Reflections on time....

 Time

"I never have enough time...to be the best father, husband etc...."

Let's try to unpack (translate, interpret) this universal cry that we all hear, may even have uttered at moments of frustration. Physicists describe time as the measure of the movement of things in space...Rovelli defines time as an illusion.

It is the question of our unique "take" on our own particular situation that matters most on this question as on so many others.
We "create" our own world, in terms of how we integrate, interpret and respond to people, events, theories and even god.

 
In a "Christian" culture, a penetrating foundational premise is the "fall" as depicted in Genesis. And as some cogent writing is appearing advocating for the cultural abandonment of "Genesis" ( a reasonable and provocative premise), I offer a slightly different notion: that "the fall" must not be conflated with personal unworthiness, scarcity, inadequacy. And yet, in our cultural and conventional habit (proclivity,) to use words in a very general and imprecise way...And we have monstrous machines reinforcing that tendency: think law enforcement, incarceration, news about bad behaviour and the constant barrage of comparisons of "good" and "bad" people.

Truthfully, we are all capable of both good and "not-good" deeds, words, thoughts....And while we have e experienced both kinds from others we also have "done" both....

Nevertheless, as in so many instances, we do not serve our best interests and tendencies (as the "flowers" and the gifts of our life) through an excessive concentration on our inadequacies.
We are not likely to become better fathers or husbands or colleagues by issuing a "stream" of critical parent judgements to ourselves...whether we believe we are "short" of time of money or social status or friends or...or...or ..

We caution our children in that manner. Our parents deployed the same approach in our lives...and too often those very voices haunt us long after their owners have died.
Indeed, much of adult life for many consists of shedding those projections of "fear" and judgement that far exceeded the dimensions of the moment they were uttered.

Back to the perplexing "time deficit"...
The clock and calendar will continue to march regardless of how we "perceive" that process. We can control, manage and rely on only our own way of adapting to the hands of our watches or the number on our calendars.

And if course there will always and inevitably develop "things" like deaths, sickness, market shifts, broken alliances and friendships, injuries and even very unsettling information from "outside" that rock our personal equilibrium..however we have both created and rested in that state.
Those "traumas" too will take emotional time and serve as distractions and interruptions to our previously developed plans.

And yet, like the cliche lyrics have it, "life is what happens we you are making plans".
Henri Nouwen wrote that, while he was preparing and delivering lectures, marking papers and attending meetings was always being interrupted. When he reflected back he concluded what the song lyrics declare...that his real-life was in those interruptions.

Under classical management theory and praxis, work is organized by task and time. Efficiencies in business and the marketplace depend on the equation: time is money. And inevitably most of us comply with that equation, given the "carrots and sticks" of classical conditioning that management design and deliver.

And then, we slide into a similar, if not precisely identical, process of "managing" our self-talk...
And that leads us back to the opening line of this piece.

If we could/can see how we came to the place where we were frustrated by our perceived "deficit" of whatever it is we have to "make up" in order to come to respect ourselves, then we can detoxify the criticism. Only then can we re-evaluate how we arrange our schedule, or our finances or our .....(fill the blank) to restore our confidence and trust in ourself.

Whether time is illusion or not, like death it  is a finite "thing" meted out to all equally. So if our critical parent really cares beyond issuing "accusations"  or "charges or at least when we begin to neutralize the poison in at those "hot-buttons" their might be feasible for us to change both our own affairs and then listen differently when others make similar sounds in our life.

Often, colleagues too unconsciously throw around critical judgements of our deficit  (as they see it) only to serve the purpose of elevating their view of their own worth...and we have to become aware of those unjustified slights. They may have been motivated by some kind of parental concern that we improve how we behave. However too often they say much more about their spokesperson than the target.

Again, recognizing how pervasive is this cultural addiction to criticism and put-down really is, and the depth of the hurt and injury and emotional wounds this habit inflicts, we could) can then begin to withdraw from using it as either our rationalization or our unwarranted critical parent again beating a drum worn thin from overuse.

We can and do construct our world view of our self in relation to our deficits...and not our assets.
And becoming aware of this tendency can lead to new insights of both ourselves and our colleagues.

There really is hope....within!

Applebaum: The bad guys are winning....are we complicit?

 Vaclav Havel is reported to have penned these words  on hopelessness:

Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope: perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.

Havel also wrote:

Hope is a dimension of the soul, an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizon. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

We are all living in the swirl of so many forces that seem to be so dramatic, even violent and certainly outside of any apparent attempt to rein them in, that the turbulence itself is unsettling. Hunkering down, as if in our own bunker, as if the ‘enemy’ is everywhere outside our bunker, renders only a faux-security.  Whether we are watching prices stretch beyond our capacity to pay, or the earth’s atmosphere shrivelling beyond our capacity to prevent, or the political rhetoric and actions of uncivilized, autocratic men shatter the bounds of civil society without a concerted, aligned and committed resistance except from highly motivated individuals…

we are all now engaged as full attendees in a theatre whose drama envelops us all. The days of enclosed walls, proscenium arches, theatre-in-the-round, and even appointment television of some favourite sit-com, or western, or spy mystery, those limits and frames that “package” the story and the characters who play out the story have all disappeared.

At the same time, however, the voices which have commandeered the microphones, and the airwaves, and the advertising dollars, and the contracts that once were somewhat defined, monitored and sanctioned by law have been loosed on the landscape. Rather than a somewhat massaged and managed message, shaped and written and delivered under some guidelines and protocols that included and demanded veracity, trust, reliability and civility, the old “frontier” of lawlessness has exploded into what we call the ‘metaverse’….or at least that’s what Zuckerberg calls it, as he, along with many others, prepare to stake claim to it.

It is the universe of the autocrat, the oligarch, the plutocrat (how outmoded and sanitized is that word!), and the funding sources of those mostly men, supported and abetted however, by many ambitious women, that appears to be winning.

Anne Applebaum, in her most recent piece in The Atlantic, writes under a headline

“The Bad Guys are Winning”…referencing the several prominent and dangerous autocrats who not only dominate their own nation and people, but are now working together, trading, banking and setting their own trends of action, propaganda and manipulative control…to satisfy their own deep and insatiable need indeed quest for absolute power.

They care only about retaining power, and care less and less about the needs, aspirations, hopes and dreams of the people living under their rule. And, because the instruments of democracy were never designed for a world in which such power in so many capitals would be permitted to reside in so many different hands, the necessary counter-point to such demagoguery and tyranny seems limited if not actually futile.

And yet, is the same kind of mentality not riding herd on the digital landscape, where seduction machines (algorithms) seduce innocent minds, eyes, and ears into a digital world where civility, veracity, reliability and trust have been trashed on the landfill of history?

And, are there not similar motives and methods being deployed every day in corporate executive suites responsible for producing products under the express purpose of “healing” human pain while knowingly generating hundreds of thousands, if not millions of premature deaths. (Think opiods! Think Thalidmoide! Think tobacco! Think fossil fuels! Think excess sugars and salts! Think alcohol!)

And also “think weapons” and the vast empire that manufactures, markets and then deploys the most lethal, most secretive, most hypersonic and most ubiquitous hardware to every corner of the world, under the rubric of safety and security, and of course the profit of those profiteers at the core of the business.

Are we not, as a race, becoming more and more aware each day of the certainties of how power, in all of its many forms and faces, is shifting into the hands of a very few, at the expense of a very many, whose voices and counter-point fades into street protests in Glasgow and other cities around the globe, after another wet-noodle climate conference? Is our sense doubt and hopelessness not birthing a consciousness among the young and some iconoclastic grey-beards that what we are witnessing, in the actions of the tyrants, and the terrorists, and the under-belly of the dark internet, as well as in the open in the crowded ports of, for example, Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Scammers, drug lords, internet moguls, morally bankrupt political operatives, and even medical professionals who serve their own narcissism through profiting from their ‘take’ in each prescription….also serve the oligarchs even while attempting to evade the legal authorities charged with their capture and arrest.

Who is going to capture and arrest the oligarchs? Who is going to capture and arrest the ‘deconstructionists’ otherwise known as obstructionists, or self-proclaimed insurrectionists, like the thousands of  Steve Bannon’s who have informally and surreptitiously joined a kind of tidal wave of insurrection, deconstruction…including the undermining of veracity, reliability, respect and trust?

In a word, no system is either large enough or has the capability to rein in the plethora of voices for whom extremism has become their modus operandi. Just yesterday, Michael Flynn, formerly infamous National Intelligence Director in the trump administration, spoke publicly about the need for the United States to adopt a single religion. The notion of a unitarian (not the sect but the concept of absolute one-man-rule) state, morphing into a theocracy, as some nations like Iran have already, seems on the surface to be irreconcilable with democracy.

And yet, most would have thought that a president and a presidency like the one that held power in Washington from 2016 through 2020, was also unthinkable and irreconcilable with democracy.

Presidential historian Jon Meacham, appearing on The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC, commented that there never was an ‘edenic period’ in American history. When Melber asked, by stretching the metaphor, “Who would the snake be in that Eden?” Meacham replied, “Our ambition!”

While there is an inherent innate ambition in each of us, to achieve, to move forward, to live the ‘good life’ however we might define that, the line of acceptable intersection of our ambition with the ambition of another seems to have moved away from a line that all parties acknowledge and respect, into a kind of haze of deliberate and defining obscurity leading to the take-over by the most unscrupulous, the most driven, the most ambitious and the most unconscious of the public good. We have, in our complicit silence, insouciance, and withdrawal from the fray of public service, exponentially demonstrated with the spikes in threats to school board members who seek to protect the children in their schools by voting for mask mandates, vaccine mandates and the like, permitted the unscrupulous men (and it is mostly men who have rushed into the vacuum) to take over the field known as the public square.

Additionally, there is no likelihood that Biden can or will lecture Xi Jinping on the incarceration of Uyghurs in China, only to be countered with the hundreds of years of slavery of black Americans in the United States. Similarly, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has little “room” for self-righteous lectures of nations where human rights are under threat, given our own history of apartheid for the First Nations, and the recent discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of children imprisoned in residential schools. Similar stories play out in various regions and among various “tribes” in and out of power in developing nations.

Colonization, the domination of one group by another group, is another of the “realizations” that is screaming out of headlines around the globe. Whether it takes a historical form, or a more contemporary form in the intersection of refugees, immigrants forced from their native lands into the barbed-wire borders of other lands, there is a human cry of not only a profound imbalance of wealth, education, opportunity, health care, but also of sheer brute force. By whatever name, and whether it is exercised by a state, a military force, a tyrant, a president, or even a mother or a father, it is still abuse…the abuse of a single human being by another…whether by another single human being or a group.

And whenever and wherever we see such attitudes, actions words and abuse, even in our own homes, schools, churches, social service non-profits, evidence of the bully has to be exposed. And whether the bully is living under the reputation of status in the community, or not, each encounter has to be considered on its own merit. We are not going to remove, eliminate or even moderate the human proclivity to seek and deploy power, whether within the bounds of conventional social grace, or the limits of legal constriction, or the shared commitment to respect for each other (long ago evaporated from the political rhetoric in the U.S.) if we do not share a commitment to identify its ugly attitude, voice, action or even insult when we encounter it.

And the risk to such an identification, for each of us, is considerable. After all, who wants or expects to eliminate all insults, all differences of opinion, all ideologies, all religions and all debates. After all, debate and difference, when conducted under a modicum of conventional expectations, generates better collaborative decisions.

However, it is in the manner in which these debates are conducted that the danger lurks. The presumption of power and status, among those with wealth, formal education, titles, official positions of power, including judges, doctors, lawyers, accountants, professors, principals, and even those with more wealth than many in their own communities cannot and must not be justification for assuming prominent, priority, and power over those who appear to ‘have less”…especially of the symbols of power and status.

There is not a single person in any of our circles who has not experienced the abuse of power by others who took advantage of them, abused them, betrayed them, or even injured them without cause. Some such experiences were so shocking both because of their severity and their unexpected source (perhaps a parent, or a clergy, or a teacher,) that they have left scars that never fully heal. Lives are spent reckoning with such abuse. And yet, while the incidents of such abuse occur to those in the public eye generate considerable attention, the millions of lesser abuses, inflicted in the anonymity of secrecy, like the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women, remain social secrets.

In this era of extremes, exaggerated hopelessness, perhaps it is unsurprising that we are becoming conscious of the many previously undisclosed abuses that collectively, if unconsciously, we have permitted to be kept hidden.

The risk is that, in removing the scabs and exposing the wounds, we will simultaneously embolden other abusers so devoid of self, and so in need of attention that we will provide the very magnet for their need to be exercised. A similar approach accompanies hostage taking incidents….we will not negotiate because that will embolden others to imitate the abuse.

On the other side of the abuse of power is the ubiquitous victim, and our culture is becoming inured to the story of the victim, given the tidal wave of stories at the individual level. We risk missing the forest of international political abuse of power, for example, in permitting nations and leaders to opt out of obligations to preserve and to protect the planet, while we fret over the stories of individual victims’ stories of their abuse.

Self-righteous, idolatrous religion, and the dependency it has on charismatic again mostly men, is a prevalent form of the abuse of power, rendering many of its converts to a state of infantilism. And while the abusers are the men in charge, the victims are somewhat complicit, in that they are willing and too often eager to surrender their own boundaries to escape the pain of their whatever…loneliness, unworthiness, alienation, self-perceived sin and shame, illiteracy, lack of education, poverty….the list is endless.

In the political arena, too, it is shame, fear, need to escape these demons that can lead millions to the false security of a false promising prophet. Tyrants do not erupt from a vacuum. They are an integral component of a culture, a Petrie dish in which their venomous tyranny is seeded. And that dish is both individual and social, both attributable to the traits and ambition of a single person, and to the “green house” of the political culture in which that ambition can and will grow.

Personal responsibility does not stop at the property fence of our abode. Public responsibility does not stop there either. Both are intertwined, intermingled and mutually supportive….both for the negative and the positive.

Introducing Zemmour, Fascist Jew, as symbol of hate, bigotry, racism and French Populism

Bernard-Henri Levy, the French intellectual, speaking on Fareed Zarakia’s GPS on CNN last Sunday, dubbed the far-right television talk show host, Eric Zemmour, who is now running ahead of Marie Le Pen in public opinion polls ahead of the French presidential election, both a Jew and a Fascist. When I heard these two words in the same sentence describing a single person, I was shocked, incredulous and angry. Have we actually come to this, that a single person of Jewish heritage could even consider attitudes, beliefs and actions that would warrant the appellation, Fascist? Twisting oneself into such a political, ideological and even theological pretzel, it would seem, should be, if not must be, impossible. And yet here we are!

Writing in tabletmag.com, Levy uses these words:

I see him (Zemmour) trampling on everything in the French Jewish legacy that pertains to responsibility for others, or the noble effort to embrace strangers, love thy neighbour, and offer hospitality toward immigrants. In this transgression there is something that chills the blood….and

People should also reflect on the dark ideas this pugilistic candidate is hatching, the poisons he is serving up, and the shrunken, pitiful version of France he is promoting when he declares that we have ‘no business’ getting involved in the fate of Afghan women, or that we ‘will never know’ the truth about the Dreyfus affair* or that we should disapprove of the innocent souls murdered by Mohammed Merah in 2012, whose parents ‘buried their bones’ in Jerusalem. (tabletmag.com)

Robert Zaretsky, writing in haaretz.com, October 25, 2021, under the headline, “Eric Zemmour Isn’t Donald Trump. He’s Far Worse”, pens these words:

A far right pundit, vile misogynist, racial conspiratist and potential contender for the presidency, Zemmour is the Jewish heir to a particularly vicious French brand of antisemitic nationalism-repurposed to target other minorities…..During his long career as a  prophet of France’s decline, Zemmour keeps returning to the same words. Take, for example, his “grand replacement.” Coined by the extreme thinker Renaud Camus, the term distills the conspiracy theory that, with the connivance of a cosmopolitan and urban elite, the nation’s original population is being replaced with non-white peoples. Obsessed by this notion, Zemmour points to the case of Seine-Saint-Denis. T
His Parisian borough, “long the historical heart of France, where the tombs of our kings are located,” is becoming a “Muslim enclave subject to the rule of Allah.”: Seine-Saint-Denis, he predicts, will become the French Kosovo, a battleground between opposing religious communities.” This “Demographic inversion” is a fact, Zemmour affirms, not a myth. How could it be otherwise? After all, the “only young men authorized by French feminists to maintain this once traditional, now scorned, code of virility are young blacks and Arabs.” France is thus doomed since these same women refuse to accept that their duty is to “give themselves without shame” to their (authentically French) men who “need to sexually dominate them.”

How myopic, even perhaps neurotic, and dangerous!

It reminds me of a conversation at a dinner table with a teacher-colleague, back in the early eighties, when the question of the “preservation of the English language” was the topic of much debate in Northern Ontario. A group calling itself APEC, (The Alliance for the Preservation of English), had gained a meagre foothold in the town of some 50,000 concurrent with the growing acceptance of many of bilingual education in the public schools. “You are going to lose your job as an English teacher, by sending your daughters to “French Immersion”! was the cry of a guest at our table. My response, then, and would still be today, “Well, on this we will have to agree to disagree.” The topic was then dropped from the conversation, although, months later, my then spouse revisited it in these words, “You embarrass me because you do not and will not engage in small talk, in reference to our dispute over that dinner. As a footnote to the story, all three of our daughters graduated from that French Immersion program, two later graduated with French degrees from university and the third teaches French in the French Immersion program in her former high school.

The rise in popularity of right-wing populists like Zemmour, (Orban, trump, Bolsonaro) is a dangerous fire in the political landscape and rhetoric. It is not only dangerous for its own sake in the respective countries; it also emboldens attitudes and behaviours that lead to and foreshadow future ‘insurrections’ like the one on January 6 at the U.S. Capitol.

Fear, as a device to be manipulated by charismatic, if vacuous, political aspirants, acts like a toxic injection into the waters of public debate: spreading through those waters contaminating them as it spreads. It then ensnares people who refuse to wear masks, who refuse to become vaccinated against the COVID-19 Delta variant, who believe that government is going to take over personal decisions, who use Critical Race Theory as a radioactive “lure” to entice voters who fear public discussion of the depth to which racism has become embedded in public institutions, presumably because such discussion will lead to black dominance….or at the spectre of such a threat.

Many people who live in North America will likely consider any discussion of the rise of Zemmour to be outside the reasonable concerns of people living on this side of the Atlantic. After all, only Tucker Carlson dedicated his show on FOX TV to Orban’s right-wing propaganda, and that for wholly heinous and self-serving ends.

There is also some conventional “attitude” and “perception” that with all of the many threats to human civilization, the pandemic, endemic racism, global warming and climate change, the widening gap in income and wealth, the supply-shortages, rising inflation, a new language of symbols* that none of us have fully grasped, (and some of us even wonder about its legitimacy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Just this week a grade twelve co-ed in Hamilton, on a co-op placement, for which her instructor commemorated and celebrated with an Instagram photo of the group of students, raised her thumb-index finger in a celebratory explanation mark, only to be dismissed from the co-op program for inciting racism and hatred. She was totally unaware (as am I and millions of others) that such a symbol carried that message. Called the “OK hand gesture, the Anti-Defamation League has not listed it as a symbol of hate. The npr.org website reports: Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Centre on Extremism. Told NPR that for years on fringe online message boards such as 4chan and 8chan, the “OK” sign has been deployed in memes and other images promoting hate. Given the number of white supremacists who have adopted it, he said it can now carry a nefarious message…

Clearly this co-ed was unaware of the ‘new’ interpretation of the OK gesture. And also, clearly, it is time we refrained from being seduced into adopting the posture, position and purpose of white supremacists. Indeed, the decision to remove this innocent, aspiring co-ed from her chosen co-op program for such an ‘indiscretion’ is not only abominable, it is inexcusable. Context clearly has been sanitized from the situation, from the photo, and from the mind of those making the decision, on the strength of a single phone call of complaint. Racial perfection, language perfection, and absolutisms are not the way to “teach” or even to “transform” a culture that is becoming a wet-noodle to the forces of hate….humans everywhere are reeling under the weight of the “what’s next” to hit us, or even to destroy us.

Bernard Henri Levy predicts that Zemmour will evaporate like a bubble, given that he has no intellectual or ethical foundation. However, various forms and faces of fascism, white supremacy, racism, and deep-seated hatred verging toward violence is a growing phenomenon in many venues. None of us can say we are fully free from its potential.

This week it might be Zemmour’s name, or Orbans’, or Bosonaro’s (permitting the rape and ravage of the Amazon Rainforest, refusing to mandate vaccinations, leaving his people in deep jeopardy)….but similar forces are operating in the open in Florida, for example. Just this week, a new Surgeon General (Dr. Joseph Ladapo) was appointed after only two days of vetting, (normally it take up to 6 months) a part of the American Frontier Doctors, who have been prescribing ivermectin as a remedy for COVID, while creaming a ”take” from the prescriptions (according to the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC). School board trustees in Brevard County, Florida, who have stood strong for masks for their children, are experiencing death threats, as are trump opponents in the Republican party, specifically Adam Kinzinger.

Those Republican congressmen and women (thirteen in all) who voted for the Biden infrastructure bill, have received threats to remove them from their committee assignments, in an effort to keep alive and thriving the beat of the trump drum of the big lie, the threat of retaliation, the even greater threat of his candidacy in 2024, and his continuing efforts to implant stooges in positions of power in as many states as possible.

The spread of populist hate, most of it anchored in white supremacy, threatens, either directly or indirectly, the equal voting rights legislation lying dormant in the U.S. Senate. It also threatens to kill the John Lewis voting rights bill; bills in over thirty states are on track to restrict voting among blacks and minority voters, as the spread of white “hate” and “fear” similar to, if not precisely identical to the hate of Muslims being spread by Zemmour in France.

Just when the world’s population needs common, collaborative and decisive and urgent action to combat global warming and climate change, to stem the tide of rising billionaires who don’t (or refuse) to pay taxes, to assist developing countries facing the ravages of global warming already, to stem the tide of pollution among coal and fossil fuel production facilities, we are watching the cracks in the institutional “foundations” and walls and offices, and board rooms veering toward actual fissions, analogous to the sheering blocks of tons of ice from the walls of the largest icebergs.

Little ordinary people, it seems, have no voice, in the cacophony of despair, hate, narcissism, irrational populism and ideological purity and independence in quarters like Bejing and Moscow and Delhi.

And yet the size of the chorus of ordinary people is growing, so one can only hope that those voices will eventually claim at least partial success, so that our survival is no longer in doubt. 

Advocating for closing the gap between perception and reality...

 where do perception and reality meet?

We each hear comments daily that indicate barely a superficial awareness of the subject under discussion. Some of us scoff while others of us let them pass, move on and likely never give those comments another nano-second of thought.
While the "superiority-inferiority" dynamic is predictable, there may be more to this "moment" in time than  the personal level.
Writers have traditionally explored the frontier between "appearance and reality" conscious that at the intersection there is a predictable moment of tension, drama, new insight and perhaps even tragedy.
Question: Are we all enmeshed in a cultural/perceptual current in which we all contribute to the threats implicit in this collision? And, if so, can we transform our participation and thereby shift the culture forward?
Recently, I overheard a comment from a business operator about the location of his sibling's workplace: "Well, you work at a community hospital right?" The responding answer, after the deep swallow of self-restraint, followed: Well, not really,  more like a large tertiary hospital attached to a prominent university serving a large geographic and demographic base with a staff of several thousand."
The "swallow" came from some incredulity (that the full reality was not  known after many years) and also some irritation that s/he was not better known by/to the family member.
Of course, we protect much of our personal information especially in this new digital/hacking/cyber insecurity era. At the same time, there is a tsunami of personal information awash on the internet.
It is the "gap" between these two family members that is at issue.
The time apart, the geographic separation, the difference in career preparation, the age gap and the personal "interest" program and resulting significant perceptions of two individuals explain much of this "gap".
However, relationships that work grow and develop when some relevant information is shared by both parties.Career data, one assumes, might qualify as "shareable" and "relevant" to both.
And yet, even between family members this gap of "unknowing" exists and, coming out of this moment, likely grows through increased emotional distancing by the responding sibling.
Think about this "gap" as a layer of fog that lies deep between various communicators, corporate, political, geo-political and even between professional counsellors and clients.
The "gap" results from both participants, not only the first observer. Indeed, are we not all operating with a fog over our consciousness? And is that fog extant partly by conscious choice?
Eliot reminded us we cannot 'stand' too much reality, perhaps at least in part because the fullness of the reality surrounding us is too "heavy" to bear. And yet, is Eliot on to something far more significant: that we are so self-absorbed in our own bubble that we prefer the faux-comfort-and-safety of that innocence/ignorance.?
The family "protects" us from the threat of interior relationships that are "skating on thin ice" and from "black sheep" of an aberrant uncle, and from the threat of impending fiscal disaster for as long as possible. In fact, without such secrets, many families might well atrophy or even dissolve.
Schools, too, shape "hard news" in the least painful way to help protect the child. Churches, too, emphasize the comfort and safety of agape love while, paradoxically and mostly secretly, engage in the.most venemous gossip and character assassination of selected 'targets' whose behaviour magnetizes their voyeuristic attention and self-assured moral superiority.
This dynamic forces other questions into the table:
* How serious is the Chinese military and nuclear arsenal build-up? And how will we know before it might be too late?
* How serious is the growing supply of  Iranian fissionable material and how will we ever learn the answers?
* How serious is the anti-vaxxer protest to the prospect of reining in the pandemic?
* How serious is the human capacity/ choice of detachment/ignorance/blocking of self from painful truths both personal and public?
* Is there any correlation (if not causation) of chosen conscious blind deafness to hard and painful reality and a rise in specific human illnesses?
* Is there a correlation ( if not causation again) between willful blind ignorance and the resistance to taking  dramatic and pro-active collaborative steps to stem the treat of global warming and climate change?
* Is the question of human responsibility (both personally and globally) shielded by our own paradoxical and willful "ostrich head-in-sand" stance?
Being accused of "reading too much" into that moment of exchange between those two siblings ("community hospital") would seem natural and predictable, after decades of such a charge, for your scribe.
The kind of detachment I choose is to separate from as much "fog" as possible; the price of that choice, however, is usually and predictably isolation, alienation and loneliness.
Please, hold your patronizing pity!
I invite readers to consider opening to your own opportunities to "lift the fog"....simply by noticing it's faux-security.
Cheers!

between a rock and a hard place...really?

 between a rock and a hard place

In the throes of a seemingly irreconcilable vice, there are few options. If there seems to be only one of two choices, both bad, one tends to vacillate between freezing solid and oscillating between the two polar opposites.

As a kid, I was confused (not to note angry and silent) whenever I was beaten physically and demeaned emotionally by her as well. The "crime"  never seemed to warrant the rage that came over her: a note "ticked" in a piano recital, a failure to win a singing festival, a poor performance in a pre-exam piano recital.

There did however seem to be a similar mis-match between a friendly poke on the shoulder "Hi Roge!" and Miss Swain's immediate use of the strap on my hands in grade four.
Strident women, it seems, have inexplicably found their way into my face and life almost as if by "fate".

Of course, these minuscule anecdotes amount to a ripple beside the tsunami of physical and emotional and sexual violence perpetrated by men against women.
And therein lies the "rub" of the 'rock and hard place'.

"Good boys" do not and must not "rat" on their mother....and yet...
repression of the full truth festers like a toxic emotional boil in one's psyche.
Deferring to the "good boy" for most of eight decades, however, has to finally come to an end.
Although the proportions and dimensions of my plight pale beside the horror inflicted on racial minorities, the story of one family might be illustrative of some of the most heinous social and cultural dynamics.

The abuse of power, whether by a single parent or by a white Christian majority, is the same dynamic in two different theatres.

There are at least two competing forces driving such abuse: a sense of righteous superiority and an equally vehement sense of self-loathing. These paradoxical traits both have roots in a Christian theology that promises eternal life in exchange for living a "good" life.They also are rooted in a fundamental Christian belief in the "sin" and unworthiness of every person. Tying these two notions together according to the Christian view is salvation "by the grace of God"....and that self-injecting into a "life saved" through public acceptance of being born again.
Surrender to the grace of God, however, never happens with the lifting if the inherent "sin" and unworthiness that lies embedded in the theology that sustains a bow to something called humility.
Pretense and humility, like sinfulness and righteousness, oscillate in the mind and spirit of those in the grip of this polarity.

Clearly, these forces are energized in both private thoughts and prayers as well as in public acts and words.

The complex process of integration and balance, analogically by the "ego" (Freud), is characteristically omitted from much if not all of Christian formation.

In fact, ecclesial authority comes from the ownership and projection and enforcement of specific moral "good's" and opposing specific "bad's".
As self-appointed, and socially and politically endorsed moral arbiter, the church first, and then the legal fraternity, attempt to maintain order and safety and security in Western cultures.
However, built into that equation is the power and authority of the church also as arbiter and interpreter of the mind of God.
So those traits of self-righteousness and "sin" are on display as signatures of formally and publicly-declared disciples.

And they show up inside families, schools, the courts, prisons and even hospitals and corporations.
Individuals from an early age attempt to learn to "swim" through the vortex of these forces...not to mention human ambition linked to various paths to power and wealth. The "extrinsic" achievement of power and wealth are likely intended as forerunners and models of "the Good Life" within the wider and deeper parameters of Christian discipleship. Some have even mistakenly sent married "wealth and power," to God's will for "His people" under the rubric of the "prosperity gospel".

Parents' and teachers, while "wanting" the best outcomes for their children and students, nevertheless, bring their own demons into the respective dramas of their engagements. Patterns such as classical conditioning, through rewards and punishments (carrots and sticks), naturally and tragically emerge from such binary footings simplifying the complex relationship between parent and child (authority and governed) into a game of good and bad (right/wrong) experiences.

In a culture over-committed to demonstrating success as the primary way to justify one's worth, the complex nuances of social and emotional and spiritual needs and motivations necessarily give way to overt performance. Such performances can be, will be and always have been open to assessment, to judgement, and to a torquing into a moral "code"...

So parents can and do fall into the trap, as one depraved father did, of promising his six-year-old daughter a dollar for each time her hockey stick touched the puck, in her first year of the sport. The father was frustrated  because she was not meeting his expectations.

Sticks and stones will break may bones ...names will never hurt me...
is an epithet that attempts to protect young be kids from verbal bullying...presumably to reduce physical abuse and leave only the harmless name-calling.
However, for some, words can be poisonous arrows of hate, contempt and various forms of bigotry...as if the society were elevating behaviour.

And herein lies the pervasive culture of abuse...borne of a deep sense of worthlessness (sinfulness, difference, awkwardness, mental or physical impairment) projected onto any we deem weak and available targets, even though they may be family members and/or friends or colleagues.
And then, in a pattern of cultural self-sabotage, we treat the "psychic pain" with exposure and condemnation and punishment of the perpetrator hopefully thereby garnering justice for the victim and deterrence for others who might abuse.

As the street cliche goes, "How's that workin' for yah?"

While I will never understand my mother's (or teachers or other family members or even bishops and bosses) need to abuse, I can and do grasp the depth of the pain of those millions who have suffered abuse...in their family or in the wider society.

Indeed, my own participation in mini-dramas of abuse, not the imposition of legitimate sanctions, leaves me regarding those perpetrators with tragic pity more than with the scorn of previous decades.

...The retired female elementary principal so jealously enraged at being denied a treasured appointment who inflicted secretive revenge is one.

...The anal, perfectionistic high-school principal whose damning letter of reference displayed his own emptiness and fear.

...The mother desperately competing for the approval of her children who builds insurmountable walls between her children and their other parent.

...The clergy so married to the power of his own moral purity and adherence to God's will that he succumbed to the defamation of other people of a different faith.

...The woman so desperate for her own self to be restored to health that she admitted openly "destroying" whatever men crossed her path.

...The corporate mogul so deeply embedded in what he knew was a superficial and seductive training model that he succumbed to the drug of alcohol.

...The clergy so desperate for public acclaim that he rushed to the national television cameras completely robed at the moment of a family crisis....

We each have a compendium of the weakest (and most to be pitied) among us. And we all know that we too share our own weaknesses, that most likely have and will render us worthy of such calling-out as we have done here.

It seems that our legal and ecclesial paths to "shame" those who behave inappropriately (sinfully) is about as effective in their lives as well as in the broader culture as a mask mandate in the midst of a global pandemic....not at all.

There is another option to repression and irate shaming. We are all more than the "victims" we have been and our better angels await our choice to join them in our shift in attitude and perception.

We can thank our abusers for showing us their vulnerability even if they did it in ways we wish had been very different.

None of us is "superior" or more morally pure than our abusers!

Reflections on personal and public, including institutional, naivety

Expectations born out of naivety can be tragic.

It is our personal, familial, social and cultural naivety for which we have to claim responsibility. And how did we get to be so naïve?

Is there a difference between hope and naivety? Are they part of a package of psychic and emotional baggage that comes from a very early age, is nurtured by a co-dependent adult culture and then plunged into the torrent of street life, like a high-wire sensationalists trying to walk on a tight-rope over Niagara Falls?

Is naivety a sure sign of emotional immaturity, perhaps even psychic lack of full development? Are those of us who assume the “best of others” designed both to be victimized by our own mental state and the obvious temptation “for attack” we offer, unconsciously, to those in need of power and control? Is our naivety at the core of all the power-trips being waged, by all of the roaring successes, in social, cultural, secular and political terms, and triumphing with such tragically demonic and devastating results?

Let’s unpack some of the obvious signs of naivety that appear to be universal.

At a very early age, we have to confront the ‘myth’ of Santa Claus, born on the wings of love, joy, new birth, and caring from parents and grandparents to the children and grandchildren. Regardless of the culture, and the various names for the ‘persona’, children everywhere stand with eyes wide open and mouth gaping at the prospect of a kind, loving, caring and benevolent ‘father figure’ out of never-never-land, bringing gifts, ‘knowing too if they have been bad or good’. Parents and grandparents have been committed for centuries to the benevolence, the profound joy both in giving and in the eyes of their offspring at the sight of their most anticipated and valued gift. The spirit of Christmas, in the Christian calendar, is also core to the story of Bethlehem and the birth of the baby Jesus. The whole story is replete with kindness, celebration, humility and homage to a miracle. Married to the secular story of father christmas, Saint Nicholas, the bond is impossible to break, and who would even want to. Link all of this to the economic bonanza of the billions or trillions of dollars “we” spend on those gifts, injecting adrenalin into whatever kind of economic pulse we happen to be experiencing, and we share a political, economic, religious and cultural “birthing” at so many levels. Complete with roasted chestnuts and songs with both repetition and longevity that make them indelibly imprinted on our memories, so deep that many of us can and do sing them without lyrics or melodies, at the most nominal prompt.

Naturally, the ‘lifting of the veil’ for an eight-year-old can comes in a variety of ways: tears, aha in that some already ‘knew’ it was mom and dad all along, or perhaps even relief that the suspension of disbelief was a stretch too far for some time previously. Similarly, the Easter Bunny, and Easter Eggs, and the rite of spring, linked to another pivotal Christian story of the death and resurrection of that same Jesus, offer opportunities for celebration, the mystery of the hunt and discovery, costumes and tummies filled with sweets. Another rite of passage for those in “Christian” cultures, leaves young people with a mixed message of hope and perhaps confusion, or at least wondering.

And then there is the daily routine of patterns of establishing trust with children, both by parents and teachers, perhaps clergy, aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbours, as well as team members of whatever athletic or academic interest applies. These interactions, while not considered historic and legendary at the time of any specific encounter, also form a foundational pattern that includes some trust, some wariness and scepticism, and some dismay for most adolescents. Naturally, the public airwaves, popular music, popular movies and television, as well as social media all play a role in the growth and development of an adolescent world view, attitude, perception and “maturity”.

“Old before his time,” or perhaps, “eighteen going on thirty-five” are phrases we have all heard in the presence of precociously “adult” young people. One assumes, perhaps with some reason, that such young men and women have ‘grown up’ in a family system that cultivated serious approaches to most decisions. Others, on the other hand, receive cliches such as “party animal just like his father” or “so spoiled she will never grow up” or even “mother’s or father’s ‘pet’ child over-protected and at risk of being overwhelmed by reality.

It is the collision of “reality” and expectation that is our focus, and while such collisions occur daily and perhaps even hourly, for many, there are some notable examples that bring this issue into clear lens. Recently, I read the words of Jody Wilson-Raybould in an excerpt from her new book, “Indian in the Cabinet” about her believing Justin Trudeau when they first met that politics was going to be ‘done differently’ and her reflection on her own naivety After having run and won election and after being appointed the first indigenous, female Attorney General and Minister of Justice in Canada, and then having been removed from Cabinet and ultimately withdrawing from elected politics, Ms Wilson-Raybould is changed in her perceptions and attitudes about the ultimate truth and credence of Trudeau’s commitment to change. She is now much more sanguine, more detached, more sceptical and much more deeply hurt and disappointed, even though she had, before entering national politics, worked with many indigenous and non-indigenous leaders and groups in the effort to reconcile the Canadian racial history. A graduate in law, and seasoned and sophisticated and deeply cultured and committed individual, a wife, and a mature woman, nevertheless, she is still appalled at what she experienced, and her experience is conditioned in part by her own naivety, according to her own words.

Her naivety is not to be judged; rather her courage in facing it is what many of us lack. She has become, through her service, her angst, the collision of her high ethical standards with the realpolitik of Ottawa and Quebec, and SNC Lavalin, even more elevated than when she held public office, in her capacity to both comprehend the full complexity of the relationships between indigenous peoples and the ‘establishment’ over centuries on this continent and to bring those perspectives and attitudes to the ‘table’ of any attempts at reconciliation. For her people, and for the people of Canada generally, she is and always will be a national leader. And her contribution to the national debate, on whatever issues she selects to advocate for, will continue long past her brief stay in official Ottawa.

On the other hand, M. Trudeau, her antagonist specifically in the SNC-Lavelin affair, is permanently damaged politically, perhaps, and this is mere speculation without hard evidence, succumbing to his own naivety that “fighting for jobs,” his war cry of support for his position advocating for a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC Lavalin, saw him fall, in the public mind, on his own sword. There is obviously a degree of naivety in any assumption that ‘fighting for jobs’ would trump serious illicit and potentially illegal behaviour of bribery, for which some SNC Lavelin executives have been convicted. There is also a level of naivety among the staffers in the PMO at the time of this affair, that Ms Wilson-Raybould would succumb to whatever pressures were applied to achieve her compliance with the political agenda of the Prime Minister.

Indeed, the prevalence of naivety that encircles the political and cultural ethos is astounding.

·         Biden that the Congress would be amenable to his multi-trillion spending proposals on both hard infrastructure as well as social infrastructure;

·         Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that the Democrats would comply with their “socialist” agenda, even though it does not and never will warrant such a loaded diagnosis:

·         The Green Party of Canada, that the party itself would tolerate, support and even champion a black, Jewish diplomatic scholar as leader, or was that another of Elizabeth May’s expressions of hope-inspired naivety?

·         The long-standing and even longer-suffering fans and season-ticket-holders of the Toronto Maple Leafs that the bumpf of triumphal puffery being pumped out by the organization about the potential winning ways of their million-dollar babies would bring the Stanley Cup to Toronto, after six-plus decades of scarcity;

·         The people who have swallowed, hook-line-and-sinker, the bullshit that has been  spewed forth from the trump cult about the pandemic, the efficacy and safety of the vaccines (all of them ironically evolved in revolutionary time in part from trump’s funding injection), the research about the spread and the mutations of the virus;

·         The same cult’s drunkenness over the ‘election steal’ and their impending and potentially lethal threats against even their own Republican election officials who defy the “steal” and the “big lie” about the steal;

·         The Republican party, especially in the Senate, led by McConnell and Graham et al, that trump is the best their party can offer to the American electorate in 2024, and his candidates in 2022;

·         The Democratic Party, in both houses of Congress that Manchin and Sinema will bend far enough to permit a substantial and historic bill of an expanded safety net, including climate protections to a successful majority vote, and their collective naivety with the White House that starting with a number like $3.5 trillion (lobbied for by the radical wing) was the politically astute approach, when we all know that snail-paced incrementalism is the dogma and ideological “process” of contemporary western politics where “process” trumps “content” every time;

·         The Christian Church, hierarchy, traditional theologians, and church “orthodoxy” based on the presumed naivety and innocence of the ordinary parishioner, first with the printing of scripture, that only clergy could explain and interpret it satisfactorily, and then with such tone-deaf dogma of only male clergy, the even more tone-deaf dogma excluding divorce, gay marriage, and gay clergy; then over the banning of books and contraceptives; and then over the apartheid practiced jointly with the Canadian government to “christianize” and eliminate “the savage” from indigenous children…this list could go for volumes;

·         Governments in the west who/which have succumbed to the totem-pole adulation if not actual sacralizing of everything fiscal and economic dealing with money, as the criterion for assessing and predicting and promoting political success, while ignoring such basic concepts as human well-being, planetary health, rape of the natural resources everywhere on the planet and the basic assumption that those with wealth must prevail over those without;

·         And the complicit naivety of all of us, in tolerating more and more deceptive “advertising” bumpf from a variety of corporations about the safety and quality of their products, (one glaring example from the past is thalidomide!) including tobacco, sugar, salt, unsafe cars (remember Ralph Nader?), jet planes that were not adequately safety tested prior to approval by both internal company quality control experts as well as the FAA, asleep on the job while hundreds died; the naivety of the western populace that NATO will actually, on the ground, face-to-face, protect its members when invaded, and similarly that, should China attack Taiwan and/or Hong Kong, the west will effectively confront such aggression; that the United States, the self-=proclaimed protector of human rights and democracy has not and will not sign on to the International Criminal Court fearing that should it be necessary, their own personel would be subjected to its jurisdiction; and the complicit naivety of the public attitude that whistle-blowers are more dangerous than helpful in achieving a “more perfect union”: and the gullibility of the public that more dollars and more laws and more police will reduce the rampant racism that kills innocent people of minorities of colour at a rate far exceeding the abuse of power against the white majority…

 And then there is my own unequivocal naivety in leaving documents I consider important on the kitchen table while our nine-month-old Portugese Water Dog roams the house, as I write this, only to then appear beside my desk with torn pieces of those documents hanging loosely from her mouth, as she wags her tail in triumph, and attempts to lick my hand.

 Maybe Ms Wilson-Raybould’s open acknowledgement of her deep and profoundly impactful naivety is an example for each of us, letting none of us ‘off the hook’ including the political leaders, the media, the educators, the clergy, our doctors and our legal and financial establishments.

 Being hoisted on our own petard, then, would have meaning and application far beyond “the other” whom we love to point out, while hiding in our own weeds. 

superficialities and stereotypes

In a CBC opinion piece a Muslim thought leader, Narjis Karani, decries the reductionism of the words race, gender, religion and ethnicity as defining minorities. The superficiality obviously obviates cultural traditions, and patterns of behaviour that accompany the full identity of what are effectively still "colonized" groups.

Constricting those people by phrases like "s/he is religious but does not wear his/her religion on his/her sleeve", while it also has application among majorities, minority citizens feel more compelled to "fit" into their new society.

The tokenism that results, in her view, leads inevitably and tragically to assimilation as the erosion of the details of a minority's authentic choices continues.
It is not only the "devil that is in the details," that devil and those details are actually intrinsic to one's identity especially if we are ever to "do nuance" in human relations.

The collision of "nuance" in public affairs and public debates with perceived power agents and agencies is one of the most intransigent Gordon knots we have still not learn how to untie.
Glossing over a place and way for Jews to celebrate Shabbat and for Muslims to conduct Friday prayers, for example, by arguing there is no money or space or time in the organization's world view, amounts to a perpetuation if the colonial "top-down" mentality and conventional "hierarchy" that will no longer be tolerated.
Values and ethics and relationships are not reducible to their superficial acknowledgement, as.if that were adequate.

"Arm's distance" is a common vernacular for "professional detachment and is a cornerstone of the Praxis of many, including Christian, faiths. Detachment, and disengagement, ("s/he is becoming too familiar") sold under the rubric of "objectivity" and "order" and professionalism will not pass the basic test of human nature.

As one who has been accused by professional peers of "being too close" to the students in one arena and then decades later of being "enmeshed" in a congregation, not incidentally by men in both cases, I embodied the argument of the thesis in this piece.

The historic perception that social order depends on impenetrable boundaries between a public life and a private life lies at the root of Ms Karani's critique. And the linking of personal freedom as rationalization for such boundaries is not only specious but unsustainable.

The current phrase "power differential" that lies at the core of thousand of complaints of injustice, most by women against men, attempts to explain the injustice and the inequity that govern relationships between individuals who hold a rank higher than another in a personal relationship. The assumption, and it has deep historical roots, is that first men are more "powerful" than women and that any abuse of that power is the exclusive responsibility of the men. Often based on "legal" definitions and compilations of specific incident evidence, accusations and convictions are determined, without the benefit of "contextual" or what is deemed perjoratively as "circumstantial" evidence.
And the meme of male dominance and female victimhood not only continues but is substantially reinforced.

If we are going to move toward true equity and equality of minorities with majorities and of one gender with another, (setting aside for a.moment, the multiple issues of gender identity), it seems that a critical examination of who people are in some rigorous detail, how they behave both consciously and unconsciously and how we can and must move beyond religiously-based and sacralized determinants.

Getting to "know" students beyond their test scores and their public masks is essential for all teachers to be effective. Only in this way can appropriate mentorship take place.
Similarly, getting to "know" individuals in a congregation entails hearing their deepest fears and highest aspirations and dreams in a supportive and obviously confidential way.
This dynamic of "getting to know" is the one side of a human coin whose alternative side reads "please see, hear and respect me"!

Ms Karani as a Muslim wants to be able to shed the social and politically correct imposition of superficiality to her life and identity.

My students, without every uttering the words, wanted to be "seen" and "known" as evolving human beings with their talents and their warts. So too, again without ever emitting the words, parishioners want to be "seen" and "heard" and "valued" and respected far beyond their vote at a parish council meeting.

And if and when that sharing the process of "getting and beng known" veers into the intimate, we should not as a culture immediately rush to shame that intimacy as unethical, immoral or worse criminal.

Of course, the wannabe and the authentic "clinicians" among us will cry "Out with this specious argument!!"
Their very professional existence is founded on the objectivity and detachment and disengagement of which I write.

And it is certainly not rocket science to note that all scientific research carries with it the intimate human nuanced traits of the experimenter and that "human element" can never be fully excised from the research or from the results.

Is it not time for educators and religious leaders and practitioners to begin to remove the professional armour/mask their professions impose. Could they not be in  the vanguard of the thaw that melts the "ice" of professional and political faux protection from authority figures (potential colonists) and elevates the thoughts and feelings if us ordinary mortals to respectability.
And that would have to include shedding some dangerous myths about "power differentials" and "ethnic  minorities".

As individuals, we are each amazingly complex and needy and talented and unique. If that is true, why do we persist in subverting and repressing our uniqueness in such highly sophisticated and seductive ways?

Surely, it cannot be legitimately argued "for the public good"!