With apologies to Raymond Carver: what we talk about when we talk about love

Lots of people talk about love, especially at this time of year, but what does that word translate too in our day to day, minute to minute experience?
What does love mean in a traffic jam or crowded parking lot when other people don't behave as you have it they should?
what does love mean in the context of family members who refuse to conform to your expectations
what does love mean in abbatoirs and factory farms?
what does love mean in the supermarket aisle and at the rubbish bin
what does love mean in casinos and advertising agencies and news rooms and in our addictions to the dark sticky energies of conflict and resentment and self justification?
what does love mean in aged care facilities with a ratio of one worker to ten inmates
what does love mean for animals that you have stewardship of
what does love mean when we don't know, or are overwhelmed, or are hurt, 
or are masking hurt with anger, or trying to escape what looks like boredom?
how does love acknowledge our limitations?
how would love support us?
what would love have us let go of, if anything?
what would love have us accept and embrace?
what would love have us do?
what would love have us be?

Simchat Torah Thoughts: We have met the enemy and he/she/it is us

It seems to me there is a tendency to project onto the psychiatric establishment, multi-national pharmaceuticals etc etc our shadow stuff...that they are the “baddies” who pathologise deviance and attempt to control the symptoms of deviance with money making drugs administered by a hierarchical system which has the power as gate keepers to define the sane, with all its attendant privileges, and the insane, with all its powerlessness and exclusion.

But this conceptualisation of “the problem” seems to me to be as futile as the war on drugs was futile when it ignored the demand side and only went after the supply side. There is no point in trying to get rid of Afghan growers or Jihadist drug networks or Mexican cartels when you have huge urban markets that demand recreational drugs...no matter how many producers and distributors are removed, new ones arise to take their place because their is a lucrative demand for the product. In the same way we create the demand that our appointed agents – doctors, psychiatrists, carerers, police – remove significant deviance (illness, old age, madness, dysfunction, criminality, extreme poverty) to the periphery of our vision. When we have soccer world cups we drive all the beggars and homeless people out of town, so as not to stain the eys of tourists with our city's blemishes. When we have V8 motor car races in Australia, we take the animal emblazoned on our coat of arms - the kangeroo - and shoot any of them that may possibly wonder onto the track and stop the mad racing around asphalt which is done in the name of entertainment and distraction.

We – you and I and pretty much everyone - collectively create and maintain the conditions for closed mental wards. In the same way as we banish abattoirs and land fill and sewage farms to the peripheries of our cities, to keep the under belly of our so-called civilization hidden from ourselves, so we banish our “criminals” to jails, our toxic waste to poor developing countries, and our insane to locked wards. As with the butterfly affect, there is a direct link between the numbed out signature which ends most commodified interactions in Australia (“have a nice day”) and the collective hiding from ourselves which gathers like a cloud of numbing anxiety and depression over large swathes of the Australian human landscape (and any other over developed society). 

It is our collective fear of significant deviance and diversity that creates police forces and psychiatrists. We give them permission to act as our agents, they do not derive their power from anything other than the collective permission we grant them to keep us safe by removing significant deviance from the public realm where we may encounter it and where it may unsettle our already tenuous hold on our own sense of ok-ness. Not only do we allow police to criminalize dysfunction, and psychiatrists and psychologists to pathologize otherness, we task them with doing this. They are no more complicit than we are. So let the work of integration begin with me...bring the killing fields, slaughter houses and locked wards back home, into my house. After all, my house is large, and has many rooms.

A Modern Hebrew Primer

A text book to teach children Hebrew was recently published by Dvir Eitan, a publishing house which specialises in educational material. The authors have tried to make the texts relevant, and to reflect current Israeli realities, while also covering the new mathematics syllabus. For those of you who don't speak Hebrew, I have translated a few paragraphs, so you can see where current Israeli pedagogy is heading:

Here is Avraham. Avraham is a settler.
See Avraham throw stones at Ibrahim.
How many stones does Avraham throw at Ibrahim.
One stone. Two stones. Three Stones. Four.

This is Avikam. Avikam and Avraham are friends.
Today they have decided to cut down some olive trees.
Whose olive trees will they cut down?
Why Ibrahim's of course!


This is Yitzchok Elchanan. Yitzchok Elchanan lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh.
Yitzchak's family belong to a group called the charedim.
This is Ayelet. Ayelet lives in Ramat Beit Shemesh. Her family belongs to a group called dati-leumi. In Israel different groups all get on well because evn though they have nothing in common, they are still all Jews.
See Ayelet going to school in a pretty blue dress.
See Yitzchok Elchanan shouting at Ayelet. See Yitzchok Elchanan spitting at Ayelet. See Yitzchok Elchanan and his brothers Pinchas and Mordechai and Dovid and Shmueli and Yisroel spitting at Ayelet.
What a lot of children!
By counting the spit on Ayelet, can you work out how many children there are in a Charedi family?

This is Ahmad Maloun. When Ahmad grows up he wants to be a suicide bomber, just like his dad, and four of his older brothers. When his oldest brother Shahid blew himelf up, he killed seven Israelis. When his younger brother Osman blew up, he only managed to kill three Israelis. Ahmad's dad, Abu Kasim, blew up while he was still assembling his bomb. That means that the average score for the Maloun family is 3.3 Israelis. If there are 6 million Israelis, and 4 million Palestinians, how many Palestinians need to blow themselves up in order to get rid of all of the Israelis?

This is Tom. Tom is a secular Israeli. By mistake, on the way back from a casino, Tom has knocked over an 80 year old Holocaust survivor who was trying to cross the road. Unfortunately Tom needed to get home so he did not have time to stop, but he did make a mental note to be more careful in future.

Look. Now Ibrahim has thrown a stone through the window of Avikam's mother's car and she has crashed into what used to be an olive grove. And look now Avraham and a few of his friend are burning down Ahmad's house, because Ahmad's village was easier to get to than Ibrahim's.

Here is Inbal. Inbal is a leftist. She thinks Avraham was wrong to burn down Ahmad's house. She holds up a big sign. Here is a tear gas cannister fired by a border policeman.
Uh oh Inbal. I think you had better move from there.

And here is another cannister. Oh, it is a a spray can. What is Avikam spraying on the wall of Inbal's building? I think he likes her and is making a love poem for her. "Soon" he has written. Now he is writing some more words. "I will send you". Perhaps it will be chocolates? or maybe flowers? What do you think children? let's see what he's writing: "to join Rabin." I'm not sure I understand this poem children, can one of you explain it to me?

See the Hamas missile. Boom
See the Hizballah Missile. Boom. Boom Boom.
See the Iranian missi