A brief look at oscillation

Let’s have a look at the notion of oscillation* as it applies to human behaviour.

A fluctuation between to outside points around a central position offers a kind of “energy” that could be useful, or perhaps counter-productive.

Robert Fritz, author of “technologies for creating” speaks about the oscillation that occurs between two mutually exclusive goals, operating simultaneously. For example, if one seeks to lose weight, then one often becomes excessively hungry and eats more…oscillating between the two mutually exclusive goals.

Fritz posits that, in order to reduce, if not eliminate the oscillation, one has to decide which goal is primary, and which is secondary to help the individual to move more effectively toward the preferred goal, even if it takes a little longer than anticipated. Even the awareness that one seems to be oscillating, from Fritz’s perspective, can help to curb the tendency and shift to a more effective achievement of the desired “creation”.

In music, the notion of resolving tensions, between an unsettled sound to one of finality creates a “cadence” leaving the listener aware that the phrase or the piece of music has come to an end. It was the tension itself, however, that was playing out through the manuscript, as the phrases rose and fell in speed, or pitch or volume, depending on the composer’s intent.

For much of our lives, we are mostly unconscious of the playing out of those “phrases” of activity, varying between quick, slow, loud, soft, high pitched or low pitched….each of them signalling a different emotion, mood and comfort level. And most of our consciousness focuses on how “others” are impacting the music of our lives. A phone call, an email, a text….they each can and often do send a ripple of emotional energy depending on the nature of the message, the relationship to the sender, the timing of the message and the anticipated next step. Managing these micro-impulses, however, can often render us blind or unconscious to the larger patterns of the way things seem to be “flowing” or not in our lives.

One example of a kind of oscillation that appears in some lives is that between the victim and the bully. A victim is usually the receiver of negative messages, perhaps abusive messages, from others who project their insecurities onto him/her generating the inevitable feelings of insecurity, resentment, anger and revenge. If the abuse of negative messages is protracted, the negative emotions only grow generating a compelling need to release the pent-up negative emotions, generating a new “self” as a bully…one that gives out, rather than receives, similar negative messages. Of course, much has been written about being “OK” or “ NOT OK” (See Eric Berne’s Games People Play, Transactional Analysis). And, from a cliché perspective, we all want to be OK, rather than “NOT OK”.

However, being “OK” is not cast in granite, for most people, depending on the culture in which the early and highly impressive early messages were positive and negative. The culture, itself, can and often does oscillate between a historic period of “positive” messages and “negative” messages. An example of this oscillation can be seen in the American education culture in which positive messages to every student have generated kids who believe they can accomplish anything and everything, while many of their scores on demanding tests demonstrate a lack of learning the basics needed to pass those tests. There is a profound gap between “feeling good” and accomplishing one’s required goals.

How both the culture and the individuals perceive any oscillation, and their place in the oscillation, can offer some clues both to personal identity and to a larger picture of the nature of the world we live in. Recently, an election in the United States illustrated one dramatic oscillation: following a period of calm, rational, predictable and even smiling leadership under Obama, the country swung wildly in favour of an irrational, impulsive, unpredictable and mostly angry candidate, believing that the former was a “weak” leader and the latter much more “strong” and unable or unwilling to be “pushed around”. It is not incidental to note that Obama (the rational and predictable and moderate) followed immediately on the heels of another “war monger” in George W. Bush, whose over-reaction to 9/11, with the full compliance of the American people set the stage for the election of Obama.

It is not only from the perspective of the nature of the nation’s leadership that this oscillation can be considered. It is also an oscillation in the unfolding of the search for masculine identity that is playing out, both in the oscillation from Bush to Obama, and from Obama to Trump. Identity is one obvious stage on which both individual and cultural oscillations develop. Who is this person? And what is the country’s identity? These are critical questions is the evolution of personal and national identity. And they emerge from the existential search for meaning and purpose….following the inevitable “existential moment” in which the person/organization/nation recognizes its own meaninglessness. And for many, there is not a single “existential moment” in the course of history.

The identity of feminism is another curve that demonstrates a kind of oscillation from the “victim” archetype to the “dominant” or “warrior” archetype. This oscillation can be witnessed in the many upheavals in domestic relationships, where, for example, the female begins as completely compliant with the male interests and over time, emerges (sometimes seamlessly, sometimes more turbulently) into a much more assertive individual. And parallel to this evolution is the shift from a male archetype of “warrior” to the “compliant” or “passive aggressive” model, neither of which effectively provides an authentic and responsive partner for the evolving female.

Gender identity as one of the primary cultural, sociological curves of our time, oscillates between images of “strength” and images of “weakness”….just another of the many reductionisms that plague much of contemporary public consciousness and discourse. What seems to be missing from this discussion is the concept of androgyny, the notion (offered by Carl Jung) that in both men and women, in our unconscious, there are indications of the opposite gender. It is a resistance to the reality of androgyny, especially among men, that is often at the centre of the extremes in oscillation in the gender identity drama. “Bush” attempted to project an image of “macho masculinity” in response to the 9/11 attack supported by most Americans. Obama, on the other hand, adopted a much more evolved and more moderate leadership approach, in part because it is consistent with his own personality, and also because he believed it was essential for the country’s long-term interests geopolitically.

The recent push back against Obama’s weakness, (at least as perceived by those men who have been emasculated by their many serious losses of jobs, income, status and even respect, as well as those who feel “second class” in their relationships, rightly or not) has catapulted Trump to the most powerful office in the world. Is the vote an over-reach demonstrating a risky oscillation? Of course.

And it is the over-reach of most of our personal, organizational, and national oscillations away from whatever it is we perceive to be the “force” we are saying “No” to that comprises much of the drama of our histories. If things feel “stuck” we will oscillate into dramatic “action” just to demonstrate that we are capable of “action”….and vice versa, if we perceive our lives as strung-out, overwhelmed, and out of control, we will seek either to escape such turbulence, or perhaps some “medicative” escape, whether that escape is within limits or not.

When we observe and discuss the dynamics of a group, we can easily perceive the modus operandi, in terms of, on one hand, clear decision-making, or conversely, murky and indecisive co-dependence with much “niceness” and almost obsessive feel-good messaging of all members by the others.

Here is a typical illustration of one of the primary oscillations, between action and being. In seminaries, we hear many times the expression, “I am a human BEING not a human DOING,” as if to underline the difference between justification only from accomplishment, achievement, extrinsic rewards and appreciation as compared to “the who” of our being. Our culture is much more interested in rewarding, recognizing and perpetuating the “doing” of individual lives, and not their “being”. The latter is considered peripheral to how much of our work and home lives are structured.

It is the race to the bottom line, the cutting of costs, that is the current culture of most organizations, especially those whose leaders are rewarded by such accomplishments. Do more with less, accomplish more with fewer people….these are the mantras of many in middle and upper management….If they only recognized and accepted how counter-productive is their approach.

Neurotic organizations come in many varieties and colours. One obvious example pervading much of our work culture is “do more with less” so that targets of decreasing losses, or increasing profits can be met. And of course linked to that “corporate philosophy” is the acceptance of the fact that full disclosure of the real “figures” and the authentic fiscal picture will never be released. Once launched on the path of “cutting costs” these gigantic corporate ‘ships’ cannot be easily and quickly turned around to move in a direction of respect and dignity and honouring the workers and their already proven ways of accomplishing their tasks.

And so, ironically, the deficit of respect from supervisors to workers only grows, thereby completely defeating the stated goal of reducing costs, a goal designed to be implemented by all managers in training, so easily trained and measured is the skill.

Worshipping the bottom line, just like turning every relationship into another transaction demonstrating “profit” or “loss” to the participants, is so demonstrably counter-intuitive and counter-productive that a concerted oscillation back toward honouring personal dignity, personal feelings and personal respect for all, while much like pushing water uphill is more than worth the effort.

And this energy dedicated to real human encounters, ones that are not dependent on classical conditioning, the tool of the control management operatives, includes a recognition of and respect for androgyny, for discussing our own oscillations, for perceiving and naming the oscillations of the organizations in which we are involved, in helping our children to moderate their vacillating and oscillating intensities so that they too can and will escape the ensnaring trap of the many oscillations, and learn to fly their own unique flight path, neither too high (like Icarus) nor too low (like too many Canadians who have been told “we are not that kind of people” by their parents when they wanted to go to med school).

It is true that through oscillations, we find our limits, and our boundaries. However, when the culture marches to the drum beat of the one percent, it is only the interests and the values of the one percent that become the dogma of the new religion. And we all need to put our thumbs on the scales to balance the inordinate power and influence of that one percent, the same one percent that will be moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on January 21.

Surely, the church of the plutocrats is no authentic religion, but rather a machine perpetuated by the powerful, of the powerful, and for (only) the powerful. And the refuse it generates every day in the losses of human potential will soon suffocate the very edifice in which it worships.

*Oscillation:

(physics, statistics) regular fluctuation in value, position, or state about a mean value, such as the variation in an alternating current or the regular swinging of a pendulum. a single cycle of such a fluctuation. (from dictionary.com)

Eulogy for the Common Good

weather reports depict the next hours,

                           or days

climate forecasts look through a

                                longer lens..

both fail to measure and report

                  the erosion of conscience

the depletion of the natural resource,

                                the common good

as if to hold it up is to honour

                               some communist

ideology

while the dictates of fashion moguls, and the

              exclusive lists of the ‘best’ parties

and the Forbes list of billionaires

                    all exhibit a cultish reverence for

idolatry

               of the ‘big’ names for their clones

of their disdain for the voiceless

                      of the contempt for the imprisoned

many of whom merit amnesty

                                     and rehab…not incarceration..

grace and forgiveness, once cornerstones of

                          public morality, and authentic

justice

                        have been exterminated with the

hundreds of species of flora, fauna and fish

                            in a garbage flooded ecosystem

married to a narcissistic individualism

                          and then

a story of an eleven-year-old’s

lemon-aid stand fundraising for a good cause

                   generates a feel-good news story

like a Zoloft for the masses

                 and an amnesty for our

guilt and our

                          apathy

                                     and our detachment

We are the hollow men T.S. Eliot prophesied

                                             and we stuff our heads

with the straw of illusion

                                        and fame

                                                       and money

Oxford choses “post-truth” as the new word for 2016..

                                        has shame too been exterminated

or merely highly endangered?

Sounds of Silence 2016

bodies of babies lying lifeless on

                  Mediterranean beaches

silently screaming…stop the bombs!

stop the missiles!  stop the insanity….

                                  no one listens…

                                           even today the children’s hospital

in Aleppo is bombed!

                       clinging to power with children as

hostages

                      invalidates both the power and the

method of holding on

                     the leaders of the world

and their people have all gone

              deafanddumb

to the pleas of sanity,

                                   compassion

                                                             and ethical requirements

of ordinary citizens

                                if we were follow the lead of our

leaders, we would spend the rest of our lives in a cell

                    in ‘enlightened’ countries

and likely tortured in others

                      there is no oversight, no law enforcement, and no courts

                   for those in power

and their files are silently screaming

                                                          like those lifeless bodies

for their attention….

                      war, arms sales, poverty, hunger, clean air, water and conscience

                         the ‘words of the prophets written in graffiti

on tenement walls’

                              have become sets for comedy rants

and funky entertainment

our children’s minds are filled  

                                                     with tactics

for personal aggrandizement

                                               stuffed  with insouciance

and greed

and the narcissism

                                they see everywhere when they look

UP!

 will we build walls around men with power-needs to keep them

                           away from nuclear codes and all the

communication devices that command the military

generals?

                  the silent cries of lifeless children

                                                           carry our hope

into the corridors of political power…..

                                                               can anybody hear

their deafening, screaming silence of death?

The Real Wild West

The Real Wild West

Sun spilled over the continental divide

         on a 1996 September Sunday afternoon,

The wine Subaru cruised curves on this new

                      topography of barren hills

An alien ventured into the northwest corner

                      of a rigidly right-wing state

Of mind

Blindly tempting the boundaries of will

                          and faith and ministry

Greeted by blowing tumbleweed on parched

                         empty streets of a movie façade

For the Butch Cassidy western foretelling the

                        Smith-and-Wesson insurance

Of all the straight-pipe half-tons seemingly

                          blown like vagrant weeds

through the straw-dry dreams of coal-miner

                         imaginations behind a mascara of

black soot, defiant fears, teen wives and mothers

                          and children who are forced

witnesses to their father’s shooting sparrows

                              from clothesline wires

Just to prove their power over all, disdainful

                           of the impact on their innocence

Small-town bigotry targeted “city-slick”, educated

                         ‘sophistication’ of tree-hugging

Environmental sensibility, gun-reform advocacy

                                         and all faith practice

Sustaining racial, gender and ethnic tolerance….

Into this cauldron the man with an alb, a bible,

                                  a chasuble and prayerbook

Reminded observers of a new fawn trying to find

                                       food on a desert mesa

Misfit, alien, dangerous and suspect…..the white-tail

                                        gasped for air and water

In vain…

And lay lifeless forever....

With an 81-13 plurality in favour of trump fascism

                        the county has finally found its

Messiah…………………..while losing all hope!

Reflections on a country in denial

"Everybody Knows" (A/Z lyrics)
By Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016, whose death has left us grieving and gifted with the inheritance of his mind and spirit.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died 

Leonard Cohen’s lyrics never seemed more fitting than on the day of his passing.                                                      

Some weeks just have a way of staining a year!

Such weeks witness something(s) shocking, often highly depressing and perhaps even tragic.

Ending on Remembrance Day, today, this week has left an indelible mark on the history of the world. Looking about as far as the end of their nose, too many Americans, in all the ‘wrong’ states, wrought a revenge so blatant, so narcissistic, so self-sabotaging and so demoralizing as to rank high on the list of the worst mistakes in American political history. George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 is legitimately considered the “worst mistake in American foreign policy” in the history of the country. Similarly, the election of a tongue and ego rivalling the cruise missiles of the Pentagon, killing the people while leaving the buildings still standing, to the highest office in the nation, and the most powerful leadership chair on the planet, outranks even the Iraq tragedy in its potential for long-term danger to the  planet, as well as to the American people.

While Doomsday prophets are having a field-day, and young men and women have taken to the streets in protest (chanting “We re-ject the pre-si-dent-elect!) the sitting president, of course, demonstrates how surreal is his capacity for grace, dignity and generosity, by hosting the “pres-elect” in the Oval Office. Denouncing “lobbying” in favour of “briefing,” Obama so impressed the new guy that he has already announced a mere “amendment” and not a total revoking the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). New Jersey Governor Christie has been shunted out of the chair of the ‘transition’ and replaced by Vice-president elect Pence. (Bridge-gate may finally pillory the rotund Governor.) Nevertheless, the tweets continue from the ‘big bully’….example: those protestors are being paid by the media….how unfair….

Not a word has blurted from his larynx, nor from his cell phone that would demonstrate his potential for being ‘presidential’. Why would anyone be surprised?

Michael Moore, appearing on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning, took tragic credit for having predicted that DT would win both the Republican nomination and the election. One example he used as evidence for his “ordinary-person, high-school educated, baseball-cap-proud ‘insight’ was his ridicule of the pundits’ guffaws earlier in the summer, after the party conventions, that the Trump campaign spent the highest sum of dollars purchasing baseball caps. The sophisticated talking heads so ridiculed the decision (suggesting more polling or more ‘intelligent’ budget allocations) that Moore knew then and there they did not ‘get it’.

What did they not get?

They did not ‘get’ the disillusion of the people in small towns, villages and rural counties who wanted to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington, and who wanted to get their revenge for having been dubbed a ‘basket of deplorables’. They were willing to overlook the mysogynist’s racism, his gutter-tongue, his preening arrogance and his “I alone can save you” authoritarianism. So disgusted were some 87,000 voters in the state of Michigan, for instance, that although they voted on every other category on the ballot, they pointedly left the presidential section blank. Moore also pointed to Obama’s visit to Flint, where young children have been poisoned permanently by lead-infested drinking water from rusted lead water pipes, where the president drank the water to illustrate the ‘end’ of the problem, thereby short-circuiting all further coverage of an issue far from resolved.

Besting Romney’s vote numbers with Latino’s, Blacks, and especially white voters, both college educated and those without a college education, Trump quite literally romped to victory in the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote.

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 
It's coming through a crack in the wall; 
on a visionary flood of alcohol; 
from the staggering account 
of the Sermon on the Mount 
which I don't pretend to understand at all. 
It's coming from the silence 
on the dock of the bay, 
from the brave, the bold, the battered 
heart of Chevrolet: 
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 

It's coming from the sorrow in the street, 
the holy places where the races meet; 
from the homicidal bitchin' 
that goes down in every kitchen 
to determine who will serve and who will eat. 
From the wells of disappointment 
where the women kneel to pray 
for the grace of God in the desert here 
and the desert far away: 
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A

(Democracy, by Leonard Cohen, (A/Z Lyrics)

Another of the prophet’s satirical pieces stands today, as the world mourns his passing, leaving us all wondering how democracy can even creep ‘through a hole in a wall’ when as Jeff Greenfield put it on ‘Charlie Rose’ (Bloomberg television, Canada) “Everyone today has their own set of facts” and no one cares what that means.

It is not just that Trump’s campaign painted a picture no one, including the candidate, can testify is ‘reality’ just like all the other Orwellian overthrows of meaning (“war is peace, peace is war”). We can all testify that without a compendium of agreed evidence on which to base an observation, and an opinion about the amelioration of the problem, the problem of those rusty lead pipes will continue to plague the people, those terrorists will continue to use the president-elect as a primary recruiting tool, the rich will grow their Wall Street investments (just look at how the market has rebounded from an initial drop), the air we breathe we grow ever more contaminated, (global warming is a hoax pawned off by China, according to the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania).

And we can read words penned nearly forty years ago:

 the upper-class elites of America have the greatest attachment to constitutional democracy. They are the abiding activists in the use of electoral, legislative, and judicial machinery at all levels of government. It is their baby. Ordinary people-called the masses by Dye and Ziegler-tend to share this perception. The democratic machinery belongs to them, "the powers that be," not to ordinary people. It is not their baby.

What will happen if more ordinary people should try to take over this baby and actually begin to make it their own? How would the elites respond if the masses began to ask the elites to give much more and gain much less-particularly when, under conditions of capitalist stagflation and shrinking world power, the elites have less to give. Some radical commentators claim that the powers that be would use their power to follow the example of the classic fascists and destroy the democratic machinery. I agree with Murray Levin that this would be stupid. I see it also as highly unlikely. No First World Establishment is going to shatter machinery that, with a certain amount of tinkering and a little bit of luck, can be profitably converted into a sophisticated instrument of repression.

Indeed, the tinkering has already started. Some of it is being undertaken by people for whom the Constitution is merely a scrap of paper, a set of judicial decisions, and a repository of rhetoric and precedents to be used by their high-paid lawyers and public relations people. Some of it is being perpetrated by presidents and others who have taken formal oaths to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Sometimes knowingly, often unwittingly, both types of people will spare no pains in preserving those parts of the written or unwritten constitution that protect the rights of "corporate persons" while undermining, attacking, or perverting those parts of the Constitution that promote the welfare and liberties of the great majority of all other persons.

(Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross, South Press, 1980, p. 230)

Some have argued that the disparity in incomes, and the hopelessness of those left behind by the shift in manufacturing jobs to the lowest available labour costs elsewhere lies at the root of the national pain. Others like Eddie Glaude, a black professor of Culture at Princeton, (appearing on Morning Joe, MSNBC) argue that race relations are the core issue, given that both Trump and Sanders, the faces of the latest insurgencies of populism (some would add ‘nativism) both struggled to include minorities in their vision of the ‘city on the hill’ that so epitomized the Reagan legacy.

Naturally, the economic historians will tilt to the wag and income and joblessness as the core issue given that it encompasses all racial demographics. Others like Gaude, a native of Jamaica, will express a cultural perspective that begins with the identity of the outsiders. (In another page in this space, I tell the story of my thesis advisor, a black Bahamian native, who, after earning a doctorate from Harvard, was refused ordination to the Episcopal priesthood in Massachusetts because he was not “black enough”, stuck his finger in the eye of the presiding bishop and travelled ‘south’ to Atlanta where he was ordained.) To us, the economic/cultural emphasis, while useful for the pursuit of more rigorous academic research, scholarship and the achievement of the revered doctorate, need not be disentangled as a contradiction in “reality”. Many of the same “data points” appear in the research in the ivory towers of academe and in the bureaucracies inhabited by the policy wonks.

What drum beats will echo in all of our ears will continue to be those who believe that they simply do not matter to those in power. And, from here it would appear that they have been the most vulnerable, not only to the recession and the impacts of globalism, but even more importantly to the candy floss hyperbole/lies/seduction/manipulation by Trump.

Governing, in a world filled with anxiety, and with the pounding impacts of shifts in money and power, the alienation and the despair of the “masses” is not even analogous to a reality television show. The excesses of narcissism of the newest billionaires (and their “brilliant” defiance of tax laws) coupled with capsizing boats filled with desperate refugees from wars that refuse negotiation, from disease that defies available treatments, and from a global ecosystem that cannot sustain more carbon emissions from fossil fuels (‘Trump is the best gift for coal ever’, read the headlines) and from political decisions and promises that demonstrate an insouciance beyond imagination create a toxic political cocktail.

Bernie sought to begin a political revolution and many are now asking if he would have bested Trump. Change, that loaded ‘star’ to which both presidential candidates attempted to hitch their wagon, (Trump clearly won on that reductionistic front) in a culture so deeply addicted to the ‘star’ personality cult, is inadequate as a discerning instrument for active citizenship, especially when it is embedded in revenge.

And basing a campaign of change on a footing of lies, bounced around in a twitter universe that gives a veneer of “power and influence” to everyone with a cell phone, coupled with a media drugged by the ratings obsession and their own job-dependence, based also on the ‘star’ quality of their own ratings leaving the truth exposed and dying on the battlefield of the newspapers and the television and computer screens is another canvas fraught with deception and a disturbing level of self-indulgence.

From a clinical, pastoral perspective, the “patient/client/grieving family/victim” (the nation) is suffering from a collision of many self-sabotaging delusions:

·      A history that holds open extreme conflict, including military conflict, as its greatest achievement

·      A belief in the power of money to symbolize superiority and exceptionalism

·      A history of championing “competition” in the earliest years of a child’s life as the pathway to excellence

·      An national neurosis of denial of the blind spots in its perceptions of the good life

·      A progressive obsessive compulsive adherence to the drugs of entertainment, and capitalism, and racial superiority/inferiority that distort even the most basic water-cooler conversations

·      A denial of the significant potential contribution pool of the poor, the outcast, the prisoner, the sick and the “challenged”

·      A demonstrated mask of humility, vulnerability and compassion belied by too many overt and overt decisions in schools, families, corporations and government

·      A belief in the basic evil that motivates most, especially ‘strangers’ (dubbed aliens in the national lexicon) and the need to combat and to compensate for that danger, as a guiding national principle

·      A history of the abuse of excessive power in race relations, sexual relations, diplomatic and foreign relations, and in the culture of corporate competition

·      A history of denial of the relative importance of government to ameliorate social dislocation, and the spreading of opportunity to all

·      A veneer of sophistication that defies and masks the real insecurity and the psychosis of the fear of not knowing all the answers another self-sabotaging impediment to the pursuit of national truth-telling and the achievement of sustainable national collaboration, co-operation and harmony.

The public discourse will, of course, focus on the immediate political upheaval, the need for the democratic party to rebuild and the titillation of the latest now president-elect tweet. And the nation will continue to vacillate between periods of excessive submission to the power of money with periods of submission to the power of the guns/missiles/bombs/ and the attitudes that undergird both of those faces on the common insecurity/fear/obsession/compulsion that lies at the root of the national unconscious, another of the serious national denials.

Modest Proposal: University of Toronto offers Honorary Doctorate in Common Sense to Professor Jordan Peterson

Too many days, these days, we wake up thinking we have descended into the upside-down world of Alice in Wonderland. The people being paid to protect us are shooting and killing innocent young black men, because they “believe” the innocent victim is armed and dangerous, sometimes even armed with ‘skittles’. Some nine states in the U.S. will vote on ballot options that would make “recreational” marijuana legal, when everyone knows that it is harmful to the brains of both expecting mothers and their fetuses. The men and women holding responsible leadership positions in corporations, like Wells Fargo, for example, send orders down the “line” to their robotic pawns, to sell new bank accounts to customers, without even letting those customers they have new bank accounts, just to satisfy the order to “meet quota” in sales projections. Sure, 5000+ have been fired, as well as the CEO, and there is a new advertising campaign, promising a “new commitment” to our customers but the absurdity of the original situation does not automatically evaporate with the lost careers.

And in the rarified atmosphere of both the Canadian government and the University of Toronto, (full disclosure, I graduated from that once illustrious institution in another life) the highly reimbursed cabinet ministers and administrative mucky-mucks at the hallowed halls of “UT” are fully engaged in what has to be the most idiotic, hair-splitting, politically perfectionistic, and fully anal exercise of the ridiculous.

The issue of civil rights, particularly the rights of the LGBT community with respect to the pronoun each person selects as the one to be used when addressing the individual, is now consuming the kind of time allotment worthy of Obama’s attention to the campaign against ISIS. I guess, if one looks down the telescope the wrong way long enough, one can and does conjure the most potentially explosive political firestorm the world has ever seen.

All large organizations have been paying untold obeisance, even fawning obeisance, to their cadre of lawyers and accountants, in deference to the avoidance of legal cases against their institutions and more particularly to their personal carers, for more decades than warranted. These legal/accounting drones have been flying under the radar of public scrutiny, designing the forms, writing the contracts, directing the traffic in psychiatric hospitals and wards, for example, and setting the foundations of policy and practice, as if they and they alone owned the sole access to the highest and the best and the most ethical way of doing things imaginable. Channelling “wisdom” however, is not the gift of law school graduates, nor of accounting programs, nor is it the special purview of law school professors, or senior accountant partners.

“Rules” as in the highway traffic acts that keep us driving on opposite sides of the road, for our own safety, are definitely essential, and greatly appreciated. And, for similar purposes of assuring some degree of fairness, tax codes, for example, provide benchmarks that give a degree of confidence that if I make X dollars, the income tax rate will be the same for me as for the next person who also makes the same X dollars. Similarly, if my home is invaded, I expect some level of seriousness from the police and the courts to seek out and to provide evidence that will result in some degree of punishment, sanctions, on the perpetrators. And it is true that such an incident will invade my sense of security, and my sense of privacy.

Similarly, within large organizations, there are policy and practice guidelines, that provide those in positions of responsibility some confidence that they will not be putting out fires every minute of every day. Some ways of doing things may actually make some sense from a safety perspective, or from an efficiency perspective, or even from a professional perspective. Hence, new inroads into the use of derogatory language,  or of excessive expressions of anger have been somewhat normalized in many organizations, provided the context is acknowledged.

And here is where the rubber meets the road. Imposing standards that would be appropriate in one setting may not have even a modicum of relevance in others. Expressions of anger, for example, in a male hockey dressing room, would be and should be much more tolerated, without personal insult or injury to a person’s dignity, than in a hospital patient’s room. And, of course, the degree of political (lobbying) pressure that is brought to the ethics and moral “police” will have some influence on if and when restrictions on human behaviour are recommended, and then imposed, and “policed” (monitored) with the inevitable “sanctions” for crossing the new line of acceptable deportment.

So, what pronouns, depicting a member of the LGBT community, are acceptable, normal, worthy of consideration, beyond the “baked in the cake” he, she, him her, they, them and their corresponding possessive forms? Do we have to “invent” or “create” new combinations of letters for each person of the LGBT community, in order to satisfy some outlandish request, or even demand, for “special” treatment?

A psychology professor at UT, for one, has refused to learn and then to memorize the variants expected by both the LGBT community and then “expected” and “enforced” by people whose pay grade far exceeds both his and mine. And, for his courage, determination, pragmatism and vision, he has been subjected to letters of discipline, angry public protests from students, and a ton of support from outside the university community.

Please consider this piece an integral component of the latter support.

People in positions of responsibility are more than the suits in the office of that executive position in that organization. They represent what we used to consider
(without having even to express the perspective) social and thought leadership. They hold those positions, especially in an institution of higher learning, but also in all other colleges and schools, hospitals, churches, and especially governments, as a matter of trust not only for their specific organization, but also for the wider “public good”. And if they bow as sycophants to the tiniest breeze of political pressure, they will give voice and permission to the most anal of political pressures, thereby transforming a culture from one capable and willing to see the “big” picture and relate to it, but also to know when the finest details matter.

“Covering Your Ass” has for too long been a staple in the quiver of all bureaucrats, and especially of those ambitious one’s whose careers depend on their demonstration of “dependability”…..defined in the most restrictive terms. “Sucking up” not only to the normal expected parameters of a job description but also to the particular “idiosyncracies” of  a supervisor, in order to pave the way to promotion, is one of the more established modus operandi’s of the ambitious.

And we have some “factories” located throughout the North American continent that seem to be producing such human models, at a very high rate of production aided and abetted by those same universities with which we began here.

Compliance, following orders, top-down hierarchical power structures have been around for centuries in armies, the church, and many governmental agencies. So the attitudes and  behaviour of the sycophant have been burned into our consciousness. And, on top of that structure came the feminist revolution which, if it did not spawn “zero tolerance” certainly gave the initiative a heavy thrust forward, another illegitimate, illogical and also supremely unenforceable move to rid the world of whatever was its specific target (as if such purification were even achieveable). And so, here we are today, witnessing another chapter in the saga of the interminable march toward something so specious as to be unworthy of the best minds of our time….human perfection.

There is a significant difference between striving for the “perfect union” knowing full well that such a goal is merely aspirational and human perfection, including the eradication of specific behaviour. Remember that “banned book” list that was supposed to keep people from reading salacious literature; it predictably and unceremoniously backfired, as common sense knew it would. Not only did it not prevent readers, it attracted them like flies to sugar! Similarly, prohibition, another of those “anal” perfectionistic social and political goals of the most religiously fundamental, and those who had read scripture only on a literal level and meaning, backfired and generated mega-sales of black demon rum, under the counter and out of sight of the “authorities” who could have told the sanctimonious that their efforts did not comply with human or any other kind of nature.

And now, under intense scrutiny and criticism from the administration at the University of Toronto, (undoubtedly all or most proudly wearing their doctorates in their specific academic specialty) a tenured psychology professor, Jordan Peterson, has faced and will continue to face criticism, perhaps even threats, and who knows if he will even hold onto his professorship.He refuses to buy in to the university’s expectation that he learn and memorize the specific pronoun selected by each his students from the LGBT community, and use those pronouns whenever he addresses those students. And, what’s more, a considerable number of students have confronted the “heroic” professor protesting his refusal.

Peterson has, in effect, drawn his own line in the sand of the vernacular, that portion of speech in which pronouns, (words used to substitute for nouns) are to be used. “Zie,” and “zher,” or any of another dozen words have been proposed as acceptable. “Gender unicorn” has been selected by Alberta teachers are their proposal for these occasions in which pronouns acceptable to the LGBT community are required.

Not incidentally, today is Common Sense Day, on which everyone, including those in the ivory towers in Hart House, or whichever building this species of administrators is currently encaged, needs to come out of their rarified and obviously oxygen-depleted atmosphere, breathe the air in the quadrangle, or along Bloor or St. George Streets, take out their cell phones and take some photos of the sunlight shining on the “real world” and contemplate the absurdity of their position.

Laws that are without merit, after all, are not laws needing to be observed, complied with nor endorsed. And this notion applies not only to laws passed by legitimate legislatures; it also applies to the kind of regulations that have spanked, wrecked the reputations of thousands of men in the last three or four decades, as emasculated men (in positions of authority) bowed to other equally specious lobbies from straight women, who were so over-protective of their sisters that they successfully created policies and practices that rendered all men as violent perpetrators of sexual abuse, and thereby robbed the very equality so demanded by women from those same women who were are, and will continue to be more than capable of making their own decisions in personal relationships.

Nanny Administrations, whether in universities, churches, governments, hospitals or in corporate structures, are still myopic, mis-guided, infantilizing Super-Ego’s for their respective organizations, and in their pursuit of their own “perfection” in their performance of their roles they have made significant contributions to the erosion, even depletion, of public trust from the very institutions they “run”. When “common sense” has left the building, or worse, never was permitted entry, and the anality of the perfectionists, (regardless of their ideological church) takes over, the whole system of “public good” falls apart. And so it should.

Jordon Peterson should not only be relieved of the considerable political, professional, (non)-ethical pressure under which he currently gasps for real air; he should be offered a honorary doctorate in Common Sense for his contribution to the health and wellness of the culture.

Sorry, to all those in the LGBT community, who will undoubtedly dub me prejudiced. Sorry, again, but you are wrong on both counts!