Pandemic Era Politics; favouring Charles Eisenstein’s #LivingPlanetPolitics lead
Let’s return to something better than “normal”; Only the monetary economy has crashed; The Generosity/Gift Economy is worthy of a third of your economic week as is the Timebank Economy for your Care Pension (@caredotmov).Please don’t see Coronavirus as a 1 in 100 year event; make it “The Great Turning” for “The Industrial Growth Economy” & support #CommunityDevelopment eg freelender.org
On getting elected to represent the constituency of Hastings & Rye with just 49.6% of the ballots cast, Sally-Ann Hart said that she “will be representing all of you regardless of how you voted.” As the Parliamentary candidate (2019-2029?) who stood for the decision making processes that enable us to “Move Forward More Together” , and has now taken the energy of the “Hastings Citizen Manifesto” to generate the UK-wide stand for “Grassroots Manifestoes” I want to know what policies you’d need the local MP to support for them to represent you? Democracy need not be a choice of three or four “set menus” but built up from below with a choice of policies only limited by our creativity in meeting the extraordinary challenges of our times. I will work hard to give voice, as best I can, to the 32.4% of the Hastings and Rye electoral roll - that’s 26,250 people - who didn’t vote in the 2019 election.
I stood because Politics in the UK seemed broken and the possibility of Independent Candidates giving power back to the constituents seemed to have been forgotten. To show a glimpse of what could be achieved by voting for a truly accountable Independent Candidate, let me know what policy or policies being implemented by this government would be what you’d want any candidate holding a balance of power -even the 1% of the vote I gained in 2019- to push for so that the MP acts with the consent of the majority; not just 33% of the vote. Those who voted Independent and those who didn’t vote together almost outnumbers those who voted for the current MP. Democracy has a long way to go. Join me on that journey which can find the most positive use of social media to bring out the 10 policies that matter most to every constituent and have meaningful dialogue between all those who differ. Your considered thoughts and best intentions please,Thanking you in advance for your comments below,Paul
(Paul Crosland with Marshall Rosenberg at an event which he organised with Mediation UK and NVC-UK, May 2006)
During a particularly hot 2017 July (which was cooler in the wooded Ancient Woodland valley of Refuge Tree Woods, in Wales, with its refreshing stream, etc) a preliminary retreat was led by Alobhin.
The most notable talk there was given by Andy Slack and is available via the #PoliticsAndBuddhistEthics101 playlist:
2020 Programme
The first three of the 5 days to be a daily talk on (mould-breaking) Triratna inspired themes for 1hour, with the remaining 30minutes of the session allocated to discussion with the other two speakers from the first three days:
Tuesday 1st Sept
10am Alobhin - Title to be announced - though undoubtedly including A Vision for The Festival of The New Society as a vibrant network of those working beyond left-right politics and inspired by the Bodhisattva ideal.
Wednesday 2nd Sept
10am Paul Crosland
“Level-Up (Y)our Life” (talk outline below)
Thursday 3rd Sept
10am Andy Slack (TBC)-#PoliticsAndBuddhistEthics101 revisited in the light of recent Labour Party Election defeats and change of leadership.
Friday 4th Sept
10am
Chaired Discussion between the Zoom audience from any of the previous 3 days
Saturday 5th Sept
10am
3x15minute talks from the 3 Speakers as to what we each take away from the 1st Festival of the New Society followed by panel discussion & networking next steps discussion including setting up Facebook group onto which to load the Zoom footage of the 1st Festival
Talk Outline:
Level-Up (Y)our Life -being delivered on 2nd September by “Paul BasicIncome Crosland”* Independent Parliamentary Candidate, Hastings and Rye, 2019-2029(?) -promoting #GrassrootsManifestoes etc
Intro: Whose Life Is It Anyway?
1. Join any two (safe-ish) “cults” & distill the differences.
Or (intensive) Pressure groups, Alternative Health groups, Stop5G?.
2. Build a model of Integration that works for you,
so that your disparate parts cohere, widen and deepen you.
3. Stand For Something (in the spirit of Educate, Agitate, Liberate.
eg when I was asked to declare in a workshop a lifetime ago what I stand for I proclaimed “I stand for Generosity” & that memory I’ve made into a sort of backbone or return to my heart.
4. In Receiving Feedback (which may well include imprisonment): “I don’t know best, we know better”
Develop your own version of what excellence looks like in hearing others’ response to how you appear to them, at your “best” & “worst”. Recollect when you changed your views and keep that antidote to polarisation alive. Remember that leadership requires taking others’ in and following too.
-Or 2/3rds of the power to the other wings of the movement needed to get from here to the Zero Carbon future? As a member of the Hastings & St Leonards Extinction Rebellion discussion group I sent this message this morning: “I celebrate Extinction Rebellion plans for the August Bank Holiday locally and onwards into London. I acknowledge that some people may find it obnoxious: 1) to have posts from the Independent Candidate in Hastings & Rye 2019-2029(?) put up here & 2) that I post in the form of verbose YouTube clips whilst working 70hours a week Shielding my disabled & dementia-suffering Dad:https://youtu.be/QKFDfsG8gZ8
What I’ve just pasted is, I’ve just learned, an “intuitive story telling” and the importance of closing down capital cities begins at 8minutes in. I’m with you in spirit. I have already registered my support for the Three Demands Bill when asked to by an @XRHSL member in https://Twitter.com/paulcrosland
All power to 1) your campaign & 2) the other wings of “The Great Turning”
What I’m standing for in the #PandemicEra reworking of #EthicsEconomicsPolitics I try to communicate in three pairs: 1) “Kinder Politics” which opens the door to, amongst other things, “Deeper Accountability”. (“What would #KinderPolitics look like to you?” is a key door to door question for the next election campaign in which I’m involved.) 2) A change in custodianship responsibilities with “Land Value Tax” initially at 3% of Land Value to fund “Universal Basic Income” to free up people’s creativity to meet the needs of these times. 3) #GrassrootsManifestoes - as many citizens as possible putting forward for representation their main 4-10 policy suggestions. This bottom-up policy making meets with the conscience of their would-be representative and mediator, who needs to be free from the obligations of a political party. Powered by GrassrootsManifestoes (or other forms of interaction with constituents) Independent Candidates can now share a platform, standing for “Whip-Free Accountable Mavericks In Parliament”. My first two nominations for possible forerunners in getting into Parliament under the hashtag #WFAMIP are Martin Lewis (of moneysavingexpert.com) and Russell Brand (of https://m.youtube.com/user/russellbrand)
Let's start with a couple of useful lists from the editorial of The New Statesman (12th-18th June 2020), headed A World In Revolt:
In common with 1848, 1968, 1989 and 2011, 2020 is already being celebrated as a year of revolt. Nation states are not threatened by these revolts. Political systems will not be demolished. However, this new spirit of insurgency not only reflects the grievous social and economic toll of the pandemic, but also the forces that have driven upheaval since the 2008 financial crash: wage stagnation, unemployment, austerity, inter-generational inequality, social media and political polarisation.
That's 6 forces listed; five of which I agree with; one I do not. Do you recognise all 6 descriptions as complete enough? Perhaps you think I'm splitting hairs in suggesting that commentators are failing to distinguish between a technology as a cause and the use of that technology as the true cause of the problem. So to me, "Social Media" is not a problem at all, but these three aspects of its use are a potential civilisation-breaking problem:
lack of ethical standards or clarity
lack of mindfulness in applying one's face to face ethical standards when on line
lack of accountability (due to anonymity etc) on Social Media are generating problems.
Perhaps the primary vested interest of all magazines or TV News programmes is to show that they are the most legitimate source for considering the issues in whatever they deem the "proper way". Here are three examples of what "the proper way" to present news and the world around us may be:
"Impartiality",
"Class War and the need for Dictatorship of the Proletariat"
From a media agency that prides itself on it's impartiality, the BBC, via the journalist Amol Rajan, here's a direct attack on Twitter as unfit for purpose in these times:
"It is worth saying that this is a very difficult & toxic area where people on both sides receive the most horrendous amount of abuse and I'm afraid Twitter is just not the place to have these conversations; it has dissolved into a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all. Twitter is slow to remove abuse; there's huge scope for insult before you violate policies there, many users are anonymous and if there is a moral to this story it is that the more complex, sensitive and emotive the subject, the less useful, I think, Twitter is to discuss it" (BBC "News at One", 11th June 2020)
Whilst I hope for, and ask you to discuss, Twitter to split its service into two tiers according to the verification of identity or the anonymous, enabling choice as to which one participates in and what can be expected in terms of #DeeperAccountability.
Without change in how Social Media is provvided to us, the responsibility of ours is to use it withina clear ethical framework. I offer below the 5 ethical questions I keep asking myself and then an outline of what "Right Effort" is:
*The Politics101 course that I offer exclusively is that recorded in RefugeTreeWoods and the playlist edited by the main shareholder in the company that owns RefugeTreeWoods, ie Mediation Support Ltd. Here's #PoliticsAndBuddhistEthics101
In the wake of a police officer in Minnesota applying lethal knee pressure on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes, the twitter-sphere -among other spheres- appears to have polarised views. Reading words from screens I have been hearing “shouting” like I've never witnessed before; the volume of messages and the tone of insistence/dogmatism of protest and counter-protest. I've been taken aback a few times, not least by banners declaring “Silence Is Violence.”
I stepped into the discussion hoping to do so with more creativity than reactivity. However, I ended up tweeting more than I intended. At best, my aim was to go beyond #PolarisationInPolitics, acknowledge what sense I could see in President Trump's words, and adding what I thought might help round his proposals, encourage approaches that put everyone on the same side. Putting everyone on the same side takes more than the hashtag #AllLivesMatter as a response to #BlackLivesMatter.
The most visceral upset I experienced was in relation to this tweet:
[I find now that the tweet I was going to copy I can no longer see in my tweet-stream; presumably deleted by the author or by Twitter. It said it was from a woman writing of her being raped by a black man in Leeds on a given date and the lack of attention/support she received from others in contrast to the attention being put across much of the world on what happened to George Floyd.]
How long would you take to retweet these words, if you would, and with what comment appended? (May #SleepOnIt become a watch phrase for us before sending what we can reasonably expect to irritate others...) Around this time in the middle of the day, I lay down for about two hours without sleep in a darkened room processing the enormity of the stream of human suffering I was feeling in touch with via Twitter that morning.
Sometimes I retweet without comment, and, unlike many other Tweeters I do this also for many tweets with which I profoundly disagree. Rather than have the “retweets are not endorsements” type of comment on my Twitter profile, at the time of writing, I use the very limited micro-blogging persona profile space for these words: Founder(2011)StLeonardsSharing Consortium.Parliamentary Candidate2019(565votes)working with #NVC leaders towards #LivingPlanetPolitics
@2066Country @ceisenstein
By retweeting notable content, amongst other aspects of the Twittersphere I am currently noticing is, as I'm confident you'll be aware, the lull in “We're All In This Together” sentiments. In that vein there has sadly been no apparent take-up of the 3rd part of my General Election slogan/potted manifesto of “Pause5G, Citizens Assemblies Now, Move Forward More Together”.
How might it be possible to cut across the polarisation that it might be too easy to fall into in relation to the #rape tweet above? The best added comment I could manage at the time was something that has now been removed (or I've mislaid), but it said that both concerns pointed us to the need to question patriarchy.
This was the first time I can recollect having written a word that I had previously avoided like the Coronavirus/Plague. The word that took so long to alight on my page (or flash in pixels) was patriarchy. I wouldn't be using that word if I hadn't discovered its meaning within a framework of #NVC i.e. the body of understanding proliferating from the legacy of Marshall Rosenberg.
The richest exploration, for my money, of the paradigm shifts that the world need now was provided to the East Point Peace Academy YouTube Channel by Miki Kashtan. Miki Kashtan's previous blogging (from February 2013) around one of my poems I just hyperlinked so that I/we can return to extract more of its juice in showing the shortcoming of my compassion at the time I wrote that poem, and, sadly also in many subsequent times I have read words written by others not-trained as I have been privileged to be in the clarity of separation of observation/ judgement/ feelings/ needs/ values/ requests etc
So here's the UNMISSABLE (IMHO) Film of 2020, eclipsing the 007 movie, Spectre, that the #PandemicEra led to be postponed for launch currently to the 26th October 2020:
And here's just a paragraph from what I call “The Film of The Year so Far” (#PandemicEra #BuddhistEthics #SacredEconomics #LivingPlanetPolitics blog rating: 5 stars). This is the first section in Miki Kashtan's world-view that has got me, as I hope it will “get you”, looking more closely at what alliances might be formed in arriving at a shared understanding of, and addressing, patriarchy?
I put my hands in just about everything; I work from the smallest most-internal domain to global governance and it is always like a big choice what to focus on. I decided to focus on decision making because if we get decision-making right then we can go from there to making all the decisions that we need to make to create a collaborative nonviolent future. That's why I focused in this way and we'll see if that yields benefit. I look at the Coronavirus situation as something that is an opportunity in that exposes some things that were there for quite a while but were under the surface, and now suddenly there's crisis and there's the opportunity to see the cracks; so it's even more visible. We either have a nonviolent future or we have no future because the kind of present that we have -the way of living that is based on scarcity, separation and powerlessness- that comes from 7,000 years of patriarchy. The core essence of patriarchy is scarcity, separation and powerlessness. Patriarchy manifests in gender but isn't about gender; gender emerges from it. The two main things I see in patriarchy are control and either-or thinking. I'm going to try to show that in how we approach decision-making we can exit those and go to a nonviolent future of choice, togetherness and flow so that control is replaced by purpose and either-or thinking is replaced by integration.
Coming up to 10 weeks of lockdown the politics felt visceral; waves of upset over how the Dominic Cummings lockdown travel story was being imagined, spun, told and judged. Late on Bank Holiday Monday I phoned up a certain mediator friend to have a go at her for not upholding the values of mediation on Facebook in relation to Dominic Cummings; and in so doing I undermined my own “moral high ground” & lost touch with my ideals regarding what I aspire to be modelling.
In the end I was thanked for my initially "frustrating" intervention -a familiar pattern to this "agent provocateur" character I represent to many; as does Dominic Cummings.
For my money, Dominic Cummings provided the best drama of the week; I watched for over an hour, with what's called baited breath, (not to be mistaken for a Covid-19 symptom). I watched to see where he'd put a foot wrong in terms of PR, and from my perspective he did that when he used the hyperbole word "millions", leaking in that moment his frustrations; he could no longer be as measured as the rest of the testimony/performance.
I will work hard to give voice, as best I can, to the 32.4% of the Hastings and Rye electoral roll - that’s 26,250 people - who didn’t vote in the 2019 election. 
