Strength

 

Mr Putin is amassing invasion-ready troops on the border with Ukraine—and simultaneously accusing the US administration of provoking a war as a pretext to impose economic sanctions against Russia.

This is classic bully behaviour: reframing the story, when they are stood up to, the bully insisting that they are the one being bullied. The narcissist, on being held to account, crying, ‘I am the victim of a witch-hunt against me!’

Politics (in the widest sense) is about power: including the power to do good; and—with the best of intentions—to cause unintended harm. And power is easily abused. Therefore, (well-intentioned, most often Left) political solutions to the problem of bullying produce systems that are susceptible for co-option by the bullies themselves. The very structures put in place to protect the vulnerable end up creating cover for the Übermensch.

I am currently enjoying watching the tv series Superman & Lois with my wife and our teenage son. In the pilot episode, Clark Kent, his wife Lois Lane, and their teenage sons Jonathan and Jordan Kent move from Metropolis to Smallville, the backwater Kentucky town where Clark grew up. Smallville needs them; but Clark and Lois recognise, their family needs Smallville as much as (perhaps more than) Smallville needs them. This family needs Smallville, and something that is found in Smallville, but that Metropolis lacks.

Superman and Clark Kent are not so much alter-egos as the same person in different spheres. Superman is saving the world; Clark is trying to be a father to teenagers.

One sphere is concerned with power—and, yes, how to exercise self-control, and build (or lose) trust, and be accountable, all of which a father needs to pass on to his sons, for the political sphere is a sphere of all our lives.

The other is concerned with covenant. With commitment to the common good of a group of people who have much that is not shared in common. People with different personalities, facing different challenges, having different values and aspirations, coming to different conclusions as to the best way forward—yet committed to one another.

Smallville has endured some hard times, but here there is still a civil society based not on power or expediency but on neighbourliness and free association. It is at risk, cannot be taken for granted; but, nonetheless, it is still there, in the fabric of the place.

If we hope to be the kind of society where bullying does not flourish, we won’t get there by legislation, which is not to say that legislation does not have its place, but that it has is limits. We will need a very different vocabulary, a different playbook. We will need to learn to be curious, to ask questions for clarification, to suggest ways forward held lightly and open to counter-suggestions, to negotiate compromises, to take time-out, forgive, ask for forgiveness, seek to bless, prefer others over our own interests. In such ways we build resilience and healthy esteem for ourselves and for others.

There is a strength to power. But there is a greater strength to vulnerability.

 

You are not enough, and that is okay

 

There’s a thing you’ll see on social media, in relation to mental health and wellbeing, that tells you, You Are Enough.

That’s sweet an’ all, but if you need to hear that You Are Enough, you are already perfectly aware that you are Not enough. And that is actually the truth, and a good thing.

You were never meant to carry the burden of being Enough. And neither was some ‘soul mate’ waiting to be found.

The hope we have in God is that we don’t need to be enough. We are finite creatures. God is infinite, and God’s love never runs out. Wonder is infinite, the healing renewal of every sunrise, or looking into the eyes of a new-born child looking back at us.

Sometimes, God says to us, I am with you, and that, for now, in this moment, is enough.

Sometimes God says, lift up your eyes and look at the sunrise, or the ocean, or the mountains, or the stars; this, in this moment, is enough.

Sometimes God says, let’s go hear that symphony, or watch that match, and let’s go with friends, and be lost in a crowd bigger than ourselves; or get lost in a novel, if you prefer; that will be enough.

All of these things are bigger than us. The incredible thing is that all of these things are diminished without us, for, God loves to share the moment.

We are not enough, but we are a key part of whatever is enough. And that is enough. Especially when we come to the end of ourselves, and fall into the arms of Love.

 

Cognitive dissonance

 

Today, a man, known jokingly by his colleagues as ‘the Rapist,’ has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard.

Today, also, as in many days since the start of the football season, the morning news was full of the on-pitch finesse of a man accused by at least three women of having raped them.

The defence is always “whatever happened to ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty’?” But presumed innocent until proven guilty is not a statement of fact. If a man rapes a woman, he is guilty of rape from that moment. If a man kidnaps or murders a woman, he is guilty of kidnap and/or murder, not innocent until that guilt is proven. Presumed innocent until proven guilty sets out a legal process, in which the cards are stacked in favour of the accused. And there are, perhaps, good reasons to uphold this principle; but it is a principle that can be easily abused.

Very few rape cases come to trial, largely because the ‘justice’ system subjects the women who need justice to incredible trauma. The most powerful football player on earth can engage lawyers who will present these women with a choice: be crucified by us in court, and by hundreds of thousands of trolls on social media, or accept compensation out of court, in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. This is the closest to justice you can hope for. What should such women do?

An out of court settlement and NDA is an admission of guilt without consequence. (Sure, there is a financial consequence, but one easily absorbed.) Guilt without being held to account. Without having to face up to one’s actions. Because there was insufficient evidence to meet the legal threshold, in circumstances where such evidence is almost impossible. She said, he said.

When men perpetrate sexual violence against women (and yes, women perpetuate sexual violence against men, by how it is handled by society is different) we rally round to recast the victim as predatory gold-digger and the perpetrator as victim. And when we hold up these ‘wickedly wronged’ men as role-models, we tell less famous, less wealthy, less powerful men, this is how to treat women. This is what you ought to aspire to.

I hope that today feels like some kind of justice for the family of Sarah Everard. I hope that there are some very uncomfortable conversations within the Met, and that they lead to genuine culture change. But when I look at the bigger picture, I don't see the will, among men, to help make the world a better place, in which all can flourish.

A tragedy in the making

On Friday, a 28-year old Sudanese asylum-seeker was shot dead by armed response police officers in Glasgow, after stabbing six people. I don’t doubt the bravery of those police officers, nor that this was their last, not first, resort. This is a tragedy for all concerned, and for my hometown. And at the centre of the tragedy is a young man whose hopes of a new life were cut short. His name was Badreddin Abadlla Adam.

I am not a journalist, and I have not researched his background. But until last year, Sudan had lived under a 30-year long dictatorship, that had imprisoned and tortured opponents and practiced ethnic genocide in Darfur. This young man never knew what it was to live in a society at peace. He was precisely the kind of person who should qualify for asylum, having made it to the UK, most likely through the exploitation of people traffickers.

Before any facts were established, Nigel Farage had tweeted that this was precisely the danger to our citizens we face for allowing illegal immigrants. To be clear, this man was not an illegal immigrant, he was an asylum-seeker. But Farage is not entirely wrong, in as much as we do treat asylum-seekers as criminals. From the moment they arrive, they experience the ‘hostile environment’, official government policy (only just acknowledged and now to be reviewed) of making their life so miserable that they will choose, at any point in the process, to voluntarily return home. Preferring to take their chances with a genocidal dictator than in a democracy. Let that sink in.

Then, rather than direct resources to provide essential, expert mental health support for people suffering from PTSD, money is given to private companies to provide the most basic accommodation. Asylum-seekers being an income stream for unscrupulous landlords. In effect, they become property.

And so, yes, it is perhaps inevitable that sooner or later some such young man might just break, with devastating consequences for those who happen to be around him.

And it is easier to blame immigrants than to take responsibility for our own actions.

According to the most recent statistics I could find, two women are killed by their partner or ex-partner every week in England and Wales; and a further two women are killed by their partner or ex-partner every week in Scotland. As Scotland has a much smaller population, I can only assume that it is an even greater problem there than south of the border, that the men of the long-term, predominantly white, British population cannot control themselves and are a danger to those around them, especially British women.

And the silence is deafening.

So, don’t give me your bullshit about how we are civilised men of honour, taking a principled stand to protect our communities from those who would betray us with their bleeding hearts.

Sulking children

Author Candice Carty-Williams has won Book of the Year at the British Book Awards for her novel Queenie. She is the first black woman to do so. Interviewed, she admitted to a host of emotions: pride at her work, and gratitude towards her publishing team, alongside sadness and confusion that she should be the first black woman to have won the award.

BBC Radio 2 shared the news on social media, and the comments are vile, ranging from the racist, “this isn’t about talent, it’s about politics: no white authors will win prizes for the next few years” to the racist, “she’ll have to live with never knowing whether she only won because of the colour of her skin” (white authors, how confident are you?) to the racist, “this prize should be about writing, not skin colour” (indeed; so why is she the first? and why are you so defensive?) to the desperately emotionally-stunted, “If she can’t even be happy to win, she should give the award back.”

In the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, from Matthew chapter 11, Jesus describes his society as being like children sitting on either side of the marketplace, one group calling out, “we played the flute for you, but you would not dance,” and the other responding, “we wailed, and you would not mourn.”

Jesus is describing learnt, coded, culture. Men led the community in celebrations, such as weddings; women led the community in lament, such as funerals; and boys and girls learnt their expected roles—as leaders and followers, depending on context—through role-play, while the adults went about their daily business. But the role-play had broken down, into two camps, each aggrieved at the other.

Jesus’ point was, surely, (at least in part) we’ve forgotten how to hold celebration and mourning together. He goes on, John (the Baptist) came in prophetic severity, proclaiming God’s imminent judgement on injustice, and you dismissed him; I came proclaiming God’s embrace of the marginalised, and you dismiss me. But the two go hand-in-hand, each taking a turn to be the leading- and responding beat.

It seems to me that Carty-Williams gets this, and that her critics don’t.

The Curious Case of Captain Moore

I’m fascinated by the media frenzy around Tom Moore, the 99-year old WWII veteran who set out to raise £1000 for NHS Charities by walking around his garden 100 times, and ‘accidentally’ found himself raising £18million and counting. The social media sharing I have seen has been overwhelmingly positive, with a small non-concurring minority, and I find myself troubled by both camps.

First, the nay-sayers. The backlash to the Tom Moore story has centred on how broken it is that we are looking to an old man to fund the National Health Service, rather than adequate taxation. Indeed, some have shared the German observation, “In Germany we don't do charity, we do taxation.” Well, here’s the thing: in Britain, we do both, taxation and charity; we don’t see them as an either/or, small State/big State polarity. To be clear: Tom Moore is not fundraising for the core provision of the NHS, which is paid for (inadequately) by taxation, but for the NHS Charities. These exist, and would exist even if the NHS was adequately funded by taxation (which it isn’t), in order to go above and beyond. They exist for, and because of, those people who have been helped by the NHS who say, “Over and above paying my taxes, I want to do something to help, to give some small thing back, bearing in mind that I can never repay the debt I owe and I know that you would never ask me to.” This is public-private (or, perhaps better, personal) partnership; the person as both citizen of the state and participant in the community. We might argue that the balance is not right at present, but the argument that, “It is a scandal that the NHS should be supported by charity” actually undermines the very important argument that the NHS should be significantly better funded by taxation, because it presents, by simplistic sloganeering, a false case.

All this being so, I am disturbed by the Captain Tom Moore story. Firstly, I am disturbed because here is an elderly man who has been exploited—albeit willingly; and I choose the word ‘exploited’ deliberately—by a media whose interest is in a very different circulation figure than 100 laps of a garden. Media outlets including, though not restricted to, newspapers who have exerted all the resources at their disposal to keep political parties proposing progressive taxation and better funding for the NHS out of power. This is bread and circuses, a distraction—and we lap it up.

Secondly, I am disturbed by the sheer disproportionality of the public response. Tom Moore wanted to raise £1000, as a personal thank you, from himself, from those who know him and who know what and whom he is thankful for. But this is denied him, by the British obsession with the Grand Gesture—not only giving millions, but also calling for a knighthood, and on us all to send him a birthday card. There is something deeply unhealthy about this, and something that says much more about us, collectively, than a shared belief in the NHS being a good thing deserving of our support (which it is—though, devoid of personal connection, this episode does veer towards taxation by proxy). That is to say, our motives are mixed, and alongside something good there is something murky we are turning a blind eye to, in the hope that if we ignore that persistent cough it won’t ‘turn into’ (or, out to be) lung cancer. At best, we just don’t know how to respond proportionally and in sustainable ways. We feed ourselves on exciting stories of war heroes, and neglect role models who got on with the hard work of rebuilding a quiet world, recovering from the fever of competitive injustice.

I wish that most of us had never heard of Tom Moore. His worth is not dependent on our acclaim, and ours is not enhanced by his. Let us, like him, play our part, and let that be enough.