30/5/20 Poems - #InterpersonalPolarisation & #PolarisationInPolitics

A broken connection 

A grief

A sense of misunderstanding 

A hurt

A wish to be seen as precious

A wish to have valued more palpably

And arrived at the solidarity 

That is all that may save us.

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We each hold part of the story

And many of us fire it from a self-erected moral high ground

Instead of meeting in wigwams on the plains

Where we might open to something more profound.

And hear the tale of a sense of betrayal 

As well as that of attempting to govern

Then weave in my dream to go beyond the polarities

Of the northern expeditions

By the Number 10 key worker

Whose integrity is questioned

By his not staying southern.

The "narrow-mindedness of our biases and preconceptions"

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.

Whilst typing this a ping on my phone brings headline news that Durham Police have said of so-called #BarnardCastleGate; it "might have been a minor breach of lockdown rules".

For light relief I tweeted that the following film was not made during lockdown; just to get that straight.

Much of the time it is hard to set aside the narrow-mindedness of our biases and preconceptions, particularly in relation to Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. What's the best we can do? To stay in touch with what values are driving us? Fairness? Accountability? 
Maria alighted on publishing the Nolan Principles of Public Life in her Centre For Peaceful Solutions blog post. Comments on her blog and the Pandemic Era 2066.uk blog here below please.

For What Do You Care?

The fly on the wall at Number 10

When the risk of a half-million Britons dead

Tipped the scales against herd-immunity strategy

What would it tell me for what you care?

The vampirical bat virus out of hell, or Wuhan

That has now made a meal out of us

And charged not a tithe but ninety percent

Of capacity on a public service bus

For those bereft of transport, what vehicles do you lend?

The buggers rejected Universal Basic Income

And failed to introduce Land Value Tax

Thus assigning tens of thousands more to die 

not for the country/land but for what?

Do you care? Will you share 

#MoreGenerousMoreSharing?

The Myths of The Undeserving Poor and The Evil Tory

Letter to my (former) biographer; sacked without furlough from that position on https://www.youtube.com/user/Toothpaste007 after the start of the #PandemicEra in 2020:

13th May 2020

Dear Chris

What’s optimal for our developing our political perspective is talking in your kitchen IMHO so how about a conversation sometime to unfold what the different political approaches are, rather than just Facebook?

I’ll put forward that a major shortcoming of the Tories is they believe in what the Local Treasure of St Leonards & food bank co-ordinator,Natalie Williams, has written about in her book “The Myth Of The Undeserving Poor - A Christian Response to poverty in Britain today”

The mirror shortcoming of Labour I provisionally label “The Myth of The Evil Tory; our compassion doesn’t extend to hearing any one of them; we have our ‘enemy image’ to maintain”

There is a secondary problem in trying to change the government by backing the left. NB - an outdated paradigm the left-right one needing to be superseded by the interconnectedness perspective that I believe is the only way to turn around ecological doomsdays on the horizon.

The “baggage” that comes with the left these days doesn’t cut it on the estates; the example I give being this tweet from  @LonsdaleKeith replying to @Keir_Starmer: "Thank goodness you lot didn't win in December. We'd have no PPE, no Nightingale hospitals but, diversity managers on every ward."

( http://additionalinfo.blogspot.com/2020/04/gaps-in-provision-of-kinderpolitics.html )

I really don’t want you (& all those you symbolise to me) to put great effort into Tory-hating and achieve so little in electoral terms all over again! 
There is a way that saves more lives by practising what is so poorly labelled #NVC - nonviolent communication. With roots including the Indian Cultural Inheritance exemplified by Gandhi of ahimsa (non-harm) and the masterly recognition and development of the emotional intelligence of “needs consciousness”, please don’t mistake nonviolence for “being nice”. (On request I’ll send you the link to 180(?) ways to protest nonviolently). So, now we’ve established that nonviolent communication (often called “compassionate communication” or similar) is not the “nice”, in the pejorative sense of that word, thing you imagine it to be, please invest an hour at least in finding what has been one of the two most valuable discoveries of my life. As I continue to attempt to channel Marshall Rosenberg (who founded cnvc.org) I gain in confidence to truly hold anyone (& especially myself on the political stage) to account. What opens up, especially once others come on board, is the transformative possibilities of creating solutions where there were apparently incompatible agendas:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07q87sm
P.S. I’m working on bringing into being a book called “The Myth of The Evil Tory”.Chapter 1 has this provisional title!: How the BBC ran with the Hastings Labour Candidate’s misrepresentation of what the Conservative Candidate had said on disability and the minimum wage.

Here’s the playlist of 5th December 2019 Hustings onwards