Sports and Status

 As a “Boomer” who grew up in “Industrial Cape Breton” with families supported by coal miners and steel workers I am grateful for the role of sports in communities in which I was formed and in the community in HRM where my children and grandchildren have the opportunity to grow through their participation as athletes and coaches in sports that included paddling, soccer, figure skating, hockey, rugby, Canadian football, volleyball and skiing.

Sports and Life

They have been fortunate to travel to National and Provincial Competitions and training sessions across Canada and in the United States. One of the most impactful aspects of their coaching experiences, to me, was a sincere desire to reach out to young athletes and provide, when possible, support for athletes who had to work harder to play and compete with physical, developmental, social and financial challenges. Just one of the pressures my “coaches” had to address in team sports was the tension between giving the athletes who were not yet as skilled in the sport an opportunity to get “on the court, in the boat, on the field, on the ice,” during competitions when the important desire to win needed to be carefully balanced with fairness to all. I don’t doubt that this is an increasingly difficult dilemma for coaches, particularly as our society seems in general to be more inclined to favour “individualism” over “community”. Some of the feedback from my coaching family is the importance of the “grace moment” when the less skilled athletes on the team indicate to the coach that they wish to stay on the bench for this shift or event to get a chance for a win for the team today. As adults, I see in the work my athletes/coaches do in their professions as continuing their experience of the value of community and providing a coach's desire to enable participation for people who face financial and life experience challenges. They “coach” and work to address their clients' need for efficient and functional housing, reliable and affordable transportation, restoration and refurbishment of rental accommodation, and skills to enable their growth as skilled electricians. GO TEAM!

Consistent Ethic of Life in COVID and Culture Wars

Some recent research has brought to mind that an ethical approach that offers the view of the individual as possessing inherent dignity and as inherently social with responsibilities to other individuals and to society was at play during our battle with the Covid epidemic.

Challenges in Health Care

People chose to wear masks, practice social distancing, and be vaccinated for self protection and more significantly for the health and safety of others, especially the most vulnerable in society. Attempts to foster this type of ethical behaviour in society include those of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who in a lecture at Fordham University, on Dec. 6, 1983, first articulated what he referred to as the "consistent ethic of life." 

The following statements attempt to present some non-controversial truths about life processes that concern people who consider making ethical decisions about human life and well being.

Abortion interupts a process that is very likely to result in birth.

A sentence of capital punishment initiates a process that is likely to end in an execution.

Medical Assistance in Death approval initiates a process that is likely to end in an early death.

Dr. Ron Hamel, senior director, ethics, Catholic Health Association, St. Louis writes about problematic personal and social attitudes in medical health that he feels the "consistent ethic of life" may help correct.

Fourth, the consistent ethic of life is corrective in that it brings to light problematic personal and social attitudes — individualism, a utilitarian assessment of persons, privatization of moral choices, excess autonomy, the commodification and commercialization of health care, the technological imperative, and the like — often associated with various technologies and aspects of the health care system. These attitudes are threats to human life and dignity and are, therefore, unacceptable. In their place, as an alternative, the consistent ethic offers a view of the individual as possessing inherent dignity and as inherently social with responsibilities to other individuals and to society.

In sum, Bernardin's consistent ethic of life as a moral vision underscores the fundamental importance of human dignity and human life, sensitizes to threats to human life and well-being, brings these threats to the foreground, inspires alternative attitudes, approaches and practices, and motivates for profound change. (HAMEL, n.d.)

During COVID, the individualism that declared “my body, my choice” around infection precautions and vaccination, fortunately, had less acceptance than the decision by the majority to protect society and reduce hospitalisation and death by adhering to COVID restrictions.

The most vulnerable in our society, thankfully, continue to remind us that an utilitarian assessment of persons, based perhaps on their usefulness to the maintenance and increase of our GNP, is a direction we have rejected in our condemnation of autocratic regimes and atrocities against human life.

We have wrestled with the impact of our moral choices more intensely in COVID times as we have moved to understanding the limits of our freedom and autonomy come into play when we negatively impact the life and health of others. 

An epidemic may also bring into view the economic costs of sustaining human life. The requirement that we try to base treatment on medical need rather than the ability of the patient to contribute to the cost of treatment mandated that money be injected by the government into the care of COVID patients.

Prior to our societal and personal experience of COVID, Ryan P. Burge researched attitudes in the United States about social movements supporting anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, and anti-assisted suicide policies.

Public opinion has shifted over time. Opposition to the death penalty was relatively consistent over the last 30 years; since the early 2000s, it has reached almost 40 percent. The other two issues saw a significant shift between 1977 and 2000. Though opposition in both cases has been increasing again in the new millennium, overall the American public has become more supportive of allowing a woman to receive an abortion for any reason as well as allowing terminally ill individuals to end their lives (both by 20 to 25 points more). (Burge, 2017)

Survey of Attitudes in the United States

The overturning of Row v Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States has made “we” versus “them” conflicts more prominent as the “culture wars” challenge our attempts to discern courses of action that provide health care and social supports for women discerning a potential birth in their future.

Justice Systems deal in the three R’S, Retribution, Restitution, and Rehabilitation. The process initiated by a sentence of Capital Punishment needs to respond with ethical treatment respecting the dignity of the person and the benefits to society of recognizing rehabilitation.

Perhaps the utilitarian view of care for people approaching death has allowed loneliness, neglect, or lack of financial or comfort resources to outweigh the social and psychological benefits to the dying person and the people who care for them by fully experiencing the mystery of death.

Reducing the human experiences of birth, reconciliation, and death to individual decisions with utilitarian outcomes, in accord with “my truth”, denies the deeply social meaning of the connection of our lives to the lives of others and the opportunity of community to enrich our life. The “consistent ethic of life” emphasises our responsibilities to other individuals and to society. This emphasis has been essential in our progress against COVID in recent years and may introduce some common ground for support for people in search of a better life.

References

Burge, R. P. (2017, September 12). Almost No One in the US Believes in a 'Consistent Ethic of Life'. Christianity Today. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/september-web-only/consistent-ethic-life-abortion-euthanasia-death-penalty-gss.html 

HAMEL, R. (n.d.). Twenty-Five Years Later: Cardinal Bernardin's Consistent Ethic of Life. Catholic Health Association. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://www.chausa.org/publications/health-progress/article/november-december-2008/twenty-five-years-later-cardinal-bernardin%27s-consistent-ethic-of-life 

Unity in Christianity

A recent reflection on the texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary on January 19, 2022 inspired some thoughts of how we may find some hope for Christian Unity in the challenge to act in a different manner to address growing disunity and revisit traditions that we may be prompted by the Spirit to change.

A Community of friends

 

The reflection shared the views of several commentators on the defeat of Goliath by David from the First Book of Samuel and the healing of a man with a withered hand by Jesus on the Sabbath from the Gospel of Mark. Alex Hale, SJ, a Jesuit Scholastic from Metro-Detroit, studied in the "Philosophy, Politics, and the Public" Honors Program at Xavier University while simultaneously working in local politics for various elected officials in the Cincinnati area as a legislative aide and campaign manager. He writes there is evidence that American Catholics are just as influenced, if not more so, by partisan politics than their Catholic faith on a number of hot-button issues. According to Pew Research, 56% of Catholics are in favor of legal abortion in most cases and 53% of Catholics are in favor of the death penalty. This is despite years of emphasis by church leaders on the sanctity of life from conception until natural death. This dynamic has influenced not only people’s positions on given issues but the way they treat folks on the opposing side. Hale suggests that we can find a model in St. Peter Faber, one of the founders of the Jesuits and, according to St. Ignatius Loyola, the best person to give the Spiritual Exercises.

Faber spent a good deal of his ministry in places that were heavily Protestant…Faber realized that people fell away from the faith not necessarily because of good arguments (though those play a role for sure). Rather, he wrote “They are led astray not so much by the teaching and seeming good of the Lutherans as by the wickedness of those very ones who should be examples of zeal.”  Why would someone want to stay or become Catholic when they saw the hypocrisy of priests living in opulence in Faber’s time? Why would someone want to become Catholic when Catholics are publicly messaging each other that they are ‘jealous of the angel that will get to throw their opponent into hell’? This display of hatred is a major reason why people run away from the faith. Faber understood that the core of our faith is the love of Jesus.1

 

Thomas P. Rausch asks what will tomorrow’s church be like? Will it be a truly catholic (small “c”) church, a communion of local churches living in visible unity? Or will it be a multiplicity of churches and communities, even more divided in faith and life? The present estimate of the number of Christian denominations is roughly 43,000, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. In 1900, the number was 1,600. From a Roman Catholic perspective, Christian unity means a communion of churches sharing a common heritage and living in visible communion with each other. Recently the World Council of Churches published an important convergence (not consensus) text entitled The Church: Toward a Common Vision. The statement is structured in terms of four ecclesiological issues. Relatively brief, it treats successively the church’s essentially missionary origin, its nature as a communion, its growth toward the kingdom and its relation to the world. Rausch suggests we should ask, how might the Catholic Church and the confessional churches establish the bonds of communion that witness to a common ecclesial life?

First of all, it is important to keep in mind that ecumenism always begins in friendship. When people from different churches or traditions get to know one another, they no longer remain the “other” but become friends, associates, brothers or sisters in Christ. That holds also for relations between more traditional Western churches and these new churches. Second, the social mission of the church may offer common ground for addressing together many of the practical problems these new churches face. While there are often ethical differences between the churches, most of our churches face the same differences within our communions. Finally, we might ask, what if the Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches and the other liturgical churches were to relax somewhat their sacramental discipline to extend occasional eucharistic hospitality to those from these new churches who are able to recognize Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and are willing to live in communion? Might some experience of common worship lead to a new sense of the church as a eucharistic community? So what is the future of the church? Christian unity is God’s work, not ours, as recent popes have emphasized, but we are all called to work toward it, that the world may believe (Jn 17:21).2

The Synodal Process initiated by Pope Francis begins a two-year journey that will culminate in the Synod of Bishops in October 2023. The synod is expected to adopt a final document that will guide the continuing development of a synodal church going into the future. The anointed boy, David, defeats the giant Goliath by refusing traditional amour and Jesus challenges the traditional practice of the Pharisees and does not hesitate to bring freedom and new life to the marginalized. Perhaps our Prayer for Christian Unity is that we open our hearts to action that increases the “friends” in communion in our Church.

 

References

 

1	(n.d.). Catholics Need to Learn how to Deal With Disagreements. St. Peter .... Retrieved January 19, 2022, from https://thejesuitpost.org/2021/03/catholics-need-to-learn-how-to-deal-with-disagreements-st-peter-faber-can-help/
2	(2016, January 7). From Churches to Church: Assessing the movement toward .... Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/churches-church

Rebuild the economy through community ownership

As we rebuild the economy after the Covid-19 crisis, the deficiencies in our response to the crisis may be deliberately underplayed by those few who have built up great capital wealth in the decades since 1980. In the call for resilience in the United States, some basic changes have been advocated,

resilience in the United States

The free market neoliberalism that has built large personal wealth for the few has shown North Americans that those marginalized wage earners, deemed “essential” by governments in health care, food distribution, and transportation also bear the heaviest toll in sickness and death in the pandemic. Unfortunately, when we look in society for organizations in support of marginalized wage earners, we find the influence of trade unions to provide living wages, job security, health benefits, work safety, work-life balance, and just hours of work has waned greatly since the 60’s and 70’s.




The “progressive agenda” for the renewed economy in Canada has been publicized. 

progressive agenda

To be sure, a couple of items in the list will light fires under the well funded neoliberal globalists. Ironically, a modification of capitalism focuses on ownership of property by those who have been eliminated from access to private capital since the 19th Century times of Charles Dickens to become wage slaves to the Industrial Revolution and, in our time, to the service economy. The Antigonish Movement originated in the St.F.X. Extension Department. They organized and led a series of actions intended to produce a particular end, namely a self-sustaining cooperative system in eastern Nova Scotia rooted in the community and supported by a citizenry enlightened by adult education. Adult education was learning brought directly to the workplaces and homes of the people. This teaching method, organized by intensive fieldwork, became a technique for mobilizing adults for continuous study, by means of small and serious social action study groups. The end result was the generation of new economic cooperation for the common good. What ensued in Antigonish in the 1930’s and 1940’s can be thought of as a ‘movement’.




The concept of the “ownership of the means of production” is frequently associated with Marxist economics. In the Maritimes, co-operative fish plants owned by the fishers loosened the control of traditional plant owners on the compensation for their food production. In a similar manner, co-operative farming ventures supplying food directly to the people of the local communities, improved the return to farmers for their efforts. In the United Kingdom and the United States, at about the same time, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Day worked on an economic model that was neither monopoly capitalism nor Marxist socialism. The method of Distributism, advocated by G.K. Chesterton, was based on the wide distribution of the ownership of property, particularly to those who are currently wage slaves of monopoly capitalism. Co-operative ownership in resource communities is also a form of small scale local capitalism appropriate for larger developments.



What can advocates for social justice and greater economic equity draw from these earlier ideas? The Antigonish Movement certainly puts emphasis on adult education in how to manage local economic activity. A land base for economic development has been a demand for indigenous reconciliation in Canada. Many examples of successful indigenous enterprises have been started when this “land base” is available. The return to local management of economic resources through small scale private ownership and co-operative ventures is another “take away” worth studying.

Climate Change and Communities

This curation of articles focuses on the way people in communities are experiencing climate change.

Temperature rising

Brian Kennedy, a research associate focusing on science and society at Pew Research Center writes that, in a new survey, the Center asked people who said climate change is affecting their local community to describe those effects in an open-ended format.

http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2018/05/11095105/PS.05.10.18_report-12.png

Roughly six-in-ten Americans (59%) say climate change is currently affecting their local community either a great deal or some, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Some 31% of Americans say the effects of climate change are affecting them personally, while 28% say climate change is affecting their local community but its effects are not impacting them in a personal way.

Patrick Barkham reports on the concerns of Mayer Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist, who says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it. Mayer Hillman is amazed that our thinking rarely stretches beyond 2100.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7069f766c026db06db7c44b9426e0feaf28adf1e/0_29_3011_1807/master/3011.jpg?w=380&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=3b91ce8d79ef7977b1fe2120d853af52

“This is what I find so extraordinary when scientists warn that the temperature could rise to 5C or 8C. What, and stop there? What legacies are we leaving for future generations? In the early 21st century, we did as good as nothing in response to climate change. Our children and grandchildren are going to be extraordinarily critical.”

Our society’s failure to comprehend the true cost of cars has informed Hillman’s view on the difficulty of combating climate change. But he insists that I must not present his thinking on climate change as “an opinion”. The data is clear; the climate is warming exponentially. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the world on its current course will warm by 3C by 2100. Recent revised climate modelling suggested a best estimate of 2.8C but scientists struggle to predict the full impact of the feedbacks from future events such as methane being released by the melting of the permafrost.

On a more hopeful note, Bruce Mohl writes that Sen. Michael Barrett of Lexington said putting a price on carbon “is the single most effective thing a state government can do to fight” climate change. He said the vote on carbon pricing makes the Senate of Massachusetts the first legislative body in the country to approve revenue-neutral fees as a carbon pricing option.

Putting a price on carbon got a big boost when National Grid, one of New England’s largest utilities, called for  putting an economy-wide price on carbon and rapid electrification of the transportation sector. The utility said both initiatives, as well as a host of others, are needed if the region is going to have a chance of meeting its carbon emission goals for 2030 and 2050.

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Electric-vehicle.jpg?_t=1529097242

People in American communities, a long serving social scientist and environmental activist, and the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts present experiences that underline our need to act now because there is no Planet B.

References

(2018, May 16). Most Americans say climate change affects their local community. Retrieved August 9, 2018, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/16/most-americans-say-climate-change-affects-their-local-community-including-two-thirds-living-near-coast/

(2018, April 26). 'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will .... Retrieved August 9, 2018, from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention

(2018, June 15). Putting a price on carbon gains momentum in Mass. - CommonWealth .... Retrieved August 9, 2018, from https://commonwealthmagazine.org/energy/putting-a-price-on-carbon-gains-momentum-in-mass/

Climate Change and Communities http://tinyurl.com/ycjz9h2u

Local school boards will be an issue in the next election

Business Models 

Alain Fortier, president, Federation of Quebec school boards explores what may be some hidden motives behind axing N.S. school boards.

Is there any subject more important than education, the vessel cultivating our future generation? I certainly don’t think so. This is why the government of Nova Scotia should rethink and make education the priority of everyone, not just a few.
Or maybe this government has a different agenda. And that is what worries me the most.

The table below highlights the benefits that local input through school boards provides. It also offers some suggestions where greater control may be a political action advantage for government.

Benefits of Local School Boards	Political plusses of no local boards
Collaboration over local concerns	Control over collaboration
Decisions in public education are public matters	The government will make all the decisions.
Locally elected address needs of everyone	Uniformity? Abolish local political representation.
political leadership should mobilize people	discourage people from involvement

Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D.,director of Schoolhouse Institute, and author of the February 2018 AIMS policy paper, Re-Engineering Education: Curing the Accountability and Democratic Deficit in Nova Scotia, offers a six-point plan of structural reforms that begins with two essential building blocks.

Amend the Education Reform Act to transform the school advisory councils into school governing councils (SGCs), composed of a majority of elected parents and appointed municipal, business and post-secondary education representation.Empower school governing councils with block funding and expanded authority in 10 specific areas, including including setting school priorities, developing and overseeing a school budget and improvement plans, a defined role in the hiring and reassignment of principals, ordering of textbooks and resources, holding regular school policy forums, and producing annual community accountability reports.

The table below shows a comparison of the building blocks of the Bennett policy paper and a long standing direction of AIMS in support of independent schools organized in a business model.

Paul W. Bennett AIMS Policy paper	AIMS Policy: Independent Schools
school governing councils (SGCs)	establish private and independent (charter schools)
Empower SGCs with block funding	a business model of competition and product management
developing and overseeing a school budget and improvement plans	staffed by non-unionized teachers

This tendency toward “Charter Schools” has concerned Grant Frost, educational commentator and a teacher of 20 years, for a long time.

The touting of independent schools is certainly nothing new for AIMS. They have been preaching from that pulpit for as long as I can remember. Nor is it uncommon for the various and sundry national “think tanks” to take a stand in local media trumpeting the value of school choice.
From the Frontier Center for Public Policy to the Fraser Institute, everyone who values an education system that follows a business model of competition and product management loves the idea.

The rapid move of the McNeil Government to remove the local school boards will likely not be the last position of the government. It is not acceptable by those parents and teachers who value the diversity of opinion, democratic process, and ability to address local needs of the school board system. The “neoliberal” philosophy of market forces, business models, and absence of government and unions in education expressed in AIMS policy does not wish to have education in Nova Scotia controlled by the government bureaucracy.  The Government will need to return decision making to the people in education. The people need to decide in the next election whether the market should be a factor in how education is provided, as in the AIMS model, or that the McNeil government has made a serious error in the management of this file and a new government needs to establish healthy, democratic, local school boards to achieve the best educational outcomes for all Nova Scotians.

References

2018, March 16). VIEW FROM QUEBEC: Beware hidden motives behind axing N.S. .... Retrieved April 5, 2018, from http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1553745-view-from-quebec-beware-hidden-motives-behind-axing-n.s.-school-boards

(2018, March 16). BENNETT: A real cure for the democratic deficit in education | The .... Retrieved April 5, 2018, from http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1553742-bennett-a-real-cure-for-the-democratic-deficit-in-education

(2014, August 12). Charter-school push aims to undercut public sector | The Chronicle .... Retrieved April 5, 2018, from http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1228988-charter-school-push-aims-to-undercut-public-sector

Centre Plan for peaceful consultative development

Ponder problem of perception

Identity community and a sense of purpose