Are Three Generals Keeping us from Chaos?

 Kudo’s to the Nobel Prize Committee for their announcement last week of the 2017 winner of their Peace Prize: The International Coalition Against Nuclear Weapons. It may seem at first like another “motherhood and apple pie” award to which no sane person would be opposed.

Sometimes the timing of an announcement in geopolitical affairs is as important, if not more important, than the precise content of the announcement. And that could be the primary and lasting impact of this announcement. With the North Korean regime aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons, with the Iran nuclear accord potentially being axed by trump, thereby releasing the Iranians from any modicum of restraint in their pursuit of nuclear weapons, and today, with NBC’s reporting that trump is seeking a ten-fold increase in the number of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal.

Of course, trump denies he ever said this, preferring the more modest cover, “I only said I wanted them updated and modernized.” Nevertheless, stories abound from a variety of sources that depict the president as isolated, angry, like a te-pot needing to vent and when unable, about to blow (we are now in the latter stage, according to one source).

Hints of the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution are being reported by sources like Vanity Fair, and former White House Senior Advisor, bannon who allegedly told the president directly that he should be wary of that piece of law. “What’s that?” snapped the president, when told of the enabling legislation should the Cabinet consider their boss unfit to govern. (Read more in this space, under the title “Don’t Hold Your breath waiting for trump removal”)……

Comparisons with Nixon in the last days of his presidency are being touted, while accompanied by the caution that “this is worse”.

For the Nobel Prize Committee to fire a diplomatic ‘shot’ across the bow of the trump presidency at this moment not only signals what we are all experiencing, an elevated level of anxiety and fear, but also a warning that the whole world is watching. And there is something to the notion that some (not in this administration) Americans really do value and treasure their nation’s historic reputation around the world, a reputation that has been seriously flawed since Bush’s Iraq war in 2003.

For General Mattis and his crew to have to fashion some kind of jerry-rigged compromise for trump to be able to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, because his boss thinks it is a bad deal, while all of the other countries, plus the IAEA, confirm that Iran in is compliance with the terms of the deal, is just another sign of the “pot’s” readiness to explode.

Threatening the broadcasting licence of NBC, because of their telling the world that Tillerson called him a ‘moron’ and that he himself wanted to elevate the number of nuclear warheads by a factor of 10….both of which he considers ‘fake news’ is another sideshow, threatening to morph with the several other ‘sideshows’ into one gigantic volcanic eruption from which not only the country, but also the rest of the world will take years to recover.

There is a kind of ironic, self-fulfilling prophecy to the psychic orientation of this man: if the whole world is your enemy, (in your belief system) and you act from that premise, then it is only a matter of time when the “belief” (perception, world view, core attitude) becomes its own flower…and the whole world turns back on you with a vengeance. And this vengeance is not without merit or might. That irony may seize the members of his own cabinet, after too many public humiliations. It may be that his best trading partners (Canada and Mexico) find other partners. (Britain has already put out feelers about joining NAFTA if trump kills the original tripartite deal).

While trump takes the axe to foreign aid, we learn that China has already invested some $350 billion in developing countries in foreign aid, for growth and for infrastructure projects and obviously engendering thereby a supportive reputation that will only serve their national interests when necessary. Wisely, and  with foresight, the Chinese have also tied their aid to loans that need to be repaid with interest, thereby enhancing their own national coffers, while dancing with their recipient partners.

The old “ugly American” archetype of the 1950’s, represented by a merely bungling and undiscerning American ambassador to an Asian conflict, is a pale analogy to this president. Innocuous, benign and uninterested would be less frightening than the current chief executive who has to be depicted as malignant, narcissistic, untameable and globally ‘nuclear’.

Recent reports indicate that 99% of original trump supporters believe he is doing an outstanding job as president. And that ‘army’ of angry, equally racist and equally malignant sycophants will, undoubtedly, cause a serious problem should their “hero” be politically decapitated. In fact, it is not inconceivable that violence in the streets of cities and towns across the country would break out, testing the strength, resolve and the resources of every law-enforcement detachment in the country. The fact that many of those forces have been armed with military equipment, far above the former (and normal) enforcement arsenals, only adds to the potential dangers for every American citizen. Minorities, especially, will be at risk, as this president has already unleashed his own brand of permissive racism that gives licence to racist law-enforcement on steroids.

From inside, from outside, it is clear that a system that has constitutionally granted unlimited powers to a single person, as the culmination of the wishes of the American people, through their legal right to free speech and the unfettered release of money as the loudest expression of that “freedom”, in an unforeseen age of social media, international cyber crime, and the demise of “truth” as a litmus test of public servant cannot continue as originally envisioned.

First, though, this debacle has to be brought to an end.

What will it take?

·      Failing to staff the United States State Department

·      Failing to nominate United States Attorneys, after firing several

·      Failing to support, foster and endorse the investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into Russian activities to influence a presidential election

·      Firing the Deputy Attorney General

·      Firing the Director of the F.B.I.

·      Publicly asking Russia to co-operate with a presidential candidate by releasing an opponent’s emails

·      Participating (vicariously and indirectly) in a meeting to acquire damaging information from Russian sources on a presidential candidate (opponent)

·      Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord

·      Announcing a proposal to withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Accord

·      Publicly excoriating the Attorney General for his recusal from the “Russian Investigation”

·      Threatening to pardon staff, family and self, when faced with a Special Prosecutor’s findings on potential collusion of presidential campaign with a foreign enemy

·      Threatening war (“fire and fury”) on North Korea

·      Signing an Executive Order banning LGBT candidates from serving in the U.S. Military

·      Signing an Executive Order banning travel from primarily Islamic nations

·      Selling $300 billion American military materiel to Saudi Arabia over 10 years

·      Threatening, “if we have nuclear weapons why not use them”?

·      Endorsing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by both South Korea and Japan

·      Gutting the Environmental Protection Agency

·      Attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, thereby depriving 20+ millions of existing health care access

·      Failing to discern a moral and ethical difference between White Supremacists including the KKK and opponents in Charlottesville

·      Undermining Cabinet Secretaries by publicly defying attempts to negotiate with North Korea

·      Appointing Cabinet Secretaries whose conflict of interest with the goals, purposes and identities of the departments they lead prejudice their ability to fulfil their oaths

·      Openly accepting payments from foreign governments and their officials to a private for-profit corporation while serving as U.S. president

·      Defying all requests to release tax returns, a convention adhered to by candidates for president for decades

·      Portraying a predecessor as incompetent, “leaving a mess” in his wake

·      Failing to pay attention to the responsibilities of office in the provision of resources in the wake of calamitous hurricanes, leaving many in danger of illness and potential death

·      Declaring, through the Attorney General that DACA has been rescinded, leaving some 800,000+ undocumented immigrants in legal limbo

·      Proposing to sell Patriot Missiles ($8 billion) to Poland (arguing for defense against Russia)

·      Secretly succeeding in revising the Republican campaign manifesto, softening its stance on Russia

·      Misleading the public about “having absolutely no interest in or connection to Russia”

·      Declaring “war” on the mainstream national media by naming both networks and specifically targeting individual reporters as incompetent

·      Engaging in hate speech, through endorsement of white supremacy ideology

·      Taking credit for job “creation and/or preservation” that has no basis in fact

·      Declaring a judge incapable of hearing a case against him, because of his ethnicity (Mexican)

·      Declaring his willing and proud violation of women

While this list is hardly comprehensive, one is moved to ask out loud, what will it take for the United States (legally, morally, ethically, politically and historically) to come to its collective senses, including the full Cabinet, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., The Pentagon….to act decisively, responsibly and collaboratively to remove this president?

What is the state of United States' national health....is the tumor removeable?

One of the first lessons one is expected to integrate, and then practice assiduously, when entering training in chaplaincy, is that the only issues that matter are those of the patient. A similar boundary is required in medicine, social work, counselling and, one hopes, in teaching. The “issues” preying on the professional’s mind have to be set aside, insofar as is feasible, so that the encounter can be focused on the immediate and pressing needs of the “client”.

A similar separation of the issues of the professional and the client pervades the work of grief counsellors, especially when dealing with traumatic circumstances resulting in the death of many victims.

While politicians are not trained or skilled in the professional requirements of the care-giving practitioner, there are minimum expectations on compassionate friends, acquaintances, neighbours and first responders. And, to be blunt and “in-your-face” about it, throwing paper towel rolls to the victims of a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico, as the nominal president of the United States did on his historic and disastrous visit to the capital,  is not even close to meeting minimum expectations.

All presidential “acts” have a “roll-playing” and symbolic quality that elevates them (or is supposed to) above mere literal and functional acts. Another gap in the preparation of many politicians is a familiarity with the “poetic” the “symbolic” and the “art” of the situation. And there is no reason or justification in dismissing the “poetic” or the “symbolic” or the “art” of leadership. Together they comprise the core of the exercise, and must never be reduced to a mere “frill” as unnecessary or as irrelevant. There is something of a paradox in that a person is placed in the position of a multi-dimensional institution, for which centuries of examples in history have painted on the national canvas of the national imagination.

And that national canvas and that national imagination frame how each citizen perceives him(her)-self and his relation to the nation of his birth/adoption. It is the marriage of history and art that gives birth to a national culture. And for any leader, especially one confronted by a minefield of potentially existential threats, to disregard both art and history is to both literally and metaphorically “rob” the nation of its heritage, and demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge, interest and comprehension of both his place in history and the potential of his moment in that landscape. This theft, whether conscious or unconscious, is so penetrating that it impales the chief executive and enclouds every decision made in the Cabinet Room and/or the Oval Office. It effectively erases the two-plus centuries of history, and the two-plus millennia of literature, drama, poetry and all other forms of artistic expression.  Racist slurs, blue-note epithets, demagogic “your fired” as if the national stage merely replicated the television “reality” show set are no substitute for nuanced language, attitude and insight of the kind the world grew to honour from the previous occupant of White House. And to paint that kind of artistry, both in language and in governance as “effete” (a word likely still outside the vocabulary of the president), is a testament to those who would trash Obama, without having to acknowledge, own, or account for their blatant racism.

Words, symbols, carriage, character, institutional reputation, rhetoric and resiliency…these all rely on a full grasp and comprehension of one’s place in the universe, not merely the universe of the last election, nor the universe of the real estate barrons of New York, nor the universe of the nouveau riche clubs in their various venues. And the current occupant of the Oval Office not only does not have, nor does he aspire to acquire, even a minimal appreciation for such things. As a national leader, he ridicules both the office and the reputation of the nation with ever tweet and every laryngeal utterance. He is, and no army of generals can or will change this, a self-inflated suit under a shock of obviously dyed straw, with an ambition that seeks to erode the best of America and replace it with his most sinister and self-serving palatial emptiness.

There is another aspect of this erosion of a consciousness about the importance of art, symbol, language and history and that is that the American media, as well as media sources and practitioners in other countries are dedicating their news reporting and their column inches to the literal with barely a tip of their tablet to the potential role that metaphor, simile, personification, irony, satire and any of the plethora of literary devices potentially in their quiver. This vacuuming of all contextual and textual nuance from their reporting reduces much of the punditry that follows to a personality “exposure” of the central figures. And no one needs that kind of personal, ego-centric and epic exposure that the person currently in the Oval Office.

Stripping the language of the public square of what has stood the test of time, for centuries, including the demise of the liberal arts programs in hundreds of (formerly) prestigious universities and colleges, and substituting various levels of skill training (accounting, personnel assessment, maintenance and repair of new technologies, economic theory and practice, medical skill and protocols) will leave us worshipping at the altar of “function” and have the effect of turning each of us into the means for some other’s ends.

Kant warned us all about that ethical principle, and without so much as a blink of our collective eye, we have become, in effect, the means to another’s ends.

And no one takes that dictum to its most expansive reach than the current president of the United States….everything and everyone is a means to whatever he perceives his personal, narcissistic ends….”SUCCESS” in his own definition.

Insulting Puerto Ricans by throwing packages of paper towels at them, as if he were the “great benefactor” is insulting to those struggling recipients. There could be no more clarion model of colonialism than that scene…patronizing, demeaning, insulting and another historic nadir of despicable performance by a person whose only obsession is his own person.

And yet, it is also an insult to every American, and to the length and breadth of nearly three centuries of American history. And then to trumpet the “wonderful” success of the relief efforts on the part of the American government, while also sticking his thumb in the eyes of every Puerto Rican, by reminding them of their fiscal debt is another act for which, if those in leadership in the United States have a single ring of spine left, should compel at least a censure, possibly an act of Congress that apologizes to the Governor and the people of Puerto Rico, and an open letter of reproach delivered in person to the White House.

Tillerson’s “moron” retort, following the trump speech to the Boy Scouts, an organization he previously led, is a minimal report on this president. And, by the way, the sentiment of the “disloyal” epithet places Tillerson on the right side of history, given everything we have learned and fear to learn about the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Eugene Robinson, in the Washington Post today, writes:

One of the most appalling aspects of the Trump presidency is the sycophancy he requires of the officials who serve him. Trump demands not just loyalty by flattery too. He insists that his courtiers treat his pronouncements, however absurd or offensive, as infallible holy writ. Members of his Cabinet have made a humiliating bargain: humor him, suck up to him, and maybe—just maybe—he will leave you alone and let you make policy.

Whether Tillerson has broken the unforgiveable rule or not will play out in the ensuing hours and days. And whether the rest of Cabinet and the Republican leaders in both Houses of Congress can take heart (not cover) from Tillerson’s irreverence and exert the kind of persistent, unilateral and disciplined pressure on what is obviously a dangerous presidency is also uncertain.

It is not merely the political futures of each of the persons in the Cabinet that are at stake; it is also the fate of the nation that is now threatened, as foreign leaders continue to find ways to run “end-runs” around this impediment to democracy, to decency, to integrity and to international order.

Sycophancy, patronizing colonialism, arrogance that redefines narcissism and above all, detachment from reality….these are some of the dangers inherent in the current presidency.

There are neither laws nor precedents for how to stop this administration from continuing to dismantle many of the good institutions and traditions of the United States. And we are watching a deficit in courage, in telling truth to power, in imposing an iron-clad and unrelenting discipline on this dangerous president….and General Kelly cannot be expected to accomplish these ends by himself. It will take the whole of the American government to rid itself of this cancer.

Can Robert Mueller issue his findings before Il Duce issues his ubiquitous pardons of his retinue, his family and most deplorably, himself?

It does not take an autistic savant, like Dr. Shaun Murphy, on The Good Doctor, to discern the fatal and growing cancerous tumor on the body of the United States nation. It will, however, take a team of courageous, ethical and independent political surgeons, to remove the tumor and provide a modicum of hope that the republic can restore much of the damage already in evidence after only nine months of this Greek tragedy.

Are there any political “surgeons” available?

Islands of mercy in a sea of self-sabotage

This space is seemingly chock-full of criticisms of public figures and yet….

There are other compassionate, and unbelievably generous acts of unexpected kindness being offered and delivered by human “angels” every day that never see the light of day.

We can likely agree that the headlines generated by public figures do not demonstrate our ‘best’ selves, and grind away at any residual sliver of confidence and optimism we have left about “humanity’s greatness’.

I just left a conversation with a co-worker whose vehicle, needed for her work, had recently sprung a leak of antifreeze from the radiator. After borrowing her sister’s vehicle, and booking hers into the repair shop, she got it back with a repair bill of some $500. Confident the problem was now in her past, she parked the repaired vehicle in her driveway, only to come out to use it next, to find a large pool of antifreeze on the driveway. When she called the repair shop, there was no apology, and no acknowledgement of any missed assignment on their part. Nevertheless, she had it towed back, not a small task given the distances and the variety of steps required.

Upon her discovery of the pool, she also noticed an approaching good Samaritan who offered to replace her car with his, to complete with her the duties she had to perform, and then to drive her to her sister’s home to pick up the same vehicle she had used when the problem first arose. This kindness probably took well over one hour, and even then this good Samaritan still had another hour drive to his home.

Amazing, inspiring and surprising….and well worth re-telling!

And, following a meeting last evening, I came out to realize that I was missing my car keys, while my spouse waited for me to pick her up at the mall, on the other side of town. To my amazement, one of the people attending the meeting offered and then delivered on the offer to drive me to where my wife was waiting, drive both of us home, another forty minutes, and back (a second half hour) with the keys to our car. And this, after a full day of work, a two-hour meeting and another nearly two hours of generosity. Only after she waited to assure herself that the car would start (it had been parked in an area of some uncertainty as to its safety and security), did she turn for home, another forty minutes away.

While I was expressing my gratitude, in the drive to pick up my wife, I heard her say, “Well, these things happen, and I only hope someone would do the same thing for me some day, if I were in a similar situation.”

Slogans like ‘paying it forward,’ ‘passing it on,’ and ‘a little kindness goes a long way’ float like shimmering clouds across the horizons of our consciousness every day. We hear about people rescuing trapped people in Mexico City, following a horrible earth quake, and others showing up uninvited to help victims of tropical storms and hurricanes in Houston and Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Dominica and the Florida Keys when real life-threatening trouble confronts vulnerable people. And we might text a donation to the Red Cross. Or when a raging fire overwhelms a town like Fort McMurray, neighbours who previously did not know each other are suddenly thrust into a needed closeness, compassion and generosity that would have been undisclosed without the emergency.

Conversely, our conventional attitude would indicate, at least to a visitor from Mars, that we expect our leaders to exercise a kind of muscular and even combative attitude, when, for example, a 220% tariff is intemperately imposed on a series of jets by a ‘neighbouring country’ whose leaders have decided to ‘draw a line in the sand’ on what they consider ‘unfair treatment’ under a historic trace treaty. “Fighting for jobs” becomes the battle cry we expect, at least nominally and extrinsically, from our leaders who, if they fail to “lead,” will have heaps of negative critiques imposed on their reputations. Emergencies of all kinds, some of them “man-made” and others from “mother nature” and some from a combination of both, abound, and the attitude we seem to take in our public discourse and in our conventional water-cooler conversations is also combative.

Nevertheless, we also all know (and we know it so deeply in our bones and in our finely-tuned moral and ethical compass) that our public posture can and will lead only to more of the same from those we are directing our venom toward. And it is not just our venom that generates the return of its own kind; it is also our indifference, our detachment, our “objectivity” and our fear that our “help” will be considered invasive, presumptuous, aggressive and overbearing. Like begets like; hate begets hates, indifference begets indifference, and withdrawal and distance magnetize their own in return. This principle applies to every stage of the human drama. It applies to the parent who so vehemently and too often violently “punishes” a child’s aberrant behaviour, a teacher who over-reacts to a student’s stepping out of line, a boss’s time-off without pay when conditions set by the employer contributed to the mis-step.

The principle (did it originate in physics?) that for every force there is an equal and opposite reaction, seems more readily recognized, acknowledged and accepted when the matter concerns some kind of physical energy. Well, it is not rocket science to postulate that a similar kind of dynamic is discernible in human relations, even if many wilfully or innocently ignore its power.

 To be sure, there are legitimate caveats when the compassion/generosity/empathy and political opportunism of governments and social service agencies are the source. The danger in each of those situations is that a growing number will come to consider such “social justice” as their right and their entitlement, come to rely on it, and even twist themselves and their stories to “fit” the criteria so that their dependence deepens. And, predictably, the resentment of those hardworking, law-abiding, quietly compliant taxpayers grows in conjunction and in concert with the abuses.

Although we try valiantly to keep our public and private lives separate and apart, there is little doubt that we persistently fail. Whatever happened in our early life, especially when it was traumatic, abusive, neglectful, abandoned, or isolated for whatever ‘reasons’ or ‘explanations’ has a half-life that might be compared with the half-life of radioactive iodine (the kind that is used to quell an overactive thyroid gland). It really never “dies” until we stop breathing. Sometimes our “pain” finds vindictive expression when we least expect it, and are least able and willing to acknowledge and to deal with it. It embarrasses us; it unites us to every other human on the planet; it demands to be heard, acknowledge, and healed….and that process, whether it is considered a psychological one, a spiritual one, a personal reconciliation one, or even a private gift of the imagination in answer to the question, “What would I do today if I were in the same situation?” discloses our shared and indentifying truth, that we have all suffered, and that the suffering is our gateway to new insights and gift of new wisdom, maturity and a life lived at a very different and rewarding level than we knew previously.

Reflecting on how we would act today in a situation that originally resulted in trauma can give light to our growth, and to the potential “pain” of those who inflicted that original pain or injustice. It can and will also confirm our shared humanity. Our prisons are populated with men and women who have so far been unable (unwilling, unsupported) to find a more healthy relationship with their woundedness. Our social service agencies, too, have files filled with narratives of emotional issues that began in early life. Our school populations, apparently increasingly, have issues for which the professional staff and faculty have been clearly under-prepared to cope with adequately. (Of course, there are a small number of people whose genetic code impairs their emotional,, intellectual and social growth.)

In fact, the rising issue of public service workers (police, fire, paramedics, medical profession, social workers, teachers) having to confront emotional and behavioural issues for which they have only a token of preparation is going to have a significant impact on our worker compensation budgets, as well as on our post-secondary curricula, in many academic disciplines. Similarly, the rising issue of wounded individuals not being able to discern when their woundedness from their early lives is impacting the public budgets (and the pocketbooks of all taxpayers) is going to continue to grow as we struggle with how to deal with it, without breaking personal confidentiality and private security issues.

An anonymous agency, against which to find “justice” previously denied, withheld, and replaced with the anger and resentment (and the unbounded need for control) has to pay an inordinate price for the acumulation of these injustices. Mis-directed anger and revenge costs individuals, agencies and the public purse generally more than we have so far taken into account. We all have injustices that have left scars on our psyches, imposed often by those who “loved” us (or so they said and thought and even believed) and yet….and we have also expressed those “resentments” in our personal and professional lives, without recognizing their source or their impact.

There is in our minds a field of both wish-fulfilment dreams (like the ‘angel’ stories above) and the other kind, avoidance visions of injustice tilting one way and then the other. Our familiarity with the plethora of injustices we have experienced and those we witness daily too often seems to wash away and to minimize the importance of those acts of human kindness, generosity, compassion and reaching out. The time it “takes” to reach out a helping hand also serves to restrain our better impulses.

We have so blinded ourselves by the notion that we must not be taken advantage of, that we must not be “used” and that we must not stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone, because….well because of so many excuses like:

·      if he wasn’t so stupid he would not have lost his keys, or

·      if she had taken the car to a more reputable mechanic, or,

·      I really don’t know this person so I had better be careful in reaching out a helping hand…or,

·      I don’t really care about their plight and

·      there are public services that’s/he can find to address this situation.

We are, each of us, a compendium of rationalizations, excuses and avoidances on a daily, hourly and even minute-by-minute basis…in order to protect and preserve our “confidence” and our self-satisfied and self-assured reputation that we can do this alone…

Nevertheless, there is a compelling force from our public media and the discourse over those details that puts barbed wire tightly and narrowly around our hopes and   expectations for our shared future in harmony. We continue to meet people whose “hopes” for mankind have dwindled to a dust ball in a hurricane wind, unlikely to survive. Yet we all know that without hope, kindness, generosity, compassion and the extension of ourselves that gives energy, meaning and purpose to our own lives, we contribute to a collective spiral of negativity that like a vacuum sucks even more hopes and dreams into oblivion.

Of course, there are millions on the ‘right’ who will protest that all of these traumas make us stronger, and more resilient and thereby more ready to meet other crises in our lives. That argument includes border walls, gutted social programs, a jungle of ‘survivors of the fittest’ and the kind of invisible social engineering that favours the powerful. They will also argue that kindness, from both private and public sources, breeds softness, complacency, laziness and a dependency on the public purse. The evidence, however, points in the opposite direction: that those who are helped when in distress are not only deeply grateful and moved to emulate their benefactors, but their stories ripple through the coffee shops, around the water coolers and into the locker and board rooms, the classrooms and entertainment dramas like a persistent wave of light, hope and promise.

Children who are raised in a home defined by meanness and detachment, withdrawal and unrealistic demands are more likely to generate ‘social’ turbulence later than those whose early life is supported not merely fiscally, but more importantly emotionally and spiritually. Children whose early life is stained with loneliness, coldness, and the desperate need to ‘prove’ to their parents their “ambition” (really to embolden their parents’ good name and reputation) know intimately the desert in which their spirits dry up, without knowing fully why they live in barren lands. Classrooms, too, dominated by mentors whose openness and willingness to get to know their students, beyond their capacity to demonstrate “skill development and proficiency, will nurture a sense of adventure, and a sense of wellness that is needed to provide stability and a reliable base for future risk taking.

And, ironically, and completely counter-intuitive to the macho, combative, rugged individualism of contemporary political and corporate culture, the real signs of human and cultural growth and development are not to be found in the range and the depth of our missile development, our deep internet capacity to spy on our enemies, our road-rage, our boardroom competitive intrigue nor in our capacity for mean and angry vindictiveness, revenge and dominance. Our finest and most longed-for growth can and will come from a focus on a different horizon:

·      the vista of honest acknowledgement of our having hurt others,

·      our deep and authentic steps to reconcile with our enemies,

·      our reaching a helping hand to those in need, and

·      our strengthening the muscles and the habits of compassion, empathy and shared vulnerability

And, clearly our political leaders, and our “thought-leaders” are marching to a very different, martial, and entrapping drum…as we engage in, enable or innocently foster a wave of individual and cultural self-sabotage. 

History is more than 'silly putty' to be shaped by egomaniacs in their own image

The “power” of elected or appointed office, and the “status” of income, personal address, wardrobe, executive title are too often misused by those who are convinced they possess such power and status. In small towns, elevated “position” and elevated “income” are often ascribed/worn/claimed/flaunted by the same people.

And it is not only through their attitudes, actions and words today that they abuse their power; their influence has written most of the history books read and studied by young people in schools. It has also generated the myths of “status and culture” that are passed down from generation to generation. Their legacy in entombed in the names and the bills and the buildings and the athletic stadiums, the performing arts halls, and the graduate schools, especially the business schools bearing their names. The appropriate and conventional public attitude to such benefaction is extreme gratitude. And to some degree, these facilities might not exist, except for their donors, even if the donations are undoubtedly tax deductions.

One of the more noxious examples of the unwarranted abuse of power came in a memo from then Ontario premier, Mike Harris, to the scholar at Queen’s charged with writing the next edition of the grade 9 history text for Ontario schools. According to the memo, no accomplishments of women, labour or indigenous people were to be included in the text. I recall feeling shocked and incredulous when I first learned about the memo. My naivete and innocence precluded my previous embrace of such a directive.

With the rising public tensions over public statutes, like the one over the statute to Cornwallis in Halifax, and the several Confederate monuments in the U.S. South, the issue of how “privilege” dominates not only on the stock market, and in the corporate board rooms, in the university boards and institutional trusts, and also how that influence infuses the tone, the words, the images and thereby the myths on which we are raised.

This weekend, trump, having no other more pressing issues lying in piles on his Oval Office desk, urged NFL owners to fire those players who knelt during the playing of the national anthem, since he considers such defiance an act of disloyalty to the realm. Of course, players, coaches and even owners responded variously by kneeling, linking arms, absenting their whole teams from the field until the anthem ended and generally thumbing their nose at the president’s attempt to divide the league. (Let’s not forget that the first NFL player to protest how blacks are treated especially by law enforcement in the U.S., Colin Kaepernink, has been black-balled by the league and no team has found it in their moral or ethical compass to offer him a contract, even when they needed a quarterback.) And then, after witnessing the defiance of his intrusion into league deportment, for trump to declare that the issue “has nothing to do with race” is such a complete perversion of the facts to suit his need to control history that it casts an additional layer of contempt on the president.

In their attempt to minimize the complexities of conflict in their departments, some executives declare (blindly and boldly) “We are starting from today, and everything that has happened in the past is to be wiped off the desk as if it never happened.” As if to reduce human beings and their evolving issues (including personnel issues) to a single slice of a cell on a microscope plate, in order to analyse the component parts, in sterility and from the perspective of complete control, these men and women are committing a very serious mistake, both in their assessment of reality and in their potential to “fix” the problem.

History refuses to comply with such reductionisms. And for that we can be thankful. Just as trump’s “cause” has been reduced to “respect for the flag” (after he has shown such exaggerated contempt for the American judicial system, the State Department, the Health and Human Services Department, the Housing and Urban Development Department, The Director of the F.B.I., and the dignity of the Oval Office) the issue of racism refuses to be silenced.

History, of the kind that journalism begins, and scholars dig deeply into the archives, the documents and more recently the video and digital archives to find, has attracted many of the best minds in all generations. Revisionist history comes from public “information” departments in government, or from the public relations arms of political parties and corporations. Some scholars have seen history as coming from a variety of academic perspectives: economic, geographic, single human agency (the strong man/woman, either shaping events or being shaped by events into the leader s/he became), religious, ethnic, political, scientific, or perhaps cultural. In a recent column in truthdig.com, Chris Hedges references Nietsche’s reflection on three varieties of history: monumental, antiquarian, and critical.

The first, monumental, focuses on the monuments that have been erected to laud and honour certain individuals or their ‘historic’ contributions. Apparently, a revision of their respective ‘contributions’ is taking place across North America, as specifics of some of their negative and nefarious traits are surfaced from a new and more critical perspective. Antiquarian history, the kind that is removed from context, supports the “ancestry” movement, and the filling in of empty lines on family trees. There is no attempt to discern the conditions under which those names made choices, moved from place to place, attended which schools, or entered which occupations, nor suffered from which diseases, nor belonged to which groups or political parties. Both ‘monumental’ and ‘antiquarian’ categories of history pale in their complexity to Nietsche’s third: critical.

And in a time when power is so ubiquitous, money and status so redolent, and reductionisms to favour personal bias so permitted and present, critical history suffers a kind of daily pumelling, if not by direct hits, then certainly by glancing blows, most of which are unnoticed except by those professional practitioners whose focus is the preservation and the elevation of the best standards of the “historic” pursuit.

Ironically, it is only through the lens of the “critical” historian that we can better grasp the full reality of where we are, when we are, how we got here, and how we might extricate ourselves from our worst and most dangerous entanglements. Calling the disclosure of “critical” assessments of current or past public events “fake news” will never obliterate their truth, nor eviscerate the inherent motive for truth that underpins human existence. The diligence of courageous reporters, and the unqualified support of editors who can and will continue to discern facts from bullshit (propaganda, political opportunism, distractions, and the many other techniques to paint mascara over their errors deployed by the powerful), along with publishers who are unaffected by the taunts and the threats to withdraw advertising dollars because of unfavourable coverage are pillars of democracy that we must never take for granted.

Critical history, also, cannot and must not be replaced by monumental history, nor by antiquarian history. Comedian Stephen Colbert’s retort to trump’s ‘taking the knee has nothing to do with racism’ in these words, “that’s like saying Gandhi’s hunger strikes were a protest against snacking”….qualifies in the current context as “critical history”….and there is an insatiable need and appetite for critical history.

We have already suffered enough through the lies, cover-ups, distortions and denials of ‘significant’ people including:

·      both Holocaust and Global warming deniers, political decisions to “improve health care for all” under the guise of a tax cut for the rich, and also a

·       promise to “fix” everything by a man whose history is to have torched everything he ever touched

·      a promise to restore coal jobs to miners who have lost them, when everyone knows that is another cotton candy ‘delivery’

Sadly, the list is growing weak under the weight of its own lies….and there is no sign of a let-up in the pattern before 2020, when we can only hope that an authentic person with at least a modicum of integrity will find and receive the support of the American people.

Written in the 1958, a novel entitled “The Ugly American” by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer depicts an American ambassador to Southeast Asia whose powers of discernment allow him to see the conflict he is there to help resolve as one between communism and democracy. By the time he is able to see a more nuanced and complicated “reality” it is too late. The Peace Corps was established, in part, as a Kennedy response to the novel, aimed at portraying and displaying a much more effective and responsible voice and face of America in foreign lands. Ambassador MacWhite, from the novel, would likely have a more reasonable and nuanced perspective on the issues facing the Oval Office today than the current occupant.

So, from the perspective of north of the 49^th parallel, one has to ask, “Have the Americans really elected the archetype of ‘the ugly American” as an expression of the collective ugliness of their country? Co-incidentally, daily I am one of several cars that line up for a ferry from an island in the St. Lawrence River, to return to the mainland. The island lies between the U.S. and the Canadian border, and just a few minutes ago, while turning the corner to board the ferry, I found an American tourist cutting into the line in his motorhome.

I was so strongly tempted to get out and tell him I was confident he had voted for trump…although my instinct for getting home unscathed prevailed. As a young boy, I lived and worked in a town overrun by American tourists, and in those many years, I encountered none of the brash rudeness of today’s encounter, nor the simpleton reductionism of MacWhite from the novel.

A critical ‘take’ on history is necessary not only historians, journalists, editors, ambassadors, legal scholars and especially the occupant of the Oval Office. Anything less than a substantive grasp of the truth of the past, the complexity of human beings and their legendary issues, the capacity to continue to learn and debate issues from a variety of perspectives, ideologies and intellectual files as well as the insight to accurately and honestly reflect on the calculus of each potential option in every situation….these comprise a minimum list of requirements for the most important office in the world. And the current occupant fails on each account.

It took Obama to begin to restore America’s good name and reputation following the debacle that was George w. and his war in Iraq. It took John F. Kennedy and Sergeant Shriver (Kennedy’s appointee to generate the Peace Corps) to begin to rebuild America’s good name and reputation following the Burdick/Lederer novel. Following WWII, the Americans mounted the Marshall Plan, to help rebuild devastated towns, cities and factories in Europe.

What will it take to heal the cancerous tumor that is infesting the American ship of state in 2017, and likely for at least the next three years?

Tweeting about flags, monuments, crooked Hillary or any of several other opponents (the appetite for targets is so demonstrably insatiable that it suggests a wild man in a shooting gallery with never enough targets to take out) is so reprehensible and so ugly and so despicable as to paint the American “face” with gothic and threatening paint, every day, without the playfulness of Hall’o’ween….

The world’s foundational grounding in a common, shared and credible, if often tragic, history is being eroded minute by minute and the process is deliberate, willful, co-ordinated and cumulative…and all of it destined to burnish the apple of the reputation of a single dangerous man…..Is there anyone else who is both shocked and now growing more frightened by this spectacle that seems unstoppable?

A first step to levelling the playing field from centuries of colonialism...Justin Trudeau at the U.N

Prime Minister Trudeau hit a home run in the General Assembly earlier this week with his historic speech of atonement for the century-plus abuses of colonialism against the indigenous people of Canada. Of course, words alone will not bring a full measure of justice for the innumerable wrongs First Nations people have, are and will continue to endure. However, to take the podium in New York and to acknowledge the black hole that is Canada’s history on this file, and to risk the derision, scorn, jealousy and even contempt of world leaders and the home media suggests that the man is growing into the potential of his elected office.

As he correctly and appropriately pointed out in his address, this is not merely about righting those deplorable wrongs in Canada; it is also about focusing the world’s attention on the serious power abuses that are intrinsic to colonialism, a pattern and a history that is endemic to empires, dominions, satellite clusters of countries and the proposition that dictators can dictate the lives of people in their sphere of influence.

Whether colonialism is at the root of political empire building, or corporate aggrandizement, or religious dogma and domination, or financial buy-outs and mergers in which the most powerful take control of the playing field regardless of whether they offer the most effective, the best-designed and built, the most efficient or the most ethical products or services, top-down hierarchies that are indigenous to colonialism, like behemoths, proliferate the planet.

In the Canadian context, for a government, after 150 years of insouciant racism and avoidance of responsibility for the lives of the original people (who claim to have been here  for 15,000 years), to take the first step in a long-overdue journey is not only a monumental shift in national priorities; it is also so complex and encumbered a prospect that it will not be completed in the life of the current federal government, nor in the life of succeeding governments for the next century.

Clean drinking and bathing water inside safe and hygenic housing, safe and competent schools, access to effective health care and most importantly work with dignity…these are achieveable and measureable targets, dependent only on the vision, the will and the commitment of national leaders, in collaboration with indigenous bands and their respective leaders. A system of indigenous justice, designed and implemented by indigenous elders, along with the national observance of land treaties, and the implementation of those clauses that require shared planning, shared design and shared compensation from natural resource extraction, refining and distribution projects.

 Individual human rights and dignity, along with a profound respect for the environment (land, air, water) as honoured by indigenous people are all potential gifts from that community to the broader national community. And the sooner the national consciousness embraces this reality, the more healthy will be the lives of all Canadians.

And then, on the world stage, there is no country on the planet that has not, and does not still have to face a colonial history, with the so-called major players in North America and Europe being the originators and the sustainers of colonialism while many of the countries in the developing world are still struggling to get out from under the binding ropes and chains of their colonial masters. And the implications of this power imbalance continue to plague the world community, from processes that would acknowledge the monstrous effluent being emitted by developed countries and their corporation and the legitimate demand that those countries offset the costs of pollution control in the developing world, to the deplorable imbalance in arms production, sales, proliferation and the political implications of that implicit and “imposed” injustice.

It is not only individual human rights that the world community has to protect; it is also the national and tribal rights of indigenous peoples everywhere that have to be factored into the collective decision-making, process-design and collaborative execution on the large and threatening issues we face: the environment, the drug crisis, the military arms race, the economic divide within developed countries and between the developed world and the developing world.

Trudeau is positing a very different way of perceiving and hence of dealing with minorities, especially those minorities who have suffered, endured and suffered some more at the “hands” of the rich and the powerful. Imagine if the Trudeau theme had been emitted from the mouth of the American president, about indigenous peoples in Dakota and in New Mexico, and about African-Americans and Latinos. Imagine the degree of integrity and humility, the historic level, that would have been trumpeted by the U.S. media, if such an address had come from trump rather than the name-calling, bullying drivel that we all heard.

Although the Canadian leader has perched himself and his government on a very high and slender branch of a very brittle tree, a branch that reporters and pundits will be gleefully trying to break from the trunk of the tree. There is nothing more seductive to a journalist that the prospect of bringing a high-wire rock-star politician down from his precarious perch. And already, the National Post, in headlining all those topics not covered by the speech, and the CBC’s At Issue Panel, in pejoratively dubbing the speech “lobbying for that seat on the Security Council (Andrew Coyne) and castigating it for failing to address all the ‘hot-button’ issues of the day like North Korea, Putin, Syria, refugees and cyber-security (Althea Raj of Huffington Post).

If there ever were a time when the length and breadth of vision of both political leaders and reporters/editorialists needed to be raised off the floor of the mud-wrestling ring in which both Kim and trump are wallowing, it is now. And for Trudeau to deliver a speech that positions Canada, and the Canadian people, squarely in the world’s headlight, as a counterpoint to the racist, sexist, homophobic climate denier now occupying the Oval Office (just a side-bar of accomplishment for the Trudeau address), demonstrates that he may actually be starting to fill his father’s shoes, and the inflated shirt he has worn since romping out onto the political stage as a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

Individual minority rights, while laudable and worthy of legal protection (in individual cases) will struggle for their rightful and respected place on the public agenda so long as minorities everywhere shoulder the mantle of “inferiority” (no matter how that badge is perceived).

So many different iterations of colonialism pervade the global culture:

·      Workers without labour rights and the organizations to advocate for their pay with dignity, their safety and security, their pensions and their access to health care are living a form of colonialism.

·      Even labour unions themselves are guilty of practicing a kind of reverse “colonialism” given their relentless, and now toothless, pursuit of new members, and their demeaning of employers who block union certification votes.

·      Small town politics and the players on that state continue to defer to the “founding families” or the most affluent, or the most “connected” in their granting of zoning amendments, building permits, disharges from minor offenses, street repairs, the restoration of services following a disaster like a hurricane, a large fire or an ice storm.

·       School boards, both public and private, as well as colleges and universities, whenever they can, defer to their own graduates when making staffing appointments, as if there were some “privilege” attached to “local” graduates, when we all know that new ideas, new perspectives and new ways of doing things will more likely assure the growth and evolution of the organizations. This is especially true when making appointments at the senior administrative level, thereby ensuring a narrowing and parochial approach, as compared with the promise of innovation.

·      Towns and cities, when prompted to ask neighbouring centres for some practical advice on files both are facing, will too often categorically refuse, preferring “local” approaches simply because they are local, and not because they are more effective. *

·      Ask anyone who has spent their school years moving from school to school, as part of their following their parents for whatever reason. So lonely and so isolated are most, and they have been for decades, that recently in Florida, one “outsider” student has implemented a welcoming program for new students. He has gathered some who see the wisdom and the compassion in his idea, and they now eat lunch, approach and welcome newcomers to their school as an act of student “citizenship”.

·      Watch the lethargic and almost relentlessly blocked integration of immigrants, refugees, and newcomers to most towns and cities, (or the reverse, a smothering of uber-“care” that leaves them no room to breathe) and the impediments to a successful orientation program for sponsors that takes place in many “welcoming” communities.

From a variety of perspectives, we are all living, simultaneously, on both sides of the colonial moat. We are, at one and the same time, dominant in parts of our lives and recessive and submissive in other parts. And the “divide” keeps us vacillating between feeling confident and feeling quite insecure. Whether the divide is generated by a physical symptom, a racial difference, an income divide, a linguistic divide (even one so mundane as a grammar divide), even a voice volume and enthusiasm divide will find some being rejected in select “fraternities” or “sororities.” In many North American towns and cities, there is a religious colonialism, pitting protestants against Catholics, Muslims against Jews, white supremacists against blacks, Jews and immigrants of all varieties.

The first and requisite act of levelling the playing field, after decades, or centuries of forcing it to favour the “dominant” agent is to acknowledge the pattern, the participation in the pattern and history of dominance, and to begin to “listen” (really listen) to the legitimate needs of the “colony” with a view to searching not merely for short-term accommodation but for long term and permanent reconciliation. And that process, regardless of where it begins, will inevitably take decades, if not longer.

Trudeau’s first, bold and courageous step this week offers a model for other agents who dominated and controlled the colonial world to begin to thaw their hardened and potentially arrogant arteries, let the gagged voices free, and begin a process, not of lip-service, but of real and authentic accommodation and collaboration. A process of reconciliation whose vibrations, like the rock tossed into the pool, can stretch out to the very edges of the world’s communal pool, and transform a world in which antagonisms, hatreds, feuds, and conflicts dominate to one in which processes that offer alternative dispute mechanisms can and will be learned, practiced, applied and continuing revised and researched.

The October 2017 edition of Reader’s Digest contains a quote from the first Jewish woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada (appointed in 2004), Justice Rosalie Abella, with which Trudeau would clearly concur, and with which the world’s highest ideals and aspirations comport:

These words are taken from a speech Madame Justice Abella delivered at Brandeis University:

“It is time to remind ourselves why we developed such a passionate and, we thought, unshakable commitment to democracy and human rights, to remember the three lessons we were supposed to have learned from the concentration camps of Europe:  indifference is injustice’s incubator; it’s not just what you stand for, it’s what you stand up for; and we can never forget how the world looks to those who are vulnerable.”

 *This scribe made a presentation of an original design of a “career retrofit” for unemployed tech workers in Ottawa early in this century. The program was designed in North Bay, some four hours to the north west of Canada’s capital. The first and most prominent question we faced in our presentation, so indelibly is it engraved on my memory was, “So why should a program from North Bay be implemented here and not one designed in Ottawa?” There were no reflections, questions or even criticism of the details of our design, just a rejection out of hand, because it did not originate in Ottawa.

Talk about colonialism!