#61 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (male-female stereotypes)

In a recent documentary entitled, If You Could Read My Mind, Gordon Lightfoot, utters a profound insight: “The really important thing is the relationship between men and women.”

In Surfacing, among other notable quotes, Margaret Atwood writes:

She must have heard the door opening and closing in the middle of the night; she produces a smile, warm, conspiratorial, and I know what circuits are closing in her head: by screwing Joe she’s brought is back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all mirages raised by words.

And in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood writes, through her character June, in a voiceover:

Someone once said, ‘Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.’ We should have known better. I thought there were still secret places, hidden in the cracks and crevices of this world. Places we could make beautiful, Peaceful. Quiet. Safe, Or at least bearable.”

It is not only the violence that men perpetrate on women that haunts Atwood’s work but the fact that the image of that violence “exist is the back of our heads in our world as well.”

Reverberating in the backs of all of our heads, incorrigibly inevitably and relentlessly, are images of both men and women who haunt us if and whenever we return to moments of trauma, terror, ill-ease and profound vulnerability. And the images of those faces, those hands, those voices, those weapons used against us even those guns will never completely subside. Such reverberation is not exclusive to “the back of women’s heads, nor is the “fear” so echoed exclusive to women, nor is the direction of traumatic fear exclusively from men to women. Both genders, equally if differently, have those drums beating in the backs of our heads, and even in the pits of our stomachs, depending on both the severity of those initial “strokes” and the work we have each done or not to confront them. Watching an air-head male, a former American marine, shoot a sparrow on a clothesline, in front of his twelve-year-old daughter just for some ‘fun’ while she screams in protest, is indelibly seared in my memory back, at the back of my head. So is the memory of my father pointing the .22 at his head, behind the jacket-heater, at 3.00 a.m, when, at twelve, I asked him to give me the gun.

Men with guns, regardless of their national origin, their motivation or their share of responsibility for the situation that provokes the use of those guns, are frightening. And there are a lot more men with guns than there are women with guns. There are a lot more men dependent on those guns then there are women. And there are a lot more men who are unable or unwilling to confront their insecurities, whatever form and face they take, than there are women who confront their insecurities.

 Males who continue to brandish their hollow ego’s, and their loaded guns, and their histrionic bravado and their impetuous, irrational and authoritarian, unassailable and un-questioned and un-appealable decisions all contribute to the arsenal of emotional weaponry deployed by both men and women in a desperate pursuit of unattainable okay-ness. In that frenzied chase, both men and women have recruited blunt gestures, single name-callings, bullying, rumour-mongering charges, character assassinations, gossip, and outright defiance, as weapons in the all-out war on gentility, empathy, identification, ennobility and social security. And included in that arsenal, rightly or wrongly, is laughter…AT the other.

Comparing women’s laughter as the ultimate fear men have of women, to women’s fear of the guns of men, however, hardly captures the relative fears, or arsenals of either gender. On the one hand, men fearing being laughed at by significant women in their lives, is in fact a deep and profoundly threatening experience. We laugh at banana-peel farcical falls, and at comics whose exaggerations, atypical associations, imitations, and entertaining tricks amuse, often to the point of tears. Gags continue to represent moments of laughter that for the most part are never administered in contempt, or hatred. In fact, they connect, unless and until the gag is motivated by a desire to pillory, undress and even destroy another. However, when a woman whom we, perhaps mistakenly, consider significant from a mutually shared perspective, laughs not with but AT us, that moment is indelibly imprinted on our minds, never ever to be erased.

So disarmed, and so literally disabled to “know what or how to respond” not having the reservoir of vocabulary, including the connection with the specifics of precisely how we feel at the specific moment, we are devastated, disarmed and not mere embarrassed at the laughter, but enraged at our own impotence. It is not the laughter exactly that we fear, but our own impotence. Impotence, that deadly, self-imposed, self-defined, and radioactive humiliation, is something from which we ultimately never really recover.

Impotence, too, has so many faces, forms, and expressions. More than all of the genres of music (symphony, fugue, oratorio, prelude, sonata, study, waltz, march, opera, jazz, rock, and many others) impotence, even if the word never crosses the consciousness of our mind, lurks at the root of our identity. Hard-wired as agents of procreation, and as foolish, even incompetent carriers, protectors and employers of our cultural, and biological role, we are never far from feeling a threat to that truth. Never mind crying “pitty-party” after reading that last sentence! We are almost unconscious of that part of our identity, except if and when its “power” is threatened, when, like the cat whose eyes have just been drenched with turpentine, we explode. So, dear women who believe that we fear your laughter, while you fear our guns, rest easy. We fear the spectre of our own impotence and your capacity to remind us of our impotence.

Now, dear women readers, let’s get back to the “guns” of your fear. It is not unreasonable for women to be perhaps even excessively anxious about the size, the muscle, the sheer loudness and the impetuosity of the men in your lives. At the zenith of the expression of masculine “anger” (frustration, embarrassment, insecurity, anxiety, worthlessness, disappointment especially in one’s self, shame, guilt, rejection, alienation, abandonment…..and lots of others) for women, there is the spectre of something exploding and quite naturally, of threatening to life and limb. The evidence of domestic violence points directly to the perpetration of that violence, primarily by men against women. Men exhibit violence, not only to other men, and to women, but also to various forms of life including animals, birds, fish, and the eco-systems on which all life forms depend. And their primary weapon, in their hands, most effective in the “kill” is their gun. Also, unfortunately, deployed as their weapon is their “take-over,” their “buy-out,” their zero-sum definition and exhibition of competition “to the death” by whatever means. Baskets, field goals, free shots, penalty shots, winning goals, sales targets, bonuses, stock options, trophies, Mazarotti’s, investment portfolios, Bali vacations, while considered legitimate goals, are also embedded into the framework of masculine competitive, testosterone-fueled-and-driven determination…and much of this “work” is our considered and taught and exemplified and honoured role-modelling in order to attract a beautiful, brainy, witty, self-reliant and courageous woman.

Mating is another of those words riddled with cynicism, scepticism and even animalism, dependent on when a dog, horse, or cow might be in heat and when procreation is planned. Dating, romancing, entertaining, teasing, flirting, “getting to know,” and perhaps even “discerning level of maturity and responsibility” through such processes as graduating, achieving promotions, nominations for exclusive posts, are other words to depict the process, in a sophisticated culture.

Failure, however, like a never-receding cloud, hangs on the horizon of each of our window-sills in our bedrooms when we awaken, depending on our age, our history and our perceptions of our potential. And the question of males fearing failure or success more deeply remains for another place and time.

Let’s unpack another device in our exploration of some of these words, pictures and issues in the inter-connectivity of men and women. That device is a measuring device for “pro-activity” and “reactivity”….when and whether to initiate, or to respond. When to lead and when to follow, and how to discern the appropriate moment for each…these are not merely skills, they are intuitive and imaginative “tests” of our depth of both perception and adaptation to the moment. Is this person one who appreciates surprises or not? Is this person one who engages in repartee or not? Is this person one who appreciates flowers and chocolates when one has disappointed, or a more matter of fact apology? Is this a moment for “sweeping” her/him off his/her feet or not? Is it time, is s/he ready for the momentous meeting of one’s parents? Does this person enjoy rom-com movies, biographies, mysteries, histories, tragedies? Does this person like to “travel, dine out, try new recipes, entertain, engage in off-beat conversations?

These questions only become part of the consciousness of each of us at our unique and individual time, sometimes inappropriately, too early or too late, depending on the synchronicity with the other. And too often, it seems, (without supporting sociological research!) that male emotional maturity, and readiness to open to the significance of these mere “relationship” nuances far lags behind that of most females. A male accountant, a former associate, once demurred in silence, when I entreated an executive committee to focus on developing relationships with a critical, supportive and feeder demographic, as having nothing to do with his role as a member of that executive committee. Men, sadly, still refrain from even perceiving the importance of “developing relationships” (except dramatically designed as “transactional and profit-generating”) as a highly significant component of all business, professional, and clearly learning and supporting relationships.

Cynics, especially males, will be exploding with Oprah epithets, as if this piece exhorts all males to become “oprahfied” like women. That is definitely not the  purpose here.

What is the purpose is to expand the vocabularies, and the expectations, the perceptions and the confinements of both masculine and feminine stereotypes of their own gender and of the opposite gender. Our conversations will go no where if we continue to dig trenches in our minds filled with stereotypical definitions of men and women. Throw away those shovels that have been used to dig the trenches we already occupy. And both genders have been firmly clinging to those shovels.

Reducing male emotional keyboard to a one-note repeating, harping anger leaves all men reduced to less than those cardboard cut-outs that try to emulate “stars”. Similarly, reducing all men to “guns” is another route to the same carboard caricature. Reducing all women to a “fear of men” on the other hand, and implicitly, rendering all women “second” and subservient and unequal is a similar reduction.

And those reductions, like all of the other bumper-sticker aphorisms, aimed at one or another gender, just as pointed at one or another individual, can and will do little more than exacerbate what already is a tense situation. And in the midst of one of, if not the worse, global tragedies in human history, the COVIC-19 pandemic, all men and all women, in every village, town, city, state and nation need the best from each of us. Not only do we face our own mortality more emphatically than any of us could have anticipated, we also face a moment of many months if not years, when we can and must face those questions which heretofore have eluded our consciousness, and thereby our imaginations as reasonable and available relationship options.

Exaggeration for the purpose of waking us up has a literary purpose. Operationally, however, it bodes engendering more fear, more angst and more anger. None of these provide the impetus, motivation or nutrition for enhanced harmony, creativity and collaboration…and ultimate survival.

#60 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (men behaving badly, others leading)

Reports of gun and ammunition sales sky-rocketing on both sides of the 49th parallel are not merely shocking; they are straight-out frightening!

Whether the argument is the more pallid and seemingly tranquil, “we have to stock up for hunting and target shooting,” or the more virulent “we have to get ready to protect ourselves from the walking dead”…the rationale will not hold water. And, the perpetrators of this nefarious, if legal, bingeing, are, of course, men! And demonstrating both blatant opportunism and profound insecurity, knowing that anyone who throws their behaviour back into their face will be castigated, impugned and bullied into submission, such men shame the rest of us!

And these men are not the only ones behaving badly. The screens and the microphones are filled with their faces and voices, respectively.

Men behaving badly:

    strutting Florida beaches on March Break, or

    hoarding needed supplies from supermarket shelves and then selling them to unsuspecting and frightened people at two and three times the original price,  

    blaming others while denying responsibility (think trump!) or

    painting rose-coloured pictures of fantasies in masks, ventilators, vaccines and even numbers of people directly impacted by this extremely penetrating, painful and unpredictable virus

    refusing to come to grips with legitimate and emergent requests for support

    pontificating about how wonderful is the job “we” are doing

    delaying decisions on compliance with reasonable, protective directives/orders from professional health care leaders

    using the pandemic to underscore an extreme right-wing populist agenda, refusing the sharing of necessary supplies for health care workers

    selling off sizeable portfolios of stocks about to be negatively impacted (hotels and airlines, for example) immediately prior to the public news of the pandemic and immediately after a private, confidential briefing on the extreme danger of the pandemic in the U.S. Congress

    condescending to phrases like “we are not a shipping clerk” in reference to the U.S. government when asked about acquiring needed supplies for health care workers (think trump again!)

    condescending to lower classes when asked if professional athletes can be tested while people suffering from the virus cannot, “that’s how things work sometimes” (think trump again!)

    deflecting tough and embarrassing questions to known, reputable, trust-worthy public health professionals, and then muzzling them into a chant of trumpeting the “decisions of the president and vice-president”

    denying they kept real numbers demonstrating the severity of the pandemic from the public, in order to protect their political hide

And then there are the voices (not all of them men) of hope, courage, leadership and authenticity we all need and gravitate to, in spite of the dominating thunder of those malevolent men blowing their own horns:

Anthony Cuomo, Governor of New York, whose state bear the brunt of the highest rate of infection in the American landscape. His clear, resonant, reasonable and even prophetic voice comes out after seeking the most detailed, and the most dangerous probabilities from the best minds and the most insightful and even intuitive professionals he can find. Holding back from a full-out public health “order” to keep all people in the state in their homes, he nevertheless balances the various competing yet needed services in the state to address fundamental needs of emergency and ICU beds, ventilators, protective equipment while calming public fears. It is Cuomo who speaks most clearly and unequivocally about the risks of public fear being potentially more dangerous than the virus itself.

Bill DeBlasio: Mayor of New York: he too speaks clearly and unequivocally about the silence in the responses he seeks from the White House, in his desperate search for needed equipment for health care workers in his city. Seeking compliance with the directive to close all restaurants, the Mayor indicates, this morning on MSNBC, that a mere half dozen operators tried to squeeze out a little more profit after the directive was issued. The fact that he has/had a personal grasp of the details of the first death in his city, an elderly woman suffering from pre-existing emphysema, demonstrates his attention both to the finer details, in order to calm public anxieties, while exercising considerable energy in pursuit of the more broad public requirements.

Gavin Newsome, Governor of California: the first Governor to declare a public health order confining some 40 million people to their homes, while also providing a counter-weight to the incompetence, insouciance, and hubristic attitude, verbiage and decision-making of the White House.

Governor Inslee of Washington State, the first to actually being the process of erecting an emergency hospital on a soccer field in Seattle. Facing one of the early hot-spots of the pandemic, including the deaths of too many elderly in a nursing home, Inslee has taken the kind of perspective and courageous rhetoric he used confidently in his presidential bid to defend and protect the environment before withdrawing, and applied his considerable political skills to this latest threat.

Dr. Bonny Henry, provincial health officer in British Columbia, along with Dr. Tam, the Canadian public health officer, have authored many public statements based on the most tragic and depressing facts, while maintaining an air and attitude of composure, calm and yet deeply serious and concerned. Their respective strengths in both comprehending and in illuminating the darkest recesses of this pandemic births confidence, hope and courage as the figures of infections and deaths mount, and as the campaign to acquire and distribute needed medical supplies across the country mounts.

 Prime Minister Trudeau, himself self-isolated because of his wife, Sophie’s being infected with COVIC-19, has offered information and public calm each day from the front of his residence. Also, the provincial premiers, in their capacity as agents of public calm and comfort, as well as providers of the needed professional care in their jurisdictions, have appeared before television cameras, in a deliberate, non-partisan effort to achieve transparency and accountability, the two most necessary ingredients to maintain and sustain public trust and confidence. While portending economic disaster in his province and in the energy sector, for example, Premier Jason Kenny of Alberta, refrained from his usual virulent attacks on the federal government and especially Prime Minister Trudeau. He knows, as do the rest of us, that Trudeau is no more responsible for this pandemic than is his former political opponent, provincial premier Rachal Notley.

And then there are the thousands, if not millions of parents who previously went off to their offices and workplaces, after dropping their kids off at schools and day-cares, who now remain closeted in their homes, 24-7, finding and lifting their school lessons from their laptops before they replace those teachers who prepared and sent them. Home-schooling has now become democratized, as digital reality finds and adopts an even more prominent place in the lives of these professionals. Even the “in-home” piano teacher is now turning to Facetime to conduct “private” piano lessons with his students. The prominence of fire-fighters, law enforcement, ambulance and paramedic professionals has never been more appreciated, and more needed.

In the state of Indiana, people are being asked, as in wartime, to actually “make” hospital masks for health care professionals, while they remain in their homes. Neighbours are checking in on elderly shut-ins, while families deploy Skype to reconnect and to support and care for those who cannot and do not have a social life.

The military, in both Canada and the U.S. are undoubtedly going to play an increasingly impactful role as the need for “field hospitals” becomes more evident, and the potential for increased anxiety and fear rises.

We are currently, and we will in the near and medium-range future be privy to statements, personages, actions, decisions and forecasts that display a deep and profound connection to and respect for the empirical evidence we all face. And we will also become increasingly aware of those voices, persons, actions and attitudes that defy public confidence, public trust and public integrity.

And our hope lies primarily in the latter, although the former will continue to provide a clarion foil for our discernment of their inadequacy. When Mayor De Blasio declares on national television that the federal administration in AWOL on this pandemic, should not be listened to, and should not be trusted, we all know that North America to some extent, like New York, is fighting this war impeded by one arm tied behind our back.

The White House came late to this exigency; denied its existence first and then its dimensions; and while seeming to come to take it seriously, still cannot be fully trusted or relied upon for those tasks with which it has been charged. Fortunately, in Canada, so far, we have a 180-degree contrast both federally and provincially. Only time will indicate the relative significance of the political divide in the long-term impact of this pandemic.

The phrase, “we are all in this together” has never, at least in our life-time, been more relevant, applicable and urgent. And out of this conundrum, we can only hope that the lessons of collaboration, co-operation, and a new-found equality among all inhabitants of the planet might shine a little light down the other existential threat of global warming and climate change.

#59 Beyond Gender, Divisions, Conflicts

Each of us has it within our grasp to “frame” each situation in the way that “suits” us in that moment. Like moving cameras/projectors, we move about our ‘world’ taking pictures, refocusing those pictures, replaying those pictures, and then storing them in another kind of “frame” as to where they belong in our personal archive of memories. 

In a kind of paradoxical way, while we are ‘sorting and filing and storing,’ we are also projecting these pictures onto our own screen as well as onto the screen in the room where we sit. And while it is in constant flux or flow, our archive is one of the bases of what we consider to be our identity. Our pictures of “who” we are, and “how we have become and are becoming that person, shedding each and every single cell every single year, and replacing them with new cells, our minds are continuing to ‘discover’ images along with the thoughts, feelings and the gestalt of that “moment” currently on our screen.

We are introduced to “laws of physics,” and “laws of human development,” and “laws of gravity,” as well as “laws of biology, geology, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, and then the finer “laws” of each of the academic disciplines. Simultaneously we are learning about the ‘laws’ that govern our behaviour, land law, commercial law, criminal law, contracts law, and the many processes through which any of our needs, complaints, conflicts and aspirations must pass in order to move toward recognition, respect and perhaps even reward.

We “learn” both through cognitive memory and through the experiences that cross our paths, including the faces and voices of others both formally assigned to our mentorship and those who accidentally and “fatefully” appear in our space.

In each situation, we listen to and watch the words, attitudes, beliefs, and actions of those who have preceded us, in our family, our school, our town, and our nations. In turn, we reflect on what flows into our conscious minds, and what flows into and through our unconscious, although the latter is much less visceral and risks being missed. We also interact with the ‘things’ that comprise our little world, like our phones, our laptops, our televisions, our vehicles, the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the messages that affirm or disclaim our particular choices.

And when we each face a serious threat/challenge/opponent/illness and potentially death, we somehow revert, according to one of the ‘laws’ of psychology, to our default position, the one that seems to have been our preferred “framing” of the situation in the past. Often described as “fight or flight,” this default position, however, is much less easily and neatly boxed as one gets older. For the child, however, it is eminently reasonable that such a choice is paramount, depending on the degree of the threat, and the depth to which it penetrates his or her “heart”. And for much of the public discourse, similar binary choices apply to the public messages delivered by leaders charged with managing the crisis. To close all schools, or not, to send all workers home or not, to ban all public gatherings or not, to test all citizens or not, to put the country on a war footing or not….these are all public discussions, debates and eventually decisions that political, health, security and academic thinkers and leaders will have to face.

Classifying any “event” (itself something of a misnomer, given the extensive and expansive dimensions of an evolving event into a dynamic that could/would/will continue to reverberate over a protracted period of time) as, for example an economic crisis, or a health crisis fails to grasp the interconnection and inter-dependence of both aspects of the current pandemic. And those who fail to perceive, believe and accept it first as a “health” crisis, with economic, national security, environmental, and perhaps even existential aspects, are risking the potential options and processes needed to confront the crisis.

An invisible, barely discernible microbe which infects an individual prior to that individual’s exhibiting symptoms of the infection tends to defy many of the threats for which we have prepared. Measuring devices of its invasion, while needed, along with ways to discern how and whom it most seriously impacts, form a reasonable basis from which to plan our most comprehensive and effective response. And while we search and research all of the many ‘faces’ of the pandemic, from the multiple perspectives of its appearance in terms of geography, demography, alacrity, political sensibilities, and even ideology, it is dropping its imprint among all of us, especially in large groups.

Self-interest, as compared with the plague of political narcissism, is part of the personal emergency aid kit of each of us, and that too does not contain or fulfil our human response. Knowing that each of us can be both a recipient and a carrier/spreader of this microbe, all men and women are burdened and gifted with the responsibility and the opportunity to be both victim and healer/rescuer/warrior.

Looking through the lens of “a war effort” against this microscopic enemy that knows no national, gender, age, economic, intellectual, religious or ethnic boundaries, we are quite literally compelled, by nature if not by reason and our health care professionals, to drop our pretenses of both superiority and inferiority, of our mentally, and geographically “gated” communities, of our “inside versus outside” perspectives, given that we have all been struck somewhat blind, deaf and dumb by this ‘creature’ of the night. While the epidemiologists have considerably more knowledge and experience with pandemics than the rest of us, and the “modellers” have been doing what they do while we have not, those charged with fundamental decisions in every “polis” are, like the rest of us, dependent on both the experts and their own character, including their capacity for compassion, insight, clarity of both thought and courage.

And while we have no choice but to drop our conscious and unconscious pretenses to power and prestige, rendering us somewhat frightened and vulnerable, we are being asked, seemingly by the gods of the universe, to listen to the rest of the world, all of the nations and towns and cities, in order to develop a “common front” against this scourge.

And that basic requirement is a fundamental threat to everything that we have been raised to accept:

·        that our nation is special,

·        that our culture is what holds us together,

·        that our gender is our most defining feature,

·        that science and empirical knowledge is our saviour,

·        that the unconscious and the imaginative and the spiritual are either luxuries we cannot afford or dangerous influence we cannot tolerate,

·        that our status on the social, political, economic and spiritual totem poles of our communities is what we must defend and preserve

·        that our “systems” to develop every human in our lands are our best instruments to prevent devastation of our most vulnerable

·        that our neglect of our poor, our racially different and our refugees is merely benign neglect not worthy of leading our public debate and public decision-making

·        that cities are more important than towns, and towns more important than rural municipalities, and that industrious and fiscally sound communities deserve more public attention than those lagging behind

·        that the battles for gender equality are paramount to our survival as a species

·        that the use of military might is the best answer to our personal and national security

·        that our concentration on hard power will “protect” us from all enemies

·        that our “divides” engender the most efficacious pursuit of excellence among all individuals

·        that short-term reactive, narcissistic and self-serving leaders illustrate the most ethical and appropriate role models

·        that young people, like Greta Thunberg, are merely whistling in the wind

·        that we really do “know” what we are doing with the finite, fragile and even sacred blessings of our planet’s essential nature

And under such serious and perhaps even existential threats, there will be the inevitable, totally predictable and lethal demand to “hunker down” in our metaphoric, and perhaps even literal “bunkers”, whether those be our individual homes, our towns, our nations or our offices. Observers are already predicting the erosion of the European Union, given the various countries’ closing borders to human and produce and trade, and refusing to adopt the more challenging and also more potentially rewarding posture of collaboration, co-operation, open discussion and deliberately “getting to “yes” rather than “no” as the negotiating manuals even for dummies advise.

There is, lurking in civilization’s history  as well as in our multiple mythologies, what the Greeks called “Thanatos”…the god who brought peaceful deaths to the underworld, as opposed to Hades, the god of the underworld. Thanatos was the god or personified spirit of non-violent death, with a gentle touch, likened to his brother Hypnos (sleep), as compared with Thanatos’ blood-craving sisters, the Keres, spirits of slaughter and disease. (Wikipedia)

While it is not timely to talk about “gentle death” when we are facing the prospect of perhaps thousands of untimely passing’s, it is perhaps relevant to bring to the consciousness of our death-denying and perhaps even in some instances death-defying culture, the notion that we are all facing our own mortality. And that universal, shared destiny is another very significant, and potentially life-giving reality from which none of us can escape. And if the current pandemic erodes our denial of death, and opens us to the potential that accompanies every person who comes face to face with that prospect, and brings us all to a more realistic, and more supportive and more understanding and tolerant perspective of each other, (and our need for each other and our literal dependence on each other) as well as our attitude and willingness to compromise, to collaborate and to dedicate ourselves to the shared prospect of the survival and ennobling of all of our grandchildren and great grandchildren, that could only be a long-term “platinum (not merely gold or silver) lining to this pandemic.

We are much more than divided by our gender, our ethnicity, our social status, our academic degrees, the size of our portfolios, our nationality, our wisdom and prophetic vision, our geographic distance and isolation, and our employment or unemployment status, just like our homelessness or not….we are all being found and declared equal, from the perspective of the microbe, as opportunity/enemy to infest, and from our perspective, as an ally. None of us have to attend at a recruiting office to enlist; the microbe has already done that for us. None of us have to take boot camp training, in order to serve; the microbe and our consciousness, as well as our unconscious, have already given us all the tools we need. None of us can use the excuse that we have nothing to give; our persons, our consciousness of each other, our neighbours, our families, our primary care workers, and our leaders…we are already ALL that we need to be to serve our shared future and destiny…we all need each other now more than at any time in the last century, perhaps.

And if this reads like a trumpet blasting the silent and hollow melodies of utopias beyond comprehension and also beyond reality, it might be time to reflect on the nature of the lens through which we are trying to “see”. Hope is, like this enemy, an invisible yet highly energized force of antibodies already “bottled”, and delivered in each and every email of compassion, and every call on a neighbour or shut-in, and in each u-tube thanking our public health workers, as well as in each and every phone call between leaders who otherwise fight for supremacy in trade talks, or in cyber-security strategies.

We live in the laboratories, our minds, hearts and bodies, that consistently and persistently produce resounding choruses of hope, brilliant bouquets of the flaming red roses of hope, and the crystal, spring-waters of hope that flow from the pens and the lips of all people who love and care for our species. And without all of the expressions of hope we can imagine and deliver, the tests and the vaccines, and the pharmaceuticals for harnessing this virus will be in vain.

#58 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (Reflections on loneliness and alienation)

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone; solitude expresses the glory of being alone. (Paul Tillich)

Like others, feeling lonely, especially in youth, seems unbearable, given the apparent excitement that accompanies the phone call asking if you want to “hang out” or the knock on the door wondering if you can ‘come out to play’ or, today,  the text asking, ‘how’re u doing?’ The natural and necessary process of learning to relate, to explore relationships is the sine qua non of adolescence. All of that stuff of doing those assignments, signing up for the various teams and clubs, the training for the various competitions, and even signing up for a curricular schedule…all of it touches upon and brings flesh, breath and interactive engagements into full bloom. We note the nuanced expressions on the faces of our siblings, our parents, teachers, coaches and officials whenever we are engaged with any of them. We do not necessarily ‘discuss’ our reactions to each of those raised eye brows, wrinkled noses, barked insults, or even those occasional cheers for something we said or did. Nevertheless, we store each and every one of them in the software of our memory, building a bank of memories that shape us, guide us, and even teach us about how and when and by whom we were bruised, teased, ridiculed, embarrassed and especially rejected.

Each of us has a permanent “film” that is readily recalled if and when another ‘strike’ is swung that seems to be “against” us, however we perceive opposition. It could simply be a parent saying “No” to a simple request. It could be a warning shot of intimidation from a jealous classmate. It could be a look of disdain and anger or contempt at a shared joke that fell flat on its face. It could be merely a  tease about our name, our body shape, our activity/identity profile (nerds for techies; artsy-fartsy for artists, musicians, actors, dancers; egg-heads for scholarship; and something racial for ethic differences, the epithets abound here!)

Bullying, separation, segregation, isolation, whether in person or more recently digitally, expresses how others seek the illusion of power, when authentic expressions of support and appreciation seem unduly “adult” and “stiff” and totally outside the boundaries of “the insiders”. Adolescent, especially masculine, bonding depends on dissing and being ready to diss back, as a way of using irony and satire to show “respect”. Not being “inside the circle” where such dissing/bonding is the norm, is a sure sign of exclusion, felt by every single adolescent in every culture, who is different. And different is defined uniquely by the range and the depth of “the imagination of each neighbourhood culture.

Theoretically, the argument goes that each of these “barbs” toughens the skin of the recipient, thereby justifying its deep embeddedness in our social and cultural attitudes and behaviours. Other times, dissing goes too far, alienating its object, and reinforcing the separation of “the other” (as each group defines him or her) from the group. Occasionally, (thankfully) bullying, dissing, and character assassination sends the target over the edge, and then all hell erupts, as it should.

The goal of developing “healthy” independent, self-respecting young adults, on its surface, merits consideration, so long as along with this goal is an accompanying and requisite grace, slack, openness, and tolerance of differences that do not harm injure or impede the growth of the outsider. In adolescence, however, that “grace” is often undeveloped, missing, or even disdained itself as being too “feminine” or “weak” or “sickly” or even “immature.”

Reading Max Domi’s biography, recently, reminded me of the lengths to which an adolescent, plagued by both type 1 diabetes and also celiac disease, will go to “fit in” to the culture of minor hockey, junior hockey, and finally the NHL. Hiding juice from his team-mates, until they learned the full story, for example, is only a minor example of his secrecy in managing both his condition and his social/team standing. It is not that those who do not face similar conditions would not, or could not understand. And remarkable feature of his story is that many friends, team-mates, coaches, trainers, and later executives and managers, along with parents and surrogate parents, proved to be the supportive network that enabled his early, intermediate and professional success. Even his dog Orion can detect the changes in his body’s insulin levels, and trigger Max’s need for self-treatment. No weakling, no outsider and no more-valued team-mate is this current Montreal Canadien. Yet, it was never smooth, easy nor predictable for the young son of former Toronto Maple Leaf, Tie Domi.

Nevertheless, organizations like professional athletic teams, corporations, schools, and government departments and social service agencies, hospitals, colleges, seek individuals who have developed a capacity known as “team-players” with the capacity to initiate, to demonstrate self-discipline, and to work “inside” the culture of the organization. Fitting in has become so significant to the “brand” of an organization that recently an athletic coach who tweeted comments about the manner in which another university had dealt with their athletic coach’s case was fired for expressing those comments.

Compliance with the protocols, including the public expressions of opinions, comes with a price, both for each individual holding and expressing opinions deemed inadmissible by the organization, and ultimately for the strength and credibility of the organization. Belonging to and serving at the pleasure of the organization has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few decades. The individual opinions of an individual apparently belong on the editorial pages of the local newspaper, a platform reserved in many communities for those considered especially “grumpy” and “fossilized” or “activist” and “ideologues” or “politically ambitious”. In many communities, the local paper has merely faded into oblivion,  been sold to a mega-corporation, or morphed into a facebook page of venom by a sore loser politician.

Individualism, as a benchmark of a culture, has shifted both to the right and to the left, in a pattern similar to our political culture: on the right, it is highly conformist to an authoritarian, traditionalist, conservative viewpoint, often also highly populist, or it is deeply committed to a radical, left-leaning, transformational and sometimes even apocalyptic perspective.

A few editorial writers try to observe and preserve a balance in their viewpoint pieces, for example, endorsing professional and healthy government interventions to restrict the spread of COVID-19, while also endorsing significant government spending to support the potential and real victims of the disease.

It is the disease itself that elevates the dichotomy of both our “extreme inter-dependence” as well as our extreme isolation, and potential loneliness, alienation and anxiety.

Each of us, in our unique moments of loss, failure, rejection, firing, divorce, alienation and despair know intimately of the pain of such moments, the lingering fears of those moments of despair returning, or being evoked by additional similar moments. Each of us also knows of the names and the faces and the voices of those on whose shoulders we have walked in order to be still putting one foot in front of the other. We are each conscious of the gifts and the risks of both extremes. And we also know that, in that consciousness, we seek to live, to create, to help, to support and to take care of ourselves.

Bruce Springsteen, in a book published in 2013, Springsteen on Springsteen, “speaks of a troubled adolescence, describing himself as a ‘dreamer,’ ‘one of the town freaks’, and a ‘misfit who was pretty ostracized by my hometown’. He says he was a ‘sensitive kid’ who had the ‘devastating experience of not being accepted by my father’. He said of his father, ‘he was a pretty good pool player and not much else’.” (From The Telegraph, August 24, 2015) Having listened to critics who trashed his music, and others who thought he was the ‘second coming of Christ’, (CBC, “q” yesterday), Springsteen carries on doing what he does, as a role model for each of us, especially when our shared future’s horizon is so clouded.

There is a significant “rub” when one hears what can only be interpreted as rejection, especially while attempting to support the transformation of a culture of self-sabotage, and the strength, commitment and energy to continue to “spit against the wind” as the title of the novel about Tomas Paine has it.

And the wind of the prevailing establishment culture will always prevail against the isolated voices of those committed to ‘spitting’ against that force. And the voices of those committed to ‘spitting’ need the support of others who, themselves, are also committed to ‘spitting’ against the prevailing and dangerous, self-sabotaging cultural winds.

Some of those unique, isolated, and even alienated voices write novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Testaments and win literary prizes, thereby becoming not merely highly valued and accepted by a sizeable segment of contemporary culture. Some others, like Malcolm Gladwell, write about how more is gained, socially and personally by trusting others than by “fearing strangers”. In many small groups, however, the prevailing attitude to the newcomer, especially if that newcomer is not visibly different, not from a different ethnicity or race (being deferential to other races in small communities is virtually mandated), is resistant, often fearful and certainly restrained. This is especially so if the newcomer has a few small yet useful notions that might merit consideration, and even puts them out rather energetically.

We all remember Bobby Kenendy’s evoking of Bernard Shaw’s quote in his presidential campaign:

Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.

It is that concept that both injects new ink into the blotter of the local community, and also threatens to estrange its spokesperson from the opportunity to participate.

Men, especially those deeply embedded in what can only be called the establishment of any community, corporation, church, service club or athletic team or even sport, are deeply loyal to the traditions of that entity. Loyalty to those traditions offers comfort, acceptance, solidarity, and the opportunity to engage with others in common efforts. Men who are not easily and comfortably fitted to the depth and degree of loyalty to how things are done here, and who, like Mesrs. Shaw and Kennedy, ‘dream’ and ask ‘why not’ are frequently passed over, left out and designated as trouble-makers.

It is the motives of such men (and women), especially, that are least known and least investigated. Such investigation, of course, takes time, patience, curiosity and a degree of tolerance for the unknown that is least tolerated and baked into the ‘cakes’ of group culture. Given that young men are so well indoctrinated into a masculinity of ironic ‘dissing’ at a very early age, and that competition is so deeply embedded in a capitalist, corporatist and “insider/outsider” culture that relies on gate-keeping enforcers, it is little wonder that Bernie Sanders will be a footnote to the history of the Democratic Party and a footnote to the presidential campaign history of the United States.

·        His refusal to take our membership in any political party, illustrating a lengthy vision of political disinterested disaffection and lack loyalty to both political parties in the U.S. and....

·        His refusal to adopt the prevailing campaign financing practices, as well as his outright disavowal of the rule of the oligarchy,

·        His open advocacy of health care for all as a human right,

·        His open advocacy of free college tuition for all eligible candidates

·        His open advocacy for serious cuts to Pentagon budgets and the American penchant for war and

·        His outright call for a political revolution on behalf of the 99%

All of these positions point to his ultimate rejection by the mainstream American voter, especially given the obvious cover reason that “defeating trump” is the national scream of a majority of Americans.

Whether there is room in the Biden mind and organization for the millions of young people who support Sanders, and a demonstrable integration of the Sanders positions into a new, evolved Democratic party platform remains to be seen. What is not in question is that the Republican opponent will besmirch all Democrats with name-calling like “communists” and “socialists” and “immigrant-apologists” and “anarchists.”

Can the American people come together in a conclusive and final ostracizing of the ultimate “alien” who currently occupies the Oval Office? If so, we could witness one time when a common perception by the middle could, as the exception, prove the rule that the outsider is indeed valuable and needed.

As one septuagenarian, I thoroughly appreciate the glory of solitude, and the conviction in my own ‘dream’ of asking ‘why not’ in the face of fossilized and unquestioned and dysfunctional traditions.

#57 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (reflections on power)

Questioning the filing system that relegates gender issues to the sidelines of the political agenda!!!

A few years ago, when discussing  the contemporary state of masculinity, a prominent Canadian lawyer and political figure demurred when I innocently and spontaneously wondered if the “political science” department at the local university might be interested in this subject. An immediate, direct and highly scornful “Not at all likely!” was his response.

Presumably, political theory, political polling, political science and political parties, political leadership, and political ideology either exclude the notion of masculinity and gender as an active agent in the political process. 

 www.managementstudyguide.com defines political science in these words:

Political science is that branch of the social sciences that studies the state, politics, and government. Political Science deals extensively with the analysis of political systems, the theoretical and practical applications to politics, and the examination of political behaviour.

At the end of Nicomachean Ethics, (from Wikipedia) Aristotle wrote:

That the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise, or perhaps connected lectures, dealing with the ‘philosophy of human affairs.’ The title of the ‘Politics’ literally means the ‘things concerning the polis. (literally means ‘city’ in Greek) . Polis defined the administrative and religious city centre, as distinct from the rest of the city. It can also mean a body of citizens.

Several ideologies are associated with politics: anarchism, colonialism, communism, despotism, distributism, feudalism, socialism, totalitarianism.

On a more cynical level, our vernacular uses the phrase “play politics” to refer to an act for political or personal gain rather than from principle.

George Orwell in his essay on Politics and the English language writes:

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour seems to demand a lifeless imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases---bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free people of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has the curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

There is a very small “slide” from political conformity, to “political correctness.” And in an article entitled, “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy, in The Guardian, November 30, 2016, Moira Weigel writes:

Three weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength….Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trump’s was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems.

OpenLearn.com explores the relationship between politics and power. Their website includes these words:

“Some define politics quite simply as the exercise of power. This definition most clearly demonstrates two issues…..the problem of definitions or, in other words the issue of the contestability of concepts; and the limitations of the narrow-broad spectrum.”

Wherever one or more individuals influence one or more other individuals, regardless of the setting, we can observe and comment on the politics of the situation. Writers, for example, deploy all of the many and varied instruments of power to convey a point of view, a “statement” by which they wish to nudge, shove, ‘manipulate’ or ‘seduce’ their reader to a precise or more general point of view. It was Orwell who reminds us that “all literature is political.” In a lecture delivered in Barcelona at the Centre de Cultura Clontemporania de Barcelona on June 6, 2018, in honour of Orwell Day, and abridged in The NewYorker, Masha Gessen writes:

Orwell argues that totalitarianism makes literature impossible…..He imagined two  major traits of totalitarian societies: one is lying, and the other is what he called schizophrenia. He wrote, ‘The Organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.’ The lying entailed constantly rewriting the past to accommodate the present. ‘This kind of things happens everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societie4s where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.’….

Orwell was right, (Messen continues). The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality. She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes everything conceivable because ‘nothing is true.’

We are living when hybrids of formerly separate concepts abound. We are also living when language, especially the language of public discourse, including its use in both political propaganda and advertising, risks the very demise of anything that resembles objective truth. While some, including renowned intellects like Soren Kierkegaarde, posited that the only full truth lies in subjectivity, this view expressed the highest value of personal truth including beliefs, intuition, and imagination not necessarily applied to the public square. 

Northrop Frye, in The Educated Imagination, discerned between what he called the language of practical discourse and the language of the imagination. In the former, we attempt to discern the differences between things, people, ideals etc. In the latter, the creative writer links things, notions, concepts that are not united in the language of metaphor, simile, personification and anthropomorphizing. When we attend a drama in the theatre, or a cinema, we are expected to suspend our disbelief, enter into the scene playing out before us and let it work its ‘magic’ on our sensibilities. Nevertheless, this is a very different, discreet and honourable process, openly dedicated to the process of letting the dramatic intent of the writer, actors, directors and the rest of the crew play out in our imagination. Similarly, our relationship to any and all religious notions, beliefs, practices, while bearing touchstones in objective reality also stretch far beyond what we can observe with our senses and verify in our laboratories or doctoral theses.

Orwell’s Doublethink, on the other hand, is the act of holding simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. Doublethink requires using logic against logic or suspending disbelief in the contradiction. Clearly, this concept helps those in power who wish to impose its dictates on their ‘polis’ given that they can then use both truth and their own deception as instruments of their own power.

Without veering into clinical practice, it seems clear that only a person so desperate, weak and vulnerable, as well as frightened beyond the capacity of one’s body, mind and spirit to sustain the normal vicissitudes of human existence would even consider venturing into a space that imposes ‘doublethink’ on any ‘polis’.

And yet, here we are, living, supposedly in a western democracy, in a developed quadrant of the world, in nations (the U.S. and Canada) proudly claiming the highest level and spread of education in history, with the most advanced laboratories and the scientists to staff them, and with the most advanced abstract thinkers and philosophers and even theologians and ethicists in history, and yet we as a species are “falling through the cracks” in our own system.

It is not our ideology, per se, that we can point to as our Achilles’ heel; nor is it our capacity to write and enact laws; nor is it our capacity to plan and to assemble different points of view; nor is it whether we worship in a cathedral, synagogue, or mosque that determines our vulnerability; nor is it our capacity to design, invent and produce new machines, new technologies, new pharmacological interventions; nor is it our capacity to discern between right and wrong that brings about our current state of vulnerability.

We are, as a species, so embedded in both intellectual and operational files, that segregate each academic discipline from every other, that silo each “authority” figure from all other “authority” figures in disparate disciplines, and even permit, for  example, only women to speak about the issues facing women (mostly the result of the horrific behaviour and attitudes of men) and only men to speak and write about the issues facing men. If the political science department at one of the most highly valued post-secondary institutions of learning in the western world cannot even conceive of how “male” issues belong in that department, and if the education faculty of that same university cannot conceive of how Archetypal Psychology, for example, does not belong under their academic and structural roof, and if, for example, our pandemics (as well as our surging numbers of cancers, cardiac incidents, pollution indices, poverty indices, homeless indices, and our economic determinants like GDP, GNP, National Debt and Deficit) are not the consequence of both men and women participating in a gigantic game of willful deliberate, highly sophisticated power politics, including political correctness, class warfare, narcissism, short-term planning, and micro-managed conflicts that essentially endorse the issues deemed to be significant to the political class.

And that political class “rules” in each and every institution, and in every legislature, and in every town and city hall, as well as in every secondary school, elementary school, university, college, bank and hospital. And each of us risks “accepting” without protest, the implications of the agendas, including the processes designed to achieve the desired hierarchical agenda in each of the places we engage. Our personal power, as men and women, is never to be surrendered to the language, the whims, the agendas and the protocols of the powerful, simply because those are the expressed “wishes” of those in power.

And, especially in times when the truth is under siege, even so denigrated and rejected by so many millions of people, without bothering to question their own grasp of reality, and those aspects of reality that are being fed through “official” channels, as if they monopolized a shared reality, we must find our voices. And this voice is loudly shouting, even screaming, that men’s voices, both because too many men hold positions of power and influence in respect of our half of the population, and because men, in too many cases, have succumbed to the “compliance” of surrender and sacrifice, in order to ‘fit into” the specific hierarchy of our jobs and our institutions, have been relegated to the penalty box of our cultural memes.

In both political science, and in education, as well as in theology, philosophy, psychology and the arts, the voice of men need to be represented, formally and informally, not merely in the offices of the chief executives, the deans, the bishops and the principals, but in the academic departments, the lecture halls, and certainly in the elementary and secondary schools of North America. Men, for the most part, are providing not merely dysfunctional leadership through this COVID-19 crisis. Men have designed, built and sustained an economic system, and a political power structure and expectation that needs to be challenged, especially by men, Women are already seeing its structural erosion, and are crying out for change. Men, on the other hand, are clinging to the models of their own generation, and their own hold on power.

And given the current administrations in Washington, Toronto, Rome, Beijing, Moscow, London, Indonesia, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, it is long past time when the ways in which we think about how we are going to survive, or not, have to shift so dramatically, as to literally and metaphorically shake the very foundations of our civilization.

Inclusion, collaboration, co-operation, the paradox of the power of vulnerability, and the power of not knowing need to be so easily and readily embraced by men, and so swiftly that we cannot wait another week or another month for that embrace.

There are some male voices chanting hymns of hope, promise, inclusion, reconciliation and respect for all; their choir needs the voluntary inclusion of all males in position of leadership, in families, in town councils, provincial governments, and national administrations. And those males who choose complicity with the thugs calling themselves “heroes” need to be replaced by men and/or women whose vision and promise offer the hope of life for every human on the planet.

It is not only those speaking from public podiums who risk eviscerating their humanity by mouthing hollow words, concepts, beliefs and perceptions. There is an equal danger in raising generations of men whose voices have gone hollow and silent, while their words flow like angry lava over a culture drowning in their insouciant narcissism.