Transcendental Business

oil painting, Rightness, by the author

In business school there is little ambiguity as to the mission, money... profits. In art school it's a little different. The one I went to required focus, after a year of fundamentals, on one of several options: Advertising, Illustration, Industrial Design (all, you'll note, with the same point as business school) or Fine Art. Within the Fine Arts, by year three, one selected a major: painting, sculpture or printmaking. Of course everyone knew that “fine art” was a commodity, but it was considered crass to dwell too much on that area. So what, if not money, was the point? Well the word transcendental might have come up, if not that particular word then a synonym. Before we go further it should be pointed out that it has nothing to do with dental work. I don't know how dental got in there.

We looked to figures like Van Gogh, wholly taken up by painting despite poverty, ridicule and scorn, little recognition beyond their circles of starving artists, a few patrons maybe. It's not about money we said, and meant it. But what did we mean? I mean, what was it we were after if it wasn't money? Beauty? Truth? Authenticity? Ok, but what do those words mean? They were bandied about in the art mags and theoretical writings and we thought we knew what they meant just by using them. But the question remains, what do they mean? Why was art-making special and beyond commerce?

Of course the artists we admired now have respect. People flock to the museums to see their work. There are adoring biographies, imitators, framed reproductions, astronomical auction prices... so there is definitely a material presence in the shadow of the great men (mostly) just as the great religious figures attracted a following that didn't necessarily get the message. Yes, ego is everywhere, crap and corruption, but that message, again, what is it?

We identify things in the world, sub-sets say of the actually indivisible whole, ie, atoms, photons, waterfalls, buildings, galaxies and death, or our ideas of that mystery. Even our own thoughts and emotions… and here we have an insight, that if we are aware of our thoughts and emotions, who or what is aware? There must be something beyond the thoughts/emotions that is aware of them and that something is awareness itself, what YOU (or I - we) actually boil down to. I venture that here is the message, that what, outside of ego, moves art makers is the tantalizing glimpse of awareness that pulls them away from commerce toward the world that can only be experienced, in its deepest aspects, through awareness, presence as the Buddhists would have it. Intuition was another word we used to try to get at this. Catherine Fox, in a review of this writer's paintings, wrote, “For Ferguson, art-making is less a career than a yoga practice - a vehicle to get him to a state of consciousness.”

So why would we be interested in “consciousness” when there are material riches out there just waiting for us to get our hands on 'em. They promise us feelings of superiority, invulnerability, and pleasures of palette and flesh. Well some see through these appeals to ego and others, like the Buddha himself it is said, achieve the seduction of “success” and find it hollow. Consider the billionaires who continue to obsessively amass wealth even when what they have would take multiple life times to spend.

The attraction of “consciousness” is that it gives us access, it is a portal to the joy and profundity of being. It is how we experience the incredibly beautiful and complex phenomenon of existence and feel our inexplicable interconnection, unity, with it... it is us, we are it... and this transitory, material world is a wave swelling up out of the sea, rolling the peppled shore and returning once again to the deep.

My Country 'tis of Thee

The phenomenon of elderly people fixed with rapt and adoring attention on The Lawrence Welk Show used to totally baffle me. Everything about it seemed transparently fake - fake smiles, fake dialogue, fake music. The bubbles might have been real. It was like the glaring opposite of hip. But hip can be fake too, more like the opposite of authentic, or maybe anti-real. It’s not much of a leap from Lawrence Welk to Ronald Reagan.

My sister dragged me to a church dinner program once while visiting her in California. It was like being in the Lawrence Welk audience; corny and lame humor with everyone laughing politely as if what was said symbolized humor and the laughter symbolized rather than was actual amusement. Sort of like a high end car can represent status rather than a good car. I thought, these are the kind of folks who believe Ronald Reagan was heroic and actually voted for the guy, later approving naming airports and freeways after him, and today going on about how they miss him – if only he were around, the country’d shape up fast. I almost said “sincerely” voted for the guy. I suppose if you believe something, however deluded, you are “sincere” when you act out of those convictions. This is what the 60s intuitively rejected as some of us began to shake off our slumber. But Welk fans were there too so it was only a segment of the population who embraced criticality. And, unfortunately, it’s not a generational thing. We can’t expect superficiality to fade with the passage of time for it seems to dwell among us and to replenish itself.

I’m not sure how large the Lawrence Welk audience was. Nixon liked to pretend they were the “silent majority”. The election of he and Reagan, and Bush for that matter (both of’em), suggests he wasn’t far wrong. In any event, they represent a huge problem for any politician with a progressive agenda. They constitute a large body of theoretically easily manipulable, and easily alienated voters. All bolstered of course by a compliant, hell, complicit media.

A strange incongruity to the picture I’m painting here is that polls show a majority of the population supports diplomacy over war, single-payer healthcare over insurance company tyranny, environmental health over corporate profits. Yet the corporate stranglehold on our political system doesn’t allow candidates with these priorities to flourish. Several factors come into play: candidates need contributions to run their campaigns; and short-term shifts in attitudes can be manipulated by mis-information efforts – witness the recent defeat of GMO labeling initiatives in California and Washington. Polls showed the labeling campaign favored until Big Money turned it around. There’s also the political strategy of saying what your pollsters determine your audience wants to hear. And the establishment pressure on elected officials to do their bidding and to mask it, in patriotic rhetoric or whatever works this week.

One of the things that seems to work over and over is to associate some virtue, flag or Jesus for example, with the desired candidate or platform. Or to the negative, distracting voters with actually irrelevant, to them, but hot-wire issues like gay marriage or abortion, getting them to unknowingly vote against their own real economic and personal liberty interests.

During Bush the Younger’s administration polls showed that people believed W embraced certain values - environmental concern, violence only as last resort, standing up for the little guy etc; values that he quite obviously did not actually give two toots for.

Given this unstable demographic there is always the danger that some master manipulator will come along who can exploit it and sweep us all, once again, into the furnace of world-wide war – this time with the “firepower” to not come out of it. There is a hope, at least as likely (?) that some gifted individual might find the language to touch the authentic awareness that lies at the heart of every person not a sociopath, an enlightened person of integrity who recognizes the necessity, if we are to survive, for a shift in consciousness. Count on the sociopaths to go after this person, should they appear, offering riches and power that cannot be declined, or, turning to the Mafia creed that if you can’t buy someone, you can murder them. Meanwhile the sociopaths seem to be running things and ordinary citizens can lay the ground for such a “revolution”, call it Democracy, by resisting pathology and asserting for an environmentally sustainable, peace and justice, alternative path.

Antiestablishmentarianism

In electoral politics, the establishment point of view attracts hefty campaign contributions from the, well, establishment. Conversely, and obviously, anti-establishment points of view do not. Establishment comes in suit and ty, as if to declare the area off-limits to the imagination, though politicians of the female variety, apparently for reasons of their traditional, established, status as decorative objects, are granted some leeway here, a dab of color there. Otherwise, no suit and ty? No credibility - closed eyes/ears/minds will greet citizens testifying before a congressional committee without the required garb, except perhaps when an actor dressed as plumber is trotted out to convince the working class to vote against their own interests.

Advocates of the established stance are practiced in their capacity for denial, competitive with any alcoholic. There is an ease with which factual material can be cherry-picked and basic logic obliviously ignored, competitive with the most fundamental of religious adherents. As in this latter arena, naivete is not always the full explanation. Corruption and cynicism can come into the unsavory play.

Instances of establishment positions would be a zealous pro-nuclear backing (whether power or weapons), regardless of Chernobyl, 3-Mile Island, Fukushima and the routine radiation releases involved, and the unimaginably long term nuclear waste that must be absolutely isolated. Not to mention also, the Armageddon hanging over us, to this day, from hair-trigger, launch-on-warning nukes at bases in the U.S. and Russia. Nuclear armed submarines lurk in our oceans, any one of which could vaporize millions of world citizens. Survivors would suffer the fatal effects of the nuclear winter such an event would almost certainly trigger. The screening process for crew members is mistake-proof, right? Right, just as mistakes can’t be made at nuclear power plants, and security is impeccable (unless you read readiness test-results). The proliferation to ever more nations of the nightmare of nuclear technology, abetted by the U.S./Russian refusal to honor NPT (Non-proliferation Treaty) obligations, further substantiates this critique.

Another bullet point in this tirade would be ideological calls for austerity that emphasize cuts to social spending but rationalize against increased taxes on the 1%. The social security trust fund is a separate tax, set aside for the protection of citizens in their waning years, meager to be sure. But the establishment has borrowed this money, interest-free, spending it mostly on weaponry and war, limos and pork. Instead of treating this loan as sacred the powers that be entertain ways to reduce or eliminate the debt by extending the retirement age, reducing monthly stipends, privatizing the whole thing… all the while bailing out imprudent, hell, criminal! Wall Street banks and reducing taxes on the rich. When mafia-controlled unions make off with the pension fund we know what to call it – theft. When the gummint does it, a euphemism comes in to obscure what's going on - austerity.

Climate change is another issue that can only be examined through the filter of campaign contributors and media hacks like Rush Limbo. I got an email recently that put this rather succinctly: If you consulted multiple doctors on a health issue and 98% of them recommended a certain course of action would you go with the 2% or the 98%?

Storm trooper establishment mouthpieces attack any attempt in the congress or executive to take measures which benefit the general population or address pressing issues which infringe on “business interests”. Hysterical cries of, “socialism!”, “communism” or “class warfare”, arise knee-jerk fashion at any such sign, words that have been carefully cultivated for their utility in demonizing ideas and persons. The intent is not to merely prevent “socialist” legislation but to roll back any measures already passed, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal, campaign finance reform or the clean air and water acts. Ideology and denial are effective tools with which to clobber those who attempt to call for a change of course as we drift toward the Niagara Falls waiting downstream, along the river of business-as-usual.

The struggle, the polarization, at root, is between those who see the social world populated by separate individuals ruthlessly competing for limited resources and those who relate more to the lines of Mick Jagger’s song from the album Steel Wheels… “We’re in the same boat, on the same sea... in the same breeze.”

Ways & Means

oil painting by author: "White Cap" (detail)

What is the best way to arrest our skid toward extinction? How to live an ethical life? How do we advance “spiritually”? How do we create the shift necessary to avoid nuclear war, war in general, alleviate poverty, eliminate pollution and unsustainable practices? I have always been suspicious of one-sentence or one-word answers to big questions but Tolle’s take on these questions overcomes my skepticism as it embodies the beauty of simplicity and a strategy to address the full range of critical issues that plague the human family. As with all simple answers elaboration is required.

Tolle's statement can begin that elaboration, “...there are many questions but only one answer...”, presence. How do I respond to my perception that the momentum of history is leading us toward extinction? That the quest for profits, power and privilege, or mere survival, is devouring the life system? That the most successful in that quest use their considerable influence to insure that no alternative way of organizing ourselves gets a fair hearing, that their preferred mode undergoes no serious questioning? This is accomplished via their ownership of media and disproportionate impact on the political system and other institutional life.

We can use our minds to create strategies to propagate alternatives, we might do that. The traditional resistence to the oppressor, cited even in the bible, in one of its many moods, “When the spirit of the ruler moves against thee, yield not.” But what we are inspired to do out of presence is not predictable which is why Tolle doesn’t advocate specific actions like blocking logging operations, whaling ships, war materials and demonstrations. Get present, then, connected to the self-evident intelligence out of which flows evolution, you’ll know what to do. It could be those actions, it could be others, but it is known only through stillness.

On some level reality can be conceived as a frequency array. Human consciousness, or unconsciousness, can be seen as part of this array, anger vibrating at a different frequency than affection, judgment different from acceptance… and presence, the state of non-thinking awareness, is a frequency we can call joy or peace. An agitated angry self-righteous demand for peace is little different, frequency-wise, than a similar demand for war. The frequency array is shifted by mere presence and one’s contribution to that is the ultimate form of activism. Presence is the state we enter when obsessive thinking is stilled. That is attained by simply noticing the chatter, bringing it into consciousness where it dissolves, transforms into presence.

Now in presence, in the stillness of being, there eventually comes an impulse, an enthusiasm to act and that is the answer to the question, what to do.

Happy Holy Day

Reading Richard Dawkins's memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, which I'm finding a bit boring, I'm led to question, how much less interesting would an autobiography by a non-celebrity be, like the one i'm working on for example. Well, there may be some redeeming quality, say if it were very well written, or something that caught the imagination of the reader, expressing the zeitgeist or whatever... but I've always seen it as something of interest only to myself and, maybe(!), my daughter. My interest quickens whenever Dawkins deals with the evolution of his thinking that eventuated in his book, The God Delusion (reviewed on my blog and the DEW, May 2011). So I took a break from the book to go to youtube to see some of his debates.

In a documentary titled, The Enemies of Reason, Dawkins interviewed, or maybe ambushed is more accurate, certain high-profile “spiritual” teachers, astrologers, tarot readers etc; I say ambush because he seems to have stopped them in a hallway or garden enroute to somewhere else. They stand there, Dawkins peppering the victim with questions, the camera person wandering back and forth between the debaters and sparks not quite flying but evident in the tense and rapid repartee.

Of the clips I looked at most victims were struggling mightily if ineffectively to hang onto their “faith”, masking the indefensible with theological jargon. Only those who wish to be deceived are fooled by this tactic though apparently the numbers are pretty high who so wish. Usually Dawkins' questions are quite interesting while the answers he gets are nearly unbearable obfuscation, reducing usually to “faith” or “personal experience”.

Dawkins however came upon a worthy opponent when he waylaid Deepak Chopra. I did not know Deepak was an MD. I once saw a PBS documentary of one of his talks to a business group. I thought it was quite clever of him to counsel that audience to “go to the wordless space and envision your desire.” Clever because when you get to the wordless space, as I understand it, and I'm sure how Deepak understands it, you have no desire. You are only in wondrous awe of the interconnectedness of all things. Business people of course, deeply involved in an enterprise where profit is the central motivation, would expect this “wordless space” to be a sort of magical process for getting one-up on the competition. That whole world would be subverted were they to actually get there and realize that other values arise... beauty, harmony, reverence, peace.

Apparently Chopra's medical practice combines traditional medicine with “new age” notions of wholistic health. Dawkins probed this area, thinking of it as non-scientific and therefore vulnerable, actually using the word “mumbo-jumbo”. Deepak quite persuasively refuted the idea, saying we use the word “mumbo-jumbo” when we don't understand something and “science” when we do, obviously the one being respectable and the other not. So Deepak itemized a list of complaints about traditional medicine, chief among which is the “fact” that going to it for treatment is fraught with serious risk, citing statistics that, if true, would justify any reluctance you may have to go to your doctor.

As impressive as the doc was I have to say his references to treating the whole person seemed vague. What was impressive was his ability to spar on an equal footing with Dawkins and his skill at articulating the “spiritual” realm, admitting readily that 80% of “new age” stuff is superstition. They didn't actually seem that far apart, Deepak's weakness being a vagueness on some topics, Dawkins' being a defense of science bordering on the dogmatic. Chopra apparently used the word “quantum” from physics in some of his writings, metaphorically, but Dawkins thought this was an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of science for something that was clearly unscientific. Deepak addressed all charges without defensiveness, with great seriousness and eruditon (maybe only apparent, who knows, not me) and with some humor.

 If anyone in this exchange was defensive it was Dawkins. He is right to be concerned about the carnage that religion has wrought. He substantiates in his writing and videography, his claim that science can provide an experience of wonder and awe. He fails, however, to acknowledge that a parallel experience can be had via poetry, mythology or “religion”. Words point at the ineffable and despite the charletons of literal religion and the occult, and their deluded followers, metaphor is as reliable a portal to this realm as science. In fact, being impressed by such things as the immensity of space/time, macro and micro, may actually be an inferior experience to the “mystical” sensing of interconnection. Or it may be that these words are actually pointing to the same thing. As does this seasonal(?) collection of my songs, Holy Whole http://thinkspeak.bandcamp.com

Life is but a Dream?

I looked over and the strange fact that Pamela Kheto was driving seemed perfectly normal, even though my sole contact with her in the last ten years was a brief meeting in a parking lot where she tried to recruit me for some kind of power-grab at her church. When I looked to the front I saw we were on rough terrain. I felt the bottom scraping on large boulders and finally hitting something huge that threatened to completely ty us up, the edge of a cliff actually, but our momentum carried us up and over, teetering on the edge a moment then flipping over, dropping about 20 feet. I was thrown out of the convertible and I tried to keep tabs on the car, leery of it rolling over me. It took a weird bounce and came right for me but since it was a convertible, as it rolled over I was able to avoid injury by tucking into the seating compartment. But all that excitement woke me up. I lay there breathing, heart pounding, wondering, WTF? Are dreams parallel realities or just random happenings that we attempt to make sense of by tying disparate fragments together into a story as best we can?

I’ve always been influenced by whomever I’m reading, in terms of writing style. Like Chomsky for political writing. In high school when I discovered Sherlock Holmes I would write friends, usually friends I was hoping to make girl friends, in the style of that early detective story writer. Lately I’ve stumbled upon David Sedaris. Anyone familiar will probably notice him lurking in this writing. Back to my dream: Mulling this stuff over I got up and did my five minute yoga routine, coordinating movement with breathing, keeping my attention on breathing or rather the moment in time I'm standing in... except when I dart off to add something to my to-do list, then trying to remember where I left off, doing five of each movement but losing count and settling for however many, lying there at the end wondering whether to get back in bed or lay here and meditate... falling asleep, waking, random stuff going through my mind as if they were life or death issues, catching myself, letting them dissolve, being once again, transforming that energy into presence, determined to not drift off, realizing I'm thinking about that meeting thursday, some stuff to add to the agenda... waking, letting it dissolve again... focus, focus... um, that line in my latest song, it has the word little in two consecutive verses, need to change that... wait a minute! Let it dissolve, back to now.

So I put on the ear buds, hook up Nugget Q. Underfoot the dog and head down the street, making for the cemetery, a thirty minute walk to get rid of that extra five or fifteen pounds or at least maintain a holding action, and keep the old bod in minimal shape. Half a block and I notice the song I’m playing is 2/3 through and I haven’t even been aware of it. So now I attend. The next song starts and I drift off thinking about random stuff like those dreams. There’s a song again, half way through and I’ve missed the first two verses. I seem to wake up in the middle, vow to focus but mostly only hear beginnings and endings.

What I’m listening to are the songs I’ve been recording. I’m going through more or less chronologically, recording in batches of ten the songs I’ve written since 1969. A bit more than 2/3 through that archiving project. “Album” number 18 coming up. I listen for mistakes or dull passages that need to be tweaked. Sometimes I listen to other artists, like The Swimming Pool Qs but I always come back to mine own… it’s what interests me I tell myself, and if I didn’t listen to them they wouldn’t get heard… I tell myself. I’m using Mac’s bandcamp to record them, usually laying down guitar and vocals to a drum track then adding bass, lead guitar and maybe keyboards. When I load the batches to bandcamp I do a cover, using one of my paintings or drawings, and add lyrics and commentary. My pace is such that I put up an “album” a month and if twenty people check it out that month I feel like I’ve accomplished some sharing behavior, even though I can tell that many only listen to part of a cut, according to the stats available. Can’t begrudge folks, I’m the same way, I can’t sit there and listen to album after album, read all the poetry, novels, see every movie produced, read all the essays of my fellow bloggers. Ya, I do a blog too. You’re reading it.

The blog started out, and so states at the top, with a focus on being and power, power being basically looking at who rules civilization for whose benefit, the 1% we’ve heard so much about, Noam Chomsky, as I said earlier, being the guru here. The being side comes mainly out of the work of Eckhart Tolle. I mean, many folks have nudged me in this direction but no one has provided such clarity on the subject as ol’ Eckhart. The blog readership, like the songs, is miniscule. I think I got 60 readers once when I posted thoughts about Israel that pushed somebody’s buttons, bringing charges of anti-semitism, a definite possibility when dealing with that subject. The more usual readership is 15 to 40, and who knows if they make it through the whole essay? A few listserves is mostly how I promote the blog. I accompany the posts with political cartoons, drawn from my archives or done special for that post. For posts on being I more often use paintings since they generally deal with aesthetic rather than political issues – the aesthetic being the philosophy of beauty and beauty being what one experiences in deep being - if you know what I mean. Turns out the being half is far less than half.

BTW, some citizens of backward countries like, say France, think we in the U.S. don't understand hardship. I've got this tankless water heater I installed for environmental reasons and it worked great for awhile, lowered my gas bill noticeably. Just as the warranty expired it gave out. I invited the Georgian “expert” on tankless water heaters over and after 3-4 hours he threw up his hands and disappeared. It was a loss for him because I never got an invoice and he lost cell phone minutes talking to the engineers at the manufacturing plant – ya, made in USA!

So anyway, now when I’m ready to shower I turn off the in-line to the unit, turn on the shower (no water of course since the input is off), put on my robe cuz I have to walk through my screen porch to get to the unit, go there, turn on the input, light the unit (one in three times it lights itself) and head for the shower where I have a bucket to catch the water. It's usually hot by the time I get there so I put the bucket aside (to be used for toilet flushing later) and do the shower. I wet down, turn it off and lather up. When I turn on the water to rinse there's no way of knowing if the unit fires up so chances are the only hot water I have is in the pipe between shower and unit so, a quick rinse is what I get. Well, it saves water don't it, as the English say. And they, along with those Frogs, probably also say that we in the states don't suffer but i've just disproved that, didn't I.

Photo by/of Tom Ferguson

Three Books: Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions and Arundhati Roy's War Talk

I join these three books because of their common unveiling of who-rules-for-whose-benefit, across cultures and time. Parenti shows an ancient example, the destruction of early Roman Democracy by oligarchic forces. Chomsky illustrates the continuation of plutocracy, or elite rule, in our time, despite and in opposition to the advances of Democracy. Roy provides confirmation that this struggle is international, in this case India.

It was news to me that democracy (a very limited form to be sure) was operant in early Rome. Nor did I know it was demolished when Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Parenti portrays him as a reformer, limited but still siding with the common people on many issues and being assassinated for his trouble. The prime consequence of the assassination was a civil war that saw the end of democracy for hundreds of years. Democracy had long struggled to supplant monarchy, making an overt return politically unwise. The rulers after Caesar, kings in all but name, took on the title Emperor, coopting the prestige of Caesar by taking his name and ruling Rome, quite undemocratically, for hundreds of years. So today, the Italian media billionaire Bertolucci labors to undo whatever democratic gains he can, yearning I suppose for the good ol' days when his class ruled without challenge.

Rome's very limited democracy was hoarded by a ruling class which may have squabbled among its various factions but definitely excluded what they would have called the “rabble”, the common people, ordinary workers, women and slaves. The financial manipulators of the time were fond of a scheme where they would lure less advantaged “citizens” into great debt such that, by law, they could then enslave them. On the other end of this game was the freeing of slaves, also by law, but used primarily to unburden slaveholders of obligations to feed and house those whose working lives were over, due to age or infirmity. The primary concern of this ruling class was to maintain and expand their privileged lifestyles. They objected to, and assassinated, Caesar, claiming that he was ambitious of destroying democracy. Their true motives were as obvious as were those of George Bush as he claimed to be spreading democracy. There were few objections to tyranny when their class privileges were not threatened.

Dissidents in Rome faced a pretty brutal and lethal response from the self-appointed “authorities”. In the U.S. today, consequences for dissent are relatively benign, depending on how far you're willing to push it. Just standing out on the corner with a sign denouncing drone warfare, nothing's likely to happen beyond the occasional middle finger from passing rightwingers and you might be infiltrated by taxpayer-funded, Constitution-defying spies. Occupy a public space and you face pepper spray and a weekend in jail. Whistle-blowers like Bradley Manning, Snowden and Assange start to feel the effects of riling the beast that pretends to worship freedom. It's good to keep in mind that this situation where citizens are relatively free to dissent is a hard-fought legacy of activists who labored in difficult and dangerous times, advancing democracy inch by inch.

In India, the world's largest Democracy seems firmly in the same hands, or worse. Criticizing the high court can get you jail time, as it did Arundhati Roy. She'd probably still be there if not for her celebrity as a best-selling novelist. According to Roy, leading Indian politicians are, “...either members or admirers of a right-wing, ultra-nationalist Hindu guild which has openly admired Hitler and his methods.” These are the overseers of India's nuclear weapons. Arch-enemy Pakistan seems no wiser but also blusterous possessors of nukes. And into this tinder-box the U.S, sends incendiary drones as if to assert that we of the west too have learned nothing from the devastating violence of the twentieth century and its pandora's box of weapons of mass destruction.

As Eckhart Tolle has said about consciousness, “There are many questions but only one answer.” And as Einstein warned many years ago, “With the splitting of the atom everything changed, save our way of thinking. And thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Until we commit fully to non-violent resolution of conflict, with all its implications for justice and environmentally sustainable practice, we sail an accelerating, Armageddonesque trajectory.