When not to be angry

Every day brings things to get angry about, from human apathy destroying the planet, to global injustices and political stupidity. We need to get angry enough about these things to get up and challenge them. All too often what happens instead is that our energy and rage is focused on much smaller and more personal issues. There have been some great comments here on the blog recently about the importance of assuming people online mean well, and being willing to listen so as to develop our own compassion (Andrew and Sean, and thank you!).

Every kind of opinion and belief is out there waiting on the internet to offend and frustrate you, and any number of trolls lurk in wait for victims. There is simply no point getting angry about this one, it just feeds them. I think we mostly know that, even if we do still get drawn in.

Then there are those situations when the other person goes that bit further, making accusations, getting personal, dishonouring you. Whether those are public situations with strangers, or private situations with people we know, those are hellish, and the desire to wrathfully defend honour is enormous. This is the point at which we may look to our wider community for justice (by which we invariably mean support for ourselves). From observation and personal experience, this is not reliably forthcoming, for all the reasons I was talking about in the Druid in conflict post. Then what? A tattered reputation, recriminations, anger, sometimes bad enough to tear whole communities apart. It’s rare that anyone wins one of these, whether they deserved to, or not.

What happens when we get angry? We assert our case, make accusations, take the dirty laundry out into a public place… The thing is that when you arrange it so that shit hits the fan, pretty much everyone ends up wearing it. Often these things start small, a word out of place, an angry exchange, then digging up some history, and an escalation, often enabled by the wider community, until you reach a point of no return. By the time you’re venting angry words online in defence of your knowledge, skills, status, beliefs… it probably is too late. Part of the trick, I think, is nipping this sort of stuff in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Here’s an example. Last week, in a public forum, someone said something that most definitely implied I was stupid and irresponsible. As it happened said critic had made some wholly wrong assumptions about what I’d just posted. I could have got angry and defensive. What I chose to do was apologise politely for any confusion caused, and then explained. There was no come back, no escalation. I also had the pleasure of making said critic look like an idiot without actually being rude. Win!

I thank people who tell me things I did not know and offer counter-arguments because I am genuinely grateful for those. I learn a lot from the folk who see things differently, and am pro difference, not threatened by it. I don’t get any heated arguments there. I also like offering people free use of the blog to expound on different perspectives. I find that sees off the trolls. It’s very easy to write ‘here’s a total over simplification of the issue’ on someone else’s work, a lot harder to come up with the goods when invited to do so. And of course if they did, that would be win all round, and we’d all learn something.

If someone imputes your honour, and you respond by yelling abuse at them, threatening them or calling them stupid… the odds of coming out of that looking good are slim. If you can draw a deep breath and try to respond with compassion, politeness, and patience so much the better. It’s not easy to avoid being patronising, but worth a shot. If you persistently uphold your politeness, people are much less likely to take against you, less ammo is handed to those who would use it, and sometimes, the whole problem goes away. You have upheld your honour, by acting honourably. I’m amazed how many people seem to miss that one online. Everything we do is part of our Druidry, including what happenes when we’re really pissed off.

Leaving us time to go back to the much more important business of challenging governments and big business and trying to save the world.

You can’t get there from here

Usually, it’s offered as a joke, often with a strange local person uttering the words. Logically, it shouldn’t hold up. However, nothing fills me with fear like the kind of scenario that announces itself in these sorts of terms. The form which you can’t fill in without having the right code, which you can only get by filling in the form. (We had one of those this morning). More often than not, there is a way round it, although significant resources of patience, lateral thinking and perseverance are often called for.

Life has thrown me a few seemingly impossible things to try and field in recent years. The necessity of moving when there was nowhere affordable to rent or buy in viable striking distance was one such. It led to us being on a boat – not a challenge free arrangement, but one that gives us what we need. I’ve seen plenty of systems that seem to have impossibility built into them. Things where winning is just not possible. Others hold all the power, deal the cards, name the game and decide how to interpret the rules. Every run-in with one of these makes me that bit more cynical, and also that bit more determined not to let it grind me down.

There are plenty of systems you can get round by paying them to leave you alone. In essence this is corrupt, but it’s widespread. If you have enough money to hire the best lawyers you can write letters to intimidate others into giving up. If you can pay, you can force a less affluent opponent to quit just by upping the stakes enough. The rules of the poker table seem to apply all kind of places I’m pretty sure they shouldn’t.

Part of the trouble is that we have a longstanding culture in which money buys privilege. In English history, peerages, and parliamentary seats have been discernibly for sale. Politicians today will vie to buy your vote and to court the media. The company with the biggest budget can advertise the smaller competitors out of the market or undercut them to death. Money doesn’t just talk, it carries a big stick.

You can’t get there from here. You can’t easily change country without a lot of money to wave about. If you can show the funds, you can buy your way in. Criminal courts may be free to the victim, but many kinds of justice (restraining orders, child residency orders, small claims for repayment etc) require the civil courts, and you pay for that. Justice has a price tag, all too often. I notice down here on the canal that the bigger and more expensive looking your boat is, the more you can get away with – mooring alongside the no mooring signs is a popular one. Manifestly less affluent boaters would be moved on at once, but even those with legal authority hesitate to challenge the exceedingly rich.

The more obscure, convoluted and challenging a system is, the more unfair it is. The harder you make things, the faster you exclude anyone who isn’t so well educated. The more nasty your legal language, the sooner you intimidate folk who can’t afford legal advice or can’t buy themselves out. The more aggressive you are, the easier it is it shove out people who already feel vulnerable. There is no excuse for this. All official systems should by default, be as simple, clear and transparent as is technically possible. Ideally we ought to test them on eight year old kids. If the kids can’t navigate it, the system isn’t good enough. I’m thinking here about benefits systems, tax systems, medical systems, all the facets of society we may need to appeal to for help in times of difficulty. Any system which at any point has the capacity to exclude or intimidate, needs work.

Although that wouldn’t serve the interests of anyone who can currently buy their way to advantages, and who doesn’t want to share the privilege. Or anyone who fantasises about making it to the degree they think they too will one day grease the wheels and that therefore it should stay as it is.  While any of us buy into the make believe that we’ll win the lottery, land the movie deal and get to cross over to the place of power, we’re stopping ourselves from fixing all that is sick and stupid.

We can get there from here. It might take some doing, but we can.

Sweet little lies

My son has a tremendous interest in ethical questions. He’s particularly fascinated by the ethics of lying, such that this has been a significant topic of conversation lately. Now, the simple answer here is that lying is unethical. But of course there’s the line ‘If Hitler is at the front door and Anne Frank in the attic’. There are times when the only honourable thing to do is to lie. There are many people who lived and escaped persecution only because someone hid them and lied for them. Everyone who helped a Jewish person flee the Nazis. Any movement that resists oppression and tyranny depends on subterfuge to some degree. The underground railroad. When the state itself becomes evil, following the law is not the most honourable choice.

Most of us will not find ourselves in a Hitler/Anne Frank scenario. I hope. But every day presents us with opportunities to be more or less honest. Lies by omission are common. The things we let slide, don’t mention. The little injustices we allow to pass unchallenged. The little mistakes we cover up. Most of the time, these don’t make a lot of odds in the grand scheme of things, but when they do, situations can suddenly run out of control and either you have to fess up, or their follows a process of having to tell more lies to hide the first one. Not a good place to be, not an honourable solution, and frequently, not something that allows for a fix. The person who can admit to a mistake has the space to learn, repair, improve. The person who denies ballsing things up cannot redeem themselves, and cannot learn. Appearing to be right, at the expense of actually being right, will cost you dearly in the long run, more often than not.

Then there are the lies we tell to spare someone’s feelings. The theory being that a lie to avoid pain is kinder. That is true sometimes, but at others, it sets people up for a fall. The person whose failings are not pointed out to them can have a seriously inflated self opinion, and sooner or later will run into a bit of reality, and find they aren’t the best novelist who ever lived, after all. I gather current TV shows frequently make ‘entertainment’ by laughing at people who think they’re far better than they really are. The kinder thing to do would have been to point it out sooner. Thinking you are something, and finding you are not, can be far more traumatic than dealing with the truth early on. And again, there’s scope to change. If someone points out where you are failing, you can learn, improve, become what you want to be. The person who wrongly believes they know it already is being denied all kinds of opportunities to really achieve.

There are the lies of convenience. Most people, when they ask how you are, want a short, reassuring answer. It can be tempting to give that. I spent years lying to everyone around me, by saying  ‘a bit tired’ ‘just a bit under the weather’ when I visibly wasn’t ok, rather than saying what was going on. I did it to spare the people around me, and I did it to protect the person who was depriving me of sleep, undermining my self-esteem and abusing my body. Crazy. But like a lot of women in my situation, I didn’t want to face up to the implications of what was happening to me. Easier to blame myself, than the father of my child. Had I spoken the truth, someone could have pointed out to me that things were not ok. I couldn’t bear the idea of anyone thinking ill of my ex back then. And I also wondered if people would just agree with him, that it was my fault for being too demanding, too emotional, too… whatever it was that week.

When I started being honest about what had happened, I found warmth and support. I found versions of me that weren’t deemed useless, ridiculous, over reacting and unreasonable. I was told that the things I felt, wanted, needed, were the least a human should have. I wish I had dared to trust sooner.

One of the things I learned from this, is that if you consider yourself to be an honourable person and do not feel safe in being honest, it is time to question the situation you are in. It may not be Hitler at the door, but something external is quite probably awry. If you have a mindset that leans towards taking on responsibility, then it can be easy to internalise blame, to carry things that are not yours, and so forth. When honesty feels dangerous, there is serious work to do, somewhere.

The decision to lie should never been taken lightly. If it’s to avoid inconvenience, or for some other short term gain, it’s worth weighing up what the bigger picture looks like and what the ultimate cost might be. Difficult truth can be handled with tact and care. Mistakes need to be owned. And if it’s not safe to be honest, start thinking about an exit strategy.

For myself, I’d rather tell the truth as far as is humanly possible, come what may. But I do not currently have an attic, much less any Jewish girls depending on me for their lives. In that scenario, you can bet I’d be lying my ass off.

To those who will inherit the earth

I had one of those parent jobs this morning, the sort that you know is coming, but dread. There are so many things in this world that it is horrible to have to explain to a child. However, I don’t believe on fobbing them off with half-truths. Once a person is able to ask a question, they need to hear an answer. This morning it became necessary to point out that the world is not an inherently fair or just place, and that the people, bodies, institutions we should be able to rely on to treat us fairly, are not always reliable. It didn’t come as a shock to the lad, I think I was confirming what he’d already suspected, but it’s better to talk about these things.

So we talked about institutionalised racism, which he thinks is crazy because people are people and judging them on skin colour is stupid. Allow me a moment of happy pride over this. We talked about the history of laws, and where they come from. Because go back a few hundred years and in most of Europe, there wasn’t much legal protection for poor people against rich ones. The UK was better than average. We talked about the way in which the crimes of poor people still seem to be taken more seriously than the sneakier financial and environmental crimes of the wealthy. We didn’t get round to huge corporate tax dodgers, but we could have done. We talked about libel laws, and how your likelihood of being taken seriously depends on how rich and famous you are. To be poor and maligned is still to be maligned. It is a life no less damaged.

There are a frightening number of things around us that I can point to, to illustrate institutionalised stupidity and unfairness. Of course he needs to know, this is the world he is poised to inherit, the one he’s going to need to survive in. The odds are increasingly stacked against the poor. The desire of consumerism still gets priority over the needs of the environment.

What I feel is overwhelming shame. This is the world I get to pass on to my son. Ugly with corruption, cruelty, and systems that cannot be trusted to deliver fairness. And ok, most of this I have not created, or planned or supported in any way, but how much time have I spent trying to make it better? Not nearly enough. Every day there is something in the news where the short-sightedness, the inhumanity, the greed and horror of human choices shocks me. And no doubt my child too, because he’s listening. A bus full of people who, between them, didn’t have twenty pence to save a girl from a ten mile walk at three in the morning. She was attacked as a consequence, by a guy high on cocaine. The small evils we commit against each other on a daily basis go to make up such wrongs.

The latest one to be grating on my nerves is this: Plans that mothers who defy court orders over access to their children, be punished by having their passports taken away. On the grounds that it’s not fair to the child to be denied access to a parent. If a guy doesn’t want to have anything to do with his children, he’ll still have to contribute financially, but he can walk away. Never see them. There are no suggested sanctions to make reluctant fathers see their kids. It’s not a gender thing. Reverse who has the kids and it still holds up. We collectively abuse the parent who undertakes to do the parenting, and let the one who is disinterested do as they please. That’s no kind of fairness or justice.

The temptation is to keep my head down and not fight the many wrongs that I run into. The fear that I live with is that by protesting, I will draw adverse attention. What, after all, is to stop any of these systems from crushing me? If I call a government body out over unjust behaviour, what is to save me from unjust treatment at their hands? And yet, to stay silent, to refuse to notice, to keep my head down, is to tacitly support any wrong I turn a blind eye to. We have a conspiracy of silence. All of us. For the sake of a quiet life, an easy life. We don’t complain, we don’t draw attention to ourselves, we don’t invite the unfairness we know perfectly well is out there, to come round and pick on us for a change.

Dear children, this is the world we have contrived to make for you. We are poisoning it, and many of its structures are corrupt. Close your eyes and ears, pretend it’s all shiny and happy. Don’t look at anything that hurts. Play this game instead. Watch another TV program. When you get older, you can use alcohol to blot it all out.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Druidry the waterways and Justice

One of the things my Druidry drives me to do is challenge injustice when I encounter it. There’s not a vast amount I can do on this issue apart from speaking out, but, if you are not impressed by what I share below, then please reblog, or tweet the link or otherwise help to put the word out. I believe that governments should be bound by the rule of law, and should not be able to go beyond the laws that govern us all to serve their own ends.

We’re back to the outrageous behaviour of British Waterways again. Much of the content in today’s blog has been taken from other sources and is online other places. Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, we now know that  BW’s internal Licensing and Enforcement management reports between June 2011 and March 2012 show that BW has set a target for “all boats not moving at least 30km during their contract period to be within  enforcement process. The policy of taking enforcement action against “all boats not moving at least 30km during their contract period”  is at odds with the evidence given to the House of Commons Select Committee on the British Waterways Bill 1993-94.

The only time frames and distance requirements in the guidelines are as follows: You must move every 14 days unless you have a very good reason not to (like a broken leg, or a broken gear box). You should not return to the same spot in under a month unless you have changed direction – eg reached the end of a canal. Over the term of your licence, you have to move more than ten miles. The license lasts a year, but I’ve seen for myself that BW is harassing boaters about their movement over the winter months, not with regard to the 14 day requirement, but with regard to not having moved 30km in something a lot shorter than the period of their license.

Furthermore, the policy of taking enforcement action against “all boats not moving at least 30km during their contract period” has remained secret. It was not disclosed to the User Groups who met with British Waterways Legal Director Nigel Johnson and other officers including the Head of Enforcement Denise Yelland, the author of the Licensing and Enforcement management reports, on 23 June 2011 to discuss the revision of the Mooring Guidance for Continuous Cruisers. The policy and the secrecy with which it is being pursued appears to reveal British Waterways’ objective of removing itinerant boat dwellers from its waterways.

Let’s pause and repeat that. A government body, soon to be a charity, looks like it has a policy to remove poor people from the canals. Since when was it the business of a charity to ‘cleanse’ a space of poor people who live there so that the rich folk have more room in which to play with their toys? There is every reason to think that British Waterways prefers not to mention it’s creative interpretation of the law to boaters, so as to hold a threat over the heads of itinerant boat dwellers with the intention of pressurising them to move off the waterways altogether, rather than giving them information that would enable them to know how to avoid enforcement action. My own experience is certainly consistent with this. Emails saying things like ‘I wish to comply, please tell me what to do’ were not even answered. Also, I have emails in which BW staff have told me that any person with a conneciton to an area – work, family, school doctors, that means the need to be in viable striking distance of somewhere, cannot be continuous cruisers. This isn’t in the guidlelines either, and would rule out pretty much everyone but the indepenedantly wealthy.

My source says… “In addition, British Waterways reported in its Boating Projects report for May 2011 that it has plans to introduce “longer term towpath [mooring] permits” in certain areas such as the Kennet and Avon canal which boaters without a home mooring must pay for to “allow” them to travel in a way that the rules already entitle them to do. To introduce such permits would be unlawful, but to introduce them without informing boaters of the policy of taking enforcement action against “all boats not moving at least 30km during their contract period” amounts to extortion in addition.” Which is interesting because such towpath moorings already exist on the Sharpness to Gloucester canal, I have no idea what the legal basis for them is. Morally I find them suspect because we are told that the point of a permanent mooring is to provide a safe place, off the towpath for your boat when not in use. Mooring permenantly on the towpath is magically safe if you pay to do it.

You can download all the Licensing and Enforcement reports and Boating Projects reports that were provided in response to this FOI here:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/boating_management_and_consultat#incoming-281372

The Minutes of Evidence of the Select Committees that drafted the 1995 British Waterways Act are available for the public to read and copy in the Parliamentary Archives, contact archives@parliament.uk.

Alternatively, you can email enquiries.hq@britishwaterways.co.uk and tell them what the likelihood is of you giving money to a charity that acts in this way. Feel free to write to your MP as well if you are in the UK. This is not just about the abuse of boater’s most fundamental human rights, it is about the principle that government bodies should not be able to act in this way. They should have to uphold the law. They should not be extorting money from people or using threats, they should not be causing homelessness. What would happen if other departments took the same attitude? If we let them get away with this unchecked, what comes next? Culling protected species for the benefit of rich people who like to shoot pheasants? Oh, they’re talking about doing that already…

Justice, the follow up

I’ve been pondering Red’s comments on Contemplating Justice, again and felt it needed more response than a note back. I’ve also had input from Tom, whose take on the justice issue I want to share.

 

Red commented about the primacy of relationship in her understanding of things, and a dislike of the authority inherent in the language of justice, and its incompatibility with anarchic principles.

 

My first feeling is that anarchy, like communism and many other beautiful ideas only work when all the people involved are working consciously and ethically in the same way. Wonderful aspirations, but not consistent with how many people are. It only takes one user or abuser to make such an approach fail. My second feeling is that relationship is not always quite such a straightforward option. In the Stone age village in my head, the whole community exists in relationship, but I’ve never lived in that situation. I’ve probably not known the people who stole from me. Often my only ‘relationship’ in threatening circumstances comes from being on the receiving end of something I don’t want. For the kidnapped child, the raped woman, the guy stabbed by a stranger, there has been no relationship with the attacker, no chance to avoid harm, and personally I see no reason for someone who wounds or kills a stranger to get away with that unchallenged. I recognise this means that I want there to be a degree of authority and power able to respond in some way to those who are not able to manage their own behaviour well for the rest of the tribe.

 

All life causes harm, but my thoughts around making justice an inherent part of relationship, had everything to do with my own desire to reduce the harm I cause. Red spoke of beetles accidentally squashed.  I mostly walk and cycle. I stop for beetles. No doubt I squish a few, but it’s not a bad example, the intent and effort to avoid causing harm is, for me at least, a recognition of the injustice that would be inherent in my killing something by not paying attention. No matter how hard we try, we will cause harm, but the more attention we pay, the less accidental, needless, pointless, careless harm-causing there should be. I think it’s got to be worth a shot.

 

But where there is no relationship outside of the harm-causing event, I do think community action, authoritative intervention is called for. Every three days a woman is killed by her abusive partner. Every ten days a child is killed by an abusive parent – and that doesn’t count death by neglect, that’s just murder figures. Relationships they could manage? I doubt the children had much say in it. Numbers for child murders by postnatally depressed women have been radically reduced by support and medication. I feel I have a duty to support a system that in any way tries to prevent that kind of thing from happening in the first place. That kind of justice – preventative justice – is increasingly part of how I understand my druid path. That’s not about individual relationship, but about whole community relationship and how we support each other. With so many people involved, we have no hope of doing that without some degree of structure. I believe we should hold a degree of responsibility for each other’s wellbeing. And yes, this is justice by humans and for humans. That which is human is also natural and we are not the only creatures able to reward or punish each other.

 

Tom pointed out to me that culturally we tend to view things in terms of success and failure, and that this impacts on our understanding of justice too. I am a clever person, I know this because I have lots of money and have never been a victim of crime. Victims are too naïve to protect themselves, bring it upon themselves, or are stupid. Take 2: I am successful because I have earned  lots of money off the backs of other people’s work. I am cleverer than them and therefore entitled. Take 3: I am successful, I have a lot of money because I have miss-sold a lot of products and gambled with other people’s savings, and thank you, yes I will take that bonus this year as well. Take: 4 I am successful because last night I broke into your house and stole all your valuable electrical goods, and I am too smart to be caught by the police.

 

We are so quick to blame the victims for not doing enough to protect themselves from crime. We are willing to see it as predators and prey, as it being natural to predate. The weak are fair game, because they are weak. Success is all about the bank balance, not about being a good human being. And until we’ve tackled that, as a whole culture, it’s going to remain very hard to think about justice at all.

Contemplating justice, again

Overnight someone hacked Tom’s facebook account. It’s not unusual to have your privacy  violated online, and I’ve suffered identity theft in the real world too. It’s one of the most threatening, uncomfortable crimes.

 

Justice is a topic I keep coming back to, not least because I see so much going wrong, and justice is seldom forthcoming. And yet I’ve read that justice was supposed to be integral to the world views of many of our ancestors. We enshrine it in law, in the druid’s prayer, we talk it up as a druid concept. But where the hell is it? The gods do not bring justice in this life, and I’m no great believer in hoping it all gets sorted out in the next one. I’ve been shuffling towards this line of thought for some time now. Justice after the event, if you can get it, often isn’t that helpful. Where there’s scope to restore and make amends, then that helps. Stolen and broken things replaced, public apology made, compensation offered, but it doesn’t undo what was done.

 

Real justice is not what happens after the violation. Real justice is not what we do to those who have offended. It’s not even the fine art of saying sorry. Looking in that direction is a distraction, it’s the wrong thought form.

 

True justice, is lived.

 

Like so many other ethical ideas, this has to be done by choice, not imposed. What does it mean in practice? Ideas of what is, and is not just are bound to vary. It brings up issues of entitlement and rights, of how you handle conflicting needs. Is it justice to take what you need, if you are starving and another has abundance? It certainly isn’t justice to live in luxury while others starve. Yet when you consider international standards, most of us in the western world have total luxury compared to the poorest people on earth. How do we balance justice for self against justice for others? Should they mean the same thing? The more I poke around at this, the bigger I realise it gets but the more certain I feel about the jumping off point. Justice after the event is not that much help. True justice comes from not being a victim in the first place.

 

The people who do not choose to live in just ways (by my understanding) no doubt have their reasons. Entitlement, the sense that ‘if I can do it then why not?’ a sense of victimhood that creates justification… and no doubt many others. There are undoubtedly things I have done that others consider unfair, unreasonable… but I do not. I do not believe in any external arbiters of truth. Where does that leave me? With a perpetual negotiation, an idea that has to be carefully tested against each new life experience, something that will take a lot of work and create a lot of challenges.

 

How do I undertake to live in a fair and just way? How do I make inherent in my actions a compassionate sense of justice that helps guide and shape what I do? With no external rules, no thou shalt nots to lead the way, I have only my own judgement, flawed as it inevitably is. We all do. If we pick external rules to adhere to, we are still responsible for choosing, understanding and applying them.

 

I think it’s because so many people do not have much internalised sense of fairness of justice that a significant number of crimes occur. I also think that in a fairer, more just and equitable society, people would stand a better chance of having those values be part of their world view in the first place. When all you see is unfairness, how can you hope to know what justice would look like? It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. You can’t get a just society without the individuals in it working for just that, and it’s tricky getting everyone thinking in just ways when faced with all kinds of injustices. But not impossible.

Crime stories

Not what I’d planned for today, but Tom’s bike was stolen overnight, and this is all on my mind rather. To the police, it’s just a stolen bike. Not inherently worth all that much. The trouble is, as is so often the case, the value and impact are judged from the outside. Steal thousands from someone rich and the odds are the police will be interested in you. Steal twenty pounds from someone who consequently can’t afford to eat that week, and it’s small time stuff and nobody cares. Value is a tricky thing to judge. For us, the value of a bike includes it being our primary mode of transport, and technically difficult to replace. We don’t live in easy walking distance of anywhere that sells bikes, and as we live on a boat, getting one delivered would be challenging. We had plans for today. Bike dependent plans. Worth is about so much more than the price tag.

How about the worth to the person who took it? I wish I could feel it had been taken by someone in extremis, prompted by dire need, an urgent requirement to get somewhere. It probably wasn’t. More likely, as when we’ve had thing taken in the past, it’s been a brief giggle, a quick adrenaline high, or something to sell on, or throw in a ditch. Something that was cherished and valued by us, probably isn’t being valued by whoever made off with it.

We have a habit of naming things. When you believe that everything contains spirit, when you recognise that spirit as part of day to day living, the naming of things comes easily. This bike was called Henson, because according to Tom it looked like the kind of bike Kermit the Frog would ride. When you name something, it ceases to be just another ‘thing’ to use and discard at whim. It becomes a friend, a fellow traveller through life’s journey. You care more. I’ve never been drawn to the acquisition of stuff, but at the same time the things I have are loved, and frequently named. Saying goodbye to a worn out pair of shoes is like saying goodbye to a friend. I appreciate that for the kind of person who steals, this would sound insane. I’d still rather be the sort of person who grieves the loss of a well loved thing than the person who doesn’t care for anything.

And then there’s the egret, flying over the canal this morning, oblivious to the development threat to one of his fields. He stands to lose a lot more than we have. It’ll be worse for all the ones who call that hedgerow home, or who are the hedgerow. Theft is a very human concept, and is only used to describe what happens when one human takes a thing another human didn’t want them to have. Up until relatively recently, we were pretty good at not even counting some humans as being able to own, and therefore to be stolen from. But when you think about it, we steal all the time. Homes, food supplies, offspring… and most of the time no crime has been committed at all.

Grant, oh spirits, thy protection. And in protection, strength, and in strength, knowledge, and in knowledge, the knowledge of justice, and in the knowledge of justice, the love of it.

I suppose in theory I could love justice, I just don’t think I’ve ever seen more than fleeting glimpses of it, so it’s hard to tell. I find it increasingly hard to believe that it exists at all, which is one of the main reasons that I find it hard to believe in any kind of gods, or karma, or anything that helps to balance the scales a bit. I see no evidence for it. And as for human justice…. The more I see of that, the more I believe it comes down to money far more than anything else. And that’s as true for the egret, as it is for me.

What I can do is keep trying to do the right things, for the right reasons. Yes, I can put pen to paper and give the egret a voice in the process. Whether that will do any good, I can’t say, but I’m having a go. Justice, like so many other ideas, depends a lot on our ability to believe in it. Or enough bloody mindedness to think that if it doesn’t come naturally, we ought to get out there and damn well make some. But today has been another knock back, another reason to admit defeat and stop caring, stop trying. Another reason to decide that maybe the life lesson to learn is that there is no point and that I might as well not bother. So far every time I’ve been knocked down I’ve managed to get up and try to do something about it, or move on. But there are days like today, when I question the point of what I do, and I wonder why I’m doing it.

Peaceful Druid, Angry Druid

Peace is a state upheld by druids as being the ideal. We work for inner peace and for peace in the world whenever we can. But at the same time, Druids are also eco warriors, protestors and trouble makers because some things have to be fought and some things you can’t respond honourably to without getting bloody angry first!

This raises some interesting questions for me, about when to seek peace and when not. This is very much a line of thought in progress, so please, please do pile in with observations, I find the feedback very helpful – both in a personal way and in a wider, more academic sort of way too.

I think peace has to come after resolution and after justice. Peace without justice is not going to work – either it won’t be sustainable, or it won’t be honourable, or both. Quiet dishonour is not peace, it’s just acquiescence. So there needs to be a reckoning, a redressing of balance of some kind for the anger to pass. I’m not sure where that leaves you if justice or recompense seem unavailable. Still wearing the angry Druid hat, perhaps.

Perhaps what matters is what we let our anger do. If anger is the righteous motivation towards necessary action, and the idea of redress, or regaining balance is the goal of action, then anger can be harnessed to work towards peace.

One thing I’ve learned is that supressing my own emotions does not engender peace, within myself, nor lead to sustainable peace in relationships. Anger can be very healthy and necessary, the natural recognition of wrongs, or dishonourable behaviour. I may mostly be a pacifist, but I do also think there are a small subset of people who need their arses kicking. Possibly literally. I’d rather work with reason, with solid arguments and persuasion than with violence, but when you’re dealing with the smug and self righteous, too locked into their own self serving world views to know what good behaviour looks like, the stick to posterior option gets tempting. Not that I have, but ye gods its good therapy thinking about it once in a while.

Today I have the angry hat on. I’m looking at issues I don’t think I can make peace with, but justice is not unimaginable. I can’t yet envisage where I will be once justice has been achieved, but if the theory is right, peace may indeed follow. Peace in my heart, in my soul. Not forgiveness for wrongs done, but the space to forget and move on. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we get there. And I firmly believe I’m going to get there.

I’ve blogged before about re-enchantment and reclaiming magic. All of the positive thinking I can muster at the moment is focused on justice, on fairness, on the truth making itself known and dishonour meeting the rewards it deserves. I am relearning how to hope and how to believe. Angry Druid is a far more effective creature than the defeated one, and right now I think Angry Druid is the persona most able to ultimately serve the calling to peace.

Rioting, prisons and justice

In the aftermath of the UK riots, we’re hearing that about three quarters of the arrested rioters and looters have already been in trouble with the police before. At the moment, the solution of preference is to slap longer sentences on people. But, if these are people who have already been through the prison system, there’s little reason to think another stint inside will change their ways.

A lot comes down to how you understand justice, and what you believe prison is for. If prison exists as punishment only, then it has some function as a deterrent. All the evidence makes clear that deterrents, even extreme ones like the death penalty, flogging, cutting off body parts, do not cause crime to cease. We’ve been locking people up for a long time now, and they still go out and re-offend.

I think to understand why punishment isn’t effective as a deterrent you have to consider why people commit crimes in the first place. On one hand we may have crimes of desperation – theft and violence occurring because people feel (rightly or wrongly) that there are no other alternatives. This feeling of no alternatives will not be challenged by additional risk of punishment. Alternatively, there is an idea I first encountered through Brendan Myers talking about attitudes amongst native Canadians. Crime can be perceived as a breakdown of relationship. Thus the criminal may feel that there are entitled to use and abuse – a might is right attitude for example would lead to this. They may consider themselves superior to others so that they imagine the normal rules are not, or should not be applied to them. They may consider their victims to be inferior, inhuman, irrelevant such that the crime against them does not matter or is justified. This would be true of all hate crime. All of these reasons go with a mindset that will not expect to be caught, and if caught, will not expect to be seriously punished, and if punished, will not necessarily give up the beliefs that underpin the criminal behaviour.

If people commit crime through desperation, social isolation, hopelessness, anger or poverty, punishment won’t fix that. If people do it because they have no respect for anything, locking them up will just reinforce their ideas. And on the other side, putting someone in prison gives nothing back to the victims, there is no redressing of wrongs.

I’m a big believer in getting offenders who have committed smaller offences to do community work that will help them re-engage. This is part of my Druidry, in which justice is a very important idea. Not just any old job that occurs to the powers that be either, but something that will affect them. Cleaning up their own mess, repairing the damage they have caused where possible. I’m also hugely in favour, where appropriate, of sitting offenders down with  their victims and making them face those people as people. That can be tremendously healing for the victim as well.

There are people who are so sick and antisocial in their behaviour that, for everyone else’s safety, they need taking off the streets. Locking them up for a few months or years and then sending them back out won’t fix anything longer term. Prison has to be about re-education. Many prisoners have already fallen through the cracks and have major literacy and maths issues (I know, I have friends who teach in prisons). Many have mental health issues, drug addictions and other problems that need fixing if they are to escape from crime. There is also the issue of violence as learned behaviour. In Strathclyde, I gather, police are tackling violent crime as though it was a contagious disease, taking the stance that people who are normalised to it are more likely to perpetrate it. This makes a lot of sense to me. It means not only tackling gang violence on the streets, but looking at where our young humans learn that bullying pays, violence is fine and he who shouts the loudest and punches the hardest gets to rule the roost. And where do they learn this? At home, all too often.

Domestic abuse is widespread. Children who grow up exposed to not just violence, but disrespect, verbal abuse, emotional, and psychological abuse learn to abuse, and to accept certain kinds of behaviours as normal in their peers and future partners as well. I’m not saying ‘blame the parents’ here either, because abusers do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of cultures and histories, attitudes to women, belief about might and right, and the pernicious belief that if you can claim provocation, violence is ok.

If we want justice, and if we want to tackle criminal behaviour, then locking up offenders is not going to get us either. It is not a solution, just a reaction. It doesn’t prevent crime. If we want to not have rioting and looting, if we want to not have violent gang cultures, then we need to start by looking at the context in which these things happen. I feel very strongly that we need to start paying serious attention to both the direct, and the knock on effects of domestic abuse. Violence begins in the home, all too frequently. If we want to deal with it, we have to figure out how to tackle it there as well.