The erosion of human dignity in a transactional, narcisstic culture

But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. ….Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced  back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytic couch. (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

Usefulness, achievement nihilism and commodification….turning all encounters into a buyer-seller exchange and teaching that purpose can be achieved through the acquisition of money and all that money buys….these are the traits of a culture mired in its own self-sabotage. None of this implies, infers, nor even connotes human dignity*. And there is no guarantee of one’s dignity as a concomitant of “achievement” especially if it is a dignity defined by “roles” and role playing.

(While nihilism may have been prominent on many university campuses when Frankl was writing, there is considerable evidence that, as they morphed into ‘training schools’ preparing their students for some job with varying levels of  skill demands, that nihilism has also morphed into an even more empty quality, “the pursuit of personal wealth and power.)

I first learned about dignity, although at the time I would not even have know the word, from watching my father, a hardware store manager (not owner!) who simply lived his life and his role as one, honouring all others, engaging all others on their terms, and demonstration a degree of patience, tolerance and respect beyond what most would consider normal, and thereby earning the warranted honour and respect of everyone who met and knew him.

In Canada, as in other countries, an introduction to a person is almost always accompanied by the cliché question, “What do you do?” as if the knowledge of this information is the essential key to getting to know that person. And, after that, the stereotyping, and the pigeon-holing, and the conscious and even the unconscious comparisons start between that person and every other person we know we wears that vocational hat. A person in the military or in law enforcement will too often be dubbed as authoritarian, while a clergy will be painted as dull, boring, dumb and passive, and possibly too compassionate, while a teacher will be depicted as nit-picking, micro-managing, controlling and dominant. A doctor suffers from the incurable stereotype of ambitious and rich, while not necessarily being all that interested in helping heal others.  A lawyer, sadly, is so disfigured into the ambitious, ambulance-chasing, social-climber who represents the dramatic actor of the society, given the need to perform before the judge and jury.

While none of these stereotypes are totally false, neither are they complete. They are, rather, our reduction and simplification of the “role” of the model with which we are most familiar, a familiarity gleaned from the sometimes deliberate and often off-hand remarks of our parents, neighbours, teachers, coaches and friends. To a certain extent, their world is almost imperceptibly passed along to us, much as a cold virus would be, without our being conscious of the ingestion. Occasionally, there will be an example of a “role” in the community that nearly all the people will consider to be the antithesis of the stereotype. There is no community that is  immune to the caricatures, stick people, black sheep and even tempermental individuals who wear the costumes and play the part of these “achievers.”

There is, however, a kind of security in operating inside the professional “boundaries” of the roles, expectations that are shared with most communities, with the bodies licensing the practitioners, and the traditions already established by the previous personnel who each contributed to the culture of the role. Of course, over time, there will be the inevitable shifts sometime mere nuances, that move the expectations, the conventions and the rules in each role. Security, however, is no substitute for dignity; in fact, the kind of security that effective “role playing” provides may well impede, repress or even obliterate the pursuit of one’s dignity.

However, there is a significant danger in the potential for ordinary citizens to drape their pictures of a ‘good’ practitioner in any of the respective roles, projecting his or her unique model of either excellence or its opposite. And that is certainly not the only danger.

Another danger is the real potential for individuals themselves, once having donned the “role,” to hide behind its stereotype, and to shrink from coming “out” with opinions for which the community might retaliate. If there is not a specific financial loss for taking a public stance on a specific public policy issue, there could well be significant and negative consequences for the “reputation” of the outspoken practitioner. In addition, the circle of influence in which s/he lives and operates will rarely get to know the person hidden under the mask of the role.

Sometimes the role might even be a “husband” or “wife” or “neighbour” who guards his privacy even from his or her closest family and friends. And there is an inevitable and rarely dissipated estrangement from people, mothers, fathers, sons daughters, sisters, brothers, cousins, nephews, nieces when the role is all the rest of the world is permitted to see, and when the individual substitutes the role for “showing up”…as the full, authentic, unguarded and vulnerable person he or she really is.

After spending a day of ‘orientation’ to the business school in a renowned Canadian university, I commented to one of the university’s retired professors, “There is a lot of social engineering going on on that campus.” He confirmed the observation, underlining his words with, “especially in the business school.”

In fact, so dangerous is this strippng of the dignity of the individual that many people are either unable or unwilling to distinguish their mask from their ego. And to a large extent, the world will let them be, in the suffocation of their own cocoon, whether that cocoon is conscious and deliberate or unconscious and unknown.

We all know people like this, from the simply experience of being with them and looking into their eyes, and seeing not the far-off gaze of one who is preoccupied with an important question, but the vacant and empty look of eyes that have almost literally glazed over, as a kind of contrived armour, keeping the world at bay.

Dignity, on the other hand, involves a state of genuine comfort in one’s own skin, a sense of who we are as a human being, sentient, curious, engaged, expressing the real emotions of the moment, regardless of their impact on the situation and cognizant of the full presence of each other person in the room, not merely their role, or their mask, or even the reductions bandied about among colleagues. The role is a kind of entrapment, often precluding change, when we all know that we are changing each and every day, whether anyone notices or not, and whether or not even we make note of the changes.

Fathers often become mere “cheques” in the family, just another way of being ghosted by the rest of the family, especially if the father does not protest. Mothers, too, are often reduced to the kind of care-givers they were obliged to be when their children were in diapers, long after those same children have graduated from grad school.

There are those among you, dear readers, who will vigorously defend the generation of stereotypes, “role models” for the younger generation, as a protector and guarantor of social stability, law and order and a general attitude of respect for the traditions of a shared past. And while there is merit in that observation, when the individuals who break out of the stereotypes, who re-draw the expectations of those stereotypes, who cannot be ‘contained’ within the boundaries of those boxes of the expectations of others, who are the most interesting and the most challenging and the most “alive”. And if and when those “outcasts” are trashed, demeaned and alienated from the “professions” and the main street, the culture grows a little more sterile.

And when the culture grows a little more sterile, then governments are more able and more likely to “snow” their citizens, without worry of public uprising or protest. The culture is predicated on the achievement of the bottom line, after a complicit race to the “bottom” in which everything, everyone and every encounter has a price tag. In such a culture, human beings, with dignity, rarely participate in encounters and exchanges with authenticity and respect and dignity, that dignity that is dependent on each individual having his or her own, and having that dignity honoured and respected as a cultural norm.

And there are so many ways in which this transactional foundation of the culture play out. Most obvious is the total predatory attitude to women incarnated by the Republican candidate for president. And while that may be one of the more heinous dangers, there are others:

·      the hundreds of bullets fired into the bodies and the heads of innocent young men, and

·      the hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women, and

·      the boiled water advisories on literally hundreds of First Nations reserves, and

·      the unemployment and underemployment of hundreds of thousands of mostly men, and

·      the growing lines at food banks and shelters for the homeless and

·      the failure of the “great powers” to take legitimate responsibility for their complicity and their brutality in places like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine and

·      the sell-out of the main street media in treating Trump as a “ratings magnet” (as well as an ISIL recruitment magnet) for their own self-aggrandizement and

·      the abdication of political responsibility for addressing the growing danger of global warming and climate change….

And this list could go on and on, all of it easily and legitimately traced back to a failed notion of the human being, as a mere cog in the machine of business, government, the military and the media.

Clearly the revival of human dignity as a quality inherent to all people, as considered and practiced by all people, would not solve all of our culture's many pressing issues. However, as a starting point for healthy human develoment, parenting and education, it would significantly shift the public discourse, and thereby support real "humane" solutions.

Frankl would be dismayed at the extent to which his foreshadowing has become the new norm.

*Merriam-Webster dictionary definition:  the quality or state of being worthy of honor and respect 

Family issues must be front page news...not relegated to the "family" pages

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. (Confucius)

One morning in another life a grade twelve student met me at the door of my classroom holding his report card in his hand. As a student whose first language was not English, he had received a grade of 58% in the average of his term work and his examination. He was adamant that such a mark was unacceptable. I listened carefully to his petition; reviewed his work and informed him that the mark would stand.

I later learned that the mark had been “deleted” (back in the non-digital age, ‘white-out’ was the rather obvious choice for deletions) so that his parents could not see the truth. Pride, parental expectations and evidence of personal shame, completely unjustified by the diligence and the persistence the student displayed to learn a new language, were at the root of the situation. Deception was the choice of method to deal with the perceived problem.

There are so many different “reasons” for both children and parents resorting to deception, cover-up, dissembling, and failing to “show up” as we really are.

Basic to the dynamic of deception in the family is the varying reliance on “pride” that accompanies too many situations. If the family is engaged in alcohol dependence, or domestic or child abuse, it is taken as a “given” that family secrets have to be protected, at all costs. Even the closest of friends, neighbours, fellow pew-sitters, co-workers, and classmates must not and do not ever learnt the truth of the tragedy. In fact, too often, even within the family, certain members will not be made aware of the full truth, thereby “protecting” both the abuser and the one kept in the dark from quite literally having a relationship. No relationship is feasible without a full disclosure among close family members. And the refusal to disclose, including the unwillingness, and the incapacity to disclose, as well as the fear of such disclosure (another piece of evidence that is often overlooked in any analysis) lies at the heart of the issue.

While T.S. Eliot reminds us that we cannot stand too much reality, nevertheless, it is the degree of withholding that too often determines the kind of foundation on which family relationships are constructed. For a young twenty-something to drive her car into a snowbank on the way home from a house party, without injuring any of the occupants or damaging the car, without having the courage, and the openness to inform her single mother, as a way of protecting both herself and her mother, is to demonstrate a degree of enmeshment that warrants critical self-examination. For an adolescent male to put long sleeve shirts on every day before leaving for school, to cover up the welts inflicted by his mother, is what many might call a merely incidental incidence, not worthy of consideration as a serious family issue. Those who hold such a view, however, are not, were not, and cannot image being in the “shoes” of the adolescent. For the adolescent, one of the questions is ‘why is this abuse occurring only when my father is not present, and is not being told?’

We do have some examples of public disclosure that, although they are often relegated to the social columns, nevertheless merit a reference. President Obama, for one, stopped smoking cigarettes six years ago, “because he so feared his wife’s response” if he failed to stop. On the other hand, for Trump to have to apologize to his family for having said what he said, and for what he has done, and not said, is loudly displayed as fodder in the current presidential election. So the issue of truth-telling is front and centre in the public discourse in North America, and perhaps around the world.

No child or adolescent can or will tell his or her parents everything about their lives: not the first time a car drives into a ditch, not the first time too much booze renders one intoxicated, not the first time some illicit drug renders him ‘high’…and yet the patterns of disclosure are begun in such situations. For some, it takes a few days, weeks or even months for them to find the confidence to disclose. And, with that time lapse, perhaps they can and do reconcile their fear, and their apprehension about the consequences of full disclosure. And the parents, themselves, are not without responsibility for the kind of family culture they have fostered over the early years. Too much pressure for control, too little relaxation and acceptance of the small “mistakes” and too much rigid discipline, all of these squarely in the purview and the job description of the parent will lead to an inevitable withholding. Parents, too, who operate at such a high performance level, (I was certainly one of these!) will inculcate a fear of not being “good enough” even though their words might be unequivocally supportive of their children.

Fear of not being “good enough,” of not being “up to the perfection” of their parents, of not being willing (or perhaps ever able) to let their parents see their “imperfections” is one of the dynamics, and a very subtle and dangerous dynamic it is) that infiltrates many professional families. How many times have we all heard the story of a young man or woman who spent most of their life trying to life up to the expectations of their parents. And, we all know that those expectations might never have been specifically articulated, but merely inferred from the actions and the attitudes of the parents to their own lives. And these attitudes are extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the child to confront. When, for example, is there time in a busy, fully scheduled, fully engaged, (over-regulated) schedule for children to participate in their various “activities” and then also to have the time and the energy and the composure to say to their parent, “You know, I am getting tired of trying to meet your unrealistic goals for my life! I would like to talk about what I want to do, and what I am willing to do and I would like to get your support for my agenda, not the one that makes you look good in front of your friends!”

Clearly, it is not only the ‘sins’ of the child that need disclosure. So do the attitudes, demands, expectations and even beliefs of the parents also need to be explored, fully and in an unqualified and unrestricted manner, in family circles. And such circles require “strong” parents, open parents, vulnerable parents and the courage to structure time and space for the family to have these conversations. And it is this family culture that I failed to facilitate in my own marriage. I was too busy “performing” on the public stage, drinking in the applause that comes from such performances. I was too dependent on public adulation to be the kind of effective and compassionate and open and vulnerable parent that my children needed and deserved. The temperature inside the home, especially the “heat” of the parental expectations, and also the parental “strength” to take the honest criticism from their children (not the phoney power games, but the real issues of too much pressure that forecloses on open communication) is critical for full disclosure.

And the time and patience required to open to our children, really open, really sit and listen, rather than burying our minds and our bodies in our own “professional agendas” as an unconscious way of medicating the pain of our own unworthiness and our determination to prove our value to “whomever” it is that we believe we have to prove ourselves to, is so ephemeral, like a butterfly, and so fleeting. And like the tennis racket that is poised at a certain angle, needing to be shifted only a fraction of an inch to get the ball over the net, parental attitudes, in too many cases, need to be shifted from achievements of power, money, status and public recognition and acknowledgements to getting to really know their children. I failed in this primary parental responsibility, and for that I have profound regrets and for that I apologize to my three daughters.

They are all professionally successful, and for that they have themselves to thank. They did it! They made their parents and their culture proud. And I can only hope that they did not do it at the cost of missing the emotional and the psychic needs of their children.

Confucius tells an important truth. Can we read the deeper implications to our culture and to our families in his observation. For far too long, family issues have been relegated to the social pages of our newspapers, where the majority of readers are women. Education, parenting and the development of a family culture, including the development of family relationships has for far too long been considered “effeminate” and the responsibility of the mother. It is long past time for editors, political leaders and fathers to learn that they obligations do not stop with the proverbial “bring home the bacon” commandment. All the bacon in the world will not feed the soul, the spirits and the hearts of their children. We need to raise the expectations on ourselves, (and to reap the rewards of our determined and disciplined shift of the “racket angle” of our goals and our agendas) and put more of our energy and our imaginations into the kind of atmosphere and the kind of warmth we bring and foster in our kitchens and our television rooms, and in our backyards, and in our camping trips.

Roots of the gift of unvarnished truth

And the eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you"; or again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, it is much truer that the members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary; and those members of the body which we deem less honorable, on these we bestow more abundant honor, and our less presentable members become much more presentable….

Taken from the book of Corinthians, this picture has impact in so many situations.

The voice of the weak, the less honourable, the less presentable….that is the voice of such basic and fundamental truth, based as it always is on a rather unvarnished examination and experience of reality, unpolished and even uneducated, untainted by the salons, the lecture halls, the sanctuaries and the board rooms. There is a story that has meandered through our family history. It concerns the Baptist clergy grandfather who, upon being confronted by his congregation with the demand that he dismiss, exclude, drive out the ‘unsavoury presence’ of the poor, the illiterate, the contemptible and the underclass from the congregation, faced them down, categorically refused their demand and faced his own dismissal, a firing on behalf of those voiceless, that continues to echo today, a full century later.

There is a refreshing candor to the world view, and the language used to relate to the world that flows from each and every utterance, unencumbered as it always is by pretense or the need to put on a face of sophistication, from the people who have struggled, scraped, gone hungry and even had to beg for much of their survival. They know when the politician and the bureaucrat, for example, resorts to obfuscation, or change the subject, or when they embellish their ‘story’ for their own personal aggrandizement and they are unimpeded by fear of rejection when they call a spade a shovel.

They have already been stripped of any vestige of status, social standing, political power and economic stature, those symbols of power and sophistication to which many have committed themselves, especially those who have entered the vaunted middle class, and seek to climb even higher. Their residence is often on the wrong side of the tracks, often without the normal conveniences of clean running water, access to a steady supply of energy for heat and light, thereby depriving their children of even the basic food and heat and light needed to engage with their homework, no matter how much or how little, in order to pursue the kind of education that might provide some hope and opportunity for a more sustainable life for any future family.

And while the political class and the policy developers consider the “poor” needing physical amenities like water, food, housing and work with dignity all of them legitimate, worthy and needed, there is a poverty of the spirit, a poverty of the range of options available to them, especially in situations of trauma, sickness, loss and even deeper depravity than most of us will ever know or experience. The poverty borne of a complete deprivation of travel, of books, movies, foods from foreign lands, of opportunities to explore various belief systems, political ideologies, and the opportunities to discuss experiences with those whose world view differs from those of the local community is infrequently mentioned when discussions develop on the needs of the poor by those with power to make changes in their lives.

There is a cultural condition that can be depicted as intellectual, emotional and even physical isolation, a hunkering down to the kind of life patterns that making a living demand. Early rising, sparse nutrition, hard labour, an even more intense fixation on the kinds of aphoristic perceptions and beliefs that characterize the history and the tradition of the neighbourhood are just some of the cultural pen strokes that tend to depict the thousands of growing ghettos in towns and cities around the world.

Historically, the ethnicity of peasant communities often comprises one or at best two cultures, leaving the rest of the world to be thought of as “foreigners.” I once met this bigotry, born of the poverty enshrined in fear, when I purchased a Japanese-manufactured car: “Oh you got one of those ‘slanty-eyes’ eh?” The speaker drove one of the muscular North American half-ton trucks, complete with tonneau-cover, the pride of his life.*

Little ‘kingdoms’ or ‘empires’ of highly restrictive and restricting clusters of mores and expectations fossilize attitudes in these towns and villages where the lives of everyone are open books to the people living there, exposing the big and the small indiscretions as worthy of condemnation, alienation and even ostracizing the miscreant. Often, underlying these judgemental attitudes is a kind of religion that can be characterized as literal, fundamental, judgemental, hard-edged, and imposed on all as a kind of template of moral and ethical rules. Sometimes, too, the religious leaders in many poor and rural communities hold inordinate power over the lives of their adherents, bleeding from the personal ‘code’ to the political party to vote for.

Naturally, those whose mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers were born in the community, are considered “insiders” and all others, even those who might take up the challenges of community leadership are, and will remain, “outsiders” who will never really belong. Their ideas, their recommendations, their honest and honourable contributions will forever be considered “suspect” and “snobbish” and “pretentious” and non-conforming to the “way we do things here.” This attitude pervades not only the towns and villages, but the churches, schools and the various organizations within the communities. There is a ‘natural’ preference of those ‘insiders’ to build (sometimes unconscious) walls of ‘tradition’ and ‘convention’ and ‘acceptability’ that greets newcomers and potentially even with conscious “exclusion” efforts, has the result of keeping newcomers and their attitudes, perspectives and suggestions ‘at bay.’

So in the spirit of John Donne who loved James and Mary and George and Jane, (individuals) while at the same time hating the “whole” community, or the group or the ‘gestalt’ of the edifice of public attitudes, perceptions, practices, and fears we each have the burden of discerning the values of individuals when they are often embedded in the public “myth” of the stereotype of the community.

And we each have the obligation of sifting through the experiential baggage of all the people we encounter, seeking to discern the unique individual character from the community “values” that have been imprinted on the individual. I was told, as an adult, that I was born in what had been known for a long time as “the most conservative town in the province.” On reflection over the ensuing decades, I have come to agree and to give witness to the rebellious attitudes within my being both to fundamental, literal and suffocating faith beliefs and practice as well as to the arrogance of politicians inside the establishment who resist and refuse to open to and to integrate new science, new ideas and new possibilities. As the inveterate “outsider” I share the mantle with those who have very little, who identify with the outcasts, who enjoy poking our fingers in the eyes of the “establishment” and who hold the “power structures” of all institutions under the most powerful microscope, scepticism and suspicion.

Doubtless, this “attitude” and perspective of scepticism, suspicion and doubt, like an “irish-spring deodorant, pervades every encounter I have with people in positions of power and responsibility. And in my own narrow perspective, I hold strongly to the position that power by definition overcomes all of those who seek and who find it. Power demands its own language, belief and the willingness to maintain its superiority, through the presentation of unbalanced pictures of reality, pictures that favour the reputation of the originator of the picture, whether those reputations are of corporations, presidents, principals, prime ministers, bishops, bank managers and presidents. Power, too, has the capacity to seduce even the most honourable, the most moral, the most disciplined and the most religious of men and women. And this attitude of scepticism, suspicion and doubt of the powerful emerges from a very small town, where I was able to witness the excesses of wealth, the excess of political control, the excesses of moral/religious superiority, and the excesses of insularity, isolation and resistance to the world itself.

Rather than share the power and the wealth of the insiders, and the entrappments, stereotypes attitudes and beliefs that inevitably attach themselves to that power and wealth, I honour the spiritual wealth of the truth, unvarnished, unsophisticated, and unfettered by the fear of being rejected by the powerful. That rejection is baked into the cake of the underclass, to which I proudly proclaim adherence…. It is a gift from the “poverty” and the culture of my home town. And it is a gift I have and will treasure so long as I breathe.

*Of course, this sounds patronizing, demeaning and insulting. Rather, I felt sad and anxious that such attitudes or dependence on the “bling” and the “bobbles” were so deeply embedded in the culture of the rural, isolated and relatively vulnerable community in which I was working. 

The river of truth flows in, through and around us...asking us to grasp its full current

Are we becoming caught in the vortex between a change in our reading and writing habits and the growing dependence on stereotypes, aphorisms, headlines and out of date fossils of intellectual habit and conviction?

 There is some evidence that, in some quarters, refined consideration of the sounds and the rhythms of both language and thought have been normalized, even elevated to an artistic level. The narrative on feminism, for example, has witnessed and demonstrated various stages of anger, defiance and empowerment, and more recently a deep and profound acknowledgement of the similarities between the genders, in a word, androgyny. While the narrative on the rise of the feminine voice, in all areas of public life, (as well as in domestic lives) may well have and continue to confuse most men, it has generated a far different level of conscious awareness and potential reduction in the use of some of the many blunt, insensitive and downright offensive attitudes and encounters that men have perpetrated for centuries. Similarly, many women continue to dismiss men as “jerks” who want only one thing at the same time as the number of fathers walking, changing, feeding and nurturing their young children has grown exponentially.

Ideology too, has a trail of expression that entraps some in intellectual cages, while others attempt to ride both sides of the left-right divide. Newspapers, for example, as well as television networks, have tended to represent a political point of view, a perspective, in order to attract viewers of a similar persuasion. Others, like the New York Times, have worked hard to become respected by both right and left political thought leaders.  Nevertheless, we are all subjected to a cataract of headlines, both in 72-point type and in their highlight position and distressing repetition, many of them becoming lodged in our brains as “reality” even long after they have changed, developed, been proven inaccurate or actually disappeared.

Trump’s berating China for manipulation of their currency, for example, is so outdated as be virtually a distortion of reality, for which Trump needs to be held accountable. A firm grasp of both history and the nunc fluens (the flowing now) is a minimum expectation of a presidential candidate, as well as the ability and willingness to differentiate the two. However, there are some examples of “failing to keep up” or in other words, holding tight to deep bias, prejudice and offensive attitudes that are appearing in too many headlines.

The courts have given us some of these examples recently with a judge asking a woman complainant in a sexual assault case “why she did not close her knees”….and there is another from a case of sexual abuse in Arnprior, presented by The National last night, in which the evidence in trial was recorded, in  one judge’s notes that, except for a single piece of testimony on the part of the male defendant, clearly defined the female judge’s perception that his testimony was unreliable. Prior to sentencing, however, this judge became ill and the case was turned over to a male judge. Upon reading the first judge’s notes, the second judge elevated the single piece of credible testimony to the point of justification of his declaration of a mistrial. All other evidence was disregarded, apparently.

Are we witnessing in this case, and in so many others, the unshakeable “stuckness” of too many who have the power and the opportunity to shape how we grasp and interpret reality that our biases are now in charge? Certainly the Arnprior complainant would be justified in believing that the court either did not hear or did not accept her testimony, much of it repeated on national television last night. Similarly, Trump’s followers are mired in their conviction that “internet” polling (of absolutely no scientific value) tells them that their candidate ‘won’ the first presidential debate, when all the “reliable” and verifiable polling tells us otherwise.

While Hillary tells Trump “he lives in his own reality” during the debate, there is a real danger that competing realities are now engaged in the mud-bowl of public opinion. Assumptions, distortions, misrepresentations, even now apparently mental fixations have replaced a common apprehension of an objective reality…and even when there is some common empirical reality agreed upon, it comprises only the overt committed actions, or words of an actor on the public stage. The omissions, silences, withdrawals and avoidances have been buried deep under a public unconsciousness.

The news, the courts, the governments the hospitals/doctors, the social service agencies, the schools and the churches….and certainly all the corporations are dedicated to a version of extrinsic “reality” that mostly boosts their public appeal, acceptance and trust, at least in their minds, while public trust for all of these “institutions” has never been lower.

Could it be that our shared failure to acknowledge our failures, our omissions, our silences, and our avoidances are more important in determining our shared outcomes than our overt extrinsic actions, and words? Could it be that we have been impaled on and by our own myopia, our own denial and our own refusal to share all of those attitudes, biases, prejudices and beliefs as integral to our shared lives? Have we so submitted both our selves and our culture to a fundamental secrecy, privacy and ghost-like mask in order to find a safe path so that we do not have to face the truth of who we really are, what we really believe, how we really think and perceive? Is Trump just the latest and the most visible model of our own capacity to dissemble, to distort, to modify and to champion our fragile ego while trashing the deep truths of our souls? Are we part of this big cover-up, so big that we are unlikely to be able to find and to summon the courage, and the shared capacity to reverse course?

Are stereotypes replacing our detailed perceptions of unique individuals, of unique moments, different from other moments, and our shared knowledge of both current events and certainly more remote history? Is manipulation, both corporate and political and also personal and spiritual, now the name of the game in which we are all complicit?

Is the winner not only the one with the “biggest and most expensive toys” but also the one who can get away with the biggest cover-up? Are we hiding behind whatever protective ruse, self-designed and self-imposed, a stereotype, an extrinsic act, or word in order to preserve and protect our less-than-innocent truths?

And if there is even a grain of truth and “reality” in our potentially affirmative answers to these questions, then we all have both an opportunity loudly and collectively “ to shut the door” on the world of 1984 that Orwell warned us about half a century ago. And we can begin, through basic things like learning to “READ” and to converse beyond the plastic images of the headlines and the stereotypes to expose the acts of omissions as just as important, (if not even more important) than acts of commission.

Motive, for example, is highly significant in all legal matters, although very difficult to discern. And yet, without motive, the truth of the crime and the truth of the person charged with its commission is withheld from consideration by judge and jury. Motive, too, is part of the mystery of the truth that is being endangered as we all rush to worship at the empirical, stereotypical, conventional and reductionistic altar of the “visible”…..the accountant’s balance sheet, the doctor’s many and varied test results (mostly numerical and comparative), the psychiatrist’s diagnoses (in the DSM-V, depression determined primarily from anecdotal evidence from women) and the politician’s proof of his/her good work and headlines.

Integrity, that word that encompasses a shipload of expectations, requirements, judgements and infrequently confessions and penitentials, cannot be reduced to a recording and accounting of acts done, words spoken. Even acts done and words spoken in pursuit of justice, while legitimate, are not adequate to depict one’s integrity.

 

 It has to encompass the heart of one’s spirit, the emotions that are kept locked inside the vault of our hearts and then protected by the discipline of our minds, especially in a culture so banketed by privacy, especially the kind of privacy that is needed to protect one’s reputation. Our personal integrity has to encompass the attitudes and the beliefs and the perceptions that include revenge whether overtly sought and committed or not, jealousy, whether enacted or not, coveting whether pursued or not, destruction of another’s person and character whether voiced or not.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the medical profession resisted conveying a patient’s diagnosis, especially one that included a serious cancerous tumor, given the considerable evidence that such a diagnosis often contributed to a significant decline in the patient’s health and well-being, and often precipitated the death of that patient. So, the simple judgement of whether or not to tell the truth, or the “whole truth” cannot be reduced to a simple prescription that applies in all or even most situations.

The specific situation, and the comprehensive awareness of its uniqueness are essential to a clear accounting and assumption of responsibility for defining and acknowledging one’s integrity, and definition and acknowledgment go a long way past the “Sunday school” commandments of so many faith . In fact, the need to compress an individual’s acts, words, and the expresions of others’words about them into a neat, compact, and easily memorized and transmitted ‘moral rule’ is among the several ways by which our affinity to simplicity and reduction demean our persons, our lives and the fullness of our reality.  A case in point just jumped out of the radio on CBC News. The Roman Catholic bishops in Alberta and the Northwest Territories have announced that the priests in their charge will not be permitted to conduct church funerals for those Catholics who choose to die with dignity, under the new federal legislation permitting such a choice for those terminally ill who are suffering inordinately. It is a grave sin to make such a choice, in the eyes of these Bishops, and their congregants will have to choose between a church funeral or a death with dignity.

Where is the integrity of the institution in that case? Of course, the church hierarchy have and will continue to argue that this position is congruent with the church’s teaching on abortion, yet for many Catholics, that teaching does not extend to capital punishment.

The pursuit of one’s integrity, in the light of one’s comprehension and clarity of the whole situation in which one finds oneself, is a highly complex and ambiguous journey the ethics of which are best left to one who does have a more full awareness of the many dimensions, not to leave individual humans hanging in anxiety and fear of damnation, but to support their constant striving to find “the light” both within and without, through prayer and reflection, through intimate conversation, through reading and through a deliberate and disciplined time of reflection and consideration, in order to minimize the potential role of stereotypes, aphoristic platitudes, quick and easy judgements and a denial and avoidance of the many ambiguities in all situations including the complex emotions that attend every ethical and moral choice.

Very often, those experiences we most fear, especially those situations that might tarnish our public reputation, force us into acting and  speaking behaviours that are more in keeping with protecting our good name, than with expressing our deep and conscious truth. Compromising our truth, for the sake of retaining only a good name is too often considered the (perceived and agreed upon) “right” thing to do. Whereas, the public convention of silence, the secrecy of “discretion” and the panache of political correctness too often compromise our real integrity, and leave us gasping for moral and ethical oxygen.

Reconciling Simon Peres’ commitment both to the development of Israel’s nuclear machine and his later pursuit of peace, while apparently troubling to many reporters, demonstrates a “development narrative” of patriotic proportions. However it does not justify a military build-up as “reasonable and condoned by the lustrous Jewish diplomat.” We cannot permit ourselves, or our culture to become entrapped in frozen fossils of manipulated still and sterile images, while the river of people and events drowns our poetic imagination.

A "real" president in graphic relief beside a "fake wannabee"

Based on yesterday’s near-unanimous vote to override the presidential veto, it is not surprising that a mere 19% of American people believe government will do the ‘right thing’.

The vote, in both houses of Congress, gives families of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks in Manhattan the right to sue Saudi Arabia for “justice” given a perception of state support of the terrorists, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals. All the “official” evidence could not establish unequivocally that the Saudi “nation” supported the terrorists who flew those four aircraft on that fateful day.

That vote shows how “low” the members of Congress have fallen, in pandering to the emotional pleas for justice, effectively revenge against a foreign state, thereby generating a potential for reciprocal retaliation against U.S. military and diplomatic officers serving in foreign countries, should some mishap occur, and the families of victims chose to sue the American government. Of course, it is an election season when, obviously, all reasonable thought and pursuit of serious government policy based on a serious and critical examination of the nuances of the issues has long ago ‘left the building’. And of course, insulting the president in the last months of his presidency just completes the political excoriation he has endured for the last six years of his administration.

Some of those who voted for the override did not even know what they were voting for. Others were merely pandering to their potential voters in November. Others were deliberately sticking their finger in the eye of the president whom they consider ‘weak’ and ineffective and resent his clear capacity to lead, ‘to take the high road’ and to endure the slings and arrows of their racist venom.

Its is not accidental or incidental that the same day of the vote the President appeared on a town hall on CNN at Fort Lee in Virginia in which he answered questions from Jake Tapper and from the service men and women gathered for the first presidential visit to the base. Two days following the first presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Obama, without inserting a single word of partisanship, demonstrated clearly and unequivocally not only his command of the issues, but illustrated reasonable expectations of a legitimate President. Just by his “presence” he effectively, subtly and yet very powerfully underlined his support for Hillary Clinton.

He took a question from a military widow whose husband failed to get treatment from the Veterans Administration and died following the metastasizing of his colon cancer. His complex and respectful answer about the systemic dysfunction in the VA and how far that process has both advanced and needs to go, acknowledged the serious impact of the bureaucracy and his aggressive attempts to change the culture.

He also took a question from another military widow whose husband, following several deployments in which he witnessed too much from battle, and from which he suffered PTSD. He refused to seek help for his illness because he did not want to be considered “weak” by the military, and he became one of the twenty-two military veterans who take their lives every day in the United States. Again Obama indicated that he has directed the Secretary of Defence and the Joint Chiefs to send the important message ‘down the line’ that seeking help is not a sign of weakness, and must not be held as such within the military itself.

Another cultural change that will take decades, if not centuries to reverse, especially given the tide of hyper-masculinity, epitomized by Trump, and upheld by millions of his frightened little men supporters that is running rampant across the country in this election season.

Whether he prepared for the first debate or not, and whether he prepares for the next two, Trump cannot escape the fact that if he secluded himself for days, or even weeks, he could never cover up the core truth of his arrogance, his incompetence and his lack of integrity, not to mention his idolizing of money, and the commodification of everything including himself, and by extension, the country, should he become president. And that list does not even mention his narcissism and his racial and gender and sexist “phobias”

One real president in graphic relief  beside a mere ‘wannabee’….and contrast could not be more clear or evocative of the danger in the nation’s reaching for the bottom of the barrel to vote for the cardboard cut-out.

Donald Trump: The Ugly American 2.0

In the book, The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer, the episode that gives the book its title features Homer Atkins, a plain and plain spoken man, who has been sent by the U.S. government to advise the Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan on engineering project When Atkins finds badly misplaced priorities and bluntly challenged the entrenched interests, he lays bare a foreign policy gone dangerously8 wrong.

First published in 1958, the book became a runaway national bestseller for its slashing expose of American arrogance incompetence and corruption in Southeast Asia.

Donald Trump evokes memories of that arrogance and incompetence when neither quality, nor the current incarnation of those qualities, is appropriate in the vortex that faces the next president. Trump will not study, prepare, assimilate the fine details of either American domestic or foreign policy, so enamored is he with his Teflon bombast that has no place in politics and belongs inside a reality television show set and camera.

I grew up at the time the book was popular, and without then knowing the specific content of the narratives, I know the phrase “ugly American” had resonance as an admitted stereotype, even archetype, for the American political/military/industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned his compatriots near the end of his presidency in 1960. Even today, some nearly 70 years later, following another episode of misguided American foreign policy and military engagement under Dubya, there are still too many places where wearing an American flag lapel pin is ill-advised. Obama has worked almost feverishly, certainly deliberately and professionally, to try to normalize the American presence in world affairs, and a return to the kind of American attitude and presence on the world stage now, through the election of Trump, would be a disaster not only for the United States itself, but also for the whole world.

In its unrestrained, yet brutally honest endorsement of Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s edition, The New York Times, cites

·      the long span of her career in the service of children, women and families,

·      her highlighting of women in her address to the United Nations Bejing Conference in 1995,

·      her steadfast, if unspectacular pursuit of her bipartisan work in the Senate, securing the support of Republicans like John McCain, for her mastery of the details of military needs and goals

·      her intellect and command of the various files and importantly

·      her experience and attention to the complexities facing the world and the next president

.

The editorial acknowledges her preference for secrecy, her later-explained mistaken vote for the Iraq war in 2003, and places her candidacy squarely in the eyes of undecided voters whom Ms Clinton needs in order to defeat Trump.

As the “paper of record” in the American political landscape, this editorial, while by itself will not elect Ms Clinton, give a needed shot of adrenalin on the day prior to tonight’s debate, billed as a heavyweight prize fight in the American media, with a projected audience in the 100 million range, rivaling even the Super Bowl.

Promising filmy and glossy never-never-land solutions to highly complex issues needing leadership, sophistication and compromise evokes the image of the ugly American, stomping an unduely heavy footprint all over the world map, without delivering on the needed policy ideas is not what the world needs.

And, barring a significant toe-stub tonight, by Ms Clinton, the world can only hope that she will deliver what the American pundits are calling her “minimum” to win: a home-run in political terms.

All of the subtlety of her many policy proposals will have to give way, at least for an historic moment in which, in the tradition of the gladiator fights of the middle ages, she “takes out” her political foe. He has certainly given her a arsenal of lies, distortions and fit-only-for-Hollywood conjectures on which to unleash her considerable and the public’s even stronger venom against Trump.

We will be watching.

Can we secure the "right to clean water" as a human right and save fresh water resources?

Here are some grains of unsettling data to stir into your morning cup of “joe”…..

·      Over 150,000,000,000 (that’s BILLIONS) litres of untreated, or undertreated sewage is dumped into Canadian waterways each year (Environment Canada)….That’s about 4 time the average flow of the Ottawa River!

·      Victoria and Esquimalt cities dump about 130 million litres of raw sewage every DAY into the Strait of Juan de Fuca

·      Ice coverage on the Great Lakes declined by 71% between 1973 and 2010 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

·      Glaciers hold as much water as all that is contained in Canada’s lakes and rivers….there are 17,000 glaciers in British Columbia…

·      Glacial coverage on the Alberta side of the Canadian Rockies has declined by 25% and 300 glaciers have been lost in last 3 decades

·      Researchers have detected traces of acetaminophen, codeine, antibiotics, hormones, steroids and anti-epileptic compounds in the Great Lakes at levels high enough to be of “environmental concern” (CBC)

·      A 2014 study of the Great Lakes by the U.S.-based 5 Gyres Institute found 43,000 microplastic particles per square kilometer; near cities the number jumped to 466,000.

These are just a few of the many arresting pieces of information contained in a new book by Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, a social justice think tank. The book, entitled, Boiling Point, Government Neglect, Corporate Abuse, and Canada’s Water Crisis, was available to Barlow’s recent audience in the Grad Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontaio.

Here is a quote from the Canada Water Act of 1985, a federal government statute, outlining the core of the federal-provincial shared, and thereby extremely complex oversight of Canada’s water resources:

 the Minister may, with the approval of the Governor in Council, enter into an arrangement with one or more provincial governments to establish, on a national, provincial, regional, lake or river-basin basis, intergovernmental committees or other bodies

·       (a) to maintain continuing consultation on water resource matters and to advise on priorities for research, planning, conservation, development and utilization relating thereto;

·       (b) to advise on the formulation of water policies and programs; and

·       (c) to facilitate the coordination and implementation of water policies and programs.

One of the many signs of shared federal-provincial jurisdiction, shared power and thereby frequently unattainable “action” can be seen here, given the overlapping footprints of this extremely important and highly threatened resource, really a human requirement, access to clean water.

The United Nations has expressed itself on the human right to clean water.

On 28 July 2010, through Resolution 64/292, the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realisation of all human rights. The Resolution calls upon States and international organisations to provide financial resources, help capacity-building and technology transfer to help countries, in particular developing countries, to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all.

In November 2002, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted General Comment No. 15 on the right to water. Article I.1 states that "The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights". Comment No. 15 also defined the right to water as the right of everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable and physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses.

Sources:

·       Resolution A/RES/64/292. United Nations General Assembly, July 2010

·       General Comment No. 15. The right to water. UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, November 2002

Implementation, however, only occurs when and where the “rubber meets the road.” And, for example, although the Canadian government has recently announced its intent to move the hundreds of First Nations communities off “boiled water advisories” in Canada, by the year 2020, the issue of whether water is to be an authentic human right remains under a big cloud of confusion.

Just yesterday, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced that her government would be reviewing a policy that currently permits Nestle to purchase ground water from Ontario wells at a price of $3.71 for one million litres. Not only is this policy stripping the ground water from the south-western Ontario wells, Nestle then turns around and bottles and sells the water back to Ontarians for $1+ per bottle. And Nestle is only one of many large corporations dependent on the access to clean water for the production of their products.

So the question of whether or not water is “for sale” or is a human right, is one of the major issues facing jurisdictions around the world. And herein lies the nexus of the fight between “public” access to fresh, clean, water and “private” for-profit corporations’ ownership of that water.

In a “grass-roots” approach to raising consciousness about water issues, and to push back on the “sale” of clean water, The Council of Canadians with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has initiated a Blue Communities project.

On the Blue Communities guide, we find these words:

The recognition of water as a human right in Canada would ensure that all people living in this country are legally entitled to sufficient quantities of safe, clean drinking water and water for sanitation, and would require that access inequalities be addressed immediately. Unfortunately, water is not officially recognized as a human right by the federal government. On the other hand, the rights of corporations, whose activities drain, contaminate and destroy watersheds, are protected in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other international trade and investment agreements. Internationally, the Canadian government has also actively prevented the recognition of water as a human right at key United Nations (UN) meetings. In 2002, Canada was the only country to vote against the right to drinking water and sanitation at hearings of the UN Commission on Human Rights (now known as the Human Rights Council). The Canadian government has said that water is an important issue and that countries are responsible for ensuring their populations have access to water. But Canada has clearly stated it does not believe that international law should recognize the existence of a right to water.

Paris joins Blue Communities

From the Council of Canadians website, here is a progress report on the Blue Communities project

Blue Planet Project founder Maude Barlow was in Paris, France today to present a blue community certificate to deputy mayor Celia Blauel.

Barlow stated, “We applaud Paris for taking the bold new step to protect water as a commons by becoming a Blue Community today. The global water crisis is getting more serious by the day and it is being made worse by the corporate theft and abuse of water. Becoming a Blue Community like Paris has today is a critical step toward the stewardship of water locally and globally that we need now and for future generations."

A 'blue community' is a municipality (or university, church, First Nation or association) that adopts a framework that:

·       recognizes water as a human right

·       prevents the sale of bottled water in public facilities and at municipal events

·       promotes publicly financed, owned and operated water and wastewater services.

On March 22, 2011, Burnaby, British Columbia became the first blue community in Canada. On September 18, 2013, Bern, Switzerland became the first international blue community. And on January 12, 2015, Tsal'alh, St’át’imc Territory became the first Indigenous blue community. The University of Bern and the Evangelisch-reformierte Kirchgemeinde Bern-Johannes Church have also become blue communities.

The largest blue communities in this country are Burnaby (population 223,220), St. Catharines (131,990), Ajax, (109,600), Thunder Bay (108,359), and North Vancouver (84,412). All together, there are now 1,034,515 people in Canada who live in communities recognized as blue communities. Internationally, there is now Paris (population 2.244 million), Bern (130,015) and Cambuquira (13,299) for a total of 2,387,314 people.

When Barlow presented the first European blue community certificate in Switzerland, she said, "It is my fervent hope that your undertaking today will be the beginning of a European-wide movement that will one day reach across the whole world."

Canada has, for decades, held the cultural “myth” that we are an inexhaustible source of fresh water. Not only is that not based in empirical evidence, what clean fresh water that does currently exist in Canada is under serious threat.

·      the legal entanglement of federal-provincial shared power,

·      the current cultural “for-profit” thrust in the ideology of free trade agreements, granting inordinate powers to for-profit corporations,

·      the rising tide of both pollution and the resulting global warming and climate change

taken together make for a political ethos in which the push to provide clean water to all people is fraught with many perils.

The Council of Canadians’ rejection of corporate funds is just another indication of the depth of their commitment to the concept of “public” ownership of this most valuable, precious and threatened source of life.

Attempting to make allies, and to generate Blue Communities around the world, demonstrating the narrow but significant “municipal” autonomy on this important, if vexing, issue in the current highly competitive and complex environment is not only a worthy and noble objective, it may well be the signal issue project of our time.

And it needs the kind of financial support that a campaign like the one Bernie Sanders generated in his campaign for the presidency of the United States, based on contributions averaging  $27….The millions of contributors gave him the largest ‘war chest’ of the candidates, at the time when he was still in the race.

Can such a campaign be generated to save the world’s clean fresh water and the human right to its access?