Let's tear down our dependence on "walls"

The whole world is asking the same questions:

·        What has happened to the United States?

·        What can each of us do to restore civility to our public discourse?

·        When will the Republicans find and re-insert their spine and stand up to this president?

·        When will Assad be deposed from power in Syria?

·        When will global warming and climate change reach the level of seriousness it deserves?

·        How do we reconcile the random acts of violence with the spectre of a civilized city or nation?

·        How dangerous is it really, to live in the current vortex of negative impulses?

And then there are some other questions that a few on the left are also asking:

·        When and how can the world eliminate all weapons of mass destruction?

·        Is the pursuit of peace merely an aspirational goal and slogan, never to be achieved without going through another global conflict?

·        Have the faith communities, at least those inside the radical fringes on both the right and the left, become obsolete and irrelevant?

·        Is this period of cultural and political and economic chaos a temporary phenomenon or something the world will have to endure for decades?

·        What are the roots of the “strong man” archetype to which we seem to have fallen victim?

·        While we know that humans have a spiritual quality that yearns to be connected with the ultimate reality, we also know that humans have a capacity for hate, fear, contempt violence and self-destruction. Is the latter trait overtaking the former?

·        Can the corporate state be tamed and brought into some kind of compliance with the public interest?

And as the questions swirl, inside each of our heads, around most water coolers, and across the television screens, internet websites and daily newspapers, all of them in search of answers that go beyond a mere band-aid, aspirin or placebo, a sense of powerlessness pervades and prevails.

Nevertheless, there are small sprigs of “green” hope attempting to break through the asphalt of our contempt. The Caucasian Republican Congressman from Columbus, who, with his African-American female Democrat colleague from the same city has seeded a project dedicated to the commitment to civil respect in the public square is to be applauded for his efforts. Their project has so far attracted some three dozen paired members of Congress who have signed a commitment to practice civil discourse. The two originators have also begun to spread their message into the Ohio school system, in their attempt to neutralize and reduce the incidents of hate speech on social media among young people.

In Chicago, a group calling itself Lighthouse, working with emotionally, physically, intellectually and socially handicapped persons in “hands-on” projects that provide work with dignity and respect to many who otherwise would not have such an opportunity, has initiated a specific “lighthouse” project whereby models of lighthouses are painted, covered and otherwise emblazoned by their client base, and then “planted” along Michigan Avenue in that city. The premise behind the project, according to the report on CBS’s Sunday Morning, is to help passersby  pause and consider the person who created the specific lighthouse model, as a way to enhancing public awareness and respect for those on the margins.

Small, and to some perhaps insignificant in the tidal wave of violent speech, violent bombs and missiles, overturned refugee boats in the Mediterranean, and 3+million girls who still do not have access to education.

Pleading in this space for a more tolerant, more activist and more compassionate and empathic approach to all of the world’s threats/opportunities has often seemed pointless and hopeless. A new and more “loving” (in the agape sense of that word) attitude, among ordinary folks, as well as among the “ruling” class, has seemed to be defied by the multiple examples of news stories to which we are fed on an hourly basis.

Nevertheless, we continue to try to absorb mass shootings like the one on the Danforth in Toronto last night, and mass drownings like the Duckboat capsizing in Missouri killing 17, and the hundreds if not thousands of victims of the violence in Syria, many of whom would not have survived but for the “White Helmets”  who have risked their lives to save the wounded and dying in the midst of that horrendous civil war.

Words, however, without actions, seem quite hollow, given the ease with which they flow. We have, all of us, been involved, (entrapped, imperiled, ensnared) in some kind of conflict from which we have found it difficult, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves. Many have also found it problematic to engage in some form of reconciliation, or formal mediation. Even when and where one might expect a motive and spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness might be feasible and even expected, some have found that spirt and motive MIA….even after making overt and covert overtures to begin such a process.

Call it pride, hubris, arrogance, fear, stubbornness, a need for power and control, lack of trust….any or all of these attributes can be and likely are at the root of the intransigence that prevents and precludes reconciliation. We do not start with a perspective of trust in our encounters. We each start from a position of scepticism, often verging on cynicism, borne from previous experiences in which we may have attempted to reconcile without success. And the hardened positions grow more impenetrable and fossilized as time passes. This happens in our personal lives, in our professional lives, in our political lives and in our public perceptions of national and international issues.

In schools we teach history, most of it written and documented by the “winners” in the conflicts, and most of it baked into a cake we call “convention” or “normalcy”. Simultaneously, we initiate peer-mentor programs on our playgrounds in a minimal attempt to “teach” conflict containment. There is a cultural and cognitive dissonance to our evidence. We do not really listen to the victims of history, the indigenous, the poor, the handicapped, the marginalized, the victim of addictions, or the people who commit “crimes”.

Our mind-set “manages” them out of sight and out of mind so that we gravitate to the people the culture considers “successful” in the blind belief that such role models will help to ensure more who will emulate their success. As the proverbial question has it, “How is that working for you?”

It is our mind-set, our turning away from those who need our support in a hand-up, (dismissed as a hand-out from those who decry the nanny state), that fails us at every turn. We are “our brother’s keeper” only through folk-songs that make it to the top of our hit-parade. We are not even conscious of the pain being suffered by those in our immediate circle. And we rationalize, “It is none of our business!” as we release ourselves from all responsibility for their plight.

We scream and shout about the “wall” proposed to keep out unwanted people, while remaining silent, ignoring the walls we continue to build inside our mind, our imagination and our hearts. It is the interior walls, for which we do not have to claim responsibility to anyone but our private mirrors, that imprison each of us in cells of fear and contempt, aloneness and solitude, reducing and eliminating options that would include a process of re-evaluating our need for those inner walls. They do not “protect” us, except from ourselves, our anxieties and fears. They are both illusions and delusions of self-confinement from which there are but a few paths outward.

And we have to begin our own search for such pathways out of our own prison cell.

First, we have to acknowledge that “our walls” inhibit our openness to new adventures, new people, new challenges and opportunities to create. They also stiffen our blood vessels, our nerves, our imaginations and our risk-taking. And they provide only illusory benefits like the kind of safety and security that comes in the Cracker Jack box….a mere trinket or toy.

Our walls also keep us from venturing out to share the light of our knowledge, experience, inspiration and comfort to those who need and deserve it. And the more walls we build in our minds and hearts, the more we underline the futility of those walls.

Sounds like another morality play??

Not really. This is more like an attempt to draw attention to the straight-jackets of walls of fear, insecurity, contempt and hate. Never mind that trump and his cult are so fixated on that Mexican wall, to be built and paid for by the Mexicans (another massive deception and delusion); this little piece of pedestrian prose is designed to deconstruct the very notion of the utility of walls. Not only do they not accomplish what they are intended to accomplish; they also give encouragement to those people like trump who need walls to prove their worth.

Gated communities, too, are a strategy to delude the affluent into believing they are safer behind those walls when, if they were to think more deeply about their “fortress” they would realize that they are contributing to a kind of phoney superiority and snobbery that reeks of racism, bigotry, and contempt for their fellow human beings of all classes and demographics.

Let’s turn our energies to more lighthouses, and more projects that promote respect and dignity of all regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, economic and educational status and the thickness of their resume. Let us begin to deconstruct those fake fortresses that have so encased our altruism in a vault for most of our lives.

Words actually do change history

Strong men do not have to be imbecilic, stupid, or destructive. Witness one former leader of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle in his discernment between patriotism and nationalism, a discernment the U.S. president has obviously never learned or accepted:

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first.

Apparently, there is currently an epidemic of conflation of non-equivalencies poured like molasses into the gears of the current crop of white supremacist and nationalist self-proclaimed leaders. Remember Charlottesville: “There were good people on both sides!” (trump) and then Helsinki: “Both countries are at fault!” And then in the subsequent interviews, “I think it was the Russians, and it could have been China or other people’ there are a lot of people out there!”

The self-declared “right” to do whatever you want “when you are a star” does not include the option to redefine reality in such a way as to serve only one’s deepest fears and narcissistic instincts. The slithering of language into a slough of both inaccurate and unsustainable definitions, while contemptuous of everyone else who speaks the language, is also an empirical witness to hubris, bullying and inferential collusion with others who have engaged in this propaganda for their whole lives.

To operate from the premise that no one will either catch on or be sufficiently bothered to do something about challenging me on my conflation of evertyting, including patriotism and nationalism, is nothing less than subversive, whether the laws and the legal system can or does accuse the current president of treason, obstruction of justice, defying the emoluments clause, or that ubiquitous “collusion” with the Russians.

These modest observations about the meaning of words, and their abuse, is just another route to exposing the dangers of this chief executive. And yet, there are some significant implications of the conflation of patriotism and nationalism.

Twentieth-century history, if it taught us anything, attempted to point out through millions of unnecessary, unjust, unwarranted and inexcusable deaths, that nationalism is a path leading only to darkness and destruction. Conflating the “Russian component of Crimea” with justification for the invasion and take-over of that region of Ukraine, leaps directly into the putin logic, and abrogates that “logic” as American “collusion” and compliance, and foreign policy rationalization. And even putin’s putative proposal of a plebescite for the people of Ukraine to cover over his illicit invasion (let’s drop the politically correct incursion and call it what it is) is another of his vaunted manipulations to maintain the upper hand. It reminds one of the adolescent “Better to ask for forgiveness after than for permission before” committing an act that would be clearly unacceptable.

And, from the English classroom, the conflation of meanings of words is one of the “weeding” aspects of gardening the pubescent flowers that are attempting to grow and develop before one’s eyes. There will always be a combined denotative and connotative aspect to the meaning of words. And the context in which they are used is another factor in their “interpretation”. These are basic considerations in a grade nine classroom, where language skills, vocabulary, discernment and judgement, including the capacity to discern and name inferences (as well as coherence, unity and emphasis in the complex task of developing clear thoughts, feelings, perceptions and ideas) are like the tiny shoots of “green” that announce the beginning of new growth in Spring. And each student “takes” to the growth curve differently; some blatantly disdain its ‘femininity’; others much on it like the latest offering from McDonald’s with vigor, energy and even a kind of playful combativeness. And then there is a large group in the middle who seem almost disinterested in the concept itself.

The “readers” of course, admire often to the point of fascination, the complexity and the excitement generated by world-class writers. The ones who despise reading or find it difficult (and often these are some of the same students) shy away from the “obsessive” interest in words and the delicacy of their meaning and import. This dichotomy also holds when the skill of “listening” is at issue. Those who deem words to have meaning and import, listen much more carefully, and intently (today’s therapy calls it “active listening”) while those who have withdrawn from words and their complexities, tend to turn off when conversations go “into the proverbial weeds”. Policy wonks, poets, playwrights, lawyers and clergy, journalists and humanities academics, among others, find this withdrawal especially obstructive, given that their ‘stock in trade’ is words.*

The marketing business also requires word mastery to build sales campaigns on the emotional impact of selected words. Just this morning, Donny Deutsch, marketing guru, appearing on Morning Joe, indicating he would be meeting with Democratic Party officials next week to map out a “slogan” for the midterm elections declared, “this is the vote of your life” as his preference, given the current serious and potentially fatal threats to democracy embedded in the words and actions of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Words, then, and their meaning and import are mere chop sticks in the awkward and singularly “undextrous” hands of the president, useful for the immediate “meal” of whatever “scene” he is producing in his private and personal reality television appearance, and disposable in the trash, ready to be replaced by another and different and even opposing “sticks” in the next “appearance”.

The word “produce” and not the word “create” was used in the previous sentence for the simple reason that trump would not know how to “cre.ate” something even with a manual. He gathers props and pays for props, including all the candidates for president from the Republican party in 2015 and 2016. There really are no other “items” in his “props” list than other people, regardless of their name, their character, their intellectual, ethical, political, military, national or loyalty histories. It is as if he is in constant “production” of the next episode of his own epic biographic narrative. Entertain, evoke applause, provoke knee-jerk cheering and jeering of his opponents, dropping epithets filled with nuclear emotional explosive dynamite…..all in  the service of a literal and a metaphoric “empty suit” of a man.

It is, in a word, pathetic!

There is something to be said for the comparison with Obama, one of, if not the most literate and sophisticated writer to occupy the Oval Office, and the comparison does not favour his successor. Nevertheless, the public expects and deserves a president who has sufficient command of the language that blatant conflations, deceptions, dissembling and lying are not the norm. So, by any reasonable standard, the president is a disaster as an executive responsible for his own use of language.

What is even more striking and startling is that some 35-40% of the American public either does not know or care about the difference between patriotism and nationalism and goes right along with the chicanery. This is either or both an indictment on their language training in elementary and secondary school, or a much more blatant disregard for the difference in order to permit and enable trump to carry out his iconoclastic bombast on all laws, institutions and traditions. And for the president to do all this under the rubric of “making the country great” a slick slogan for “patriotism” (really a ruse to cover his insidious nationalism) is so  tragic and unforgiveable that it reeks of the political bar room.

When the language through which we communicate ideas, plans, strategies, hopes and dreams for a nation is so disparaged by the leader of a country, whether it is done consciously or unconsciously, the effect is the same. The very foundations of the national culture are being eroded and are slipping into the sea along with the millions of tons of plastic, the flow of which this president is only exacerbating through another of his many heinous acts of hubris, removing environmental regulations to “make his friends a whole lot richer” (his words to his friends at Mar-a-logo immediately after the passage of the tax bill).

It is not which words he uses that matters; it is also the contempt demonstrated for the meaning of the words he does use that also manipulate the once most trusted and honourable democracy in the world.

No longer!

Recall the words of Martin Buber, the Jewish scholar and theologian:

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

Not hard to tell into which side this president slithers.

*It is not a stretch to advocate here for a minimum of one and preferably two or three courses in Literature, Creative Writing, Debating, Rhetoric be included in the post-secondary education of all students in Science, Math, Medicine and Engineering.

Reflections on world "citizenship"

There is something startlingly unrealistic in thinking and then imagining a world in which the shared interests, needs and issues of all people might be considered and answered by institutions that are free of racial rancor, religious bigotry, fiscal plutocracy and superiority, political narcissism and denial of global warming and climate change.

It is a spectre to which the world as we know it will never even aspire, never mind attain. Where then are the seed of hope that might be planted to begin to germinate such a geopolitical, planetary seedling of a embryo that future generations could then nurture and develop?

Two roots of human development, outside of the genetic pool, remain open for enhancement: parenting and education. The first, while primarily private and exclusive to the biological parents of newborns, is nevertheless a relationship (not merely a job, role, set of skills, task or responsibility) for which most people of child-rearing age are woefully unprepared, untutored, and are even badly modelled.

Based on our parents’ examples, we all bear the scars of wounds, deprivations, exaggerations, fears, bigotries and negative animus from our time in our family of origin. That is not a simply “poor me” victim statement. It is an observation that most adults can and do make, after they have had children of their own. Our parents’ time and generation were simply uninformed of many of the important and often nuanced perspectives and information and expectations that come from an evolving and developing body of research, experience, and new ways of communicating, travelling, sharing and opposing. And while history has a way of informing and contextualizing their values and perspectives, it also has a way of  fossilizing those very attitudes, beliefs and biases. And no matter how defiantly we struggle to rid ourselves of the negative impacts of those influences, they have a tendency of lingering and popping up when we least expect them to. In fact, the more strenuous our attempt to eradicate those influences, paradoxically, the more they cling to our psyches and show up in our own lives.

Fortunately, there are no “bleaches” and no sanitizers, and no microbial soaps to launder the biases from our minds. There are also no churches, no schools, no books, no hospitals or doctors that can erase the negative impacts of our fears, neuroses, anxieties and bigotries. So, we are left with our own unique cluster of what our parents might have called ‘shades of meaning and value’ that we now experience as limiting, narrowing repressing and sabotaging.

The question then is how to “manage” (such an inappropriate word in this context) or “tickle” or “wear” or ……our self-sabotaging biases!

Some may even ask, “Why should I have to manage them?  After all, they are an integral part of my identity!”

If we are going to continue to commit to a more equitable, more just, more humane and more compassionate and more collaborative world community, then those biases that inflame our passions, provoke our wars both civil and territorial, prompt our destructive and parasitic tendencies will need some curtailing. And before they can or will be curtailed, they have to acknowledged, especially if and when they create unnecessary ruptures in our relationships, both personal and professional, as well as geopolitical.

The proverbial “cat-fights” between the Hatfields and the McCoys, or between the Catholics and the Protestants, between the whites and the blacks, browns and yellows and reds, between the rich and the poor, between the educated and the non, between the scientists and the artists, between the visionaries and the historians….while all comprise a significant set of volumes in the library of human history, (and also prompt significant and revealing debates, new insights and new directions) need some kind of separation from the global threats that all “tribes” are now facing.

Previously, humans were either unaware of what was happening on the other side of the globe, or they were peripherally and superficially conscious that “something” might be happening that was ‘not good’….resulting in deaths, mamings, injuries, starvations or even epidemics. Today, everyone has access to such information in real time. And consequently, none of us can claim ignorance, insouciance or a freedom from responsibility for any of it. When young girls are abducted in Nigeria, we are all appalled. When pedestrians are mowed down on French streets, we are all mowed down. When refugees drown on beaches in the Mediterranean, we all experience a kind of drowning. And if we don’t because we have become immune from the sheer onslaught of the repetition of these movies, then there is an even greater impulse to rid ourselves of these preventable tragedies.

Just as individuals cannot erase their biases, so too individuals and groups cannot eliminate their ideological, religious, ethnic biases. However, what we can do is to begin a long..very long and protracted process of reducing our shared dependence on a number of options that currently operate a centre stage of our public lives, in the global public square. Among these are:

·        The zero-sum option

·        The myth that tells kids never to turn from a punch, from a bully, or from a threat….there are many options here including counting to ten or a hundred, finding a third party mediator, helping young children to see the “plank” in their own eye, before magnifying the speck in the other’s eye…

·        Mount community initiatives to teach/learn about the world view of people from different backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities

·        Participate in welcoming immigrants, new-comers, refugees and asylum-seekers into the local community

·        Urge community clergy to adopt collaborative community projects that demonstrate collaboration, as an normal and ordinary reality, not only on radioactive days like 9/11

·        Urge broadcast outlets, like TVO, PBS, Netflix, HBO to develop documentaries and films that expose diverse audiences to different cultures

·        Urge international agencies like the UN, the Clinton Foundation, Gates Foundation and others to target the development of cultural films, documentaries and digital media options opening the world to unfamiliar cultures…this kind of initiative is just as important as the eradication of AIDS, poverty, ebola and other epidemics.

·        Petition various world religious organizations to facilitate the preparation and dissemination of learning opportunities from diverse global locations and cultures

·        Read and talk around the dining room table about “how the rest of the world lives”…as a normal subject for family discourse

·        Help our children link with a pen-pal (facebookfriend, et al) with a peer from a distant country

·        Petition school boards and principals to develop student exchange opportunities at the secondary school level, in both public and private boards

·        Adopt fund-raising activities to support student travel, especially to parts of the world currently under-represented in the local community

·        Host an exchange student, (through Rotary International, or another reputable philanthropic agency) and inquire about his/her culture and habits

·        And then there is the option of inclusion of formal, traditional debating/seminar strategies and tactics, beginning at a early stage of elementary school, including local team competitions, honing the skills, but also planting the seeds of normalizing this kind of discourse among young children.

·        Introducing Moot Court opportunities, including both the gathering of evidence, and the presentation of witnesses, as another foundational post in the curricular development swath that could sweep across both the developed and the developing world. Include the deployment of FACETIME and SKYPE to facilitate cross-continental competitions, after securing both governmental and corporate sponsorship.

Naturally, all of these ‘ideas’ are directed to enhancing a global perspective in each and every town and city on the planet. Educators, especially those with vision, ambition and creative courage could be at the heart of such an initiative, in addition to their duties to prepare students for twenty-first century jobs. The short-sighted and highly charged political goal of “job training” risks serving the other highly charged political goal (again a race to the bottom) of reducing unemployment ranks, to justify the politicians’ re-election.

The media reporter cadre, too, has a pivotal role in how it “covers” racial conflict, jerrymandering to curtail voting opportunities, and the normalizing of cataracts of cash manipulating all electoral processes. They also have a significant role in whether and how they treat criminal activity…especially since the reduction of stories about crime mostly focus on the events and the charges and the sentences. Leaving out the details of the lives that have become derailed long before the specific crime was committed, is just another way of imposing a dangerous and somewhat violent reduction on the name and person charged and convicted and sentenced. We have to begin to think about crime differently. Previously, in this blog, I quoted one of the more ignorant and dismissive observations of a former neighbour when speaking about crime: “Well, all crimes are committed by the same 2% of the population, and that’s not going go change!”

Just another instance of a “developed culture” fixating on the superficial symptom, without digging into the root causes, as part of our shared aversion to the mundane and boring activity of “prevention”. And we already know that prevention, while costing more up front, would significantly reduce costs in the long run. Not incidentally prevention would also restore lives that otherwise would be effectively terminated in some jail cell, or a coroner’s morgue.

Superficial understanding is frankly an oxymoron. And when we link a superficial understanding with a transactional modus operandi as the “norm” we risk undermining both the purpose and the sustainability of our institutions, our traditions and our collective futures.

Schools, families, and of course, private corporations, now stretching their arms and legs around the globe, to take every advantage of every single loophole, and every single human being desperate enough to accept less than human working conditions, wages, safety, and environmental protections, are potential sources of creative energy, in the pathway to generating global citizens, global strategies and tactics for the survival of as many people as is feasible to support. Short-term greed, for lining the trust accounts of investors, is another “good business” oxymoron. It is simply incompatible with the larger, long-term interests of the planet and its people.

Economies that people have to serve have turned upside-down the preferred “economies that serve the people” perspective. And so long as we have people like trump and, more recently in Ontario, Mr.Ford, a Northern echo of the monster south of the 49^th parallel, opting out of carbon pricing, taking the federal government to court, opting out of all green energy projects inaugurated by the previous government, we know that their economy will serve their “political interests” especially their cheque-writers. (Already trump has raised a reported $88 million for his 2020 re-election campaign! Imagine the caravan of tractor-trailers that will be needed to transport the final tally to the bank when the totals are calculated!)

If we are to begin to rid ourselves of our biases, we will also have to learn to express whole truths, and not depend on half-truths. Just yesterday, I heard a talking head columnist from the Washington Post say obviously ironically, “trump has a slight disability when it comes to recognizing and telling the truth!”

Say what? Is this politically correct speak for “trump is a pathological liar”?

Straight talk is the only way to express clear thought. And without clear thought and straight talk we are all somewhat imperiled. And it is not only people like trump and putin who prevaricate.

It is an epidemic among people under thirty, who, if and when they screw up, immediately deny, blame another or ignore their mis-step. (Of course, atr generalization that has not been tested in formal research! It is an intuitive guestimate, begging for empirical verification.

As Obama pointed out in South Africa, speaking at the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela words to this effect: social media was once predicted to be a force for solidarity, learning and the growth of the human condition and yet it has become an instrument for lies, division and propaganda. If we can listen to such prophetic voices with our own commitment for a world committed to its own hope and survival, then, presumably, we can “go higher” in all of the connotative applications of those words from Michelle Obama.

Contemporary leaders have staked out for themselves the “low road” that serves only their narcissistic needs and desperations.

Surely we can do better than this.

Time to re-invent global governance

The definition of “peace” has expanded from the absence of military confrontation to include the reduction, amelioration and possibly elimination of the root causes of social, political and military conflict.

Naturally, limiting nuclear weapons while working toward their elimination, on the same rationale as justifies the prohibition of chemical, biological weapons of mass destruction is a first priority. And this is an issue, like many others, which cannot be satisfied through mere “lip service”; it requires an almost daily monitoring to keep it on the front burner of all political actors of all ideological stripes. And as with other shared global issues, it demands the endorsement, monitoring and even the policing of international agencies. And, in turn, that points to the decline in the relative influence of the United Nations, the World Court, the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization. The Paris Climate Accord is sadly a voluntary accord, without the kind of teeth that would seek, expect and require compliance, including sanctions for non-compliance.

In order to establish a “world perspective” among municipal, provincial and state politicians, local media, and local school boards have to start thinking about how to integrate significant news on a daily basis from around the world. And the enhanced circulation of the daily DOW and NASDAQ numbers does not qualify as satisfying that benchmark. The old adage “all politics is local” has to be injected with the single steroid that “local now includes the planet”. While there are a few issues that require specific local expertise, we have both the means and the need to access best practices from sources around the world, to help us design strategies and tactics for our local situations.

And, in order to facilitate that new approach, a differentiation between the what and the how of our political decisions is relevant. Let’s examine a few of the issues faced by all local, regional, provincial and national governments:

·        We all face a surfeit of garbage and those mountains are going to continue go expand

·        We all face a need for clean water, sewage treatment plants, desalination capacity, lake, river and ocean restoration

·        We all face the impact of the tech revolution, including its impact on school curricula, employment planning and training, employment displacement

·        We all face rising global temperatures, and the implications of our dependence on fossil fuels, not only for manufacturing and transportation, nobut also for a plethora of conveniences and especially packaging

·        We all face growing poverty, as evidenced by the widening gulf between the have’s and the have-not’s, linked to a rising river of refugees that knows no borders, no harbours and no collaborative strategies to accommodate it

·        We all live in jurisdictions where the laws lag far behind the capacity and speed of technology to invade and compromise personal, organizational, governmental and national security

·        We all face a welter of mixed messages about the state of our world, requiring a level of profound literacy skills that sorts the “wheat from the chaff” and makes “meaning” out of the chaos served by multiple completing sources, both individual and organizational. This also impacts our shared need and obligation to equip citizens to discern and to interpret reality in a manner that holds public servants much more accountable than currently.

·        We all face instability with respect to global economic forces, trade trends and practices, animated by a growing cabal of affluent, greedy and heavily armed with both lawyers and accountants, who can and do ferret gazillions of dollars out of reach of national revenue agencies, thereby depriving the public accounts of their legitimate contributions.

·        We all face a growing need for the proverbial safety net, including assistance with food and prescription acquisition, access to affordable quality health care and creative and pro-active strategies to enhance human dignity, the motivation to work and to commit to life-long learning, and to participate in stable domestic relationships

·        We all face a cultural indoctrination that renders every human being a “means” (or widget) in the plans, strategies and plans of large corporations, governments, and even not-for-profits…and this reduction’s embedding in the mind-set of all authority in the culture demands a significant shift away from the commodification of what it means to be human.

·        Another cultural meme concerns our concept of time, driven by an instantly responsive and addictive technology, market systems that are highly reactive to the most miniscule hiccup (political, economic, trade, climate, military or terror)

This list is easily extended to include many more.

Yet, the more important aspect of the shared “issues” is that responsibility for each and everyone is unable to be contained within national, provincial or civic borders. There is quite literally no legitimate way to ascribe responsibility for air and water pollution, for the global income gaps, the penchant for violence as the preferred means of pursuing justice, the greed and profiteering among international mega-corporations, the invocation of radical interpretations of various religious dogmas, and the tidal wave of “strong-men” leaders and the twisting of the digital media into instruments for hate, lies defamation and propaganda.

 

 What’s more the political institutions in both developed and developing nations that currently stand as our “protection” and our “defense” and our “hope” for our shared future remain closeted within very narrow confines. Those confines, based on history, tradition, custom, culture and various sets of laws seem intractable to a world that is so changed as to be unrecognizable to those who wrote those laws and established those traditions and developed those cultures. In a word, our current and evolving reality has far outstripped the capacity of our national and the few beleaguered international institutions to cope. And the gap between what existing laws and institutions can and will accomplish and our shared and growing need for relevant, applicable and cross-border covenants to address these many issues grows daily.

The income gap, while extremely serious, is even more significant as a metaphor for what “we” (the citizens of the world) are prepared to tolerate, endure and attempt to withstand, fully aware that this gap, by itself, is unsustainable. Access to clean water, air and land, education, access to healthy food, access to quality health care, freedom from violence from domestic, state and non-state actors, access to work with dignity, the right to vote and participate in public debate in some form  of citizen-activated governance and personal and public safety and security…..these, while being a minimum requirement and legitimate expectation of all sustainable cultures and the individuals living within those cultures are nevertheless also a list of the deprivations to which most humans are subjected…and they are subjected to such conditions with impunity.

Those responsible will throw an array of excuses for not aggressively delivering  such a bare list of “doables”. Cost, human resources, history,  the laws, the traditions of our ‘tribe’…the expectations of our people, the silence of the people in demanding such “perks” (and what reasonable thinking person would consider them perks?) International habits, focusing on national sovereignty, is another of the limiting if not precluding factors.

National sovereignty, that mantra to which more and more “white supremacists” and “populists” are resorting, like “free speech” has to be limited, circumscribed and restricted in a deliberate and permanent manner, a manner to which all nations are prepared to subscribe. And that has to be one of the more naïve and ephemeral and utopian statements every to be committed to type.

There is a clear difference between tribal culture, ethnic culture, linguistic culture, religion and food and entertainment culture on the one hand, and national sovereignty on the other. And there is no reason why the surrender of a limited, and equal degree of national sovereignty, for the benefit of the whole planet, should limit the growth and sustainability of unique cultures. Surely national boundaries can encompass many indigenous cultures, provided that a starting point is a deep and articulated respect for those unique indigenous cultures. And this perspective, while shifting some of the prevailing premises of how nations formed and developed, merely opens to the new realities of the world’s changing capacity to communicate, to research, to support and to envision new ways of doing things in the public square.

As a free-lance journalist, covering a city government in a small town in northern Ontario, I was frequently dismayed with the response I received, invariably, when I asked a municipal politician a question like: “Have you or the city staff checked into how other northern Ontario towns and cities have addressed ‘this’ issue?” After that “blank” look swept overt their faces, screaming, “What are you talking about?” or “How dare you suggest such an approach?” they usually demurred to a whispered “No”!

Provincialism, parochialism, isolationism, are, none of them, attributes of a healthy, growing and motivating and stimulating communal culture. They are, rather, severe limits to possibilities and potentialities. A typical example, also from a northern Ontario family:

A young adult son speculates in the kitchen of his family home, before his parents, that he hopes to attend medical school to become a family practitioner. Astounded, his mother immediately retorts, “You can’t do that! We are not that kind of people!” Whatever she intended, that young man remembered her words, accepted her limiting psychological (and irrational) circumscription and retold the story as a verbatim in his mid-sixties, after graduating with his doctorate in Family Relations.

Conflict, comparisons, judgements, and a vain attempt to “sign” every aspect of our lives, as public servants and politicians is a sure path to a downward spiral and even more darkness. We have to rethink the way we do politics and public service away from self-aggrandizement and back to attempt to serve the legitimate needs of the public. Domains of specialists, while appropriate in the operating room of major hospitals,  university labs and lecture halls and court rooms, is a false equivalence if and when applied to the public square. We, the ordinary citizens, cannot afford to permit the “specialists” to decide all public decisions, lest we all fall into the trap currently gripping the United States, a total rejection of what the hinterland calls the “effete” snobs, their evaluation of the “rule by snobs”. And just look at what they  grasped on to, as their choice of replacement…an iconoclast who probably does not even grasp the damage he has done and will continue to inflict, pending the self-emasculation of the Republicans, caught in the web of preserving their political status and careers.

None of the this is rocket-science; even the most casual observer can pick up the clues. However, it is going to take some “electric jolt” for the global political culture to awaken to the reality that superficial, short-term, narcissistic and ultra-nationalistic ideologies, policies, promises, campaigns and restrictive laws are, taken together, a recipe for disaster.

The wisdom, the history, the patience and the “circle” of indigenous people, fully conscious and practicing a collaborative spirituality with the planet, can still serve as a beacon to which to turn our shared political compass, in our “shared” attempt to pass successfully through this very deep and truth-defying fog, of a new kind of war. In every country, indigenous people have suffered the slings and arrows, the rubber and loaded bullets, the disparaging taunts and the outright character defamation that make that eminently suited to provide leadership out of the slough of racism, poverty, discrimination, the loss of hope and the deprivation of their languages and culture. Will we invite them to lead us out of our own darknesses, blindnesses, hubris and complacency? If we can make the even the binary choice for “life” and all of its bounty, over death and all of its multiple threats, we can win this new ubiquitous conflict for survival.

This is a war that is effectively, like a scheming and toxic fungus or tumor, eroding the very body politic of the globe. It is a war based on selfish, narrow, frightened and narcissistic private (including racial, tribal, ethnic, and even religious) interests and motivations.

Human rights, are not restricted to rights under the law: they must include the right to breathe, to drink clean water, the right to access education, health care and work with dignity and the right to live in safety and security in one’s rightful place. And, if the laws are slow to embody them, then the laws have to change, And if the people responsible for the laws are not prepared to pass such reasonable and sustainable and pro-active law, in the best interests of their “constituents” then those people have to be replaced.

And a somnambulant, insouciant, detached, disengaged, self-declared victim populace is in not condition to take such spinal, and vehement and self-supporting activist steps.

As Pogo reminds us, “we have met the enemy and he is us!”