Vancouver

Mirror Images

~ philipamerson

Mirror Images

Independence Day Reflections

July 2nd is Independence Day for the United States!  So insisted John Adams, always the contrarian.  You see, Adams and others believed the festivities should be celebrated on the date the thirteen colonies officially voted to separate from Britain.images.jpg

There are many parts of our nation’s birth story that are subject to question, even revision.  The musical “Hamilton,” for example is a recasting of our nation’s earliest years.  Hamilton gives new focus to the significance of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.  (And the musical provides a delightful reconsideration of our ideas about folks like Washington and Jefferson.) 

I have been thinking about the mirror images (and differences) between the United States and Canada.  Canada celebrated its 150th Birthday on July 1st.  We have so much in common.  Two nations, so similar in cultural traditions and yet so different.  We are, and we are not, mirror images.   We both reflect the quest for democracy and freedom in North America… and have much to learn from one another.

Web searches on the topic of “Myths about U.S. Independence” or “Misconceptions surrounding the Revolutionary War” will uncover lists of the fallacies regarding our easily held stories of the nation’s birth.  It is helpful to be reminded that our knowledge can always be advanced; our own self-identity is much more complex than our fifth grade history lessons portrayed.  An engagement with the story of Canada, for example, makes these myths even more fascinating.

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Sullivan reelected, May 9. 2017, Straight.com

In May I had the privilege of meeting Sam Sullivan, recently elected to a second term as a member of the British Columbia legislature in Canada.  Sullivan, former mayor of Vancouver, B.C., was left paraplegic following a skiing accident at age 19.  A civic reformer, inventor, leader in rethinking urban landscapes and how we might live in more environmentally sensitive ways in the future.  Sam is a delight to be around.  He loves challenging the taken-for-granted worlds which too often confine us. 

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Lunch with Sam Sullivan, July 17, 2017, photo by Travis Lupick

Sullivan is a student of history, especially the founding of our two nations.  In our visit he enjoyed retelling the U.S.’s founding story, from a Canadian perspective.  He reminded us that had there been no so-called “revolutionary war,” slavery would have been outlawed in the colonies decades earlier, women would have had the right to vote sooner and the taxes over which we have been told were the basis for the Boston Tea Party were, in fact, rescinded before the revolution began.  He suggested we take a closer look at the ways France played a critical role in our founding as an “independent” nation.

If my perceptions surrounding Independence Day are distorted, what might I need to reconsider about the current social, cultural and political realities?

It is too easy for me to speak of the narcissism of the current occupant of the White House.  He is indeed a troubled soul, so hungry for adulation that he surrounds himself with people who agree to only see the world through his lenses of reality.  There is, no doubt, plenty to criticize.  (I have given much space in this blog over recent months to doing so.)  He seems to forever be looking for validation and praise, seeking self-worth by looking in the mirrors of the media for images that portray him as hero and victor.  If he doesn’t like the reflection, it is “false.” The myth of Narcissus is, in fact, the story of one so hungry for adulation that he dies beside the stream admiring his own image.

But this critique is too easy for this Independence Day.  How many times did I preach of the importance of seeing oneself clearly in the world in which we live and work?   Drawing on the thoughts of great theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I encouraged myself and others to be aware of the “Little Hitler” that exists in every human breast.

IMG_4166Now for those of you who don’t like this theological assumption of original sin, I confess that I don’t like it much either.

I would prefer to speak of human beings as being originally blessed, avoiding anything to do with original sin.  Honesty, however, compels me to believe that both make up the human condition.  Our nation’s history and our personal ones argue that we are subject to less than noble self-understandings and actions.  The temptation to move to binary thinking (one is all good and another is all bad) leads us to places where we can easily condemn the other and remain immature and unfulfilled ourselves.  Let me recommend the teaching of Fr. Richard Rohr at the Center for Action and Contemplation on the limits of such binary theologies.  [See Richard Rohr].

Please do not read this as suggesting an equivalency between the current occupant of the White House and Adolf Hitler.  That is NOT the point.  My suggestion is about the rest of us — that we all need to be freed from our tendency to divide the world too easily and believe our understandings are the only way to proceed. We, the people of the United States, need some honest looking in the mirror around our history, our bigotry and our potential.

The call is toward renewal, personal and social.  The call to be freed from distortions in our self-perceptions and idealized views of our being somehow more special than others.  This, I would suggest, is a true way to celebrate Independence, on July 2, July 4 and every day of the year.

I leave you with the words from the song of that great philosopher, Michael Jackson:

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If  you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

[Performed by Michael Jackson, written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Learning, Loving or Loathing?

~ philipamerson

For Learning, Loving or Loathing?

There she was in the alley.  Pushing a shopping cart.  She might have been mistaken as a homeless woman, except the cart was transporting a box of strawberries and a thermos of coffee.  Beside her along the route of sidewalk and alleyway, we walked.  She was recognized, and sometimes greeted, along the crowded path.  I looked on and saw scenes replaying over and again, as if she came from central casting.

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Ann Livingston, Al Etmanski, John McKnight and Michael Mather (Photo by Travis Lupick, The Georgian Straight Magazine)

I was unprepared to meet Ann Livingston, founder of a group known as VANDU.  We were in the east end of Vancouver, B.C., Canada.  VANDU has been around for almost twenty-five years as an organization of drug users and former users.  They organize as peers, seeking action to better their neighborhood, their personal situation and that of others.  Ann is what I call a “divine irritant.”  She challenges the taken-for-granted worlds of Vancouver. 

Ann disrupts the “normal” activities of police officers, operators of cheap single room occupancy hotels, health professionals, social workers and drug dealers.  She is a convener of alternative visions, a truth-teller, a fierce organizer.  Her work — joined with dozens of others, especially drug users — rattles the tectonic plates of political, economic power.  She challenges the assumptions, programs and professional expectations of many on the east side of Vancouver. 

When I say Ann comes out of central casting, perhaps it is better to say she seems to emerge from the story of other women, women I never met, but have long regarded as saintly disturbers of the peace.  As I watched and listened, I thought of Francis Willard, Jane Addams or Lucy Ryder Meyer, from the 19th Century.  

With the arrival of fentanyl, deaths from drug overdoses in the neighborhood soared.  In the last six years over 1,800 persons died from overdoses. When public officials were slow to act, Ann and others decided to set up unsanctioned injection sites.  This strategy, along with clean needle exchanges, is based on the successful Four Pillars approach in Europe.  The four pillars are: Harm Reduction, Prevention, Treatment, and Enforcement.  To learn more see: Straight News, December 2016.

LEARNING

Now at the front end of my eighth decade, I am discovering how little I know and how much more there is to learn.  (And, I am learning of the many places I have been wrong in assessment or assumption.)  I am helped by new learning occasions.  Yes, these new insights can come from books and films — but I am advocating for putting ones self in new and uncomfortable places.  Places that challenge easy assumptions about life and how things really work.

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photo by Travis Lupick

Visiting an unsanctioned safe injection site with Ann, I appreciated that we are not limited to the official, and agreed upon, responses to the social and institutional challenges we face.  When there was a need for a response to drug overdoses from fentanyl use, and the system failed, Ann pitched a tent and began to offer a place for safe injections.  There were safe needle exchanges and a responding to overdoses by offering naloxone,  Naloxone can counter the probable death from a fentanyl overdose.  When asked about the consequences of breaking the law, Ann simply replies, “I am pretty sure it is not against the law to save a person’s life.”

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Ann Livingston and John McKnight, photo by Travis Lupick

My “learning journey” was with colleagues Mike Mather and DeAmon Harges of Indianapolis.  It was a gift to accompany friend and mentor, John McKnight.  John has advocated an Asset Based Community Development approach to community organizing.  It is about encouraging the recognizing of abundance within all communities.  This approach focuses on identifying the assets of people, rather than collecting up their deficits.  This approach, that focuses on gifts rather than needs, is widely known around the world, as ABCD community organizing.  Ann Livingston is a most remarkable practitioner of this approach, seeking out the abundance in her community, encouraging drug uses to be their own researchers, advocates and providers — and not being afraid to disrupt that which focuses only on neediness.

LOATHING

As I traveled I couldn’t help but think of our situation in the United States.  Our Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is determined to return our nation to the expensive and failed “war on drugs” that focuses only on ENFORCEMENT and PUNISHMENT.  It simple doesn’t work.  Or, better said, it provides results that are exactly the opposite of what is believed. 

This effort misses all of the lessons that have been learned from around the world and across the years.  It comes from lousy morality constructs and even worse theology.   Incarceration only turns prisons into schools for future soldiers in the drug cartels and neighborhood pushers.  The time has long since passed for us to establish ways for the addicted to have access to methadone and medical heroin.  Only by ending the demand and offering a Four Pillars approach to drug use and addiction (harm reduction, prevention, treatment, enforcement) can we find a way forward that is not just a revolving door to continuing our past mistakes.  Mistakes that destroy lives, families and communities.

Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan has wisely said that much of the mean-spirited, anti-democratic and fear-based political efforts in the recent years is what he calls a “loathing of the present.”  It is a hunger to return to a world that never was — except in the minds of those who out of fear seek to divide, exclude and punish.  In this world those who suffer, who are different, are to be loathed because they represent a reality that cannot be accepted.

LOVING

Can there be a turn from loathing to loving?  Any faithful Christian expression would say “yes, of course.”  No need to cite chapter and verse — it is evident in the entire sweep of scripture — to move toward health, abundance and renewal… and to do so out of love and not exclusion.

By now, good reader, you have probably wondered, “Strawberries?  Why was Ann carrying strawberries?”  It seemed incongruous in the midst of all of the suffering and tragedy to bring strawberries to the unsanctioned safe injection site.  When asked why strawberries? Ann’s answer was simple, “Who doesn’t love a strawberry?”