Is Climate Inaction from Peak Individualism?

A recent article in The Guardian asked one of the UK’s top climate scientists, Professor Ed Hawkins, to bust the biggest myths about climate change. He tells us we can’t keep adapting to rising temperatures; burning fossil fuels is what’s primarily affecting climate; harvests are suffering; we’ve known the basics of all this for over 175 years, and it’s never too late to change. Does it help to clear all that up? I wonder if our reluctance to change has less to do with myths continuing to propagate and more to do with an increasingly pervasive ideology of individuality and independence. These myths might just be a way to rationalize our desire to be oblivious to our effects on one another.

From Met Office Hadley Center, based on Ed Hawkins' stripes model

I always enjoy Rebecca Solnit’s writing, and her 2025 book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain is no exception. The essays start with the need for a long view when we try to enact change, and she touches on several issues including democracy, masculinity, abortion, covid, and climate change, leaving us with some hope at the end. The thread I want to pull on is a much needed shift from a simplistic “us vs them” way of thinking into more complexity and nuance that comes with the acceptance of our necessary interconnectivity. I can’t help noticing some parallels with psychiatrist Frank Yeomans’ Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, which might imply that our personal development is important for the sake of the world. Maybe funding therapy would save the planet!

SPLITTING: The problem with clarity, certainty, and comfort.

It’s comfortable to have two clear sides to any issue or between groups and to know which side to root for. We like to have certainty and predictability in our world. It’s comforting when things are clear and stable. Old Westerns and WWE and cheering for our favourite sports team all play with a good vs evil narrative that’s familiar. We can get a sense of belonging from just wearing the colours of the home team. We bank on stats and polls and other bits of data to arrive at conclusions about each side. Even if our team or our politician of choice loses, there’s still a solace that we’re on the right side and can commiserate in good company. Solnit explains that it can be so painfully distressing to experience the tension of ambiguity that we’ll rely on the most dubious evidence for backing.

“When it comes to real life, this state of unknowing is both normal and so wildly uncomfortable that we engage in foolish and delusional imitations of knowing, whether it’s trusting untrustworthy authorities or making pronouncements about outcomes with no particular basis in fact, knowledge, or history.”

Our desire for predictability can prevent us from questioning our stance or attempting to change even when it’s vital for our survival. We sometimes choose a side and stick to it, ignoring the nuance of positions and the possibility of harm in part just to have that decision off our plate, rationalizing our stance if need be. Everything is simpler when we can look for signs revealing which side someone’s on and judge them accordingly. (Wait, is a Canadian flag on the back of a pickup truck good or bad now?) This tendency towards the comfort of black and white thinking is vitally important to consider at this point in history. We’ve been living through constant change, often imperceptible, but climate change’s effects will require overt adjustments. Solnit cautions,

“We are leaving behind our old familiar world whose stability we can remember as a great kindness and entering into a rough new set of circumstances. Like refugees leaving a place, we are leaving a time. What should we carry with us? … What will sustain us through this period?”

Frank Yeomans has a compelling take on this type of divisive perspective that fosters clarity and certainty. He calls it a paranoid-schizoid organization. It’s common and harmless in small doses; the problem comes when we get stuck there. His theory suggests it’s our infantile state of being, and something we need to grow out of:

“In the early year and a half of life, as it is posited, experiences with the caretakers by the infant are seen as either perfectly satisfying or totally depriving because there’s no concept of object constancy. If you’re being caressed and fed and kept warm and cozy, you’re in heaven, but if you’re uncomfortable, you’re cold, you’re hungry, you’re soiled, and the caretaker isn’t there, you don’t have this feeling, ‘Oh, I know mom will come.’ … You’re in pain. You’re suffering and you perceive the other as the source of the suffering. So you’re either in heaven or hell. … The mind is divided between the segment of the mind that’s about positive ideal experiences and negative persecutory experiences. …

If you go through life where things are either perfect or terrible, you don’t adapt well to the complexity of life. … The positive side of the split internal world is just as pathological as the negative side that’s all about paranoia and rejection and harm because the positive side doesn’t correspond to reality. You never find the perfect caretaker. No matter how much you’re in love with your partner, they’re not going to be perfect. …

It’s called schizoid because it’s split. It’s called paranoid because in that mental organization where fondness and aggression are totally divided, the person experiencing aggression is not comfortable seeing himself or herself as the source of the aggression. They tend to project the aggression and see it as coming from outside. So as soon as you begin to get close to somebody, you’re nervous because you think something bad is going to happen. … Splitting allows you not to think as much. Splitting is simple, but in a way it’s reassuring when your mind functions according to splitting. You know what’s good and you know what’s bad. There’s no ambiguity. …

You can allow yourself to regress, to forget about all the complexity of the world … enjoy that for two hours. The problem is that political leaders can appeal to splitting when they say we’re all good; the only problems are outside of our group. Everything bad is outside. … The system breaks down because in that tribe mentality, people are not taking responsibility for themselves, but only blaming the other, and then when you get enough of that going on, somebody’s going to get into violence, and it’s going to fall apart.”

I wonder how much of perfectionism and rejection sensitivity can be framed through the lens of operating from this earlier splitting phase of life. Either we’re successful or a failure, and either people love us fully or hate us completely. Either you’re with us or against us. The projection of aggression helps to understand the sense of increasing fearfulness of one another that can come out as actual rage against others: Canada’s Freedom Convoy, ICE’s itchy trigger finger, the US invasion of the capital, and an undisguised defensiveness in people ready to fight against any request to share or have compassion for others.

At the start of the anti-vaccine protests, I had a handful of students in my civics class insist that nothing should impede anybody’s freedom ever. I countered that all laws impede freedoms, and we had a discussion about freedoms to and freedoms from and the delicate dance to find the best landing spot between them. But it was unnerving to me how quickly some had bought into the extreme individualism idea that the best society is a society in which we each survive on our own, and we should be allowed to do anything we want, which is the absolute antithesis of civilization. It’s a simple narrative, often presented with unwarranted confidence: Freedom is the cowboy with the white stetson, and responsibility and compassion and care are part of the posse that’s threatening to burn down our farm. It’s me against the world! I’m not sure I changed their minds.

INTEGRATION and Interconnectivity: The importance of caring and community.

Solnit points out that we once thought trees competed for light, but now, with Suzanne Simard’s work, we know they work together to share resources. We’re slowly recognizing the network of cause and effect that we’re each a part of. If we can acknowledge that we don’t live separated from the world, but are of the world, then we have to recognize our impacts on virus transmission, world hunger, climate change, and so many other issues we’re facing or trying to ignore. Solnit questions if our political factions should be renamed to reflect this key marker: “Isolationists and interconnectionists might be more useful terms for the political divides of our time than left and right. … You could describe the position as: ‘Nothing is mutual, there is therefore no justification for aid” (53). And later,

“A lot of why the right doesn’t ‘understand’ climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. … Recognizing the reality of climate breakdown means recognizing the interconnectedness of all things. That connection brings obligation: to respect nature, to build domestic regulation and international treaties that protect what’s needed, to negotiate the freedom of the individual in the name of the well-being of the collective. That is, of course, a worldview in direct contrast with free-market fundamentalism and libertarianism.”

Solnit points to the crafted message that all crime and trouble comes from outside, which allows the powerful to demonize targeted groups of people. We’re still stuck in a version of the American Dream that fosters the ‘achievement society’ values that adhere our worth to our capacity for production and consumption. If we have no sense of mattering to the world in our own right, of having inherent worth, we will need to continuously prove our existence is valuable with accomplishments and acquisitions. This misses the million tiny ways we each affect one another. It also means, as Solnit says, “If you equate your wealth with virtue, you tend to equate poverty with vice.”

For Solnit, the sense of predictability in the world, the illusion of knowing, provides “a false certainty that excuses inaction. Whether you feel assured that everything is going to hell or will all turn out fine, you are not impelled to act. … Not acting is a luxury those in immediate danger do not have.” Solnit provides many examples of people who appear to be powerless nevertheless changing the world over and over. It’s historically demonstrated to be possible, but our short-sightedness makes us wary of following a path that’s been overgrown. She says,

“We have been making short-term decisions for a long time, and the consequences have arrived. … People without much sense of history imagine the world as static. They assume that if the present order is failing, the system is collapsing and there is no alternative. A historical imagination equips you to understand that change is ceaseless. … The rescuers we need are mostly not individuals, they are collectives — movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society.”

Yeoman’s transitional stage out of the schizoid-paranoid organization is called the depressive organization, which is the preferable place despite its name:

“If you integrate those two radical polarized extremes, two things happen. One is you have to give up and you have to mourn your belief that you can ever find the ideal other or that you can ever be the perfect ideal self. You have to give up on thinking anybody can be ideal, and that’s kind of a sad awareness. The second thing that happens when you begin to integrate your positive and negative emotions is that you begin to have an awareness and take some responsibility and consciousness for the aggressive feelings you always saw as outside of you. It’s a painful trajectory from splitting and projection to integration and mourning the ideal object, and accepting that one has one’s own aggression. … In other words, does your identity allow you to assume and connect with the full range of who you are as an emotional being.”

There’s a grief that comes from realizing you were on the wrong path, and the ideals you hoped for were attached to inevitably fallible human beings. As that fantasy turns to dust, we need something else in its place. Yeomans clarifies a point he made that’s been previously misunderstood about where to look for ideals:

“Here’s what I said about religion, philosophy, and art, which is that that’s where you can idealize. … I don’t think you’re not allowed to have ideal beliefs, ideal values. They might be embodied in a spiritual system, an ethical system, an artistic pursuit, an aesthetic pursuit. So I think ideals are laudable, but look for them where they might exist, and not in another person or oneself.”

We have to look outside ourselves and other individuals for values and ideals. We need religion, philosophy, or art, or something to help us find the better path instead of glorifying the words of a politician, MVP, or influencer.

A couple years ago I wrote about the move over centuries from following religion to modernism to post- then meta-modernism, and Charles Taylor’s concern with our flattened horizon and lack of shared values. It’s a tumultuous trek to give up what’s familiar and comfortable in order to enable and enact change:

“From the pre-modernist time to now, we were encouraged to serve religiously, then to discover scientifically, then to grasp for all we deserve commercially, and now we need to recover a hierarchy of secular values that encompass more than ourselves. The problem with this retrieval of values is that we run into internal conflict and anguish — if we’re willing to acknowledge it — as we recognize how much exploitation we have become accustomed to in virtually every aspect of our lives. When we encounter cognitive dissonance as we recognize an internal inconsistency between how we think of ourselves and how we actually live, we have the choice of changing it or using defence mechanisms to protect ourselves from it. We’ve taken the latter route for long enough to destroy our planet in the process.”

We’re at a daunting yet privileged point in the timeline of our species in that we’re aware of the choices on the table and where they might lead. It seems like it’s up to us to see ourselves as part of the cause and effect of it all in order to be willing to work through the grief and anguish of changing direction.

 by Pieter Weltevrede 

Solnit’s hope for us comes with a description of the Hindu goddess Akhilandeshwari, which translates to “She Who Is Never Not Broken.” She discusses the meaning as it was explained to her:

“‘The whole is finite; in our brokenness we are infinite.’ I think she means that being perfect, being whole, means being sealed and shut off in some way, being that version of complete that needs and welcomes no more. To be broken is to reach out, to be open, to be incomplete and therefore to welcome outside in. Maybe a break opens up room for yearnings as reaching beyond.”

The illusion of completeness and perfection means we don’t need anyone else or we shouldn’t need anyone else, which merely keeps us separated and isolated. The alternative is to embrace imperfection, uncertainty, and the incompleteness of the self that leads us towards interconnection with others, in solidarity, in order to build a more compassionate future, or maybe even the only possible future. When we see ourselves as just a piece in a larger puzzle, it gives us the impetus to join together, the space to welcome what comes next, and the courage to step into the unknown.

Something like that.

Embracing Fallibility

Many of us live in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It's an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much loneliness. We can't connect when we're working with blind determination to find our place above the rest. We can't connect when we don't dare show an ounce of vulnerability for fear of being taken down like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. Our quest to rise to the top for the security we think comes with status and money is completely at odds with our very real need to feel authentically known, within the security of a community.  

We're no longer following that love and forgiveness bit from Christianity, if we ever really did wide-scale. And we project our fear of losing on anyone who has suffered through difficulties, no matter if it's a natural disaster or massive layoff. We distance ourselves from the suffering of others by convincing ourselves they must have done something stupid to be in this position, and, therefore, we're safe as long as we keep on going hard. It's just a trick to make us feel safer, that unwittingly keeps us from too consciously noticing the floods and fires, layoffs and illnesses lapping at our heels.  

The Art of Helping

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
~ Alexander Pope

Is it, though? 

We're in a mental health crisis and people need more access to help. How much learning is necessary to help one another, and is it dangerous to listen and offer another perspective or even some suggestions without an advanced psych degree? In old movies, people told their stories to bartenders, hairstylists, or cab drivers for the price of a beer or trim or trip to the airport. They just needed a captive audience willing to listen to their worries Now we want people with credentials as if that will provide more certain results.  

But not all credentials are created equal. 

Last year BetterHelp got in the news for allegedly sharing confidential health data to social media sites, and was fined $7.8 million. TV writer Mike Drucker wrote:

"EVERY BETTERHELP AD: 'We're like therapy but cheaper and easier! We have people for every problem so you get care just for you!'
ACTUAL BETTERHELP: 'We're gong to set you up with a confused therapist that will ghost after two sessions. Also we told Facebook about your assault.'"

More recently, the New York Times had an article on scams in the wellness coaching industry, describing scenarios in which the new recruits were bilked out of massive amounts for "tuition" made up of a few hours of videos, and then were never helped to find clients. 

"Business is booming. . . . The number of coaches increased 54% between 2019 and 2022. Because the industry lacks standardized accreditation, it's most likely larger -- one of the dangers of life coaching is that anyone can claim the title of life coach. . . . [One coach] has spent an extraordinary amount of money on the certification and clung to the dream that had been sold to her . . . found herself short of clients and scrambling to make any income. . . . There is a problem in the industry of coaches who coach coaches to become coaches. . . . Life coaching attracts people who are vulnerable to exploitation."

On Feudalism

Have we ever lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism with peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners? 

One perspective of the past thousand years or so might go something like this: Peasants lived on the King's land, first for free, then later in exchange for a portion of the food they grew or products they crafted. A tax on land started when the Lords realized they could profit more from keeping sheep than people, and peasants had to commodify their labour for the privilege of continuing to live where they had been born. Then we had some revolutions to usher in a whole new way of living, to be able to have individual property rights and to choose our leaders. The wealthy expanded their land into plantations and dragged over people from the colonies to work them in exchange for some food and shelter. It was different in tone the King/peasant dynamic but not result: lords allowing food and shelter on their land to people who already lived there in exchange for their labour compared to landowners providing food and shelter to people they kidnapped in exchange for their labour. That type of labour was never abolished; it was merely outsourced to poorer countries and American prisons. More acknowledged today, we have the working poor who make just enough to barely pay for rent and food. Leaving a horrible job at Amazon isn't a realistic choice without any possibility of saving money. They're free in title but not in practice. They might very well still live on land belonging to their overlord! 

So, when did we have a democracy in which each person's unmanipulated and unfettered vote counts as much as any other, or human rights in which we are all have the right to food and shelter and certain freedoms. Did I blink and miss it? I wrote about this five years ago as well. 

Mask Up for Measles!!

The WHO put out this reminder about measles, which is hitting Europe and the UK hard and starting to be seen more in Canada too:

I re-did it to bring more attention to the pandemic we're currently swimming in:

And a few people commented things along the lines of measles being a real disease, or a virus to worry about because it's actually deadly. Measles is somewhere around 4-9 times more contagious than Covid, spreading faster and further. It also can be stopped by wearing an N95. The public health notifications are explaining aerosol transmission, which is identical to Covid. Measles incubates for about 1½ to 2 weeks, and people are contagious for four days before getting a rash. Kinda like Covid is contagious before you have any symptoms. Maybe this will remind us how asymptomatic transmission works. It's great to stay home when you're sick, but it's really, really not enough to avoid spreading either of these viruses. If you're like me and couldn't live with yourself if you realized you gave someone a disease that destroyed their life, then wear an N95 in public places.

Realistic Faith: Strength for Those Who Look

It can be hard to keep working to show people that N95s and cleaning air will actually significantly reduce the number of sick, disabled, and dying in our communities. Here are some words of solace to keep your fires stoked this winter: 

Sue J. from Cleaner Air Collective wrote a lovely, poetic epistle to everyone working hard to keep us all safer. 

"Finding a way to not give up is the ability to hold being realistic and being resilient together in face of huge challenges. It may seem hopeless and too difficult, but if we keep going, we may prevail. If we stop, we can't.

I’ve mentioned before, I spent six months tearing my hair out trying to convince my vulnerable elderly parents to mask, “but no one else does.” Providing masks, modelling, explaining, lecturing, challenging, pointless … til it wasn’t. They’re the only ones masked at church now. 

The other day my young adult, at risk youngest daughter sighed as she put on a mask to attend a crowded outdoor market with me: “I hate wearing a mask outside, but I’ve been making good choices for so long, it’d be stupid to stop and get infected today.” 

On Hearing Others

Louis Cozolino's beautifully written book on neuroscience has an explanation near the end about our necessary interconnectedness. 

Communication from one body part to anther happens when messages throughout our body are transmitted by neurons, but the transmission doesn't happen inside the neurons but between them, in the synaptic gap that separates the dendrites of one neuron from the axon terminal of the other. 

Then there's this bit that I love from Cozolino's book: It doesn't stop at our epidermis. The communication continues outside of our individual bag of bones into others nearby. The space between us, you and I, is a synaptic gap. The transmission of messages is continuous, not just inside our bodies but between them. So, maybe it's silly to think of ourselves as separate beings. We're one giant blob of a being, but some of the transmission circuits are damaged. Inside the body, damaged circuits manifest in a variety of ways, like Alzheimers' and Parkinson's. Between bodies, it feels to me like our systems are struggling to function from the lack of dendrites able to receive our signals. 

Cozolino says,

Cultural Differences of ASD

I was once introduced to a new colleague who made very direct, sustained eye contact, and I thought to myself as I spoke with him: he's on track to be in admin. He just seemed the type to make connections and get ahead and would likely end up at the board office. But then, after talking to him a few more times and seeing him in moments of awkwardness, I thought, "Oh, he's autistic." That didn't change my reaction to him at all, of course, but it did help me figure something out.

That interaction was a lightbulb moment that helped me understand the many many times someone gloms on to me as if somehow I'm the most interesting person in the room, then, after a few conversations in which nothing appears to go wrong, they completely ghost me. They thought, because of my sustained eye contact boring into them, that I must be someone important, an alpha even. Then they figured out their error and shunned me, embarrassed by their own mistake. I'm fine with someone changing their mind about hanging out because that happens to the best of us, but the absolute worst part of it, worse that literally being pointed and laughed at by other adults, is when they suddenly understand that I'm on the spectrum and start talking to me like I'm a flippin' space cadet. 

So, just last month you wanted to take me to lunch at some fancy place, and now you've concluded that I'm practically brain dead. Curious. It's always startling how abrupt that transition is for people. And how reliable.

Then mix that in with "you can only do that because you're autistic" like writing every day, which is a thing that writers do, but if you can't motivate yourself to do it, then the reason I can do it despite clearly being inferior to you must be my hidden superpower of being autistic. So things I can't easily do are laughed at openly and the things I can do are discounted. Lovely.

It's not tragic, but it is trying. These little things can eat away at people. Surely we know it's not right to behave this way with others, though, right?? 

A few studies show that people notice something different about people with autism in the first few seconds of an encounter (h/t Callum Stephen). In one study (Sasson et al, 2017), they filmed a variety of people, some with ASD (level 1) and some neurotypical (NT), in a 60 second mock audition. The study participants were assigned to one of five groups to watch the videos and assess each candidate on likability, intelligence, attractiveness, trustworthiness, etc.: audio only, visual only, audio-visual, static image, and transcript. Only in the transcript option were people with ASD rated as highly as NT interviews. Even the still image set them apart. (Is that why there are no good photos of me: Internalized ableism??) The study concluded,

A Return to Social Cohesion

 Bill McKibben wrote about being asked Where Should I Live to avoid the climate change issues. He outlined the problems with many places that might seem ideal, and concluded that we're best off staying where we are if possible, but working on building social cohesion:

"Get to work building that kind of social trust in as many places as possible, because we’re going to need it. We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you. We’re going to need to rediscover that we’re a social species, which for Americans will be hard—at least since Reagan we’ve been told to think of ourselves first and foremost (it was his pal Margaret Thatcher who insisted ‘there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women.”) And in the Musk/Trump age we’re constantly instructed to distrust everyone and everything, a corrosion that erodes the social fabric as surely as a rampaging river erodes a highway.

But it’s not impossible to change that. Joe Biden has been frustratingly dunderheaded about approving new pipelines and oil wells, and hydrocarbon production has been soaring on his watch. He has been much better about trying to restore some sense of national unity—he has been trying to scale down national division by rebuilding left-behind economies, and also by appealing to our better angels. And those angels exist: the most hopeful book for our time remains Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell, which recounts how communities, whenever natural disaster strikes, pull together, just like Vermont this summer. It happens in cities as easily as in rural areas—maybe more easily, since cities are places where the gregarious gather.

An appeal to social trust is not an appeal to some airy idea of universal brotherhood. Vermont Digger, our local news service, had a reporter in a neighboring town yesterday, as it began to dig its way out of the flood. At a washed-out road crossing he encountered a pair of what I think you could only call hippies, trying to join a “Rainbow Family gathering” at a national forest campground nearby."

Depending on One Another

A.H. Reaume, disabled from a brain injury, wrote about how dramatically her life changed with some help once in a relationship. Her partner does the household chores and makes sure she eats well and regularly. 

"Being in my disabled body feels different with him than without him in my life. I can work more and make more money. I can do it with pain even. I have much higher hourly earning potential, so I work more hours than he does, and he does things that make my life simpler. I've never made more money freelancing in my life, and I can do that only because of him. I feel better. Being partnered as a disabled person is a vector of disabled privilege we really don't talk about enough. I could not do this single."

It made me think of all the men throughout the last couple hundred of years who made huge contributions to society with the help of someone doing all the other work necessary in their lives. Her partner isn't doing anything different than has been done by countless wives. 

The Winning Mindset: Billionaires in Bunkers

An article from a year ago came my way, about how the super-rich 'preppers' are planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. Douglas Rushkoff was hired by some über rich men to field questions about, basically, what they need to do to survive in a bunker. One of their biggest concerns was how to ensure that their security--vital to keep out the masses-- doesn't turn on them! Plato had a similar concern. He solved it with an excellent education that provokes the warrior class to care more about the city than themselves. It's too late for that here. 

"The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where 'winning' means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. . . . The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making."

Then he met J.C. Cole:

Chris Hedges on Our Current State of Paralysis

Hedges writes on Substack now, if you haven't been able to find him lately, and his piece today is excellent. 

He starts by pointing out the growing rich-poor divide that is seeing the top earnings increase by almost 90% in the last decease in the states, while the lowest struggle to find an apartment they can afford. The government is doing nothing about poverty, climate, infrastructure, health care, and violence by police or fearful neighbours. He says, 

Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group swill save us. Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system, and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests.

This analysis helps to explain how many corporations have so easily walked us back to pre-New Deal years, stripping away workers' rights, ignoring environmental regulations, focusing on basic facts while eroding the critical thinking of the humanities in public schools and universities, and removing useful health protections in hospitals. We're already not a democracy, as Hedges has said for years, invoking Wolin's inverted totalitarianism. Today he quotes research from professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, 

Personal Troubles and Public Issues

"People do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction." Developing a sociological imagination is necessary so that, "By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues....To understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them."        ~ C. Wright Mills in "The Promise"

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society"        ~ attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti in Mark Vonnegut's The Eden Express

There was an excellent op ed on mental health, by Danielle Carr, in the New York Times yesterday. I'm saving pieces here. She looks at how we treat mental illness, and how futile some efforts have been. Many have been led to believe the problem is a matter of access to care, but she goes down a different road.

Are we really in a mental health crisis? A crisis that affects mental health is not the same as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

It's politics. She uses the term "reification" to explain the institutional gaslighting in which political problems are spun as personal problems which conveniently "abracadabras" away any nosy questions about who started it and who benefits from it. 

It's how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become 'social media addiction,' how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a 'heat wave'--and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become 'inflation.'

In medicine, it's called "medicalization," which focuses on an individual's body while ignoring the social system that's often at the root of the problem. Like with the mental health issues arising from Covid. Incidents of depression and anxiety have increased dramatically, but that's not surprising given the circumstances: "feelings of anxiety and sadness are entirely normal reactions to difficult circumstances, not symptoms of poor mental health." Looking at the data, economic security is the biggest predictor of a mental illness during a crisis: "it's not simply a question of the numbers on your bank statement - although that is a major predictor of outcomes - but of whether you live in a society where the social fabric has been destroyed."

On Extra Time and IEP Designations

We administered the literacy test yesterday with one new twist that most teachers weren't privy to until the previous evening: There would be no specific accommodations for students with IEPs (Individual Educational Programs) that call for extra time. Instead, we would allow extra time for anyone that needs it.

This is a significant shift in accommodating special needs. It's something I've done for years in my classroom, so I'm already on board. My rationale is about access to the IEP designation. To get an IEP, many students get a professional assessment. This can be done for free through publicly available psychometrists, but there's a wait list that's years long. Or, if you've got the kind of job that insures this, it can be done privately at a cost of two to three thousand dollars. So, right off the bat, there's a bit of a class issue around the designation. Adding to that, there's the fact that many parents aren't aware that this is a thing. Or, if they've heard about IEPs, they don't quite understand what they are or what they're for, and they're not sure they're necessarily a good thing. This all boils down to the reality that in any class, I'll have some kids with noticeable barriers to their ability to do the work who don't have an IEP in place. So I make my tests a bit shorter, then let them do other work once they finish, but let everyone have the full period if they need it.

The downside of this is that some of them slow right down. They take their sweet time and might not  learn to work efficiently, to train their brains to read and think and write all at once in a timely fashion. Thinking quickly is a skill that's useful in most jobs and definitely necessary in college and university. I can only hope that the offer of time to finish other work is enough to make them get their test off the table. My oldest progeny, with IEP in hand, ran into difficulties at university after many years of teachers giving them all the time in the world instead of their specifically allotted time and a half. Their first term was a disaster because they had never learned to write quickly.

For the lit test, one effect was immediate. In previous years, we might have up to a third of our students needing an extra time accommodation. This year, offering an extra 15 minutes per booklet for those who wanted to take it instead of leaving for the full break, plus allowing them to go to a "late room" (I prefer "extra time room") if they wanted more time than that, meant only a handful of students actually took extra time to finish.

What I wonder is, had students known ahead of time (like they will next year), would they have slowed down to take the full double time available? And, this year, sitting in a room where everyone is scrambling to finish in the usual allotted time, with most people getting up to leave at the earliest dismissal time for break and at the end, how many rushed to finish, when otherwise, in a room where everyone was designated extra time, they would have taken the time to craft a better final sentence and more thoroughly check over all their work? That's a concern, for sure.

Despite these potential issues, however, there's something else I really like about the shift. I'm not a fan of labels. I hate when I see people's behaviour mocked, then a bit of backstory about their childhood or their condition, maybe ADHD or ASD or whatever, and suddenly they're treated with more kindness and compassion. But we've all got some issues. We're all a little bit something. Imagine if we could treat one another with kindness and compassion without knowing any backstory! With the IEP designation, some students reveal the framework of their abilities, but others don't. Ignoring the designation, but accommodating everyone as needed, takes away the expectation of always needing the extra time, takes away the 'specialness' of certain kids, and provokes us to see the unique needs of each of our students. And each other.

With my own experiences as a mother with two children with an IEP, I found the process of discovering specific barriers can be enlightening and incredibly useful for the child and parent about half the time. I don't want to throw that away. But how we attend to all these types of designations could use a reworking. It will be interesting to see how this change plays out in the coming years.

On UW's Mental Health Recommendations

After another suicide on the campus of the University of Waterloo, the university compiled 36 recommendations to try to alleviate the mental health crisis and held (and taped) a forum as well. It really says something about our lives that one of the recommendations is about the process of communicating suicides to students. At my school board, when I was a union rep, we had long conversations on this same topic. Suicide is now common enough to elicit developing a standard operating procedure for WHEN it happens.

We are clearly in the midst of a profound mental health crisis everywhere, not just in the universities. But because we're still on shaky ground trying to determine the cause of the problem, it's so hard to find the best solution. I had a good discussion with my class about Johann Hari's Lost Connections, and they were quite defensive at the suggestion that anxiety and depression are anything but biological conditions. People with these conditions are "actually sick," they insisted. Of course they are. But we can be sick without the cause of the illness being an inborn chemical imbalance. Clearly we can get lung cancer from living in a city where we swim though polluted air on our daily commute. So, like particulates physically affect our lungs, loneliness, trauma, ongoing stress, a lack of control over our environment, losing hope for the future, and perfectionism physically affect our brains. The effects can be seen in an MRI. It's no less real and no less an externally imposed condition in our brains than pollution is in our bodies.

Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage

The book cover says the book "provides the hope and clarity required to change the world." Well, he certainly tries. He's got a plan of action that's possible, but I didn't get the requisite hope necessary to be spurred to action. It's a bit of an overview of many ideas from different places, many of which are already in action somewhere in the world, and it left me with a solid  book list to peruse, but it also left me with a sinking feeling that this will never work. We're never going to get our shit together enough to do any of this. But I've been wrong before.

The first part is a mix of Charles Taylor's notion of social imaginaries, Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Robert Reich's Inequality for All, and Noam Chomsky's talks on solidarity. Then he gets into specifics about our ideas around our communities, environment, economics, and democracy.

On Shame, Honour, and Vulnerability

I was forwarded this 47 minute podcast with Brené Brown on 1A, and some of the ideas she has are remarkably similar to Timothy Snyder's views in On Tyranny (e.g. connect with others in real life, speak truth to bullshit), so I bought her newest book, Braving the Wilderness. I was sorrily disappointed. She has done a bit of useful research, but it's written in such a self-helpy way that makes it all seem so dubious: anecdotes from childhood, some forced acronyms, lots of repetition of ideas, a slightly bigger font than most books, the sort of thing that feels questionable but likeable. She's very popular. She's a TED Talker, which can also boost popularity but detract from credibility in equal measure (see here, here, and here). Luckily, I found her original research (but just that one journal article), which is a much better starting point.

I'm interested in her findings but also concerned with some ideas left out of her analysis. Granted I haven't read all her books, but I think I get the gist of her ideas.

On Community, Again

I just read local author Paul Born’s Deepening Community. In places, it’s very close to what I’ve written about in terms of ensuring that we’re kind to one another at the very end. He doesn’t skirt around the issue that we’re in dire straights and that we can choose how to behave when push comes to shove. (But I think he should have called the book, The Born Community.)













I've written about community before, and I'm going to say much of the same thing here but in many, many more words!  There are pictures and video clips to break it up. (I included headings for clarity and page numbers throughout - where I remembered.)   I aim to critique Born's book while trying to get to the bottom of what can be done to foster a cohesive sense of belonging and caring spanning the globe.  I'm using Born's book as as starting point, but I don't have all the solutions.  I'm ever in the process of seeking.

Fixing French Immersion

The Agenda with Steve Paikin had a segment on French Immersion in the schools this week. The panel raised some interesting points but neglected a few issues.




A Bit of a Summary (skip down for more interesting bits)

The guests were Caroline Alfonso, an education reporter for the Globe & Mail (with a young child in immersion), Stuart Miller, the director of education (in Halton), John Lorinc, a journalist with older kids who went through immersion, and Mary Cruden the President of the Canadian Parents for French. Despite the fact that the show is titled, "The Problems with French Immersion," the journalist seemed the only critic of the current program with some concerns that led to one of his kids changing streams.  Stuart raised some issues with the cost to run the program born of the fact that some schools are left with only four or five kids in the English stream, and with the unequal access to the program. It's costly to run a class with such small numbers. But elsewhere he praised the educational benefits of a second language.

Enrollment in immersion programs is increasing across Canada, and Paikin asked the panel why so many parents want their kids in immersion. Caroline and Mary suggested parents want to have an extra tool in their tool basket, a leg up on the competition to give the kids an edge. Paikin offered that it might have something to do with being a proud Canadian, as was Trudeau-the-elder's dream almost fifty years ago, but nobody bit at that one. From this panel's perspective, parents put their kids in immersion to get them ahead of the curve. The fact that many students don't make it to the end, didn't seem to phase the guests. They believe that early intervention is key to greater success in the long run.

According to Stuart, immersion students don't do significantly better or worse in the long run, however an article in Macleans disagrees (but without links or references to see the studies):

Working memory, used in activities like math, is improved, especially among those aged five to seven. Even reading scores in English are significantly higher for French immersion students than non-immersion students, according to a 2004 study, which noted the higher socio-economic background of French immersion students alone could not account for the stark difference.... [However,] turns out native English speakers living outside Canada’s sole francophone province are rather poor at keeping up their French skills as they get older. In 1996, 15 per cent of 15- to 19-year-old anglophones outside Quebec could conduct a conversation in both of Canada’s official languages. Fast forward 15 years and the bilingualism rate for 30- to 35-year-olds in 2011 was eight per cent.

If the results are accurate and statistically significant, then I still wonder if the immersion program itself is having the most significant effect on those results. Higher income might not be the primary variable, but students with parents who, regardless their income, advocate for them more, who push them more and who, therefore, might want them in immersion, will likely have kids who are higher achievers even if immersion weren't available. I'd like to see a study compare parents with immersion in the area and parents without, not parents of immersion and non-immersion kids in one school. Ask many questions about their attitude towards schooling, their own education, and their income, and then, compare results against the success of their kids on a general, comprehensive test to see if parental attitude towards education affects kids more than the immersion program.

Because the panel raised one important issue about the way the program is actually running...


Teacher Shortages

It's hard to get good teachers who are also bilingual. Stuart explained that, "Qualified and quality may be two different things," and cited stats that 80% of principals struggle to find quality French teachers who can speak the language fluently AND are proficient in the subject matter. If they're not francophone, prospective teachers have to keep up their French in university courses, but then take their teachable subject courses on top of that, all the science or math or history credits required to teach those subjects. It places an extra burden on the shoulders of teachers training to be immersion teachers who teach core subjects in a second language.

John spoke of a problem with many unqualified educators in the French stream; teachers have to teach multiple subject matters they're not qualified for, or else they're not strong enough in French to speak all day and they end up switching to English during most classes. Immersion students can miss out on some better classes with teachers stronger in the field in the English stream.

The shortage of good teachers is also a factor when students begin to struggle. There was much disagreement over whether or not it's a problem or a benefit not to have parents with a command of French, but John is clear that it creates an extra barrier for children with homework that can't be supported by parents at home. It creates an inequity if some parents can afford a tutor. Others thought that, if a student is struggling with the work, it should be the teacher that supports them at school. But, in my experience, that's just not the reality of some situations. Some teachers would add supports in English to ensure the students didn't get behind, but others were adamant that it would harm the integrity of the immersion program. I was lucky enough to tap into a group of parents who had copies of an English math workbook so I could help my daughter to understand the math concepts at home. But it was all very clandestine; we were sneak-learning the subject content. Learning shouldn't feel so weirdly criminal. But without that, it can be really unclear whether the student is having a problem with subject matter (math) or with the language of instruction. How do we know which part needs remedial help?

Mary explained that what is the parent's responsibility is to ensure that kids get authentic experiences in French in the community. I wouldn't know where to find that in my own area, but the Ministry developed Frenchstreet.ca to connect parents to French experiences, something I didn't know about until I saw the show. Unfortunately, most of the experiences are in bigger cities, adding to the divide between families of means and those without. I played tapes of French songs in my house from the time my kids were born, but I've never encountered a French experience in my community. That's a different kettle of fish.

Inequality and Self-Segregation

Is immersion elitist? Some suggested that the program isn't elitist, it's just that some parents act like it is. According to Mary the Ministry FSL framework includes students with special needs. The Ministry says they will get support they need. She insists that it's a myth that some children are more suited to FI than other, and that's not supported by research. If teachers identify the learning issues, they find students will have it whether they're in immersion or not.  She says we can't allow quiet conversations about the student who isn't suited to the program rather than actually supporting the struggling learning. FSL classrooms should reflect the demographic of all kids in that board. But Stuart added that this is all related to teacher shortage. Immersion should have the same supports, but they don't have Spec Ed teachers who speak French. All support is delivered in English.

To me, that the intention is to offer it to everyone is irrelevant when it's only offered to a few. That it's a scarce resource makes it desirable. The fact that some people have an easier time getting in than others, creates an inequity at the intake. The fact that some people have an easier time helping their children because of their own French background or their ability to afford a tutor and trips to Ottawa, creates inequity throughout. Any parent can cut an apple into sections to talk about fractions with their kids if they're struggling with the concept, but not every parent can help with the French instruction when their child hits a wall.

There's also an underlying sense, as Mary suggested, that students should be a "good fit" for the program, that it's really NOT for everyone, and some students are just not suited to it. How can it possibly be said to be offered equally if it's overtly stated that there's a type of student that should be admitted. And, as some suggested, there's not a significant effort to help struggling students. Students who have difficulties with French are coaxed to drop down to the English stream.

And this is the part that starts to feels pretty slimy. Immersion can be a way to get kids away from "undesirable influences" that might include students with behavioural issues, new Canadians, and students less inclined towards school. That's an unspoken piece of all this. Some parents might be streaming not for the mental benefits, but for the peer group. They don't want any weird kids in the class next to their darlings. Parents are more overt about this in some circles, and we all need to be reminded of the dangers of this line of reasoning. I would much rather my kid talk to all sorts of different types of people in a classroom than have aspiration for Harvard. That's what makes for a healthy society. Too many are forgetting that. It's like Chomsky was on about a while back - we've shifted from a mindset of solidarity to competition, and it's absolutely essential that we make the effort to shift back!

Stuart adds that there's a perception that the French stream is more rigorous but he denies that to be the case. There's a concern with the kids who are behind. There has to be better supports for students struggling in French without taking them out of French. Caroline suggested that the idea that the English stream is seen as a place for kids with behavioural needs is a mentality of parents and of teachers who encourage French as if the English program is inferior, which needs to change. John thought that kids should get into the program randomly to reduce the elitism of the program, but I don't see that as a viable solution. It would just cause different problems.

What They Didn't Say

They didn't talk about the overall results of immersion for Canada as a country:

When our cultural norms change, it can take a while for education to match it. When we were finally required to introduce people of a variety of ethnicities and genders in our history courses (surprisingly recently), that sent me scrambling for new resources because I had been teaching what I had been taught in university: all about dead, white men. It will be a few years and a lot of work for teachers to overcome our own narrow education of old.

But we've had immersion in our grade schools for many decades now. It's surprising to me that it seems we haven't actually produced a significantly more bilingual country, at least not significant enough to adequately teach the next generation. I would have liked to hear them address why immersion students aren't still fluent after university, and why there aren't more of them in education? If our goal is a bilingual country, and the middle-aged early adopters have forgotten all their French, we're obviously not going about it the right way.

They also didn't discuss one facet of the student experience that is my greatest concern:

Full disclosure: I teach in a high school that offers immersion, and I live an area that offers immersion at the local primary school, but I actually tried to have my first little one go to a different school. I discovered that parents can apply to have their child go to an immersion school far from home, but they can't apply to go to a non-immersion school. What I saw happening at the local school and in my neighbourhood was the development of a strikingly divisive student body, and I didn't want my kids to have any part of that.

Because of the attitudes of some teachers and parents who see the French program as superior, the students are living that artificial hierarchy. From what I've seen, they begin to treat one another differently as early as grade 1. It's the English Muffins vs the French Fries. Some students who struggle in the French, and don't get adequate supports, are loath to shift "down" to the English because of the stigma involved. That there's a palpable stigma that comes with being unilingual in a school that offers immersion is a serious problem. Schools should be about opening doors for kids, of breaking barriers and fostering a sense of equality, not arrogantly suggesting that one type of kid is better than the rest.  That attitude has no place in our school systems. But there it is. We've fought so hard to divorce ourselves from any notion of class divisions in our land of the free, yet we've created that very experience for our six-year-olds.

I mentioned on Facebook recently that a surprising number of my academic students didn't hand in their first assignment in my class this term. A former student commented to the effect that it's probably just the English stream students. The implication is that French Immersion students always get their work done on time and English kids are slackers. This prejudice doesn't go away after they leave school, even as they lose their French. They still see a division between them and us that we fostered in grade school.

Schools could help to override this by joining the classes together in each grade for co-operative games and dividing them differently for some classes, like phys ed. There has to be regular integration of the two streams from the first day on. We all promote integration in every other way, except this one. Schools must create an atmosphere of inclusion, and immersion schools have to work harder at this one.

Schools have become competitive in other ways with parents suggesting their child wants to take a subject they have no interest in just to get them into a specific school.  This further divides student bodies and divides communities. I want kids walking to the school down the street together instead of half of them being bussed across town for a special program that's rarely all that special. Some teachers promote their school, not just as another great school in the region, but the ultimate learning environment, without acknowledging the problems with this type of abject loyalty. I love my school to bits, but we have to keep an eye on the broader arena to ensure excellent education across the region, and country, and world. Solidarity is key.


Can it Be Fixed?

If we agree that learning a second language is good for kids's brains, and if our goal is to have a bilingual country, then everyone should learn French in school from JK on. When kids struggle with learning math, we don't stream them in such a way that they don't have to take it again until grade 4. They get lots of extra help to meet the standards required by the curriculum by the end of the year.  It's a serious problem to acknowledge that something is really good for kids' brains, but allow parents to opt out. It's an even more serious problem that some parents want their kids in the program but there are not enough available spots. Imagine if your kids couldn't learn math for a couple years because there's just not enough places for them. If we agree it's really good for kids, then we have to make it happen for all our kids.

And it has to start at junior kindergarten to take advantage of the younger sponge-like ability to learn a new language. According to recent studies, the optimal time to learn a second language is in the first two years of life, and the decline in the ability to learn one can start as early as age five. Grade one is way too late. We need more immersion in the early grades and in daycares where they're talking more and writing less (and no dictée quite yet, please), and then we can work on maintenance throughout the rest of the grades. The early years will help with the natural acquisition of verb tenses and pronunciation, and the later years can focus on developing better writing ability.

But I advocate for this instead of half day immersion in the later grades. If I were queen of the province, and I knew we couldn't provide enough French teachers to accommodate all students from grades 1 to 12 (because we didn't actually create a significant bilingual population...yet), then I'd move the available teachers to JK and SK classrooms for half days at all schools, and I'd offer incentives for daycares to have at least one French ECE on board, and for summer camps to have at least half the counsellors speaking French. I'd have rather my children played tag and learned how to canoe in French than have learned long division and how to memorize lists of words.

If the important thing is ensuring the best education for everyone, and we don't have the expertise to do it fully, then we have to offer a partial program to everyone rather than a full program for a select few. But from this panel discussion, and from discussions with students and parents, I don't get the impression that the best education system for all our kids is what's most important to people. What really matters is that some people get a little more than others. As they said right from the start, they want a leg up, an extra edge. That's a bigger problem of promoting the individual at the expense of the community, and it has to be ameliorated.

With full immersion in younger grades and only one class a term in later grades, students would still be able work towards a certificate, not through taking the right number of hours of French each year, but by having their fluency tested at the end. That would give them the incentive to maintain their French speaking and writing ability throughout high school at after school programs or just with conversations with peers - who would all have taken French since they were three or four.  It wouldn't be an extra, a burden, if it were learned well at a young age when all children are primed for language acquisition.

This would reduce problems with teachers who are less proficient in other subject areas in higher grades. And it would reduce the competition for an extra goodie for the select or lucky few. And, over another generation or two, we might undo the unsavoury class-divisions we've unwittingly established.

Avoiding the Lesser of Two Evils

It's not my country, but what happens in America affect the world. And we're right next door. The Left Forum had a panel discussion a couple weeks ago with Glen Ford, Chris Hedges, and Jill Stein, chaired by Linda Thompson, that's worth a listen. It's two hours long, and a feat of tolerance for all the chattering and cell phones in the audience, so I summarized some highlights below.




In a nutshell, Clinton is just as scary as Trump, so everyone who hoped to vote for Sanders, should vote for the Green Party or any independent party if Sanders doesn't win in the primaries. The Greens are unlikely to win, but it will send a clear message that there are enough Americans who care about reform, that they won't fall for the ideology that there are only two parties running. Here are their arguments heavily condensed and slightly paraphrased:


Hedges on the Façade of a Two-Party System:

"Once the neo-liberal ideology is no longer able to hold the loyalty of a population, those regimes will collapse. Mechanisms that defend power are no longer willing to work on its behalf. That process of revolutionary change is slow and often invisible. The facade of the superstructure remains in place. That is precisely where we are in American history. It’s incumbent upon those who care for the socialist society, that we step outside these structures, even if we remain a minority, so that we provide an alternative to this power.  

Nationalism is a disease which has infected both parties. It deifies the military. It sucks people into its orbit; it has at its disposal powerful forms of indoctrination that stokes the kind of proto-fascism we see at Trump rallies. Democrats are as culpable as Republicans at creating this toxic environment. Clintons are built on loyalty to corporate power and white supremacy. They passed the three-strikes law, massively expanded sentences, expanded the prison industrial complex, pushed through the first trade agreement. John Ralston Saul called Bill Clinton's administration a corporate coup d'état.  

Sanders was okay with Israelis bombing Palestinian communities. He's an AIPAC wind-up doll. He's been in the pockets of the Clintons for a long time; he campaigned for Bill Clinton in 2004. He's got a faustian bargain with the Democrats, and he's naive to think he could compete fairly in the primaries.  

We owe it to our children to step outside this system and begin to fight back. We'll never achieve power through political parties. All of our energy has to be invested in movement. We have to knit groups together (anti-fracking, black lives matter, fight for the minimum wage...) and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience. The ability to reform from within the structures of power has been taken from us.

Stein on the Lesser Evil Agenda:

"I'm most horrified by a political system that gives two lethal choices and says pick between them. This is a reflection of inherent dysfunctions in this system. Both are minority parties, so it's important that we seize this moment. A report from NOAA last week discussed an Oh my God report confirming that we could expect nine feet of sea level rise by 2050 if we don’t take profoundly different action by then. Instead we get drill baby drill on steroids not only increasing, but accelerating.

While agreement in Paris was being forged, and Obama was celebrating, they were behind close doors, signing on to the end of the oil export ban which massively increases oil exploration. We have a choice of a corporate vision with a smile or without a smile. Both parties are funded by same predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers. It’s clear we can’t keep going in this direction. Climate meltdown has a deadline. By 2050 all of the coastal US cities will be under water and 600 million people will be refugees. The greater evil is the economic meltdown we’re looking at. Banks are bigger than ever.

But we actually have the power. Alice Walker said that the biggest way we give up power is not knowing we have it in the first place. If we don’t fight in the halls of power, then we’re basically raising the white flag of surrender, and we’ll be bulldozed by the stroke of a pen. The great news is that we have the power to stand up. If you take just people locked into predatory student debt, locked into economic servitude, and those people are 43 million strong, that is a winning plurality in a presidential race. There's only one party who will bail them out if that word gets out. It doesn’t take a whole lot of motivation to see it can be erased with a stroke of a pen if they vote Green. We’re in the polls now where Sanders was six months ago. As Bernie’s campaign begins to fold in a path of sabotage, we can’t have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party.

We need coalitions. Change is not going to happen under Clinton. We need to stand up now if we want to decommission nuclear power plants on the coast because they will flood out. We should be telling supreme court what to do. We did it in the 60s. We brought troops home; brought in clean air act and clean water act. Don’t accept that we’re powerless. We are powerful. And we have the numbers it takes to win the battle. We just need the courage of our convictions. There's an attitude of cowardice that is unleashed when we’re told to accept voting for the lesser evil. We need to have courage. It’s time to forget the lesser evil and fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it, because they do. 

The lesser evil paves the way for the greatest evil and makes it inevitable. People can’t mobilize themselves; witness the beating Sanders is getting. That party is being hijacked. Through the policies of the Clintons, we got the makings of Trump. We got the right-wing populism which is a response to the economic desperation of the people caused by Clinton. In terms of the nuclear threat, the Obama administration withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty which was the main tool to move towards nuclear disarmament, and now the Obama administration is leading a trillion dollar movement towards nuclear war. We know what Hillary will do. She wants to take an airborne attack. Trump is risky, but Hillary is certain death.

Thompson on Some Problems with the Left:

Che Guevara said that revolutionaries are motivated by great feelings of love. The left is bad for getting too intellectual and has problems expressing that love. People have to feel safe abandoning the lesser evil and going for the unknown. Unity is the key. There are lots of little tiny groups of activist that have to unite. 

A lot of the problem isn’t Trump, it’s the corporate media and the 1%. The left-wing media is to blame as well. Amy Goodman has blacked out Jill’s campaign as much as the right-wing media does. There’s a section of Democracy Now where you can say what you want to see on their show. Ask them why she’s not covering these parties. We can’t let them get away with this anymore. Call for a revolution.

Hedges on the Prison System and Fascism:

We have to stop talking about people within the system of mass incarceration and focusing on non-violent drug offenders. There are round-ups of everyone in the room in a drug deal. 94% of the people incarcerated never go to trial. They slap all sorts of charges on you that you didn’t commit. They tell you, if you go to trial, you’ll be charged with all of it, and you’ll never win. But if you accept the plea of 11 years, we'll cut this and this. 80% of the people in the prison system shouldn’t be there. The whole system lynched them. My students with the longest sentences went to trial because they didn’t commit the crime, and they punished them with 30-year sentences. 

Fascism rises out of a political vacuum. We have to stop getting conned into the personality. We have to see the system for what it is. In terms of fossil fuels, war machines, etc., there will be no difference between Trump and Clinton. Read Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon Wolin to get an understanding of how inverted totalitarianism works. Neither Clinton nor Trump will set up a reasonable environmental policy. In this system there’s no way to vote against Exxon Mobile. 

Ford on Black Leaders

"Some black leaders are still corporate owned. We can’t just vote for people who look like us. We have to support people with values, people willing to stand up against racism and imperialism. We have to get away from skin-based politics."

Stein added, "The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement put together a plan in the context of an emergency of racial injustice that demands attention."

A commenter added: "Society can’t be dominated by white progressive and white liberals. There are so many overt displays of white supremacy, that black people don’t want to join them. We need to think of a society where you don’t have control of most of the land, because it wasn’t yours to begin with."


Hedges on Fighting for Marginalized Communities: 

Within marginal communities the system of capitalism has created a system of perpetual evictions, which has affected the psychological health of citizens and the cohesive nature of neighbourhoods. In the 30s, people would get up and block sheriffs from bringing foreclosures. Capitalism destroys the cohesiveness that make that resistance possible. Men are in prison and women and children are evicted. Marx called this surplus labour. People are preyed upon. They lock you in a cage to generate $40-50 thousand a year. Whole corporate entities (moving companies, storage companies, insurance...) are built around benefiting from systems of oppression. 

We’re not in those community to see what’s been done to crush those people. None of us could endure that. It gets back to the dark system of corporate capitalism. You have to look now at sacrifice zones - at what we have allowed to be done to the vulnerable in society. We’ve gotten caught up in the boutique activism of personality politics. Feminism should be about empowering oppressed women, but it’s about having a woman president and woman CEOs. The bottom ⅔ of blacks in the country are worse off than when King marched. White liberals are caught in the game of diverting attention from horrific, brutal, cruel forms of injustice. I teach in a prison because I wouldn’t know otherwise. These people are invisible. They vanish. Newspapers don’t even have labour journalists any more. 

Ford added: "It's not just white liberals - it's those who have become collaborators with this corporate system. In every struggle for independence of colonialist power, we have to kill more fellow African-Americans in order to get to the enemy."

Stein: "It's our job, as privileged white people who have enormous benefits from the system, to support the community and struggle in their fights as they define them. They’re already organizing; our job is to help. There have been victories in indigenous land and treaty rights. The support of environmental communities is critical to those victories. This is a model to support."

Hedges: "In the prisons, they are so far ahead of us politically. They don’t think anybody’s going to overcome the lobbyists. They are organizing a mass prison strike. It’s going on right now across the country. It started in Alabama. I will be cross-country on September 9th, the anniversary of Attica. In system of neo-slavery, no prison runs without prison labour. Don’t go to the state house or the capital to protest, go to the prison house to show us you’re there. These people have so much courage. They broke their strike in Alabama by refusing to feed them. They are a highly conscious politically oppressed group who are rising up with integrity to fight back, and we have to stand with them."

Thompson: "We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We need to re-invigorate the discussion the Panthers started. They already created a 10-point program."

Ford: "We need to decolonize Puerto Rico and forgive the debts."

Stein: "We need to liberate the public airways. The president could instruct federal communication to stop the privatization of airways. When the FCC looked at privatizing internet, there was a social movement that stopped it.

Commenter: "We need to be willing to be under the leadership of The African People's Socialist Party and go to the prisons. It's the only way to be in touch in a vital, emotional way or else it gets too abstract.  A lot of things we debate are moot.  39,000 strikers are protesting a destructive company that gets 1.8 million per month in a template that's the demise of the working class. They shipped call centres to Trinidad.

Hedges: "Workers are reduced to serfs across the board. The problem is multifaceted. It's partly the fault of the unions who made concessions to corporations. But this is what’s going to happen to all of us  It's a reconfiguration of the economy to neo-feudalism with prisons that feed like sharks off them, where a phone call home costs 5 times the actual costs, and prisoners have to pay from their $28/month wages."

Stein: "The media calls Verizon strikers greedy, but it's not just about wages. They're demonized because they're asking for more than living wage. We're moving to a system in which a poverty wage is acceptable; it's important to be vocal to support the strike."

Ford: "It is all about the cost of labour and the race to the bottom driven by the tremendous wage differentials in the world."

Stein: "We need social movements. They are the engine of social change. Political parties are able to unite social coalitions. A real political party is an effort to bring people together under a common agenda. There’s not a conflict between working for electoral parties and social parties."

Hedges: "The next trade agreement will destroy the post office. It says that no government enterprise can exist unless corporations can compete with them. It's the same reason hedge funds run charter schools. Marx explained that in late stages of capitalism, as you disenfranchise the country, you disembowel the state structures in order to make profits."


To sum it up: We have the ability to make this change. It feels like there are a lot of issues to address, but there's really just one: the neo-liberal agenda to profit off the back of the people. And it's being promoted by the Democrats as much as the Republicans. We need to continue to have candidates run that come out of the movement. And we actually have to vote for them.