The collapse of dialogue and the collapse of a nation

What happens when a country stops being able to dialogue with its disparate parts? Can it stand, does it fall or does it ultimately stand still until its seams unravel. Being an American expat I try to keep up with American politics as much as I can but the main problem I face is that my perspective of america is primarily filtered through the media (i.e. new reports). I left America 4 years ago to the day to peruse some questions I had about the world without really any nationalistic or anti-nationalistic opinions.

Over the past few months I have been noticing a scary trend in the news coming our of America. We've stopped having conversations with each other. Who is to blame for this? Some people would blame it on Fox News and others would blame it on the Liberal Elite but in reality I think we are all to blame. That's you, me, Glen Beck, Barrack Obama and the millions of Americans who refuse to understand the questions people genuinely care about and continue to feed this monster that we started birthing in the 70s and 80s. It's as if we have taken G.K. Chesterton's quote to its extreme:

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

If we are going to use this liberal vs. conservative model (one which I really don't believe exists) to speak of our society it is important to remember that both the liberal and the conservative are necessary. We need each other move forward. When we get things like parents keeping their kids out of school so they are not 'indoctrinated' with the Presidents desire for their children to study (something George H.W. Bush did), Town Hall meetings that don't even happen because people are shouting 'rumours' over the information the very same person wants, policies that favour the wealthy or these so called 'golden parachutes' we have gone too far. Why is it that 44 million americans don't have access to healthcare? because we refuse to have a conversation about it. Why is it that the working class is not seeing the promised results of the stimulus package? Because we refuse to have a conversation about it. We are a country that has to work together conservative, liberal, homeless, politician, nationalist, activist. If we can't do this... and I mean truly do this in love, than we will not find a way out of the problems we are facing. Please start talking to your neighbours, your opponents and don't forget the most important part... listen to them!

Words of wisdom from the (very) near east

This past Sunday my wife and I met three young people from the Czech Republic. They were here as part of what I can only understand was a religio-arty course trying to read a traditional Czech fairy tale in everyday Scottish life (or something like that). We found their story interesting and invited them over for dinner last night to get to know them better...

As we anticipated our discussions were varied but also very intriguing ranging from wedding rituals to art and everything in between. But, what I want to share with you is a few excerpts from our path of dialogue on travelling, missionaries and religious questioning. It began as a dialogue of the 'western' desire to travel. The Czechs were under the impression that westerners seem to have an inherent desire to travel and visit far off places, something I can't disagree with myself living in a country other than that of my birth. Someone asked everyone to say somewhere they really wanted to visit and one answer was fascinating and in many ways was a breath of fresh air. To him, he wanted to visit his home country. In short, he was speaking about this new found sense of place and desire to travel the area near him and discover the intricacies of his community. This desire to have an intimate knowledge of the place we find our selves is very foreign to may of us (despite the fact some of us want to have that desire). The first foreigners to visit Czechoslovakia (and still the majority of who visit places other than Prague) were missionaries. The impression these missionaries gave the Czechs was one of a culture of restless evangelicals who combine their desire to travel and their desire to proselytise and go into far off communities seeking to share a new series of questions. This really was not a critique of the early teacher-missionaries that travelled through out Europe but one that was asking serious questions about more recent missionaries travelling to local communities without really understanding them. You see, different cultures have a different questions it finds important, and these questions have a lot to to with the philosophical tradition of that region. In Britain we are very much children of the enlightenment and rationalism and on the whole tend to have a very literal and, well, rational set of questions we carry with us. Think of the types of debates we have here between Christians and non. continental philosophy on the other hand is very much about what is unseen. They look for why someone is saying what they are saying, what is behind the answer or better yet think about a fiction story. In and of themselves they are neither true nor false, they are encompassing something or an idea greater then the words on the page. You see when contemporary missionaries visit these communities they are introducing their own set of questions, many which don't make sense at all. I'm not attempting to say there is no need for missionaries around the world, but I did find this account intriguing as in many ways it implies a religio-philosophical colonialism where we find interdenominational competition (something very regularly done) taken to a new level one we perhaps have yet to properly critique.

On Landed Power and Community Ownership

For the past 8 days or so I was visiting the islands of Eigg and Muck off of the west coast of Scotland (about half way between Mull and Skye). Over the past few years Eigg has received much press about its community buyout where the islanders set up The Isle of Eigg Trust (a partnership between islanders, Scotish Wildlife Trust and the Highlands and Islands Council) which bought the island and now gives the islanders say and protection from many of the problems associated with being tenants. Everyone is supposed to have a say and participate in ownership of the land. Muck on the other hand was left pretty obscure an unknown to me prior to heading out to the Islands. I was quite keen to find out how these close and somewhat closed off communities operated, to see if it really was that different on the ground and I carried a series of questions with me as I walked around and sadly they only got asked verbally on Muck.

The day we arrived on Eigg there was a gig on. We were excited about this and were told by a local that many times gigs turn into ceilidhs and last a long time. When we arrived to the gig there were maybe 16 people, 8 of which were tourists like us. Very few people seemed to enjoy it and half the people (including us) left at the interval simply because there wasn't much happening. This was quite sad an unexpected (something that is a fault of a bit of romanticisation on my part). But the next day, it was the big lunch and everything seemed to stop on the island with everyone going to the community hall for lunch... stark contrast to the night before. They also have just finished a huge renewables project making the island self contained for electricity. I don't feel the short time on Eigg allowed me to truly see how the community works but the feeling is that the Myth of Eigg is very inspiring and powerful, but like all myths the real thing rarely lives up to it and probably never can.

Muck was a stark contrast to Eigg in many ways. We quickly discovered that the Laird is viewed as as much apart of the community as everyone else. He was referred to as 'benevolent,' 'a worker' and 'friend.' We stayed in a B&B on the island that was actually just someone's spare room. Dave who lived in the house was shocked when he moved to the island that no one was growing fruit and veg. He set up a huge gardening project and now produces enough veg to supply all of Muck, Eigg and a few veg boxes on the mainland. He simply asked the larid for some land and it was his. It was a surprisingly large project and was working very well. On Muck we were treated like family and invited in to a few peoples homes... It was the opinion of some people that Eigg is a big idea that gets big funding, its a question whether some other groups could use this in good ways and whether if Eigg didn't have the funding they did whether or not they would be forced to work harder to make some things work. It was also the impression in other areas (that can be reinforced a bit by what we saw) that a good portion of the population on Eigg just sits and drinks a good portion of the day, they also recently had a drug bust on the island.

On reflection new questions are raised. I don't pretend to be able to shed more light on anything that what I saw and were told by locals and I hope I could reflect that. I would recommend both islands to you, but for different reasons, Eigg for what they are trying to do and Muck for what they have done even under a Laird.

The next place to look is Gigha, an island bought out by the community soley by themselves (grant funded) without needing to partner with other bodies.

Homeless Farming in London

Weed it and reap

questioning the system of organisations

It's been over a month since I have posted last and there has been good reason for this as I have had quite a difficult time feeling free to put the thoughts I wanted to write into public space, but you see that itself is a symptom of what I have been wanting to write. Let me rewind a bit and fill you in on the rest of the story...

For quite a few years now I have been involved in a conversation about charity, organisations, economics, empire, resilience, justice, community, love and faith. This conversation has led down a path of learning and experimentation, steps of faith and opening up to new paths of questioning. I won't put forward that I have come to any answers I have only refined and found better ways of expressing my questions. I have become increasingly sceptical of organisations, corporations and churches who create bodies that do charitable work. That is not to discount their motives or their genuine desire to help people. I do on the other hand wonder what version of 'good' is being sought through these acts of charity. Are these bodies set up with a desire to liberate and not co-opt; are they rooted in a belief that they don't have a monopoly on the answer for what people need or do they fool themselves into thinking there is this answer for people and that they know what it is? Are charities and organisations the best way to address societies woes? These are the questions I carry with me in my pocket as I attempt to act on the world and continue to contribute to a conversation that more and more people are joining.

In April I decided to take a very active role in a new organisation being set up attempting to learn whether or not it is possible to create stop-gaps to prevent this community from becoming co-opting and instead directed towards liberating, freeing and releasing people to discover their potential. We are working with an existing community of people, many of whom are classed by the government as vulnerable (not sure exactly what this means really) and just about all of whom suffer from a breakdown in community and resilience, (sounds a lot like the majority of the people in our society). On the ground it is fantastic, the majority of my time interacting with the community is through finding out people's dreams and attempting to introduce them to people and paths to help them achieve them. I love being in that place. One level up from that though is where the learning and difficulty seems to present itself. I am quickly learning that the system we have developed over the thousands of years we have been trying to help vulnerable people in society isn't set up in a way that can start releasing people. I have also been finding that certain questions can't even be articulated in certain circles simply because there is no vocabulary to translate ones questions into those circles. Legal barriers begin to come up as one established 'organisations' and certain questions get barred from being acted out on. It becomes difficult and stressful yet still enlightening and educational.

Over the next few two months we will be facing the 'make it or break it' time for the new structure we are putting in place. I only pray we can make room for questions to be asked at all levels and ensure their is a space for everyone to be able to ask their questions about what is set up (I realise as I write this that organisations seem very static don't they). I welcome any new streams of thought on this as there are some great examples of groups who have circumvented the problems we have placed in front of ourselves, but then again most of those groups never went as far as to set up and organisation....

Homeless and Politicians

How can we help the most marginalised reclaim their voices? Recently through a discussion with some of the guys who frequent the centre I work in I discovered a profound sense of political opinion and knowledge. This same group of men sits around a table five days a week and chats through the new things they read in the news and hear on the radio. Although It's good that they have an outlet for these discussions I asked them what they do about their opinions, if they ever share them with anyone else or vote in the elections. For some reason this threw a spanner in the works and some felt that politicians were all corrupt or that we can't do anything because no matter who we vote for they will just do what they want.

This challenged me as its a similar critique I have heard when I used to challenge students to lobby their politicians. So I decided to try and create a space to allow the members of our community to meet with and pose questions to politicians. On Wednesday we had our first visit. An MEP came and spent time touring our project and one of our community members spoke with him sharing his thoughts on why we do what we do and how successful it is and then for 40 minutes the MEP went around and shared coffee and time with various people having lunch. It became a very interesting space. Lots of varying opinions were shared but the exchange was one that seemed to be releasing. The only person who seemed to feel out of place was the MEP's assistant.

It was an interesting experiment and will be even more interesting next time... It might be good to try and get an interested group together who does this regularly.

Food Inc...

For those of you in America this is a very important film, for those of you elsewhere these are questions to ask about your own food system...

Food Inc. - Trailer - [HD]1080p