Reflections on the Pope's visit to America

Electoral politics in both Canada and the United States have had to peek out from behind the wall-to-wall coverage of the Pope's visit to America this week. And the juxtaposition of the two "theatres" provides some remarkable evidence.
First, the decibel level of the Pope's encounter is decidedly lower than that of the political titans.
Second, the subjects, while overlapping, are framed very differently. In the political arena, the pursuit of power over, hard power, aggression, hubris and victory generates language of winning over opponents. On the Pope's stage, the pursuit of community, acceptance, tolerance, harmony and caring generates language of openness, innocence, interactivity, humility and sharing.
And the "audience response" to the different stages is also remarkable dissimilar.
In the case of the political theatre, many are disenchanted, disillusioned, vindictive, cynical and even hopeless, whereas, in the Pope's lens, magnified onto the televisions' screens the audience is aroused, uplifted, hopeful, charmed and even ecstatic,  as well as touched and blessed. Thousands eagerly attend events just to be in his presence, different from the 'rock-star' that American media uses as it comparative model, but merely to be present in case a touch, a blessing, a selfie, or even a memory is available and possible.
Now to the subjects: capital punishment, global warming and climate change, equality and poverty, geopolitical conflict, the sale of arms, refugees and immigration and tolerance of human differences....these are included in virtually all of the Pope's public statements, but their inclusion is not designed to divide but rather to awaken, and to engage. People of all religious persuasions agree that Pope Francis, attempting to emulate his namesake in caring, including human beings as part of the environment of the universe, the earth, God's gift to each of us, represents the caring and the inspiring and the uplifting and the hopeful side of the spiritual life. Even his now-famous declaration on a jet months ago, when asked about the faith's response to gays, "If one is gay and is searching for God, who am I to judge?" echoes in the minds and hearts of thousands as they gather in the streets, on the White House lawn, in Central Park, and today in Philadelphia.

• Over-ruling his security staff by asking them to bring a "delinquent" little girl who crossed the barrier keeping the crowd at bay from the Pope-mobile to him for a blessing and a kiss,
• mingling with crowds while walking,
• attempting to engage in a digital image with school children,
• asking those gathered at Catholic Charities to sing in a spontaneous gesture of welcome,
• confronting the powerful with words and perceptions and an attitude of compassion and urgency to work together to end war, and to save the planet, and to abolish the death penalty
• committing to an exhausting schedule for a middle-aged human, at 78
• previously empowering negotiations to bridge 50 years of divorce and estrangement between Cuba and the United States and then publicly asking Cubans to open their hearts and minds to faith 
• canonizing a controversial and conflicted and reputedly brutal Franciscan monk, from an order previously in competition with his Jesuit order in Mexico and what is now California
• addressing the United States Congress (the first Pope in history)
• repeatedly asking others to pray for him, a sinner

The ministry of this Jesuit-trained priest in the barrios of Argentina records his commitment to the poor long before his elevation to the papal throne.
Without showing signs of changing the dogmatic Roman Catholic absolutes of:

• no female clergy, 
• no abortion (while offering a year of 'clemency' or forgiveness for those who have had an abortion), 
• no contraception, and
• no gay marriage or clergy
• no divorce (while reducing the number of 'hearings' from two to one for marriage absolution)

and while continuing to address the complications of clergy abuse of young boys, Francis has attempted to emphasize the caritas (charity) virtue of the Roman Catholic church. After his predecessor Benedict whose veins flowed with dry ice, Francis exudes warmth, compassion and humility. He comes to a world starved of hope, connectivity and community, (ironically in the tidal wave of digital technology,) and gluttonous of acquisition of material 'things', addicted to maintaining superiority and terrified of its loss or damage in any and all matters and manners. He takes full advantage of all of the most advanced communication vehicles, strategies and tactics, (operating outside the church's and the Vatican's 'high' walls, for the most part) in his herculean attempt to restore a world in which people mattered, not only the rich and the powerful, but ALL people.
Yesterday, as represented by people attending (and contributing to!!) church, obeying church dogma, staying in all marriages, defying premarital sex and contraception, covering sins with extreme hypocrisy and the resulting neuroses, uncontaminated food, the thaw in the Cold War, the precarious stand-off (buy-off?)  in the Middle East, and the dominance of Christianity is wrapped in liturgical robes, mitres, bishop's staff, beautifully harmonious music, exuberant and sycophantic acolytes cheerleading as talking heads, politician's tears, and presidential welcome.
It is a symphony of mixed and conflicting notes, voices, images and 'rushes' with which no single politician or political party (or even rock star or revolutionary) could reasonably expect to compete.
When the White House, the Congress, Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Madison Square Gardens and even American Airlines are all transformed into ecclesiastical bodies for the drama, eagerly funded by corporate advertisers for 24-7 coverage on MSNBC and CNN, the question of the separation of church and state are, for the moment, muted, even silenced with the consent of the 'governed'.
We are all, for the week, participants in a spiritual spectacle, a political event, a mass movement of human bodies, minds and spirits that would compel the most committed sociologist, and we are left with memories of our perceptions, feelings, and our own questions of the meaning of the events.
And we are also left wondering if there is really any possibility or likelihood that whatever warmth and hope we experienced will flow over the conversations on Monday between Obama and Putin, (who just this week opened a new Moscow mosque that accommodates 10,000 Muslims), or between Merkel and her peers as the EU seeks a resolution of the refugee migration that threatens to drown some of her members, or between Merkel and Assad, should he agree to her invitation to attend talks designed to end the war in Syria.
Was the vote in the United Nations to affirm the 15-year commitment to end world poverty this week a reflection of the capacity of the spirit of the Pope's visit to permeate the General Assembly? Or, for those pragmatists, agnostics and secularists, was it merely an expression of a global fear in the face of such a massive migration of starving and dispossessed human beings from many quarters that would render the current refugee crisis a mere blip on our collective consciousness?
One million, or will it be two million attendees at the Pope's Mass in Philadelphia today, (along with thousands of "Pope-o-potties," courtesy of Paul  Hunter of CBC) could render the political system irrelevant or awaken it to do what it was designed to do, to govern for all people. Or more likely, merely pass as another image in a historical video-museum, one to which our grandchildren will point in their quizzical penetration of why nothing really meaningful transpired as the impact of this drama.

Putin the arsonist as firefighter in Syria?

With hundreds of thousands of refugees overwhelming countries beginning with Jordan and Lebanon near their homelands, and now including Greece, Hungary, Austria, Croatia, and Germany, the analogy of the kids falling over the waterfall with people rushing to pick them out of the water, while a lone investigator climbs to the top of the waterfall to see why they are falling in comes to mind. The world is one again more focussed on the symptoms of the disease than on the root causes of the sickness. Anyone who puts the issue of 'security' ahead of the issue of compassion and rescuing the stream of people, as Canadian Stephen Harper's government continues to do, is resisting both the issue of the mass migration and the root causes.
The war in Syria, the Assad regime, the cynical opportunism of ISIS, and pitiful support from  the west for the Syrian rebels, and now the blatant and opportunistic entry of Russian troops and military supplies including Russian fighter jets into the Syrian conflict in support of Putin's ally, Assad, is the stew in the cauldron boiling over onto the European continent. And just as in Ukraine, the west is apparently suffering from an ambivalence and an uncertainty and a surfeit of anxiety over how to respond. Obama is, as the inheritor of the Bush mess in  both Iraq and Afghanistan, very reluctant to pour American troops into another potential quagmire in either Ukraine or Syria/Iraq. Sending bombing missions into the war theater is analogous to a patient suffering from dementia going under the surgeon's scalpel to amputate a limb, in the vain hope that somehow the surgery will distract from the pain of the dementia.
It is not rocket science to observe that, just as in Ukraine, a vacuum of clarity and political potency from the United States, and from NATO brings the cynical and opportunistic Putin in to fill the void. With his allies Iran and Hezbollah Putin is once again striding onto the world stage taking 'two birds with one shot': he raises the profile of a crippled Russia in the world headlines while poking his finger in the eye of the western powers, including Britain, United States, France, Germany and Canada, without demonstrating a 'fig' of concern for the people of either  eastern Ukraine or of Syria.
Writing in The Telegraph September 18, 2015, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer puts it this way:
Putin says, settle the war with my client in place -- the Assad regime joined by a few "healthy" opposition forces -- and I solve your refugee nightmare. You almost have to admire the cynicism. After all, what's driving the refugees is the war and what's driving the war is Iran and Russia. They provide the materiel, the funds and now, increasingly, the troops that fuel the fighting. The arsonist plays fireman. (In Syria, Vladimir Putin is the arsonist playing fireman by Charles Krauthammer, in The Telegraph, September 18, 2015)
Cynical political and military intrigue of epic proportions requires considerable insight, linked with significant action that pushes back against such intrigue, if the world is not going to continue to offer opportunities for terrorists to expand their barbarity. Unfortunately, while diplomacy may be burning the lines between the Pentagon and the Kremlin, between both U.S. secretaries of Defence and State and their Russian counterparts, ships are unloading in Syria their Russian cargo and Russian military personnel, defying even the intent of those limp and lethargic, impotent and dramatic phone calls.
While the world's super powers make much of their 'campaign to eradicate ISIS', Putin strikes their hubris in the knees, rendering it almost laughable, notwithstanding the slow drip of headlines reporting 'another ISIS leader taken out'.
Just as the European Union seems paralyzed in its attempt to formulate and then execute a strategy to deal with the mass migration crisis pouring along its rail lines, and over its secondary highways, overflowing its refugee tents, and stretching the search and rescue efforts on its seas, so too the western countries seem incapable of reaching some effective strategy, both in design and in execution, to end the Syrian civil war.
Of course, such complicated scenarios, both the refugee crisis, the Syrian conflict, require the best brains, with the best research and the most creative and courageous recommendations, as well as political operatives prepared to step out of their comfort zone and take those steps that would bring Assad, Putin, and the rebels to a ceasefire. Events on the ground, while generating images of horrific conditions, both in the refugee encampments and in the towns and cities of what was Syria, do not and will not portend the negotiating table. Combatants, by definition, especially unrestricted and unimpeded combatants, seek more combat: it is their raison d'etre, their identity, and their are infused with a passion to fight, to recruit more fighters and to destroy their enemy. Assad has just declared, once again, on Russian television, that only the people of Syria can and will drive him from office. With fewer and fewer Syrians still alive and living in their homeland, soon the prospect of such a political decision will involve only Assad's family voting on the question.
American boots on the ground, accompanied by British and French and German troops on the ground, seems to have been ruled out, the argument for restraint apparently being that the countries indigenous to the Middle East have to solve the problem. And while restraint in the deployment of military power, including soldiers on the ground, has to be commended, as a general principle, and while sanctions are at best a modest instrument to change the minds of political leaders like Assad, Putin and the Ayatollah in Iran, Putin's brash move into the Syrian conflict cannot and must not be considered and met with the same indifference from the world's major powers that followed his takeover in Crimea and military incursion into eastern Ukraine, on the faint pretext that those provinces are still more attached to Russia than to Kiev.
When the arsonist becomes the potential firefighter, we all know that the security and balance and compliance with international law on which the world depends, have broken down and require a sustained and compelling response.
The military bravado that characterizes the Republican debates for the White House is only one overt attempt to fill the vacuum that seems to characterize the establishment silence from the political capitals of the developed world. Painting Obama, just as they did Carter, as weak and therefore incompetent, is a predictable component of such rhetoric. Putin knows that he will not face a military response in either Ukraine or in Syria, from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany or Canada, (although Harper would die for an opportunity to punch above Canada's weight in the middle of an election campaign he seems to be losing).
However, Obama, in not facing another election, and in not seeking to leave the Democratic Party's reputation on national security and in seeking and finding resolution to serious world problems (as he has successfully done with the Iran nuclear negotiations) has more room to move than he would have had in the first term. He needs to meet directly with Putin when he visits the United Nations, and bring the Russian faux-czar to his knees before the knees of the west are broken by this self-appointed tyrant. Permitting Putin along with his henchmen in Hezbollah and Iran to become the leaders in the fight against ISIS is not acceptable. And yet, the evidence of successful attempts to bring down the terrorist cells is still missing. Another vacuum of leadership, strategy, tactics and collaboration.
Too many people are suffering under the oppression of military conflict, starvation, displacement, and the removal of hope from their lives for what end? At some point, just as the image of the little boy dead on the beach in Turkey galvanized the world's opinion into action on refugees, so too, perhaps the image of a Russian fighter jet taking out an American fighter jet over Syria will galvanize world opinion into de-escalating initiatives to bring the temperature of world tensions down below the level of more military action.
One would hope that the mere announcement of Putin's intervention into Syria would galvanize the world into taking action to stop him in this and in any other incursions he may contemplate. And, it would seem that since military action is off the table, and sanctions produce only modest and minimal impact, the world will have to find alternative sticks and carrots to "beat him with".
The arsonist as firefighter is a mixed metaphor "up with which the world cannot put"!

Can this sick planet find a circle of care?

 There is a strong series of currents that are pushing back against the tide of corporatism in which the world has been engulfed for more than a decade.
How business operates, in a playing field of their own making, (through the removal of regulations, controls and legitimate limits by the politicians they fund) is akin to the law of the jungle, ‘everyone for himself and may the strongest only win.’

In words, on a page, that last series of words seems quite benign, devoid of blood, and certainly devoid of mortal confusion. We all agree, it seems, that competition in the marketplace is a given, even a requisite for the market to operate freely. And we have watched as the former restrictions and controls on Wall Street have been lifted and how the financial services sector has plunged the world economy into the deepest depression since 1929. And while the world’s media covered the collapse, the conditions for another massive sell-off, accompanied by a debt-recall by China on all those U.S. Treasury Bills, continues to hang over our heads.

It is not only the Greek economy that has been, and continues to be, propped up with money from outside the country. For more than a decade, the United States has been borrowing money from the Chinese government, while at the same time depending on the infusion of “quantitative easing” from the Federal Reserve, only now being slowed. A century ago, the American/European economies dominated in the world, with a lagging ‘developing world’ or less charitably, a ‘third world’ accounting for a small portion of economic activity.  Today, however, we see a reversal of that equation, with both Europe and America accounting for less than half the world’s economic activity, and the former ‘developing world’ moving to the forefront.

Simultaneously, the amassing of wealth in the hands of a small few has proceeded unimpeded for decades, as these hedge fund managers rode a tide of globalization, mergers and mega-mergers across the globe. Into this scene enter a large group of risk-taking, ambitious, and highly dangerous operators who, while growing rich and now demanding respect because they are rich, could care less about rules, regulations and playing by those rules. Money and the hands that own and control it will find opportunities to grow whether or not there are rules and regulations that preserve the public good, and whether or not there are states which have eliminated the kind of corruption we have been reading about for decades in developing countries.  Ambition, greed, risk-taking that simply ignores or bribes anyone or any government attempting to reign it in, the extraction of resources and the running free of all of these unleashed forces make a cocktail unfit for the faint of heart. Link all of those factors to a desperate masculinity (and most hedge-fund managers, money brokers, and high-end investors are still masculine) and we are witnessing an growing potential for a series of events that stretch the definition of “market correction” beyond its bounds. A brief predictive diagnosis might include:

·       An implosion of credit,

·       A rise of political impotence,

·       thuggery and corruption on both the open market and the black market that is fueled by decades of a kind of ‘wild west’ playing field,

·       a deep internet which even the designers cannot penetrate, where the thugs deal with impunity

·       inject a successfully operating North Korean nuclear reactor and nuclear weapons,

·       a devolving Middle East,

·       a large shot of  terrorism from Moscow in Ukraine,

·        militarization of China and Japan,

·       booming economies in India and China,

·       western governments that are pre-occupied with ISIS and it many faces,

·       a mass migration of displaced and dispossessed fighting for their lives,

·       dictators like Assad, Putin, and the Ayatollah of Iran, and Kim Jung Un....

·       and a United Nations that has the power merely to persuade, without either an army or a police unless and until members countries consent,

and while the disease might not have a name or a preventive or curative prescription, it also overlays an body politic whose environment has plunged into suffocation, temperatures that are off the thermometer and political indifference that defies comprehension.

In the hospitals, something known as a “circle of care” has emerged, linking all care-givers of a specific patient in a ‘need to know’ bond, that effectively and ethically opens all practitioners to information necessary for the full diagnosis and treatment plan for that patient. Clearly, if the global political economic social cultural and religious unity were a single patient (and for this argument we are making that analogy) then a circle of care would have to involve all leaders and all citizens, and it would also depend upon a communication industry that was not muzzled by any power brokers, financial agents, advertisers, investors or any other colluding conspirators. When the banks, the investment community and the political operatives are all drinking the same koolaid from the same shared cup, there is no chance for the patient (the global society) to survive without serious changes.

·       Divesting all television, internet media corporations  and snail mail of private money, (the opposite direction the Harper Conservatives want to take the CBC), and

·        investing a much greater portion of national budgets in education in order to guarantee all young people a full and relevant education (robbing from the military),

·       creating world food programs supported by tax levies from all wealthy nations that would through monitoring refuse to permit starvation on all continents,

·       opening the vault of secret information that would yield the account names of all squirreled money in Swiss or other bank accounts, thereby requiring all account holders to pay their fair share of taxes in the country of their head offices or the residence of their CEO’s,

·       securing the signature of all wealthy nations to the International Criminal
Court, Interpol, an international Secret Service that would not be beholden to a national government but to the United Nations

·       generating an empowered negotiating/mediating/arbitrating agency under the United Nations, supported by all member states, that would and could  bring warring parties, including ISIS, Assad, North Korea, Japan, China, Putin, to a table for full disclosure, and an agreed procedure for pre-empting military conflict, and for foreclosing such conflicts as soon after they have begun as is feasible

·       securing the signatures of all developed and developing nations to a global currency from which no nation would depart, without suffering compelling sanctions

·       negotiating an arms limitation cap on all nations that would have as its long-term goal, the complete elimination of all nuclear, chemical, biological and cyber weapons, with open and accessible international sanctions for crossing this red line protecting humanity

·       negotiating a global cap to the emission of carbon dioxide emissions, including a series of punitive measures that would compel compliance, based on a full disclosure of the destruction already wreaked on the eco-systems of the planet

·       re-educating the world’s public on the required limits to private finance and corporate profits, including a global commitment to cap executive compensation.....

These are just a few of the many initiatives that our collective future needs and expects if we are to relieve the pressures of economic, military, and hegemonic abuse of power...and the west is clearly no immune from such abuse both as victim and as abuser. There is no country, no political party and no political leader that can claim immunity or impunity; none of us is free from significant responsibility for both over actions and for omissions to stop decision, actions and failures to act on which we all, and especially our grandchildren depend.

Of course, these ideas are idealistic, even illusory; nevertheless, there is a growing awareness and consciousness that the world is headed in the wrong direction and that only through concerted and sustained argument and action in opposition to the many threats (also opportunities, if we are open to that notion). They will be scorned with phrases like “what is this writer smoking?” in order to discredit the source. They will be laughed off as immature, naive, impractical and apocalyptic and therefore worthless.

However, we can no longer depend on political, institutional, corporate or religious leaders to ‘carry the ball’ on our behalf. They are all operating from a premise that their job, their reputations and their futures depend on their obsession over micro-issues, while letting the macro issues wither from inattention on the vine of collective consciousness.

This is a time in human history when the world has become a ‘village’ and every member within that village has a voice, a brain and a conscience....all of which are desperately needed in order to set a global agenda of both policies and processes to achieve those policies.

Nationalism, parochialism, religious differences, linguistic and cultural differences....these all have to give way to common, determined and sustained initiatives to preserve the potential lives of our grandchildren....and while our differences may and indeed will enrich our collective decisions, they must not be permitted to block the process. And our shared history  books will have to include those chapters in each people’s story that embarrass, that enrage and shame the people. Stories about secrets, national, familial, communal, ecclesial, from all theatres of our lives will have to be exhumed from the vaults of our locked memories. Stories that point fingers, accompanied by stories that point fingers will have to find the light of day and the drum beat of the keypads, the sound waves of the microphones and the images generated by the cameras.

And this release must not be analogous to the current libellous and ascerbic bullying that pervades the internet. Telling the truth, ironically, is not something to be feared. In fact, the very opposite is true. We are in most danger when we are in denial or in simple ignorance of the full complexities of a situation. And those with titles of power can no longer be permitted to determine what information is released to the public. That decision rests with each citizen, as does the responsibility  for its release, taking extreme care to tell only the truth, nothing but the truth so help us all, God.

And then, today, September 16 we find the following encouraging report in the Toronto Star:

The “leap manifesto,” signed by more than 100 actors, musicians, labour unions, aboriginal leaders, environmentalists and other activists, aims to pressure the next federal government to wean Canada entirely off fossil fuels in as little as 35 years and, in the process, upend the capitalist system on which the economy is based.

The drivers of the manifesto are best-selling author Naomi Klein and her husband Avi Lewis. It echoes the theme of Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which was turned into a documentary of the same name, directed by Lewis.

Tuesday’s release of the manifesto coincides with the debut of the documentary over the weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The dramatic transformation envisioned in the manifesto is in stark contrast to the pragmatic platform Mulcair is offering: balanced budgets, an openness to free trade deals, sustainable development of Alberta’s oilsands, no tax hikes except for a “slight and graduated” increase in the corporate tax rate.

Yet among the celebrity signatories are a number of prominent NDP supporters, including former Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis, father of Avi, who gave a rousing introduction for Mulcair at a campaign event in Toronto last month.

Others signatories who’ve declared their NDP sympathies include pop duo Tegan and Sara, singer-songwriter Leslie Feist, Canadian Labour Congress president Hassan Yussuf and Paul Moist, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Stephen Lewis doesn’t see his support for Mulcair as inconsistent with the manifesto, which he notes is also signed by people from other parties, including Roy McMurtry, a former Ontario chief justice and one-time provincial Conservative cabinet minister.

“For the New Democrats, it’s an extension of the kinds of things they’ve been talking about,” Lewis said in an interview.

“When Tom Mulcair talks about climate change and the importance of dealing with global warming in Canada and internationally, this is an extension — admittedly a dramatic and vivid extension — of the kinds of things that many of us yearn for.”

Starting with the premise that Canada’s record on climate change is “a crime against humanity’s future,” the manifesto argues the country needs to make the leap to getting 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable resources within 20 years and weaning itself entirely off fossil fuels by 2050.

This means adopting a new “iron law” of energy development: “If you wouldn’t want it in your backyard, then it doesn’t belong in anyone’s backyard,” to be applied equally to pipelines, fracking, increased oil tanker traffic and Canadian-owned mining projects abroad.

In the process, the manifesto envisions a transformation of the entire capitalist system into a Utopia in which the economy is “in balance with the earth’s limits,” jobs “are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality,” agriculture is “far more localized and ecologically based,” and low-carbon sectors of the economy, like caregiving, teaching, social work, the arts and public-interest media, flourish.

The signatories declare their belief in “energy democracy,” in which energy sources are collectively controlled by communities, rather than “profit-gouging” private companies.

They call for an end to “all corporate trade deals” that interfere with attempts to build local economies and regulate corporations.

In contrast to Mulcair’s insistence that running deficits puts an unfair economic burden on future generations, the signatories declare that “austerity — which has systematically attacked low-carbon sectors like education and health care, while starving public transit and forcing reckless energy privatizations — is a fossilized form of thinking that has become a threat to life on earth.”

The signatories assert that the money to pay for the transformation they envision is readily available. All it requires is for the federal government to end fossil fuel subsidies, cut military spending and impose financial transaction taxes, increased resource royalties and higher income taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

In Calgary on Tuesday night, Mulcair said the New Democrats welcome the ideas contained in the manifesto.

“I do understand the profound desire for change reflected in that document,” he said.

“We’ve talked about a cap and trade system, that is our policy, that’s what we will be doing.”

“Before the election, we are going to tell Canadians what we are going to do and once we are elected, we are actually going to do it, it has never been tried,” Mulcair said.

Other manifesto signatories include actors Ellen Page, Rachel McAdams, Sarah Polley, Pamela Anderson and Donald Sutherland, singers Bruce Cockburn, Neil Young, Gord Downie, Sarah Harmer and Leonard Cohen, novelists Michael Ondaatje and Joseph Boyden, environmentalist David Suzuki, anti-free trade activist Maude Barlow, artist Robert Bateman and film director Patricia Rozema. ( Prominent NDPers back manifesto calling for overhaul of capitalist economy by Joan Bryden, Canadian Press)

Can the NDP offer a couple of bold ideas for the Canadian imagination as well as an guarantee of dependability?

Nothing says “I’m different than Harper and the Conservatives” more than Tom Mulcair’s unequivocal declaration last night on CBC that, if elected, a New Democratic Government will immediately bring all Canadian troops home from Iraq and Syria.

Committing to ending the bombing, and to working toward a negotiated settlement of the civil war in Syria and stability in Iraq, contrary to the conventional wisdom of many western countries, will either elect the New Democratic leader  Prime Minister, or render him a footnote in history. Pledges to make Canada a more fair and just society could be washed away if the Canadian public rejects his promise to withdraw from military action in the Middle East.

“Restoring Canada’s place on the world stage,” as Mulcair sees it, is not only dependent on his leading government action on the global issue of climate change and global warming as he has promised. It also depends on taking positions consistent with decisions like the one made by then Prime Minister Jean Chretien to stay out of the 2003 war on Iraq misconceived and miscalculated and premised as it was on faulty intelligence and George W. Bush’s machismo administration.

October 19, the date of the Canadian election, could well spell the termination of the Harper government and the tenure of its leader, Stephen Harper. Certainly not a warm and fuzzy personality, dubbed a control freak, and even acknowledging “I am not perfect” in his CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge, Harper has put a large footprint on the government in Ottawa: emphasizing stiff sentences, more prisons, mandatory sentences, friction even fractiousness with First Nations, separation from the provincial and territory leaders, gutting environmental protections, turning a deaf ear to calls for an open door for additional refugees from Syria and Iraq and other African countries, lower taxes for oil and gas corporations, promotion of all pipe lines on both north and south sides of the 49^th parallel, and then boutique tax cuts for targeted ‘conservative’ (wealthy) voters who might seek piano or ballet lessons for their children.

Mulcair, while fervently nudging his party to the centre of the political spectrum to moderate public opinion that the party is too radical, underlining party history as provincial governments with the best “balanced budget record”, and being extremely careful not to express either radical opinions or to use inflamed language, is continuing to monitor a slight lead in most opinion polls, but not yet enough to assure a majority government. Meanwhile, his opposition opponent, Liberal Justin Trudeau, manages to garner headlines for social policy announcements like the one he delivered yesterday pouring millions into public housing and beginning the effort to end homelessness in Canada.

Mulcair will have to demonstrate more “expansive” and resonating ideas like his $15/day day care over the remaining five weeks of the campaign if he is to be permitted the keys to 24 Sussex on October 20. Prisoner rehabilitation, a significant level of federal support for post-secondary education through tuition fee cuts, a provincial-federal conference on health care that seeks to inaugurate a pharmacare inclusion, like the one announced by Green Party leader Elizabeth May yesterday, and a commitment to a specific reduction in carbon emissions, one that both corporate and international monitoring agencies can applaud and uphold, a restoration to the role of parliamentarians, moving power out of the PMO and Cabinet, without bruising their legitimate responsibility to lead, and putting federal resources into research into negotiating and mediation towards a global commitment to a world less reliant on hard power....these are some of the potential layers in a vision that would elevate the NDP to a party committed to both big ideas and effective and efficient governance.

Everyone agrees that this is a pivotal election, if the legacy of the Harper years are to be moderated, if not completely reversed. The economy is not the only issue for government, and it is supposed to be the servant and not the master of government policy. The Canadian public is watching and waiting, not for a knock-out blow that will render Harper unconscious on the mat, but for a significant proposal to raise  both our hopes and our aspirations, beyond what Mulcair has so far offered.

We know the party and its leader are both capable, and we also know the calendar is ‘ticking’....and we will be watching in anticipation for the final and convincing call to put Mulcair into the Prime Minister’s residence.

Cognitive Distortions 101

In their outstanding and shocking piece in The Atlantic entitled "The Coddling of the American Mind," Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt draw information from two books:
1) David D. Burns, Feeling Good
2) Robert L. Leahy, Stephen J.F. Holland and Lata K. McGinn, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders
From the latter work, they detail what they call Common Cognitive Distortions,  those habit of thought, perception and attitude that impose a degree of self-sabotage on each of us. This is part of their initiative to spread what they recommend as a partial remediation for the politically correct epidemic on American university and college campuses to 'protect' students from words, ideas, or even facts or theories that would cause them emotional anguish. Lukianoff and Haidt advocate for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy exposure for college freshmen, as part of the remedy for the tragic malaise that threatens to distort the perception of reality that graduate will face when they enter the workplace.
Here is a brief list of those Cognitive Distortions: (Dear Reader, you can easily find your own patterns from among the list....and if and when you do, you can name the distortion you are employing and begin the process of reducing its impact on your life, and on those in your circle.)
1. Mind Reading: You assume that you know what people think, without having evidence of their thoughts. "He thinks I am a loser."
2. Fortune-telling: You predict the future negatively: things will get worse or there is danger ahead.
"I'll fail that exam;" or "I won't get that job."
3. Catastrophizing: You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful that you won't be able to stand it. "It would be terrible if I failed."
4. Labelling: You assign global negative traits to yourself and to others. "I'm undesireable" or "he's a rotten person."
5. Discounting positives: You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. "Those successes were easy so they don't matter."
6. Negative Filtering: You focus almost exclusively on the negative and seldom notice the positives. "Look at all the people who don't like me."
7. Overgeneralizing: You perceive a pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. "This generally happens to me. I seem to fail a lot of things.
8. Dichotomous thinking: You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. "I get rejected by everyone;" or "It was a complete waste of time."
9. Blaming: You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings and refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. "My parents caused all my problems."
10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about "what if" something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. "Yeah, but what if I get anxious? or What if I can't catch my breath?"
11. Emotional reasoning: You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. "I feel depressed; therefore my marriage is not working out."
12. Inability to disconfirm: You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought, I'm unloveable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently your thought cannot be refuted. "That's not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors."
Some of these "distortions" were once considered "projections" or "rationalizations" or "assumptions" (making an "ass" out of you and me)....so they are really a more detailed, and sophisticated version of these other categories. Imagine, for a moment, a novelist or poet or playwright having to scrub all conversations leaving them clean of cognitive distortions: there would be very little emotional conflict and the audience would, at least for the first century of such presentations, think they were attending a conditioning laboratory designed to remove all distortions.
Yet, when we reflectively examine the conversations of our recent past, we can all recall comments that fall into one or more of the above distortions, without our even being aware of the fact. Of course, taking responsibility for our lives, including for the perceptions, attitudes, and concept of reality we embrace is solely on our shoulders, and not on the shoulders of any other person. Being persons in many interactive situations, and being hard wired as social beings, we are deeply embedded in many of these distortions both directly and indirectly (through others). Imagine two things:
first, the role the churches play in the development of these distortions in our lives and
second, the difference a conscious awareness and acceptance of responsibility for naming and changing the language on both sides of all contract negotiations from distortion to clear reality, including those at the diplomatic table, would make.
First, the religious influence on our distortions:
"If you are not saved, you will go to Hell!" Here we see fortune telling, catastrophizing, negative filtering, dichotomous thinking, blaming, what if?, emotional reasoning (manipulation by fear)....
and there is not a person in the western world who has not heard such statements from "responsible" clerics, without facing any challenge from the parishioner.
"If you do not obey God's word, you will be sentenced to a life in Hell (or Purgatory)"...similarly, fear is deployed as manipulator to induce some form of spiritual transformation.
"If you are not saved when Jesus returns, you will suffer eternal damnation." Talk about catastrophizing through fear and anxiety for the purpose of serving the goals of the institutional church, to grow the numbers and the dollars in the coffers.
The net effect of such distortions, dangerously, is to infantilize the other, to render the other so fearful and so incapacitated that a personal reflective decision about one's spiritual life becomes nearly impossible. Further, these distortions contribute to the generation of a culture in which evidential truths are subordinated to various forms of emotional manipulation.
In political vernacular, blaming the other, labelling, fortune-telling, mind-reading, discounting positives, overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, what if? and inability to disconfirm... all find their place both in headline copy and in many of the fine print stories that dominate political campaigns, political debates, political essays and even political theory.
Critical thought, the sine qua non of a democracy, cannot and will not even reach the 50% level of discourse so long as the distortions continue with full impunity and immunity. What could happen instead, is for reporters to ask, following an obvious distortion not only of the facts and figures but of the emotional manipulations, "Sir/Madam, would you agree that your last statement is a cognitive distortion?"
Imagine Donald Trump huffing and puffing that such a question is so nasty that the hypothetical reporter is immediately ushered from the room. Think for a moment, too, if all homilies in all parishes were accompanied by similar questions from the people in the pews, when the clergy veered into cognitive distortions in order to demonstrate his/her theological superiority.
And then, to bring the issue closer to home, imagine how a married couple could and would help and enrich their intimate conversations after having agreed to mention gently the observation of a cognitive distortion when it shows its face in those conversations.
We are all going to need to claim responsibility for our cognitive distortions if we are to come to a place where human relations are emptied of racial bias, emotional bullying, power-tripping, and it is clear that a campaign exposing microaggressions and trigger warnings will only suck all the oxygen out of the room, including the lecture rooms on all American campuses, and other campuses whose leaders are so frightened by the possibility of offending their thin-skinned, fragile students.
Also, to focus on the fine print of each and every conversation will also deflect and even dispose of thoughts of a much bigger picture that includes a premise of a bountiful potential to all human lives, in spite of the bumps and  bruises that are an inevitable component to all human exchanges.
We all have to ward against being sucked into a black hole of the addiction of judging all others, rather than in a gentle reflective, critical self-examination, putting the emphasis where it belongs: in our own self-directed life.

Lawrence Lessig's presidential bid: historic and/or quixotic?

In theology, there is a difference made between theory and praxis (practice, or process). The former evokes notions of 'content' or 'meat' or 'substance' or 'ideology' or even 'dogma'. The latter speaks to things the 'how' or 'method' or 'approach' or even 'plan'. In political language, the duality would be posed using words like "policy" versus "how to execute" the plan, how to pay for it, which alternatives would trump others?
We as observers/participants vacillate between reflections on 'theory' and reflections on praxis. In fact, marketers also need to focus on the quality of the "product" while deploying the techniques of how to make the product "sell" using whatever words, images, underlying themes, background music, voice-overs, and pyrotechnics they believe will appeal to the target market audience. The classroom is another venue for the delivery of both "curriculum content" (the terms of the peace treaty, or the formula for the equation, or the symbols of the poem etc.) and methodology: essay, term test, lecture, group report, seminar, field project, research report, oral history, examination, public speeches, laboratory experiment and report, case study, creative expression through various media.
We make decisions about the "messenger" and the "message" and often differentiate between the two, balancing our opinion on observations on each facet of the "message".
Much has been written on the theories of communication, including the Marshall McLuhan aphorism, "the medium is the message," in his attempt to compare the television and radio media as to their "heat" or their "cool" and their congruence with specific personalities. Pierre Elliot Trudeau, for example, was a 'perfect' messenger for the television medium, as compared with his Progressive Conservative leader, Robert Stanfield. Trudeau's cool easily trumped Stanfield's frumpy, almost grandfatherly warmth. Policy alternatives, for example, their respective positions on wage and price controls, articulated as opposites in their campaigns, were merged in history, when Trudeau did implement them, having promised not to.
In the United States, the image of Donald Trump, the cowboy/quick-draw-McGraw/outrider brand huckster's literally swamps whatever policy 'content' he might actually implement, should he (heaven forbid!) win the White House in November 2016. Similarly, Hillary Clinton's mishandling of her emails both while serving as Secretary of State, and subsequently, daily flushes any policy statements she makes into the drain of oblivion. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is a messenger of a content/policy variety, notwithstanding his 73 years, and drawing crowds that vastly outnumber Clinton's. His refrain, "The billionaires cannot have it all!" is almost pure content, content that resonates with a large segment of the American electorate.
There is a new Democratic candidate for the American presidency who, having just reached the minimum requirement of securing $1 million in campaign contributions, is a laser as a messenger of political process which, according to his commitment, when completed will bring about his immediate resignation, leaving the presidency to his Vice-president. A Law professor from Harvard Law School, Lawrence (Larry) Lessig, spoke this morning to George Stephanopolous on ABC's This Week: “I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. "We have to recognize -- we have a government that does not work. The stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work.”

If elected, he says he will be the first “referendum president,” promising to serve only as long as it takes to pass his Citizens Equality Act of 2017 -- a bill aimed at reforming campaign finance, voting rights, and Congressional representation. Once the bill is passed, Lessig said he would then step down, handing over the reins to his vice president. (From ABC website, September 6, 2015)

How politics works, if it does, is equally as important as which policies are embedded in the laws written and passed by legislators. If Lessig is right that there is indeed an "elephant" in the room, and his diagnosis of the identity of that elephant is accurate, that politicians are pawns of the 400 families who currently fund campaigns in the United States, that politicians jerry-mander electoral districts rending the process completely inverse to the intentions of democracy whereby voters are to select their representatives, dominating and controlling the process, and that voting rights are being denied to millions of voters, then people may have to express their views on his candidacy. Should he mount a public opinion of 1%, he would also open the gate currently excluding him from presidential debates.

Clearly, the person Lessig selects as his running Vice Presidential candidate becomes such a significant choice, that all voters would know that that person would become president as soon as the Citizens Equality Act of 2017 were passed. While voting, electors would also know that Lessig is not a candidate dependent on his charisma (he has almost none!), nor on his ancillary policy options (he is a strong Democrat who admires the current president), nor on his military record (he does not appear to have one), nor on his capacity to negotiate with world leaders ( he has no intention to engage those leaders), since, if he were elected he would have secured a highly specific mandate, and a highly restricted mandate, but a mandate nevertheless that attempts to solve what he concludes is the monumental paralysis in the American political process, rending ordinary citizens powerless in the current process.

Some have dubbed him the "one-week" president, an obvious satire on the premise of his candidacy.

Some will dismiss him as irrelevant, especially in a market-driven, capitalist, image-branding political culture that feeds almost voraciously on style over substance, on the macho-prize-fighter image that Trump presents as the grease he hopes to smooth his path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The likelihood of his capturing the nomination as the candidate of the Democratic Party for president is so remote as to be considered laughable, at this point. The likelihood of his securing adequate funds to mount a campaign as an independent candidate is even more remote.

Nevertheless, Lawrence Lessig offers the American voter such a unique and specialized political promise, (he would consider it the solution) that he will be eventually dubbed the "boutique" presidential candidate. If he is able to transform that moniker to Mercedes Benz, or to BMW, or even better to Masserati or Ferrari, or perhaps to the political version of the "family doctor" who actually does House Calls (the House being both the White House and the Congress), then his candidacy will take on a significance even he might not have envisioned.

We know already that this is the political season of the "outsider" and Lessig clearly fits that definition. Evidence of the current popularity of the "outsider" is clear in the latest polls in the Republican party race: Trump at 24% with newcomer and never elected Dr. Ben Carson (neurosurgeon) at 12%...double the rating for the next candidate, Jeb Bush.

Lessig is unique, possibly historic, in the two century-long race for the presidency. Whether he is merely quixotic, or a footnote in American presidential history, will be determined by the potential additional to an army of financial contributors, and then an even larger army of primary voters.

He has the focus of a political rifle, in a world that demands a shotgun approach, and an inevitable probing into the personal life of all candidates that would render an F.B.I. investigation elementary.

Does Lessig have the stamina, the funds, the popular support and the marketing strategy to make the kind of history he believes firmly the country desperately needs?

We will be watching along with millions of American voters.

 

 

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.