Can we envision the future as our "friend" and not our enemy, exclusively?

When does a situation become so pressing in the public consciousness that we demand action?

The old adage, “it’s too late to lock the barn door after the horse has left the building” seems to be rooted in both history and culture. Nevertheless, we keep rushing to put the lock on the door (fix the lock, find the key, get a new lock, adjust the door…whatever it takes) to assure ourselves and our families, organizations the horse will not be able to bolt “the next time”. Taking the deliberate, conscious, planned and reflective step to make sure the “lock” works and is engaged, PRIOR to the horse’s exit, however, seems like a nuisance, a bore, a distraction from our busy lives, too high a cost, and a target for a compendium of excuses, rationalizations and denials.

We seem either to love “cleaning up our own messes” or to be too disengaged to “prevent” those messes in the first place. We can and do laud the “vision” and the anticipation of a Wayne Gretzky who seemed always to know where the puck was “going to be” before it got there, as exceptional, sensational, visionary, even so extraordinary that only a very few are so “talented.” We all know people whom we describe as “having their head and eyes glued to the rear-view mirror” as the preferred pattern of their lives. History, after all, is the best teacher and, for another of our “cracker-barrel maxims” we shout, “Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it”. Some towns and cities in Ontario have taken to expressing these thoughts on the signs they erect at their ‘front door’:  (Name) “where history and innovation thrive;” “where past present and future live in harmony,” “where history inspires our future,” “touch the past embrace the future,”…..all of these purporting to hold both past and future in equal balance and significance.

The simple fact, however, is that we have some ‘record’ of how things “were” and no authentic and credible picture of how things “might be” tomorrow. Churches, using a potentially powerful influence on our culture (in the past) depend on the words, the injunctions and the warnings from their revered “fathers,” the writers who put those words into sacred texts. It was never that the writers believed or attempted to engrave history into our psyches as if it had more reason to be considered “sacred” than the “now” or all of the tomorrow’s to come. On the other hand, “authority” (Divine Right of Kings, and the prophetic writings of the various teachers and prophets, the omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God…all symbols of some power and influence we are instructed to value, emulate and obey. And all of them come out of our past. In schools and families, we prosletyze the habits, values, perceptions and expectations we have absorbed from our ancestors. And that includes our embedded bigotries, our food preferences and abhorrences, our at-meal prayers, our vacation patterns and perhaps destinations. There is, we believe and are repeatedly told, high value to our way of living, believing, perceiving and behaving. In many families too, our sons and daughters take on the career patterns of their mothers and fathers, often in the same geographic locations. These might be the “family farm,” the family business, the family law or medical practice, or “following in the footsteps” of the politician father, for example. And, let’s agree, there is a kind of continuity to this pattern of observing and honouring the traditions of our past.

For many in the political or academic arenas, their professional lives rely extremely heavily on the precedents set by their predecessors: academic research, for example, the laws and traditions of the courts, the procedures of the operating room. Even the chosen garb worn by the respective practitioners is a symbol of the past, carried forward, with sometimes minor adjustments. (Wigs no longer worn in Canadian courts, except at the Supreme Court level.) And while we have multiple highly advanced systems to disseminate the details, and the perceptions and the values of our collective past, there are still many “new” developments for which we are alarmingly unprepared.

Global warming and climate change, the rise of terrorism, the plague of starvation, the epidemics that defy our antibiotics, the shift in trade practices from local and national to neighbourly to global, the displacement of millions of workers resulting in both a drain on the health care budgets and an exponential spike in drug and alcohol dependence….these are just a few of the files that often seem either too dire and complex to respond to our normal degree and kind of interventions, or whose implications and warnings can be debated and demonstrated to be too far in the future to worry about today. After all, the argument goes, we simply cannot afford to predict and to solve every crisis before it strikes.

Nevertheless, there is a cultural proclivity that favours looking backward, and includes a dissection of the present variables, while ignoring our responsibilities for the future, to a similar extent. Let’s re-examine the old story of the children falling into the waterfalls, in which people rush to the bottom of the falls to pick them out. Rarely, if ever, are our primary resources directed to the top of the falls to discover why they are falling in in the first place, and to preventing that tragedy. Rushing to “rescue” rather than rushing to “prevent” is a culture norm on which, if we remain permanently impaled, will “hoist us on our own petard”.

Self-sabotage, it seems, is not exclusive to the male demographic, although our (male) championing of its repetition in our individual and our collective lives is a red flag we might want to take more note of. However, when it comes to cultural self-sabotage, we can take pre-emptive and preventive steps as our own best “warriors”.

We do have both the skills and the knowledge necessary to develop a shared perspective that focuses our eyes and our minds and our hearts and our wills on the road ahead. There is nothing that proves beyond a doubt that our “knowledge” of the past is more “credible” or valuable than our anticipation our the future. History is, by its very nature, subject to a variety of widely differing opinions, new evidence examined from new perspectives with new technologies that permit new conclusions and therefore just as subject to change as our “view” of the future. It is our fixed attitude that renders the future much more frightening and therefore worthy of both avoidance and of denial than our attitude to our past.

There are so many layers to this observation Let’s start with the most obvious, our avoidance and in many cases our denial of death. So taboo is the subject that it is, in many quarters, equated with or even identified with EVIL. In the Manichean dichotomy that declares LIFE sacred and thereby good, then its opposite has to be evil.

 I have always found it difficult, if not impossible, to square this notion with the concept of “natural law” on which much of Christian church theology is based. Is death not just as much an integral component of natural law as birth? Are we not cognizant of and in agreement with the paradoxical concept that every “dying” opens a door to a “new life” in some manner, just as the inverse is also true, that every birth involves some “dying”. Living and breathing not only implies but actually declares that death will ensue, just as naturally and predictably as a morning sunrise after a dark dawn.

Our footprints in the sands of time in our families, our towns, cities, schools and universities (as well as our churches for the dwindling few) are moments to celebrate with celebrations, congratulations, anniversaries, baptisms, and even (dare I say it?) funerals. And yet our future prospects, visions, hopes dreams and even bucket lists are considered somewhat frivolous, unworthy of too much concentration, planning and concentration. After all, what value do they have, unless and until they have been fulfilled? (At least that’s the conventional “wisdom”!)

And yet, those things, pictures we envision , especially in our darkest moments, may be the single rung of hope on which we can hang our determination to carry on. They are not yet written in our diaries, nor are they documented in our family histories, nor are they recorded in the daily newspaper or the history archives. Yet, do those omissions qualify them as unworthy, irrelevant and readily dismissed?

Literature uses two traditional literary forms to speak about the future: utopia and dystopia, a future to be yearned for and one to be desperately avoided. And yet, there are so many less dramatic portraits of the future that are completely passed over in such works of art. Often, too, such works of literature are considered apocalyptic, given that our “imagination” permits their inclusion only in an “end of time disaster” or “an end of time rapture.”

We miss so much potential to put “paint on the canvas” of our lives by rendering the past as sacred, important and valid, empirical and measureable, and dismiss our future, unless and until we design and apply the latest digital technology that renders us capable of “predicting” the future.

Jurgen Moltmann, a German theologian contends that the future is what theology is all focused on. Hope, resurrection, re-birth, transformation and transcendence…these are just some of the words and concepts that purportedly represent the Christian faith. And yet, in the secular world, especially as the lawyers and the accountants assume pre-eminence, demonstrating the highest valuation for dollars, deals, profits, investments and all of the cultural attributes of the corporation, including the limits of all expectations except those that measure record highs for the Dow and the Nasdaq, these “etherals” are regarded as unsubstantiated, unreal and unworthy.

And it is not only in the abstract that the past limits our potential for a renewed future, individually and societally. If and when revert to our memory of what happened in our past, as prologue and predictor of the future, especially in the specific arena in which those memories originated (I had a bad experience as a child, so I refuse to have children because I do not want another child to go through what I went through” is just one example of the limiting of our future.)…then we have parked in an experience that was “then” while “this is now” and there may well be no reason to imprint the present and future with the experience of the past.

However, we seem categorically unwilling and/or unable to shed that trap.

“I had asparagus when I was young; it was horrible and I have refused to eat it every since.”

“I failed math in grade seven, and have had terrible experiences in math in every class since that time.”

“I won a talent contest in grade school so I expect to win this competition in university or in the workplace.”

This is not another “either-or” argument either. It is not that the past is sacred and the future dangerous. There is really no complete separation or segregation of past from present and future. Rather it is how we integrate our past experiences into our current perceptions and our future aspirations, not as limiting and precluding energies, but rather as gateways to our potential to do things differently now and in the future, based on our real learnings from our past.

And there is where the rubber meets the road.

How often, in our personal conversations or in our professional meetings do we ask questions like:

·      What lessons have we learned from our experiences that shed light on how we might do things differently in the future?

·      How can we move past our negative experiences into a perception that builds from that experience and provides even more possibilities than we would perceive without reflecting on that experience?

·      What “comfort” did we really experience from letting our negative history colour our present and future? (if we are honest, it was a false sense of security, rather than “comfort”)

·      What is the pathway to finding the gifts from our dark times that can free us from the limits to our expectations that we and others have placed upon them?

·      How can we support each other in a tectonic shift of personal and public attitudes that anticipates not merely negatives from the future but a full range of possibilities and probabilities, all of which will require monitoring, adjustment and careful planning?

·      The notion of risk, while real and significant, is not a determinant, except if we let it, of our shared future. How can we bring this observation to reality?

·      What new models of visioning, human, digital, weather and climate forecasting, new treatments of lethal disease, new ways of conceptualizing power and success are there right in our own circle of influence from whom and from which we can draw support for a transformative view of what might be possible in our shared future?

·      What new “ethical values” have already been accepted universally, demonstrating not only a change from historic values, but also a heightened ethical plane of potential?

·      How can we re-shape and re-structure our conversations to look more sensitively at our capacity to self-sabotage our individual lives and our shared future, to accept how we are capable of better?

There are those already raising their eyes in dismay, disdain and even contempt for what they are reading. They are already seeing another Don Quixote tilting at windmills pecking at the keys on his keypad. They almost shout out at their computer screen, “This is BS and I will read no more!”

Why such a strong push-back?

It is because we have too many examples of promises made and unkept; of dreams articulated without being incarnated; of aspirations cut short by the army of interferrents like illness, accidents, poverty, falling in love, the death of a family member, the injunction to forego a dream “in order to make a real living”….the prophetic warning from too many “responsible” parents.

Hawthorne and Thoreau, American writers, were advocates for and espousers of something they called Transcendalism, the notion that people are inherently “good” and become corrupted through their association with various organizations in the public square. How different such a perspective would impact our current fixation on both history and a potentially tragic future!

It is within each of us to move beyond all of the strictures and the injunctions of our parents, our teachers, definitely our clergy, and our professional colleagues, to embrace a new view of the future, one shaped by our best hopes and dreams, not one we permit to be victimized by our limited permission on the definition of what is possible.

How do we really  know what is possible unless and until AFTER we have tried to bring about something different and new? Like the  artist who puts paint on the canvas, s/he cannot know if the work is “good’ until after the painting is complete. Similarly, we cannot know what the future holds, unless and until we have put all of our best efforts, based on our highest ideals and visionings, into bring that future into being.

And yet, we, both individually and collectively, risk failing ourselves and the richness of our shared future by foreclosing on it and on ourselves through our perspective based on the past, and limiting our picture of the future.

And, we can do things differently, if we only choose.

Do we choose?

It may not be that global warming and climate change, or a nuclear arms race, or poverty and income disparity, or disease and terrorism are our greatest enemies; it may well be our ingrained attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and "positions" that require dramatic shifts in order to put us in "sync" with the energies of bounty, plenty and the miraculous that are all around us!

Let's not default on our better angels

The debate about fake news, alternative facts, the evidence of leaks of classified information (presumably by disgruntled government employers) and Trump’s war on the major news outlets as the sources of lies and fake news has finally got down to the question of individual human literacy.

 Among other things, literacy now includes the capacity…

·       to read,

·      to discern literal empirical information from figurative language,

·      to draw inferences from tonal quality, physical body language, images of power and

·      to deduce some relevant assessment of the world in which we live.

Bombarded with words and images, we are all, today, subject to a drowning cataract of what most sources call “information”….more of it now of the “infomercial” variety attempting to sell some product, some view of the world, some ideology and, as the dark side of the previous goals, the venality of the opponents. In the United States, the Second Amendment promises the freedom of expression, including the impunity even immunity from prosecution for what the rest of the world calls “hate” speech. Many pundits and observers consider the existence and healthy functioning of a free news media as a sine qua non of democracy: simply, the government of, for and by the people depends on the free flow of public information, dispensed with professional discipline, rigour and integrity (not to mention verified clarity) from a variety of sources reflecting a diversity of political ideologies, independent of the current political office holders.

A number of strong and fundamental forces are competing and converging on the political stage(s) in many countries. They include:

·      The emergence of social media, by which everyone has the opportunity to “report” on whatever happens in their individual life, and to comment on whatever happens in the range of their individual and collective conscious,  

·      the dislocation among former industrial workers who have watched their jobs slide to countries in which neither labour nor environmental standards exert the level of costs on corporations (a race to the bottom, in human workplace economic, political and sociological terms)

·      the rise of Russian nationalism, including military aggression and the seizure of Crimea

·      the wave of migrant refugees that threatens the political order in several European countries, and foreshadows and sustains the rise of nationalistic populism, racism, the far-right political parties that seek power, or have achieve it in Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States

·      the devolution of the language in public discourse of dignity, respect and honesty into character assassination, slander, libel and “alternative facts” with impunity

·      the serious erosion of the financial statements and thereby the reporting corps in small and medium-sized daily newspapers

·      the spike in cyber-intelligence and cyber-invasions that have and continue to undermine the integrity of democratic elections, to wit the presidential election in the United States

·      the erosion of public confidence in historic institutions and the people who serve in those institutions including government, corporations, and the many agencies of government

·      the rise of specialized academic research among the corporate and university communities that competes with what had been established “sibboleths” of personal life practice and process, rendering the ordinary citizen fearful of being able/capable of digesting and assimilating and making sense of the import of much of this research

·      the spike in video-game culture that supports and sustains a violent competitive world view of winner and loser, already deeply ingrained in the movie and television entertainment industry

·      the shrinking of the world’s space and time, making travel for leisure, business and learning much more accessible today than ever in history

·      the video-audio recording of moments from both public and private lives/conflicts/debates/investigations/reports much of it competing/conflicting with information from similar competing sources

·      the history of unresolved racial divisions taking shape and form uniquely in various places, with various minorities whose integration into the mainstream awaits their succeeding generations

·      the implications of globalization and global warming and climate change, two of the macro-issues still thirsting for resolution

These are just a few of the forces shoving individuals, organizations, governments, families and nations in several directions simultaneously, leaving everyone and most organizations confused, unfocused, nervous and in some cases dysfunctional.

The media, as a public face on our collective consciousness, struggles with its identity, as do the political parties that have depended on traditional roles, positions, and public credence, the leaders of the organizations, not only at the top, but in the many departments who, naturally, when facing fear and uncertainty, revert to self-protective behaviours that may prove to be short-sighted and self-sabotaging both to them and to their organization, also struggle to find an identity in this vortex of the confluence of new and potentially dangerous torrents for which none of us has prepared.

Identity politics, in a primarily transactional business-dominated (win-lose) culture, pits my ability to dominate against your’s in every office, boardroom, operating room, union hall and classroom. It is as if the poverty of the adage “do it to them before they do it to you” has found universal resonance. This poverty of perspective, robbed as it is of “the other’s needs, hopes, aspirations and dreams” has stripped the consciousness and the demands of the “public good” from conversations about shared issues, shared resources, shared goals and shared hopes and optimism.

• When we accept the poverty of this monumental scarcity, in the face of such threatening and impending and seemingly intractable issues, we fulfil the self-fulfilling aspect of our own prophecy. 
• When we place our individual needs above those of the “public good,” we not only abandon our responsibility for serving the needs of the public good; we also absolve future generations from having to take those responsibilities seriously. 
• When our world view, in the face of such a plethora of storms bearing down upon us, reverts to isolationism, nationalism, walls, guns and deportations, as the primary way of dealing with perceived (and demonstrably unreal) threats, we have already joined a large public army/consciousness/conventionality/normalcy that is a lie to the human spirit.

This current political threat from the far-right denies our basic, demonstrable and verifiable human reality: that we are hopeful, compassionate, social, egalitarian, spiritual and integrous at our core. If and when we, individually and collectively, submit to the denial of these better (even best) angels, and join the parade to feed our darker instincts to personal power under the threat of one or more of many fears, we reduce our capacity to defeat these dark forces, and thereby throw away our opportunity to nudge the world to a higher and more sustainable and much more honourable level of civilization….a goal that regardless of our political, economic, academic, religious or national background, we all share.

Let’s start demonstrating that basic truth.

How much chaos and deception and lies can the world tolerate?

After the chocolates, the flowers, the romantic music and the loving of yesterday (Valentine’s Day), this morning the dark shadow of geopolitical reality hangs over our heads and our spirits.

Within the last week:

·      Kim Jung Un has fired a medium-range ballistic missile, fired this time with solid fuel (not the liquid kind that gives a longer warning to enemies),

·      Putin has fired a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, in direct contravention of the agreement signed by Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev,

·      National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn has resigned in disgrace over his at best inappropriate (at worst illegal?) conversations with the Russian Ambassador to the United States, over sanctions against Russia for its intervention into the American electoral process, and

      reports circulate from multiple sources that the White House is in “turmoil”…..staggered by the many mis-statements from alternative facts to lies about the three million undocumented immigrants who voted illegally, the request for an investigation into the “sales pitch” from Kellyann Conway on Fox to go out and buy Ivanka Trump’s line.

Whether it is a committee of the Senate or the House or both, investigating the Trump debacle that attempts to pass itself off as the official administration of the United States, testing the White House gang at the moment of its obviously deepest chaos seems to have become the chosen sport of both the North Koreans and the Kremlin. Whether General Mattis, Secretary of Defense, can put a lid on world jitters this morning at the NATO meeting in Brussels, given the depth of the administration’s dysfunction is, for many observers, doubtful if not actually impossible.

While Europe just this morning signed the CETA trade agreement with Canada, removing tariff barriers between Canada and the EU, the angst among many European nations and their leaders grows in the wake of the turbulence in Washington and the prospect of opportunistic “dictators” like Jung Il and Putin to exacerbate the already boiling geopolitical pot(s). The notion of a stable, honourable democratic and trustworthy partner in the White House and in Washington seems to have flown away with the tornado of lies, falsehoods, allegations, “lock-her-up” charges and testosterone-laden invective that spews from the president and his coterie of sycophants. (Incompetence, laced with invective and ego-mongering seeps through in the most innocuous ways: “Prime Minister ‘Joe’ (not Justin) Trudeau”, from the mouth of the White House Press Secretary yesterday.)

The Trump “brand,” having been banned in China, is undergoing a potential resurfacing in light of the dramatically altered geopolitical realities in which the president of the United States puts his business empire’s growth on the table with the many other negotiations, in his hubristic and blind belief that ‘the president of the United States does not have any conflicts of interest’.

This morning reports indicate that there are wiretaps of ‘several’ phone conversations between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives in the midst of the presidential campaign. That, by itself, ought to generate ulcers if not cardiac arrests among elected Republicans, so adamant is (was) their party as the protector of the United States from the “murderer Putin” (to quote Senator John McCain). However, while talk and news reports proliferate in Washington, missiles fired and the strafing of U.S. warships in both the Baltic and Black Seas by Russian fighter jets must be giving everyone watching the jitters reminiscent of the Cold War of the fifties and sixties.

Gorbachev, in a recent op-ed piece in Time, predicted that the world was moving inexorably toward war. In that piece, he called on Trump and Putin to jointly offer a resolution to the Security Council of the United Nations to put the option of war off the international table. Recognizing that neither ‘side’ can or would win in any military conflict, Gorbachev’s incisive analysis and prophetic invitation need to echo in Brussels, in New York, in Moscow and especially in Washington and Beijing.

The world is not ready for, nor can it tolerate another cold war, especially as the existential threats of global warming and climate change, massive immigrant dislocation and migration, the unattended issues of human rights abuses and the rising levels of un-and under-employment resulting from globalization and the widening gap in incomes…..and the rising tide of ill-ease, bitterness and even contempt for the institutional leadership.

Facsists and ultra-nationalists, protectionists and those like Steve Bannon who seek the overthrow of the “establishment” everywhere, (following Italian apocalyptic thinker Julias Evola endeared by Fascists in both Italy and the Third Reich) have to be “outed” from their closet of  toxic secrecy and nefarious scheming and shown to be what they really are: dangerous to world order!

Trump says Flynn was fired because of a lack of trust; how ironic! Who can, could or will trust the Trump administration? Sometimes parallel process (whereby precisely the same dynamic is playing out in a private life and a parallel universe, such as the whole administration) is so clearly evident as to be almost ghostly in its weirdness. How could these two dramas being taking shape unfolding on this public stage simultaneously?

And, among the names being floated for Flynn’s replacement is General David Petraeus'; although somewhat tarnished by his disclosure of classified information to his biographer/lover, why would Petraeus even consider such an appointment? Loyalty to his country, of course, for a life-long military careerist who has risen to the top of the national totem pole of power, will go a long way to prompting a positive response should he be tasked with replacing Flynn. And, with the current White House in shambles, the nation’s security being discussed in front of private patrons at Trump’s Florida digs, (not in a private and confidential space!) and the world shaking its head and wagging its collective parental finger at the mess of the first 26 days, little wonder there is anxiety in many world capitals.

Can Petraeus, Mattis, Tilerson at al rescue this administration and keep this national ship “on course” (whatever that might mean under the unpredictable and irascible and uncontrollable chief executive? Will the Wshington Post and the New York Times (the dishonest media in Trump’s mind) uncover and report enough evidence to force the appointment of a special prosecutor, as in the Watergate affair, and will the evidence be so overwhelming as to render the president potentially empeachable?

It is early in the drama; however, there are many demons released from the administration’s closet with more likely to come. Can treason really be on the radar in this deplorable state of the U.S. government just when stability, trust and predictability are what the world needs most?

Our historic opportunity for change through global collaboration, co-operation

There have been declarations of “the end of history” when Hegel noted the triumph of Napolean, and when Nietzsche noted the end of man, and when political philosopher Francis Fukuyama noted that consumerism would supplant ambition, courage, imagination and individualism. Back at the beginning of the public consciousness of the danger posed by the release of carbon dioxide through hydroflorocarbons from aerosol cans, the apocalypse became the watchword for many environmentalists, and through that spike in consciousness, the environmental movement lost much of its steam. Overstatement is, by definition, a potential self-sabotage simply because the “end” does not appear, and because the public becomes disengaged. A yawn replaces the appropriate activism and change in habits.

The Christian heritage of the “end of times” is an archetype from the book of Revelation that foretells the time when good triumphs over evil, and when the ultimate judgement of humans by God separates the “good people” from the “evil people”. Anticipating the end of time has been a repeating theme starting with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem A.D. 70 and as re-emerged intermittently in various writings from Ezekiel to Isaiah, as a method for disclosing the future intervention and power of God in the lives of those writing the Old Testament.

As expected, the writers who have raised the spectre of the end of time have fed on and nourished a kind of fear of epic mortality, often as a motivating vision and stimulus for reformation. When the current reality overwhelms our capacity to integrate and comprehend what we are witnessing and experiencing, humans frequently dip into the well of metaphors and re-cast the image of ultimate terminality. Wars, tsunamis, droughts, fires, mass migrations, mass deaths, economic depressions, epidemics, population explosions, revolutions….these are just some of the turning points in human history that have energized the deployment of apocalyptic thinking and writing.

Of course, the wringing of hands, the turning to prophets and saviours, heroes and tyrants, a spike in both legal and illicit medications for escape….these are some of the ways humans choose to confront their mounting fears. Large and seemingly unresolveable fears ironically generate a kind of thinking and language that confronts the fears with over-reaching power, in images of the 'end of times'. Also, when one is frightened, one’s grasp on what is “real” seems to loosen and one looks for reference points of stability, perhaps even maturity, perspective and calm. Some also look for “silver bullet” remedies that can be compressed into a kind of sound byte, without the full comprehension or even openness to the complexities of current reality and any authentic process for change. The opportunist gravitates to such a vacuum, ready willing and eager to ride the wave of fear to ultimate power and control by promising instant, glib, (unachieveable, unrealistic) and large answers to what are really gordion knots so complex that no political, economic, military or executive act will resolve. As part of the paving of the path to power, the opportunist seizes on promising the “moon” to a people starved for their “due” at least in their own mind.

The convergence of “scarcity” with the ambition of the unscrupulous, especially with the advent of a mind of technology with which the masses have yet to adjust and to integrate into a kind of normalcy in their lives, offers a unique moment in history when moderation seems to fail the starved imaginations and the limited visions of many in the public for what they perceive as required solutions. Power, in the short term, swings toward those who promise that “moon” without any real expectation of resolution. Desperation, at that time, becomes the operating public mood in the culture.

With the rise of opportunists, charlatans, hucksters and narcissistic self-fulfilling and self-declared ‘super-humans’, one of their easily manipulated tools is the re-writing of the public discourse. What once seemed an agreed body of information over which a legitimate debate took place as to what approach might best meet the need for change is replaced by a tidal wave of mis-information, dis-information and outright distortions. Charlatans have no remorse at cleaning away the underbrush of facts in order to have a new unfettered road to dominate both the facts and their proposed solutions, all of which are designed to enhance their own personal reputation. Any thought of the “public good” is obliterated from the consciousness of the opportunist charlatan, for the simple reason that “the other” has no “standing” in the court of his mind. The only “other” that matters is the other who submits completely to the will and the whim of the “leader”. “Serve me, or prepare to be outcast” (in order for me to sustain my invincibility and my supreme power) would seem to be the mantra of the supreme leader.

Little wonder then that talk of the end of time, the end of history has re-surfaced in the public consciousness.

The triumph of “virtuality”, the new word that seems to be crowding “reality” off the stage of the human consciousness, seems to have reached a “zenith or perhaps a nadir” with the rise of Donald Trump to the Oval Office. Dependent almost solely on the utterances of his own vacuous mind, the new president “invents” terrorist threats, raping Mexicans, corrupt Hillary, rising crime rates and a swamp that needs draining, not to mention “so-called judges” and presidents who are not encumbered by any conflict of interest nor a constitution. As for the divestiture of private business interests, the disclosure of tax returns, the nepotism embedded in appointments to the administration of family members as well as the historic respect for individuals like Senator John McCain,…..well, these are all mere myths in the mind of a dishonest and disgraceful media and not worthy of honouring, respecting, or even circumscribing as off limits from presidential tweets.

The Speaker of the British House of Commons shouts that Trump be denied the opportunity to speak to Parliament when he visits London,  an occasion that would be an embarrassment to the Queen and the British people. The Canadian government sends as many cabinet ministers to Washington as will be received, in order to pave the way for a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Trudeau, as if such inordinate pre-planning would leave the Canadian leader vulnerable to the Trump bullying offensive.

It is not only that Trump lives in and propagates an “alternative reality” which he expects his acolytes to utter before every microphone the can find. It is more importantly also an “alternative reality” that he expects the American people, the leaders and people in countries around the world and the media serving those billions to believe. In short, this man is challenging the credence of the world, in order to bend it to his supreme power. Every opposing statement is countered with a denigrating rebuttal, based usually on an “ad hominum” attack, (witness the attack on Senator Blumenthal’s war record attack, following his disclosure of the Gorsuch comments on Trump’s demeaning the judiciary as “demoralizing and abhorrent”). 

Witness the presidential flaying of Nordstrom after they dropped his daughter’s clothing line, because of lack of sales. (‘They have treated her so unfairly!’) Nothing and no one is outside the line of fire of the psychotic, narcissistic and egomaniacal inhabitant of the White House. And, there is a real danger that the constant drumbeat of headline-followed-by-headline from HIS obsession with control will both literally and metaphorically swamp the consciousness of both the media editors and their audiences.

It used to be with George W. Bush that we learned, “I don’t do nuance!” whereas with Obama, nuance, moderation and reflection were defining traits. Now we learn that Trump does not even have the word “nuance” in his lexicon. He does not know such a word/concept exists.

And with the consistent climb of the Dow, and the Nasdaq, the drop in unemployment numbers in the U.S. and the confirmation of some of the most far-right, potentially abusive and sycophantic cabinet ministers in U.S. history, we are on the brink of several regressive and retrograde steps backward in history: the decimation of the public school system, the emboldening of  law enforcement’s trampling of civil rights of minorities, women, refugees, and the demolition of Obamacare, the final death knell in the history of the labour movement, and the danger of a geopolitical pot that boils over from the disturbances and the bullying of the new administration. The danger of the erosion of NATO, and the resulting empowerment of Putin, linked to the potential trade wars that Trump has already announced are in his sights bode badly for stability in world order.

As the globalization of economic trade coughs up its winners and losers, and the tectonic shift of the locus of manufacturing, and the replacement of millions of jobs with digital engineering, added to the displacement of employment “with their hands” for which men were eager to prepare, (with the rising need for workers in health care, education and the soft services historically filled primarily by women), the spike in health costs with a rising tide of retirees who consume a major chunk of health costs, there is enough turbulence and scarcity of real solutions to the convex of large issues for an opportunist like Trump to attempt to fill the vacuum with his own vacuity.

There are people in countries other than the United States who recognize the “idiot” (their word) that Americans have elected president and they do not wish to emulate or replicate the American mistake. Hope for many observers lies in the potential defeat of far-right wing-nuts in France, and other European countries, a move that would only fulfil the prophecy of Trump that he is the voice of a world-wide movement.

Surely, the election of Trump and the ensuing trail of lies, phony promises, hollow explanations and rationalizations, and empty sound and fury of the Trump Roman Candle will self-immolate before the eyes of the world. Also, surely the better angels of the American judiciary and the Republican party (so far suffering under their own self-imposed gag order and nose holding), along with the  self-respect of the American people.

However, before this “storm” is fully spent, having inflicted considerable damage and devastation on all of the most vulnerable, including minorities, unemployed and underemployed, the rule of law, the public institutions like hospitals and schools, traditional trusted relationships with allies, committed protective alliances like NATO, the world will have to adjust its attitudes to how it protects itself from the potential of a hostile take-over by those seeking the dominance they believe is their’s by right.

The hostile take-over is a routine story from the corporate business world. A large company with a mountain of resources sniffs out a likely target corporation whose acquisition would significantly enhance the profits of the pursuing corporation, or just as likely, would impede the profits of the primary competition of the pursuing corporation. Such a power-metaphor, however, is not so acceptable in the geopolitical realm. Witness the Putin hostile takeover of the Crimea and the potential incursion into other border countries.

The business model has invaded, like an unstoppable virus, the way public business is conducted. The privatization of everything, as the “right” pays unlimited homage to the generation of private profit for investors and “winners”, leaves a wake of “losers” for which the social net then has to scramble to lift up. And the cost of this “lift” is far too heavy for the kind of revenue stream left after the taxes on the uber-rich have been eroded by their loyal law-makers, leaving a sea of poisoned detritus, both human and environmental.

It may be dangerous to speak in terms of ultimate threats to our shared responsibility for creating a world in which equal access to opportunity, including basic services like health care, education, employment and a stable and secure family that delivers a healthy environment to its grandchildren. However, that risk seems necessary to take, if we are to mount a sustained, effective and ultimately mortal wound to the Trump administration.

Whatever form the combined forces of man and nature conjure to “beach this whale” permanently, thereby depriving it of its needed oxygen to live, the world is now conjoined in a shared responsibility, the likes of which we have not experienced for decades. Collaboration, people in the streets in all the towns and cities in every country in the world, a confluence of “fact” generators to combat the alternative facts of this “alternative universe”, and an environmental initiative at the level of every household on the planet….these are the minimal requirements to begin the push-back….and the efforts have to cross ideological, religious, cultural, linguistic and economic boundaries.

Anything less will fail.

What is the difference between "my way or the highway" and religious fanaticism?

Executive orders pour forth from the Oval Office, banning Muslim immigrants from seven countries of largely Muslim populations, while the White House shouts, “This is not a ban against Islam!”

The botched raid in Yemen, in which an American was killed and others seriously injured is falsely blamed on a Deputies Meeting on January 6 which “easily approved the idea and sent it on up” (by the White House press Secretary) while a ‘deputy’ who attended that meeting says there was no discussion of the specific raid, leaving it to the next administration.

The House of Representatives, through a 97% Republican vote, this week agreed that mentally unstable persons should have better access to guns.

The North Dakota legislature voted this week to trash the ethics office for legislators, a measure already signed by the state’s governor.

The phone system in Washington was broken by a tidal wave of protest calls from constituents to Senators protesting the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Her family’s wealth, based largely on profits from Amway, is estimated at $5 billion by Forbes, and her efforts to champion vouchers for schools are, for many, a profound threat to the very existence and stability of public education. Her Christian Reformed faith adherence also is a red flag for those holding to the separation of church and state, again a model on which the public education system is based.

Judges in Brooklyn and Seattle have issued ‘stays’ on the Executive Order on immigration, while the White House has promised an immediate appeal to reinstate the order, as just and lawful.

Millions of normally silent and compliant ordinary citizens are marching in the streets in many cities against many of the flurry of “power orders” coming from the new American administration. While the Acting Attorney General is fired for refusing to enforce or defend the immigration ban, and is declared to be “weak on immigration” by the vengeful president.

The president’s choice as the next justice on the Supreme Court comes, albeit with platinum education credentials (Columbia, Harvard, Oxford), out of the same “culture vat” in which millions have been nurtured to favour corporate values over consumers, to favour the 1% over the other 99% and to reject the Obamacare mandate of providing contraception by employers. A clone and fierce fan of deceased Justice Antonin Scalia, Gorsuch would likely sustain the Trump legacy for decades, should he receive Senate confirmation.

The thirty-five year old son-in-law of the president, Jared Cushner, is now a ‘senior advisor’ with credentials that point only to an inheritance of real estate holdings and their management….his appointment testing the boundaries of “nepotism,”  credibility and confidence among the ordinary American citizen. Loyal perhaps he is, but deserving of the throne of power, hardly. He has been reported as being deputized to secure an agreement and peace between Israel and Palestine, as if sending a “boy” to do a job that generations of serious, and brilliant men and women have failed to complete is just another sign of the “miraculous” self-declared competence of the new chief executive.

(Maybe it is not that surprising if we consider that a new iteration of Peter Pan is now the occupant of the White House inviting Wendy (the American electorate and the world’s geopolitical community) to come to Neverland, where all enemies are vanquished, and Peter is permanently stuck in his own innocent (and very dangerous!) imagination. (Wendy, on the other hand, according to a later supplement to the original story, matures and returns to her real home in the real world.Peter does not!)

A growing pattern of Trump’s thumbing his nose, thereby dismissing all irritants from his universe, is developing:

·      Vanquishing all media reporters a the most dangerous liars on earth

·      Generalizing all protesters as paid thugs

·      And all existing trade agreements as “disasters”

·      And Obama administrators as weak and kind (reference to the Iranian nuclear deal)

·      And all women as “willing” to let ‘stars’ do “anything”

·      And all women who have abortions as deserving “punishment”

·      And all military generals as knowing far less that “I” do

·      Telling all civil servants who do not agree with the “program” to choose between submitting or leaving the federal government’s employ

·      Characterizing the New York Times as a ‘failing and dying” newspaper

·      Demoting the Joint Chief and the Secretary of Defense from the National Security Council and elevating Bannon to the inner circle

·      Telling Israel to stop announcing plans for new settlements in the West Bank

·      Threatening heavy new import taxes on autos manufactured outside the U.S.

·      Challenging the one China policy of the legacy of many U.S. administrations of both governing parties

·      Issuing clawless sanctions on Iran following their testing of a missile

·      Berating a refugee agreement with Australia, in a “meet-and-greet” phone call with the Australian Prime Minister, from which the president exits by hanging up barely half-way into the conversation

·      Announcing ‘we must keep ‘evil’ out of the United States, as if there were no ‘evil already within the country

These are signs obvious and available to anyone watching and listening. And, even the most inexperienced coach, counsellor, therapist or even serious and independent advisor would note the pattern of both self-sabotage and potential danger for the nation. When a single person presumes to be the “only solution” to the fake degradation of the country, and enough of the country buys the “pitch” it is not only in the Oval Office that Peter Pan resides; he has taken over the voting patterns of so many voters that the results of the election threaten us all.

Neverland is not a place the people in the street wanted to inhabit. Neverland is not a place they even dreamt they might like to visit, when they entered the voting booth.

Yet, Neverland is the place we are all now expected to willingly join or, just as the Islamic terrorists said to the Queen in Great Britain, “You have two choices, convert, or leave Buckingham Palace which we will convert to a mosque!” So too has Trump told the thousands of diligent and loyal Americans who have worked for presidents and administrations from both Republican and Democratic parties. So too has Trump told the main media outlets. So too has Trump, inferentially told the thousands of educators in public education: convert the schools to ‘christian’ models to grow the “kingdom” or leave (should DeVos be confirmed).

Whether one wants to characterize the developing tragedy as an incipient theocracy, autocracy, dictatorship, coup, or oligarchy….supply your own word…the early signs are all “warning signs” of things to come which do not have a scent, or a shade, or a hint of safety, security and competence.

Little boys who refuse to grow up were never envisioned or expected to be rewarded for their arrogant immaturity.