Can we listen to Niebuhr's urging us out of our tribal limits?

The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men. (Reinhold Niebuhr)

If only we were able and willing to consider the “tribe” to be the totality of humanity, rather than the club, whether that club is the athletic team, the service club, the faith community, the linguistic/ethnic lineage, or the nation…especially the nation.

 We celebrate the tribal circles of influence in which we have “power” perhaps because we need to both demonstrate and to prove our worth that we are engaged. We, and others in the circle can and do ‘see’ the impact of our presence, thereby providing immediate feed-back, of our existence. To consider the whole of humanity as our ‘tribe’, however, is to carry the real risk of not being seen, heard, known and appreciated. Steeped in the requirements of being measured, including the need to “measure” ourselves in terms of the benchmarks of cultural norms, we rely on symbols of “success” from the very beginning. Starting with the family, the neighbourhood, school, church, theatre, restaurants, and local teams, we “belong” as part of our “socializing” almost as if the pack mentality provided not only protection but also identity.

Of course, these facilities, and social structures provide ‘nesting’ for children and their parents for basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, and mentoring. Finding our way in the world, has to begin with challenges and opportunities that ‘fit’ our awareness, our age and maturity, and our capacity to deal with them without being overwhelmed. Roles, responsibilities and opportunities to learn about self and others, and the complexities of the multiple interactions, comprise our “schooling” for life. The narrative themes, events, conflicts, acceptances and both successes and failures form a maze of software programs laid over the hard wiring of our genetic identity and lineage. And attending to hourly, daily, weekly chores and timetables, activities and expectations of the adults in the room, we engage in those moments, many of which have been pre-planned by those closest to us at birth.

We initiate, through both birthdays and religious rituals, and we instruct in both formals and informal situations, in the hope and determination to prepare young children and adolescents for their adult lives. And, in the course of all of those ‘preparations’ we might, depending on our own childhood, and whether or not we  seek to endorse and to replicate some of its events and attributes, offer opportunities for children to engage with a wider world. Rotary exchange students, are not only an example of enriched opportunities for young people from around the world to visit and to experience the customs and the condiments, the spices and the scenery of new places. They also enrich the fabric and the culture of the host clubs, communities and families who integrate those young people. Such opportunities are far too rare, although both travel and costs of such projects have made the model more accessible. National programs like the former Peace Corps of the United States also birthed a generation of young adults whose consciousness was profoundly shaped by their experiences ‘abroad’. Today, universities have been developing and enriching programs of international study, as a way to expand the horizons of their graduates as well as to enhance the network of persons with both a knowledge of how other people of different places, languages and customs live, but also a deeper appreciation of both their own range of opportunities and a connection to a concept, now with names and faces, with tactile and visceral memories, that stretches their perceptions, their circle both literally and metaphorically.

Of course, all of these opportunities are available only to a very small slice of any population, mainly to those whose own wealth and education and community associations make the opportunities known and accessible to aspiring young people. Increasingly, philanthropic cells have been developing in various locations where needs have been identified that cry out to those able to offer help. And the opportunities to support those non-profits have increased exponentially over the last few decades. Once again, however, both the activists and their respective target populations, while growing long-term and often deep relationships, have to experience the kind of social and fiscal and psychological dependence the risks of which have to be mediated. Just as the original ‘missionaries’ who brought their messages of both faith and “civilizing-the-savages” (often as a single unified over-powering indoctrination based on a conviction that those missionaries are/were doing God’s will and work!) faced unconscious and highly traumatic bias and prejudices, so to there is an inevitable element of the parent-child nexus in many of these projects, even with their intended benefits.

The culture of family, school, community and all of the warm fuzzies about those features of everyone’s life is supported by some very powerful forces: advertising, consuming, competing, the church, and all of the ‘team’ and platoon/battalion/regiment connections that serve the military and the quasi-military institutions, corporations and political parties. We literally sanctify many of those “warm fuzzies” to a degree that inevitably seeds and nurtures attitudes of disrespect and perhaps even contempt. “If all of those families are living the good life,’ the self-talk goes, ‘then why is this family not doing something akin to that’? Feelings of unworthiness, perhaps spawned in the childhood of parents who may have endured toxic environments, or excessive ambitions of parents who are determined to have their children “succeed” or perhaps a strong ambition for success within parents themselves, resulting in extended absences, both physically and emotionally….these are some of the seeds of family dysfunction. Care-givers, inevitably emerge as expressions of kindness, sympathy and sometimes empathy for those in duress. And, similarly to the elevation of the warm fuzzies of family life, our culture also holds up the care-givers as models of the Good Samaritan, that entrenched biblical verse that champions the rescuer.

So, in many instances, the ‘rescuer’ from all sorts of pain has become a model of both integrity and honour, even spiritual humility. And we have extended the applications of that model to how we “perceive” and “conceptualize” many of our social problems. Leading the way on the rescuer is the church, the incubator of some healthy and collaborative approaches, as well as seeding other attitudes and approaches that are self-sabotaging, both for the church and its adherents. The cliché that captures the essence of this ‘holy’ attitude goes something like, “Everything is going to be alright and you are going to get better and beat this disease!” These words, uttered in the best of intentions, are not only self-serving of the speaker; they are also condescending and patronizing to the patient, given their unreliability and their denial of the evidence.

Of course, miracles do happen, and yet, to couch pastoral visits in false hope is a denial of truth and reality beyond tolerance. Prayers, active listening and sheer attentive and even silent presence are far more appropriate in those situations. And yet, the rescuer archetype, while necessary in dire emergencies, fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes, and even in the emergency rooms of our hospitals and clinics, is not a model for health relationships, at any level. Nevertheless, having not either taught or learned the superior value and worth of truth, including sometimes uncomfortable truths of having been hurt even if and when the hurt was not intended, we are swimming in waters that endorse, inculcate and elevate the concept of the rescuer as hero. We then place pedagogues in classrooms where the discernment between the need for compassion and empathy up against the need for discipline and control is essential.

For a majority raised in such a culture, there is a divide between the way men and women approach the moment of encountering pain in another, especially one who is close both in the family and in the circle. While men are taciturn and somewhat uncomfortable generally, and tend to adopt a “is there anything I can do to help”? approach, while remaining quite silent and perhaps a little confused, women, on the other hand, being hard-wired for motherhood, are extremely comfortable, cozy supportive generally, with expressions of support and empathy, without consciously thinking or strategizing about it. Spontaneous overt support from the females is both a sustaining antidote for the plethora of pains we see around us as well as an unspoken aspect of identity, often linked to “goodness” and altruism and a better society.

On the other hand, excessive empathy, if such a notion is even admissible in today’s culture, to some, seems to elevate all pain to a psychic condition requiring psychiatric ‘treatment’. Grief of a family member, following the death of one of that family, has recently been included as a clinical condition. For some, including this scribe, that is a reach too far. Not only have we all participated in the sacralizing of the “warm, loyal, supportive and happy family” while we witness its erosion and decay all around us, we have also elevated the psychologizing of human lives and their medical and medicinal treatments into a kind of professional and politically correct ritual. Many domestic partners, for example, are quite comfortable “sending” one partner into therapy, while the other remains immune to any need or desire for therapy, when, in fact, the issues among and between them are to some degree shared, and contributed to by both. Males, almost without exception are those “sent” into therapy, by their female partners, and whether or not they comply or resist becomes another issue in the partnership.

So, the sacralizing of the nuclear family, and its endorsement by the ecclesial community, including and emphasized by the ecclesial authority, is a pattern around which, or even in which, many children are raised. This model, naturally, spreads throughout the rest of the culture, in both positive and negative footprints. Those whose early experiences were less than sanguine will carry a certain kind of memory “card” while those with “happy childhoods” will bring a different kind of memory ‘card’ into their adult lives. Issues of authority, integrity, fear, unworthiness, self-acceptance/rejection, social affinity/alienation, courage and optimism/pessimism….these and others will all find a way to play out, triggered in part by the kind of social and political and cultural crock-pot in which one lives and works.

Habits, too, for example of how to deal with conflict, the range of what becomes essential for anyone to include in that repertoire, or what is excluded, denied, avoided…these are also matters that find their early seeds in youth.  A slogan graphic hanging on a kitchen wall that reads: “All of the hopes of all of the tomorrow’s are planted in the seeds of today” expresses this adequately. The insertion: “all of the weeds of tomorrow are also planted in the seeds of today” is rarely committed to a similar graphic.

Nevertheless, most of us perceive, perhaps even believe, that “our” way of doing things, in our family and home community/church/school/workplace, is, at first the only way we know, and then, for some, the ‘best’ way for reasons that remain somewhat puzzling. Old habits, burned into the unconscious, form a tapestry of weaving that hangs on our psychic and emotional wall, as well perhaps as our family room wall. Sometimes instead of a tapestry, those habits become a concrete boot encasing both feet, enabling a perception of both authority and righteousness. And, along with such habits, incarnated by faces and names that meant something to each of us, we bring those ‘tribal’ features into the rest of our lives.

The question of how others, in different times, places, ethnicities, religions, languages, laws, diets, and innate talents and inherent institutions pass through a similar apprenticeship, however, is for many, outside their comfort zone. Even if and when people not originally “from” here arrive, those ‘inside’ the tribe very often view them with suspicion, especially if the preservation of the rituals, habits, traditions and expectations of the tribe are sacrosanct. “How we do things here” is a kind of moat, a linguistic and cultural moat, that declares to any from “away” (to borrow from the Newfoundlanders) that, in order to fit in here, and to be accepted, there are specific proving-ground steps over which one has to demonstrate a mastery, before one will be welcomed, embraced and permitted to participate. Often, too those ‘steps’ are not articulated because to do so would mean that the ‘closed’ shop of ‘natives’ would have to be considered a “gate-keeping’ function openly, honestly and transparently.

And no institution “does” gate-keeping half as religiously as the churches. Not only are those people preserving their ‘community’ but they are also preserving (at least in their own mind) the will and wishes and aspirations of their God, as they perceive them to be. And that form of religiosity, underscored as a requisite of discipleship to a deity, comprises much of the tribe’s identity and expectations.

For a non-indigenous person, for example, to attend a sweat lodge among indigenous people, is a step many non-indigenous have not taken, and have not even considered. Mu guess is that such an experience would go a long way to melting some of the ice that encases race relations in Canada.

Similarly, if all service clubs, and all religious parishes and all schools were to include in their activities, the opportunities both to communicate with those in “foreign” lands, and then to exchange time spent with each other, to learn both the similarities and differences of two ways of living and being….and if all professional schools were to include in their curricula the opportunity to study in other lands, and to read the best thinkers from other times and places, (not only the Greek philosophers, or the French pedagogues, or the Swiss or Austrian doctors, or the African explorers, or the American capitalists)….so that, in addition to the skills and the formal training of each ‘school’ graduates would become open to, familiar with, and comfortable with the “other” as they are incarnated in real people, in real places, in real time, in the lifetime of those young adults.

Our co-existence, indeed our survival, may well depend on our shift from a local, regional, provincial or national 'tribe' perspective and attitude to a perspective, atttidude and acknolwdgement of  our shared international, global, and mutually inter-dependent tribe. Pandemics, carbon dioxide and methane, as well as fresh, clean drinking water are needed in equal proportion, and requirement, and are a mutually shared right for all of us. While there are some advantages to provincialism and parochialism, there are serious limitations to its exclusivity.

Of course, I am dreaming in technicolour! Guilty as charged! 

Why can't NATO prepare and announce a pathway for membership for Ukraine now?

 The glory, honour, dignity and respect of and for Russia, at home and on the world stage cannot and will not be resurrected on the back of a tyrannical, megalomaniacal, psychotic and hollow president who deliberately kills opponents and bullies his neighbours.

No matter how many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and Russians are killed in no matter how many battles in military, cyber and stealth engagements, Russia will have to endure the castigation of the world, (save and except China) for what is apparently about to take place in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Not only is the paradox screaming; so is the incontrovertible evidence that the “west” including NATO really has no perceived, prepared or ready spine to get into a third world war. Nor should it. The world, and that means every single citizen inhabiting the planet, and all of our children and grandchildren now alive and prospectively born into the last half of this century and beyond, cannot either comprehend nor tolerate nor absorb the ravages of another war. Any sentient human being, regardless of where s/he lives, or where s/he was educated, trained, or professionally accredited, knows cognitively, affectively, ethically, morally and spiritually that the spectre of violence that we are anticipating is and will be, throughout history, considered another epic page in the litany of “man’s inhumanity to man”….and furthermore no sentient human being, regardless of the office he or she holds on the world stage, can or will be able to sleep nights, if this slaughter takes place.

At the same time, all of this “talk” about serious and dramatic sanctions, the likes of which the world has not seen, is little more than a puff of smoke in the eyes and the mind of Putin - public relations bafflegab, certainly not serious diplomacy. The strutting and the huffing and the puffing of Putin is analogous to the “three little pigs story, of the wolf blowing the houses made of thatch and sticks, but not of bricks. In this case, the ‘west’ including NATO seems analogous to the first two houses, made of thatch and of sticks respectively. The spectre of a brick house, however, is clearly not visible or even contemplated by the ‘wolf’ Putin.

What would a brick house, in Ukraine, actually look like?

Perhaps it would entail, not the announcement of sanctions, or even a portion of the planned sanctions. In spite of the facts that, according to the letter of the conditions, or the hoops, through which Ukraine must pass, in order to be admitted to NATO, those steps have not been completed, nevertheless, a timetable with specific conditions to be met, to pave the way for Ukraine’s admission to NATO now, would demonstrate, not only to Ukraine, but also to the world and especially to Putin, that his huffing and his puffing and his threats to blow their house down, are in vain. And Putin’s threatening to take it over, and make Ukraine another puppet in the Russian orbit is nothing less than blowing their house down. Bullies, insurrectionists, and anarchists, all three groups of which Putin is an honourary member, seek and find a crevice of apparent weakness, (thatch, sticks, in the fable) through which to “blow” their over-weening bombastic power. They tell lies that distort and pervert truth and reality, in order to bolster their distorted and perverted conception of the world, in order to justify their attitudes, beliefs and actions. And of course, they all know where their like and their ‘kin’ are hiding. And in hiding they conjure spectres, or perhaps fantasies, that are designed to bring them even more power and influence than they already have and are already mis-managing.

The wolf has no legitimate arguments to justify his need to blow their houses down, except his own in ordinate emptiness and need for control. And, neither does Putin have any legitimate arguments to justify his apparent obsession to bring Ukraine ‘back’ into the Russian orbit, except the hollow dream of glory.

The question of the intersection of Russian glory and honour with life on the ground has already been  rusted, hollowed out and defamed by the very actions of the Putin regime. And more territory, along with lists of individuals (including LGBTQ) opposed to the Russian take-over of Ukraine to be murdered or sentenced to camps, will not revive whatever glory Russia and the Soviet Union ever had. The argument that autocracies, (and even that is a euphemism for tyranny) can adapt more quickly, and make more decisive actions without the impediment of public debate, transparency and accountability hardly holds water. It is specious at best and irreconcilable with the preservation of and the protection of human rights. Autocracies, dictatorships are defined by the adulation of a single usually a male, and characterized by multiple actions designed to preserve that individual in power. It is the astonishing to note the arrogance and hubris to which many such autocrats cling that as trump himself so brazenly declared, “I alone can fix it!” referring to his perception of the ‘carnage’ that was the  America he inherited upon his election in 2016.

Condoleza Rice, former Secretary of State, and Russian scholar, now executive director of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, prior to his being tabbed by Yeltsin to become leader of Russia, described her first meeting with Putin, noting that he stood by himself in a corner, exhibiting a shy demeanour which only modified later into confidence and the megalomaniacal, as she put it in an interview with Fareed Zakaria yesterday on CNN’s GPS. The United States has been horrifically tutored in the ways and means of the megalomaniacal from 2016 through 2022 and beyond by a former occupant of their Oval Office. It is not transference to “envision” Putin and trump in the same mental, operational and megalomaniacal frame. The comparison is warranted, although both parties will protest its application to their leadership.

Dancing to the Kremlin’s demands, however, by western leaders, only exacerbates the situation in favour of the Kremlin and Putin’s overweening ambition and political and historic and legacy-building ego. Honourable, perhaps morally and ethically warranted and justified, but nevertheless, hollow, empty and ineffectual in the end.

Tyrants understand only one thing: not threats, and not vague promises, and not public relations poses, but the power of action.

And in this case, the power of action is not contained, defined or exemplified by the words and scuttling of these western leaders who diminish their stature, and their capacity to ‘bell this cat’ (if you will pardon the mixed metaphor) by failing to take action.

Zelensky pleads for the announcement of immediate sanctions on Russia and Putin and his coterie of oligarchs. He has even, in a recent visit to the Oval Office, raised the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. Meanwhile, Blinken pushes back saying that to announce sanctions now leaves the west and NATO without anything left in their quiver upon the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces.  Reports (New York Times) indicate that Ukrainian leaders believe they have achieved the level of democracy and human rights that would qualify their nation for NATO membership. Only in the mid-nineties, Biden himself, then Vice-president of the U.S. argued for the admission to NATO of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to “mark the beginning of another 50 years of peace” for Europe. Now, conversely, Biden uses statements like, “we do not think in cold war terms today” a statement that seems worthy of contesting given the conditions Putin is imposing on western world leaders and the people in their domains.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, argues that the issue is not even on the table, except for Putin having put it there, and therefore no one should be discussing it as a relevant issue in the current public debate. However, one of the specific arrows in the at-least “imagined “quiver” of the west and the European Union, although specifically opposed by Germany and France, (and NATO membership require a 30-vote member consent) is the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine.

All signs seem to point to the public figures in the debate declaring that Putin, rather than driving NATO members apart, has brought them together. If that is true, and if Germany is really going to accede to the closing of Nordstream 2, the natural gas pipeline from Russia, that could provide heat and energy directly to Germany in the event of an attack on Ukraine, then it would seem to be an appropriate occasion for NATO to consider actively the issues around Ukraine’s potential membership, to set out a deliberate, public, transparent and thereby challenging path, both for Ukraine and for Putin, and in the process force Putin to face the prospect of a united, fortified and willing force before he makes a final decision to invade Ukraine.

Of course, such a decision by current NATO members would be highly risky, and highly provocative. And yet, is not the spectre of Putin’s nearly 200,000 fighters, along with fighter jets, missiles and cyber-threats a highly risky prospect. And this prospect inflicted on the world by Putin, is not going to impact only the nation and the people of Ukraine; it will impact the whole world, because, along with the carnage and the loss of lives and the trauma that will be inflicted, this predictable invasion will again demonstrate that the west really has no answer for such a dictator.

And it is the failure to confront dictatorship when they threaten, not merely illegally and illegitimately, but factually, the right to decide their future of a self-respecting, independent people. Having surrendered their nuclear arsenal in the 1990’s, as part of their move to independence, at the time being guaranteed safety and security by Russia, Ukraine now sees that the Russian commitment was nothing more than hot air. And for that failure, according to their Foreign Minister, appearing on 60 Minutes last night, Ukraine holds the U.S. and the west “partially responsible”. Even that aspect of the situation is getting far less attention than the headline-grabbing shuttle diplomacy between Macron and Putin and between  Blinken and Lavrov. It would seem that, at least in the western media, that aspect  warrants no attention.

From the broader and more penetrating perspective, however, (a perspective not exactly appealing to American media) it would seem that we need to hear those less known and less publicized features of the context, in order to better understand the complexity of the situation.

We are all, today, and for the foreseeable future, Ukrainians, not Americans, and not Canadians, not Germans or Russians. And for the time being, we all have to be pulling oars in the same boat as Zelensky, and that includes the active participation of all NATO members, not necessarily in a narrowly-defined military aspect, by putting boots on the ground in Ukraine, but by moving their policies and their

timelines and their conditions out into the open for all to see.

Russia not only has no ‘right’ to invade; it must have no “option” to invade Ukraine.

And in order to remove that option NATO members will have to adopt a broader perspective than the legal, literal, compliance perspective that currently clouds, or perhaps even blinds their vision of the whole situation.

The United Nations, another product of the last war in Europe, also has a role to play here, in pressuring NATO members to come to a conscious awareness that a war in Europe is an event the world cannot contemplate let alone tolerate. And, if we are to move to a global theatre in which collaboration, negotiation and compromise are to rule, with concomitant muscle, the west and the democracies will have to find the spine that, for example, many of the liberal organization like the Democratic Party in the U.S. seem to have lost.

Leadership, in today’s world, where facts are drowned in conspiracies, and where raw power trumps reasoned debate, and where military and cyber subterfuge trumps transparency and accountability, and where dictators throw weight around too often with impunity, and with the endorsement of specific cult-addicted media (think FOX in the U.S.), requires a far more disciplined, courageous and creative response. As Zelensky himself told the Munich Conference, the systems designed to ensure peace and security of world order after the last war in Europe are no longer adequate. They are not holding, and this moment in history demands their re-invention.

And a first step in that direction would be to design, and to acquire a unanimous vote from all 30 NATO members, to publish a pathway to membership for Ukraine.

Internal Conflict --a necessary, natural and life-giving diet

conflict...a necessary diet

What if all of the "shit" that each of us has gone through was necessary and inevitable and also life-giving?

And what if the primary question for each of us is not just to diagnose the anatomy of each conflicted chapter and then contextualize it as the patterns appear but to "learn" from and to "grow" from the emotional and psychic "welts" that remain?
That may sound simplistically cliche.

And yet....

The basic notions that life was never ever going to be easy, that nature is full of "snakes in the grass" and that in whatever situation we enter there is always and inevitably and even predictably going to be any number and kind of "head winds" that we are going to confront seems so obvious and yet poses such a riddle and profound ennui for many.

The riddle might be contained in the Pauline insight:  I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. (Romans 7: 15-16) And, what if, rather than reduce my ‘conflicted self to sin and evil, as carnal and lustful, perhaps the conflict is inherent, natural and even ethically necessary and ultimately good, as opposed to evil?

 What if, WE are the conflict that we bring into each encounter.

And that kernel is the one we seem most blind to realize, to accept and to reconcile.

Conflicted inherently, we both project the tentacles of tension into the environment and also evoke the conflicts and tensions within each of the others present.
Much of this reciprocal projection takes place under the radar of the unconscious. Consequently, rarely if ever does the resulting collision, really collusion, become the acceptable agenda for open discussion and relationship-building.
Instead, there are some well-established protocols, politically correct, and non-invasive "dance-steps" that appear. Intuitive signals put up our defences, point us to detach, or even to withdraw if, after minimal or even moderate attempts to
moderate the rumblings in the gut, we come to "believe" that compatibility or professional reconciliation is either impossible or not worth fighting for.
Of course, our needs and circumstances will extend the time and the energy we put into achieving some kind of tolerable co-existence.

All of this sketch grows out of the "greenhouse" of our childhood where the levels of conflict, while ubiquitous, vary in details and psychic impact in each situation and with each individual.

The "weight" of the burden of our early life shifts depending on our new relationships, both with others and the new insights we learn about how we were a part of the incubator of our family of origin. Self-consciousness, not narcissism, is not a finite destination but rather a life-long pilgrimage. Being true to oneself, also is not an itinerary or a program; nor is it a medical diagnosis or prescription. Wqe work assiduously to "find" paths and places, classrooms and courses, careers and clusters of associates, both as enactments of our social 'hard wiring' and our continual need to learn and grow and develop, congruent with the calendar and our courage and cosmic connection.

Questions of skills and talents, supported or restrained by coaches and teachers (and possibly parents), and books, lectures, homilies, mentors and even heroes, like intersecting movies are forming within our senses and our cognition and our emotional and psychic life, and transforming our "conception" of our place, meaning and purpose.

Sometimes (often?) reaching beyond minimalism, and the motive to “fit” into the expectations of others, we discover our limits, our failures and our finitude in the belief that we can and will only discover who we really are by bumping up against those walls of a situation demanding competencies and strengths we did not  know we even had. Whether those limits and failures are defined as "sins" and/or new insights or some combination of both comes out of our personal, family and culture's inculcation and our integration of those impulses.

Any image of a deity, including relevant texts, shamans, elders and dogmas, evolves from the impact of both the energies we encounter and our filtering of those energies,  an interactive river of both consciousness and unconsciousness.
Our choices, decisions, acts and avoidances in dynamic relationship with the acts, decisions avoidances of others in our circles comprise more of the same cataract of consciousness and its unconsciousness.

Attempting to "snap-shot" any moment, or having to "pause" to absorb the impact of trauma tends to offer a glimpse of the anatomy of who we are, or seem. Pauses and reflections also have the potential to connect us to the pain and abuse in  other moments in other lives and places in some imperfect comparison.

Personal identities, and the manner and mask we "present" to the world depend on many variables including the conflicting motives of self-protection and magnanimity that swirl within, again, as always, in various degrees depending on our perceptions and attitudes of the moment and our place in it.

The dynamism of our personal and private selves, itself a swirling whirlpool of recurring eddies, is engaged in a parallel gestalt of eddies and whirlpools outside of us in concentric circles that both encircle us and impose constrictions for us to challenge. This reciprocal process makes for a release of some many different energies, opinions, emotions, ideologies, faith threads, fiscal, physical and spiritual probes and responses.

And all if these impulses throb within our mind, body, relationships and imaginations, again replicating some of the more complex inter-and inner-relationships in nature.

Relationships and perceptions and attitudes to God, to authority, to our responsibilities to ourselves our community and the universe are all developing and expressing themselves, and through expressions, we "see" who we are and others also believe they "see" us. And of course, they “evaluate” what they believe to be the “truth” of who we are, just as we “evaluate” and assess the ‘truth’ of who they are, including whether or not their mask is pretense, defence, secure, authentic or whatever.

In fact, however, the public/private aspects of our "performance" just like the public/private aspects of everyone else are both presented and grasped only minimally, partially and through a fog generated by all.

Ironically, believing we must be "data-driven, basing our interpretations on empirical evidence, we fail to acknowledge how little we "see" or "know" or "understand" and continually make observations, build attitudes and join causes that themselves are little more than apparitions. Our consent to join those mirages, however, remain integral to our perceptions of who we are/must be/are expected to be and do not warrant dismissal from others unless the experiences threaten or abuse us.

All of our attempts to seek, to find and to impose order on any situation are implicitly incomplete, based on limited and obscure data and perceptions and therefore tenuous and imperfect and flawed.

Our protest to the contrary, that we are dealing with absolute truth, is fraught with fear and levels of hubris and assertiveness and even aggression that are likely unwarranted from any objective perspective.

It matters not the source of absolutes given that all declarations of “absolute” truth are, by definition, human, conflicted, partial, imperfect and tenuous.
We have, however, been "schooled" in the empirical, measureable and dependable data of our senses, repeatable and predictable under the rubrics of theory. And that ‘schooling’ is, by definition, only a partial and incomplete and foggy notion of the whole of reality, and the depth of truth.

And, at the same time as we underdo the discipline of our schooling, coaching, mentoring and evaluations, we risk losing, or at least forgetting, avoiding, resisting and defying our counter-vailing truth:

that we (and they) do not know the whole or the incontrovertible fullness of the truth.

There is, however,  nothing wrong with "not knowing"! The danger and threat arises when we deny/defy/avoid/fail to acknowledge that we do not know.

Incompleteness, uncertainty, ambiguity, confusion and humility, rather than being weaknesses, are essential truths and thereby strengths.

Our refusal to acknowledge the resource, not only the ethics and morality, of our uncertainty and tentative quality of all of our knowledge threatens to hoist us in our own petard.

Messers Putin, Xi Jin Ping, Biden, Macron, Johnson, Zalensky.... are you reading?

My own internal tensions and blindnesses, too late in many cases, have shaped much of my story. Reconciling with the story and the pain I have caused, and have been subjected to, are and remain life-enhancing experiences, although not always, or even often, pleasureable or certainly without deep pain and shame.

Nor is that reconciliation and learning and acknowledging, like sweet deserts, the first choice when envisioning a schedule for a day or week.

Encompassing discomfort and unrest and the uncertainty of the conflict of always wondering about our own authenticity, however, deepens our connection with the universal, human truth/reality of critical self-examination and the tensions of conflict inside and surrounding each of us.....and that river continues to flow inside and outside interminably.

And Thankfully! 

We all share the same cauldron inescapably

 

We can all see and feel and viscerally experience storm clouds on the horizon.

Nevertheless, those storm clouds are somewhat darker and more ominous that many in positions of power and responsibility would, perhaps could, have anticipated. The capacity to anticipate and prepare for what’s coming, within the institutional structures, the governments, the civil services, and the so-called “above-ground” culture is, or maybe already has been, outstripped by the digital revolution. Using the United States as one model, it seems that the arms and legs of governance, the Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the battalions of civic bodies, are all in a frantic state attempting to keep their “hands” on the tiller of what has been considered public order for centuries while the winds threaten to capsize the ship of state.

The pandemic is mutating and spreading faster than our “sensors” can detect, collect samples, examine those samples in certified labs, and then disseminate the appropriate information, including health care guidelines for schools, businesses, and governments to manage the level of threat. This dynamic is rolling out across the globe, within various governmental structures, ideologies, economies and national security establishments. Ironically, while we are being bombarded by 24-7-365 news and public information, in real time, on devices we carry in our hands and often have plugged into our ears, the originators of much of that information are struggling to gather, filter and spread the amount, and the severity of the information to a multitude of audiences.

A pandemic, a recession, an income-poverty gap, a suffocating planet, a revolution in technology as well as a heightened consciousness of the abuses of power and the spiking of violence at the street level, the hate crime index, the drug dealing index, the cyber-criminal index, and even the corporate ethical responsibility index….these are all being conflated in very different ways depending on the people doing the curating, the location of their work and the potential impact on  their friends and enemies. We may have democratized access to information and the capacity to enter into the “public square” through twitter, Instagram etc. At the same time, we have literally and metaphorically blocked many of the previously dependable channels for the flow of both information, goods and geopolitical ambitions and plans. Our individual capacity to digest information is on overload, as the rush of details swamps our filtering processes.

Consumer consumption, (that’s what consumers do!) is higher than ever, while manufacturing of many of those consumer goods has been “out-sourced” by producers bent on achieving maximum profit at minimum cost. So instead of the Dickensian sweat shops, in the west, we have exported those deplorable working conditions to nations prepared to permit such abuse, in the name of corporate and investor profit. Instead of a world order that emerged following the second world war, we have the rise of previously “quiet” nations like Russia and China and India and Brazil all of which appear to be on a “fast-track” to achieving a new degree of status and stature depending on the specifically selected levers and theatres each has chosen to engage. Distribution and shipping, the supply chain, coping as we all are with pandemic incursions into existing labour and also into potential new hires, complicate and frustrate consumers. Expectations, on the street and family level, have been disappointed.

Prices for food, gas, pharmaceuticals, and all platforms for entertainment are rocketing through the what was considered tolerable. This morning in Canada, I paid $1.58 for a litre of gas….multiply that by 4 in order to approximate a gallon ($6.32 Canadian) and there is literally no single person or family not being heavily impacted by these prices. Public reports of price spikes on food, housing, transportation and normal living expenses abound,

The mandates for masks and vaccines,  absolutely necessary public health preventatives, have been unevenly tolerated for months, along with the public policy encouragements/urgings/mandates for vaccines….and the nerves of the people of the world are fraying.

Signs of this fraying are on the streets in Ottawa, in the streets of Kyiv, on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, and spreading to other locations in acts of defiance, anger, revenge and rebellion that are not so pale imitations of the January 6^th 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Signs of the fraying… and we all have to take ownership of this fraying, we are all frazzled, anxious, a little frightened, and more than a little unnerved….are everywhere.

Drivers passing on double lines, and on hills and on curves, impatience with government leaders even in places, like Canada, where protests have historically been peaceful (is that another gift of the indigenous people of our country?) and then there is the ‘other side’ whereby the clerks in the supermarkets take extra time and pay extra attention to “how are you today?” questions, underlining the shirts that ask customers to “be kind” and “be patient”…

Just the existence of such shirts is a tell-tale sign as to where and how we are living….and as one cashier put it last week, “When someone asks, ‘What’s new?’ I want to ask them what rock they just came out from under.” For her the only ‘new thing’ is a proverbial “same-old” pandemic and rising prices, and more pandemic and more rising prices…with no voice or agency to make a difference in either, in the big picture.

“In the big picture,” where the “big” decisions are taken, (like mandates and vaccine passports, and masking for school students)…where most ordinary people do not participate. So, for the very first time in a very long time, if ever, ordinary people are moved to get off the couch, out of the kitchen and off those bar stools, and go out into the public town halls and, even for a small minority, to drive a tractor-trailer 3000 miles to plug the streets of Ottawa, “until all mandates are lifted”. The blindness and rage of such a manifesto, however, is that all or most of those mandates are designed and imposed by provincial authorities. Those regarding border crossing truckers from the U.S. do come from Ottawa, and they match similar mandates from Washington.

Immediacy, and something called efficacy, a measure of what makes sense because it “works” underlies much of the public protests. Perceptions, stirred by latent frustration, anger, fear and a loss of hope and optimism are prompts to action by many who had never before even carried a picket sign. Incongruities, like rules and regulations that appear to make little to no sense to an audience, designed and delivered by health care officials, “on the fly” using their best data at the moment, all of it migrating on the back of a mutating virus for which we are all unprepared offer a public movie script of the classic collision of incompatible forces.

Immediate and “free” access to digital devices offers a handy valve through which to vent and to organize like-minded others who seek to exert their “opinion” forcefully, immediately and threateningly. The 90% of truckers who have compliantly received vaccinations and simply try to go about their daily routines are not adequately or ethically represented by the less than 10% of their peers making all the noise and air, and private space and street “pollution” called a “siege” by the Ontario premier in declaring a state of emergency.

So far, the violence in Ontario has been restricted to “things” and spaces and intimidation of citizens who have nothing to do with the protests. And that has been and continues to be unnerving. Attempting to meet with the Governor General, who, according to their manifesto, is envisioned as ruling with a public committee of the protesters, while also embarrassing the prime minister and his government are hardly a path to relief from all mandates. Nevertheless, the “siege” continues, at last report, on the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor and Detroit, in  spite of a court-ordered injunction to disband. The protests have been unnerving to those ordinary people who continue to grant grace to scientists and doctors and the public figures who echo their best advice. Rather than focussing on the irritant of “lost freedom” as the protesters are fixated on, the rest of us are trying to stay safe physically and mentally, as the evidence is gathered, lab-tested, and the public figures attempt to balance what they think/conceive/imagine the public can and will tolerate as the pandemic lingers.

Balancing public “health” in the narrow sense of whether or not individuals are “infected” with the broader “public health” of the body politic in the first pandemic of this magnitude, both in spread and lethality, in a century, is and will continue to be a challenge for the best minds and the most articulate and sensitive public leaders. And while that responsibility rests on the public figures, ordinary people are left digesting the perceived success or failure of those political decisions. While children are left wondering if they will be attempting to learn remotely or in a classroom, the body politic has been rendered an epic-sized classroom, with distant learning coming through the television and personal screens. Returning to being a “student” as the “professors” are also trying to keep up with the evolving curriculum, filtering their shifting date through the lens of their learning and best practices, was not a prospect many who already may have had negative experiences with formal school in their youth envisioned or willingly accepted.

Pile those “school-room” images on top of images of distrust and ennui fostered and nurtured by an American president and administration determined to “deconstruct the state itself” and the North American continent is being transformed from a relatively stable, predictable normality to something verging on not merely chaos, but anarchy. And, as the civil servant of a small city in Ontario observed, ‘the small minority of pickle-ball enthusiasts is making far more noise in demanding facilities than their numbers warrant.’ The proverbial ‘tail’ in numbers of protesters has clearly taken control of the ‘dog’ in making far more noise and disruption than either their numbers or the validity of their anger warrant.

We see this kind of imbalance every day on every newscast, depending on the ‘newsworthiness’ of the event. Loud trump-supporting women in the Republican party have garnered far more media attention than their numbers and the validity of their argument warrant. The former president, himself, garnered far more media attention than his political standing and positions taken warranted, especially given his iconoclastic, insurrectionistic and even anarchistic motivations. And those motivations and his vacuity were both on full display at the very beginning of his escalator ride in trump tower. Cozying with dictators merely satirized the predictable and reliable public role and persona of American presidents, and the underlying motive of insulting the ‘establishment’ not only in personal terms but also in political action terms, lay then, and continues to lie at the heart of the former president’s modus operandi.

Manipulating public opinion, through whatever platforms are available both to disseminate propaganda and to vacuum cash from unsuspecting and innocent and even ignorant and willing ‘victims’ was and continues to be a national “scam” so far escaping the claws and the grasp of the American legal/political protections. And manipulating public opinion through the same platforms has birthed the “freedom convoy” and, until the assets were frozen, funded the protests.

Tragically, as the freedom convoys interrupt public confidence and supply chain flows, embarrassing public figures in North America and elsewhere, on the geo-political scale, Putin amasses hundreds of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders. Combining the military threats with the threats to public safety and security, is to beg the question about whether the tail and the dog have not reversed traditional roles. Is the tail now in charge of the public square? Is protest, as a vehicle of political persuasion and control, the new war theatre, supplemented by the digital platforms for cyber warfare? Anne Applebaum wrote, several months ago, in The Atlantic, “The bad guys are winning.”

Disaffected truckers, angry at mask and vaccine mandates could pass as the tail wagging the dog in the North American context. Whereas Putin and Ji Xin Ping dominating the world stage, solid in their opposition to NATO, constitute a formidable axis, in a potential conflict in more than one conflict zone, (think Ukraine, Belarus, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and potentially the Balkans). Are Iran and North Korea to be considered allies of their’s? And, if bullying and throwing inordinate weight around to get one’s way is the model for the trucker insurrectionists, they have mega-models in trump, Putin, Ji Xin Ping and Kim Jung Un. Cyber currency, as well as digital platforms are among the new weapons for all those opposed to domestic and world order.

And the sad fact is that the mind set of the iconoclasts, the anarchists, and the insurrectionists is to “damn the consequences” while the mind set of the Democrats, and the Liberals in Canada, the Conservatives in Great Britain, Macron’s party in France and Germany’s Bundestag are all conditioned to attempt to resolve differences through negotiations and the applications of the law. In the cliché vernacular, that is like taking a machete to a missile fight. The winners and losers are predictable from the beginning.

Ontario Premier Ford has attempted to find a middle path, by declaring a state of emergency, supplemented with legislation that would make those who defy the law subject to substantial fines of $100,000 and jail terms of one year. Will that be enough to neutralize the siege in both Ottawa and on the Ambassador Bridge? Time alone will tell.

Is Ford’s siege a parallel push-back to the imposition of serious sanctions on Putin now, before the first shots are fired inside Ukraine?

Given that the Ontario story was the lead story on the BBC World News last night, it is inescapable that the information revolution makes the latest moves on any continent immediately accessible to the whole world.

Neither the conflicts nor the issues themselves will be contained in any specific theatre. And we are all imperiled on the horns of the worst and most heinous behaviours everywhere.

Do we have the requisite power and will to counteract whatever is coming?

Will we reject being reduced to someone else's "function" and ""dog"?

 

car heater options

floor,
floor and cabin,
windshield and floor,
cabin only
All of them tied to a fan and a temperature gauge.
And the driver selects some combination of force of fan, temperature and direction of heat or cool air.
"User friendly" is the operative phrase in an "operative culture". And "operative culture" is the foundational principle in a world where individuals are valued and measured by their "operative contribution" which is again measured and valued on one or both of two options:

1: what have, can, will you do for me?
2: how much have, can, will you "make/charge/invest"?

Of course, this model operates "on" individuals, families, organizations and nations. As "assumed" to be ethically and collectively normal and therefore based on a consensus from the "bottom up", the premise needs to be unpacked.

Does the model, for example, serve the fundamental needs and aspirations of individuals?
Is the competition embedded in the model a healthy one for individual humans and the planet?
Does the model imitate and/or emulate and/or enhance nature?
Is the model sustainable?
Are the thought leaders enmeshed in the rewards and benefits of the model and therefore granite in their resistance to amend or to shift priorities?
Is the global population impaled on the sword of our own design?
Is there a more life-enhancing premise and model that will open opportunity for lives of dignity, respect and honourable work/activity to all?

Some will read the above as a scathing indictment of capitalism and the inevitable endorsement of socialism or, worse, communism.
Their emotional and then intellectual reactivity is in part based on a binary either-or assumption of the limited range of options.
For the purposes of study, Aristotle divided all of nature into phyla and genus. Definitions of everything gave a level of meaning and understanding that could/would be shared, taught, researched and ultimately embedded in the cultural mind-set.
And over centuries, authorities educated in the combined Socratic/Aristotelian model ("I know nothing so I question everything"/these are the names and identifying features of") have propagated both content and method to aspiring students in all disciplines.
Artists experiencing a degree of both constriction from and rebellion against these disciplines. Mathematicians and scientists also stretched their basic learning into their soaring yet disciplined flights into the unknown, the imaginative and the creative.
And then following these expansive equations, manuscripts, canvases and  theories, a whole range of implementers took them and ran with many of them into the development of "operative" models that could affect some "result" in extending or ameliorating living conditions, or in generating profits and investments/dividends.
As the implementers created/designed/built, they merged brings like craft guilds into mass-production factories which continued to refine both their processes and their output.
Ethics, following these developments, imitated the "perfectionism" that became the operative ideal in production, health care, communication, and a new level of employment known as management.
Naturally, trying to merge the perfectionism of highly tuned machines with the ordering of human leadership, management in the new locus for both design and enhanced profit, is and will continue to be a project fraught with the inevitable "irreconcilable differences".
Nevertheless, stubborn as we humans are, we have pressed on with our fixation, a compulsive-addictive pursuit of manipulation and control of each human worker, in orders to demonstrate the absolute unshakeable worthiness of our historic achievements through the deployment of a now industrial-scientificmanagement-
medical-legal
military-informational
cyber-security
inflation of the original model...all of it carrying the weight of ethical case-studies...
based on a hierarchy of the value of human life.
Experts trained in more and more specialized, narrow and "in-depth" analysis, exemplified clearly in cancer diagnosis and treatment, are expected to make decisions that afford treatment to some while denying it to others.
And they are expected to accomplish this feat with a "board" of experts from associated disciplines all of whom have been educated on the highest value been assigned to empirical evidence.
That evidence is then weighed on such scales as projected longevity, will and support to live, attitude to continue living...etc.
There is a real risk in this collision of method of assessment and distribution of resources, not to mention the very act of "ranking" accessibility, that a gestalt of the multiple factors that "come" with each human being, including a full biography, with interests and passions, mentors and supports, spiritual aspirations and life goals will not be incorporated into the decision.
The personal biases of the decsion-makers themselves are also likely to be overlooked, as are the inherently impactful observations of those who are familiar with the subject under consideration.
Ethics and morality are not reduce able to manufacturing tweeking;
they are also not reducible to 140 characters in a tweet;
they are not reducible to the philosophic schools of thought in which the ethicists have been schooled nor the faith communities nor the ecenomic or academic or the political "status" of the individual.
A simple anecdote used in another of these spaces:
An academic ethicist, when informed of a Cambridge study attempting to find a causal link between the 2008 financial crisis and a surge in make testosterone, was totally dismissive even if the thought.
We all need to become intimately acquainted with our life ambitions and purposes, not only our career choices.
And we also must resist any and all incursions into our self-respect that are based on reductionisms to function.
We are so much more than paycheque   and an office, a title and an investment portfolio.
And we must also resist all variety of attempts to reduce us into any of the pejorative roles that so glibly slip off the tonques odour colleagues:
"ally"..."kiss-ass"..."climber"...."indolent" ..."cost"..."revenue"..."policy wonk"..."accountant"..."civil rights advocate"..."school teacher"...."drill sargeant"..."secretary"...."labrat"...
Any of these can be reductions in the eyes and mind of another...and that 'tone' we have all heard.
Dismissals are really colonial.
Differences are no excuse for isolation  or alienation...
Put-down's are emotional abuse inflicted by the neurotic...and each if us have been at different times colonizer and colonized....

It is up to those of us who are, have been and will continue to be silent in the face of attitudes, expressions and actions that demean, insult, alienate and ostracize to take the kind of action which we would prefer not ever to have to take. As Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us,

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Bullies are not going to stop bullying, unless and until the rest of us make them stop. And we are more likely to do that by refusing to tolerate their oppression in all of its many faces and forms.

The racist forms of bullying are grabbing headlines as they must. However, the obscure, unreported incidents that take place every day in each of out lives, with impunity,  dismissively comprise the fabric of a culture seeking a "dog" to kick. We must not allow ourselves to be that “dog”….there will always be someone seeking to “kick”…

And such a culture will witness not only a  pandemic of a virus but an  endless endemic of alienation and the anger and hate it spawns.

Book banners and insurrectionists....boiled in the same cauldron

 Book banning is and always has been a clear sign that fear is the motivating impulse of those energized by the need to “protect” their children.

The Roman church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum forbade books as “dangerous to the faith or morals of Roman Catholics was relegated to the status of a historic document in 1966 after existing from 1564. In 1954, the dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, offers a future U.S. society where books are outlawed and ‘firemen’ burn any that are found. In that novel, books were forbidden as a way for the government to control the thoughts of the public. Just like this week, reasons (really excuses) such as offensive language and bitterness over different levels of intellect that made people “feel bad” were used to justify the bannings.

Digging a little deeper into the issue on readingpartners.org, in a piece dated September 28, 2020, entitled ‘The little0known history of banned books in the United States, we read:

In 1624, English businessman Thomas Morton arrived in Massachusetts with a group of Puritans. But he soon found that he didn’t want to abide by the strict rules and conventional values that made up their new American society. So, he left. Morton established his own colony (now known as Quincy, Massachusetts) with the forbidden old-world customs that the Puritans abhorred. He was eventually exiled by Puritan militia, which sparked him to file a lawsuit and write a tell-all book. His New English Canaan was published in 1637. In it, he critiqued and attacked Puritan customs so harshly that even the more progressive New English settlers disapproved of it. When a book compares you to a crustacean, it’s unlikely you’ll be begging the author for a sequel. So the Puritans banned it, making it likely the first book to be banned in the United States.

From literature.stackexchange.com, we find this:

The book 1984, being about suppression of information itself, was banned in the USSR for being anti-communist, but it also was banned in the USA for being pro-communist. In the U.S. it was banned in Jackson County Florida in 1981 “because the book was ‘pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter’.” (the georgeanne.com, Rebecca Munday, September 28, 2021)

Challenged books in Canada include some very popular titles.

From penguinrandomhouse.ca, we read these words:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: challenged because of ‘profane language, anti-Christian overtones, violence, and sexual degradation.

Such is My Beloved by Morley Callahan: In 1972 two Christian ministers tried to get this novel removed from a high school in Huntsville, Ontario on the basis fo the depiction of prostitution and the use of strong language.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence: In 1978 a school trustee in Etobicoke, ON, tried but failed to remove this novel from high school English classes. The trustee objected to the portrayal of teachers ‘who had sexual intercourse time and time against out of wedlock’. He said the novel would diminish the authority of teachers in students’ eyes.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: In the mid-90’s this book’s presence in the Alberta curriculum was challenged as part of a petition to withdraw books that ‘demean or profane the name of God and Jesus Christ’.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler: Parents demanded the removal of this novel from high school reading lists, objecting to ‘vulgarity, sexual expressions and sexual innuendoes’ in the text.

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence: Letters written in Canadian newspapers at the time opined that the ‘educators in Peterborough would be deficient in their duties if regard were not had for those whose values and sensibilities might be offended by profanity and explicit sex as found in Mrs. Laurence’s ‘work of art’. From the Archives of CBC, “Fundamentalist Christians deem The Diviners ‘blasphemous’ and ‘obscene’ and pressure school boards to ban Laurence’s novels. Several schools comply.

Today, the hue and cry about books that demand banning centres around the title Maus. Detailing Dan Spiegelman’s (the author) father’s experience of the Holocaust, ‘inappropriate language and  nudity’ motivated a Tennessee school board to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel from its eighth grade curriculum. Writing in the Washington Post*, former middle school English teacher Paul Regelbrugge writes this:

“It’s almost indescribable actually. At first blush, it’s like—okay, let’s try to put this in perspective, that it’s one small district in the state of Tennessee. But clearly there has already been an international response to this, as part of a much larger issue. My personal response is that having used this book with kids in middle school and up, I have never seen a text change the dynamic of a classroom the way this one did for several years that I used it—with different demographics, different background. I taught it to mostly African American kids in Buffalo, and to all Hispanic kids in Chicago, and kids from all over the world in Kent School District (in Washington). It becomes an unbelievable vehicle. And all the students that I’ve ever had have connected so profoundly to it. It’s become truly life-changing for many students. So, taking it away is incomprehensible.”

There is a cannonading collision occurring in many public spaces around the world. On one side of the crash is the demand for absolute control by people like trump, based on not only false information, but actually on a conceived executive decision to overthrow a duly elected democratic government. This side believes that is must take control of all levers of power away from those they consider robbing them of all of their freedom, legitimacy and agency.

Funded in part by foreign dollars, (read United States money), this past week has seen the literal hostage-taking of the city of Ottawa, by people in large rigs, hundreds of them, blocking main thoroughfares, businesses, robbing food from homeless shelters, defecating and urinating on private snow-covered lawns, and defaming public statues (e.g. Terry Fox, a national hero who attempted to ‘run’ across Canada on one leg and a prosthetic, to raise money for cancer research). The Canadian version of January 6, 2021 on the steps and in the hall of the Capitol in Washington, this vehicle insurrection is now moving into other Canadian cities, like Toronto and Quebec, to wreak havoc there as well. Opposing vaccine mandates, masks and various other government-imposed regulations, these insurrectionists, like the banned-book insurrectionists, need and demand total control. And they select the first-available, most easily targeted and least likely to push back of a number of targets while envisioning themselves as the “purifiers” and “cleansers” of an evil force, that, according to their conspiracy theories, is creeping over the world like some monster in a Hollywood movie.

On the other side of this crashing are those who actually hold the idea of an open and free public forum, (including all of the applications of that space, in school board rooms, in legislatures, in public health decisions even including mandates in the public interest of protecting the vast majority from a still-evolving and thus elusive pandemic). This side seems incredulous to not only the basis of the “freedom cry” of their opponents, but also to the methods selected to impose their will on the public square. Of course, the public institutions, like the Ottawa police, as well as the Capitol Police in Washington, or the English teachers across the globe, are neither armed nor prepared for such an insurrection, whether it takes place in front of the Parliament on Wellington Street in Ottawa, on in some board of education committee room wherever.

Assaults on the legitimacy of the public square, irrespective of the specific agents holding office, just like the banning of book considered offensive, are not only to be expected, and prepared for. They are also, ironically and paradoxically, the very monster they claim to be attacking. Projection, on a very large scale, funded and propagandized by social media, itself still neither regulated nor exercising self-regulating controls, drowning as it is in tidal waves of cash, is not only a feature of human-to-human relationships.

Projection, the act of projecting onto another (person, agency, institution, government, authority figure) those features of what is in one’s own mind whether positive or negative, is a phenomenon with which no one has been yet able to wrestle to its knees. In its negative application, of course, it has to lead to ascribing traits, behaviours, attitudes and even beliefs that are so heinous as to be unacceptable to all. In the case of the “rigged insurrection,” we are all fed up with the pandemic, frustrated by the various and evolving directions, mandates, incursions into our private lives that everyone has had to undergo for nearly thirty months. Nevertheless, we are not storming the barricades; even the vast majority of those actually responsible for the trucking industry, approximately 90% have all willingly and responsibly received vaccines, including boosters where available.

With respect to the book-banning exercise, to clean up the “smut” that seems, to those self-righteously self-proclaimed “puritans” (without a capital) who seek and demand that their religious views, and their camouflaged prurience reign, exhibit a degree of insecurity and neurosis that, if actually implemented in any elementary or secondary school classroom, would drive the pedagogue out of the profession. Furthermore, the elimination of courageous teachers, administrators and school board officials would render the education system into a tragic eunuch. Children would be “spared” things they are more then capable of relating to and even to not merely comprehending but actually integrating into their world view.

I encountered a similar “resistance” while teaching in a senior elementary school, from the “language arts consultant” who opposed even the teaching of the Diary of Anne Frank to grade eight students. I also encountered a similar book-banning insurrection in the mid-seventies, when The Diviners was under the ‘political’ and moral ‘gun’ of the holy-rollers. Fortunately, the school board wisdom prevailed, and the title remained in the list of permitted texts.

Protecting “children” from many of the more harsh features of the human race’s history, while at the same time, filtering the manner of the contextualizing of the most difficult information, remains a challenge to all sentient educators. Nevertheless, not being injecting into many professional discussions about literature, is the fact that many of our students are experiencing behaviour in their own families that would curl the hair of most of the puritans set on banning books for their own reasons.

At the end of one grade twelve class, in the late 70’s, a young co-ed asked to speak to me after class. A quiet, reserved, shy young girl, from whom I had heard little throughout the term, approached my desk sheepishly. “I really don’t know how to say this,” she began; “but last night was rough at home.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, my father, who was angry, threw me down the stairs into the basement!”

“Oh my God!” I gulped. “Are you OK?”

“Well, I’m sore and bruised, but nothing’s broken, I think,” she responded.

“Does anyone in your family know about this?” I inquired. “No,” she replied.

“Do you have any supports that can help you through this situation?” I asked.

“Well, I think I can talk to my grandparents about it; they have been supportive,” she offered.

In another class, this time, a grade ten business English class, when the subject of abortion arose, from the students, the conversation shifted between those who favoured one side to those who supported a woman’s right to choose. At the end of the discussion, another shy, polite and self-effacing young girl raised her hand, “Well,” she began, “I am certainly glad that my mother did not accept her family’s pressure when she was carrying me. Otherwise, I would not be here!”

As a teacher whose reputation is tainted by public criticism of those who considered my classroom management style too “liberal” and “too close to the students” and “too unrestricted as to the subjects discussed,” I retort, both proudly and also humbly, that I would and even could not have done it any other way. Integrating the English language into the lives of young men and women, includes not only critical examination and discussion of works of literature, naturally including the reactions and responses those works generate among the students, but also a comfort and a courage to express what one is sensing, experiencing, agreeing or disagreeing with in the classroom atmosphere. And my job was always to monitor that often turbulent, and exciting conversation to prevent personal injury or attack, to probe the reasons behind whatever they were thinking and feeling, and to guide the conversation to a modest summary.

Today, I remain appalled by the insurrection in Ottawa, as well as the book banning in Tennessee and elsewhere. Both dynamics are growing on a wave of hate, contempt, neurosis and what can feasibly be termed social psychosis for which there is only highly tentative and even more long-term address…in which we all have to participate.

 

*Caitlin Gibson, Washington Post, February 3, 2022, “When should my kids read Maus? How parents can help children learn about the Holocaust

Mehdi Hasan and Whoopie Goldberg, two voices we need to hear more from

 Mehdi Hasan, on MSNBC this week, captured one of the glaring holes in the public mind and consciousness when he blasted the U.S. media for focusing on the occasional “good news” story about, for example, neighbours to came to the aid of a teacher who had to continue to drive his daughter 100 miles each day for cancer treatment after having lost all of his sick days. His teacher colleagues pooled their days, and donated them so he could continue his compassion pilgrimage. Hasan complained that the media does not ask the question, “Why are there not more sick days for all workers in the United States?”

And the point is not relative only to the media’s having succumbed to the private sector’s, and thereby the public discourse’s, fixation on the micro, as proof of some larger evidence of good will, when, in fact, the foundation of  public need and interest has crumbled under the weight of conventional perspectives of the powerful and rich pandering to the powerful and rich.

Let’s peel this onion a little more.

What are the media selling and reaping loads of cash for the exchange? They are selling minimal, superficial, hot-button social and political gossip. Of course, occasionally, they will print and interview ‘historians’ and ‘legal experts’ to provide some background for a story, without actually pulling the scab of racism, for example, or downright unspeakable hunger, poverty, destitution and a public determined to render such stories as “those poor people” or “why can’t they pull themselves up by their boot straps like everybody else”. In some ways the media executives know that their bosses and their boards are measuring their success in revenue which is measured in numbers of consumers, and more particularly, numbers of advertising dollars.

It is not secret, and it is clearly not rocket science to mention it, that even health care has been reduced to a for-profit model which by definition and by practice excludes millions from coverage for the simple reason that they cannot afford to pay the insurance premiums. And while the medical profession may continue to provide “care” those who can pay have better access, without lifestyle impediments, to more attentive caring than those indigents who frequent ER’s and walk-in clinics.

It is also not a secret that a culture that worships, literally genuflects to, the most affluent among them, as role models for everyone else, including all American children is so dominated by a self-sabotaging perspective and mind-set that holds as a cornerstone of its creed, money is the almighty measuring stick for human value, human respect, human dignity and human honour. And while fixated on this hollow and rusted brass ring, the willingness and the capacity to have conversations at the kitchen table, the office watercooler, the corporate board rooms, and even the university seminar rooms that would connect the dots, that would as simple acts of patriotism, expose the brutality and the frozen conscience of a culture that has fallen to the idol of Wall Street and the worship of anything and everything that might make more.

 Another head on this two-headed idol of American pseudo-religion is agency…making things happen, the power to construct or tear down. Social scientists once posited various classes in western society. At least three, upper, middle and lower, were the common demographics. Now, demographics is laser-focused on postal codes, neighbourhoods, streets, and the ethnic, economic, academic, religions and political affiliations of that block. Digital technology has enabled this deconstruction all of it for the benefit of selling more- technology  first, as a means to selling more widgets as the primary motive. Measures like GDP, GNP, and ratios of income to population, have come to be deployed as “stick-drawings’ of a  far more complex, nuanced, and whether integrated or segregated ‘community’….

 And the very use of that word has lost most of its original meaning. The language of the public square has been so compromised, and processed, much like too much of our diet’s menu, into microwaveable bites of both information and “analysis”, instantly arrived at, briefly heated, and served through a narrow window commonly known as a television or a laptop or a phone screen. And we all participate in ‘consuming’ without having to chew, because not only is it served in mashed bites, but reflection on the source, the motive of the source, the funding of the source, and the absolute patronizing by almost all of the sources of public information, including political debate and advertising manipulations is considered “too painful”.

It is only if and when some ‘stark’ statement, like the Hasan insight above, that arrests our semi-conscious brain, nearly drugged from a drum beat of repetitions of “trump’s latest lies” or Manchin’s latest obstructions, or, in Canada, the RCMP’s latest fiasco, or the military’s latest embarrassment, that we awake to the potential complexity of a specific story, and then begin to wonder about how long this ‘injustice’ or conflict or extortion or hate crime has been brewing.

Pick your headline, and your messenger (media, political actor, athletic or entertainment talking head, bank or investment guru, and you find one or two themes being drum-beaten as if we were all engaged in a tribal ritual…without either music or artistic imagination.

Ironically, even though we have been reduced to ‘consumers’ of whatever anyone seeks to sell, ‘lower taxes, or banned books, or ending abortion, or fraudulent elections (not) or Putin’s bluffing, or America’s supremacy, or Kim Jun Un’s unpredictability, or Xi Jin Ping’s nefarious cunning, or Biden’s verbosity, or Obama’s citizenship (thanks to defective trump)….we have become far more scrupulous and sceptical of the labels on food products than we have of word-belches from public figures.

Any attempt to embrace the public relationship to public information, including the agents of its delivery, is termed communication theory. And as such, it seeks to deconstruct the process of seeding, searching documenting, verifying, disseminating, receiving, and then digesting the diet being served by the mass media.

Rarely, if ever, is there a concentrated, disciplined, cogent and critical examination of the couch-potatoes we have all become, and the sizzle-droppers that the public figures has also morphed into, much of that dynamic birthed in the marketing slogan, “sell the sizzle, not the steak”….

When I first heard this horrific patronizing, condescending and nefarious buzz, I was  appalled and anxious. The man uttering it was about to open a knock-off to the American Arby’s. Selling glitz, rather than steak, told me more than I ever wanted to know about how low the game of selling had fallen. Having in another life “sold” all of the products Canada Packers then offered, and having trained under their seasoned veteran representatives, most of what I learned in those training sessions could have been delivered, appropriately and professionally in an ethics class in a graduate business school. It was certainly not “sell the sizzle not the steak” but rather:

We have these quality products, delivered on a daily basis, from inspected facilities, at reasonable prices without compromise. If ever there is a problem with our product, we will work diligently to correct our oversight, and offer fair compensation and respect to our customer. Mr. Semple, our trainer, is remembered for his insightful counsel: If there is a customer compliant resulting from a bad side of beef, remember in your addressing the situation to be eminently fair to both the customer and to Canada Packers. You are arbitrating the continued operation and success of both at those moments. How things have changed in sixty years! Partnerships, between customer and supplier, were the norm. Today, partnerships have, at least in too many situations, disappeared. The customer, while warranting respect, is not always absolutely right in his/her assessment of responsibility nor in his/her demands for redress.

Hundreds of horn-honking semi-drivers, currently clogging the main streets of Ottawa, funded in part by American sympathizers (the trump cabal, for instance?) demonstrate not only the absurdity of the anti-vax movement, which inevitably morphs into the anti-government, anti-science, anti-shared responsibility (for curtailing COVID) but the political “coup” mentality that was enacted in January 6 2021 on the U.S. Capitol.

Messages, at least in the public domain, are now delivered through insurrections, traffic and mental-health obliterating behemoths, assault rifles and clubs and ram-rods.

Hasan’s professional, articulate and probing question is like a blue-jay cry in a hurricane, neither heard nor recognized as the blizzard of reductionisms, exhibiting the abuse of power by the self-righteous, self-declared victims wearing the camouflage cry of “freedom” as if their freedom was more restricted by vaccines than the pandemic itself.

And of course, the political class has not shed its French-revolution ironic and prophetic anecdote: The politician in the bar witnesses the crowd marching through the street and says to the bartender, “I’ve got to see where they are going so I can get out in front of them to lead them!” Cynical, perhaps, but highly fitting to this moment in North American history.

Hasan’ question, and the many other questions his question evokes, about access to voting, access to health care, access to disclosure and accountability, and freedom from the ravages of climate change, geopolitical military conflict, income disparity and outright bold and unrestrained lies from too many public figures.

This week’s debacle at ABC’s The View, featuring Whoopie Goldberg’s comments that the holocaust was not about racism, but about man’s inhumanity to man, including her profuse apology, her inviting ADL’s Greenblatt onto the set of The View, and her final suspension “to reflect and learn” in the words of some ABC suit, demonstrates too glaringly how low our public discourse has fallen.

Racism is, after all, one of, if not THE most heinous of human acts, entombed for eternity in the massacre of six million Jews in the Fuhrer’s holocaust. And this act, as well as the hundreds of thousands of acts of violence, verbal, physical, emotional and psychic, that continue to be perpetrated by humans against other humans, of all races, all religions, all ethnicities and all geographic regions comprises man's inhumanity to man. Goldberg herself says, as quoted in a 2011 piece from Wikipedia, “My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name—its part of my family, part of my heritage, just like being black,” and “I just know I am Jewish. I practice nothing. I don’t go to temple, but I do remember the holidays.” In more recent comments, Goldberg notes the difference between being black, a visible physical trait, and being Jewish not visible to the human eye.

In effect,  it is not Ms Goldberg who needs to reflect and to learn; it is the suit at ABC who needs to pause, take himself away from his desk, take a warranted leave of absence and contemplate his reductionism of what Whoopie was attempting to accomplish with her comment.

Man’s inhumanity to man, which obviously includes the most heinous acts and attitudes of racism, extends far beyond racism….into demeaning encounters based on little more than a metaphoric ‘scent’ from a person’s cologne, or another’s frown, or a power play that squeezes an individual out of office, often permanently and with impunity, without cause or with some modest cause following by a fatal and gossip-fed innuendo  and dismissal.

Ms. Goldberg’s very person, her history of support of the Anti-defamation League and her public sharing of her nuanced, disciplined and highly sophisticated scholarship notwithstanding, are defamed by a public and a network bowing to the idol of both ratings and dollars. And both of these motives arise from a reductionistic, transactional, and minimalistic comprehension of Ms Goldberg’s words. She deserves far better.

And yet, in a culture so devoid of subtlety, nuance, and the connotative aura of language and the multiple meanings and the need to embrace her subtlety and her sophistication, we can only hope that hosts like Mehdi Hasan will continue to ask his questions, as role model and motivator for tiny scribes like this one.