Friday, December 24, 2021

Continuing to beat the drum for a united human race...unquixotically!

Reconciling the notion that humans are all metaphors, all of equal and significant value, with the notion that we are also infused with a divine spark….

Perhaps we might begin to envision our selves, our identity, our place in the universe as a member of a single tribe, not of disparate tribes, not of conflicting ideologies, not of separate and competing races, not of different nations and nationalities, not of disparate educations or incomes, or access to health care and opportunities for work with dignity. Perhaps, now that real time makes everyone potentially able to witness and thereby experience events, both disasters like fires and floods and pandemics and stories including detailed data about all of them, together as a single human tribe, we might begin to consider the ways by which each representative of “the other” might contribute to the health and wellbeing of the whole.

This common humanity notion, as an identifying and humbling and uplifting perspective would immediately re-configure how we ‘see’ each other, regardless of our respective histories and conflicts and wars and threats from the past. Just yesterday we read a news story that reported the suspension of a town councillor for 90 days without pay from the town council, on a decision from the integrity commissioner of the town, for having bullied citizens against taking COVID-19 vaccines. This morning we read of a story in the Financial Post written by Diane Francis, advocating the concept of requiring those who refuse to be vaccinated to pay for their own health care, in Canada, where national health care is a long-established law and tradition.

Every day, we are learning about the specific decisions being taken around the world on how to manage the pandemic, and potentially all leaders in all nations are learning and benefiting from the best practices regardless of the geographic or religious, or linguistic or cultural source of those practices. Similarly, we are able to access stories, for example, in The New Humanitarian, about human tragedies, terror, starvation, homelessness, refugee migration and destitution around the world. Also just yesterday, on local television, we saw the arrival of mini-homes for the homeless in what is called an Olympic Park, with interior washrooms and kitchen facilities, new homes for physically disadvantaged homeless in Kingston Ontario. The story included the announcement of a specific strategy to incorporate social and health service professionals to visit new residents of the new community, with a view to re-integrating them back into a society that has for too long excluded, or at least turned a blind eye and ear to their plight.

Such stories are not exclusive to Eastern Ontario. Other urban centres at least in Canada, are “stepping up to the plate” to address what has already become, and will inevitably grow, a common shared human story, far beyond statistics.

Those pictures, if they were to be shared around the world, (as they undoubtedly have already been), offer hope not only to the homeless in Eastern Ontario, but also to other towns and cities trying to offer hope. We can only hope that this is not a “good-feeling” Christmas story, prompted by the spirit of the birth of Jesus in Christianity. Compassion for “our brother” is not exclusive to Christianity, nor to any of the major world religions. Indeed, it is our human capacity not only to envision such real-world compassion and empathy, but also to bring programs into reality to take responsible action on our better instincts and angels.

Of course, as part of a world human tribe, we also read yesterday that $100 Billion was siphoned off from the pandemic relief program in the United States by illicit fraudsters who applied, even though they were not eligible, and thereby deprived those in real need of those funds. “Speed over efficiency” was the explanation from government sources, when asked about how such a sizeable fraud might have been committed, with the lax complicity of official Washington. Names were not checked, addresses were not checked and background checks were not performed to ascertain eligibility of recipients. Similarly, of the millions of vaccines promised by nations committed to COVAX, the regime to collect and distribute vaccines equitably around the globe, barely half have been delivered. And we all know that without all people on the planet being vaccinated, no one is safe from contracting it and the longer it continues to plague us (individually and collectively) the greater the opportunity it has to mutate and continue to evade vaccines and therapeutics.

Every single person alive has been awake to the legendary global reputation of the United States of America as the “beacon on the hill” where hard work and diligence will bring great financial rewards and recognition, and the freedom to live as one chooses. That story, embedded both in the mind and heart of all Americans, has been spread overtly and covertly for more than a century, intricately enmeshed in the American psyche, emblazoned on the shoulders of men and women in the American military, encapsuled in the limousines and suits of diplomats and corporate elite and “sold” to whatever needy or innocent or greedy of unsuspecting ‘buyer’ wherever American prowess was implanted, or attempted to be inculcated.

That story, however, is suffering from a severe erosion both at home and abroad, leaving considerable room for others (think China India, Brazil, Russia at least) to leap into the vacuum left by the U.S. No one celebrates the “bloom-fading” from the American rose; however, the global population can see both the American beneficence and the American greed on full display everywhere. And, while opportunists naturally take advantage of their American “example” and role modelling, others are more able to see how to push back against the most militarily powerful nation in history. Putin is engaged in that process today, and the world is watching. His moderate tone and words of hope for a resolution are a benign glimmer of light on a potentially ominous border between Ukraine and Russia. NATO’s next moves, while still unknown to the world, remain a constant reminder of how profoundly inter-connected the world and its people have become.

Similarly, with the Iran Nuclear Pact, and the disastrous American withdrawal under trump, we have all experienced steep rises in energy prices, as we also have given the stealth of the pandemic. In that vein too, we have all witnessed, and many have directly experienced the plague of those who refuse vaccinations, protest health care workers, doctors and health care workers around the globe. Just in Canada, consider by both natives and outsiders to be a relatively peaceful and somewhat polite tribe of people, in the last month, incidents of threats to health care workers have risen 59%, leaving many in the field to consider or even to act upon urges to withdraw from the profession…just when that profession is an integral component of our shared survival.

The forces and the winds, and the fires and the floods, the tornadoes and the hurricanes, the desperation and poverty, the hopelessness, as well as the lawlessness, lies and deceptions we all know are universal. And it demands a universal collaborative, co-ordinated, sustained and muscular response to address the dangerous threats from all of these forces. The forces themselves know no favourites, no winners or losers, no rich or poor, no educated or non-education, no Christian or Muslim or Jew, no Arab or Asian, and no western or eastern culture. And, although it may seem ironic and paradoxical, perhaps even those horrible forces might be what it takes to being us all to a new consciousness, a shared consciousness, and a shared and deliberately responsible strategy to address those forces.

The forces themselves, cannot and will not be defined by a criminal code. Nor will they bend to the will of any legislature, or law or medical treatment plan. They cannot be excised by surgery, or assassination, or nuclear bombs, or cybercrimes, or space invasions. And they most certainly will not be complicit to pouring trillions of cash at them.

We have a moment to come to “jesus” as some Americans would say. In that moment we have to realize and accept that our defences are swiss cheese in the face of the global threats. We have to realize and accept that we cannot buy our way out of this vortex. We have to come to grips with the reality that our knowledge and our best minds do not have, and are unlikely to have, a silver bullet to counter these forces, although serious and laudable steps will bite small pieces off their face. We have to come face to face with the notion that our nationality, our religion, our race and ethnicity, our wealth or poverty, our education or its lack, our political status or none, are all individually and collectively inadequate for the moment and for the foreseeable future.

Hillary Clinton’s “It takes a Village to Raise a Child” has global implications, and those implications are not ethereal, ephemeral , or inescapable. And the village is and cannot be reduced to a single town, or a single neighbourhood or a single province/state or a single nation. We are all engaged, whether we acknowledge it or not, in a process of educating, role modelling, inspiring/destroying the millions of children around the planet. And our individual and our collective actions will spell and define the nature of the kind of air, water, land, and institutional supports those children will inherit.

And if we are unable to take that responsibility seriously for our own generation, then surely we can begin to consider the option, still available yet vanishing by the minute, to grab the apple, that proverbial metaphor of taking responsibility for the next several decades. We can all make the kind of contacts with our leaders that will prompt their own shift in priorities, with a view to reducing the incidence of bullying whether in a schoolyard on in a town council, whether in a diplomatic negotiation or on a frozen battlefield in Ukraine, whether on the streets of Hong Kong, or in the Amazon Forest, and whether on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico or in the Athabasca tar sands, to bring about decisions that respect the humans in  their respective circles, not only for today, to avert what might be an immediate spark of ignition of something no one wants, but also for a much longer term.

More and more families are considering gifts in kind, to charities of choice, including environmental protection agencies and philanthropics, United Nations UNICEF/UNHCR, SOS Childrens’ Agencies,  World Vision, Amnesty International, OXFAM…and the list stretches for miles. And this individual and collective cluster of initiatives will not only have immediate material benefits for those who needs are in the focused lens of their respective help agency, but they will also have the longer term impact of modeling new ways of thinking about how we each spend our limited cash.

We are not merely consumers, nor political pawns in the chess games of the powerful. We are not either ignorant or insensitive to the global situation and the needs of human beings everywhere. And we can no longer use the perverted excuse “out of sight, out of mind” as our way of justifying our detachment and our insouciance to the plight of the world.

Compassion, while embodied in a new LEGO set for a child, and while that set might expand his or her imagination, will not feed a dying child in Africa, nor rescue a refugee in Lebanon. Nor will it scrub the smoke stacks of the developed worlds’ industrial manufacturing plants. We are, and we all know it, consuming to excess, eating to excess, drinking and medicating to excess, and our excesses are no longer slowly but rather rapidly suffocating the planet’s capacity to breath, to access fresh water and to engender a new spirit and attitude that is based more on how we can be part of the solution than an intimate and long-lasting participant in the problems.

We are not unconscious of our determined complicity in our own demise. We cannot be blind to how we share responsibility for the rape of the Rain Forest, for the extinction of species, for the suffocating pollution of the oceans and rivers and lakes. And we are not crippled without options to make new and different and LIFE-SAVING decisions in our personal lives, and then in exerting pressure on our leaders to shift them in the direction of the survival of the planet and its people everywhere.

Bullying in the playground is not any different or reprehensible than it is in the board room, on the union shop floor, in the United Nations, The WHO, or on the Eastern Border of Ukraine, nor in the legislature of Hong Kong. Bullying is still bullying and stamping it out demands a change in all of our attitudes and approaches. ‘

It was Martin Luther King who reminded us that our most serious threats are not coming from “bad people” but from the silent complicity of good people.

In his letter from the Birmingham jail cell, King wrote:

“Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” (Leonard Pitts Jr. seattletimes.com January 20, 2019) 

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Reflections on the Eve of Christmas Eve, 2021

 

They constantly try to escape

From the darkness outside and within

By dreaming of systems so perfect

That no one will need to be good.

But the man that is will shadow

The man that pretends to be.    (T.S. Eliot, The Rock)

 

Being and pretending oscillate like an perpetual pendulum inside the soul of each of us, as well as in the external universe. And the lens that perceives this oscillation is also an oscillation between the intrinsic and extrinsic lens of our paradoxical existence as both subject and object. Our “what” and our “who” and our “where” and our “when” are both dispassionately parsed and also glued in a gestalt of both reality and dream. Not incidentally, our “why” is also “siamesed” into that gestalt.

And therein lies both our tragedy and our hope, also intimately enmeshed in ways that millions of lives have terminated on the determination to disentangle that knot.

Heroes, both quixotic and authentic, fling themselves on the ‘brink’ to save the world. Men especially have been doing that for millennia. Women, too, in different ways, have ignited fires of promise and hope, rescue and life-saving danger, believing in any collage of deities, ethical codes, visionary utopias, and ‘pre-ordained destinies’ that drove them into the fray.

Saving the world, that apocalyptic vision of personal and global salvation, has hung like a cumulus cloud over history forever. It inspires many, and destroys many. Our individual orientation to the apocalypse, among other features of metahistory, is part of our individual and our collective psychic, spiritual, intellectual and imaginative DNA. It is not only a conviction in something called a rapture that signifies our shared utopian destiny; we have each been impregnated with a psychic and a spiritual and a biological and an imaginative ‘gene’ that, whether empirically proven by science or not, shines like a ‘north star’ in the galaxy potentially of both our consciousness and our unconscious. Is the source of that ‘gene’ (obviously a metaphor) some deity, nature itself, our wildest and highest imagination, our ancestors, the drawings on cave a pyramid walls, the most intimate relationship to all living things, plants, animals, water, air that all seem to have both purpose and meaning….who is willing to say?

We all seek and desire, to varying degrees, a healthy existence including some realization of an essential meaning and purpose, juxtaposed with a profound consciousness that the world is uninhabitable. We live poised, too often like an ant eterized for anatomical discovery, between our highest and most loving dreams and visions and our deepest and most heinous fears. Historic references to heaven and hell attempt to capture that polarity.

Whether either or both exist, depending on the meaning and application of how existence is determined, seems mute, given that they are each deeply embedded in the mind, heart, spirit, body and culture of humanity. And if heaven and hell can be metaphors, then it follows that each of us can also be metaphors…at least from some 50,000-foot eye-in-the-sky.

And if we are metaphors having and still seeking our identities, including our purposes, our choices, our relationships, our courses of study, our careers, and our choices of breakfast cereal, and all others too embody a metaphor, then how we perceive and respond to our identity in relation to those others who, themselves, are engaged in precisely the same process of discovery of self, others and the world, including that “cloud” of the apocalyptic “end goal” of the universe.

The synapses that flow between the DNA molecule above and the apocalyptic cloud, whether instrumentally perceived, measured and documented or not, exemplify the vibrations in the multiple tensions in which we each live, in our personal lives and in our shared collective lives. And those synapses, too, like the tides, rise and fall, flow in and out both of our consciousness and our imagination, including our art and our dreams. Whether we call that energy, in the synapses, the energy of the universe, the energy of atoms colliding with each other, the will of individuals and/or the will and love of God, it seems to have the capacity to continue to reverberate, with or without our conscious or unconscious leveraging it.

Using the human anatomy as a metaphor for our place in the universe, anthropomorphizing the universe, just as we have for centuries anthropomorphized God, risks relegation to intellectual purgatory by those who prefer a different objective correlative. The pattern seems, at least on the surface, inescapable, given our human fixation on our own existence and identity. There is a poetic/metaphysical aspect to the metaphor, too, however, given that synapses themselves, as well as colliding atoms, are discoveries of the neuroscience and physics respectively. It is very difficult either to ignore or to resist deployment of such metaphors in the first quarter of the twenty first century. We are swimming in a large pool of scientific method and discovery.

The religious, spiritual and theological vocabulary, attitudes, processes, methods and ethos have largely been shoved aside by the tidal wave of empiricism, extrinsic analysis, and objective relegation of the subjective and the universal to a second tier of both awareness and knowledge, as well as perception and attitude. Transactional pursuits of individual ambitions, demonstrating success, whether through highly ethical and moral means, or through less honourable means, does tend to reduce our relationship to the eternal, and infinite, the imaginative, the archetypal, the poetic and the divine to a quite genuflection, by an athlete prior to a game, or after a score, to a cliché expression of ‘thoughts and prayers’ for those in mourning, to the ritualistic attendance on Christmas Eve Mass/Eucharist, weddings, baptisms, bar and bat-mitzvahs and to the occasional act of generosity  and kindness to a neighbour, especially in crisis.

In reality, while there is no real or even ultimately imagined separation between our daily acts from our deepest religious and spiritual convictions and aspirations, we do tend to create mental, emotional and especially cultural “files” to separate them. We even write and then enforce laws that declare a deliberate separation between church and state, as our way of preventing the state from intervening in our spiritual/religious lives. The precariousness of such laws, however, on the ground, ‘where the rubber meets the road,’ is clear to all who see it.

Indeed, it is our deep and apparently firmly grounded proclivity to separate, divide, parse, analyse and dissect everything, and then to compare everything, including our unique and individual value as human beings, that is perhaps one of the more tenuous straws to which we cling, that, finally and hopefully, is, like the plastic single-use straw, going the way of the dodo bird.

Can we let go of that plastic, man-made, device that has served a purpose, in bringing us a little closer to a deeper consciousness of the veins of a leaf or a butterfly’s wings, and to the genetic composition of various cancer tumors, and revert to a more environmentally friendly, sustainable, and more honest ‘straw’ not only for our soft drinks but also for our cultural, religious, political, and spiritual not merely survival but conceivable and credible co-existence, in a spirit of collaboration and collegiality.

“Pie-in-the-sky” you are saying to anyone listening! Another quixotic dreamer spouting fantasies of utopia.

Not so fast, please!

No one will posit that collectively, as well as individually, humans face some seemingly intractable and potentially existentially threatening forces….a pandemic, a global climate change, a prognosis of further pillage of the planets resources, a widening gulf between have’s and have-not’s, a deepening divide between opportunities and aspirations open to men as opposed to women, a festering tribal terrorist attitude inside and outside most nations’ borders, a nuclear arsenal and the aspiration to deploy it from some, a white-water river of terror and lies including character assassinations on social media as well as too many tabloid models….etc. …etc….

And while these forces are enmeshed, to the point of exacerbating each other without equal and opposite forces to opposed any one of them, we continue headlong down our ‘historic’ and cultural and intellectual and objective and divisive models and approaches and processes as if we were engaged in a compulsive ‘reverse look’ down the telescope/periscope….having eliminated the benefits of their expansive, extensive, and projective vision either to the outer ocean or the sea below by our compulsive fixation with the microscope. Of course, that is a reductionistic analysis of what we are doing. Yet there is some kernel of truth within it.

We have devolved both through multiple successes, as well as a degree of complicity in celebrating those successes, enhanced by a capitalistic and individualistic ethic that celebrates individual achievement and success, into a western culture that sees only about one foot in front of our noses. We are shocked by our encounter with COVID-19, when we have publicly disclosed evidence of its ultimate and inevitable descent upon the planet. And we also had mountains of evidence that we ourselves, (human beings, corporations, governments, and nations) were either silently or overtly or both, conspiring to rape forests, dump sewers and tailings into rivers, streams and oceans, ecologically and willfully destroying millions of species of both plant and animal life, and playing a desperate, and again heroic, game of catch-up, both in preventive activities and policies, and more importantly in a tectonic attitude and belief shift that, without its replacing our current models of “fighting the last war” and “deploying the last reconnaissance devices” and analysing the latest laboratory findings as our preferred path to a most inconvenient truth, and not only a single truth, but a r collection of similar truths…

That we prefer doing things the old and established way

That we “know” more about the past than we do about the future, therefore it is more ‘substantial’ and credible and trustworthy than the future

That our survival and success thus far has relied upon a competitive and nationalistic and religiously independent model of existence that valued “our” reality above the realities of all others, especially of different races, religions, cultures and histories.

That a developed world has the ‘right’ to dictate the terms of our shared future together, while the undeveloped world has to be satisfied with the crumbs of our patronizing beneficence.

That our selfish disregard of those whose lives have been deprived of a full education, and a full access to quality health care, and an extensive and intensive exposure to a specific religious dogma and praxis renders them in need of our mode of rescue and salvation…in order to permit them entry into “our” civilization

That our exclusive and idolatrous concept of wealth and power, no matter the specific symbol, is a license for our own demise and potentially the demise of the planet.

That our “scientific, objective, empirical and transactional’ equations, while useful, are not a substitute for our more complex and honourable and even unique subjectivity/wholeness/and imperfection….that is exposed and deeply experienced in our most dark nights.

Our hope these days, in the longer term, is that these days of darkness, reflection, and urgent crisis and pain can and will offer an opportunity, not only during this holy season, but for the longer tern (perhaps another century or two at least) that brings a degree of welcome and receptivity to what we all know is the profound limits of our understanding of ourselves, of our universe, and most importantly of our potential.

We are not limited by our capacity to acquire things, gifts, presents, and the gold frankinsense and myrrh or Bethlehem…nor by our capacity to offer them even to our chosen deity. We are much more than ‘givers or takers’…than ‘winners or losers’…than powerful and impoverished…than rich or poor….than white or black…than male or female…then failures or successes….than western or eastern,…than Asian or European…

It is not only the United States of America that warrants our celebration!

It is the unity and the hope and the promise and the collective and individual aspirations of the highest dreams of our imaginations and our shared hearts to which we aspire….just as those who have gone before us have done….

And the blinders that befuddled them which we may have tried to remove, continue to haunt us in this holy season of 2021…fear, hubris, tribalism and a perception of our own profound and tragic scarcity…when we live in the most educated, the most spiritual, the most empathic and the most optimistic of historic times……

Can we really connect to that higher shared and loving (in the most profound ways) reality?

Pretending who we are will never outpace being who we are….

Eliot’s insight echoes in each Christmas hymn! Can we hear it in our gut?

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Ethical reflections

In 2009, in a conversation with a university ethicist, I noted that researchers at Cambridge University were reported to have undertaken research to ascertain a correlation between testosterone and the collapse of the economy in 2008.
The research was based on the premise that credit defaults and the bundling of undervalued mortgages and selling them to unsuspecting buyers stemmed at least in part from a surge of testosterone among the math brainiacs behind the scheme.
A disdainful laugh and a dismissive brush-off of intellectual contempt accompanied by the words," I don't think so!" greeted my comment. And the conversation was terminated.


Clearly ethicists do not concern themselves with gender politics as the subject is "outside" their purview.


Prior to this abortive chat, in another conversation with a highly respected legal mind, deeply experienced in national politics, I inquired if the political science department at the university would be interested in discussing the role of masculinity in the public debate of national issues.
Again, with a benign and kindly smile, he asserted, "I seriously doubt that they would have any interest in that topic."


More recently, in a chat with a Dean of a graduate school of education, I inquired into the possibility of studying the work of James Hillman, archetypal psychologist, through a lens of curriculum development for Canadian secondary education. Silence and an off-hand comparison to Jordan Peterson were the respectful and professional responses.


These anecdotal notes are not intended to disparate any of the three individuals on the other side of each conversation.


Only a few weeks ago, I listened to a dental professional describe the caution from her teen daughter's English instructor, as pedagogical direction for an essay that was intended to focus on the role and depictions of women in the works of Margaret Laurence and Emily Bronte.
"Be careful not to indulge in any references to the culture in your paper," was the kernel of the teaching.
Although I merely raised my eyebrows,   privately I wondered how such a directive was either feasible or intellectually honest.


Just this week, I read the comments of a former student upon his retirement from a career as a mathematics instructor at a university.
A brilliant mind, with a passion and talent for piano composition and performance, this scholar also has a website of his brilliant art.
His driving question, "Can mathematics ever develop an appreciation for and a relationship to art?" lingers after decades of his research, thought and praxis.


Are these examples indicative of a degree of perfectionism and purity of different but similar attempts to preserve and protect the academic disciplines to which their respective doctoral graduates have committed?


Specialization, in the pursuit of COVID-19 cells, spikes and mutations, for example, depends directly on specific tests and protocols performed under highly strict and hygienic discipline and conditions in labs by schooled  and supervised scientists.


The questions about any potential correlations between and among disciplines, while partially embraced by and reducible to multivariate analyses, nevertheless remain "outside" the academic main stream.


Upon seeking direction from a second acting Dean of education about a potential opportunity to focus on Hillman as the lens for a critical examination of secondary school curriculum for male students, I received a polite email directing my inquiry to a different professor who deals with gender studies from a feminist perspective.
You will not be surprised to learn I did not follow up.


Here is the nexus of the concern.


If scholars of gender are focused primarily, if not exclusively, on one gender (either make or female) then the wider culture risks the impacts of disseminated and somewhat unbalanced research and the implications in the classroom and beyond.


Another conversation with a superintendent of education in an urban area when I asked about the existence or plan for curriculum that addressed male students replied curtly and dismissively, "We just need to get more computers and programs into the male students' school experience!"


Academic boundaries and professional reductionisms do not appear to be dissimilar. Indeed, the culture's dependence on funding and then deploying siloes of information mined in siloes of academic research risk a permanent dependence on the kind of "experts" whose personal and professional biases "infuse" each and every interaction including those designed and intended to be ethical and comprehensive and balanced.


"Rifle shots" of evidence, symptoms, even lists of contextual support are the stuff of medical, legal, financial and accounts of public issues and affairs.
There is a belief that such specificity signifies competence, professionalism, and expertise. And to some degree. it does.


However, to build first a curriculum and then an institutional foundation on such pillars as STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) as a means to accomplish the goal of raising the number of female enrollees in those fields (dominated by males) as well as incubating new potential workers in a tech culture brings significant risks.


One risk is contained in our dependence on numbers/graphs/equations/calculi/algorithms as means to solutions of problems. Our analysis, diagnosis, prognosis and prescriptions are founded too much on such numbers and calculations.


Archetypes, metaphors, poetry, stages, and their respective connotative and denotative meanings too often are relegated to "emotions" and to the "artsy-fartsy" irrelevancies (another prominent vestige of hypermasculinity).
Just this week, in a conversation with an aspiring business consultant, I was trying to advocate for his adoption of values and mission statements in order to more precisely identify the primary purpose and benefit if his consults to his clients.
A graduate of a reputable business school, he acknowledged he had received no instruction or even orientation to the abstractions of vision, mission and identity. Those were not reducible to a formula.


Trying to "carve" his "artist/poet/painter" from the granite of his professional and disciplined busyness, however, may prove to be a reach too far.
Phrases like "connecting the dots" in a rational, calculated and cognitive process still resists the imagination that not only seeks but actually depends on the "free-reign" of the wholeness of the landscape of all factors, including the intellectual, the emotional, the psychic, and the spiritual.


Our wholeness and our humanity come with us, and with all others into all situations. And we are not and will never be reducible to "digits" or "precipitates" or even "algorithms". Our complexity is not reducible to our biology, nor to our intelligence or emotional quotient. It is our imagination that brings all the factors together...and even if that "composite" picture seems unruly (who can deny it is?) if is precisely that "unruliness" that epitomizes the unruliness and the unpredictability and the irregularities that we embody and that nature reflects.


Compressing our reality to formulae, dogma, containment and order for whatever motives remains ultimately and definitively hubristic and unholy.
I remain committed to bringing Hillman's perspective to whatever tables I encounter...even if that perspective finds few if any listeners/readers among the curious.


Monday, December 13, 2021

"Rape" and "pillage" under our nose

 I used to be angry that trump was even a candidate for the presidency of the U.S. And then, I was even more disheartened that he won the office, with the obvious and perhaps somewhat benign complicity, at least in motive but not in impact, of James Comey, the Hillary emails, and the sexcapades of Anthony Weiner.

And then I realized that sexcapades were another pandemic that has lodged itself into the cultural unconscious of the American landscape. There is Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and….and…and..,,there is HIV-AIDS, and the taboo against gay people, and there is Bill Cosby and all of the other “star” personalities whose reputations have sewered resulting from inappropriate, unacceptable, acts of men exposed by various complaints from women of various age groups…and it became indisputable that sex, drugs and money were/are/have always been radioactive “hot-buttons” for a tabloid, and increasingly a mainline, media. While this dynamic has historic roots, its size, shape and impact have become lethal and tragic in the more recent past.

There is a predictable, guaranteed, paying consumer demographic for smut….fed and enhanced by a prurient* fixation on the intimate lives of public figures. The movies, television programs, advertising and print advertising have, and continue to deploy, female bodies and their lure, as magnets for flushing cash from the pockets and pocket-books of mostly men. Men create the marketing “creatives” and then rush to fulfil the never-ending prediction that such creatives will work on them.

The role of women in this scurrilous and ubiquitous dynamic, while obvious from the perspective of sitting for photo-shoots, and enlisting in entertainment options, dependent on the endless support of masculine bodies, minds and cash, is, however, something of a mystery. Female complicity with abusive and disrespectful, dominating advances by men, needless to say, is less profiled than that of male abusers.

And then, as I watched millions of women fall prey to the seductive, nefarious sexually motivated, engineered and delivered trump “promises” of inordinate personal power and the bowling-ball collapse of those women to the mass addiction of his power, I became tragically, so disillusioned and dismayed as to wonder what the nation, and the male leadership especially, could or would do to combat a seduction of such massive proportions and impact.

Cliches among popular musicians, both country and rock, tout tales of “picking up a guitar to attract girls” and a similar cliché is historically attached to and lived out by athletes, military uniforms and high-profile actors and corporate tycoons. What woman does not want to bring home a Harvard-degreed lawyer who has been recruited and signed by a high-profile Wall Street law firm? The future, it would seem to all witnesses, would be “set” in the eyes of her parents and set mostly in gold. Similarly, what woman does not want to date a West-Point grad, in the top tenth of his class, slated for clearly predictable promotions up the military ladder of rank? And, it is another heinous cornerstone of sexual assault that rape and other forms of sexual assault are all about power and domination, certainly not about love, affection or respect.

Power, in all of its many forms, is an unlicensed aphrodisiac…..It does not fall under the jurisdiction of the FDA, of the Department of Health And Human Services, the limp and unenforced gun-control legislation, the oversight of the SEC, or the Treasury Department, nor is it subject to the scrutiny of the National Intelligence Office. It is not sold in pharmacies, nor in liquor stores, nor in the more recent cannabis outlets. It is not under the radar of the FBI, or the CIA, as one of the most powerful and addictive drugs available everywhere….And the sexual aspect of this powerful drug pervades American culture, in all of its many forms.

Power is so compulsively addictive that its possession, historically in the hands primarily of men, has become a magnet for the female population, who already knew of the magnetism of their sexuality long before the corporate and political and academic and ecclesial opportunities became accessible. And the access to power positions by women was not achieved without much tension conflict, organizing and protesting, ambitious climbing up those multiple ladders of status and power. In order to demonstrate that women are as competent as men, in all fields of endeavour, women sought to prove their worth, essentially by out-performing them in executive, leadership, scholarship, pastoral and care-giving skills. Their capacity to perform in all arenas was available throughout history, but not permitted deployment and the concomitant awards and rewards by neurotic men who were literally and metaphorically frightened of being ‘knocked off their (our) pedestal’ of power.

There is a new wrinkle in the power/sexual politics game, inserted by the fundamentalist evangelicals. They believe, and uphold that belief in practice, that men are the head of the household, that their female partners are to be obedient to their men, and that all sexual activity must be restricted to the marriage bed. Is such a belief system blatantly congruent with, or co-dependent on, a trump model of masculine dominance? Is such a belief system a depraved cry for their male partners to demonstrate power and authority, in a rescuing model, so that those women will feel more secure in an insecure world? Is there a religious lens about God and what is “godly” that is attempting to preserve and propagate a male-dominance model of health human families?

And, how, perchance, is such a belief and praxis system compatible with a public figure who blatantly uses, abuses and disposes of women for his personal satisfaction and aggrandizement?

Religious purity, of the kind fundamentalist literalists cling to, is now being marketed under a church originating in Australia, under the name C3. It has spread into 64 countries, including Canada and the United Sates, almost illustrating a hybrid model of Lions International, with community, (in person and digital) as the social glue, with a literal Biblical interpretation the alleged spiritual glue holding it together, and holding its people in its sway at the same time.

Size, as in all other human endeavours, seems to qualify as a standard by which to evaluate any proposition. The more people who “follow” (for whatever unsavoury and illegitimate motive or purpose) and the bigger the bank and trust accounts of these now ubiquitous global fundamentalist evangelical behemoths, the more attraction they garner from the media. After all, would it not be reasonable and justifiable for media agents to “speak” to an audience that includes members of such religious monsters in order to generate ratings, advertising dollars, career advancement, tailored writing and delivery of daily news stories?

The ambition and search for power, recognition, influence, status and even identity is universal. This is not an argument for lassitude, apathy, indolence and narcissistic laziness. It is, however, a recognition and exposure of the seemingly distorted path pursued by many to forms of power that are reduced to individual, as opposed to collective power and influence. While that is obvious, what is not often detailed is the degree to which the culture complicity endorses and enacts the notion and the implications of its disdain for others. Recently CNN honoured individual heroes whose lives are directly contributing, with others, to sustainable, honourable, achievable social goals in their respective communities. Subaru, a corporate sponsor for these awards, is increasingly devoting much of its marketing to enhancing life on the planet. And while cynics will dismiss Subaru’s efforts, their corporate leadership warrants some public respect.

There is a kind of clarity of motive and action that characterizes these local heroes, some of whom have turned their own personal pain into first an identification with others who were experiencing similar pain and then a plan to address the kind of specific pain they themselves previously underwent. A former convicted prison needing a second chance, for example, has created a foundation executing second chances for other recently released convicted prisoners, under the slogan, “your worst act is not who you are”. Among his community, recidivism has been cut to 1%, compared with a much higher rate among other recently released prisoners. And while both the motive and the achievement of these heroes is commendable and worthy of emulation, representing the better angels of human transformation, there are sizeable currents of various individual and collective pursuits of power and influence that are working against the human survival and healing of men and women and children and the planet itself.

And not all of the nefarious influences are easily detected or neutralized by a common solidarity. One example, from a recent documentary on the ‘gig’ economy, portrayed a male individual in Florida, 36 and living with his mother, who has learned the ‘tricks’ of how to make a living by completing surveys. Although Caucasian, he has signed up to complete surveys for which he is paid, as a “black Republican,” knowing that such a category has very few numbers. He thus has become a sought-after subject for surveys that pay him, according to his own statement, somewhere in the neighbourhood of $30,000 annually. Of course, his responses to survey questions have no relevance or application to the category to which he has assigned himself. And the company operating the survey have no way of identifying him as a ‘fraudster’ and there is likely no “law” preventing his approach, especially in an economy that is sliding like an avalanche into the valley of  “gigs” by individuals everywhere.

Stories abound of individuals who ride bikes in urban traffic to deliver food, in alcohol, and all manner of goods, as “private contractors,” who are universally denied protections of job security, benefits, and safety by the ‘firms’ who dole out meagre pennies for their efforts. Are those corporate decision-makers not also fully engaged in a kind of ‘rape’ of the dignity, decency and humanity of their slaves for profit? And is that abuse not escaping the eye and the attitudes and the actions of many in power who could ameliorate their situation, but refuse to enter into the fray in an unholy alliance with their powerful owners, operators and manipulators. And is that unholy, unspoken alliance not a model of the abuse of power that we saw in the trump administration in epic proportions, and continue to witness in his cult’s defiance of legitimate probes into his private affairs as well as into the insurrection, and also into the manner in which his administrations’ negligence (deemed criminal here) in their mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths?

And was it not primarily male leaders, with millions of men and women followers that comprised the trump cabal? And was the abuse of power, under the guise of empowerment of the “seduced” not the sine qua non of the whole operation? And was/is the abuse of power by that man in Florida, by the trump gang, and also by the thousands of complicit enablers, both inside the Republican party as well as among the plethora of white supremacy militias serving as acolytes to the  ‘movement,’ not a tidal wave of neurosis running after whatever papier mache symbols of power and influence they could cling to?

And this co-dependent movement of enablers of abusers, who seem to be willing to stoop to whatever means it takes to deconstruct the institutional edifices and systems of conventional and traditional social order, serves as “role model” for the men and women who must cling to whatever levers of power/money/food/shelter/clothes they can find?

And such models of abusive power and influence for personal gain not only abound but apparently remain, for the most part, untouched by whatever authorities might bring the behaviour down.

Despondency, despair and desperation, like a early morning fog on London streets, slither up and down the streets and alleys in all of our towns and villages, suburbs and inner cities. And while we focus on a pandemic virus, and a climate gasping for clean air and water, and for affordable and safe food, and for modest gifts for our families at this holiday season, all the while the deliberate, concentrated, illicit and inescapable forces of “rape” and “pillage” (robbing a place through violence especially in wartime) of millions of innocents continues with a kind of impunity that pirates enjoyed.

How can we reconcile our legitimate public contempt for the individuals who abuse women and children with our social and cultural fixation on the abuse of power by mostly men of wealth, political and corporate malfeasance? The mega-abusers like trump know they have commandeered such public attention that they have swamped the micro-news-professionals with so many nefarious acts and defiances. Covering each minute detail naturally swamps coverage of the tectonic shifts in cultural attitudes that pose even bigger threats.

And their dominance depends directly on a public appetite for the scurrilous stories about their “powerful” and “seductive” assault on the innocence and complicity of millions.

Are we all complicit?

 

*Meriam-webster: marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire, especially marked by, arousing or appealing to sexual desire.

Thursday, December 9, 2021

Another Wake-up call to men....desist from all forms of violence and aggression against women!

Did you know there will be approximately 9000 threats/acts of violence mostly against women in the U.S. Congress this year? These threats include threats of death and rape.
That's nearly twice the number from 2020.


According to Statistics Canada(2019), approximately every six days a woman is murdered by an intimate partner in Canada.


In 2021 StatsCan reports that 4 in 10 women have experienced some form of intimate partner violence.


From the Canadian Women Foundation website
canadianwomen.org:
30% of all women age 15 or older report experiencing sexual assaults at least once.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives reports in 2014:
In our society, gender inequality is present in many areas, including politics, religion, media, cultural norms and the workplace. ....
Hyper- masculinity- the idea that masculinity is determined by hostility and aggression- is damaging for everyone. It promotes violence and entitlement.
Reading about domestic violence, however, seems somewhat clinical and detached from the real lives that are impacted...directly and indirectly.


Also, for a male even to presume to write about family violence begs some scepticism and contempt.


My personal life experience is not congruent with the overwhelming data.
Violence in our home originated with the matriarch. However, it did not take place in a vacuum. The failure of the adult male to "show up" as confident, assertive, courageous and “emotionally literate and intelligent” (in today’s terms) and proactively seeking to negotiate with his partner contributed significantly to the power imbalance.
Impatience and a belief that her partner lacked basic qualities expected of men contributed to the frustration and the violence.


Although statistically insignificant as a pattern, perhaps the dynamic of power needs a counter-balance of equal and authentic power, as perceived and applied between "consenting adults".


Men who fail to "own" both an awareness and a precise consciousness of our needs, including our emotions, our sexuality, our fears and insecurities, as well as our authentic hopes and aspirations leave a predictable and tragic vacuum in relationships.
Women cannot and must not be expected to "fill" that black hole. Similarly, for women, stereotypically to believe and disdain male inadequacies and insufficiencies contributes significantly to the emasculation of those men.


A recent letter to an "advice" column asked the columnist for advice on how to tell a potential male partner their relationship was over
"because he is poorly endowed". Why was that man even considering a relationship with that woman letter writer?


Powerlessness, in any of its innumerable faces, is a scourge...similarly, the over-compensating for any neurosis also undermines the potential for healthy relationships.


One of the more egregious aspects of the abuse of power, especially between men and women is commonly known as "micro-aggressions".
A woman about to introduce a guest speaker is mistaken for a female waiter at a banquet.


A male municipal politician tells a female executive, assigned head-table seating at a hosting club, to sit "down there" so I can sit at the head table to introduce my guest.


A male committee member dictates the terms of an incubator  committee's process, precluding the expression of views by female members.


A female expressing a nuanced opinion is cut off by a male who presumes to be an expert on the topic.


A male touches a female's face after a first conversation over coffee, without considering how she feels about and how she  interprets the event which was not arranged as a date.


A male is asked to help a female only to resist in order to continuing watching a sporting event.....


This list of examples is endless; yet, the insensitivity of the subject males renders them "tone deaf" to their own behaviour and attitude.


Of course, such emotional and attitudinal blindness, while hardly headline worthy, underlies the far more serious, dangerous and deeply offensive violence by men against women.


Fear of women "taking over" parallels the racist fear that immigrants will steal jobs from "white men". Similarly, the demand for respect and equality by the LGBTQ community threatens the established status quo of traditional masculine power and entitlement.


Violence itself must not be reduced to bruises, black eyes, broken bones and lethal physical injuries. Betrayal by men of women, through any of many deceptive patterns, including drugs, alcohol, career addiction, affairs, gambling and "hiding" in man caves and/or computer games are all potentially abusive behaviours which emerge when partners cannot and do not "communicate" openly and frankly.
Given the obvious female advantage in both language and emotional intelligence over most men, it is extremely important for women to first recognize that "upper hand" without deploying it abusively and insensitively in their demeaning put-downs of their male partners.


Men need not sacrifice our inherent masculinity by opening ourselves to the more complex and subtle and authentic emotional selves. And it is mostly other men who block such a development, fearful that hard masculinity will erode and eviscerate them in the process.


One of the more telling questions I heard came from a senior male focused on the recently envisaged prospect of attracting women to his traditionally male service club. It was sad that he was inquiring of another male and not a female, even his partner. It was also sad that the question had not been raised effectively inside the club much earlier.


Listening to stories of women leaving such male bastions after a ‘bad’ experience only serves as markers of how far we all have yet to go for our daughters and grand-daughters to experience genuine respect and dignity from the men in their generations.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Write another law?....tragically insufficient in U.S. culture

 

write another law?

Every time there is a mass shooting in the U.S., there are long and loud cries for new laws to control access to guns, to lock triggers, to limit magazines, to ......
Rarely, if ever, is there a cry for the country's violent political and entertainment culture to be reined in.


Paradoxically in fact, it seems that the more and the louder are the cries for new "gun laws", the more the political and entertainment language and culture extend to extremes in both.


The superficial description of this widening divide points to the chasm between Republicans and Democrats including, but not restricted to, the former's obstruction of any and all proposed legislation from the latter. Just yesterday, Senator McConnell openly announced that Republicans were not going even to come up with a platform for their plans for 2022 as they face the favourable opinion polls pointing to Republican majority wins in both Senate and House.


Zero-sum games in a culture saturated with both guns and radioactive language and attitudes, aided and abetted by the deliberate denial and avoidance of empirical and indisputable facts, is a political, cultural, psychological, ethical and moral recipe for disaster.


The perceived antidote of writing and passing new laws as a prescription for the depth and the savagery of such a terminal, and apparently irreversible, cultural cancer is reminiscent of the mosquito scratching itself to death when sprayed with insecticide dust particles lodged in the crevices of its wings.


Ultimately and predictably ineffectual and thereby lethal!


Self-sabotage, however, is not foreign or alien to American, and likely many other, cultures. Hourly magnification of trend lines on stories of violence, through a lens that demands a hero and a victim, a winner and a loser, feeding an insatiable appetite of voyeurism addicted to violence, offers a steady diet that feeds this hunger.


And when the "cultural heroes" who serve as icons, if not actual idols, pursue wealth and status and power through whatever means at their disposal, everything that supports the national legendary metaphysic where cash and greed reign, how can the world expect something different.


Paradoxically too, food and nutrition insecurity, social security deficits, blocked access to health care and broadband, eroding roads, bridges, ports and airports parallel a tsunami of guns and lies.


Back in 2008, where Ms Palin was a vice-presidential candidate, the phrase "mascara on pig" surfaced to capture the aphorism that make-up cannot remove or erase the animal's identity.


Archetypes of horse-races, disgraced and fallen men, oscillating competitions with geopolitical enemies like Iran,  China, Russia in a  vain and limp comparative "balance" with CNN Heroes, or the anecdotal stories of "good news", do not  a nutritious or even sustainable diet describe or prescribe to inculcate a healthy, mature, balanced and hopeful citizenry.


Religious voices disciplined in narratives and theory and praxis of hope and regeneration and rebirth, while melodic and harmonic and welcome, cannot and will not be heard and appreciated in a culture so deeply enmeshed in the angst of literalisms, immediate gratification and individual supremacy over the needs and aspirations of the community.


Reducing "the community" to a town or village, or even to "a state" (States Rights) and thus eliminating the common weal of national needs, aspirations and culture.
Stereotypical "warm and fuzzy" dramas like Hallmark movies, while illustrative of the human drama of romance, serve also as a "float" of icecream and soda pop hardly adequate to offset the deeper and nefarious addiction to violence and deception.
When a law in Wisconsin depicting a specific number of inches for an assault weapon to be banned as illegal justifies the dismissal of a charge against a seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed "protector" of law and order, we see the limit of trying to limit access to those weapons.


When a mother and father comport to buy and give a high-powered handgun to a fifteen-year-old, obviously deeply troubled son as a Christmas gift, we see the blood tragedy of four dead classmates and four others wounded including a teacher in an Oxford Michigan high school.


Chasing and joining a public debate about ideological positions on individual liberty versus government over-reach fails to capture or address the far more profound social and political, cultural, racial, economic and public health crises that, taken together as they both warrant and require, pose. It reminds me of a conversation with a former, now alienated colleague, who, upon learning of my displeasure with his behaviour and actions, protested vociferously, “I will counter each and every argument you present with my own!” To which I replied, “For God’s Sakes, X, it is not about winning an argument, it is a matter of trust and I do not trust you!”


In medical protocol, rarely is a full biographic workup given the time and attention in a professional culture that is designed on symptomatic interventions. Similarly, a symptomatic fixation pervades much of public discourse, legal system modus operandi, political debate and the most social service interventions.


Cultural "Gestalts" are complex and extremely difficult to untangle. Professionals trained in their respective disciplines and their concomitant language and definitions, while essential for objectivity and clarity, rarely cross boundaries into other disciplines. Indeed, the outsourcing of "expert" opinion and witnesses is a well-established pattern of the various processes involved.


A specific "cause" or issue, when investigated by interested parties, will predictably illuminate evidence that includes a variety of sources, as they purport to support the position of the advocate. Such initiatives lead to literary works, political campaigns, advertising campaigns and treatises both academic and public.
Too many events currently fall into a catch basin that demonstrates a failure to connect the multiple active "dots" and "forces" that, taken together, justify a willful blindness, denial and defiance of how the multiple factors coagulate into a picture demonstrative of a need for a significant and dramatic transformation of social attitudes underlying the culture.


Token adoption of "good" causes by corporations and/or philanthropics, even incentivized by tax concessions, are not adequate to compensate for the overriding negative energies of violence, deception and narcissistic greed.
Ecclesial voices, too, for their part, are invariably drowned out by the cacophony of the public noise and expectations.


Two young boys, one as self-appointed public defender, and another "whose life was worthless," illustrate far more serious social and cultural malaise than any single attempt to amend statutes can address.


An economy that relies for its survival on a 75% consumer-driven purchase ratio also demonstrates the personal acquisition of things drowns the public and legitimate need for environmental protections, universal health care, access to public education, and a national commitment to acknowledge basic facts and honourable, transparent and open collective responsibility.


A national budget that pours the largest allotment of national funds into the largest military establishment in world history demonstrates a dependency on hard power at the expense of legitimate human needs and aspirations. As importantly, the recruitment and training in that military and the para-military of millions in the use of weapons, in such a climate and culture, foreshadows and even predicts a deployment if those armed skills against whatever perceived opponents might arise.


The currently unregulated social media facilitates the worst and most dangerous nefarious attitudes, providing enhanced opportunities for coalescing into armed militia gangs determined to enforce their "victim" ideology on the culture.
Sacred kids, suicidal veterans, unemployed refugees from economic downturns, young people learning distrust of their personal and institutional mentors....and everyone running frightened of an out-of-reach mutating virus....


"the horse has already left the barn"...
only to find billions of dollars and millions of people aimed at and purposed for building stronger barn doors...

This gestalt is a recipe for epic tragedy.

Thursday, December 2, 2021

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation..neither has the church

 

the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation

Pierre Trudeau's historic insight demands recall in the face of the current U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of the potential limiting or erasure of the protections for women under Roe v. Wade.


Trudeau's statement focused on decrimilizing homosexuality; it also has relevance to the abortion debate.


Before your pitch your phone/laptop to the wall, hear me out.


My argument is based on the premise that not all aspects of human existence can be, should be, ever reduced to a statement of law.
At the heart of that premise lies the ubiquitous, inescapable feature we commonly call "love"...agreeably the most complex, evasive and yet indisputable sine qua non of our individual and our shared existence.


The church has tried, and failed abysmally, to put a moral "fence" around the experience and expression of love in the vain pursuit of staking out exclusive territory for their control and management under the umbrella of "sacred theology". Marriage, traditionally exclusive to members of the opposite gender, is the most prominent liturgical feature of this "theology" which also embraces the exclusive right and responsibility of procreation and parenting.


Not only has that "man/woman" law fallen into the warranted trashcan it deserves, but the whole premise that the church "fathers" had/have/can prophecy.. the veracity of the mind and will of God is pretentious and invalid.


Even through an intellectual/academic/epistemological definitional parsing of agape, Platonic, storge and sexual intimacy, we are still  left with a "domain" of human existence (including its discernment and comprehension) that defies embodiment in any kind of regulatory premise, save and except the obvious exclusion of all forms of abuse.


And it says here that the radioactivity of the experience of "love" is exacerbated in part by and through its inclusion in and reinforcement of the constrictions of church and state (The state, if course, can and will fall into the "perceived halo" of religious and sacred premises.)


Removing  intimate loving relationships from the supervision and sanction of the church, first, and the state, second, offers the prospect of a degree of integrity and authenticity to the limits of the powers of those institutions...and the implications of such a limitation are potentially bountiful for the ordinary people.


We all know the history of "banned books" listed for the ostensible reason that they were "filthy" and that meant sexual references that the church considered unfit for consumption by their lay and clergy members and employees respectively. Sales and secret reading if those titles rocketed through the roof.


Sex, through the church's commandeering and sanctioning of its use and expression, has sabotaged the healthy life of both the institution and millions of its adherents. Celibate clergy is only the most visible and tragic piece of evidence of that tragic appropriation of human nature. Exclusion of divorcees from receiving the Mass is another. Papal concurrence for divorce and the manipulation if the justifications for marriage failure are two more.


It is, however, the dominant impact on a culture that is, has been and will continue to be the most tragic impact of the masculine-based interpretation of the mind)will of God.
Seen from the perspective of male theologians, monks, scholars and the "fathers" and administrators of the church, the pursuit of order and control and the elimination of all evidence of the "savage" bifurcated and imposed a colonial, domineering and rigid rule on individual humans.


Oscillating far past a medium, balanced and sustainable ethic into the extremes of purported perfection, the church has reached beyond its legitimacy.
And the conception, gestation and delivery of that perfectionism is in effect a metaphoric abortion in that it infantalizes believers and renders ecclesial "blessing" and forgiveness through the Crucifixion and Resurrection the atonement for sin and its concomitant shame, through grace, the ineffable and undeserved gift of God.


However, transactionalism is not the business of a deity worthy of the name. Classical conditioning, critical parenting and the imposition of such moral and ethical power is itself a perversion if the "holy".


At the heart of Christian belief is the love of each human being, in ways and in words and depictions far beyond human capacity to explain or to comprehend.
Colliding with that ineffability and the continuing "revelation" and  discovery and disclosure of the deity is the incontestable absolutism that lies embedded, ensnared, in the dogmatics of the church's sustainability.


Of course, the theology of the church argues that we live "in the between" between the secular and the sacred. It says here, we are and have been far to fearful of the "not-knowing" and the mystery of the holy, and have clung to those tangible and extrinsic pieces of evidence that provide what Eliot calls the "objective correlative" if the novel or poem in which the poet hangs his/her words.


Freedom is not reducible to protections under the law. Freedom exists when the state openly acknowledges its natural limitations and trusts the better angels of the people, trusting that an ethical and moral and spiritual incubator embracing limits to state and ecclesial power can and will open the door to the other sine qua non of a healthy culture, authentic respect of each by all.

Reliance on institutional overreach, whether that overreach is by the state or the church infantalizes too many.

Let's tell each other the hard truth that those masculine conceptions of God's mind and will which have brutalized millions in God's name, is inexcusably hubristic and unjustifiable.

And whatever ruling comes down from Mount Olympus (U.S. Supreme Court) cannot and will not change that legitimate hope and goal