Attention

I’m disheartened to see another shooting on the front page of my morning newsletter in the country to the south. Disheartened because it is a country where I lived some years ago. Disheartened when all the columns say that nothing will be done about it. Disheartened even when an article about the lack of progress in meeting the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - who dealt after all with even more deaths that the current tragedy - has only addressed a small percentage of them, and token ones at that. And that article appears on a back page because it doesn’t sell newspapers.

But I felt more positive after a comment made by a man in a discussion group later this morning - that if there is to be action, it has to come from mothers. That’s who made things better in Ireland. Mothers on both sides of the Troubles complained to their own leaders that what they were doing was unsustainable. Today is where those mothers need to get to work.

There are only two places where guns have any legitimacy that I can think of. One is hunting for food. The other is as a last resort in a time of war. A second amendment right in the US Constitution related to a particular time and place. To pretend that it has validity in 2022 is a twisted sense of logic that ought to belie belief by any sensible person. But it’s cleverly retained by appealing to greed and fear.

But I am wrong in thinking that all Americans love their guns. This is what Pew Research Centre said earlier this year:

• A third of Americans own at least one gun. 40 % say they live in a household that has one. If you do the math, that means that the majority don’t. Men are more likely to say they own one (39%) as opposed to women (22%).

• People say the reason they own a firearm is for protection.

• 48% of Americans see gun violence as a problem. This includes 82% of Black adults, 58% of Hispanics but only 39% of whites.

• 52% would like to see stricter guns laws - but that number is declining. They are divided as to whether lower ownership would lead to fewer mass shootings. They are also seriously divided politically.

When society has changed dramatically throughout histroy, it has almost always started from the ground up - though sometimes with tacit agreement from the top until support grows. Women know about waiting nine months to bring new life to fruition. The cost of remaining silent is too high. Let’s get started.

Other

The week’s news continues - elections in Ontario, primaries in the US, hate crimes in cities, wars, resignations. So much involves anger that can turn to violence.

I’m interested in Larry Rasmussen’s and Matthew Fox’s comments about the common metaphors that we use, The former talked about the Great Chain of Being - a picture of how the universe was understood - with a supreme Being at the top with a series of steps down with lesser and lesser agency at the bottom. The Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny are similar examples - how those in power “lorded” it over those below by assuming the right to take over their territory, their culture and their language. To do so, it is necessary to think of the other as inferior. The most extreme is a Master/Slave relationship but there are lots of gradations that are more nuanced. Witness our attitude toward people of so-called colour and toward nature itself.

We often are smug as Canadians in examining American race and immigration rhetoric while conveniently ignoring the history of our treatment of our original inhabitants. Whether we believe that humans are inherently good or inherently bad, we nevertheless cannot ignore the existence of evil - as a possibility within ourselves or a reality in the larger world around us. But how does the possibility gain such a foothold?

Is tribalism learned? We belong to many groupings. As a small child I was troubled when my Presbyterian mother commented on a coming wedding. “She’s marrying a Catholic”, she said. “It’s too bad”. Something piqued my curiosity. We had a live-in maid in the household who was a Catholic who sometimes too me to her church. As a five year old rather liked an Angel who would bow her head if you put a penny in an urn she was holding. That probably is long gone and not representative of Catholicism in any way, but at least I questioned the tribalism pf my mother’s comment at the time. Why as it too bad? Since I didn’t get an answer, I decided for myself that on that point at least, she was wrong.

How do we get from too bad to replacement theory? How does a teen embody so much hatred in the span of 18 years. Is it fear? Is it the desire for celebrity? Do we have any idea of the difference between a disagreement on a certain issue or policy and turning someone with a different point of view into an “other”?

Matthew Fox today notes that hatred has always been with us as a species when we don’t examine the five year old’s conscience or curiosity to ask why. We protect our own. And when that doesn’t allay our fears we turn the other into a scapegoat. The other side of that is the hubris that builds our view as the right one and gives us the authority to exercise power. When we turn that power into an institution, we may be on the way to hatred in some circumstances - and violence is the eventual outcome.

Abandon all hierarchies and we often end in chaos. Keep them in place and the other may become objectified. It spreads to gender, race, nations and the elements of the planet - fire, air, water, soil.

How Fox deals with hatred is seeing it as the negative form of energy - the positive one being love. Both come from the heart before the mind deals with them. Anger, he says, can be part of the positive side when it follows from compassion for the other as an injustice is clearly perceived. But it can also grow into resentment that becomes hatred and ultimately leads to violence.

I can see in myself how a small thing can lead to resentment. Without reflection, it can so quickly lead to scapegoating and blame. Reflection has never been more necessary in our world of constant noise. We need to examine the small resentments that lead to such engrained ones that spring up and grow among us like viruses. They have always been part of human history in all cultures. We are no long part of a world of chains. We live in a world of networks. How do we use them to infect others with love?

What we need

The only remedy is moral outrage heated enough to get people to the polls. “Nothing great happens without anger.” (Thomas Aquinas)

This was Matthew Fox talking this morning about the impending American Supreme Court Decision if a leak is prescient. Abortion as a culture war imperative has lost any sense of nuance or humanity in much discourse.

It reminded me of something in the book that I continue to read - Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key. In his chapter, “The Ethic we need” he observes that science can provide us with what we must need to know about a subject - in the book’s context, it’s nature, but the same can apply to any moral issue. Unlike most of the culture wars which focus of what is good for an individual, he looks at the broader implications for a society as a whole. What is nearly always missing in the current brouhaha is the larger context of the reality of a pregnancy and all the players that surround it - or for that matter, that it takes more than one person to make it happen.

The Author, Larry Rasmussen, goes on to talk about change and quotes Vaclev Havel on its anatomy: “The distinguishing features of such times are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered”. Havel thought modernity was ending and saw the world as disconnected, confusing and chaotic with few common meanings or inner understandings of what we are experiencing. Rasmussen goes on to ask us what will make our species become the one that is capable of the right kind of change.

He suggests that the levels of change are threefold.

• The first one that we think of and is the easiest to do. It’s based on what we know already and is most familiar.

• The second comes when we realize that an unexpected crisis demands something more - certainly in the case of the climate crisis, but that one is now swamped in the news by the war crisis and the abortion crisis. One decision was made about the latter. It can’t be reversed without a chance of causing another crisis.

• The shouting and distrust of institutions calls for something quite different and calls for a third - a change of consciousness - what Havel called “New meaning . . . gradually born from the encounter or the intersection of many different elements” - a different view, Rasmussen says, of what does and does not make sense.

The good thing about anger is that it can be motivating and energizing - but just yelling at one another doesn’t deal with an issue and dissuades others from exercising their own view through voting since all of the speakers eventually seem like idiots.

Suppose the placard carrying supporter and opponent of abortion - or even their counterparts in the Supreme Court - needed to hear not from lobbyists or lawyers, but from several pregnant woman as to what they were facing in terms of decision - perhaps a mother with several children to support already with less than adequate means to do so, or a young teenage girl after a chance encounter with a teenage boy where neither knew anything about unprotected sex, or a woman molested by a family member, or a woman raped at gunpoint. Putting on those shoes - what does the mind say? What about the heart? What about the gut? In turn each supporter and opponent might be asked to tell their stories of unexpected crisis in their own lives when they had to make a choice - and what the values were leading to that decision - and if the decision had to be made again, what the choice might be. Could there ever be a learning experience for any of them?

Keeping the two placarded sides separate may prevent violence brought on by anger. But is it the only possibility?

The Speed of Change

I’ve been busy with many things in my life and remiss in writing. I observed to someone recently, “Keep your day job, You will be much less busy than you will be later in retirement”. The Canadian orchestral conductor, Boris Brott, observed in an interview that he would not want to ever retire. Sadly he did not, when he died in a hit and run accident.

I don’t have paid employment, but I have lots of it in volunteer and self -imposed places. Reading and other kinds of writing do take up time. And reading gives me my best posts - not original at all, but thought provoking. Here is one from Larry Rasmussen’s Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key.

“Anyone born in 1936 and still alive in 2003 (I was for both ) was around for 97.5 percent of all the oil ever pumped and burned. In the prodigious half-century from 1950 to 2000 the global consumer economy produced, transported and consumed as many goods and services as throughout the entirety of prior history.”

What is enough is a question that has been asked before. The Limits to Growth, the Report of the Club of Rome was published in 1972. Forty years later we still avoid it. Rassmussen does not let us off the hook. He’s asking for changes based on the faiths we have inherited which asks things of us. I’ll be quoting more from him in the future.

The Time has Come

Strong words from the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, about the latest document from the International Panel on Climate Change. “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and he added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” 

 Bill McKibben’s latest essay in the New Yorker contends that the time to act is NOW.

 · There is a relation to the war in Ukraine.  Fossil fuel has given Putin the money to finance this atrocious invasion.

· John Kerry called the Glasgow climate talks our last best hope to which Greta Thumberg responded, “blah blah blah”.

·  If the US bans Russian oil – that’s just the beginning. We have to ban oil everywhere.

·  Our species has learned to depend on combustion. Now we have to unlearn it. We’ve focused on the pandemic, but we didn’t note this fact. In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as covid-19 did.

·  What we have forgotten is the fire that we can access from elsewhere without drilling for it – the sun.

·  We have the resources to replace burning fossil fuels. Early predictions of production of wind and solar energy production were pessimistic, but that is changing.  McKibben notes that Iceland, Costa Rica, Namibia, and Norway—are already producing more than ninety per cent of their electricity from clean sources.

·  Cost matters.  Here is another quote from McKibben. “ By  2013, the cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy had fallen by more than ninety-nine per cent since it was first used on the Vanguard I. Meanwhile, the price of coal has remained about the same. It was cheap to start, but it hasn’t gotten cheaper.”

·  People have believed for a long time that the cost of changing from coal is prohibitive.  Since that is no longer the case, it is beliefs and attitudes that have to change.

·  There are huge implications for Canada, according to McKibben. “A third of Canada’s natural gas is used to heat the oil trapped in the soil sufficiently to get it to flow to the surface and separate it from the sand. Just extracting the oil would put Canada over its share of the carbon budget set in Paris, and actually burning it would heat the planet nearly half a degree Celsius and use up about a third of the total remaining budget. (And Canadians account for only about one half of one per cent of the world’s population.)”

·  But we have a huge potential for renewable energy from the sky. Do we want to leave that in the air rather than thinking about what we can take from the ground?

·  Much of the world is an importer of coal – and the ships that carry it there do so over and over with fuel to transport it. Wind blades have to be transported too – but one shipment of them lasts for fifty years.

·  We are going to need more electricians.  That’s a retraining decision that has to be made by governments. They will ultimately be well paying jobs.

·  We’re still up against those who want to keep burning things – including one member of the US senate who holds the power to do so while benefiting from coal production. We pretend that natural gas is cleaner, while forgetting that it still involves burning something. Natural gas, McKibben says, is a bridge fuel to nowhere.

·  Wood burning is also seen as an alternative. But wood takes years to replace and all the tree planting in the world can’t keep up.

·  Carbon capture is raised as a possibility – but it costs more than solar power.

·  Utilities will fight hard – charging huge rates for changing systems to discourage changes. Governments need to regulate.

·  After pointing out that those who cause the least energy damage are the ones to suffer most, McKibben quotes Naomi Klein on inequities and the need for environmental organizations to think beyond themselves: “ Winning will take sweeping alliances beyond the self-identified green bubble—with trade unions, housing-rights advocates, racial-justice organizers, teachers, transit workers, nurses, artists, and more. But, to build that kind of coalition, climate action needs to hold out the promise of making daily life better for the people who are most neglected right away—not far off in the future. “

·  The haves of the world have to pay more to the fifty five have-not countries to help them pay for transfers to renewable energy.  So far, these have been empty promises.

·  We need to learn from our indigenous cousins who know the value of using small fires to prevent larger conflagrations – something that they have known for hundreds of years.