Cell913blog.com Post #2
Mandela’s life-long fight
was for political, legal, and human rights equality for black Africans, Indians
and Afrikanners. Class segregation, laws and regulations, court cases,
investigations, prison sentences and even the death penalty all supported the
policy of apartheid. His life story, in Long Walk into Freedom, details the
many personal, legal, organizational, and even military and quasi-military
strategies and tactics, the search for common ground among potential allies,
both within South Africa and beyond, to the rest of Africa and even to the
United Nations. Similar, if far less dramatic, historically significant and
painful, movements have taken place for various causes in the over-all campaign
for human rights around the world. Amnesty International, for one, is a robust,
courageous, creative and penetrating non-profit on behalf those individuals who
have been deprived of their legitimate human rights, in various jurisdictions.
And their work needs both more dollars and more letters to be written on behalf
of those without a political voice. Oppressors, as is their wont, are minimally,
if at all, impressed and/or moved to change their abusive decisions, no matter
the size or the clarity, the source or the duration of any and all campaigns to
bring about the release of unjustified, illegitimate, illegal and both
untenable and unfathomable detentions.
There are literally
hundreds, if not thousands of well-meaning, honourable, integrous, authentic
both individuals and non-governmental organizations, working 24-7-365 to combat
global warming and climate change. They are finally getting some, still far too
little, attention from the world media, many of whose organizations have
already ‘committed’ to support the many initiatives designed to combat any
increase in global temperatures. While 1.5 degrees Celsius has been the
threshold beyond which climate scientists have warned us that extreme
catastrophe is likely, we are now seeing more and more reports that it is
highly unlikely we will hold to the 1.5 degree threshold. We already know that
2023 is the hottest year on record, confirmed by the UN official at the COP28
climate summit. Global temperature is projected to warm by about 1.5 degrees
Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050) and 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit) by 2100. While these figures are both astounding and also somewhat
abstract, (we do not think in degrees on a thermometer!), there is a serious,
even existential risk to every person currently living on the planet, and
certainly that risk also extends to any new-borns who will arrive in the next few
decades.
Attempting to address
this shared crisis, (we all breathe the same air, drink from the same water
sources, and plant seeds in and harvest from the shared soil, under the same
sky), governments and their various agencies, non-profits, for-profits and individuals
are all (at least the majority) are finally acknowledging the dimensions, both
in danger and in time, as well as in costs, to this crisis. The old arguments
about the validity of ‘acid-rain’ back in the 1980’s seem more like an
American-Canadian political ‘zit’ today, compared with the monumental size and
danger we all face. No international body, integrating both governments and
non-profits and for-profits, has been aggregated, organized, funded and set to
carry out specific mandates, with both adequate funds, adequate and even
muscular sanctions and increasingly needed educational programs that not only
disseminate the available research (itself in a flowing river) but also design
new delivery methods, monitoring systems to determine the effectiveness of the
educational and informational efforts, in each country. Such a system/program
would also be able to discern specific resistances, and begin the hard job of
attempting to penetrate the most granite and impermeable of these resistances.
(Start with the global coal industry, and the need for proponents of fossil
fuels not only to open to other energy options, but to overcome traditional,
deeply embedded dogmatic and psychological commitments to ‘how we do things
here’ as a cultural, political, economic and ideological mantra.
The pace of the change we
all need, does not apply only to the climate issues; it applies also to the
cyber revolution, in which the technology has already surpassed both the
cognitive appreciation of its power, now and in the future, but as importantly and
consequently, the political/legal fences that must be erected around what is
now the ‘wild-west’ of cyberspace. While there are admittedly, positive
contributions we might expect from both AI and quantum computing, and these
benefits are still evolving, there are also serious ethical and even
potentially existential threats from the unleashing of these devices and their
evolving and sharpening capacities. As a consequence of this gap in both our
knowledge and certainly our comfort level, this galloping monster, in the hands
of a very few highly trained, and highly creative and highly motivated men and
women risk losing touch with the general public, a force on which most
democracies have to depend.
We already each in our
gut ‘know’ in ways that exceed, or defy, or even refute the kind of
sociological, demographic, political and economic data in which we all swim
daily, that we are experiencing a malaise whose dimensions seek and grasp in
the fog for the kidn of data that warrant the collective, official attention of
those charged with making decisions on our behalf. Doubtless, too, those men
and women, in all countries, have the same ‘gut’ responses, as we do, and
either sit on them for fear of awakening in the relevant “public” so much
consternation that the costs of that would bring people into the street, with a
‘malaise’ that has no specific medical, legal, political, ideological or even
theological or spiritual name.
We have become so
dependent on such a name, for every thing that bothers us, to the point that we
have, in the latest DSM
(Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual) designated ‘grief’ as a mental illness, needing treatment.
This is only one single piece of data that calls out for its astounding degree
of co-dependence of the culture on the medical model. And it is that very model
that is suffocating and drowning then health care professionals and their
respective institutions. We are all drowning in a psychology that has helped to
shape our own demise. We have fallen into the collective, cognitive, social,
political, economic, legal/medical swamp (no specific individual is responsible
and we are not draining the swamp here). The swamp is the manner in which we
‘see’ and evaluate, and program, and educate and ‘treat’ each other….through
collective eyes, ears, and brains that are dependent on and hold in high honour
the literal, the empirical, the nominal and all that goes with it. If and
whenever a piece of behaviour is deemed to be outside what we consider
acceptable, moral, legal, ethical, healthy and learned, we deem it ‘abnormal’
both vernacularly, and professionally. We either criminalize, or medicalize
that abnormality for ‘treatment’ both by the appropriate professionals and the
appropriate system, and its relevant institutions. This ‘perception’ and the
value systems, the supporting academic and professional practice protocols, the
economic and financial systems, and the leaders in each of these respective
‘theatres’ are all engaged both consciously and clearly somewhat unconsciously
in perpetuating this ‘ethos. James Hillman calls the ethos, or the culture, the
anima mundi, the soul of the world.
Before, dear readers, you
rush off into a frenetic frenzy worried about the occult, the mystical, and the
astrographic outer limits of any visions you might have conjured from reading
the last paragraph, please bear with this scribe.
Collective, willingly and
somewhat unconsciously, we have all adopted what we have been taught, modelled,
and fitted into, in our education, our careers, our families, our professions
and our expectations of what the society ‘should’ or even ‘must’ look like. For
those, like many of Mandela’s enemies, who considered his ANC to have been
infiltrated by the Communists, this is not a revisiting of Marx’s Das Capital.
Nor is it an updating of Mein Kampf, as some others will be wont to use that
rhetorical bullet, much in the way many religionists have deployed scriptural
verses as ‘bullets’ to shoot down their liberal opponents. We live in a culture
in which ‘war’ and the unleased, ungoverned and ungovernable actions of
pursuing a total win, in a zero sum game, give way, permit and even encourage
the most horrendous of acts by humans against other humans, with a degree of
both impunity and the complete absence of shame, to which no animal would
submit or surrender. Any thought that ‘we’ have ‘dominion’ over the universe,
evaporates when we compare ourselves to animals. And the arrogance that
accompanies that literal theology, regardless of the sect, denomination, or
religion itself, is part of what we are going to have to shed.
Indeed, whether its roots
come from national and patriotic pride, or ethnic superiority, or linguistic
nuance, or artistic professional training and experience, or from academic
prowess, or even from ‘the right religion’ , these attitudes and the psychology
that seeds and sustains them, will have to be re-considered, re-evaluated, and
collectively on a global basis, reconfigured. Facing the convergence of global
crises, none of which bend to denial, or
refutation, or erasure, or even moderation or amelioration, through incremental
baby steps, this scribe is inviting each reader here present to revisit the
cell of Nelson Mandela, in the state of mind, and the legal and hopeless state
of the situation he and his comrades faced.
In the spirit of a 6 x 6
cell with bars on an outside window, sentenced to an unknown period of
punishment for having willfully, consciously and deliberately confronted a
system that was literally, and also metaphorically, spiritually, economically
and politically “killing” the spirit of his people, let’s try to imagine, first
what Mandela might have been considering, (as he ironically completed his legal
exams from the University in London, while at Robben Island) and contemplated
his options on behalf of his people.
It is the spirit of
Mandela, irrespective of his legal education, or his specific tribal
affiliations in the Transkei, or his specific and relevant and highly committed
band of comrades, although certainly not without such support and
determination, that we can all, through our imagination, put on the Madiba
shirts, adopted from Indonesian batik clothing, made of cotton or silk, and pick up the torch that he has
ignited in the human spirit to defy similar, if national and not international,
forces that were suffocating his people.
We can begin to ‘see’
ourselves differently, from a single ‘ego’ with a burden of multiple and
necessary responsibilities, scratching out an existence, in the face of
seemingly never-ending climatic, political, military, pharmaceutical,
ideological, and especially narcissistic personal ambition, all of it having
donned the robes of respectability, wealth, power, status, and both ambition
and control. And those of us, without a voice, (the 99.5%) living in both
developed countries (this scribe is in Canada on the border with America), and
in developing countries, those with or without formal or gig employment, men
and women, engaged in all forms of healthy and productive enterprises have to
find a band of climate freedom fighters (think Bill McKibbon, and Gerta, allied
with and joined to a band of freedom fighters (think Nader, Moore, Malala et
cetera), joined to a band of legal and financial scholars with a commitment to
the global “public interest” (think Trilateral Commission and what would be an
imaginative reiteration of such a commission), a global media coalition, whose
voice (think Ted Turner, not Rupert Murdoch)….all of whom have the interest and
the commitment to fight the kind of opposition that Mandela and his band of
freedom fighters faced, without losing either hope or determination…
Of course, all of this is
quixote, coming from an imagination on steroids….but what are the alternatives?
To limp along, piece-meal by piece-meal, in segregated silos of both data and
thought, each of them protecting the interests of themselves, while protecting
and preserving the ‘inside dope’ that holds each of the silos together.
Coming out of our silos,
whether they are sanctuaries, mosques, synagogues, financial towers, academic
ivy-clad cloisters, or even television and print newsrooms, pharma labs, or the
millions of classrooms around the world. Let the children be heard! Let the
people living on the streets of our cities be heard! Let the men and women from
the seniors’ residences be heard! Let the millions of silenced people, many of them government
opponents, out of their cells, and out of their imprisonments…..let the bells
peel and the organs play and the bugles
and trumpets blare, and the megaphones unleashed from the political correctness
that threatens to impale us on our own ‘propriety’ and fiddles while Rome (at
this moment, the whole world) burns. Some of the people in charge, it seems,
see themselves as arsonists who then
want us to give them the gavel of power so they can put out the flames they
have ignited, as our heroic rescuing ‘firefighters’.
And this arsonist image
applies to those engaged in illegitimate and unjust war, murder, rape, bombing,
drones, and the eradication of both nations and people, both with impunity and
no risk of curtailment. It is the model of no risk, full impunity, full
immunity, no accountability or responsibility that threatens us all…and
focusing on a single “fire” in a single capital, in a single country, is
proving to be perhaps theatrically interesting and magnetic, as is all car
collisions and local factory fires. Nevertheless, such a fixation risks the
macro global picture which needs the muscle, brain, imagination and political
will of each of us.
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