance, garnering media attention and disclosing a vacuity of both aspiration and inspiration. Rhetoric that shouts out “that is the problem” is not rhetoric that either inspires or solves that problem. Muscle, macho-media power, and even charisma are no substitute for nuanced and relevant feasible and credible proposals on policy, governance and making a broken Washington function effectively.

Does the American voting public have such an insatiable appetite for “the show” that they do not even require political nourishment. Are they so determined to die of political diabetes, given a surfeit of “sugar” and “salt” by both sides of the political spectrum. Certainly the media is not above reproach either. They really seem starved for horse races, opinion polls by the nano-second, so co-dependent are they on ratings and so deeply embedded are they in ‘the show’ as well.

In professional sports, when one makes it to the big leagues, one enters the “big show” as a rite of passage. And then the performance is measured and monitored so microscopically as to be the literal definition of one’s career and fortune. However, the analogy with professional sports does not hold in politics. Decisions, even those recommended by presidential candidates will not be enacted, no matter how charismatic the “voice”, unless and until the Congress debates and votes on the measures. At best, only the broad outlines of a prospective policy will waft across the podium from all candidates, stirring as much passion and adrenalin as it is possible to generate. It was a candidate for the Prime Minister’s office in Canada, back in the early 1990’s, Kim Campbell, who uttered a fatal statement that campaigns were no place for serious debate on government policy. She was both right and vilified. Right because her observation is factual; vilified, because no one in the political class can accept that mere sound and fury are the stuff of political campaigns, and not nuanced debates about policy merits. Only broad brush strokes are delivered, and then couched in such narrow caveats that no one has to deliver. Furthermore, issues in both domestic and geopolitics are so complex and so rife with differing points of view, even among those in the same political party, that scorecards of accomplishments, of a leader, and of a representative body are and have to be left to historians.

Furthermore, if it takes sound and fury to get attention, then how is character, that so sought after and so proferred commodity, to be judged. Is getting attention from a public addicted to another reality television show really a valid measure of character? Hardly. Is even a political record (Sanders has one, Trump does not) a determining factor in judging character, possibly. Are the friends one keeps a sign of one’s choice of company and thereby one’s upstanding character. That may have had some legitimacy when we were adolescents but no longer.

The real danger in this melodrama of the larynx is that billions will be expended to buy the air time necessary to make that larynx audible, and that only an emotional ‘gut check’ will be available to voters who are both victim of the money used to purchase the air time, and victimizers of the political process by permitting it to be high-jacked by the wallets and the suits. In the U.S. voters will be choosing the “leader of the free world” as we are so often reminded. And the choice has to be founded on much more than the demonstrated capacity to attract a crowd. That, in itself, is merely another “paint-by-number” program available from millions of good marketers and political consultants. It is highly possible that literally anyone can master the twists and turns of such a program, if s/he is willing to prostrate his/her person to the dictates of the program’s designers. Someone even wrote a book outlining the campaign of Richard M. Nixon as comparable to the marketing of a Coke bottle. The world needs serious, and complex and sensible and articulate and collaborative leaders who can and will do more, much more, than draw big crowds and then feed them political pablum.

This is not yet a third world country, and its political campaign must be a visible and credible manifestation of the high level of sophistication to which the United States has reached in so many fields of human endeavour. What we have seen so far fails the candidates, the voters, the media and the rest of the world. And as one listens to the sound bites in the Canadian election campaign, without the loud decibels (we are Canadian after all!) one is struck by the  simplicity of the offerings as little more than the minimum requirement to “make the nightly news casts”.