Violence as Protest

I read a story this week about a young man being arrested for defacing a famous painting in Canada’s National Gallery. He was protesting Climate Change and picked a painting by the famous Canadian painter Tom Thompson as the image shows here.

I find it troubling to see a public protest - even an individual one- resorting to violence. When the man did this, he knew that there was protective glass covering the painting and assumed he would still be arrested, but not guilty of actually damaging it. But would any other youthful protester know the whole story and simply imitate the practice with lasting consequence. My guess is that this will not please the visual artists who spread the message of climate through displaying depicting of the tragedies of our human impact on the natural world.

I’m more impressed by those who use non-violent methods - though some of them risk arrest as well. A young woman working as a barmaid in New York travelled to Standing Rock to support the Lakota people in their opposite to the Keystone Pipeline. The experience prompted her to run for the US Congress and Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez won the election to become the youngest person ever to be seated there. From there she went on to sponsor the Green New Deal in 2019, her first year of office. It took a while to for that bill to succeed but finally much of the best of it was incorporated in more recent legislation and passed.

The young man wanted to attract attention to something worthwhile - but how it is done also counts. I hope he learns to have bigger dreams of how he will change the world.

From Despair to Possibility

I’m now re-reading a book I went through very quicky to savor the contents. The editors of Not Too Late, Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua have assembled a number of articles under the book’s subheading, Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. In another context I have been participating in an organizational review where the pandemic has brought deep grief and despair, though the participants seldom link the pandemic to the larger story.

One chapter I found moving and helpful was entitled Meeting the More and the Marrow. It began with a quote from Terry Tempest Williams, currently writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School. Williams wrote. “A good friend wrote to me, ‘You are married to sorrow". She replied, “I’m not married to sorrow, I just choose not to look away”.

The writer of the chapter is Roshi Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher and some of her own insights are worth reflecting upon too. Here are a few of them:

“Before we touch briefly on the givens of hope and wonder, I think we must navigate, at least a little bit, the tough geographies of fear and of grief, as well as the moral suffering, to discover what these harsher landscapes might offer us.”

“We now face the loss of stable ecosystems in which humans have during the twelve thousand years of the Holocene. Yet it is also important to know that like grief, fear can be a kind of doorway.”

“So perhaps we can discover that fear and grief are givens. Working our grief, facing our fears can transform us”

“Transforming our suffering doesn’t mean that we are going to be returned to the state that we experienced before. But we can discover that suffering and loss have given us a greater ability to live in the present, rather than be overwhelmed by the past”.

Truth & Facts

What is Truth?, said Pilate. And indeed we might ask. I’m hitting the Oxford English Dictionary for a history of the word over time. Here are some definitions

Year 1734 - God’s Truth:. The absolute truth (also with the and as a count noun); also God's honest truth; (b) int. used as an oath. (Interesting that use in an oath still seems to apply in 2023)

Year 1833 -A fundamental truth. Also: the real or underlying facts; information that has been checked or facts that have been collected at source.

Year 1977 -Ground Truth. A fundamental truth. Also: the real or underlying facts; information that has been checked or facts that have been collected at source.

Year 1982 -Post Truth. Originally U.S. Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion. (Aha. Has it really been that long that we have been living with this meaning and are we just waking up to it now? )

2023 Smith Indictment. “The defendant, like every American, had the right to speak publicly about the election and even to claim falsely . . . . . . “

If all Americans - and because we Canadians are frequently copycats - have a perceived right to claim things falsely - as a right, is there any way back to truth definitions of earlier times? In my country as well, we see politicians of all stripes claiming questionable things, but generally we are willing to consider rebuttals. But if adherence to law depends on the evidence of facts - and “alternative facts” are permitted outside the law, how and when will be move toward justice? Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Is the arc getting longer?

Local & Global

This morning’s parish newsletter arrives as usual with a reminder of a coming Community Dinner. This is a project going back more than twenty years. Once a month we feed 80-100 urban poor - some occasionally homeless, but most with some kind of permanent shelter. What they don’t have on a welfare income is the ability to buy enough wholesome food. We try to provide that. It is the least we can do for these regular guests that we have come to know over the years - and sometimes they tell us their stories.

Stories count in the world of climate change and too often they are horror stories. The fires in Hawaii have hit home and in a recent Zoom meeting, people talked about the places they had been - now completely devastated. Being there in the past made it matter. They understood the loss.

What is difficult is the stories we don’t hear. I’ve been reading the book, Not Too Late, which is full of stories of parts of the world with which I have no direct connection. Many are heartbreaking as the people affected suffer the climate degradation caused by mining, deforestation and other forms of exploitation that lay waste their world, while we ignore them. What if it were mandatory for any community like mine to adopt a far off island where the people face the disappearance of their land through erosion and flooding and hear their stories regularly in their own words? It might knock some sense into us as we recognize what we are doing to our island home and its effects on our siblings.

Finitude

I have a new word in my vocabulary. It comes from a book that attracted my attention when I escaped from being too involved with a project, walked some final letters to the post office - because there are still people without email - and crossed the street to my neighborhood independent bookstore. Book City combines a large range of magazines, new books and remaindered ones in a relatively small space. I tend to head toward remaindered, after looking at the new releases.

But this time a new one published in 2023 appeared to have my name on it. Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. by Oliver Burkeman. Its cover reads Embrace Your Limits, Change Your Life. My life needed a change. Being burned out as a retiree ought to be an oxymoron.

Four thousand weeks is what you get if you live to be 80 years old. I’m already beyond half way to 4700 weeks if I make it to 90. The introductory chapter is headed, In the Long Run, We’re all Dead. Time Management seems like a solution and I have read all the books for years. This one does take a different and salutary direction.

The author is quite witty and well read - he has lived through both Trump and the Pandemic nad like me, still here. Perhaps the kernel of what he says comes from - of all people, Martin Heidigger, who defeats all students of philosophy by being more obsessed with the subject of finitude than any other. An d there is the addition of the two strikes of being a member of the Nazi party for ten years, and being almost impossible to read. Burkeman though, helps us through Heidigger by pointing to the question, somewhat like Hamlet, :What does it mean to be”? He says the only real question is whether we are willing to confront that one or not. The answer is that we are mortal. We are born here, we live here, we die here. All we can do is live our one miraculous life - a gift that never depended on us.

I’ve also been reading a report this morning of the results of some consultations - with one group of people saying, “If only we could get back to the past when everything was the way we wish it were now, it would be so wonderful” - and another group saying, “What do we have to do to make the future exactly the way we want it to be - which will be so wonderful”. I tend to join the second group with all its worry and anxiety. But the truth dawns. The only life over which I/they have any control is the one I/they have right now. It’s not as if we can manage time. Our life is our time - with limits.. It’s not as though our choices don’t matter because clearly they have consequences. But to pretend that we can fully control the future by our actions or recover the past is crazy. Learning finitude is important before it’s too late - both for me and everyone else.