With the debasement of truth, and the rise of hate...where are we going?

  Newsweek today is reporting that Russian state television is advising the Kremlin to deploy nuclear weapons against Sweden and Finland, prompted by their avowed announcement and determination to apply for and pursue NATO membership.

Is this another irrelevant and irresponsible instance of sabre rattling, as a way to fend off these applications? Or, perhaps, is this a sign that the Kremlin is growing impatient with its own failures, with the failures of its military leadership, and of its frustration with the Ukrainian people and military for so courageously and persistently pushing back Russian forces?

Is the deployment of nuclear weapons actually on the table in this conflict? And if so, is it a serious indication that the “power of the nuke” is now the bargaining chip in all significant international negotiations? India is certainly using their nuclear ‘chip’ to bargain for not opposing the Russian invasion and for negotiating a lowered price for Russian fossil fuels. Has India signalled the next chapters in geo-politics, given the spike in growth of her economy, making her now the second largest economy in the world, after China’s economic slowdown?

Some are arguing that the world will split, geopolitically, into a block that includes China and Russia and India and Venezuela and Possibly Brazil, with Europe and the U.S. and Canada, Australia and New Zealand forming another block. Kissinger warns that the United States has to be careful not to alienate both China and Russia simultaneously. He also reports that Putin will have to end this war in Ukraine when he ‘sees’ that Russia’s power and status on the world stage is dissipating.

Reports of Putin’s ‘blood cancer’ along with reports of his having undergone back surgery related to his blood cancer, continue to be denied by Russian reports. However, there are also reports today that a bonafide coup movement is underway inside Russia to remove Putin from power. Whether these reports, like those of the potential deployment of nuclear weapons against Sweden and Finland, have any merit, and warrant serious consideration is so uncertain as to render them ‘speculative’ at best, and worrisome at worst. The Associated Press reports May 13, 2022, in a piece entitled, “Russian soldier on trial in first Ukraine war-crimes case” by Oleksandr Stashevski and Richar Lardner:

“A 21-year-old Russian soldier went on trial Friday in Kyiv for the killing of an unarmed Ukrainian civilian, marking the first war crime prosecution of a member of the Russian military from 11 weeks of bloodshed in Ukraine. The Soldier, a captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting a 62-year-old Ukrainian man in the head through an open car window in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka during the first days of the war.

This trial is being conducted on the basis of Ukrainian criminal law, by Ukrainian prosecutors. So, the Ukrainians are fighting on the battlefield, in the air, in the bunkers and streets and now in the courts.

The rest of the world is watching and trying, without the benefit of intelligence initiatives, except those making their way into the public media, to sort out what is going on, what is about to go on, the implications of what has already taken place and any glimmer of hope that this serious slaughter might be brought to an end, without having to face the spectre of opening the Pandora’s Box of the nuclear threat.

The matter of the loss of trust seems to pervade the background of this conflict. Established as a ‘defensive alliance’ to protect members from any military incursion or invasion by Russia. NATO has itself now been morphed into an ‘offensive monster’ by the Russian wannabe czar as justification of his own war against Ukraine. It was Ukraine that was promised security by Russia, the UK and the US when it destroyed its nuclear weapons in 1994 and joined the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT).

Here is a glimpse of the wording of that treaty:

Confirm the following:

1.     The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance  with the principles of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.

2.     The Russian Federation, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with theCharter of the United Nations.

4.     (not a typo) The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance t Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.

Why would anyone of us not be confused, frustrated, and utterly in contempt of the hypocrisy, at least, and the undermining and sabotaging of their own words in initiating this act of war against Ukraine?

And, who would not also be in contempt of much of the language of public discourse that has devolved into little more than a papier mache verbosity that seeks to provide the quickest and most facile escape from the truth on the part of too many political actors. At the heart of that fabrication, that ‘front’ of cosmetics in which too many aspiring political leaders have been schooled, lies a foundational cornerstone of hate….whether it be of ‘fascists’ (as Putin falsely alleges in Ukraine) or blacks as white supremacists falsely allege in the U.S. or Jews also the target of white supremacists, or Asians, also a target of white supremacists….

Racial hatred, and the fear of ‘replacement’ by people whose skin is not white, is a phenomenon unrestricted by national boundaries, a fire fueled by social media also without jurisdictional constraints, in a world in which the people of good faith and good will seem to have faded in both numbers and volume. In another life, a political cliché that bounced around a northern Ontario town in a counter-offensive to what was perceived by many as the likelihood of a less-than-honourable candidate would win electoral victory ran something like this: ‘If the good people leave the field, then the less savoury will be free to take it over.’

Millions of ordinary people struggle not only with spiking inflation at the gas pump, in the grocery store, and the vagaries of an invisible virus but also with a conviction that those in charge will tell us what they think and believe we want to hear, that is what they believe will succeed in securing and maintaining public confidence and trust. And all the while, that confidence and trust has been so eroded, not by all political actors, but by enough of the really heinous and shameless ones who seem to have a way of seeking and grabbing the largest microphones. Loud noises, trumpeting lies that even the prevaricators know to be false, have thundered through the television and computer screens for decades, leaving in their wake a tidal wave of unresolved existential threats and a citizenry many of whom have lost hope that any real progress will or even can be made in this kind of ethos.

If the ethos and the actors responsible for that ethos are committed to their own self-denial, their own self-sabotage and the self-sabotage of the public interest, and all of this continues without a hint of remorse, and certainly no sign of a change, and the capacity to generate more ‘coverage’ from the media that is co-dependent on the ratings that come from violent rhetoric and lies, it is not only toxic gases, and nuclear missiles that we have to worry about.

We have to worry about the abject failure of many of those in positions of public influence, (think many Republicans and Tucker Carlson and Fox News, an  oxymoron itself, Lepine, and Renaud Camus)

France24.com 08/11/2021, (reports): It was in his (Renaud Camus’) book ‘Le Grand Remplacement’ that he first coined the term ‘the great replacement’ which became a rallying cry for the far right worldwide….Rooted in racist nationalist views, the great replacement theory purports that an elitist group is colluding against  white French and European people to eventually  replace them with non-Europeans from Africa and the Middle East, the majority of whom are Muslim. Renaud Camus often refers to this as ‘genocide by substitution’.

Support for the healthy exchange of ideas, as well as the healthy address of serious social and political issues like food shortage, environmental degradation, a global pandemic, become highly problematic, if not inexorably complex and perhaps even meaningless where there is no basis for a common set of facts, and where the rot of human decay in hatred and contempt for the other, regardless of whom that ‘other’ might be dominates.

Descending to our most base instincts, like rabid animals starved in a drought-stricken desert, where our mere survival becomes our only goal and thereby our own feasible option, renders us all at the mercy of that survival motive. It may well not be a case of the survival of a civilization over another, but rather the survival of the whole of humanity that might be at risk, in spite of the plethora of platinum innovations in so many fields of public health, restorative justice, instant and accurate and accessible communications and the ingenuity of millions of brilliant scientists and thinkers dedicated to the ‘public good’ and the well-being of each of us.

We read and write about daily occurrences like the war crime trial, the Putin health reports, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the latest COVID numbers…and yet, we all know that much of that is only drivel if we are unable and unwilling to tackle the existential crises that exceed all national boundaries and cultures, all religions and atheism, all political ideologies and caste systems.

The Romans had a phrase that might be appropriate in these times:

Quo Vadis? Where are you marching or whither goest thou?

And we might ponder, “Wherever it is, will it be a road girded with truth, courage and collaborative hope or NOT?”

Men need male support anecdotally, daily to shape our transformation....not just new programs

The Globe and Mail is running a series about the need to design and deliver ‘programs’ to and for men, to cope with the violent behaviour of men primarily in relationships with women.

Two things stood out from that reading:

1) The preponderance of public funds that are being poured into addressing domestic violence is supporting both facilities and programs for women victims. The argument from those quarters is that any new funding for facilities and programs for men will drain off the funds they are already receiving.

2)    2) The current situation, in this as in most public policy decisions, is tilted firmly in the direction of “crisis management” and not prevention.

Of course, both of these points are directly related, in that “prevention” of violence perpetrated by men against women requires not only to address the needs of those victims, but also to seek to prevent further abuse,

So, what is it about “crisis” management that is far more appealing and even seductive to decision-makers in the political arena, as well as in the policy arena, than prevention?

How do we measure the impact of any dollars spent on “preventing” men from imposing violent acts and emotions on women? How many men “have not” committed domestic violence as a result of this program? Who knows?

On the other hand, a woman in distress, as a victim of violence, absolutely needs support, counsel and a continuing circle of advocacy to attempt to re-build her life, whether or not she brings young children into the shelter. And those ‘outcomes’ are and will continue to be measured, in terms of number of women served, number of women who re-built their lives and numbers of children who successfully survived the family trauma. Politically, then, the sheer force of e empirical reality in terms of measurable results favours the “crisis management”.

The cliché’s that come from the men who have perpetrated family violence, and then sought help, abound, and are highly predictable:

We’re told from a very young age, that we must not show our emotions.

We’re told to ‘suck it up’ if and when we are injured or bullied.

We’re told to ‘answer back’ in order to stop the bullying.

We’ re told that “emotions are for girls” and not for boys,

We’re told that emotions will get in the way of a successful career.

And then, when we are in relationship with a woman, we bring all of that baggage into the home and we are completely without preparation for what kind of communications are necessary in order to grow and to sustain the relationship. Not only that, our women partners have been engaging in the expression of their emotions from their early years. So not only are they more in touch with their emotions, they also are much more comfortable in naming, acknowledging and expressing them. So, then, we are in a double bind and we are scared silly (read shitless!)

This stereotypical and reductionistic concept of masculinity is playing out on the battlefield in Ukraine, as well as in other ‘hot spots’ around the globe. Men who absolutely believe they need power over others, in order to satisfy their fundamental needs as men, are perverting both masculinity and their people, including, in Ukraine, the slaughter of thousands, and the displacement of millions.

And while the war cannot be attributed exclusively to the perversion of healthy masculinity, that is certainly one of the root impulses, whether it will ever be uttered in any peace negotiation room.

So, how does an enlightened culture, a wealthy and relatively educated culture address the question of educating boys and young men in the attributes and the benefits of androgyny, of honouring their true feelings, and of discerning the difference between ‘self-pity’ and authentic injury or emotional wounding. Our mothers were quite good at ‘fixing’ our “owie’s” when we fell off our bikes and skinned our knees, when we were seven. And yet our hockey coach was not so considerate if we were pummeled to the ice by an opponent as we attempted to pass or to score. Our fathers, too, in many cases, were determined to have a “successful” trophy as a son (not unlike many who ‘had’ a trophy wife), whose career, in many cases would never devolve into something as frivolous as music, dance, or the arts. Those sons were indoctrinated in the gospel of heroes like doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, dentists and surveyors or business tycoons.  Masculinity, too, never was to include being gay, because, in other days, that too was abominable, especially for fathers. Indeed, boys who were proficient in the arts were often considered effeminate again by their embarrassed fathers, while they mothers were more likely secretly proud of their sensitivity and their accomplishments.

So…..what to do in a world in which several generations of men and women have grown and bee/.\n nurtured in such poppy-cock while emerging generations will have no ‘truck’ with that crap?

I cannot speak or write about other ecclesial organizations; however, I have some deep and painful experiences in the Anglican/Episcopal church in both Canada and the U.S. And the culmination of a collision of masculinities occurred one spring day in 2000, when I uttered these words, to a bishop in the U.S. and his sycophant, in his office. His response continues to ring loudly in my ears and in my body.
“It is time for men to learn what their emotions are, to own them and to become comfortable with and in them!” were the words I uttered, almost defiantly, and certainly impolitically and perhaps even impertinently.

He lept from his desk chair and screamed, “That’s far too dangerous! That is not allowed!” At which point his sycophant muttered, “And there are far too many emotions in this room now; I have to leave!”

While I have documented this scene in other places in this space, I recount it here to begin to take note of the responsibility of the Anglican/Episcopal church for having repressed human emotions, especially those of men for decades if not centuries. Analogous to improper sexuality, in the church’s eyes, mind and canons, emotions are relegated to the private lives of those engaged in the business of the church. And there are several implications of that impulse.

Emotions then become a sign of something ‘evil’ when in reality they are an integral and inescapable aspect of human nature.

And, that is not to say that emotions cannot become a serious issue in the dynamic of human interactions. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, on CNN, in a program to air tomorrow night, “On the Mind of Vladimir Putin”…when asked about his impression of the Russian leader whom he has met several times, “He has a fervour!” A modest interpretation of that phrase would be “he is intensely emotional almost demonic in his pursuit of his agenda”. Contrast that with the George W. Bush exclamation shortly after the 9/11 attack, “I don’t do nuance!” as if, from his Texan perspective, anything modest, moderate or subtle is, by his own definition of his perspective, out of bounds. What is the emotional “content” of the Bush epithet? Another free transliteration might read, “In this moment, anything less than a full-out war will not be even contemplated by me!”

While men do not “do” emotions, too often their emotions “do” them, without their being conscious of that dynamic, and certainly without their having to take responsibility for their emotions.

And while we are agree that men do not, generally, manage, or even have a deep awareness of how they are experiencing, their feelings at any moment, and will withdraw in “embarrassment” and a feeling of inadequacy if they/we are asked to tell someone ‘how they are feeling’…..we all know that many social and political situations, if not all, are rooted in the feelings of the participants. Sometimes those feelings are honourable, trustworthy, legitimate and sometimes they are not.

It is also the discernment of which situation is active and relevant at a given moment that also seems to escape the purview of many men. However, if ignorance and insensibility have pervaded the male relationship with his/our emotions, irrespective of the cultural, historic, psychological or even ethical justification for that detachment, for centuries, that situation is, inevitably and predictably, changing, perhaps, in the view of many observers, at a pace analogous to the pace at which grass grows. Aroused emotion of anger, frustration, disempowerment and embarrassment, especially for men, is a red flag. And it ought not be only our female partners and co-workers’ job to caution us against a flare-up that could sabotage not only ourselves, but a far larger situation as well.

Nevertheless, programmed into the cultural development of many North American women is the concept of, first, managing through identification and sharing of their own emotions, and second, helping their male colleagues and partners to “hold them under wraps” if and when there is a real danger of eruption. And it is eruption of emotions, mostly by men, that frequently lies at the heart of so many domestic disputes and abuse. There is also a high co-relation between those men who drive themselves very hard, and who have an extremely high set of expectations and standards for themselves and their families, especially their sons, and the eruption of negative, highly critical emotional outbursts if and when the child appears in any way inadequate. It is almost as if the reputation of the ‘father’ is transferred to the performance of the son, and, disappointing the father, resulting in deep and unforgettable emotional wounding of the son.

Clearly, it is not only our sons or our life partners who suffer the imposition of unleashed and clearly not understood or even tolerated and acknowledged emotions from the men in their lives. Workplaces, too, and organizations and corporations, experience considerable impact of conflict that, in many cases, can be traced back to some male “power-figure” being upset at the exposure of negative information, especially of the kind that demonstrates what he believes to indicate the ‘nature of the character of the offender’ in his mind.

And there is another more subtle and almost imperceptible implication of “power” over that pervades small and large organizations, especially among those who have been there, and perhaps previously held leadership positions. And this is especially evident among men, who themselves, have almost imperceptibly been supported and even cheer-led by the women in the organization, (in order to keep the peace) and have a blind eye and a deaf ear to their own abuse of power over, for example, new comers to the organization, the church, or the town. Leadership positions, while requiring and expecting ‘performance’ from those in office, also carry the burden of living examples of how human interactions occur within the group.

For example, just because a male group member is hosting a guest speaker from another organization does not give him the right to usurp the female executive of the hosting organization from the head table, in order to take that place himself and then justify such a move on the basis of having to introduce his guest to the group. I have personally watched that little scene play out and everyone, including the displaced executive member, remained silent thereby permitting the ensuing impunity to shield the offending male.

It is not because Canadians are especially polite and deferential that such situations play out frequently. It is also because women have deferred for centuries to the bad behaviour of men, without the men uttering a word either of self-criticism or of transformation of their expectations of themselves or their female colleagues. And, for their part, the women “know” that keeping the peace is preferable to raising an issue of ‘offense’, because they know that if they were to take every situation of disrespect seriously, they could be in conflict at least weekly.

Male assumption of power over others is not and cannot be justified by superior competence, nor superior muscle strength, and certainly not by a higher emotional intelligence. Indeed, the evidence of a higher emotional intelligence among women far outstrips that of most men. And that, in itself, is another nail in the coffin of male ego’s, already enduring a verbal lashing from the predominance of domestic violence cases by men against women.

And while training programs, and counselling and coaching and codes of conduct in organizations, including signs in retail outlets (I shockingly read on the door of a retail outlet this week “We will not tolerate abusive behaviour, anger or threats in our store”), will spread red flags ubiquitously, they will not transform the deep-seated fear and insecurity in many males. They/we too often believe that these changes toward equality, equity, respect and dignity for all is just another attempt to denigrate the way things were, when, many men believed they were just fine before.

Men, ourselves, in quite moments, among friends and family, having noted and embraced changes in attitude and deportment, have the obligation of leading our fellow males in a direction that can only bode well for our partners, our children and our grandchildren.

It is not only the environment’s suffocation from toxic gases that we have to address. Toxic words and attitudes from men are also polluting our shared environments.

 

  

Do the snakes want to take over the zoo...or are we going to let them?

 Sometimes over a coffee, a comment will emerge from a rather innocuous and merely social conversation that gets at something like an earth-rumble, not a volcano nor an actual quake, but a rolling rumble.

An observation from a retired health care professional, looking back on her decades of service, seemed to come from a deep place. It was an observation that had morphed into a conviction that the people she had worked with were far more likely to cut a co-worker up (put him/her down) than offer encouragement, support and empathy. Why is it that we seem to have a set of relationship “do’s and don’t’s” that pour enthusiastic cheer-leading on young people (except for those parents and teachers who are fixated on ‘not spoiling’ the kid) and then dump on our peers?

There seems to be a kind of either-or imbalance in our many engage in the competitive, cynical, sceptical and even scurrilous kind of “gossip” that may offer instant gratification for the source of the insult, the put-down or the snide remark, immediately covered with a “professional good morning” as if how we really feel about the person can be subsumed in a different mask. It is as if there are different colours, even opposite and necessary colours that describe our complexity and our resistance to tell whatever it is that might be bothering us for fear that we might have to take some responsibility for both how we feel and for a limited or even a deliberately distorted shaping of information to suit our weakest purposes.

What does all of this have to do with anything?

Well, there is a clear and present danger stomping the globe that has echoes of our personal divide. In succession, the former American president, and now the Russian wannabe czar, have adopted a kind of ‘take the gloves off’ from having the facts, the foundational facts and the foundational precepts and even what might be noted as natural human tendency to listen to, to digest, and to participate in some form of dialogue, at the state level, that addresses the whole situation, not merely a small slice of it.

The popular parlance uses the phrase “the big lie” to encapsulate the depth and the range of the self-duplicity, the self-deception, and the seduction of sycophants as acolytes to the gospel of the “big lie” that threatens to break open and inflict itself on the people of the planet. It is not only the question of a non-rigged American election, or a pandemic that will miraculously slide away “come Easter” or a Ukrainian “denazification” program that has already killed thousands and left millions displaced, not altogether dissimilar to the millions who have died from the obvious negligence of the former American president in a deliberately deplorable mis-statement and malpractice of his responsibilities.

We are at risk of falling into the trap that there is no “formal or informal” ‘league’ that connects such a kind of personal need to dominate and to deploy whatever deceptions and propaganda to sustain those deceptions. We read and listen to reports daily of the tragic and heinous steps that are and have been taken by each man, as if they were innate to each separate leader. And we risk failing to take as seriously as the signs would signal, the danger that should trump have pulled out of NATO, and should the January 6^th insurrection have succeeded, with the raging pandemic for the last many months, Putin would and could have easily ‘driven himself into Kiev’ in the words of Fiona Hill yesterday on MSNBC.

There were moments in the trump regime when reports focussed on the singular obsession of the then president to build another of his ‘towers’ in Moscow, as if that were his prime purpose in his slippery sidling up to Putin in Helsinki, like the sycophant to the tyrant he was. And, falling into a similar pattern as those health care workers who prefer the ‘put-down’ to the ‘hand-up’ we thought and believed that, by open criticism, even harsh and mean-spirited and focused criticism we were protecting ourselves from what might actually be going on. And yet, was there then, and is there still something else going on besides the public discussion and debate of war intelligence and military materiel in support of Ukraine against a lethal, obsessed and obsessive and compulsive tyrant who is/has adopted the same modus operandi as all dictators have in history? Is there some kind of totalitarian ambition among leaders the ‘west’ considers to be at best ‘rogue’ and at worst “lethal” to the public good, that, whether it is conscious and deliberate or merely accidents of history, or somewhere in between, that poses a significant threat that is not contained in the “defense of democracy and freedom” justification of support for Ukraine?

We like to compartmentalize our thinking, our vision, our vocabulary, and our protection of our own personal, family and community security and hope. We like to think that our “world” is not completely vulnerable to forces that have a need and a determination to destroy for their own insatiable appetite for power. And we like to think that we have some “order” in a common agreement and acknowledgement of something like the cliché,  “the common good is the public trust we are all upholding”…And yet…..
Is that a naïve and potentially dangerous way of not seeing the snakes in the grass, on our shared lawn of the planet?

There are so many different perspectives on political ‘snakes’ in each period of history. And today, we are all reflecting on just whom to trust, on the international stage, including the American political soap-opera/reality television show.

Putin’s denazification of Ukraine, we all know is a blatant defiance of truth and reality. So is trump’s claim that the election was stolen by fraud. And yet, both larynxes have megaphones, and purposefully and willfully manipulate their millions of cult-sycophants, including their ‘bag-men-and-women’. Trouble is, both of these men, through their open defiance of both truth and foundational reality, give both examples and encouragement, support and cover for all other wannabe dictators. Viktor Orban, in Hungary, for example, is resisting joining an embargo or boycott of Russian oil and gas, in the face of intense lobbying by the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, who travelling to Budapest yesterday to change his mind. Just today, Emmanuel Macron, recently elected president of France for another five years, has come out swinging in opposition to Ukraine’s proposed and applied for membership in the European Union.

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels, May 9, 2022, reports in The Guardian:

“Emmanuel Macron has called for a new political organization to unite democracies on the European continent, as he warned that Ukraine would probably not join the EU for several decades.”

That utterance, coming as it does in one of the hottest and most violent weeks of this 76-day war in Ukraine, is both untimely and ill-advised. Just because the French president has just been sworn in, following his election is neither the time nor a good opportunity to put such an argument on the international table for consideration. It expresses deep division within the EU, as the President, herself, is working strenuously on behalf of a swift Ukrainian process toward membership.

 Herding cats is an image not so far removed from the cracks in the EU, as well as those in NATO, in spite of the forward movement of Sweden and Finland toward NATO membership. And cats, like rebellious men and their millions of followers who not only keep them in power, or on the television and computer screens far past their expiry date, there is reason to entertain the prospect that such independence, undergirded by extreme nationalism, populism and a growing sense that their ‘movement’ is not some accident of history, but rather a fully planned, designed and now being executed shift of geopolitics from the previous post-war arrangements, which everyone knows are and were never perfect, into a much more chaotic almost deconstruction into who knows what.

Brutal stamping out all opposition, control of the media, imprisoning and poisoning opponents with impunity, control of the judicial system, and the addiction to personal acquisition of affluence and long-term office are just some of the personal attributes of those who place their own narcissism ahead of the public interest in their own country and in the world at large.

It is not rocket-science to note that if such tin-pot despots are unable to give even a modicum of care and interest for their own citizens, (think the lock-up of 25 million in Shang Hi, by the Bejing regime, to stem the faux-spread of COVID.), then how can anyone expect them to consider even briefly the broader and deeper interests of the people of the planet, many of whom are starving, and many of whom are experiencing the ravages of global warming including fires and draught as well as crop failures.

It is also not rocket-science to note that everywhere the conversation is sounding the same…we are in a desperate situation, around the world, without any of the requisite institutional and governance systems equipped and ready to address the common shared existential threats. In the provincial election campaign in Ontario, this month, pollsters reports that the dominant issue is “affordability”….the spiking costs of housing, gas, food, and the complexities of the root causes of each of them overwhelming the potential of a concerted, collaborative, and survival-based ethical construct, a global strategic plan, to address their potency.

Bill Gates has publicly argued for a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization  team (GERM), as a possible first approach to dealing with the next, and in his mind, inevitable, pandemic. This would be comprised of people from around the world who have expertise: epidemiology, genetics, data systems, diplomacy, rapid response, logistics computer modeling communications and more….

Such a model, fashioned as a preventive (as opposed to reactive) Marshall Plan for the world’s basic need to address the potential existential crisis of more pandemics.

However, the world cannot rely on the philanthropists of the world to address our shared problems, although their contributions are needed. Governments cannot and must not permit their own irrelevancy by continuing to either do very little or, more importantly, bicker bitterly over the minutiae and fail to see the big picture,

Our job training approaches, it seems, are deeply steeped in the training of skills to confront individual and business problems and symptoms. Where in the world is anyone thinking about the global issues of training generalist experts who can and will bring the disparate experts to the table, with some kind of complex decision-making model to which all participants can subscribe?

The pandemic has not only exposed cracks in our readiness; it has exposed, along with converging threats of a similar magnitude in terms of their impact on human lives, that render the American war against abortion a kind of back-yard bonfire, in light of the global threats to human life. The passion of each side in that debate, while indisputable, also sheds light on the extreme theocratic nature of the fight.

And as American unravels on the abortion front, symbolic of the unravelling that is going on on the governance front, their traditional leadership is going to come into question while the global needs continue to mount.

Who is counting snakes anyway? Do we have an academic department for that?

We got ourselves into this mess, can we get ourselves out of it?

 Meet the Press Host, Chuck Todd, says that the United States is in a ‘proxy war’ with Russia in Ukraine. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Germany last week, he wants to see Russia ‘weakened so it cannot do again’ what it is doing. President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe says he cannot ‘see’ a peace deal given than neither leader in Russia or in Ukraine is willing to give up anything. Retired military officer Stephen Witty, also on Moring Joe, says he envisions a prolonger war, similar to the eight-year on-again-off-again history in the Donbas, with first Russia taking a town and then Ukraine taking it back, and so on.

Those many ‘wind gusts’ of opinion, however, are ‘blowin’in the wind’ like so much speculation, all of which becomes merely a transcript of the daily writing/recording of history, and not the ultimate outcome. None of those voices can be considered either ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, either credible or non-credible. Varying experience and perspectives, motivations and aspirations drive such observations. Like water-cooler chatter, they are interesting and possibly even worthy of some consideration.

However, given that we are learning some other pieces of information that together do not bode well for the near-term future, it might be well to pause and consider them. Russian troops stealing wheat from the ‘foodbasket of the world’ as the World Food Program Director calls it on CNN’s GPS, yesterday, renders food another weapon in this war. The report that Poland and Slovakia are jointly considering providing MIG jets to the Ukrainians cuts through the resistance earlier put forward by the Americans. The stories of the physical and sexual abuse of Ukrainian women by the Russian soldiers, followed by predictable attempts to cover such stories in denial, along with the brazen blasts near where friendly political leaders are meeting with Ukrainian officials, add credence to the inhumanity that lies at the heart of the Russian mis-adventure.

As in the pandemic, including the public coverage of the plague, we are all living on the cusp of today’s headlines and tomorrow’s prospects/dread/fears and doing whatever we can to reconcile our fragile emotions and cognitions. This bifocal perspective, however, finds us vacillating from some flimsy sense of ‘knowing’ to an even more delicate sense of how to carry the burden of whatever knowing we seem to have, and finding both paths encumbered with history, personal angst, political gamesmanship, propaganda, contempt for the killings, the rapes the indiscriminate bombings of hospitals and innocent civilians, and the migration and/or displacement of some 12.7 million Ukrainians, mostly women and children.

According to the Director of the World Food Program, the former Governor of South Carolina, David Beasley, because of the rocket-spike of need, they are now feeding the starving while having to deprive the hungry. “Ukraine is the breadbasket of the world. They grow enough food to feed 400 million people. Well that’s gone, Beasley told 60 Minutes this week, ‘You’re already seeing fuel pricing spike, food pricing spike, cost of shipping spike. It’s already creating havoc for the poorest of the poor around the world. But this is gonna affect not just the poorest of the poor. It’s gonna affect everybody.’ (cbsnews.com May 1, 2022)

Different from the political, military and even hopeful musings of the talking heads, Beasley’s words have to be segregated from speculation and both interpreted and considered as urgent, perhaps even existential. Reports (see cbsnews.com) that fighting has spilled beyond Ukraine into neighbouring Russia and Moldova are also unnerving at best and frightening at worst.

Axios.com reports: ‘United Nations officials have been ‘blocked’ from accessing  ‘port cities like Mariupol, Mykolaiv and Kherson’- raising concerns of mass starvation in the Ukrainian cities that have been devastated by Russia’a military invasion….Russia and Ukraine supplied about 30% of the world’s wheat and barley before the war. Thirty six countries, including some of the world’s most vulnerable and impoverished, relied on them for more than half of their wheat imports (Rebecca Falconer, axios.com May 1, 2022)

Another layer of speculation now includes the prospect of NATO warships blockading the Black Sea in order to prevent Russian ships from impeding or preventing food shipments from reaching Ukrainian ports, and to enable that food to reach starving Ukrainians.

How are we in the west even to entertain a notion that holds that the war will be contained inside the borders of Ukraine, with the multiple pots that are roiling, anyone of which could spark a wider conflict. Belarus, for example, is expressing some intent to seek a wider and closer alliance with Russia, almost in an imitation of the NATO initiatives of the last two or three decades. China is reported to have publicly noted that the expansion of NATO was a serious and disturbing initiative that negatively impacted Europe, with whose members China has significant trade relations.

Still with China, Politico reports yesterday, May 1, 2022:

Taiwan’s foreign minister said Sunday that his island nation is studying carefully Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine for lessons applicable to its situation with China….There are two things, of course (Joseph) Wu said, (to Fareed Zakaria on GPS yesterday). ‘The first is asymmetric capability. Look at the /Ukrainians, they use small personal weapons to go against a large enemy. And I thing that is something we can learn from. In fact, we have been preparing for that, but we need to make more investment in this regard…The second area we can learn from Ukraine is civil defense, Look at the Ukrainian people. All of the males are having the determination to defend the country. They want to serve in the military. They want to go to war zones to fight against Russia. That kind of spirit is enviable for the Taiwanese people.

The spectre of a China invasion, or some form of take-over of Taiwan cannot be considered mere speculation, given that China considers Taiwan to be an integral component of mainland China. Whether the United States, Japan, South Korea and their allies would/will provide a similar level of commitment, support and hardware to Taiwan as NATO and the U.S. is providing Ukraine in the event of a Chinese invasion, however, remains a mystery at this point, irrespective of American rhetoric of support for Taiwan.

Separating the starving from the hungry, a highly delicate and necessary critical judgement on the part of the officials of the World Food Program, is as difficult and heart-wrenching as sorting out the ‘ethics’ morals and legalities of providing MIG jets to Ukraine, as is the reading of daily human stories of lives destroyed, separated, and left to die while facing the announced prospect of a nuclear or a chemical deployment in this conflict.

While we are being fed a surfeit of daily news stories, that are both magnetic and enervating at the same time, we are also having to do our own curating, digesting, connecting the dots and trying to make sense of both too much information and not enough wisdom. And we are not only starved of wisdom, we are, in effect, starving for a level of common sense, honesty, integrity, courage and global strategic planning and collaboration not only in the face of the Russia-Ukraine war, but also in the face of the impending starvation crisis, the impending displacement crisis, the already extant income chasm and the global crisis of climate change and global warming.

Without either life-saving training or even life-saving coaches and mentors, we are left seemingly afloat on a tiny boat, with millions of others equally desperate to make sense of our shared and impending confluence of crises, wondering how to impact the increasing political myopia, supplemented by the media and even worse, the social media, in their concentration, if not fixation on the micro-analysis, the micro-incident, the micro-conflict, fire, shooting, and even pandemic cases and their widely divergent approaches to ameliorating that historic plague. We have to focus on the big picture, especially at a time when we are inundated with storm surges of serious and threatening date, for which it seems no political institution or organization either has the power, or can summon the will to address adequately.

It is not as if no one is doing anything. Thousands of individuals in all parts of the world are going their ‘bit’ to help save the planet, and to help put people to work with dignity and to mediate peer conflicts and to urge their families and friends to ‘mask up’ and to get vaccinated and to keep social distance, and to try to stay abreast of the various public issues we all face. And yet….

When we look “up” to the “powers-that-be” for both inspiration and for substantial policies and leadership, across provincial and national boundaries, into networks of like-minded, courageous, creative and committed leaders, at both the thought and the pragmatic levels, we face a white board scribbled in shapes, sizes, colours and curves that are not only random but hardly indicative of belonging to the same ‘canvas’….

The Secretary General of the United Nations emphatically underscored, in a public interview while in Ukraine that there is much more to the UN than the Security  Council, which, until now, has failed to take action even on the crimes against humanity that were committed in Syria, according to Amal Clooney, again representing the interests of the global citizens before that august body, to ask for concerted, urgent and immediate action on the crimes against humanity, war  ini crimes and mass murder of innocent men, women and children in Ukraine, by Russian invading forces. The International Criminal Court, while honourable and ethical, does not have the signatures of either China or the United States on its Charter. Hence, collaborative action in the short term, and potentially even in the longer term, is less than likely, to prosecute Russian soldiers, generals and Putin himself.

And while regime change in not only not on the lips of any western official, given that no nation is prepared to ‘take him out’, nor should they, the world is left hanging in desperate impatience in a vain hope that Putin will remove himself from the Kremlin, or be ushered out by his more sane cronies. Certainly, he should neither be invited nor permitted to attend the G20 meeting in Indonesia, in spite of the invitation having been issued by the president of that country. And tennis stars like Nadal and Djokovic who are protesting the barring of Russian tennis players from Wimbledon need to examine both their motivating and their role in the world’s serious drama(s) in which we are all enmeshed.

Neither the president of Indonesia, nor Nadal and Djovokic, will be exempt in the long run, from the highly predictable and multiple-layered impacts of the violence that Putin has inflicted on the world. And their advisers and their respective countrymen and women would be wise and helpful in counselling them to change their views. Public figures, including even those like Ji JinPing in China, have a significant role to play in seeding and nurturing a point of view that rises above self-interest, and even national interest and reaches into the global interest…Putin does not “get it”, and will only march further down the rabbit hole of this conflict, perhaps even into the sovereign territory of other nations, if he is not stopped.

Ordinary people, by the millions, “get it” and we all need some serious and substantive indication from those who have the levers of power in their respective hands that they, on our behalf, are prepared to lead, to provide workable options that can and will lead us all out of this extremely dark basement of our collective conscious, not to mention our collective unconscious.

We are all hoping, praying, begging, pleading and aspiring for leadership toward a shared, sustainable and equitable existence…not so much for ourselves, but for our grandchildren, as former Secretary of State, Madelaine Albright reminded us over and over again. We mourn her passing, but humbly acknowledge her gift of leadership, mentorship, courage, conviction and commitment to the cause of freedom, democracy and liberty.

After being exiled by both the Fascists and the Communists, separately and at different times in her life, her voice will ring through the centuries, regardless of how long tyrants like Putin, Hitler and Stalin attempt to hold sway.

Reflections on propaganda and procrastination...at the highest levels

 No one can comprehend, justify or interpret the lock-down of some 25 million people in Shanghai, in order to control the spread of COVID.

From CNN’s Steven Jiang, April 19, 2022, in a piece entitled, Hunger and
anger in Shanghai’s unending lockdown nightmare, we read this:

‘People are also seeing Chinese propaganda czars double down, painting Omicron as a potentially lethal threat while stressing that only zero-Covid can save China from the deaths and havoc caused by the virus in the West. Officials have made it clear the policy has the personal stamp of approval from the country’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping, who has yet to visit Shanghai-a city he once led- amid the deepening crisis. Xi is expected to assume an almost unprecedented third term later this year, paving the way for him to rule for life….With state media headlines screaming ‘it’s not (the) flu’ against government statistics showing only about two dozen severe cases among the infected in Shanghai so far, nearly everyone seems to agree on the apparent absurdity of the ‘solution being worse than the problem’-particularly as stories surface on social media about deaths relating to those unable to received medical care for non-Covid causes due to the lockdown.’

This story out of China comes at a time when the world is focussed on the deadly and increasingly protracted war in Ukraine, where the Russian czar-wannabe deploys a similar kind, degree and ubiquity of propaganda in order to facilitate/achieve his personal agenda.

Propaganda is defined as information especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. What the definition does not include is the “will” or the “dominance” or the “tyranny” of the agent of its deployment. The word autocrat, (relating to a ruler who has absolute power) too has been so bandied about as to render the western audiences somewhat inured, or perhaps even immune to the full implications of its operation.

Mind control, brain washing, undertaken by men whose conscience seems to have fled their persons, may be the undeclared war that is, like the forest fire in the roots of the trees, spreading from one corner of the world to others. We saw a similar kind of mind manipulation playing out during the four years of the previous U.S. administration. The results, the votes of some 74 million people for trump, astounded many who still cannot reconcile how grown, mature and self-respecting men and women could pull a lever to mark a ballot in favour of such a presidential candidate. And it is not only the content of the lies/propaganda/mind-control that is of serious concern. It is also the machine, comprised of individual men and women committed to carrying out the “orders” of the strong man at the top of the hierarchical pyramid of power.  And that machine also embraces large organizations whose decision-makers have succumbed/surrendered/anaesthetized/medicated their own brains and minds in order to fall in to a quick-step march that feeds their puny, emaciated and starved ego’s. Holding sway over others, regardless of how rich the carrots or how painful the sticks, is nevertheless not only a political problem facing the world; it is also an ethical dilemma that undermines many of the best efforts to take and to enforce measures of public policy that would, for example, re-orient the position of western leaders vis a vis Ukraine, from one of “defending Ukraine” to one of “ensuring that Ukraine wins”.

While the good works of shipping tonnes of military material to Ukraine, and of imposing more stringent sanctions ‘than ever before’ (a political piece of inflated rhetoric instead of the simple word “previously”) must not be either ignored nor unappreciated, it is not enough. And the propaganda that ‘sells’ it as heroic, from the perspective of the American and European media and leadership, does not address the weakness and the futility it exposes. Managing the message, an integral component of every political campaign, and certainly essential to any war effort, is, in an information age of highly sophisticated and universal digital capacity to reach into the hands/hearts/minds of billions of ordinary men, women and children, dependent upon receivers capable and willing to set aside their ‘rose-coloured glasses’ and their generally adaptive and compliant wills to the music of political and corporate leadership that they once considered trust-worthy.

Mind-control by tyrants can only be accomplished through the eyes, ears, minds and hearts of those of us who are on the receiving ‘end’ of their messages. Numbed by any of the normal pain-numbing agents, whose numbers grow as our distaste for the political theatre also grows, we risk falling into a kind of attitudinal and social state of unconsciousness. The lies are so prevalent and to pernicious that we risk tuning them out, while millions, for example in Shanghai, suffer inordinately and unjustifiably. Millions too are suffering in Russia under the blanket of forbidden truth-telling about the ‘war,’ a word which if used in public can result in arrest and  punishment, and up to 15 years imprisonment, on the third conviction.

And the suffering of the Ukrainians, depicted in pictures, which if left black and white are hauntingly reminiscent of those we see in museums, movies and texts from World War II, rises above in both its depth and reach that even of the people of Shanghai. And, as Ukrainian grandmothers and grandfathers keep asking hopelessly in video clips, “Why?” a question that haunts not only those individuals and the reporters engaged with them, but each of us in every nation witnessing this massacre.

Cutting through the propaganda of the ‘western’ liberal democratic leaders, however, is more subtle and more demanding that trashing the lies of a Putin or a Xi Jinping (or a Trump). And that intellectual and psychological rigour needed to push past the good deeds into the reality of “winning” as opposed to “defending” Ukraine, is evident in only a few public thought leaders.

Obviously, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s name comes first to mind, given his daily address to Ukrainians, and anyone around the world who will listen. Thankful for all of the support, and at the same time pleading for more, is a message so obviously and intrinsically authentic that no one is in doubt. And for his native patriots, the message is both inspiring and supportive as well as embodying leadership with integrity. Not only is Zelenskyy’s message, tone, delivery and consistency laudable but placed aside the lies coming from Moscow, Zelenskyy’s purity seems even more unadulterated and Putin’s lies even more despicable. The literary/dramatic foil is on display for all of history.

And then there are scholars like Anne Applebaum, appearing on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin last evening, stressing the need for Ukraine, supported by all of those offering support, to not merely defend themselves against the Russian onslaught, but more importantly, to win this war. In her assessment, the only way for anyone to anticipate the Russians going home, withdrawing their troops, is for a clear win to be achieved by the Ukrainian forces and people. Her insight that there seems to be little if any difference between sending missiles and defence systems to Ukraine and the option of sending military fighter jets, although, based on the information she has learned, those jets will not be either adequate or appropriate for the task facing the Ukrainian forces. Her inference here is that an all-out commitment, without reservations from the west, including both NATO and the U.S., is not only needed, but essential to ensure a Ukrainian win. Just this morning, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, talk of a Ukrainian-imposed no fly zone, rather than one enabled by NATO jets, has started to be voiced.

In another space here, we have signalled the thoughts, perceptions, attitudes and conclusions of such observers as Fiona Hill, Ian Brezinski, Garry Kasparov, and more recently Vladimir Kura-Murza (recently detained), along with William Browder (American investor, targeted for death by Putin, originator of the Magnitski Act(s) after the murder of his lawyer at 37 in Russian hands), all of whom have noted, without reservation, the prophetic and lethal goals of Putin, whom they all believe will not stop with a victory in Ukraine. None of these people, and now even the Director of the CIA, Willian Burns, indicate that threats to use tactical nuclear weapons by Putin cannot be taken lightly. Former NATO commander James Stavridis also warns of a major cyber attack, not only on Ukraine, but also on many of the networks in the U.S. for which he argues we have to be prepared.

The question on some minds this morning, still however, is whether or not whatever military, intelligence and war-materiels are made available to Ukraine will inevitably be too little too late. Diplomatic and legal arguments, however appropriate in a court room, especially in an International Criminal Court, for the determination of criminal liability for ‘crimes against humanity’ and/or for genocide, for example, are no longer warranted or even worthy of honour by the people in the Pentagon, the White House, and in Brussels at NATO. While it is encouraging to learn that both Finland and Sweden are now engaged in the abbreviated application process to join NATO, (as Ukraine is also in the short-circuit path to EU membership), these moves, along with all of the sanctions imposed so far, as well as any more that might be forthcoming, will not be an adequate substitute for those military weapons, intelligence systems, and all of both the software and hardware in the stockpiles in NATO and U.S. arsenals.

The resistance, too, of the corporates in Germany, especially the coal lobby, to any embargo on Russian gas and oil is another of the kinds of realities with which Putin is and will continue to be overjoyed. Some $300 billion-per-day in revenues to Moscow from fuel sales to Europe, vastly drown the $1 million in military aid flowing into Ukraine. And that imbalance bodes badly for Ukraine and for the west, regardless of how and when this war whimpers to a conclusion.

There is a seductive appeal to a defensive campaign, free of all of the ethical and moral baggage of being “offensive”. And there are arguments that all good offenses depend on reliable, consistent and stable defences. Defensive, is the argument that is used to justify all of the nuclear warheads (Russia has approximately 6000); and yet Ukraine, having honourably surrendered her’s, on the promise of security and protection, by nations including both the U.S. and Russia, is now left naked, seemingly dependent on the largess of the U.S. and NATO. Cries from the historians that America should have done more, provided more military materiel, as far back as 2014, when Russia ‘took’ Crimea, while exhibiting an indictment of the Obama administration, do nothing to provide Ukraine today. Similarly, when Obama declared a ‘red line’ in and when Assad (read Putin) ever were to deploy chemical weapons in Syria (read Aleppo), and then ‘defaulted’ into what effectively today looks like ‘do nothing’ for whatever possibly legitimate reasons, these decisions have helped to set the stage for the thousands of lost lives and the millions of displaced refugees. And all of this might have been prevented, if only…..

Urgency, immediacy, immodesty, crying in the wilderness…these are the linguistic and thought modalities of prophets, poets, novelists, and playwrights…and they are anathema to many if not most diplomats and political actors. And then, when the crisis (in whatever sector, region or demographic) reaches a point when it can and will no longer be ignored, then, and only then, does the institutional edifice spring into action, acting heroically, bravely and self-servingly to rescue the tragedy that those same institutions, by their negligence, have significantly enabled.

We enact a parallel pattern in so many of our decisions. Rather than take those small preventive steps, (like cleaning our teeth, or daily physical exercise, or offering hospitality to our circles) for reasons that seem legitimate at the time of our default, only to learn later that we have left the barn door open and the horse has bolted…and then we leapt into a frenzy to “bolt” the damn door!

Shameful and pathetic..and seemingly with impunity! Who is going to go back into history to hold those responsible for ‘sins of omission’ when we are over-committed to addressing those sins of commission that flood our screens and our eyes and minds?

Refecting on the courage to tell the truth...

 Writing on lithub.com, April 15, 2022, Andrew Keen entitles his piece: ‘When Your Public Square is a Private Company, Any Sulky Billionaire Can Buy It’…in reference to the recent attempt by billionaire Elon Musk to purchase a huge chunk of Twitter for some $43 billion.

 Inside the piece, we read, ‘Whether or not Twitter is worthy the $43 billion that the Tesla CEO is supposedly willing to pay is neither here nor there. It’s a silly man paying a silly price for a silly product. What matters is that in our social media age, Twitter -- a place we go to try to emulate Elon Musk and make a lot of private noise-- has massive value. You see, we don’t just go to social media Twitter to make noise. We go there to make a very contemporary kind of noise---a moral noise…..(Having weaponized morality), We go there to make noise abuot how the world could and should be a ‘better place’. We go on Twitter to noisily call out strangers about their immorality—their racism, their sexism, their classism and their wokeism. We go there for an ethical jolt. To jump start and bolster our sense of moral righteousness. That’s ‘like church’ some of you might say. No. Twitter is church. That’s why I don’t go there….(Referencing writer Dan Brooks) (who) believes that contemporary morality has mostly been  hijacked by the marketing department of large companies like PepsiCo, Microsoft, and Nike  which now use social media to peddle their own, usually self-serving versions of goodness…But all they are really doing is trying to sell more shoes or carbonated drinks or suites of office software…”

Normalizing the weaponizing of morality by character assassinating those whose mistakes ring loud and clear in our tabloid vernacular, however, is not restricted to Twitter. It (weaponizing of morality) has long held a prominent place, indeed it may be the basis of the profit motive of those tabloids (think Rupert Murdoch and his empire). It has had an even longer and even more prominent place in church dialogue, in and through which specific verses of scripture have been deployed as bullets in arguments about a variety of public and social issues, over which those with a bent for the pistol in their debate prep seek complete control. Weaponizing morality, bible verses, and also political language, through the now common-place references to the Holocaust and its denial, have all contributed to an erosion or our consciousness of the ambiguous, the uncertain, the nuance and the truth.

So while Putin threatens both chemical and nuclear weapons in Ukraine if the U.S. continues to provide military equipment to Ukraine, on this side of the Atlantic, in the New Statesman April 13, 2022, in a piece by George Eaton, Noam Chomsky is quoted as saying, ‘we’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history….We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organized human life on Earth. (In another piece in the New Stateman by Megan Gibson, on March 30, 2022, Francis Fukuyama, American political theorist, is quoted as saying, ‘We could be facing the end of ‘the end of history’.

None of this is to say that the language we use on Twitter is exclusively, or even primarily the cause of what is happening in Ukraine. Nor is it to say that the massacre in Ukraine will be stopped by those opposed to Putin’s war taking to Twitter to scream bloody murder. Morality, ethics and human civilization, taken together, is not a monster to be tamed like a migraine headache, with another new chemical/linguistic potion. We have both the capacity to learn, nano second by nano second, information from every street corner on the planet, given that whatever happens turns up on some platform of social media, as if such documentation makes us all more ‘informed’ and thereby more ‘intelligent’…and also more ‘with-it’ because we ‘get-it’….Not so!

The public square has been filled for the last few years with the rantings of a narcissist occupant of the Oval Office, as if the ‘news’ comprised statements of the chief executive and reactions to them…as had been the case for decades, if not centuries. However, overdosing on narcissism, and the revenue it generated for the networks, is not a sustainable path to or for the development of social, domestic, foreign or environmental policy and leadership. Indeed, just as in the office politics of “personalizing’ every issue and thereby reducing it to the preferred resolution of eliminating the person causing the problem, so too, has the habit of personalizing the political landscape in all organizations reduced political debate to a kind of pre-adolescent gossip session among jealous, insecure and instant-gratification-dependent teens. Headlines of aberrant words that express extreme opinions, often based on rumour and/or lies, grab the attention of a public starved for that jolt that Keen was referring to in the piece above from lithub.com. The names and faces of those uttering radioactive words and seemingly lethal opinions (at least politically) have become standard fare on the menu of public discourse.

Most of us have not spent our lives steeped in history of foreign policy, especially the foreign policy that is now reverberating in the streets of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and elsewhere in Ukraine. Promises made and promises broken, seems to be a pattern that both the Russian and the American sides have adhered to, whether or not this is the moment for reminding us of that shared reality. When asked not about Putin’s fear of encirclement by NATO, but the spread of liberal democracy in Ukraine, (in the New Stateman piece cited above) Chomsky responds:

“Putin is concerned with democracy as we are. If it’s possible to break out of the propaganda bubble for a few minutes, the US has a long record of undermining and destroying democracy. Do I have to run through it? Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, on and on…But we are supposed to now honour and admire Washington’s enormous commitment to sovereignty and democracy. What happened in history doesn’t matter. That’s for other people. What about Nato expansion? There was an explicit unambiguous promise by (US Secretary of State) James Baker and president George HW Bush to Gorbachev that if he agreed to allow a unified Germany to rejoin Nato, the US would ensure that there would be no move one inch to the east. There’s a good deal of lying about this now…It’s certainly right to have moral outrage about Putin’s actions in Ukraine…but it would be even more progress to have moral outrage about other horrible atrocities…"

Consistently shining a laser on the full landscape of the language that is and has been used to design, describe and to deploy policy, commitments, and the normalizing of the open and often deliberate fracture and decimation of those same promises, by people and governments everywhere, for all time, has been Chomsky’s life’s work. Curmudgeoned and bludgeoned as he has been by the establishment, Chomsky’s voice, like that of some of his emulators (think Chris Hedges in truthdig.com) has shown the same courage that prompted his first article confronting the perils of foreign aggression. ‘The first article I wrote (as a ten-year-old) for the elementary school newspaper was on the fall of Barcelona in 1939). It charted the advance of the ‘grim cloud of fascism’ across the world. I haven’t changed my opinion since, it’s just gotten worse.’ INew Statesman, cited above)

Multiple epithets attempt to draw pencil lines on a public discourse canvas to draw attention to the human, (political, diplomatic, administrative, even theological) penchant to short-term fixes, while avoiding anything like longer-term reconciliations….fingers in the dyke, temporary policies to address a crisis, (only to fail to apply the inherent sunset clause later), protection for Ukraine (Budapest agreement), preserving jobs over production of and profit from cancerous cigarettes.... We all consciously and/or unconsciously engage in the ‘flow’ of how the street talk nudges, pushes, shoves or even punches us along. We all want to fit in, to be liked, to be integrated and to be respected….and the price of that obsession is, both in private and in public life, the sacrifice of what we all know is the truth.

Subjected to the barrage of advertising/marketing bumph, all of it containing a grain of fact, sugar-coated with a candy of aspiration, hope and more promise of fitting in, we are all fearful of alienation, abandonment, and ostracising…just as we all were in middle and elementary school. Only as adults we have different chores to take our attention away from what we are really doing, including what, when and how we are promising more than we can or will deliver.

Promising our future brides a life-time of the best time of their life is only a cliché example of what I am trying to say. Starry-eyed, hope-drunk, and herculean-empowered, we say what we know we cannot and will not ever deliver. It makes good “sweet-talk’ at the moment. It does not foreshadow decades of bliss, nor can it. A pattern of similar ‘sweet-talk’ and reinforcement, of that original promise, all the while knowing that we are bluffing our way through, gives us another sugar-fix, just like the sugar-fix the corporates are dishing out in their marketing campaigns.

Books written about the marketing of the Coke-bottle presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, while distressing, expressed a cornerstone of the American business application to the presidential campaign of 1960. And while Putin’s detaining and fining and imprisoning and poisoning political opponents are all detestable, and less honourable than our fair and free elections, there are ‘holes’ in the wall of superiority in our system that we are loath to confront.

There is a real danger that the proverb of the frog in boiling water, innocent and unaware of the danger the frog faces, as the temperature of the water rises, until at last he dies when the water boils, is an analogy for the human condition, especially as we witness the confluence of existential threats to our survival. It may be depressing and heavy and awkward and socially impolitic, and even impolite to adopt and to underscore the perceptions, attitude and insight of Chomsky. It is also depressing and heavy to hear, digest, integrate and accept the words of a medical practitioner who indicates serious life-threatening symptoms if intervention is precluded; and yet, we all know that such courage at that moment is really the only option.

If it is true that courage is the value with the highest ranking, because it is the value that enables all other values, then the courage to know and to tell the truth, and to expect and to nourish that courage is to inculcate it in our encounters. And perhaps through our critical commitment to seek and to find the kind of courage we have previously left unused or undiscovered we might individually, and then collectively, contribute to and generate a different river of consciousness…one that bodes well for our survival, and for that of our grandchildren.

Starvation raising its ugly head in human lives and in public governance

 In a piece entitled, “Russian Invasion of Ukraine threatens the global food supply,” which appeared in The Star, April 11, 2022, by Tom James, we read this:

Both Russia and Ukraine are the third and eighth-largest producers of wheat in the world, according to the UN. The Crumbling of these warring export economies could trigger famine, geopolitical stability, and poverty across the globe. That’s why we need an action -plan for cross-border trade of a similar magnitude to the Marshall Plan after the Second World War….The sudden lack of wheat and n fertilizer, on which the world relies, will not be confined to Europe and Russia. Many countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will remain vulnerable to food shortages. Up to 90 percent of Lebanon’s wheat and cooking oil comes from Ukraine and Russia, which has already triggered a food price inflation of 1000 percent. Similarly, African countries import approximately $4 billion of agricultural products from Russia in 2020, and Ukraine was Indonesia’s second-largest importer of wheat. This is just a snapshot of the world’s food system; one that is slowly grinding to as halt in front of our eyes.

 James’ words are both chilling and motivating. They focus the mind, the body and the spirit on a world seemingly beating its chest (at least in the west) for the ‘unity’ among EU and NATO members in support of Ukraine. Meanwhile, India, China, Iran, and a host of other countries have either abstained from or opposed votes in the Security Council condemning Russia and Putin for this massacre. There is such an obvious lag between the time when world powers/leaders learn highly significant information that demands timely and proportional response and their response time. We have watched this drama play out on cigarettes, on acid rain, on mileage requirements in autos produced in North America, in Ruanda, in Kosovo, and in Syria. We have been in a similar place so often that one has to speculate that the “lag” time, like the “tail wagging the dog” meme is part of the hard wiring of the ‘establishment’ at least in countries that pride themselves in being democratic, free, and observant of something called world order.

Sadly, too, we are watching a lagging approach to address the daily requirements of Ukraine for weapons, weapons, weapons, (to quote their Foreign Minister). And it is not only a lag in time, but also in the seriousness of the commitment. Only yesterday, we learned that Slovakia is considering sending MIG’s to Ukraine, after weeks of diplomatic dancing around the fine print of the NATO charter.

The apocalyptic cries of the scientific community decades ago, warning about the dangers of increased CO2 into the atmosphere, may have, in part, inured political leaders to the apocalyptic itself. And yet, such inuring is a deeply embedded theme of western and Christian culture and theology. Judgement Day has been ‘coming soon’ for some two thousand years. The Messiah’s return has been on the radar of many religious folk for a very long time. And that signal on their radar has been part of the consciousness and the unconsciousness of western people forever.

Many of these pieces have listed the combined and converging impact of several existential crises, long before the war in Ukraine erupted. And while there have been peripheral steps on the environment file, in several western countries, the full commitment of those same countries to providing financial resources to developing countries so that they can, too, develop strategies to cope with global warming and climate change, remains unfulfilled. So too, the commitments to the Paris Accord, promises made, hang in the wind as promises unkept. That is why children in Europe have launched a law suit to put teeth into those commitments, and make countries follow through.

Political rhetoric, however, is full of both platitudes and good intentions, paving, as the proverb notes, the road to hell….while pumping up the self-inflation of the speakers’ political image before the voters. Perhaps that’s why, every day we listen to Biden, on whatever file, he is uttering two words, “No Joke!” as if to say that he anticipates his audience will consider his words bafflegab, and not take them seriously.

As for anything akin to the Marshall Plan, an American initiative, heroic and epic at the same time, the world will remain sceptical until we see the measures needed to implement a trading package in futures, for example, as James recommends. Starving people are not silent and compliant. On globalcitizenb.org, we find a piece by Madeleine Keck, on April 7, 2022, entitled, “Sir Lanka Faces Acute Food shortages and Starvation Amid Economic Crisis,’ subtitled, ‘Mass protests have erupted across the country’. Her opening paragraph is startling, and should be a kind of canary in the coalmine for all of us:

Sri Lanka’s political turmoil and economic crisis have brought about a catastrophic food shortage, with the nation’s 21 million residents now forced to pay triple for basics like rice, sugar, lentils and milk powder. The price of milk powder, the Indian Express noted, jumped by close to 1000 Sri Lankan rupees in days, about 500 rupees….The 2021 Global Hunger Index ranked Sri Lanka 65^th out of 116 ,countries…

The Guardian, April 6, 2022, in a piece by Hannah Ellis-Petersen,, South Asia correspondent, headlines the piece: ‘Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns’. The speaker of the parliament, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardana, quotes by Ellis-Petersen, says, ”The food, gas and electricity shortages will get worse. There will be very acute food shortages and starvation,’ (he) told the legislature.

In the April 7, 2022 edition of The Humanitarian, Danielle Renwick writes a piece entitled:” ‘No one has been spared’; The Climate Crisis and the future of food”. In it we read this:

Climate change threatens our food systems as we know them. Some 821 million people currently suffer from malnutrition worldwide, including 151 million children under five, whose growth is stunted. A warming planet will put even more people at risk of hunger in the years to come, according to a recent  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. In some place it already is….West Africa is suffering its worst food crisis in a decade, with some 27 million people going hungry due to droughts, conflicts, and the economic fallout of the pandemic, according to Oxfam International. Severe drought combined with other factors, also puts 28 million people in East Africa at risk of severe hunger, the aid group says. But inflation and rising prices are also seeing new hunger hotposts emerge, from Peru to Sri Lanka to Lebanon. And the impacts of the war in Ukraine are leading to urgent calls to address ‘a new layer of global food crisis’.

The word crisis is among the most visible in our vernacular…the crisis of the war, of the pandemic, of the climate change and global warming, and of the starvation of millions. Underlying all of these is the issue of how the people of the world are/will/will not manage the economic implications of the maelstrom of these combined forces.

The number of agencies, philanthropics, individuals, that are diligently trying to meet tidal waves of need around the world, perhaps given enhanced focus in Ukraine and the deplorable utterances from Putin about his intent to continue to dominate, devastate and wipe out Ukraine, in order to take it over, make the question of where and how and how much to donate in a world seemingly drowning in desperation, exasperating, if not paralysis.

As far back as October 31, 2021, Global News reported: Food Banks Canada’s HungerCount2021 report show that visits to food banks climbed 20 percent nationally since the arrival of COVID-19, with one-in-four locations experiencing a 50 percent increase in demand.

We are all reckoning with substantial hikes in food, gasoline and housing costs. And the plight of those on the edge of survival continues to tug at the heart strings of people like us in the developed world, considered ‘privileged’ by those who are starving, living under bridges, in refrigerator carboard boxes or pushing their grocery cart along town and city streets looking for scraps, for clothing, shoes or even rugs for warmth.

 Compromising on the requirements to meet the global warming/climate change crisis, in order to provide fossil fuels in the face of the Ukraine war, is only one among many compromises that we will have to make if millions are not going to starve. Similarly, compromising on the budgeted amounts for long-term goals in favour of those needs considered immediate is another of the shifts we are all going to have to make. Shifting from butter to margarine, in that context, seems almost invisible and unworthy of note.

What rides above all of this talk of crisis, however, are two things:

1)    There is not a single person on the planet who is or will be exempt from these converging crises

2)    There is no existing or even a hint/prospect of a wide and deep international consensus, nor vision, nor strategy to move toward anything that might resemble a Marshall Plan…for food sustainability, for toxic emissions, for geo-political resolution of conflict, or for global vaccination distribution

The various excuses, rationalizations, legalese and bureaucratese and thumb-twisting, as well as body and policy squirming among those in governance especially, indicates there are more clouds at that level than solutions. The non-profits, the work of citizens, as history has shown, far outpaces that of government.  And it may well be that we will have to lean on that sector, along with the private sector to seek and to find solutions to our multiple crises.

Governments, increasingly, have some steep, rocky and precipitous climbs out of the morass of internecine warfare and sabotage, within and between competing nations. Starting with Zelenskyy’s pleas to the United Nations, either act or reform yourself! Russia does not only not belong on the Human Rights Council; she does not belong in the Security Council. However, even saying that, everyone knows that China will veto any move to remove Russia from that body. Just yesterday, we read that China had transported a quasi-secret supply of weapons to Serbia, an ally of Russia, to a country that only recently elected a right-wing leader.

Those of us watching from the sidelines and attempting to make sense out of what is otherwise a series of senseless or even non-moves, continue to be shift between bewilderment and outright despondency over the tardiness, the sponge-spines in many quarters and the deep and seemingly irreparable divides between the right and the left. Paralysis by extremes, both of them pleading for headlines, public attention and high opinion poll numbers, is a sure-fire path to both political oblivion and also to a profound failure to conduct the public’s legitimate business.

The public’s legitimate business, along with millions of human beings,  are both being starved of  warranted and justified nutrition. And the predictable outcome of starvation is, last time I checked, mortality.