"The Healing of the Nations"

   As a public servant, this is my second year in which I've had Remembrance Day as a statutory holiday.  Last year, being bedridden due to the flu, I watched the service from Ottawa on TV.  This year, I was able to walk three blocks to Burlington City Hall for our service. Working for the Province makes this no more or less my civic duty, though it does make it easier to serve.

   Near the end of the ceremony, a Fransciscan friar took the podium. By this time, many in the crowd were footsore from standing for an hour or so, and after the laying of the wreaths at the cenotaph, a few were starting to leave.  Carrying my laptop on my shoulder for over an hour, I was tempted as well, but I chose to finish what I began and hear him out.  I'm glad I did.

   The friar told the story of his visit to Assisi, Italy.  A pilgrimage for his Order, the trip to Assisi revealed to him the beauty of the city, and the energy that resides there.  I've spoken with people who have made the trip, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who have reported that feeling of sacredness there, of the sensation of God and spirit that defies the often hate-filled dogmas of the fundamentalists that taint what should be a religion of peace and forgiveness. Spirit and light in Assisi....

   ...and yet, not far from the city, in the surrounding lowlands, the Assisi War Cemetery sits.  945 Allied soldiers from World War II lie buried there.  50 of them are Canadian. 

  The friar spoke slowly and deliberately of the contrast of the joy in the city atop the hill and the sombre mood below where the graves lie. Googling Assisi in World War II, after the ceremony, I learned that his Order had worked to save over 300 Jews from being sent to the extermination camps by dressing them as priests and nuns, at one point forging Nazi documents so well that they managed to convince the Nazi garrison that Assisi was an open city, thus saving it from destruction.

  Imagine: a single beacon of human spirit shining through a landscape darkened not merely by war, but by the dark shadow of mankind made manifest in the Third Reich.  The Nazis were a particular evil that saw entire peoples decimated in the name of racial and ideological superiority. 

   Growing up in an age of moral relativism, where there is no longer automatic consensus to tar and feather a wartime enemy as absolutely evil simply because the government says we should, there is no way anyone in my generation can not see the scourge of Nazism for what it was.

  Ditto for the Taliban, and al Quaeda, who remain an Islamic version of that kind of oppression, destruction, darkness, and suppression of the human spirit.  The shadow of humanity manifests itself time and again in many places, in many faiths, in many ideologies.  Every nation, every faith, every person, is susceptible to the shadow. 

  And half a century ago, an alliance of free nations - in all of their shortcomings, civic imperfections, and checkered histories - recognized the shadow for what it was and sent their best to liberate and protect places like Assisi from the darkness.

  The friar's admiration of our troops was clear enough, but what caught me was his concluding quote from the Book of Revelation.  I was struck by the following:

  "In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

  The reconciliation of humanity with its own shadow is no mere New Age metaphor, but a real experience, a physical battle that takes place throughout the world.  And sometimes we ourselves play the role of shadow, as all the controversies of the past fifty years of foreign policy bear out. 

  Elements of the darkness that our troops continue to battle also appear within our borders: in the political and fundamentalist demagoguery we see appearing on the news; in new political and religious movements that embody anger and intolerance poorly disguised as meaningful change.  The National Socialist German Worker's Party began as such a movement; the Taliban and al Quaeda emerged in houses of worship.  As both examples demonstrate, under the right conditions, the men who shout at the rain from their soapboxes today become those who manifest genocide in the world tomorrow.  Sometimes all too easily.

  But in those who embrace life, and love, and spirit, and compassion lies all of our hope.  Peace is possible by acknowledging our dark sides as individuals. "A world of individuals at peace with themselves is a world at peace", as Dr. Dyer says, but it all starts with you. What will you do to acknowledge your own darkness, and thus prevent it from taking over?

  Remembrance Day has grown far beyond its original historical purpose - to commemorate the British war dead of World War I - and is not the celebration of war, but the acknowledgement of a fundamental paradox of the human experience: that we must sometimes fight for peace. 

    That we should prevent horror by addressing human grievances before they take root and grow into something far more sinister and deadly.

   And most importantly, to remember and thank those who stood, and stand, between us and the darkness that grows too big and dangerous to mitigate by non-violent means.

   And as the Franciscan stated so eloquently, today does not belong only to us, but to all, that the leaves of the Tree of Life that lives in us all will heal us all, that all nations may live in peace.

  To those who stood and stand for that peace, and to those who fell in its name, with all of the gratitude that one soul can muster....thank you.

Unnameable Randoms - July 7th, 2010

I have three alarm Writer's Block.

No movement on the novel.  No movement on "From the Battery to the Heights".  Not even on this blog.  Must be the humidity...

Gah!

Time for Declaration Salad. 

Declaration Salad

This is a new game that is precisely twenty seconds old as of the original draft of this sentence.  In it, I make single paragraph declarations about anything that comes to mind, accompanied by pictures.  Game on!

G20:  This is one of those things I've been trying to blog about, but can't, only because there's too much to write about.  So, here's my main beef: police who knowingly mislead the public.  My conservative buddies, naturally, side with the cops, saying that misleading or omitting the fact that the so-called "five metre arrest rule" around the perimeter of the fence didn't actually exist was a means to an end.  To what end? Giving the police greater perimeter control over the violent protesters.  Protecting property.  Protecting "the people". 

Sadly, the police, indeed all democratic institutions in the First World, cannot be a "means to an end" type of entity. The "means" portion very much matters, because the "means", in this case, is a little thing we call "due process".  This ain't Mexico, and it's very much a valid slippery slope argument to ask, once you start skirting the law to enforce the law, finding loopholes or just flat out ignoring existing statutes, what's to stop you from doing so in other situations? And if it came as a directive from Queen's Park, then I see no logical difference between this and the investigation of former Premier Mike Harris and his connection to the OPP killing of protestor Dudley George at Ipperwash.  You'd think any conservative worth the blue in his blood would get behind investigating a Liberal premier on this matter, instead of automatically retreating, sheep-like, to the default ideological position of police worship.

Ironically, for conservatives to reflexively side with the police force and the government in this matter is to compromise another fundamental tenet of their own ideology, a basic belief goes beyond this ideology, that has gone out the window in the Harper era, and that hasn't been a practiced part of the lunatic Republican scene States-side for two decades: government accountability.  I look forward to seeing the independent civilian inquest of Toronto Police Services in this matter. 

(And because this is such a dicey topic, prone to distraction and sleight of hand by the Limbaughs and Becks and Parentes of the blogosphere - yes, Julius, I'm calling you out, buddy - I will repeat: I am not criticizing individual police officers or government officials.  When I say "police", I am referring to the institution, not those who serve them, and by extension, us.  I'll leave it to the inquiries to find out which individual officers conducted themselves illegally during this event.)

(And yes, I realize I just broke the single rule of Declaration Salad: one paragraph only.  Call me hypocrite if you wish, but at least I'm not in command of people with guns and batons and jails.  I trust my point is clear.  Moving on.)

Personal Boundaries and Rules:  They suck.  They serve you at times when you're not comfortable, but when you're looking to grow as a person, they just hold you back. They become habits that prevent us from growing, and when we do try to look for new experiences in life, we run up against them and we have no idea why we're feeling unhappy, or not having those new experiences  Paulo Coelho writes in The Valkyries that many people are like trained circus elephants: we're given shackles when we're younger, then chained to a massive tree that we can't escape with all of our strength.  Eventually, we give up, and we grow up chained, except when our trainers say it's okay to wander, or when they need us to perform. And even when we're clearly strong enough to get away, our trainers can shackle us to a twig and we'll still sit there, just because we got used to it. This is what's been happening to me lately.  I've got boundaries and rules for everything: love, sex, jobs, exercise, diets, politics, attraction...and they're no longer serving me.  Almost none of them.  Revelation the other day: the only reason I keep them around is because I worry about what someone would think of me if I broke them. 2nd Revelation: these rules and boundaries in question come from a time when I was a different person looking for different things.  Like the GST, they no longer apply, so I've junked them.  I can't write about the changes happening inside Jody's life - I've tried - because they're ongoing, and they're new.  I don't know what to make of them yet, but I'm watching the flow.  Stay tuned.

(And yes, I realize that I just adhered to the single rule of Declaration Salad. Call me a hypocrite if you'd like, but at least I'm breaking a rule that I made up. It just didn't serve me anymore. I trust my point is clear. Moving on.)

Planning: My former mother-in-law who reads this blog - hey, Pat - used to say that "people don't plan to fail, they fail to plan."  Tellingly, though, I think some people do plan to fail - a few health and safety officials at BP can testify have testified to that - but really, success or failure is entirely contextual.  In plain English, if all intended to do was run a marathon, then as long as I kept running from start to finish, I succeeded.  If I intended to win said marathon, though, anything less than coming in first would be a failure.  Would the latter force me to do more, be more, push myself more?  Sure, but that's the point: it's not all about what you want to accomplish, but who you want to become in the process of accomplishment.  That means, on occasion, abandoning the plans you had if you're not happy with who you are in relation to them.  That's not to say you can't have goals: they're two different things.  One is the thing you're after, the other is the way you accomplish it.  And really, the goal is to feel joy and happy, no matter what specific thing we feel we have to do to get it.  I'd love to be a bestselling author in my thirties, that's plain to read, and that plan is simple: write the damned book, start networking and speculating for an agent. Beyond that, I have no clue.  According to the original life plan, I'm failing.  No house, no more spouse, no six figure income, no kids. Like the boundaries, though, the plan doesn't apply.  It's getting junked, too, along with, interestingly enough, my romantic plan.  Yes, indeed, it's a Jodyist Revolution around these parts....

Momentary Living: Because I've been having a lot of different conversations about living in the moment.  It's such a platitude, it's beyond a cliche.  What the hell does it really mean?  Logically, it seems to set up a dichotomy with planning, conjuring up images of idle loafers who never figure themselves out, but who indulge every second in something deeply pleasurable versus noble denizens of Squaresville who never have much fun, but who brush their teeth precisely thirty-three times per session and run their lives with the efficiency of a Pratt and Whitney turbojet.  It's clearly a false dichotomy: no one is a precise "type" of person.  The solution is to just have a single goal and then release it to the universe, and then....live your life, day to day, moment by moment. Quit overthinking things and just do epic shit if it feels right in the moment and it won't hurt anyone else or yourself.  Kiss that girl - or just ask her out - even if she isn't your stated type: don't give a shit what you said or what your friends will say.  Take wrong directions on purpose, play hooky for no reason except for a day off to do whatever. Apply for that Hail Mary job, take up karate even though you're 300 pounds overweight.

Do a flyby on the tower, even if the pattern is full.

Whatever.  And just know that every action, legitimately savoured as it's happening, will lead you there.  Don't abandon a dream and a goal: just get rid of the addiction to the plan.  Abandon the model.

Buckminster Fuller said it best:  "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."  Be a little stoopid.  Nuff said.

XKCD: You ma-ma-ma-make m-me h-haaaaaa-py......

Aaaaand....blockage is still there.  Shit.  Must be the humidity after all....

***

On This Earth Day....

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 10:0 Mood: Erudite)

On this Earth Day, I am tired of the bullshit.

I am tired of the endless debating, the statistics for and against anthropogenic(or human-caused) climate change, the wringing of hands over policy, and the occasional chirps from the peanut gallery on all sides of this topic.

I'm sick of the sophistry, for which the left, centre, and right of the political spectrum all share the guilt.

Most of all, I'm tired of the lack of common sense over this whole business coming from everyone who fails to see the one big, undeniable common-sense rule that we as a species are breaking: you don't shit where you eat.

That's right. For all the complexities, vicissitudes, paradoxes, hyperboles, dialectics, red-herrings, and other big, hard-to-pronounce words and terms that swirl around all talk of the environment like twister jetsam, the relationship between each human being and his or her planet boils down to simply not taking a crap in the same place where we derive our nourishment.

In a comment to a video link of Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" on my Facebook wall this morning, my colleague, friend, and vitriol-supplier Julius Parente implies that I am against "progress". I have accurately cited our definition of "progress" as a major factor as to why we are ingesting our own waste on a daily basis. This is what he and other political conservatives like him do: they engage in creative wordplay, redirecting your attention away from the issue for the sake of forwarding their own agenda.

And what is that agenda? That, too, boils down to simplicity: conservatives want the freedom to shit wherever they want. They don't want to make the lifestyle changes, because even if it's killing us, it's preferable to having to give up one's SUV.

They argue that jobs will be lost, economies ruined, lifestyles destroyed, entire civilizations pushed to the brink of collapse, masses made homeless, civil liberties taken away, and the world generally coming to an end.....if we choose as a species to obey our common sense and not shit where we eat.

To take a page from Aaron Sorkin, this is what conservatives are good at: "making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections."

But it's not just conservatives. Socialists and liberals all have their agendas, their own ideological axes to grind, and they've helped to discredit a legitimate movement by inserting their own pre-existing desire to tax the hell out of you and give more power to the state, in the name of environmentalism. Nowhere do you find room for individuals or businesses to do right on their own: the state is mother, the state is father.

Shame on you. You've given the right wing bullets to shoot at you, because you didn't know when to keep your ideological fly zipped when a far more important challenge, one that is beyond politics, knocked on your door and said "what up".

This is too bad, considering that the one thing the centre-left does do well, at its finest, is encourage everyone to aspire to more than what we are now, to become better, and to make political decisions that manifest those high ideals. Were it not for these progressive elements, I would still be a second-class citizen based on my skin colour, women would still be shackled to their stoves and beds, non-Christian beliefs would still have "occult" status in the minds of the majority, and society would be a lot less great than it is now (to say nothing of homosexuals and Jews...watch now, as they distract us away by stating that I accused them of anti-Semitism. I deal in facts, not ideologies, bro).

Conservatives are good at appealing to inertia, and the baser, cheaper, bigoted, lazy, close-minded elements of the electorate. The voters don't have to think, don't have to spend money, don't have take responsibility for anything other than keeping a job and not suckling at the government teat, don't have to sacrifice. With conservatives in charge, nobody has to work for progress, and certainly not the government.

To my friend, I am not against "progress", Julius: you, and all those like you, are, in fact, the ones who hate progress.

You work against progress every single time you imply a false dichotomy between "trees" and "jobs' to avoid talking about facts, knowing that on a level playing field, you will lose a fact-based discussion on the environment each and every time.

You work against progress every time you cite the political hypocrisies of the other side as the reason why you're not trying to do better yourself.

You work against progress every time you thumb your nose at the messengers who bring you the truth, simply because of the political colours you think they fly, or because you don't like them personally.

You work against progress every time you present junk science as fact to the genuine seekers of knowledge, aiming not to educate, but to convert.

And you work against progress when you close minds to the possibilities that simply changing existing industries, institutions, and practices to be more harmonious with the surrounding environment while maintaining our standard of living can bring a future greater than the grim invention your colleagues have concocted to scare citizens back into being okay with eating, drinking, and breathing in their own waste.

You want to know what progress is? I'll tell you.

True progress means using your brain. It means looking back at nearly half a millennium of industrial development as a necessary and vital stage of our growth as a civilization, and changing how it operates now so that our technology and standards of living don't continue to contaminate our air, our water, our food.

True progress means recognizing that the technologies have existed for nearly half-a-century that do not destroy ecosystems and climates, and all it takes is for us to implement them.

True progress means recognizing, and encouraging, the integration of green technologies into the economy for the sake of sustainable job creation and growth, and thus recognizing that "trees" and "jobs" are not mutually-exclusive.

True progress means recognizing that the well-being of other species in the food chain that we currently dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant can, in fact, be key to our own survival, especially if our current practices are killing them.

And true progress starts by doing what's right, even if it's not easy at first.

I'm done talking to the peanut gallery, since peanuts generally don't have much to contribute to a conversation in real life.

Instead, I will appeal to your common sense, reader. Outside of scientific data and methodology, which can and has been tampered with to suit ideological agendas of all sides, everything about the following is undeniable and incontrovertible:

The planet created us.

The planet provides our basic biological needs to simply live.

Thus, we have a vested interest in sustaining the healthy functioning of the planet.

Of all species, ours is the dominant one, in terms of our power and ability to alter the world.

Of all species, ours is the only one that is aware of all global systems at once, how they interact, how they affect us, and how we affect them.

If six billion individuals produce even one unit of anything into the surrounding environment, that amounts to six billion units of that "anything' being put into the surrounding environment.

We know that many of the products we emit are toxic.

We know that those toxicities end up in the same land from which we grow food, in the same waters from which we drink, and in the air that we all breathe.

We know what we are doing.

We know what it does to the systems that sustain us.

We know what it does to our bodies and our homes.

We do it anyway.

And we can choose to stop.

A Native American saying states that "no tree has branches foolish enough to fight amongst themselves". In the end, this is not a matter of choosing sides, because we are on the same side: the side of life. Things like money and jobs and houses matter, of course, but they are part of the larger whole.

Currently, that whole is not harmonious with all of its parts, and that's where our work lies: creating harmony between our everyday lifestyle and the planet itself. If you want to discuss how best to go about that, then great: speak your mind, but don't deny the fundamental facts about what we are doing and what effect it has on this world. Don't ignore the inconvenient truths. And don't lie.

"Every day on this planet, by definition, is Earth Day: today's just the day we notice everything we've lost along the path of "progress", and hope for the things we can yet save." This was my status update today on Facebook.

Progress has led us here, this is true, but if we humans, outgrowths of the Earth itself, stop fighting amongst ourselves over the very entity that sustains us, then progress will also lead us out. We can redefine progress.

And on this Earth Day, as with every day, I wonder when we're finally going to start.

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My name is Jody Aberdeen and I am the President....(this one was for you, Mr. Sorkin).



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