This post may seem a little rambling... I blame that on a combination of the 8-hour time change from Ethiopia to Ontario and the accompanying return culture shock of this world compared to where I have been. These thoughts are not meant to be complete or definitive statements. Simply some observations. As I have been jotting some thoughts down, I came across this from an on-line friend:
Numerous creditable sources now write about the decline of democracy. Close to home, look at the actions of Trump and Trudeau. While different in their approaches, both throw out long-held democratic approaches to governing.
...after yet another school shooting, I wrote the following:
They come faster and faster, the shootings do. Like a junkie looking for a fix, I keep looking at the social media sites, both expecting the next one, and reading the outrage of my friends who often put to words the things I feel. I want them to be outraged, because I want to know I am not alone in the fury I feel at our inability to address this issue. I need their outrage, because it is too easy for me to go numb, to decline to feel anymore because it is all so overwhelming.
And yet…
I also need to remember that the best critique of the bad is the living out of the better, and that outrage, while appropriate, is by itself impotent. And the better world we dream of won’t come from hitting refresh on Facebook so we know we are not alone in our anger. No, that world will come about as the result of the countless small decisions we make in our daily life. We resist the world on offer by living into the creation of a new one.
We resist by living.
Keep that in mind as a ramble a little.Politics
There is an increase in right-wing, conservative, populist politics around the world. That's one way of looking at it. I see a huge increase in political labelling and antagonism. The "other side" of the political battlefield is always wrong... and as we have seen in the recent democratic nomination race in the USA, those battlegrounds are often within the same party. Increasingly labels are meaningless. They are simply there to diminish the other person and party. People throw around labels like "socialism" and "capitalism" without really understanding what those terms mean. It's just a variation on labelling people left or right. It's overly simplistic, minimizing of others, and sometimes simply wrong.Numerous creditable sources now write about the decline of democracy. Close to home, look at the actions of Trump and Trudeau. While different in their approaches, both throw out long-held democratic approaches to governing.
Abortion & MAID
We live in a world that uses the term "quality of life" to actually minimizes life. This isn't the place to defend a position on abortion or assisted death. What I do what I want to say is that one of the indicators of the health of a country is how it treats those with no voice. Increasingly I am seeing that those with little or no voice, are being pushed aside. Whether it is the unborn, women who feel like there is no option but abortion, the poor, those with physical and/or mental handicaps or development problems, those who wrestle with trauma and addictions... the list goes on. As people created in God's image, we are to uphold life, and not make life and death decisions simply on the basis of economics. We already see this in sex-selected abortions, and we are starting to see hospital staff encourage assisted death.Protests
Since coming back to Canada there have been two main protest movements in the news. The Teachers strikes in Ontario and the 1st Nations rail blockades across Canada. And, of course, on Facebook, there are multiple experts. People who are convinced that they know the whole story, that they know who is driving the action, that again, their side of the story, is the right side.- Teacher's strikes - Ford has shown himself not to have a plan. He has made multiple promises and broken them, made decisions and then had to go back on them. When a politician tries to negotiate through the media, you know they are not really interested in a solution, they are interested in the next election. There are multiple issues at play in the negotiations. Are there problems with school boards - sure there are - but let's solve them and not create battlegrounds at the expense of education.
- Rail blockades - If you thought the teacher's strikes were complicated, that is nothing compared to this. There is the issue of the place of civil disobedience. And there is the bigger reality of ignoring 1st Nations people. Thomas King, in his book "The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America" highlights broken promise after broken treaty. I can understand why people are upset with the blocking of rail traffic - we have places to go, goods to ship - but can we understand why Canada's 1st Nations are upset? Canadian governments have not been trustworthy.
Think about the lack of drinking water in 1st Nations communities - currently, there are more than 100 communities without access to clean drinking water - and there is no clear plan to address this.
Or think about the Dryden Chemical Company discharging their effluent directly into the Wabigoon-English River system, beginning in 1962. In 1970, extensive mercury contamination was discovered in this river system, leading to the closure of the commercial fishery and some tourism-related businesses. Clean up has still not happened.
Facebook posts
Do your homework. It is so easy to share a Facebook meme. Much of the time, it is only part of the truth, some (a lot) of the time it is none of the truth. Just because a meme supports your presuppositions doesn't mean it's true.
..the best critique of the bad is the living out of the better... And the better world we dream of... will come about as the result of the countless small decisions we make in our daily life. We resist the world on offer by living into the creation of a new one.
We resist by living.
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