#blogjune

Non Violent Direct Action. BlogJune 2020/7

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IT’S UNFAIR AND WE NEED TO FIX IT


COVID-19 has magnified cracks and inequities in how we share what we have.

Disproportionate numbers of black people are dying world-wide from the disease. In Australia thousands of people already unemployed are finally able to afford food and shelter now that the government has matched their payment to the payment provided to people who are newly-unemployed because of the pandemic.

Just two examples out of so many.

Non-white people already knew about the inequities.

I think white people already knew too. Rather than debating whether we did, or didn’t know before, we clearly do know now.

COVID-19 has hit hard and discriminately because we live in an unfair system. People die when there is no Personal Protective Equipment not because we are without resources to plan, manufacture or distribute this; it is because we live in countries that allow and encourage obscene and uneven distribution of resources. Direct consequences of active choices.

The pandemic was the catalyst to so many deaths, but as can be seen by the differing death rates in different countries, a large proportion of deaths are the result of political systems that accept unfair decisions about resource allocation.

I’M A WHITE WOMAN. WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE THINGS BETTER?

In Australia I benefit through nothing I have done except be born in a family that is treated differently to other families by the education, health, social and employment systems. Others are penalised for exactly the same reason.

What do we do? How can white people be allies and listen well to non-white voices without forcing them to do the work to educate us?

Listening. Amplifying voices. Not speaking on behalf of, or over non-white voices – and not speaking up when there is a non-white person who could do the job. Admitting our comfort is at the expense of others’ discomfort. Leaning into discomfort, not expecting praise for learning to be better at giving space and listening. Donate to organisations like the Aboriginal Legal Service.

I am framing this as “who gets material stuff is unfair”, but acknowledge that it is not so simple or surface. As a white woman I have a very different experience about how I feel about my personal safety at any minute, what kinds of checks I am doing to monitor my tone and how I am appearing to others when I go outside my home.

I have very different expectations about which institutions and people working in them I can trust to help, and which I need to avoid due to a history of pain and damage to people like me. I have a difference in how often I will be minding my business and feeling OK about the world, only to have that challenged by intentional or unintentional reminders of being treated differently due to my family.

TAKING ACTION THROUGH CIVIL PROTEST

In Western Australia The Black Lives Matter March takes place in Hyde Park at midday on Saturday 13 June.

Changing the world to a fairer, more equitable, one for everyone is not just a Saturday afternoon, or even a single weekend, job. White people need to give things up. We may, and should, come out with less so everyone can have more.

Listening to non-white voices, finding out what help is needed, not doing what we think is better without first checking is a key way. Marching at the back in protests. Speaking out, even though we know we may sound hypocritical and tokenistic, and if we are accused of this changing how we do it so we do it better next time.

This is a long road and everyone who wants to help will do it differently. For me, I can see that civil action and protest will continue to be part of the way I want to make a difference.

Taking part in School Strike for Climate and Extinction Rebellion direct actions at the end of last year I was reintroduced to resources and concepts around Non Violent Direct Action. Part of the process involves working out what you personally do and do not consider to be violent, how far you would personally go in acts of non-violent disobedience and learning techniques for de-escalation, conflict resolution, restorative action and keeping yourself and others physically safe.

If you are thinking about protest and civil action being part of how you address inequity, then you may be interested in following up resources around NVDA on Nicola Paris’ CounterAct site, or Non Violent Direct Action resources at the Commons Social Change Library

Gargoyle, almond, chickens, egg, grapevine. BlogJune 2020/5

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Part of the new chookyard.

No more bending for eggs.

Other people adopted pandemic puppies or pandemic kittens, but I finally accepted that the arrangement I had for my chooks for 20 years was really not so clever, even though it sounded really, really ingenious. I held on to the theory of it way longer than I should have.

With a bit of help I moved the chooks and had their enclosure rebuilt using mostly materials I already had.

SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA…

The old enclosure was on a circular vege garden with a 2 metre radius. One side of the enclosure had a curve following the outer rim of the garden, with the other two sides straight, covering a 1/3 segment of the circle.

The idea was that the chooks dug and poo-ed in their enclosure, then after two months I rotated the whole enclosure around to the next third of the circular garden. The chooks would eat down the plants that had now gone to seed while I would plant the next lot of plants where they had just prepared the bed.

EXCEPT….

I like to let my chooks roam free. In my small garden, that meant they would eat down my newly-planted veges, jump into the blueberries and eat the new fruit, scratch up the basil in the container gardens…or I would have to leave them behind wire on sunny days when they could be running and climbing.

SO…

The new enclosure uses the curved frame from the old one on top of a limestone wall and lets the chooks roam under the almonds and feijoas…. but also has a hatch mechanism so that during the day I can let them out to fossick down three sides of my house. Each side is about a metre from the very high fence -line, with a mulberry courtyard and a lemon-tree courtyard along the way.

I already had the guinea pig cage to shelter them in the yard, but by putting it on top with an access hole in the floor, and adding a front-facing door, I can now collect the eggs without bending down.

Quite a bit of grain-throwing and greens-shaking at the top of the ladder was needed for a couple of days before the chooks would use the new area.

Not running on empty. BlogJune 2020/3

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I last bought petrol for my car on 15 March, 80 days ago… and the fuel tank is nowhere near empty.

The major journey was an hour round-trip to Perth to recharge the battery after it went flat through lack of use.

Also a metaphor. I am one of those people who are getting more sleep, nutrition, exercise and peace in lockdown.

It is hard to identify any more with having been so driven.

BlogJune 2020 – an image a day. Join in. List here.

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STEPPING IN TO BLOGJUNE…

For the last 10 years a group of mainly Australian library bloggers have tried to blog more frequently each June, originally aiming for one post per day.

This year is an odd one.

Understatement.

I am not sure I feel articulate right now. Or even what I actually feel or think, if I could articulate it.

Although writing can help work those things out, I am saving that for my journal.

JOIN IN

Here, however, I aim to add one image each day in June, with or without words.

Please join me on your blog if you would like, and use the hashtag #blogjune for your posts. There is a mob of folk on Twitter who track the hashtag each year, so you may want to automate posting there.

A JOIN-IN FORM AND A LIST OF PLAYERS

If you want to let others know you are playing, and see who else has joined in, please use the form embedded below. Under this is the Google sheet showing participating blogs.

If someone wants to create an file of RSS feeds for people to add to a reader, or create a Twitter list or tweetbot, or otherwise use the data to share, please feel free – and I am presuming anyone who adds their blog URL to the list is OK with this.

Happy Blogjuning! (should that have an “e”?)

JOIN IN FORM

Navigate directly to the BlogJune 2020 Join-In Form

LIST OF PLAYERS

Navigate directly to the BlogJune 2020 List of Players

(If anyone wants to share how to make this wider, please do. I have tried changing the iframe width to 800, and to 100%, but it does not change)

Eat my garden 14. Passionfruit and big lemon tree. Blogjune 2019/30

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This is the most unlikely corner of the garden. The little courtyard is just one metre from the fence, and then the back of the house is a metre from the other fence.

For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to plant a full-sized lemon in the corner. For some other, equally bonkers, reason the lemon loved the spot and would grow to enormous proportions if allowed.

Unfortunately, the lemons on the rooftop clog the gutters in winter if allowed, so I am constantly apologising the to the poor thing and cutting it back. It seems pretty happy about it all, considering.

The passionfruit is actually growing on the neighbour’s property. I have gone through at least 10 passionfruit vines trying to grow them in our yard, but THIS one has decided that the spot-with-no-sun is where it will fruit. If we beat the rats, and we usually do, we manage to nab the fruit for ourselves.

Radical kindness and corruption. Blogjune 2019/29.

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The Carnegie UK Trust is forefront of research into kindness and how it strengthens community. It is worth spending a couple of hours reading their research reports from the last two years that are themed around kindness.

Their output has developed from not even knowing what to call this “everyday help” phenomena , through quantitive studies about where people in the UK find kindness (**spoiler – public libraries came out top**), to asking some hairy questions about how transparency and good governance in public policy may work against kindness.

Table from p.21 of Wallace, J., & Thurman, B. (2018). Quantifying kindness, public engagement and place: Retrieved from Carnegie Trust UK website: https://d1ssu070pg2v9i.cloudfront.net/pex/carnegie_uk_trust/2018/11/09144230/Quantifying-Kindness-Data-Booklet1.pdf

It is this last idea, of kindness vs. transparency and fairness, that fascinates me as I read yet another news report about a political grub who arbitrarily used his ministerial position to not follow due process, enriching a particular set of people.

From my reading in the last year, I have drawn a few conclusions about kindness. Kindness must be voluntary and discretionary. It involves an act of help of some sort. There needs to be a beneficiary and (my contention is) when the benefactor performs the act, they must aim for a positive outcome and more benefit to the beneficiary than to themselves.

At the core, though, along with all those features there needs to be a simple test, which is “is this a good thing?” If it is not good, then it is not kindness, it is something else. The test may be simple, but actually knowing what “good” is, and how one tells if this act is good, working out “good for whom?” seems ridiculously complex to the point of impossibility.

Now, if we look at the case of Barnaby Grub and the Lucrative Concessions, many of these elements are there. Yes, he voluntarily used his discretion to benefit a set of beneficiaries. It is possible that with political motivation and back scratching involved, there was ultimately greater benefit to Minister Grub than to the individuals helped….but it quacks a lot like the kindness duck.

Researchers have used the term “service nepotism” to describe how some ethnic groups in a market (in this case a group less well-off than others) favour people socially similar to them, challenging ideas of egalitarianism and competition in the marketplace.

In the latest Carnegie publication on kindness, which was released along with the movie embedded below, they discuss the idea of “radical kindness”. Within organisations, there may be people who choose to bend or break rules in order to do good, increase social cohesion and help others. It’s key to remember that kindness is something done by individuals, unobliged. Radical kindness comes in when there is systematic acknowledgement across the organisation that some people’s needs are greater due to structural disadvantage… and there is a social environment and norms where unobligated acts of doing good by individuals are more frequent, to try to level out this inequity. This goes a little way to guiding my “is this a good thing?” test.

The idea is still nascent, but I think all of the examples described above rely on there being a background social environment of unfairness. Of inequity. Of some having more than others. With “radical kindness”, the outcome of the act would be fairer redistribution. With political trough-feeding, inequity would increase.

This links kindness very much to power. Anyone who has opportunity to be kind will have more power in that situation than the potential beneficiary. A key element of kindness, discretion, means there always needs to be a choice by the benefactor to act or not act.

Does this mean that the largest acts of kindness will be found in the most unequal societies? That actually we should aim for a world with less opportunity for kindness? While kindness will always be a good thing (or else it is not kindness, it is something else), possibly finding “more kindness” also says something about the background power relations as well as the level of social cohesion??

I don’t have answers, but I am loving the journey.

Here’s the movie that goes with the latest Carnegie report, outlining ideas arising from the last year of the Kindness Innovation Network across Scotland. Kindness at the University of Glasgow library is mentioned at 1:46.

CarnegieUKTrust. (2019). The Practice of Kindness. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP6G3y7EVJ8&feature=youtu.be

Eat my garden 13. Lavender. Blogjune 2019/28

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Lots of lavender down the driveway. At first I would carefully pick the flowers each year and dry them before giving the bushes a hard pruning back so the car could get past.

Now, we have had so much lavender that it is just binned.

One of the kids tried making a lavender syrup for ice-cream a couple of years ago. It was kind of successful, but not something we repeated.