Hopewit

  … but what if they threw a war and no one came? This anti-war slogan from the 1970s apparently did little to change public opinion that … what? …war is inevitable given human nature? For centuries, Mennonites, Quakers, Doukhobors and various secular peace movements have responded to the appeal to fight in wars by refusing to show up. They’ve always been minorities; the consensus being that the right, the patriotic response to aggression is counter-aggression-in-kind. W.B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1920 just after World War I and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. An exceedingly difficult time for humanity with little reason to hope for the Peaceable Kingdom any time soon. He might well have been writing about today: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of pas...

  Gestalt Gestalt (ɡəˈʃtælt) something such as a structure  or experien- ce  that, when considered  as a whole , has qualities  that are more than the total  of all its parts : (Cambridge Dictionary) Take the word home. Its parts include a house or apartment, furniture, people, a cat and dog, etc. But to list the parts to an immigrant, say, when he asks for the word’s meaning would NOT do it justice: home is more than the sum of its parts. Home is a gestalt . And it’s a different gestalt for all of us because it’s shaped by the included parts. My home-gestalt has no cats in it; yours probably does. We may share the family-love part ... or not. Understanding gestalt is helpful in grasping both the joys and the heartbreaks to which relationships are subject. We sense this when we invent maxims like “Don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” There are very few people on earth whose shoes would fit you; nobody in the world share...

A news analysis recently included an inappropriate metaphor. The “analyzer” wondered if in future we would be able to “shelter under the USA's nuclear umbrella.” The pressure is on to raise Canada's defence capability, to buy jet fighters, submarines, warships and to recruit more young people to join the military, and possibly to have our own “nuclear umbrella” to make us safe?? It's hardly appropriate for us to call President Trump “stupid” when his blinkered megalomania is simply a logical product of our collective lack of intelligent thinking about war and peace, our screwed up "codes to live by."             I live in a multi-unit condo. How can I be sure that one of my fellow residents won't rob me or kill me in my bed? Maybe if I had a gun, I'd be safer from such an eventuality. But if others found out that I had a gun, wouldn't they feel that they ought to have one too? Probably I should then add an assault rifle, just in ...

  Social media resemble picnics. We don’t prefer to eat every meal outside on a blanket, but the blue sky of summer, the birds singing, the sea breeze promise something different, something pleasant, something interesting, and so “I know what let’s do! Let’s go on a picnic!” seems an escape from tedium, a brief reprieve from the cares and stresses of the daily grind. (Forgive me for this crusty choice of a pleasurable “thing to do;” I’m old, and a bit old-fashioned.) And when the blanket is spread and the basket with its egg salad sandwiches, cake and lemonade is opened, it feels like a promise fulfilled. At first, the ants are just small irritants, at least compared to the wasps. Both seem to multiply as you juggle a plate of cake and a lemonade. And at some point, exuberant kids start up a game of frisbee football between you and the ocean ... about the same time as you notice a man with sunglasses leering at your daughter who's showing a bit too much leg, possibly. And if yo...

Guernica - Pablo Picasso Truth is seldom complicated. A simple admonition like the Golden Rule, when obeyed, is arguably all anyone needs by way of a moral code governing relationships. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus clearly sets out examples of what such relationships look like, but the underlying principle is easily missed: individual well-being is reliant upon community health, but community health rests on individual behaviour; life is a circle, not a straight line. In a way, this principle is evident in an evolutionary view of life on earth. Lions as a species grow strong feeding on the weakest of the buffalo herd. The overall health of both species is favoured; individuals are sacrificed to the process of “natural selection.” The strongest reproduce and the weak … don’t. But what makes applying this principle to humanity treacherous is that unlike lions and buffalo, we have been granted consciousness. Consciousness both releases us from being instinct-dependent and grant...

  Xenophobia: fear of foreigners or foreign things. (Merriam-Webster) A man from Uganda, say, expresses objections to the actions of a cruel, dictatorial regime and is marked for death by the state police. As he feels the danger coming ever closer, he makes a run for the border and is in Kenya ... illegally, of course. He ends up in a UN supported refugee camp where conditions are appalling, and the future looks bleak. Tortured by the possibility that his family in Uganda will be punished for his escape, he lies awake at night and considers going back and turning himself in. It’s possible that there’s no better way to share the earth equitably than to divide it into nations with borders and to create laws surrounding the crossing of those borders. But at the same time, it makes difficult the necessary accommodation for natural disasters—and the natural world generally—which knows no borders. Tragically, it provides handy justification for racism, religious xenophobia and the es...