The Wisdom of our Indigenous teacher: Mother Earth Jurisprudence

Tom B.K. Goldtooth* in an interview with Chris Hedges, reported in Hedges’ column in truthdig.com, October 16, 2017, in quoted as saying:

This world is heading towards economic systems that continue to eat up life itself even the heart of workers, and it’s not sustainable. We’re at that point where Mother Earth is crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is crying out for a new direction. As far as a new regime, we’ll need something based on earth jurisprudence, a new system away from property rights, away from privatization away from financialization of nature away from control over our …DNA, away from control over seeds, away from corporations. It’s a common law with local sovereignty. That’s why it’s important we have a system that recognizes the rights of a healthy and clearwater system, ecosystem. Mother Earth has rights. We need a system that will recognize that Mother Earth is not an object. We have an economic system that treats Mother Earth as if she’s a liquidation issue. We have to change that. That’s not sustainable.

*Tom B.K. Goldtooth is a Native American environmental, climate, and economic justice activist, speaker, film producer and indigenous rights leader.

“A liquidation issue”….as if every natural resource is available to anyone with the money to purchase at the lowest possible price, without regard to replacement and then spew the effluent from whatever process those resources undergo wherever and however is also the cheapest.

Goldtooth has put his finger, his brain, his conscience and his native culture on the target and on the line: our economic systems are eating up life itself. We are collectively, willfully (if completely unconsciously in a drugged state) and compulsively enmeshed in our own demise. It is an exercise of self-sabotage the like of which we have never witnessed in history.

·      The weapons of mass destruction (in our own arsenals and not undetected, unreported or unacknowledged) that can and will wipe civilizations from the planet,

·      merged with the unrestrained, unbridled ambition to acquire nuclear weapons by rogue states

·      linked to the persistent demolition of the clean air, water and land that we all need to survive,

·      linked to the political perversion into personal narcissistic ambition and instant gratification of the politicians and the complete disregard and even contempt for the people and the public good,

·      umbilically linked to an economic system that favours the rich and the powerful at the expense of the ordinary people,

·      linked to a level of detachment, disengagement and a total lack of trust in the system by ordinary people,

·      while the notes of terror, human rights violations, ethnic cleansing and the blatant defiance of the rule of law ring in our heads,

·      while we watch the undermining of all legitimate supports for truth, ethics and a common set of facts that measure our common reality (while the inverse, reality television, plays out on our screen).

And in the midst of such a stew of chaos, the nationalism that was so virulent in the 1930’s and 1940’s, at the heart of World War II, rears its ugly head, aided and abetted by unscrupulous (and elected) people like trump, aided, abetted and enhanced also by a new technology that invades our privacy, robs our credit cards and turns every person on the planet into both surveillance agent and potential criminal.

Epithets like “the rule of law” and a “nation of ideals” and “the land of the free and the brave” have been trashed and replaced by a Darwinian jungle of survival of the richest, the most corrupt and the least accountable. Tribal politics under the “cover” that political parties compete on a level playing field now has morphed into an internecine war of rape and pillage by the rich of the poor. And, without a formal voice at the table of our decision-making, Mother Earth is counted as completely expendable.

Literacy, of the kind that takes words, their meaning on both a literal and a symbolic and metaphoric level is sliding like the glaciers into the rising oceans of self-interest, identity politics and a culture of ‘gimme or I will kill you’….that, on its surface and in its deepest implications is a culture of death (the Greeks called it Thanatos, the will and the desire to die).

It takes all of our best energies, our most fervent prayers, our best brains and our health imaginations, not to mention our most profound hope to begin to conceive of a world that is not set on self-sabotage leading to self-destruction.

Extreme activities that challenge our physical and emotional limits, leading to the edge of death evoke Hemingway’s African hunts, bull-fights and all activities that demand that one pursue life to the edge of death, as if that recipe generates the fullness of one’s life and potential. (Ironically, and paradoxically, Hemingway took his own life, in 1961.) Surely we have moved past such an antedeluvian definition of masculinity and know the many positive impacts of that evolution.

Instead of putting our individual personal pursuit of our physical and our emotional limit, risking death itself, can we begin to redirect this deep reservoir of human potential and energy into something far more life-giving, life-sustaining and honourable legacy generating: providing a healthy and sustainable future for our grandkids?

Technology pretends to “connect” us, merely at such a minimal and fleeting and ethereal level as to author its own irrelevance. Our worship of these devices, as our new and most fascinating altars of worship in a religion that defies all deities, while we put our energies into our self-gratifying resumes, as just more steps on the “adventurous” hike to ‘success’ only to learn that our objectification of our very persons is and will continue to be our undoing.

The subjective is not confined or restricted to our need for baubles, BMW’s, corner offices, multiple degrees, sun-drenched homes and vacations, bigger diamonds and trophies both metallic and spousal. We are limiting our perceptions of our very human identities, by trying to do everything, say everything, buy everything and trumpet everything that we believe will get us the “best reviews” as if our comportment with the “best practices” of customer relations is the limit of our potential.

And while we have been doing this self-defying ritual and liturgy, turning our lives into sycophantic disciplines of the corporate ideology and even the corporate theology, we have filled our cancer wards, our cardiac wards, our bars and drug treatment centres will millions of prematurely dying human beings.

Do we even care?

Certainly, we cannot be uninformed about the damage we are both participating in and being victimized by. The evidence dominates our newscasts, our health reports, our economic forecasts and our research into our shared future.

Will voices like Tom B.K. Goldtooth finally be strident and melodic and rhythmic enough to register on our individual and our shared radar screens?  

Reflections on self-interest

So, okay, we are all motivated, driven and directed by something called self-interest. Some would argue that all of nature is the expression of self-interest. Others would suggest that how we define self interest is a litmus test for our ethical and moral identity. Perhaps our highest ideals too often get immersed in the sea of our self-interest. For, if there is a difference between our ideals, our highest hopes and our best angels ad our self-interest, maybe we have not thoroughly thought through the nuances of our situation.

It says here that to the degree that our highest ideals and our self-interest are perceived/conceived/interpreted as supportive of each other, our light is visible and endangered. Self-interest, in terms of basic survival needs such as food, water, shelter and health, of course, are considered legitimate; that is why they are dubbed “basic”. Our need to learn and to become part of something like a family, a team or even a culture, is also considered legitimate and basic, if more abstract and psychological and emotional. And then there is the need, (and it is also a need, as well as a self-interest) to see the world take care of its weakest, most vulnerable and most in danger. And right now, that need, and that self-interest, has to include the protection of the planet’s health, including the air we breath, the water we drink, the food we grow from the land, and the systems (including the agreements, commitments, promises and collaborations) that offer the hope and the promise that our children and our grandchildren will have a future of which we can be legitimately and humbly proud.

At the same time, we have to recognize that for many people, including too many people in positions of leadership and responsibility, self-interest has come to be more stringently conceived as personal career achievements, salary/income, political/corporate/institutional status, connections and networks, and in general learning how to climb the metaphor and proverbial “ladder” by which others will consider “me” successful. Public discourse, including media coverage, endorses, supports and even enhances the exclusive importance of everything extrinsic…the measureable, the quantifiable, the conventional and the socially and politically recognized and endorsed things for which we teach our children is the fundamental purpose of their education in the broadest sense of that notion.

David Brooks can and does argue eloquently for our preference for joining the “informal” network, as compared with the official organization chart in our workplaces. We all know who are the real, as opposed to the titular, leaders in our workplaces, in our schools, in our hospitals, and also in our governments (although this kind of ‘secret’ is rarely exposed publicly, preventing the endangering of those formal and titular leaders. Nevertheless, our “preference” (innate, individual, unique, lasting and idealistic), if we were to be fully  honest with ourselves and the others in our lives, is for a self-interest that acknowledges, conceives, and aspires to the intrinsic aspects of our shared lives. “Achievements” that cannot be purchased, awarded, achieved through promotion, strategized, and verifiable through some form of empirical measurement device, even, and perhaps especially, the measurement device known as public opinion.

Of course, it is important that young people be introduced to the notion of finding their respective place among their peers, with respect to specific skill development. Whether they swim, run, jump, join basketball, volleyball, hockey, soccer or tennis teams, they will learn the specific training and agility skills deemed important for their participation, at whatever level they choose. Meeting their peers from other towns and cities, too, will enhance and round out their internal ‘view’ of who they are, as well as how they fit into their respective skill level.

And who they are, that intrinsic, inestimable, perhaps even ethereal and spiritual dimension is the one everyone hopes is and will remain the most significant in each child’s development. Not which church s/he will attend, nor which language s/he will speak, nor which sport s/he will master, nor which corporate “position” s/he will hold….nor which profession s/he will enter. It is not that each of these identifiers matter not at all; it is that they will never fully define one’s identity, one’s highest aspirations, or ideals or one’s potential.

Back to self-interest, in the light of one’s “achievements”….Of course, there is a significant impact on one’s sense of one’s self, one’s self-confidence, one’s sense of limits and one’s potential that accompanies one’s “formal” achievements. However, there is also a potential seduction that entraps one when “achievements” dominate one’s identity. Performance, often called “the human doing” is an intimate component of our human person. It is not, however, the fullness of our humanity. And, while we are busying ourselves thinking and believing that we are attending to our “self-interest”, we are really competing for the attention of others, competing with others for a limited and finite extrinsic reward and squandering time much better “spent” on our internal, intrinsic, spiritual, affective, and psychological well-being.

The game in which we are all engaged to a greater or lesser extent, is a classic example of blind, myopic hubris, dedicated to a short-term, narcissistic, personal and ultimately unattainable quest.

If and when we come to our senses, coming to the shared  responsibility for our survival, our planet, our fellow humans, the fellow creatures whose lives we are plundering mostly for hubris and greed and just as important a matter of self-interest and getting that new promotion and that corner office, or being recognized by that professional institute, or that publication, or that academic department, or that Supreme Court Justice.

Part of our dilemma, and our myopia is our enmeshment in a time frame that extends just about into the next minute, or day, or perhaps week…and not into the next century, when, of course, none of us will be here. We are so infatuated by our personal accomplishments, our personal daily goals and tasks, our immediate responses to our relationships and our immediate attention to the next birthday gift in our family. Defining ourselves, obsessively as “busy,” “dutiful,” “responsible,” “mature,” as demonstrated in our exemplary performance of those daily/hourly/monthly tasks that fill our calendars, while purportedly leaving those “big” issues to others to solve, (academics, politicians, financiers, journalists and public relations professionals) is one of the contributing factors that have led us into the mess in which North America finds itself.

We cannot and must not leave it to the diplomats to act as our agents in extending the boundaries of self-interest in their negotiations with other countries. We have to start with the personal, private and sustainable extension of our own self-interest to include every creature on the planet, and to include all of those natural resources that are essential for a healthy life. The dramatic and epic restriction of our concept/definition of self-interest is one of the primary blinders on our imaginations, on our ethical and moral compass, on our capacity to enter and to sustain healthy relationships, on our willingness to resist the highly sophisticated bullying and patronizing that comes out of every single one of our mouths, pens, laptops and phones.

Watching House of Cards, for the first time last night, I was appalled, because of my septaguinarian naivety, to watch a young reporter invite the Kevin Spacey character to have sex, in order to cobble the precise vote numbers on an environmental bill before Congress. And then, looking down into the camera, he proudly and sardonically asserts “she never meant anything to me” about the woman in question. She claims she had to do it to get the precise number on the vote, (presumably to meet some deadline in competition with a hoard of reporters pursuing the same data piece.

In “Grey’s Anatomy, a middle aged female doctor meets an old colleague, who wonders out loud in front of her current spouse, if her child is “his”….to the chagrin of the current spouse. When he presses her to stop this routine, she retorts, “I have seen many penises that were not yours and I like what this (teasing) does to you.”

Call me an innocent who is unable and unwilling to find these exchanges “normal” or “acceptable” not so much from a sexual (pornographic or power) perspective as they are from the perspective of the concept of self-interest.

In the first case, the reporter’s self-interest is defined so narrowly as to enmesh her person and her sexuality with the pursuit of a mere number, in order to further her journalist career. Spacey, of course, is demonstrably limiting his self-interest to demonstrating his macho-testosterone-driven “I do it because I can” dominance. (Have we heard this explanation as justification before recently?) In the second case, (Grey’s Anatomy) the female doctor is playing a blatant power trip on her current spouse, by using her former relationship as the club. Far from jocular teasing, this exhibits a degree of intoxicated and narcissitic self interest that takes great pleasure in the discomfort of her current partner. (It would be the last conversation I would have with her, if I were in his shoes!)

Self-interest, when defined in such narrow and brutal and demeaning parameters is little more than selfishness, perhaps having a tinge of the dramatic, but a dramatic palette that is devoid of a rainbow of colours, on the part of the writers, the actors and the audience. It is the poverty of fearing the extension of self-interest that is currently plaguing the trump administration and thereby endangering the American people if not also the planet.

By decertifying the Iran nuclear deal, in the face of strong evidence that Iran is in compliance, corroborated by the other signatories to the agreement, trump is incarnating such a narrow, myopic and hubristic/narcissitic definition of self-interest, presumably in order to polish his personal reputation as a ‘historic figure in American history. By gutting both Obamacare and NAFTA, arguing "self-interest" when really it is making his indelible and indefatigable mark on history, he is demonstrating again his looking down the telescope backwards to the most narrow definition of self-interest imaginable. When one’s reputation is the defining feature of one’s concept of self-interest, the rest of the world is, by definition, excluded, patronized, relegated to a colonial, second-class status. And this kind of abuse of power always brings about its own demise.

When self-interest is exclusive of the interests of the “other” whether that other is a partner, a colleague, a client, a supplier, even an enemy, there is only tragedy that comes from that exclusion. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago’s self-interest was in getting revenge against his boss for failing to appoint him lieutenant. And ultimately, his deceit was unravelled by his spouse. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s notion of self-interest had so devolved into a passing recognition by the “mayor” to demonstrate his importance in a vacuous social status scale.

trump’s self-interest is blocked by his own insatiable, yet hollow, ego that demands massaging every moment of every day by everyone within earshot. There is clearly no “other” in his “scope” so blinded by his own importance are his eyes, his ears, and his inflated yet hollow image of himself. The only “other” that matters is an enemy, examples of which he searches for and purports to find minute by minute, regardless of the truth and validity of his assessment.

In the White House, this is highly dangerous. Outside, the example of the “leader of the free world” adoption of this short-sighted, narcissitic definition of self-interest cripples any and all potential attempts at co-operation, collaboration, collegiality, compromise, and resolution of any potential conflict. It is the kind of attitude, and behaviour that characterizes a two-year-old whose whole world revolves around his person. However, in his case, he is seeing and hearing and grasping and discovering new things every moment of every day, and eventually he grows out of this “stage”.

The example being offered to young people, to aspiring graduates and even to the twenty-somethings who are trying to start a career, from this president is dangerous in the immediate term, but also in the longer term, as it legitimizes this kind of self-interest, masked as “national interest” and supported by others so blind in their hubristic anger and contempt for the “other” that they are willing to risk it all betting on this imposter.

We are already witnessing the spike in opioid deaths on both sides of the 49^th parallel, perhaps in general as expressions of hopelessness in the face of the duplicity, the outright shirking of responsibility the failure to attend to the broader interests of the public good by so many in public life. If our public “actors” and models of leadership and moral example default on their definition of self-interest and their way of modelling that behaviour, can we expect anything less than hordes of young people emulating their example.

Unfortunately, for the world, trump is cemented into this stage in a kind of mental, emotional, psychological and spiritual sarcophagus of his own making. Living in both the world of the living and the world of the dead, however, is outside the bounds of reality, except the reality of his own mind.

Is this another extension of the proverb “children raising children” gone to its wildest length? If it is, permissive parenting, the current vogue, will be inadequate to bring the denoument we seek. 

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.