Famine in Somalia and U.S. debt problems have similar solutions

Famine in Somalia is linked inextricably to seemingly unrelated matters.
Obviously many are starving, but the reasons are not as clear as most imagine as hunger is just the most obvious symptom of deeper and more complex issues.

Nobel prize winning
economist, Amartya Sen,
  has views about life
  that would benefit
Somalia and probably
the U.S.

Oddly, and interestingly, those same matters are concepts to which we here in Australia, and by default the Goulburn Valley, should attend with both clarity and eagerness.
Democracy, uninhibited by greed and a lust for power, has rarely, and maybe never, allowed for conditions in which people have wanted for the necessities of life.
In a genuine democracy people have legitimate and ready access to decision makers and so can influence processes ensuring that food is broadly and readily available to all.
That same democracy also ensures individual rights, equality, and justice and within that safeguards access to food, which according to Nobel prize-winning economist, AmartyaSen, is best achieved through freedom, civil rights, economic freedom, social opportunities, transparency in dealing with government and others.
Those critical human civilities have been somewhat absent from Somalia and so the solution is not simply about providing more food, rather it is about helping the Somalians unscramble the workings of a society left emaciated after a few lunged for power and the rest of the world embraced globalization.
The solution for Somalia rests not with the economy, rather with an understanding of what it is that ignites and maintains human happiness and within and beyond that, an individual’s well-being.
The people of Somalia, and the rest of the world for that matter, will only be adequately fed when the focus is on people as opposed to things.
America presently wrestles with its multi-trillion dollar debt and sees the solution in economic terms when in reality the spotlight needs to be turned toward those things that are lamentably missing in Somalia – civil rights, equality, social opportunities, transparency and a return to the root meaning of democracy in which people actively engage with the administration of their lives.
The idea that economic growth can and will continue indefinitely is dead and survival on our finite world is now about building communities that are resilient, sustainable, adaptable and, of course, both happy and content.
A rare few, comparatively, find that ever elusive happiness and contentment through the economy, while most find nought but delusion and discontent.
The Somalian solution will not be easy, straightforward or simple, but it begins through the application of those things such as civil rights, equality and freedom as discussed by Sen.
The American situation is equally complex, for different reasons, but a solution for the U.S. is also to be found with a drive toward civil rights, equality, decency and the abandonment of the idea that a growth-based economy is a cure-all.

Euphoria overlooks reality

Australian cycling enthusiasts, along with many others, were jubilant as Cadel Evans rode last night to victory in the Tour de France.

The 34-year-old Northern Territory born Evans, set up his tour win in the final individual time trial of the tour in the penultimate last stage of the tour.

Cadel Evans in the
 colours of the world
 champion- a title he
 won in 2009.

Evans started that stage 57 seconds down on the tour leader, Andy Schleck, and demonstrated his clear edge in time trialing to finish a minute and 34 seconds ahead, gaining more than two minutes to effectively win the tour.
The ride into Paris, the final stage, is largely a formality with huge honour going to the rider who wins the last sprint for the tour on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Evans had no need to feature in the sprint, rather simply finish with the peloton.
Evans’ win prompted enthusiastic comment from many quarters with some declaring him to be the complete road cyclist with only success in the Olympic Games having eluded him.
Many in the cycling fraternity were euphoric about an Australian winning what they, and many outside the sport, consider the greatest sporting event in the world, even bigger than the Olympics.
Some declared it a seminal moment for Australian cycling as it illustrated to younger and emerging riders that they were not geographically denied opportunity of reaching the epitome of road cycling.
Embedded in the ecstasy of Evans’ success, the commentators predicted the growth in cycling over the next ten to 20 years, but overlooked some critical realities I can’t ignore, although the sheer virtuosity of the Australian’s success made me stand taller.
The tour, in its modern manifestation is a product of the industrial age and so despite its world embracing magnitude and complexity it edges towards collapse as the world uses more and more of irreplaceable resources; resources upon which such massive events are built.
Our world is moving toward “peakeverything”, the peaks for some resources such as oil have already passed, and within decades it will become increasingly difficult to sustain events such as the tour.
Humanity, and so by implication events such as the tour, faces a crisis of sheer existence brought on by the collision of multiple peaks – food, water, soil, oil and innumerable minerals – with a changing climate brought on by our seemingly irresponsible use of the very resources that are becoming exhausted.
One hundred years ago, the Tour de France was just that and limited largely to local riders and maybe that scenario will soon return.
In riding to victory in the Tour de France, Evans rode over several seemingly impassable peaks, but interestingly the peaks that both he and humanity may find even more difficult are yet to come.   

Swing dancing is about collaboration, as is resilience and community

The nimble feet of a group of swing dancers stole my attention and the uninhibited joy and co-operation of the dancers helped me understand that success for the human project should be relatively simple.

Swing dancing has
much to teach us
about
 the human condition.

Rather than bruise the other by adhering to ways that suggest we are not only cautious about demonstrating care for our fellows, but virtually paralysed by the fear of leaking any emotion that might hint at love, we should bond with others just as swing dancers do.
The swing dancing “craze” dates from the 1920s, but it was just recently I watched as a diverse group brought the fad of last century into this with an overt public demonstration of the beauty and success that arises from collaboration.
Communities, and individuals, everywhere could learn from the enabling spirit of swing dancing and so realise the wonderful solidarity and harmony groups experience when they work as one, rather than individuals.
Swing dancing comes in many variations that are complex and varied reflecting, in a sense, the life of a community and the dance’s adherents demonstrate, clearly, that working for an agreed to and understood goal, can produce beautiful results.
Watching the swing dancers gave me a warm felling, one that I always experience when I see a group of people combining their physical and emotional resources to produce something grander than the individual.
The way ahead is clearly not about the isolation and aggrandizement of the individual, rather it is about the consolidation of the community and so collaboration of all those among its number.
Communities need to elevate their aims as they embrace collaboration and like swing dancers heighten their timing ensuring they remain in step with compatriots
Interestingly it was only July 15 that Tim Dixon and Matt Browne wrote in the Melbourne Age under the heading: “Mature debate on our future needed, not Tea Party-style militancy” in which they said Australia’s present mining boom was the most favourable outside economic event in the nation's history …… “also, probably the last great boom Australia's fossil fuels will bring”, they noted.
Considering that, we, like the swing dancers, need to collaborate to combine our physical and psychological assets to ensure the benefits of “the last great boom Australia's fossil fuels will bring” are invested in a resilient and sustainable communities, rather than squandered answering immediate wants.
The nimbleness of the swing dancers led me to think about similar athletic thinking and swift strategic social and political manoeuvering demanded as we step into a future underwritten by a wholly different energy diet.
The next step in our dance of life will be quite beyond existing human experience and only possible if, like the swing dancers, we collaborate and combine our resources, both intellectual and psychological.

Our carbon tax is too little, too late, but should be applauded

Creation of a sustainable Australia begins with the introduction of the country’s new carbon tax.

The intellectual, political and ethical dithering surrounding debate about the tax has resulted in the decision being too little, too late.
Such a tax should have been should have been a working part of the Australian landscape some 20 years ago with subsequent modifications preparing us, individually and generally, for a decidedly different, but not necessarily worse, future.

Paul Keating (left) and
 Bob Hawke should have
 introduced Australians to
 the idea of sustainability.

Ideally the Bob Hawke Labour Government, followed by his successor Paul Keating, would have introduced Australians to the idea of sustainability and then, with more than a decade at the country’s helm, former Prime Minister, John Howard, should have guided us to living with a smaller ecological footprint.
Adherence to such a time scale would have positioned Australia perfectly to address world-wide emerging difficulties as detailed in The Club of Rome commissioned book, “The Limits to Growth”.
The book with Donella Meadows, who died in 2001, as the then lead author was first published in 1972 and has since been updated three times with a forth update coming.
Changes to the book’s broad message have been subtle, but the essence of its message is substantially unaltered – humans have, and are, eroding earth’s resources and subsequently the pressures we are putting on the earth’s various sinks, those places that for centuries have absorbed mankind’s wastes, are causing near irreparable damage.
When first published, the book alerted us to the dangers associated with the maintenance of our behaviours and now nearly 40 years later it is obvious we have not only not listened, rather have engineered a situation bordering on calamitous.
The outcomes of the Gillard Government’s carbon tax are inconsequential compared to a do nothing, steady as she goes alternative that ignores the science and the consequences of our lifestyles, a lifestyle that can only be maintained through the exhortation of business as usual.
Meadows and her fellow writers warned repeatedly of the collapse awaiting the human experiment if we continued on an unaltered trajectory.
In assembling the 2004 edition of The Limits to Growth, the authors looked beyond the science and searched for human values that would ensure mankind’s survival – they were: visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning and loving.
Five seemingly innocuous concepts that at first blush appear to have little to do with a carbon tax, but in reality are the essence of the legislation.
It takes vision to instigate such an idea and its realization rests with our vision; its success hinges on networking; we must tell the truth about the detriment our lives have on the world; each of us must learn much, much more about the world’s ecology and then; illustrate our love for the world and our fellows.

A sunset of contradictions and denials

Life’s sunset brings contradictions that sees most us again ignoring, or denying, reality.


Growing old is
 somewhat different
 than how it is
protrayed by today's
 marketers.

Living on death’s doorstep brings truths that our materialistic marketers prefer to overlook as they set about selling old age as about increasingly good times, laughing and enjoying the company of friends in near ideal circumstances.
Those same marketers avoid any mention of deteriorating health and sell those sunset years as the best of your life, and for some they may be, but for many I have known, they were quite different.
Life was loaded with all the expected highs and lows, but beyond that the journey to old age looked satisfyingly predictable only to be overwhelmed by ill-health and a disorder that left the marketers’ promises in disarray.
An advertisement painting a cheerful and glowing picture of life in a retirement village peopled by an endlessly smiling and obviously healthy cast had just ended when I learned that an older extended family member had died.
He had never been among that “cast” as beyond a short spell in a retirement home, he had lived alone with his dog after the death of his wife from Alzheimer’s disease several years before that.
My father-in-law, a war veteran, in his late-eighties and a truly honourable gentleman, his missed completely the claimed joy of the sunset years as for years he was pre-occupied caring for his wife before she died with Alzheimer’s and now his  health is such that the care he was once so generous with is being equally devoted to him.
He had a brief interlude of happiness when he married again, but deteriorating health is seeing that bliss evaporate, and subsequently his sunset years have been, and are, quite unlike that the marketers promote.
This troubling dichotomy between what our sunset years really are and what’s marketed, promised, and expected, seems to be a product of the baby boomer ”me” generation that was born and raised, and now aged, in the years of plenty, leaving them with unattainable and unsustainable expectations.
Primed by a paradigm that has always promised, and delivered, more, the boomers, being archetypical consumers, look to maintain their hold on life’s largesse and so, without much thought, expect continuation of the comforts they have long enjoyed.
Living on death’s doorstep will be, beyond a few exceptions, challenging because of deteriorating health and the compounding difficulties brought on by age, and worsened in every sense by exhaustion of our finite world and the complexities of a burgeoning population.
Ageing, however, does bring an increase in wisdom, mostly, and, again mostly, an expanded understanding and application of patience, qualities that will be at a premium as we negotiate contradictions between promises and reality.

A secure and non-violent future demands a daring, daunting and perilous mission

Grand and heroic projects are sadly most often allied with violent historical epochs, but life has evolved to present us now with an even more daring, daunting and perilous mission.

Nonviolence will play a
key role in addressing global
 warming.

Faced with global warming; entrenched inequality; crumbling economics; the exhaustion of our fossil fuels, particularly oil; exponential population growth; the degradation of the world’s top soils; vandalism of our forests; the looming crisis of our food supplies; the erosion of our humanity by God-like technology; the collapse of earth’s bio-diversity and endless wars brought about by a surreptitious and misunderstood anger that has infiltrated life at every level, we look, with desperation, for the exit sign.
Many turn to supernatural forces or beings in their search for a solution, but the answer they seek is right here, with us, we hold it in our hands or, at least, in our way of thinking.
The remedy rests with nonviolence and although that might seem easy and achievable, it is not. Living a genuine, and unflinching, nonviolent life is only possible through a courageous and radical reshaping of our lives: a truly grand and heroic project.
That said and accepted, where do we start? Facing sweeping emotionally and seemingly overwhelming difficulties, many do nothing, but to lean, for a moment, on a cliché – the journey to anywhere, in this case nonviolence, begins with the first step.
That first step can be here, in Shepparton, or more intimately, in your mind and that beginning is simply about using language that is nonviolent, both in terms of the words you use and, importantly, their intent.
Although subtle, such a change can alter your understanding and interpretation of events and equally how others feel about what is happening in their lives.
Along with paying attention to what we say, and how we say it, we should consciously avoid anything that normalizes violence, something about which the mainstream media is frequently guilty.
Television is among the worst offenders and so should be simply turned off, and other information sources – newspapers, magazines, books, movies and the various forms of social media – should be treated with caution and accessed selectively.
Much of what we imagine entertainment, and frequently sport, is fanciful cloaked violence and our modern commercial world is about winners and losers in which covert violence boosts bank balances.
Genuine nonviolence is a concept so difficult to both comprehend and employ that is rarely has any true traction prompting the observation from one that nonviolence was tried for a week and abandoned as it didn’t work, ignoring the fact that centuries of violence have completely failed humanity.
Bad things happen quickly, good things take time – violence springs from our ancient, reptilian brain; nonviolence arises from modern, sophisticated and mature brains.

Let's abandon male-madness to align ourselves with the power of ideas, ingenuity, literacy, art and science,

Official visitors to most any country are greeted by a show of force.
Countries, almost without exception, immediately flex their military muscle, or at least a symbol of it, as that guest walks from their plane.

Influential German
 American political
theorist, Hannah Arendt.

This flashy show of military muscle frequently does not end there either for as the visitor undertakes their tour of all, or part, of the country the idea that we are psychologically wedded to the violence is repeated.
Soldiers bearing arms, jets flying over and occasionally military vehicles rolling-by seem to punctuate the official’s visit.
This constant reference to the military, and by implication our willingness to kill others, is a centuries old affectation of countries even though they may well be the happiest, smartest and least belligerent of all societies on the planet.
It seems we are unable to get beyond this testosterone driven male driven-madness that equates strength with goodness.
Probably we can all point to moments past in which strength lead to goodness (I can’t), and any claims of such instances would be rarities and despite that, demonstrations of potency should not be a reason for one to favour another.
Rather than turn to brute, rude and raw muscle to convince others of our legitimacy, it would be masterly if we stepped beyond those base human values and turned our attention, and so the spotlight allowing our visitor to see for themselves, to demonstrating our understanding of, and affiliation with, the power of ideas, ingenuity, literacy, art and our allegiance to the veracity of science, all of which stands beyond the superstition that has cruelled much of the world.
Our guard of honour should be an assembly of our finest minds – philosophers, artists, scientists, mathematicians, authors, doctors, chefs, famers and others who use intelligence and/or wisdom rather than force to advance a point of view.
It was author Hannah Arendt who said: “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the more probable change is to a more violent world”.
Conscious of that, our visitors should leave with a clear understanding that ours is country that sees it future unfolding in a positive manner through the sweeping use of intelligence as opposed to force.
So, in short, let us abandon Australia’s identity being underpinned by violence and become a country that celebrates, and rewards, those who work to enrich the idea of non-violence among people.
Non-violence is inherently linked to peace, which interestingly is a concept that is also beyond the understanding of many for peace is not simply the absence of war.
Peace, strangely, is about aggression, but an aggression that is overtly about the pursuit of ideas and ways of living in which kindness is the preferred, and first option.