Adventures on Beannacht

“Walk quietly, and carry a big stick.” John McCain’s philosophy on global diplomacy.

Tail you for 3 minutes, 5 meters off your bumper before giving you a speeding ticket. A Washington State Troopers approach to serving his community.

“You fucking asshole” My response to a young jock who bullied Kel and I in his oversized pickup truck in the Grouse mountain car park. He drove towards us the wrong way up the narrow carpark at speed, skid to a stop, and then sat there laughing with his mate waiting for us to move out of his way.

Keli and I are just back home in Vancouver following a week long roadtrip in the States – LONG being the operative word! It was really great week of catching up with old friends (Andrea and Hardy, Mark and Claire Dowds), and forming a new friendship with Tom and Caroline Crawford, Hardy’s parents. We also met with the yacht broker selling the Beneteau Idylle in San Francisco and took a look at our No.2 boat Mirage – we were delighted with the design of the boat and the layout, and are waiting for a little more information about the boat in Rhode Island before making a move. We both feel very excited and relieved.

While we were away we watched the second US Presidential debate, in which John McCain made his “walk quietly, and carry a big stick” comment, and it stuck with me, agitating, during the rest of the week. On top of that we had been pulled over for speeding on the way through Washington, and I had my first experience of the American school of policing – tail your victim just off their bumper for 2-4 minutes before you put on your lights and sirens and pull them over. I can’t imagine how this is designed to do anything other than intimidate the member of the public that you are paid to serve, it was quite disturbing.

As this rolled around my brain during the 25 hour drive back from Riverside to Vancouver I remembered the incident in the car park at Grouse mountain, and started to distil a thought about the role of violence in my life. I’m not troubled by the words themselves, although I appreciate that not everyone chooses to formulate sentences in the way that I do, I am convinced that isolated words in themselves hold little moral or ethical value. It’s in an analysis of the use of the words that their impact can be found, rather than counting their letters. What’s important, and it really is important to me, is the use of words and their intent.

And that’s exactly why I am troubled. Troubled by myself, by McCain, by the training of police officers. As I unpacked the three examples I saw that at the root of each interaction was the belief that violence, or the threat of violence, is an appropriate and effective method for achieving what you want. This is of course not an original thought, and I apologise if you’ve already read Walter Wink or sat at the feet of Dr Higgins, but it’s also not something that I have found a practical solution to in my life and that bugs me. A solution for both the violence that I experience as well as that which I perpetuate.

There can be a subtlety to the way that violence and it’s redemptive properties is introduced too. The Christian narrative that I was brought up with said that it took the violent execution of one man to defeat evil in the world (redemptive violence). The same Sunday School lessons also taught me that in order for the children of the bible to inherit a new home they first had to kill everyone that currently occupied the land (God-ordained genocide). And of course in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pre-emptive violence and the military invasion of sovereign nations that had not declared war on any other nations was accepted as a necessary strategy to achieve ‘good’. In fact the Bush administration frequently used religious terminology to describe their actions, such as the ‘axis of evil’.

The problem with these violence narratives, Christian or civil, is that of who sets the standards for right and wrong, good and evil? The leader of the free world, as both McCain and Obama declared themselves, is self-appointed by one of the least equitable societies on earth. The UK’s so called evolved democracy was last month declared the worst place for children to grow up in throughout the EU. And ‘God’s’ plan for the Middle East is a redemptive violence narrative. As a result of the construction of the ‘peace’ wall Palestinians are being denied access to fresh water in the region, less than 8% of the total available. It is estimated that many will die due to lack of fresh water, never mind the direct attacks of the Israeli military. The UK and US Governments will say very little about this because the Israelis are buying weapons built in their countries. War is a very profitable enterprise.

So anyway, back to me…

I think my challenge for this lifetime is to diffuse the violence I encounter by employing creativity. That’s the problem with violence as a doctrine. Violence is by definition destructive, and un-creative. That’s my big problem with the traditional Christian narrative of atonement – an infinitely creative God had to resort to a destructive (un-creative) solution. It smacks of a very human approach to problem-solving, and of our insatiable need to be right and pronounce others wrong. Paul Tillich, a German theologian, imagined God as the ground of all being, and that humanity and all creation existed ‘in’ and ‘on’ the ground of all being. For the creator to do violence to the created was for the creator to damage itself – and in his view this was not possible.

Speaking of Faith

This week Krista Tippett’s book Speaking of Faith has also really got me thinking about the variety of narrative styles in the bible, poetry, prose, metaphor; and challenged a more literalist or ‘scientific’ approach to the text as failing to fully understand the power and mystery of the text itself. Both are worth a read if you think I’m nuts (you may well think I’m nuts after you’ve read them, and that’s fine).

For me the crux of the matter is my belief that humanity is called to be stewards of creation, the planet and all that is in it. To act violently is to damage creation, and to choose violence when dealing with other humans is to rob them of dignity. To deny our own humanity, the solidarity of the human condition. It strikes me that Christ always moved to restore dignity in individuals, to preserve creation.

Anyhow, before I descend into waffle I have decided that there are little solutions that I will employ to suppress my violent reflexes in future, and to neutralise the violent actions of others that I encounter.

1. When greeted by another spotty college kid who acting out of fear of his minuscule penis feels the need to bully me with his pick-up truck I shall: (a) get out of my vehicle calmly to neutral the size differential and show my own profound security in my substantial lunch box – it’s a Thundercats one that you can buy on eBay. (b) approach his extension and simply ask if he is lost, or indeed cannot recall the finer details of the Highway Code. I will feel suitably self-righteous and empowered, and shall graciously return to my vehicle and move around him without the need to drop an F-bomb, or feel like I was beaten-up (This perhaps needs more work to remove any smugness, but it’s a start).

2. At the moment that I realise that I am being tailed by a police officer who thinks he has reason to write my name down I will pull over to the side of the road and stop the car. I will cooperate politely, but also ask for his name and officer number so that I can give his manager some feedback about his performance if I feel it is below par. This dude is here to serve me, not the other way round. And if he doesn’t understand that (a) I’m an amazing driver, and (b) it’s hard to convert kilometres to miles per hour off the top of my head, and (c) that 77 in a 60 is normal where I come from; then he needs to get a passport and travel more – less than 10% of Americans have a passport you know.

3. The global war thing is a little more tricky. I can certainly not vote for either John McCain or Barack Obama (who himself said some stuff about international diplomacy that was alarming), but I’m not sure that’s exactly an ‘action’. So today I will commit to joining Amnesty International, and to attempt in very modest ways to learn about geo-politics so that I can take practical actions for global non-violence where possible. A little wanky I agree, but I’m not sure that telling a US immigration officer that I’m here to overthrow the violent regime of which he is an instrument on the border crossing in Langley is going to get me far in a quest for world peace and non-violence. Russell Brand tried that one before and got sent home immediately – or was it that he had heroin in his arse, I can never remember…

A little photo of Grouse mountain for luck – the irony being that I’d just spend a couple of hours getting all one-with-nature before I lost my rag. That hippy stuff is for weeds anyhow…

The madness of Canadians.. this is for fun