#94 Men agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (replace silo's with a global perspective)

 Silo’s prevail between institutions inside and outside of government. Silo’s also populate public discourse, media reports and academic journals.

Why so many silo’s, the isolation of content and context on one subject, issue, field or perspective from all other subjects that, while it offers “expert” data, analysis, and interpretation on a single subject, fails to connect the dots that connect each subject/file/issue from the many other files with which it connects, and naturally how each file impacts all related files?

Example:

Last night, on DVR, my wife and I watched a TVOntario documentary about the impact of global warming and climate change on multiple serious and growing public issues facing the people of the planet. Poverty, refugees, food production and supply, civil conflict, terrorism, and national security are, if we are to credit the producers of this documentary (and given the source and the content, who would?) all impacted by the rising crisis of global warming and climate change.

Nevertheless, the mass media parses stories in mini-vials of data, with dates, numbers of people and dollars, and, except for a rare much more comprehensive and deeper ‘dig’ into the relationship between those stories, and people, that warrant daily coverage, we are all left questioning their relationship to our lives, and thus to all of the other ‘stories’ we read every day.

Experts in national security, the military, the United Nations, national politics, atmospheric science, and refugee camps each must have a chair at the “table” of public conscience, and public decision-making; yet, so far as one can see, there is quite literally no “table” at which the various sit, face each other and make recommendations to national governments and international bodies like  the IMF, the Security Council, the G7/20, NATO. We learn about a Paris Accord on global warming and climate change, through which many countries pledge to take steps to reduce their production of  carbon dioxide, methane and other toxic gases from the atmosphere. No where in those meetings are people whose responsibility it is to study and then to manage any of the multiple impacts of the gaseous effluent, as if the obviously intelligent and experienced political and scientific leaders are able and willing to face the issue on a single front: green-house gas emissions.

It is as if the planet is another patient being diagnosed and potentially treated through a medical lens, with recommendations (and not conditions or sanctions) for their respective governments. If and when the recommended prescription(s) are respected, adhered to, and deployed as benchmarks, then the patient might get better. Better, but certainly not healthy; that would be far too much to expect given the competing interests of the fossil fuel industry, the banking and financial institutions sector, the multiple political agendas and the relative wealth (and thereby political clout) of each participating jurisdiction. Yet, the planet earth is much more than a medical patient; it is a source of food, water, air and naturalfo resources from which many products are manufactured. And responsibility for the health of this fragile and beautiful planet is necessarily shared by all of the people whose lives directly and indirectly depend on the good health of the many forces that contribute to the earth’s eco-system.

Of course, human lives also depend on the wages people earn by working and producing “wealth”. However, the single and rather simple (on the surface) effort to attempt to integrate effective processes to preserve and protect the climate with  the various capacities for individuals and corporations and governments to make money/investments/tax revenue seems beyond reach in most places. Competing political forces, each seeming to be portrayed to be engaged in a zero sum game, (if I win, you must lose and vice versa), provide an oscillating tension in many places, with the ebb and flow of each side depending on the degree to which it can and does mount effective, convincing and credible campaigns for what each considers “justice” and appropriate ethical decisions.

It was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier today who, when asked about “systemic racism” within the government and within long-standing institutions, noted that indeed, institutions have been built and established patterns of existence long before many of the standards of racism of today were even considered. He also acknowledged that change within governments and large institutions is very difficult, no matter how worthy and necessary, given the depth and resistance of the established patterns and cultures.

We have, then, two mammoth forces each exerting considerable influence on how the public “systems” work, the history and traditions of the institutions themselves and the current “coverage” of what can only be considered micro-bytes of news stories. Each individual citizen is then expected to make sense of a kind of rifle-shot (with multiple rounds) of news stories marching along the streets and minds in front of or behind the multiple institutions charged with the leadership and management of each of the important issues facing each jurisdiction.

Needless to say, the volume and velocity of public information have both increased exponentially in the last three or four decades. The range of sources (both people and places) from which those stories are derived, however, has not kept pace with the technology, and many reputable news sources have significantly cut the number of hired reporters in “foreign bureaus” which themselves have also been significantly reduced in number. How often we see and hear a “contract free-lance reporter covering an international story, given that advertising budgets have shifted away from traditional media outlets to a tidal wave of digital media, each grabbing and holding a niche readership, analogous to boutique retail or hotel opportunities. Segmentation by audience, another of the obvious yet serious implications of the for-profit marketplace when applied to the information business, is another of the many segmentation ripples that seem to balkanize both the information and the respective audience for that information.

The internet has, indeed, made many more information gatherers, reporters and opinion-writers and thinkers, from world capitals; yet, the national media in each location continue to focus primarily on the internal (to their geography) issues and personalities of their immediate audience. And occasionally, we hear that leader “X” spoke on the phone with leader “Y” about subject “Z”…another example of a detached, likely strategically arranged voice-opportunity for one or the other, to placate, pander to and pad the public acclaim for one or both leaders. These incidental reports, like the flurry of other incidental reports, while making token gestures to link story “a” to its own development, and potential implications, offer a menu of what can literally be described as “fast-food” of the non-nutritious kind, filled with what we used to call binder (in hotdogs) with very little meat.

And what little morsels of meat there are drop like signature pieces for the respective reporters/networks, who themselves are mired in a competitive battle for both ratings and the advertising dollars that accompany ratings, both positively and negatively. And therein lies another of the counter-intuitive forces behind how stories are written, and presented, whether as “facts” or “opinion” and then only through a very narrow and highly subjected to a “hot-button” selection process that assures both reporter and network of those required Neilson ratings.

Too few are the publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and only upon occasion do the mass media pick up a story from one of those operations, as an enhancement to the regular fare.

Local media, in many small and medium-size towns and cities have either evaporated entirely or been purchased by the ‘big boys’ as another way to supplement, without much cost, the advertising revenue. One local mayor of a small town recently informed this scribe that following each town council meeting he is literally never asked a single question about the background, premises, or arguments in favour or against any action he is proposing or upon which the council has or will vote. There is in that town an open field for whatever kind of development those with the deep pockets wish to put in place, with barely a public hearing to filter its dimensions and its quality and appropriateness.

And then, suddenly a law enforcement officer’s knee is driven into the neck of a black man lethally in Minneapolis, and social media carry the video into every town and city, and nearly every home on the planet. It is not as if there is no public interest, especially in the middle of a global pandemic, in how the world is “working” (or not) and yet the nutritional value of  the media being consumed by a majority of citizens is relatively low, growing even lower and the need for deeper, more “connected” dots on more information landscapes that incorporate all of the impacting files we all know are competing.

Just as there is unconscious bias in all institutions, there is also a cultural pattern to how each of us learns about the world we live in. And if both the stories and the platforms and the curation of those stories leaves the global audience largely in the dark, (unless and until a global pandemic, or a massive oil spill, or a tidal wave of locusts swarm an African desert, or a tornado or tidal wave drowns hundreds of thousands of people), then we participate in another of the replicating patterns of crisis intervention.

Again, based on a medical model, especially a medical model that pertains in the life of most if not all men on the planet, one that puts off signs of sickness until too late, one that dismisses any indication of deep depression, anxiety or fear because to acknowledge any of those symptoms as reality would be to admit something called failure, the world is left scrambling in a moment of shared crisis. And the information about wet markets and invasions of animal habitats, both expressions of a for-profit pursuit of wealth, without needed controls and sanctions and environmental protections, that protect the food supply and the health of every person on the planet, was know, and shared minimally, without adequate surrender of sovereignty to make any difference.

We all know that we live in an inter-and inner-connected world, (not only in a global marketplace) in which whatever happens in one corner of the world impacts all regions of the planet. National boundaries of privacy, (in the public issue sense and not in the personal privacy sense) are no longer appropriate to the size and complexity and boundry-less nature of most of the world’s pressing and potentially threatening forces. Air, water, climate, and biological viruses neither know nor respect national boundaries. It is a cliché to note we all share their bounty and their poison almost simultaneously.

However, we are not noticeably and urgently developing a global news coverage that seeks perspective from multiple cultures, multiple historic traditions and multiple creativities. Nor are we developing the cultural frameworks needed to shape opinion in a manner that would give high regard and significance to protecting the environment, and the WHO, and the WTO, and the United Nations and the kinds of educational curricula that would require all teachers to be exposed to at least one culture and history not prominent in his or her native country. We are not demanding that mass media corporations provide more curation of information that sheds light on the inevitable and shadowing intersection of the major stories with the many other stories.

It used to be, when writing a news story for print or radio or television that the writer was guided to write for a “grade six, or a twelve-year-old audience” (such patronizing condescension!) so that everyone could and would grasp its content and meaning. Today, hopefully, those same journalism students could be encouraged to write for at least a high-school graduate audience. It is not incidental to note that people who have training and experience in fields other than journalism are making inroads in some mass media circles signalling an appetite for more in depth, and more cross-story-links in the choice of guests, the choice and treatment of issues and the kind of energy that curious people everywhere have an interest in consuming.

Now, if national and intellectual boundaries could be opened, in the manner in which PBS regularly includes the BBC program Outside Sources nightly, so that people everywhere would learn more than the hot-button headlines from other places. We might also glean glimpses of creative measures being applied to the various issues threatening mankind everywhere, (and not only in one or two countries) in places no known for their wealth or military power or cyber-invasive compulsions.

I know, just another tilting at windmills of my own mind!

#93 men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (hurt people hurt people!)

Although the phrase has been echoing around the social media for a while, when it comes out of the mouth of an elected civic leader like the Mayor of Atlanta, and is carried on national/international television, it claims a megaphone:

“Hurt people hurt people!”

If this meme seeds all of the potential inherent in its connotative as well as its denotative meaning, it will be not only the city council of Minneapolis that commits to disband/replace/amend/ its police services board. The step of actually engaging in an open dialogue that seeks first to comprehend and then to apply the import of the concept bodes well in foreshadowing both hope and change for the way policing is carried out in North America. Different in tone and intent from the 50-foot high, three-block-long yellow letters “Black Lives Matter” on what is not named “Black Lives Matter Plaza” by the Mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, immediately in front of the White House, “Hurt people hurt people” actually gets into what some might call the weeds of public policy.

It is, after all, the premises and beliefs and attitudes that underpin all statements of  policy and the laws that emerge from those policy papers that shape both public policy and legislation. If public policy starts, as it has, with a premise and a belief that sin/evil/crime requires severe punishment as the primary (it not sole) method of keeping its incidence at a minimum, through both shaming the criminal and through warning and deterrence to any others, then institutions will be erected, funded and staffed in order to carry out such a “mandate.” Starting with the concept of isolation, in a cell, imposing a sentence of both silence an alienation, as a religious and faith notion of carrying out the will of God, exemplifies the degree to which western culture has been committed to the symptoms of human behaviour, including how we see ourselves in terms of sickness, wellness, and especially how we are perceived by others in society.

It is by their “deeds” that they shall be known and not merely by their words. However, “reading” those deeds takes more than the eye, ear and sensibility of a criminologist, a legal scholar and a politician. Scanning the cultural landscape of the history of how parents, teachers, principals, doctors, lawyers and eventually legislatures have viewed human beings, especially when considering acts that were deemed “abnormal” (and thereby either  deviant or dangerous or both), we can see that actions deemed “abnormal” were immediately “shovelled” into one of two compartments in both our minds and our socially-conventionally-approved-and-funded processes were either “evil” or “sick”. The behemoths of medicine/law on one hand and the “church” on the other were enshrined as society’s instruments of intervention to “keep us safe” (to server and protect), and to “heal” on the other.

We diagnosed, researched, analysed, and prescribed/meted out “treatments” ordered by doctors or judges, in a comprehensive and elevated approach to saving ourselves and our various societies from decay. Integral to this approach is the requirement of division, separation, and even the integration of agents and agencies of “moral enlightenment and education” that will repeat the mantra that there is “Good behaviour” and there is “bad behaviour” and there are “good people” and there are “bad people.” The inculcation of the masses into the commonly held baskets of “Good” and “Bad” and the choice of the best minds to follow in the footsteps of those who previously made similar choices assured both the seeding and the harvesting of these Manichean/either-or/bi-polar seeds.

Bad things happen to good people, by a Jewish rabbi, articulated a different view, given that many considered illness, premature death, accident and/or economic destitution as an act of God, for punishment for deeds they either had not committed or at least were unaware of having engaged in their committal. How many times has a clergy, in the last fifty years, heard the not completely rhetorical question from a parishioner in a hospital or convalescent bed, “Why is God doing this to me?” The presumption behind the question is, of course, that “since I am evil, (in ways I am clearly unaware/unconscious of) what is God trying to tell me?”

I heard such words from a thirty-eight-year-old woman, terminally ill with breast cancer on my first visit to her hospital room. She was angry with God[ja1] ; she was confused about why she had been “chosen” to bear the burden of this lethal and toxic disease. She was also angry at God for having dealt her this ‘hand.’ And, there are many others who firmly believed, near their death, that they were unworthy of “going to meet God” upon dying, for having lived lives sullied by their own unworthiness, imperfection and sins.

In our valiant efforts, creative, imaginative, insightful, nuanced and pragmatic, we have built a repertoire of medical and social and legal services to “address” what we have considered to be our worst “abnormalities” and diseases and evils. And, to some degree they have had some corrective and deterrent impact. We have, however, started at the wrong end. We have become fixated on the notion that we could make our selves and our society “better” (less impacted with one or both of the two-headed monsters of sickness and evil). And we had some theological and ethical scholarship that supported our premises, and our efforts.

Many of these initiatives, too, were also supportive of and emanating from the concept of “dominating” and controlling nature, as some interpretations of Genesis intoned, given an initial premise that nature, separate and different from “human” was more savage and uncontrolled and perhaps even uncontrollable. Power over, as an operating principle, has been a guiding beacon among intellectuals in medicine, science, and law, and the appending and concomitant educational establishments.

Symptom-ology, then, for centuries, has defined our approach to most of our lives, maintaining a kind of duality, and separation of the symptom from our Being. Over the last several decades, converging from many directions in scholarship, a confluence of different influences has washed ashore on the beaches of our consciousness. Among them, being created in the image of God, as a more significant and potentially cautionary cultural, religious, social and ethical marker of our individual and our collective Being’s DNA, has risen to prominence. If as the street-strut has it, “God don’t make no junk!” then what are the inherent differences between what we consider normal and abnormal. Resisting R.D. Lainge’s assessment that “abnormal” is superior to “normal” (given the perpetual blood-shed of war, and the multiple ways we abuse others), we nevertheless are beginning to face what some would consider a minimal shift, others a revolutionary notion, that humans hurting other humans are, themselves, first and foremost deeply damaged.

Focussing on acknowledging the deep damage, however, risks loud and vehement backlash from “law and order” purists, who mostly consider themselves beyond repute. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it in an interview in 1967, “It is hard for a black man to pull himself up by his bootstraps, if he has no boots!” Neither boots, nor an education, nor a piece of land, nor even a wage, for slaves, was a signature, by the slave owners, of their superiority and of the permanent inferiority of those slaves. And maintaining that “traditional” and Christian-church-approved status (under law, and enforced by law), continues to shadow the streets of cities around the world in the last two weeks.

Fanning out from the same premises of superiority, power-over, domination and control are also other legal, legislative and social conventions that pertain not only to what we consider criminal behaviour, but also to inherent power and its abuses. 

Statements such as, “You can argue with me if and when you get a degree and only then!” for example, describe a kind of abuse of power that “contemptualizes” the listener. Considering alcohol and drug dependence, too, as a crime, (merely because its symptoms can be destructive and because we are unprepared to investigate its many root causes) is also part of the accepted ways in which we are all complicit, either overtly or covertly and unconsciously. Similarly, relegating those with what the professional class (doctors and lawyers and judges and educators and legislators) deemed “mentally ill” to the outskirts of urban centres, “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” in order to keep “us safe” is another of the previously sanctioned abuses of power. And this abuse continues directly in the underfunding, and the still repressed public discussion of anything smacking of mentally unbalanced actions, attitudes, and expressions. Their root causes, naturally, are ignored, denied, and “too complex” and “too costly” for the society to embrace and then to deal with.

Warehousing the elderly in just another manifestation of how we have “shunted out of sight and mind” those who no longer serve a useful purpose in our culture, where work and making an income have come to define existence (although they cannot define what being a human is) when we all know that such a definition debases the elderly, the infirm, the poor, the ‘other’ (whoever does not fit the definition of normal).

We have, collectively and complicitly engaged in a process of not merely acquiescing (as Fareed Zakaria described those who do not protest trump’s sinister regime) but actually of rendering ourselves as sycophants to a cultural system of abuses of power that can only be sustained by lies.

It could well be that we are witnessing the tidal wave of real politik, of truth-telling, from the powerless, the impoverished, the destitute, and those unjustly charged (or still waiting to be charged) to those in power that the abuses that once conferred a crown of superiority on themselves by themselves, is slowly, if relentlessly, being removed and replaced by a very different ethic, a very different perception of how power is to be deployed.

And the signal of replacing police departments with agencies dedicated to serving and protecting, with appropriate training and intellectual discernment and discipline, can only be a harbinger of better ways of perceiving, thinking, questioning and designing and funding social policy around the world.

They did not know the name of George Floyd in Bejing or Moscow or London, or Paris or Berlin just as we did not know that name in Ottawa or Toronto or Washington barely two weeks ago. And the monstrous murder of that black man, coming as it has on the heels of a global pandemic, another of the signs that we are not caring enough for the planet, is a potential signal, (not merely a symptom) that taking better care of the weakest among us (including this extremely fragile ecosystem) is a much higher calling than one to which we have heretofore subscribed.

If we could begin our discussion of public policy, and any changes we might consider, not only in law enforcement, but also in environmental protection and in education, and the definition of what we collectively consider evil and sick,  from the premise that human beings, all of us, if given an appropriate and supportive nest, nurture and education, with both roots and wings, we can and will all fly to the heights of our imaginations and our hearts and our capacity to innovate.

That lens, brought to the fore in both developed and developing nations, and their towns and cities, would shift sharing, collaborating, based on humility and vulnerability both of which are now able to be seen a common to every one of us, as well as to every institution, religion, and ethnicity, from being merely a nicety and a diplomatic civility, to an existential necessity.

We can conceive of each of us being George Floyd, in the sense that the power of the establishment is heavy on the necks of those in their charge, as a primary perspective guiding those determined to hold onto their power, for its own sake, and not for the sake of the humanity they serve.

Let’s stop using phrases like “bad apples” in the police department, especially when it is not merely the bad behaviour, but the silent complicity that protects it. Let’s stop calling Republicans evil, and trump evil, given that we all have voices previously drugged by our own “political correctness” so as not to rock the boat, or not to offend.

Let’s refrain from saying “she lacks social graces” when we know that “she is a control freak dominatrix” Let’s refrain from dichotomizing political ideology into right and left wing for the purpose of sanitizing our news reports into what we call objectivity when we know that what is going on in some quarters including Washington is despotic, tyrannical and dangerous…and as Colin Powell publicly asserts, on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union on CNN yesterday, “I am going to use a word that I would never have thought to use on any of the four presidents I served, he lies all the time.” He also excoriated the Republican Senators who remain silent to these lies.

And for those who now are arguing “this scribe is engaging in precisely the kind of Manichean ethics he decries, think again. The current U.S. administration that cannot and will not differentiate between the looting and the legitimate protests against sabotaging symptoms and the premised that sustain them, and prefers to cling to a law-and-order mentality, and their hold on power, as the definition of responsible government warrant nothing more than dismissal, and that includes trump, barr and the Republican Senate leadership.  

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 [ja1]

#92 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (transformation...through shared vulnerability)

We have become highly adept and even surgically precise in our willingness and capacity to divide the good from the bad, the morally pure from the morally corrupt, church from state, rich from poor, white from black, women from men, east from west, Christian from Muslim, atheist from believer….and many of these divisions stem from an intellectual, academic, scientific and philosophic set of premises that start from the notion that defining anything begins with a clear notion of what it is NOT.

In Canada, gallons of ink (literally and metaphorically) have been spilled in an attempt to define what it means to be Canadian as opposed to American. Starting from the word “parliamentary democracy” as opposed to a “republic,” our respective cultures have at least a peripheral and obviously superficial grasp of one of the different legal, institutional and constitutional frameworks of our two countries. And while implicit in those differences lie such nuances  as a Canadian Governor General appointed by the Crown (on the recommendation of the Prime Minister) and  a Prime Minister elected as a Member of Parliament,  as compared with an elected President (serving what some see as both functions of GG and PM, there are far more similarities than differences between our two nations.

English language, primary capitalism with some shared public-private projects, many common entertainment, media and academic appointments and perspectives, principal historic faith communities, Christian including both protestant and Roman Catholic in slightly different ratios, a highly trained workforce, an advanced manufacturing and technology portfolio, athletic and academic transfers…these are just some of the indices that blur the lines between the two cultures.

Nevertheless, let it be clearly stated, most Canadians would not easily or readily choose to become American citizens, especially given the current administration in Washington. Whether or not some Americans would prefer to take out Canadian citizenship is an open question.

However, at the human level, looking at people on both sides of the 49^th parallel, there is far more commonality than difference, while the proportions of various ethnicities varies. The traits that can be grouped as “human” pertain, as they do across the multiple national boundaries across the planet.

We all know that the ”devil is in the details” when it comes to legal contracts, defining agreements, accords, promises and expectations. In this space, words often defy deeds, and in doing so, generate a cataract of anxiety and anger. And while we all share a proclivity of promising more than we deliver, in too many situations, and there is a calculable cost for such failures of both commission and omission, the gap continues to exist.

How the details gather together, naturally and/or from conscious manipulation tends to generate some shared themes in public discourse, some of which are unifying, others more divisive.

The drama(s) being enacted on the streets of urban centres around the world, following the street murder of George Lloyd under the knee of law enforcement officers, illustrates both the public outrage at the persistent apparent contempt of white police officers for black men especially. Simultaneously, we are watching black law enforcement officers kneeling in unity with the black protesters whose actions they monitor.

“Get your knee off our necks!” shouted Rev. Al Sharpton, in his eulogy of Mr. Lloyd, in an honorable, integrous, legitimate courageous and historic judgement of the four hundred years of racism that most agree comprises an “original sin” of the republic. Applause, cheers, and warm hugs hourly greet the kneeling of law enforcement in support of the protest.

Criminality, including bullying and animal behaviour rests heavily on the “mens rea” concept of the “guilty mind” referring to one’s mental state and volition control while committing a crime. Research linking criminal behaviour to genetic factors, undermines what is known as the “immutability” bias of mens rea. Similar to the historic debate between nature and nurture, as causation of human nature, the legal community will likely be engaged in a debate between genetic roots and immutability in their pursuit of processes of how to deal with those who offend the law. And while there is no silver bullet of explanation, for criminal or any other human behaviour, just as there are almost nor silver bullets for many of the highly complex issues facing us, there is a legitimate question of when, how, why and to what effect human actions, individually and collectively influence social culture  and policy, and potentially even law.

There remains, however, a ‘Grand Canyon’ between the knee of that officer on the neck of Mr. Lloyd and the “ark of history bending toward perfection” articulated so eloquently and often by people like Barack Obama. The former is a physical act of something at least akin to contempt, while the latter is a poetic, philosophic, abstract statement of an aspiration. It is the collision between act and ideal that is so apparent, and so often repeated at some many levels that warrants dissection. And that chasm, the chasm tearing at the hearts of millions of Americans, as well as millions of others including Canadians, between brutality and ideal, detonates both violence and its condemnation. It was Bob Rae, then leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, who noted a bi-polar mind set in our political way of meeting issues. We know what we will not tolerate, while we continue to tolerate it! We also know how to address, fix, ameliorate and perhaps even eliminate what we know to be wrong, while we also perpetuate an attitude, perhaps even a belief that, for some ‘reason’ we are not the one’s who need to take action, or ‘they’ will get to it eventually, or ‘we have to wait until we vote” or my boss will not accept me if I engage in political activism or…”it would seem unseemly for me to shout angrily in the streets, especially when I could and likely would be recorded by law enforcement and who knows who else.”

Inaction, indecision, rationalization, remaining silent starts very early, and often grows as one climbs the social hierarchy. At the top, we all know, that taking a courageous and risky position is often sheethed in sheep’s skin, or silk, or non-offensive and glib talk so as not to offend (excepting the current occupant of the Oval Office who has turned the tables upside down). Nevertheless, in spite of the many excuses for not acting, we must commend the courage, conviction and activism of those millions, mostly young adults, who are challenging the status quo on race in the U.S. and in Canada and elsewhere.

Trouble is, however, that waves of political activism rise and wane; human energy, including the size of the individual’s window of opportunity to take to the streets, is limited, and those holding the levers of power are far less interested in making significant changes to the status quo to which they owe their power. Outlawing knee-locks on the neck of alleged offenders, while legitimate, is like a band-aid on a lethal tumour. Training in racial sensitivity, while useful, is not much more than a flu injection, only partially effective against this human virus of fear, contempt and  defiance of ‘the other’…regardless of whether that other is black, brown, Muslim, indigenous, or…pick a target.

At root, we all face a serious question about how we view ‘the other’ especially those others about whom our ancestors were ignorant, and unwilling to get to know. Equating personal experiences of bullying, for example, with the long-standing oppression of black Americans, as Stockwell Day so unfortunately did  recently, is not only sad, but it points to the conflict between personal experience and public accountability.

It is the sum of multiple experiences, collated, curated and steeped in the cauldron of history that eventually generates enough heat and light to thaw frozen politicians. Nevertheless, individual biographies are determinative of how each of us perceive each circumstance, and through which lens we select.

If we are raised in a culture in which the hero dominates, for example, we will see opportunities to rescue the voiceless everywhere. If we are raised in a culture of learning, we will be more likely to consider how to plan, design and deliver an educational process that will amend the situation. If we are steeped in a medical culture, we will look for symptoms, and then seek out specific antidotes for those symptoms, knowing full well that full elimination of the virus is unlikely in our lifetime, of that of our children. If we were reared in a theological garden, we are more likely to look for “salvation” and the processes whereby “road-to-Damascus conversions might occur, as our contribution to the depraved state from which we seek release. If we come from a military ethos, we are more likely to seek out we have come to be known as “law-and-order” measures, limited by the strict application of the laws we inherited from our forefathers. If, on the other hand, we have experienced only oppression, betrayal, scarcity and alienation, we are more likely to find opportunity for rage, rebellion and violence, even though we likely know in our gut that such rebellion will only redound against us.

Given the profound differences in the ways in which we have all been reared, parented, schooled, disciplined, provided for/abandoned, spiritually/theologically counselled,  it is little wonder that such variant influences rarely generate a confluence effective enough to move the official position of the government steeped in the traditions of law, government and the status and power inherent in those traditions.

Fortunately, however, it is the apparent frozen nature of the contemporary American government to all protests on behalf of the voiceless that is one of the ost motivating forces in the current movement. The men (mostly men and mostly white) are likely and hopefully the authors of their own demise, leading blindly and hubristically, from a position no longer tenable to a public who knows more, understands more profoundly and has the emotional strength and maturity of no generation that has preceded them.

It is in the hearts, minds and especially the spirits of the young men and women where the hope of their grandfathers and grandmothers lies. We know that we have failed by genuflecting too easily and too willingly to the authority of weak and self-serving men, and bowing to easily to the kinds of cultural norms that bound and gagged the voiceless while we silently stood by. We know that we have tried, and failed, to preserve our papier-mache reputations with the establishment in our failed attempt to ‘fit in’ in what we thought and we taught was the route to our own padded resume, inflated portfolio, and/or vaulted stature in our society. The establishment cared for us only so long as we did not rock their boat. They were willing to listen only if we stayed within the fences of their agendas, their ambitions and their credo’s.

If we wandered outside those fences, we were considered “green-broke” or non-compliant or worse ‘troublesome’ and thereby unmanageable and untrustworthy. I recall specifically listening to a corporate consultant who was critiquing a personal profile questionnaire from this scribe. The questionnaire from a WACO (wacko) address, prompted answers about how power should be deployed in an organization. Naturally, this naïve scribe answered in a manner that was not in keeping with the expected and strongly preferred response, advocating for speaking up and for lobbying within the organization and for questioning authority. The male mathematics graduate, former high school principal, already surrounded by a cadre of compliant and growing wealthy team (again mostly male), argued that I would be too difficult for him to manage, after informing me that the test would have no bearing on the decision of the hire.

Deceptive and correct at the same time, was this team leader whose company already had secured contracts to provide the federal government with senior civil servants, sadly in what can only be seen as another limiting and security-fixated manner by which the government maintains what is known as stability and responsibility.

Sacrificing innovation, experimentation, creativity and spontaneity and adaptability for stability and what has come to be known as responsibility, however, is a very high price. At a time when a pandemic, an economic collapse, a racial uprising and a global climate crisis threaten not only the social order of many societies, including the livelihoods of millions of humans, and even the food supply of millions more, it is time to ask that colloquial question, “How is this working for you?”

We have to rethink and reformulate not only our notions of how we treat each other and how we treat the planet, but how we construct an economy and a justice system that is based not on fear and the abuse of power by a few over the many, and not on the premises that the earth is an inexhaustible resource, or that man is superior to nature, no matter what the theological thinkers have told us. And such a revolution will have to be spared as many open and destructive conflicts over receding resources as we can collectively manage to prevent. And prevention, it seems, is one approach to our problems that has so far escaped our notice, preferring as we do, crisis management after the deluge. (Is that too another masculine preference for the heroic?)

#91 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (reflections on chaos and responsibility)

In a class entitled, “Ethics” for Law Enforcement candidates, the most troublesome issue, one over which the class never climbed or even signalled a desire to consider, was the clearing of the mind, the heart and the pre-conceived notions of guilt, innocence and even ambiguity, when faced with an encounter with human conflict. Minds bent on a false sense of security that dismisses the possibility of ambiguity, uncertainty, and objectivity prior to facing the situation, are doomed to ‘rush to judgement’ and  perpetuate false accusations, deceptive trial proceedings and ultimately unjust judgements.

Given that we all carry a large trunk of experiences, perceptions and beliefs into each new situation, it seems incumbent on each of us to become aware of the finer points of those aspects of our psychic identity. A brutal history with an iron-edged parent, boss, partner will inevitably leave a mark on our capacity to perceive a new confrontation with authority subject to an inevitable transference: we will ‘paint’ the new authority figure with some of the same colours as we previously ‘painted’ the tyrant in our past.

Coming face to face with our own psychic history, then, seems both a reasonable and even a required first step for all professionals to take, in their formal and informal preparation for engagement in the judgements of others. While essential, however, such a formal training step is not necessarily integral to the training curricula of many professions, including the training of police officers, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and certainly political science academics. One hopes that those pursuing careers in psychology, psychiatry, criminology and the practice of ministry will have been required to explore their personal psychic baggage, both conscious and unconscious.

It is not only a personal perspective of power above, but also a perspective of  its inverse, inferiority, that humans transfer from previous learning/ experience/teaching/belief. If we grow up in an ethos in which people of a different race, ethnicity, linguistic  and/or religious tradition are considered ‘alien’ and different and inferior, we are highly likely to transfer that ‘attitude’ into our daily lives, especially when those lives are facing heightened anxiety, fear, depression, desolation and alienation. Our attempt, when under duress, to stabilize and to over-compensate for our distress, will almost physically ‘throw’ us back to what we know deep in our being, those same biases on which we were raised. And we will engage in acts which we ourselves, and certainly the rest of the world know, without an iota of doubt, to be wrong. And we will know about how wrong we are at the very moment when we commit such an act.

And while much of the western world has come to regard the writing and the passing and the enforcing of law to be the guiding principles by which mature adults are to govern our lives, at a far deeper level, we need not to have a single degree or certificate to know about the difference between an act that is considered by virtually everyone to be wrong and one considered universally as right.

Borrowing from Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life, An antidote for Chaos, we find these words:

What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That becomes the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to ‘take the sins of the world onto oneself.’ Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a prior, perhaps not wat is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced—then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening…..To place the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering at the pinnacle of your hierarchy of value is to work to bring about the Kingdom of God of Earth. That’s a state, and a state of mind, at the same time…Expediency is the following of impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is a measure of replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structures operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better. (Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Living, An antidote to chaos, Random House, Canada, 2018, p. 197 and 199)

This morning, the dailies and the talk-shows in Canada and the U.S. are filled with “what went wrong” and “how can we fix this insurgency?”…all of those reports and analyses steeped in the gruesome facts of police brutality, social unrest and a “darkmotherscream”….taken from the poem, Darkmotherscream by Andrei Voznesensky, the first line of which reads:

Darkmotherscream is Siberian dance

Cry from prison or a yell for help….

                                                        and the poem concludes:

Don’t forget---Rome fell

Not having grasped the phrase: darkmotherscream*

Yesterday, CNN prepared a package of video clips depicting the multiple murders of black men and women at the hands of white police officers, from 2012 through 2020, including the current situation faced by the perpetrator(s), whether charged, sentenced, convicted, freed, or pending adjudication.

The stories simply compound each other, pointing directly to the insurmountable, undeniable evidence that nothing has changed either in the selection, training, re-training, or the application of common decency about the treatment of black Americans at the hands of white “power”. This is not to equate white police officers with “white supremacists” as that would be totally unjustified. However, white police officers have, without argument, perpetuated a cultural ethos of both overt and covert racism in their discharge of their professional duties.

And a white-dominated Congress has either fostered the silencing of the plethora of choruses, from both the white and the black communities or willfully ignored those pleas and prayers, not only on the most recent decade but for multiple decades, even centuries, previously.

Peterson reminds us it is a human trait we all carry to “rebel against our own totalitarianism, as much as that of others. I cannot merely order myself into action, and neither can you. ‘I will stop procrastinating,’ I say, but I don’t. ‘I will eat properly,’ I say, but I don’t. ‘I will end my drunken misbehaviour,’ I say, but I don’t. I cannot merely make myself over in the image constructed by my intellect (particularly if that intellect is possessed by an ideology). I have a nature, and so do you, and so do we all. We must discover that nature, and contend with it, before making peace with ourselves. (Peterson, op. cit. p. 193)

One of the questions that, one has to guess, will not occupy much space or air-time in the media is the question of each person’s own  “darkmotherscream” to which we all have to listen eventually, and how our response to that scream contributes to the alleviation of the suffering of those most obviously living under the clouds of poverty, lack of access of education, quality health care, work with dignity (a number growing by the millions daily), fair and equal justice and most recently the pandemic known as COVID-19.

And there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative difference between the ‘darkmotherscream’ of those black protesters on the streets of American and Canadian cities (as well as London and Berlin in sympathy) and what might be considered a parallel darkmotherscream from the white supremacists, the NRA, the Republican Senators so dutifully and obsequiously self-emasculated by their false and deceitful obedience and loyalty to the occupant of the Oval Office. The scream-tweets from that Oval Office, are nothing more than expediency, designed to deliver immediate gratification, irrespective of their power to inflict suffering on those who do not comply with the “great leader’s” megalomaniacal narcissism.

The imposition of enhanced, perpetuated and unrelieved suffering on others, including blacks, browns, immigrants refugees and indigenous, for the purpose of maintaining the power to appoint far-right judges, to appease foreign tyrants while abandoning historic allies, to eviscerate environmental and educational goals and policies and structures designed to alleviate human suffering, while promoting the greed and avarice of amoral capitalist “friends” is the contemporary version of evil.

It is in the making an art form of pain, (Peterson’s words) through dehumanizing fellow human beings, that is simply wrong. And the fact that literally hundreds of thousands follow blindly, contribute also blindly and fatuously, and maintain a popularity rating in opinion polls of something over 40% that, taken together, really endangers not only those people without a voice, but the whole of the nation and potentially what has been known as the “world order” all for the sake of meeting immediate, expedient, personal, sociopathic goals.

This “cathartic” uprising over the brutal, publicly recorded, and viscerally imprinted murder of George Lloyd, (notwithstanding its attempted hijacking by white supremacists, and not Antifah ‘terrorists), must not be permitted to dissolve into the archives of the national media, nor into the mists of forgetfulness of the octogenarian (both historically and archetypally) legislators in the U.S. Senate.

And while symbols, like the choice of a Vice-presidential running mate, potentially a black woman, are important, such symbols are no substitute for concerted, disciplined, pragmatic and supportive justice reform legislation, re-integration of displaced workers into a new economic landscape that includes revival of crumbling infrastructure, not to mention eroded public education, and the atrophy of liberal education at the post-secondary level.

We have all heard of the Aristotelian phrase, “horror vacui,” (nature abhors a vacuum) and whether the phrase has legitimate application in physics, or not, in the political arena, it clearly can and does have resonance. A vacuum of leadership, amid the pandemic, the ballooning debt and deficit in most western nations, the rising clouds of toxic waste into the atmosphere (limited briefly during the pandemic), the global pursuit of a universally accessible vaccine, and especially the need for a western coalition to meet the growing fractiousness of the People’s Republic of China, is extremely threatening, disorienting and potentially devastating. The dangers are not only to the atmosphere we all breathe, and the water we need to drink but also to the obvious and growing need of all nations and people for institutions, structures, treaties and accords that will provide a safe and clean internet, a peace-treaty to ward against cyber-crime and outright hostility.

Leadership, in the moment in history when cardboard cut-outs like trump have and will continue to fail, has to come from men and women like Macron, Merkel (soon to retire) Trudeau, and hopefully from Scandanavian nations like Denmark. And, from each of us, a critical look in our own mirror, and a thorough ‘dig’ of our pre-conceived and no-longer relevant and sustaining demons, bogey-men, and myths, and an authentic commitment to engage in the large, cumbersome and highly complex process of adding our personal stories, insights, visions and dreams to the “hopper” of the world’s intellectual/social/cultural/political/religious/ethical furnace.

We need the light, and the courage, and the commitment, from men (and women) of cultivated hearts to awaken to what Theodore Roethke calls “The Waking”…

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me;  so takethe lively air,

And lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking  slow

I learn by going where I have to go.#

*Quoted from, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, p. 208

#   “          “        “     “      “       “       “      “   “    “     , p. 381

#90 Men, agents of and pathway to cultural metanoia (wildness, savage, anger, and denial...hope?)

There is no way to separate this summer from others, when looking at violence perpetrated by angry, and especially disempowered men. Where the disempowerment comes from, however, from outside or from within, remains an open question.

There are at least two different lenses through which to begin to explore masculine anger, hatred and outrage, the personal and the cultural.

 From a personal perspective, Robert Bly’s honesty and clarity are disclosed in these words:

Boys feel wild; they love their tree houses, their wild spots in the woods, they all want to go down to the river, with Huck(elberry Finn) away from domesticating aunts. Boys love to see some wildness in their fathers, to see their fathers dancing or carrying on. Some boys are so afraid that they will become domestic that they become savage, not wild. The marks of wildness are love of nature, especially its silence, a voice box free to say spontaneous things, an exuberance, a love of ‘the edge,’ the willingness to admit the ‘three strange angels’ that Lawrence speaks of. Yeats realized searching Roman and Greek texts that even Cicero, considered middle of the road, was much wilder than any of his friends; the wild man is not mad like a criminal or mad like a psychotic, but ‘Mad as the mist and snow.’

How many years ago

Were you and I unlettered lads

Mad as the mists and snow?

This question does not mean that wildness is restricted to childishness, or is dominated by so-called primitive emotions, or amounts to atavism. The wildness of nature is highly sophisticated…Jung remarked, ‘It is difficult to say to anybody, you should become acquainted with your animal, because people think it is a sort of lunatic asylum, they think the animal is jumping over walls and raising hell all over town….Yet the animal…is pious, it follows the path with great regularity…Only man is extravagant…’(Visions Seminar I, p. 282)

Thoreau says, ‘In literature it is the while that attracts us.’ King Lear attracts us, the dervish, the Zen laugher. The civilized eye of man has become dulled, unable to take in the natural wildness of the planet. Blake says, ‘The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the storm sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.’…One can keep one’s job and still be wild; one can remain married and still be wild; one can live in cities and remain wild. What is needed is a soul discipline that Gary Snyder calls ‘practice of the wild’…The practice is a secret that not all understand, but many blues musicians and jazz soloists and lovers understand it. ‘Whoever’s not killed for love is dead meat.’ (Robert Bly, Approach to Wildness, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, Poems for Men, Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade, Editors, Harper Collins, 1992, p.3-4-5.)

“Some boys are so afraid that they will become domestic that they become savage, not wild,” writes Bly, in a statement needing both repeating and echoing around the Planet, and especially in North America where ‘savage’ masculinity dominates the cultural mind-set and discourse.

From the same book, Michael Meade in a section entitled, The Second Layer: Anger, Hatred, Outrage, writes these words:

If the First Layer of human interaction is the common ground of manners, kind of speech, polite greeting and working agreements; if the Third Layer is the area of deeply shared humanity, the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of all people, of the underlying, fundamental oneness of human love, justice, and peaceful coexistence; then the Second Layer is the territory of anger, hatred, wrath, rage, outrage, jealousy, envy, contempt, disgust and acrimony. It is the Via Negativa, the Field of Conflict, the plain of Discord, the hills of Turmoil. And the Second Layer always exists between the First Layer and the Third….The populations of the Second Layer includes a high percentage of giants, hags, trolls, boxers, bears, street criminals, cops vultures gargoyles, streetwalkers, and outraged motorists. The sidewalks are cracked, the stores are closed, the lights don’t work, and there is no one who’ll listen to you. When people avoid this territory, they begin attracting shadowy figures who will one day explode into their life. Or, like a TV evangelist, they are compulsively drawn to the figures of the night. Cultures that try to shut out the Second Layer wind u0p with overcrowded prisons, high crime rates, huge black markets, and, finally, riots in the streets…There’s more bad news,. The only way out of the First Layer, the only way to break the spell of niceness when it has shifted from ensuring life’s continuance to insulting life’s purpose is to enter the turmoil of the Second Layer. Furthermore---and don’t blame this on me—the only way to find the next location of the Third Layer is by traversing the battle-scarred., dog-infested terrain of the Second Layer. (Michael Meade, op cit. p. 285-287-288)

Men are neither hemmed in by their biology and their culture, however, although such an entrapment might emerge from a binary/Manichean perspective. While naturally “tilted” and hard-wired to the ‘wild’ there is a deep and abiding difference between being ‘wild’ and being ‘savage’. And it is that subtle difference that seems to be missing from the cultural language dripping from the pages of our dailies, as well as from the screens in our rec-rooms and on our tablets. And then there is the question of ‘appropriate anger, outrage, contempt and hatred’ that hangs over the streets of both Toronto and Minneapolis this morning. Both cities are gripped in the rage of incidents whose explanations so far escape credibility and thereby trust.

In the middle of these two assessments of different aspects of masculinity, lies the demon denial, on a personal level, and then on a familial level, later on an organizational/institutional level, and finally on a national/international level. And at the same time that men are legitimately bearing the blood of wars, crusades, insurrections, terrorist attacks, exploitative trading, demeaning labour and environmental practices, they/we are in denial of our own dark side. And this denial extends from the personal to the tribal to the institutional to the governmental. And, without offering anything more than a common sense, as opposed to an expert and certainly not a clinical opinion, it is clear that denial cannot but lead to volcanic eruptions of human desperation.

Writing about the United States specifically, but the words help to put into perspective some of the world’s primary issues, Robert Bly writes:

The health of any nation’s soul depends on the capacity of adults to face the harsh facts of the time. Bur the covering up of painful emotions inside us and the blocking out of fearful images coming from outside have be3come in our country the national and private style. We have established, with awesome verve, the animal of denial as the guiding beast of the nation’s life. The inner city collapses, and we build bad housing projects rather than face the bad education, lack of jobs, and persistent anger at black people. When the homeless increase, we build dangerous shelters rather than face the continuing decline in actual wages. Of course, we know this beast lives in every country; we have been forced lately to look at our beast. As the rap song has it: ‘Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.’..Ernest Becker says that denial begins with the refusal to admit that we will die. We don’t want anyone to say that. Early on in t he cradle, swans talk to us about immortality. Death is intolerable. To eat, shit, and rot is unthinkable for those of us brought up with our own bedrooms. We want special treatment, eternal life on other planets, toilets that wil take away our shit and its smell. We love the immortality of metal, chromium implants, the fact that there are no bodily fluids int he machine, the precise memory the computer has, the fact that mathematics never gets colon cancer; and we are deeply satisfied that Disneyland can give us Germany Spain, and Morocco  without their messy murderous, shit-filled histories. ‘All this the world well knows.’…Essays, poetry, fiction, still relatively cheap to print, are the best hope in making headway against denial. The corporate deniers own television. We can forget about that. There’s no hope in commercial television at all. The schools teach denial by not teaching, And the students’ language is so poor that they can’t do anything but deny. School boards forbid teachers in high school to teach conflict, questioning of authority, picking apart of arguments, mockery of news and corporate lies….Great art and literature are the only models we have left to help us stop lying. The greater the art the less the denial..Bre4aking through the wall of denial helps us get rid of self-=pity, and replaces self-pity with awe at the complicated misery of all living things…A poem that confronts denial has a certain tone: it is dark but not pulled down buy evil. It is intense but not hysterical; it feels weighty, and there is something bitter in it, as if the writer were fighting against great resistance when he or she writes the poem….The writer could be said to be ‘eating his shadow’; in the Japanese martial arts tradition, it is called ‘eating bitter.’ (Robert Bly, op. cit. p.195-196-197-198-199)

How can an individual man, for example, begin to ‘eat bitter’ in a world that pits so many “us’s” and so many “them”…It is not merely a question of men versus women, or Republican versus Democrat, or East versus West, or dictatorship versus democracy, or have’s versus have-not’s….or Christians versus Muslims…or right-to-life versus choice…or fossil fuels versus renewables….and not only are issues never to be permitted to be defined in either-or options, so too is no man (or woman) to be permitted to be defined as “angry” or oppressor, or victim or innocent. Within each gender, too, stereotypes dominate: e.g. wimp or alpha for men, and angel of whore for women.

And the restoration of language, at both the most basic level, and even more importantly at the poetic, imaginative and literary level encompasses all of these tensions, while offering light amid the darkness of ignorance, thoughtlessness, insensitivity, bigotry and those “isms” that we throw around like grenades in a desperate pursuit of power. It is our individual and collective complicity in a culture that seeks to, indeed depends on, the abuse of the individual, except as client/customer/servant/doctor/attorney/’essential worker’ and all of the other definitions that subvert a full human identity in favour of a transactional, political, lobbying/defying/protesting/covering for preservation of power or grasping a thin  thread of respectability, status, and fame.

My experience in both education and theology/ministry has shown that those who defer most to those in power are more acceptable to the power structure than those who confront those in power. Those whose insight, criticism, honest push-back, and especially whistle-blower-courage peek through the asphalt of our denial, and our innocence and our blind-spots have too much to tell us that we dare not fail to open our ears, eyes and sensibilities to their pleas and their prayers.

And especially inside the ecclesial institution, the fact of the obliteration, scorched-earth blindness to difficult and significant nuanced abuses of power is not only permitted but actually fostered by those determined to rise to prominence and those already in charge. Good news, in the gospel, was and is a confrontation of the powerful, so much so that the adage “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is bandied about in jest, but with a sunburst of reality and truth. Somehow, as a prominent, and formerly potent light amid the darkness of the secular culture, the mainline churches have undergone a spinal-ectomy, as well as a heart, and mind and larynx-otomy. Silence, especially when the planet faces crises of our own making, is neither a sustainable theology, nor a sustainable ethic, nor a redeemable spirituality.

Bishop Barber and Rev. Al Sharpton continue, with the occasional appearance of a Jesuit and a Rabbi to speak common sense humanity, however, without the gravitas attended to the scientists, the virologists, and the attorneys. And this framing of the culture in terms that defy complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, while clinging to a false security of snail-depictions of masculinity and femininity, common-sense caring of self and others through a simple mask, and the common-sense policing of intervening when a man is murdered under the knee of a companion officer, and an epileptic young woman falls 24 stories from a balcony when only police officers were inside the apartment of that balcony.

It is not that the church’s abdication of its voice and role in the public discourse led directly to either of these preventable tragedies. However, its failure to honour the poetic, the imaginative and the creative needs of each individual, but preferring power-over to empowerment of all, as a means of self-sustaining the institution, models precisely the inverse of the kind of model it has the opportunity to offer, in the name of all deities worthy of the name.