Avarice

Petrol prices are up, disposable income is down. Our culture continues to decline while we struggle to maintain our privileged lifestyle with less available money.

Our dependence on fossil fuels is causing many of the major problems facing our world today. Rather than focusing on how our culture has evolved around this dependence and encouraging the social change required to address it, we look for alternative fuels so that we can continue to maintain the status quo. Biofuels are not the answer, in fact they may be the final nail in the coffin. While world governments are beginning to legislate ethanol based fuels, dollar signs are filling the eyes of many as they strategize on how to exploit this new cash cow. Forests are being clear cut to make way for crops to feed our fuel addiction while we continue to struggle to produce enough food to feed our expanding population. The food crisis is such that the organic food industry may be wiped out while we have no choice but to use chemicals to maximize production to address this burgeoning issue.

Here in Canada, eleven companies in Quebec were charged with gas price fixing. While oil companies continue to rake in record profits, their greed is such that they resort to illegal tactics to generate even more. CEOs of major corporations continue to get paid exorbitant amounts of money to make their shareholders rich at the expense of the planet and ultimately at the expense of the longevity of the very corporation that is feeding their greed. In an attempt to get by with less, our schools are devoting less time and funding to the arts and physical education to maintain focus on the sciences. Our governments have followed the same pattern. Perhaps this is why we continue to search for a technological or scientific solution to a social problem and why we are in another dark age of cultural decline.

For my part, I am trying to address my concerns through my wallet. I am simplifying my life so that I consume less. I encourage small local businesses by spending a little extra on their products rather than patronizing the big corporate chains. Ultimately this will encourage less urban sprawl and reduce my need to travel outside my immediate community to shop. I will continue to use my disposable income to reflect my values and not my materialistic wants while avoiding television so that I can maintain enough clarity to tell the difference.

“A grandfather talking to his young grandson tells the boy he has two wolves inside of him struggling with each other. The first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other wolf is fear, greed and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy. "Whichever one I feed," is the reply.”
- Native American Proverb

Mediocrity

“I am on a personal quest to rid my life of mediocrity and indifference. I believe that with my efforts, influence, and passion I can contribute to a fundamental shift in humanity’s core values so that we all take responsibility for the well being of our fellow man. I hope to initiate several projects that address the three issues that weigh heavily upon my soul : Environmental Self Defence, Peace Education, and Mental Health Awareness.”

This was the affirmation I declared when I first started journaling last November. Since then, my thoughts, and thus my journaling efforts, have focused on this ideal. I’m not a very politically active person nor do I even like talking politics. However it is impossible to eradicate mediocrity in one’s own life when so much of our quality of life is determined by our political leaders and their personal values and policies. I am not affiliated with any political party nor do I endorse any particular candidate. However the way I see it, my political leaders are elected officials who I am paying to do a job. If they are not doing their jobs to my satisfaction, then I am going to speak up and pull no punches. I might even resort to insults and sarcasm. Such is my wrath.

Our Alberta Premier has given himself a 34% pay increase. I would love to vent about the fact that he did this immediately following his election after his job was guaranteed for at least another four years. I would love to vent even more about his claim that he has the support of the Alberta public on this issue. If he has so much public support why did he not give himself this raise during the election rather than waiting until after he won his minimum four year mandate? I had to smile though when he justified the raise. He says it is the only way to attract higher quality candidates to run for office. Doesn’t that imply that he isn’t the best candidate since he went for the job at a lower rate? Kind of also implies that he didn’t deserve the raise. Ed Stelmach - the Peter Principle in action.

But I’m not going to vent about that - I know, I already did but work with me here. What I am going to vent about is the fact that something like this can happen without a huge public outcry. We seem to like to voice our outrage to one another but at the end of the day we all just roll over, accept it, and move on. What will be even more outrageous is come next election our political leaders will roll out huge spending increases and tax cuts and we will all be bamboozled to vote for them again. Such is the way of Canadian politics. We vote for candidates who cater to our individual short term wants at the expense of our long term needs. We leave those for future generations to worry about. We ignore what we are seeing happening in our government and vote for candidates based on their political affiliations as opposed to their personal merits. We allow our political leaders to bully our representatives to set public policy and vote according to the party’s guidelines as opposed to the will of their constituents. Somehow we have to get back control of our government so that it represents the will of the people and not the self serving will of the party. We have to start demanding accountability in our politicians and for gosh sakes, stop accepting mediocrity. We have to recognize the difference between promises used to get a politician through the next election and promises to solve a problem.

I would like to challenge my students who read this blog to take action. Action to initiate the change you want to see. If you disagree with what I have written here, email me at jeff@silentriverkungfu.com. If you agree with this then let Ed Stelmach know at premier@gov.ab.ca. It does not matter what you do as long as you do something.

There it is: short, sweet, and totally uninspiring. Just like my Premier. Except for the sweet part.

"Perhaps nothing in our society is more needed for those in positions of authority than accountability. Too often those with authority are able (and willing) to surround themselves with people who support their decisions without question"
- Uknown Author

Birthright

I met with my knee surgeon for the first time since the surgery eight weeks ago and I have to say that I am pretty happy with my situation.

The tear in my knee was significant so a flap of cartilage had to be removed. Why I continue to tear this stuff without even being aware of a precipitating incident is beyond me. I’d like to think it’s because I have an awesome pain threshold but I suspect it has more to do with bad genetics than anything else. Thanks mom and dad. The great news is that my surgeon is world class and the knee abrasion arthroplasty he performed on the joint could regenerate and strengthen the cartilage in the knee and perhaps stop this cycle of damage. The procedure involved the drilling of about ten holes through the remaining cartilage into the bone. This will draw stem cells and blood up from the bone to the surface of the knee and into the cartilage. This should strengthen the overall integrity of the joint. Since nothing is for free, I will require a significantly longer recovery time than if I had just a standard cartilage removal - up to a year. That totally explains why the swelling persists and why I still cannot kneel on that knee.

The rehab for this is right up my alley. The knee must be exercised during the healing process in order for the cartilage to have a better chance of regeneration, I just need to approach it with moderation to control the swelling. Thus I started performing my forms with deeper stances this week. Life is good.

All this good news has got me thinking about my lot in life and how lucky I have been. And I do mean lucky. Most of everything I have, and have accomplished, has been due to my birthright. Thanks again mom and dad.

I have lived a life where air, food, water, and warmth, our most basic physiologic needs according to psychologist Andrew Maslow, have always been guaranteed. I was born in a country where I have the freedom and privilege to accomplish almost anything I desire since my basic necessities for life were forever guaranteed the second I took my first breath because of where my first breath was taken.

What if my first breath had been taken in Malawi? Would I have ever had the option of studying kung fu or would I have been too obsessed with where my next meal would come from? What access to medical care would I have? I have little doubt that my torn knee would have been something I had to live with for the rest of my life if the geography of my birth had been different.

What a privileged life I live. All my necessities are more than addressed while other, less fortunate souls obsess and struggle to find enough for their children to eat. How much of my lifestyle is contributing to their plight? While I consume more than my fair share of the earth’s resources, I need to remind myself that my actions, my very thoughts, are only a privilege afforded to me by my birthright. I hope I maintain enough humility to never forget how lucky I am to have the choices and options I have. With my birthright comes the moral responsibility to ensure I consider the consequences to the less fortunate for the life I choose to live.

“It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.”
- Josiah Charles Stamp (1880 - 1941)

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)