This week I am spending time in
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, violence against women by militia and rebel groups, police and civilian men alike is growing like a malignant tumour. Sexual assault of such a horrific nature that it would make us retch to witness it, or want to tear out our eyes, has escalated to the point that it is nearly the norm. In fact, it is an established norm of life in the DRC.
Humans do this: we wear grooves for ourselves and then we lie down in them, we work them day by day until we are in so deep that on either side of us are steep walls and we wonder how we will get out. Or we stop even wondering. Or we are born inside the groove someone else wore before us, and never even lift our heads to notice that there is a landscape above and beyond our particular rut.
Still, while there is breath there is hope. Surely it is no accident that the words for breath and spirit are closely linked in so many languages. Lately, I dream at night of the work of Paolo Freire, educator and liberator, exiled for a time from his native Brazil for his radical approach that allowed oppressed peasants to become not only literate but also critical thinking, questioning, free agents of transformation of their own reality... to actually raise their heads above the walls of the deep rut into which they had been born and to see clearly that it was worn not inevitably, not because some people are simply no more than peasants while others - somehow superior - are in power, but because of systemic inequalities and flagrantly unfair practices (sociocultural habits, or ruts, we might say) had perpetuated their particular circumstances. Oh, the danger of a freed mind. It might ask for better. It might ask why.
Why, for instance, are we always asking about the 'unsustainable' costs of socialized healthcare, welfare and such, and ironically mumbling at the same time about rising personal taxes, but never asking what has happened to tax money that used to be the major source of government income and has dried up over the past 50 years: corporate taxes? Is it really so unquestioably alright and just that our constructed system called neoliberal capitalism should quite logically produce, by the simple rules of its own game (which we define, or fail to control and modify, at our peril), mega transnational corporations that elude nation-state governmental taxes at every turn, enriching the less-than-1% of the world who hold all the shares, at the expense of those governments' abilities to care for their people "sustainably"? Why do we cry foul at every government's corruption scandals, failures, the slow slog of bureaucracy... but fail to take note of these nebulous above-the-state-level megacompanies that suck capital out of states as the consuming public buys their stuff, but then fail to contribute to the public good through normal taxation, thus weakening the ability of governments to act as we'd like them to? And then applaud these corporations when they dole out the barest fraction of their profits to "charity"... or worse, to public institutions starving for tax dollar support, like hospitals, or schools... but with strings of course. There is a very, very big difference between a public institution funded through tax dollars by even a reasonably functional government, and one tied to the agendas and whims of privately donated monies.
This is not, however it may sound, an anti-corporate rant. There are always great leaders, and some corporations will be the ones to evolve beyond the current quagmire and help bring things forward. There are even some companies I genuinely love, for the spirit of kindness and continuous evolution that infuses their way of doing business, and even despite their flaws and the blindness they may have to the current system's inherent pitfalls. Corporations need to change, and some of them, a few, will do it willingly because it is the right thing to do and they are led by wise people. Others won't.
What we need is a united front of humanity and the will to honestly ask why. We need desperately to close the huge chasms through which private wealth collection has slipped. We need to ask ourselves what good it is doing anyone -- the apparently 'wealthy' who live behind high and guarded walls included -- to not only allow but to condone and actively promote the pursuit of more and more and more privately 'owned' capital, stuff, and land.... which ends up in the hands of fewer and fewer and fewer. Why do we persist in our make believe of 'ownership' in this extreme manifestation, why do we persist in our fallacious and self-destructive assumption that the world's many miracles are here for us to use as we see fit without conscience or repercussion? Surely we are here to serve each other and our world, to be part of the world and one of its many miracles.
Nature corrects all errors. We cannot beat her into submission, for on her we depend for breath. For spirit. With every meter we dig into our Mother for metal ores, we may as well be pushing blades into our own skin; every billowing smokestack is a plastic bag we put over our own mouth and nose and choke upon. Will we actually pursue this suicide course to its end? I wonder. We are due for a terrible correction to our maniacal course; Mother Earth and Father Sky surround us, mirrors that show us plainly the consequences of our choices; in the end, if annihilation is truly our collective 'bottoming out' in our addiction to ownership and resource control, then we will perish, physically, as the ultimate correction to our compounding errors. And presumably give ourselves a big shake and talking-to in the world beyond: "we were given Earth and we killed ourselves by abusing her and each other???" D-OH! We will slap our own forehead like Homer, no doubt, as we consider from our non-dimensional vantage-point the irony of it all.
Still, while I breathe, I hope. The answer to every rape, literal or figurative, human or environmental, must lie in some combination of fierce desire to protect and to heal, of asking "why" and honest assessment of the error and habit that have allowed this to happen, of working through to forgiveness, and finally of choosing again - differently, lesson learned. To climb out of these ruts, fill them in with new earth, and walk on an even green field together instead.
Paz is struggling for life. Her cancer has spread, she is in terrible pain. She is irritable, exhausted, and wondering why she has so little patience. She wants to live, to keep doing her work. She won't go gentle into that good night. And I understand. I look out the window of her office cottage here and the fields become transparent to my inner eye. Through them I see other worlds where she has walked: I see her fleeing from Chile after the Pinochet coup (which heralded in an experiment in almost pure neoliberal capitalism, by the way, that was lauded by far-right commentators when it happened... tell that to the sisters and mothers of the disappeared); I see her meeting with ex-LRA militia and abducted children in Northern Uganda, I see her teaching peasants with the Freirian methodology not just to read but to become free and questioning, to awaken. She is a bridge between the actual events and the theories we are studying and our young and sheltered minds. She brings everything to life, even as she is fighting for her own.
We all know we have so little time with her, and that ultimately she alone can make peace with her own end. If ever anyone had 'done enough' in one life, it is surely Paz. Still, as I sit beside her, taking notes and planning for our workshop on Departments of Peace
If you've managed to read this far, friends, please take a moment to offer up a prayer for Peace, and a prayer for Paz. We need them both.
No comments:
Post a Comment