Activism Revisited

I have been a staunch environmentalist and a peace advocate for my entire life. Long before we reached our current dire global state, I have been recycling and reducing, consuming conscientiously, financially supporting environmental groups, and losing my share of sleep over the state of the world. I have never been radical or extreme in presenting my views but I have always felt that my values have been adequately expressed and endorsed within my school through our many community projects and comprehensive curriculum. I was wrong. I am bewildered and humbled by the number of my students who read my blog and are interpreting my documented opinions as newfound. After over twenty years of teaching my art, how can these values not be obvious to my students?

Before writing that first blog post last November, I was so oblique in expressing my views and values in class that the relevance to their training was completely missed by many of my students. Somewhere along the journey, I lost my way. Activism is the key. All the thought in the world is not worth a hill of beans if it is not acted upon. I have been too passive when expressing my passion.

Chalk up clarity as another added benefit of my journaling efforts.

“Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.”
- Thomas Carlyle ( 1795 - 1881)

Support Our Troops

On May 15th, Amnesty International put out a call for bloggers to unite and post about human rights. I try to post my journal entries on Sundays so I am a few days late here. I think an initiative like this is important in that it encourages collective action. Sometimes activism can be fragmented in such a way that the true scale of an issue can be lost. People tend to flock to causes that are popular and in the news. If everyone were to focus on a single issue, the hype and buzz could generate more and more support and things could begin to change.

Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan has been controversial to say the least. Our troops’ deployment has polarized the country leaving very few Canadians sitting on the fence. While everyone may have a different opinion on what actions constitute “supporting our troops”, we are all deeply concerned for their safety and well-being.

In 2005, Canada and several other NATO allies entered into agreements to transfer detainees to Afghan custody even though the spectre of torture was obvious. After evidence surfaced that a transferred prisoner had been tortured, Canada ceased transferring detainees to Afghan custody in November 2007, and the Canadian government stated that transfers will only be resumed when it is possible to do so in “accordance with Canada’s international legal obligations.”

On February 29, 2008, the Canadian government announced that prisoner transfers to Afghan authorities had resumed. Amnesty International has serious concerns that much more reform is required of the Afghan prison system over the long-term before it can be guaranteed that Afghanistan has the capacity to meet its international human rights obligations.

Since we here in the west are supposedly involved in these conflicts to protect the rights and freedoms we hold so dear, should we not be supporting the men and women who are putting their lives on the line by demanding that the very rights and freedoms they are fighting for are exemplified by our country’s actions abroad? If not, then maybe it is time to question what we are fighting and dying for.

"Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free."
- HH The Dalai Lama (b. 1935)

Abstraction

abstraction |abˈstrak sh ən|
noun
1 the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events : topics will vary in degrees of abstraction.
- something that exists only as an idea : the question can no longer be treated as an academic abstraction.

This term can be applied to almost any humanity controlled blight on this planet. The abstraction of hunger. The abstraction of genocide. The abstraction of environmental cataclysm. The abstraction of war. The abstraction of mental illness. While most of us agree that something, anything must be done to address these issues, we can appear to be quite apathetic in our less than zealous efforts to confront them. We donate money, attend a rally, and crawl back into our down filled beds and sleep like babies, our conscience clear. As long as we are able to live our lives and keep world issues as abstractions, things will never change. Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio students refer to how the experience of that project removed the abstraction of poverty from their psyche. Empirical experience immediately brings abstractions into the realm of reality, making them impossible to ignore.

One of my students just returned from Nepal where she fed a thousand people. Literally. She travelled there to further her training and expand her knowledge. When she witnessed the poverty and suffering around her, she took the money she had been saving for a laptop, purchased some food, and proceeded to personally serve this food to over a thousand people. Hunger is no longer an abstraction for her. It is a very real, tangible problem. By sharing her first hand experience, she has inspired many of us to reconsider our lifestyles. The money I spent yesterday to feed twenty of my black belts a single meal could have fed 500 people in Nepal for a day. We have so much and the volume of what we consume and waste is obscene. Something as easy as simplifying our lives can address many of the most critical man induced problems facing our world today.

There is so much we can and must do. The projects we initiate, despite often having a fundraising component, create the biggest impact by raising public awareness for the issue at hand. The more abstractions we remove, the more apathy and indifference we eradicate. A world without apathy and indifference is a world without mediocrity, and a world with great hope and potential.

“Live simply so others can simply live.”
- Mohandas Ghandi (1869 - 1948)

All For One and One For All

During the same week the Alberta Government was embarrassed by the death of 500 ducks that mistakenly landed in a toxic waste lake (Syncrude uses the innocuous term “tailing pond” to refer to it - great spin on their part), Alberta Environment announced that the Province is scrapping mandatory environmental studies for high voltage transmission power lines. Where is this new environmental accountability Ed Stelmach has been promising? In fact his leadership has been so dismal that rather than coming up with a plan to address the duck disaster issue he is pointing a finger at the number of birds California’s wind generators kill each year. While all this is going on British Columbia is pointing a finger at Alberta because it was BC ducks that were killed. You know, the same BC that is responsible for dumping so much waste into our oceans. Not to worry, our Prime Minister has promised a full investigation into the whole matter. The same Prime Minister who is refusing to even try to abide by the Kyoto Protocol. It really seems like no one is willing to take responsibility for pulling us off this path of self destruction. We’re all good at pointing a finger at each other but no one is really willing to provide the leadership and initiative that is going to make a difference.

I was listening to Gord Whitehead on the radio a few weeks ago. He mentioned a story about a Weather Channel representative who had just retired and went on record as saying that global warming is a myth and a bunch of environmental babble. Mr. Whitehead went on to speculate that if someone of this caliber was questioning global warming, you had to listen. Obviously Gord himself does not believe global warming is an issue. A couple of weeks later the same Gord Whitehead was talking about the Pine Beetle infestation that has crossed the border from British Columbia and is now entering Alberta. He talked about the carnage and total destruction left in the wake of the beetle. Gord went on to say that we really need to figure out why this is happening and that we need to come up with a solution before it is too late. He even mentioned that the mild winters we have been experiencing have contributed to the magnitude of the problem. What the heck? According to him global warming does not exist but for some unrelated reason we have had so many mild winters that the pine beetle is destroying our forests.

With political leaders more concerned with keeping their jobs as opposed to doing their jobs and with irresponsible media skewing their reporting to represent their views as opposed to facts, it is going to take a herculean effort on everyone’s part to cause the paradigm shift necessary to initiate change. As martial artists let’s use our leadership to initiate the change we want to see. Let’s set an example by making ourselves accountable and let’s stop accepting mediocrity from our government leaders. Let’s vote with our wallets and put our money where our values are. Let’s demand accountability from our media and educate our students about the issues that are going to have a bigger impact on their lives than traditional self defense. Let’s get organized and work together to encourage everyone we touch to step up and take responsibility for improving our world.

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
- Henry Ford (1863 -1947)