The Yin-Yang of Life

The most glorious and uplifting experiences of my life have presented themselves in unfamiliar surroundings. One such memorable experience occurred during the many days that I spent researching the personal archives of Roberto Assagioli in Florence, Italy, at Casa Assagioli. His home is the headquarters of the Istituto di Psicosintesi.

For the rooms of Casa Assagioli radiated an extraordinary energy of peacefulness that I rarely have experienced elsewhere. A space that still radiated such transcendent energy says something profound, so many years after his passing in 1974, about the type of person who once lived and worked there.

Does the experience of inner peace seem out of reach to you? Does the attainment of world peace seem utterly impossible? I suggest that what is important, to make meaning of life and our purpose here on Earth, are not the goals for inner and outer peace, but instead consciously making the effort to take the journey towards them.

Assagioli’s quest to understand the human soul, and how to find inner peace, I can tell you was hard won. Below I will relate a poignant episode in his life that might have terminated the capacity for love and forgiveness in a less developed soul.

Inner peace is not based on material comfort. Rather, it is the experience of serenity despite the person’s material and/or surrounding circumstances. Serenity resides in the soul, and deepens in accordance with one’s capacity for forgiveness and willingness to bestow love and compassion on fellow beings.

Is that not the message in the Christian remembrance of Easter? In the biblical story, despite the persecution that led to the crucifixion of Christ, He died on the Cross with forgiveness in His heart. How consciously do we practice forgiveness toward anyone who has transgressed us?

Forgiving in itself is a journey that can take years of effort. It requires a process of letting go the emotional and spiritual pain sufficiently and be able, eventually, to feel as if a great weight upon one’s heart had lifted, through developing compassion.

This time of year also is the Jewish celebration of Passover, another biblical narrative. The story, again, unfolds from the human experience of persecution, in relating the epic journey called the Exodus, taken by ancient Israelites freed from slavery in Egypt. The remembrance, as in the best intentions of religious rituals, brings to consciousness our more edifying, spiritual qualities as human beings, such as humility, grace, gratitude and honouring one’s cultural ancestors and cultural histories.

The essence of celebrations of any religious faith and spiritual path, whether exoteric or esoteric, is to offer ritualized opportunities to awaken an intentional mind and a loving heart. Awakening, of course, is a choice always available to exercise personally at any moment throughout the year and, again and again, throughout a lifetime.

Personal narratives of courage and compassion offer us remarkable examples as well (as I have mentioned in earlier blog posts), to inspire and fortify us when we feel paralyzed by personal or world troubles.

Let us look at Assagioli’s plight. The Fascists considered Assagioli, a Jewish/Italian psychiatrist and intellectual, to be threatening, because of his anti-war and internationalist views, according to Assagioli’s student and collaborator Piero Ferrucci. In his book What We May Be: Techniques for Psychological and Spiritual Growth through Psychosynthesis (1982), Ferrucci, psychotherapist and author, cites Assagioli’s description about how he coped with imprisonment – indeed, solitary confinement – in order to withstand the Fascists’ efforts to break his spirit:

“I could rebel inwardly and curse; or I could submit passively, vegetating; or I could indulge in the unwholesome pleasure of self-pity and assume the martyr’s role; or I could take the situation in a sporting way and with a sense of humor, considering it as a novel and interesting experience… I could make of it a rest cure or a period of intense thinking… about scientific and philosophical problems; or I could take advantage of the situation to undertake personal psychological training: or, finally, I could make it into a spiritual retreat. I had the clear, pure perception that this was entirely my own affair; that I was free to choose any or several of these attitudes and activities; that this choice would have unavoidable effects which I could foresee and for which I was fully responsible. There was no doubt in my mind about this essential freedom and power and their inherent privileges and responsibilities” [p. 115].

Friends of Assagioli were able to liberate him and his son, Ilario, from the prison in Rome. Both of them subsequently hid in the woods for an extended period, to avoid being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Tragically, the relentless persecution, and the exposure to the elements, eventually took their toll on Ilario, a frail lad, and Roberto Assagioli lost his only child.

What is remarkable, given that heartbreaking loss – and why Assagioli’s example continues to provide enlightenment – is that he never gave up his vision of possible world peace someday. He continued his life’s work as a psycho-therapeutic and spiritual helper to those who came to him for teaching and guidance, and also pursued his writings.

That is why I decided that Assagioli’s life story ought to be mapped in a documentary film, and why I travelled to Italy, and did trips to the United States, to gather extensive preliminary research, confirm several future on-camera interview subjects and get legal permissions, through 2005 and 2006. Up to mid-2008, I made several efforts to get interest from broadcasters and fellow producers, spending many months on the preparation of funding proposals – with no success. Federal cuts to the arts in Canada in 2008, and the global economic downturn, have undermined our documentary industry, as has the increased TV broadcaster focus on commercial profits in programming choices.

The paradox today for many documentary filmmakers like me, who want to write, direct and produce meaningful stories pertinent to our time, is that conventional funding has largely disappeared, while at the same time growing audiences want to see serious documentaries. Therefore, we filmmakers currently are exploring and re-inventing how to finance our work, and also distributing to venues and media platforms beyond television.

So, while forced to figure out how to pay the bills at all in this economy, regardless, I absolutely am not giving up on the further development, and eventual production, of my film on Roberto Assagioli. Indeed, it took four years of persistent fundraising to complete my first film on a culturally important, yet under-recognized, Canadian subject in Soop on Wheels. However, Assagioli’s film story is an international project that requires shooting in Italy, the United States, and England where he travelled frequently in his work.

His story deserves cinematic attention. Moreover, Assagioli’s legacy continues to evolve through practitioners internationally today. The reason speaks to the beauty of his soul in its humility. For he characterized his contributions as “in development,” and welcomed future generations of psychosynthesis practitioners to develop further the insights that he bequeathed to humanity.

I fully believe the project of our time is the evolution of consciousness, at multiple levels from the personal to the global. Roberto Assagioli’s vision embodies that project, as does the vision of Wangari Maathai as she defined it in her Nobel Peace Prize speech cited in my previous blog post.

Meanwhile, what human beings can, and do, accomplish every day, through acts of free will grounded in love, is amazing. Such simple actions of caring rather than indifference represent taking steps forward in that evolution.

In my years spanning two graduate degrees through the 1990s, among the foremost, lasting impressions is the tenacity, graciousness – and commitment to the larger good – that African students brought to their studies and also to their interactions with fellow students and professors.

Indeed, entire African villages usually had raised the funds to support selected individuals to do graduate studies abroad, in order to become future bridge-builders between their home communities and outside influences – for the well-being of the grassroots people.

What struck me were two qualities: first of all, a deep sense of community instead of focus on one’s self. Secondly, in many private and group conversations, I never detected personal animosity, or cultural rage, directed towards the descendants of the colonial powers that had destroyed the spiritual and ecological practices of diverse Indigenous cultural communities across the African continent (and other continents).

Without such personal encounters, would I be accurately informed and aware of the fuller human capabilities of African people and, equally important, even begin to understand their cultural perspectives, if I only relied upon mainstream news stories? I think not. That is why documentary films have such a vital educational role, for example, when they give voice to grassroots, and other marginalized, folks, as well as to the visionaries whose messages are pertinent to the whole human family.

The late Professor Wangari Maathai was one such proactive visionary, until she succumbed to cancer on September 25, 2011, at age 71. Professor Maathai’s call to action, when she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, was emblematic of her understanding about what sustains life on this planet:

“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking so that humanity stops threatening its life support system. We are called to assist the earth to heal her wounds. And in the process, heal our own… In the course of history there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness. To reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”

She embodies the power that resides within every caring human soul, in her chosen quest to restore the trees of Kenya and, moreover, redevelop the traditional skills of rural grassroots women to plant their own food and feed their children needlessly suffering from malnutrition because of corporate and political interests.

A journey that began with Wangari Maathai’s 1977 creation of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya took her on an odyssey to recognize how to connect the dots between rural women’s poverty, malnourished children, the deforestation problem, the severe decrease in clean water, and the deterioration of the soil. Focusing on the causes instead of the symptoms of the causes, she then empowered the rural women to plant trees, initially to restore the water and the soil. Professor Maathai knew, however, that doing so, in turn, would restore their self-confidence, and equip them as communities, to challenge the bigger, related issues.

Her own life, meanwhile, was hit by several blows. They were the results of her standing up for values that would restore and sustain the environment and, in turn, nurture greater democracy and peace. Alas, these values were not shared by the Kenyan dictatorship of President Daniel arap Moi. Her husband divorced her; President Moi publicly ridiculed her. When she ran for government, the university terminated her teaching post, her income and her housing. She also was arrested and imprisoned several times, her own life, ultimately, in constant danger.

Her tenacious journey is mapped eloquently in the documentary film Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, co-directed and co-produced by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater, partners of Marlboro Productions, in the United States. Lisa Merton spoke via Skype at a screening this past weekend at the Richmond Hill Public Library, in Ontario, Canada, to a keenly engaged audience.

“She is such a force of Nature and she personifies everything she believed in,” said Merton, to the Richmond Hill audience, from her home in Vermont. “Her path led her on a holistic approach to change.” Merton, who attended the funeral for Wangari Maathai, held in Uhuru Park, Nairobi, still feels the vitality of Maathai’s spirit.

“Such hallowed ground,” Merton reminded the audience. They had just watched scenes in the film when Maathai initiated an international furor to save this park from being razed for a multinational high rise office development. On another occasion, she and a large group of rural women camped out in the park, to demand the release of political prisoners detained because of speaking out against the Moi regime. Police attacked the women.

Marlboro Productions is dedicated to a huge, long term task to dub their film Taking Root in various languages, and find NGOs willing to fund workshops, to help people globally in environmentally degraded regions.

“Everything is inextricably linked,” she said. People living directly on the land more easily understand that fact though, than those of us who no longer live immersed in a natural environment, in order to appreciate, viscerally, our dependence upon other planetary life.

Regardless, Wangari Maathai, courageously and lovingly, shows what we hold in common as a human family – our dependence upon a healthy planetary environment and, as well, traditional values that she identified as innate within each person: love for the environment, self-betterment, gratitude and respect, and a commitment to service.

For further information and how to order the film, see http://takingrootfilm.com. Regarding books and other publications by Wangari Maathai, and the continuing legacy of her activism, see http://www.greenbeltmovement.org.

I heard the loud thud of the bird hitting the windshield; then saw it bounce off and fall onto the gravel roadside, as the car continued on its way. Walking along the opposite side, I next ran across the road to check whether the bird was only stunned.

Dropping onto my knees beside it, I spoke softly, giving reassurance not to be afraid. The bird lay on its back, chest heaving up and down, and beak open as if gasping for air. I gently placed my hands over the bird, close but not touching, palms down while delicately moving my fingers along the length of its body from head to feet.

I was applying therapeutic touch (T.T.), a type of healing modality in which the healer’s hands move over the energy field of the body, to calm the recipient and reduce physical pain. Some individuals trained in T.T., in fact, do treat animals in distress as well as humans.

But survival was not to be for this beautiful little bird. So I prayed for its spirit now to rest in peace after as little suffering as possible, as I always do whenever I am driving and see animal or bird life snuffed out by drivers. In a cradle of field grass I relocated the bird farther away from the road’s shoulder, so that it would not suffer further indignities from oblivious drivers.

Life is so precious, so uncertain, so fleeting. Once we lose someone or something that had provided meaning to our own existence, where do we turn for solace? The loss could be a loved one, a close friend, our own physical or mental health, or a livelihood or vocation that had filled our days with security and purpose, or all of the above.

Three times, thus far, my personal and professional worlds together have totally fallen apart. Each crisis tossed me, rather unceremoniously, onto new and unfamiliar terrain. Once more I had to figure out not just how to survive yet, more importantly, explore processes to make meaning from life’s traumas and grow closer to spiritual wholeness.

Indeed, a perennial truth is, the way we are tested does not reside in the circumstances that befall us but, more precisely, how we respond to the circumstances.

Acknowledgment of the wisdom that is passed down through the ages, to influence our own accomplishments, is expressed by saying that we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. I characterize that wisdom more humbly, believing that I am being held in the arms of those beautiful souls whose stories of steadfastness and bravery I recall to lift any fog of darkness that, at times, obscures the path forward.

The reason is, at those moments of wandering toward an abyss, or standing at the edge, the personal narratives of people who have confronted, and transcended, enormous tests – whether provided from the external world or from their own inner demons – always have fortified me.

That is why paying attention to people’s stories is so vital, to deepen and expand our consciousness and our compassion for all beings. The stories that we choose – to reflect upon, to create and/or to tell each other – are what render us distinctive from all other species on Earth. Even so, we as humans ought not to feel superior for that reason. The reality, in fact, ought to humble us.

I recall the wisdom of Art Solomon, an Anishinabe elder who was a spiritual mentor to me many years ago. He expressed how humans are the only beings who forgot their `original instructions’ from the Creator about how to live in this Creation with respect and love. All other earthly species, and the elements, live in accordance with the laws of Nature.

Recognition of the laws of Nature means squarely facing the yin-yang of existence. We do so by learning how to negotiate the light and the darkness in the material that life presents to us, at all levels, from our personal lives to workplace, community, nation state and globally – in both human and planetary interrelationships.

What my own journey has taught me could fill a book (which I hope to publish in the future). The experiential learning skills, added to the academic knowledge and psychological training that I pursued, all contribute to what I can offer today, to help other people through teaching, workshops and individual mentoring services.

To sum up, for this blog, what sustains me daily is the following. Wherever I am (at home or on the road), I exercise kindness, recognize the sacredness of all life, treat my own body with respect, be consciously grateful for something, glean a new piece of knowledge, and keep informed about events in the larger world, with full awareness about how my well-being is interwoven with all life on the planet. As well – and very pertinent to living in a world out of balance – is the conscious enhancement of my own inner equilibrium by paying attention to aspects of beauty and joy, within and around me at serendipitous moments, that feed my soul – again, as a daily practice.

Note that those practices identify not “more things to do” during a day that already could be full. They instead identify a state of consciousness in how to move through the day, in relation with whatever domestic, neighbourly or professional responsibilities are happening. Meanwhile, I do not assume that I have “arrived” at any destination. My inner and outer journeys continue, respectively, toward fuller understanding, and being more effective in how I engage in the larger world, as long as I have breath on this physical plane of existence.

Regardless, I have come a long way to live a more balanced life today than formerly, during many years of workaholism and focusing all of my energy toward changing a troubled world while neglecting my own emotional and physical health. Those are common unhealthy patterns, by the way, among many helping professionals and activists.

Our own stories are ever evolving. When life falls apart offers content for one chapter or more in a book of life that remains open. We simply are called to turn the page onto a new chapter yet to be realized. Later, we even may decide to rewrite, at least on our heart, how we framed earlier chapters. The choice is ours.

The multi-faceted intention of my professional work is to raise awareness about the world around us, provide insights for us to understand how life functions holistically, and awaken the recognition within each person how each and every one of us can make a difference in the world.

To interconnect, in my blogs, what is professional with what is personal expresses a holistic philosophy about how life authentically engages not just the mind yet, moreover, the heart, the body and the soul.

Consider that a growing number of people seem to be developing dependencies on technologies to get through the day, while forfeiting person-to-person interactions that enable us to become more fully human through emotional and spiritual growth. (Please see my February blog titled “Giving Presence as an Expression of Love.”)

How we function in our working lives always has been influenced by personal values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that, today, in addition, are being influenced by our applications of technology throughout the day. Meanwhile, another fact, not as easily recognized, is how a person’s `unconscious’ responses to life experiences profoundly influence choices and types of interactions, whether human or technological.

That fact is why we see business news articles today about psychology in the workplace. Also, a growing number of companies recognize the practical benefit of workshops for employees, sometimes including employers too, that focus on developing a range of skills from personal mastery to building team relationships, that is, social skills, to improve the collective production and services of the business.

To include those of you who are not working though, a crucial question comes to mind for everyone: “How do we make meaning of our lives, regardless of the presence or absence of paid work?” This question is critical today, among a large number of people, across generations, who need income yet who either cannot find employment and/or have lost employment that had provided a purpose in life as well as income.

How do we negotiate life’s disappointments? How do we maintain a sense of equilibrium when we experience a professional, and personal, life that has no certainty? How do we retain hope, rather than drown in despair, while existing in a world that experiences widening chaos, economically, environmentally and politically?

All of those existential questions are the fuel that drives the content of my blogs and why I feel so strongly that simply being alive at this historic moment calls upon us to develop our consciousness. What creative processes can we practice to help us reflect on how we make meaning of our present circumstances? Alternatively, what resources could we develop within us, emotionally and spiritually, to survive and function creatively, given the possibility of losing someone or something we depend on, externally?

Although I seldom write as a journalist anymore, I do have the deepest respect for those investigative journalists who take risks, sometimes life-threatening, to tell us about critical events, and the consequences, so that the rest of us can take action to challenge injustice. Those journalists have an important role, often under-appreciated, to be messengers about realities we otherwise would not be aware of. In doing so, they fight for freedom of expression that some people take too much for granted.

The limitation of news reporting, however, is that stories are chosen according to peak moments of dramatic conflict and crisis, in disconnected units of events, soon left behind and replaced with the next conflict or crisis. That emphasis, unfortunately, short-changes, and distorts, the continuity of everyday life around the planet, in which thousands of human beings are confronting adversity with supreme bravery, helping others, and applying strategies to survive that the rest of us could learn from.

Personal narrative is another storytelling form, with an emphasis different from hard news, to address the breadth and depth of the human condition, although similarly using specific events at a particular moment in time at a particular location. Such narratives illuminate realities that are timeless and universal. My previous two blogs, for example, focused on naming – yet also suggested how to challenge, and the reasons why – the fear and discrimination in Arizona that represent a spreading, dangerous political direction.

In recent decades, the practices of `personal narrative’ writing and other `expressive arts’ have been transformative learning components of teacher training in some teachers’ colleges. These practices are incorporated as well in other helping professions, not just to train the helpers, yet also to benefit clients, patients and interested life-long learners.

The highest purpose in storytelling is not merely to entertain, nor even to inform. It is, moreover, to elevate and inspire us to make meaning of what befalls us so that, ultimately, we can transcend whatever fears and other obstacles we confront, whether within or externally.

In that spirit, I sincerely hope my narrative approach in blogging provides material for meaningful reflection.

How a human being experiences the physicality of the land might be compared with how s/he welcomes and values the diversity of the human family. Consider the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, for example, which I physically experienced several years ago during a day long drive across it, with interludes of short walks. At dusk, my friend and I sat on a bench in a desert oasis to watch one of the most glorious sunsets of my life, as the sun dipped behind the mountains in the distance.

Yet some travellers might experience the desert as a dry, barren land that is alien and threatening, through eyes that only see flat, parched earth disrupted by the spines of various cacti. Fear, of snakes, scorpions, and whatever else is not immediately visible and familiar, overtakes any willingness to be adventurous and take the time to be exposed to the less visible, unfamiliar and transformative encounters that can be possible through direct physical connection with the earth.

Other travellers defuse fear with an open mind and a receptive heart. In doing so, they expose themselves to a direct experience of the beauty, diversity, and resilience, of a very rich desert ecology that survives for reasons of flexibility and adaptability, in constant harsh conditions as well as during extreme environmental events.

The above two perspectives could be equated to how various Euro-Americans choose to look upon diverse human cultures. Some of the former have a one-dimensional and unwelcoming view, for example, as evident by those Euro-American individuals in Arizona who view the growing number of Latino/a residents with fear.

Other Euro-Americans, although socialized in Western culture, allow their lives to become enriched by exploring, and engaging with, cultures other than their own. In making that effort they thus awaken awareness about the inner beauty and strengths of resilient Latino and Native American peoples. Indeed, traditional land-based cultures, despite colonial disruptions, continue to model a spiritually-grounded value system connected with the earth that Euro-western culture would do well to heed.

That is why the fear-mongering by extreme right-wing politicians in Arizona, who have banned Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, used in Mexican American Studies (MAS), is so misguided, not to mention banning other books and terminating the MAS program. (See my previous blog.)

Politicians, such as Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, stigmatize Friere – a world-renown Brazilian critical educator – as a Marxist, and insult MAS students by suggesting the latter are being indoctrinated. This accusation shows those politicians’ ignorance, to censor educational materials that actually are teaching people not what to think but instead how to think independently. Such politicians are the actual perpetrators of ideological bias, not the MAS and other, still existing ethnic studies programs.

Indeed, Paulo Friere’s intention was to create processes to help learners take responsibility in understanding how regimes of power influence their lives. Called `conscientization,’ that is, coming to consciousness, is the first step. Thereafter, better informed individuals can feel transformed, engaged and more in charge of their lives, to make better choices for the benefit of the wider community or society.

Friere’s critical pedagogy, in fact, challenged indoctrination and what he called the `banking’ concept of education. `Banking’ refers to the transmission style of education where the teacher is the active agent, the one who knows, and students are the passive recipients of the teacher’s knowledge. For anyone who wants to examine Friere’s influence on educational theory and practice, and read critiques of his work, go to http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/~stevens/critped/linksfreire.htm.

What right-wing politicians confuse, and wrongly conflate, is the longstanding American bogeyman of state communism with the traditional Indigenous, Latino and other non-Western societal values that are communal.

Communal values call upon interactions that are inclusively beneficial to all community members. Such inclusion is not limited to human beings but, moreover, to human responsibilities toward, and interrelationships with, the communities of all forms of life. These include land-based and marine plant and animal life, as well as the elements of earth, air, fire and water.

That raises a related problem of the cultural racism exercised against ethnic studies in Arizona by its current Attorney-General Tom Horne. In his previous function as Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, he lobbied to bring in House Bill 2281, created to use against academic studies designed for particular ethnic groups. That problem is the Euro-American obsession with `individualism,’ as per the United States’ `melting pot’ (in contrast with Canada’s `mosaic’) preference in relation to diverse cultures.

In an interview with CNN‘s Anderson Cooper at that time, Tom Horne cited Martin Luther King, Jr., from his 1963 civil rights march speech: “We should be judged by the qualities of our character and not the colour of our skin.” Horne followed with: “We are individuals, and not exemplars of the race we belong to,” to justify the above house bill.

CNN co-interviewee, sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson at Georgetown University, then reprimanded Horne for dismissing “negative realities” experienced by peoples who have been “demoralized and degraded” in regard to their histories. Dyson added that until such time all Americans can address and take ownership of such realities, ethnic studies are needed.

Meanwhile, it could be argued that state communism and state capitalism are two sides of the same coin given their similar pursuits in the economic exploitation of the natural world, to the degree of undermining the planet’s life support system.

The bigger threat to Western civilization, therefore, is absolutely not ethnic cultures whose traditional communal values include socializing each and every child to take responsibility in caring for the sources of life that sustain them. Rather, the current threat to any civilization, and human life worth living at all, is the increasing destruction inflicted upon the planet globally by multinational industrial capitalism.

As American businessman and environmentalist Paul Hawken cautioned in his book The Ecology of Commerce (1993): “We have reached an unsettling and portentious turning point in industrial civilization [p. 1] … Quite simply, our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating” [p. 3].

My own experiences among Indigenous people influenced my professional approach in media literacy and also my academic studies in transformative learning. Media literacy, in a nutshell, embraces a set of concepts and practices that examine how, why, and for whom, the media construct reality. Also called `media studies’ and `media education,’ it is taught at various grade levels from elementary to post-secondary institutions in many countries around the world today, including the United States.

Media education teaches `critical thinking,’ most commonly to scrutinize the mass media and popular culture. Media, however, embrace all forms of `cultural production,’ which also include all fields of academic knowledge from natural and social sciences to economics and history. In other words, all expressions of knowledge are culturally constructed rather than absolute truths. Therein is the reason why any approach in critical thinking, Frierian or otherwise, can be seen not only as provocative to political and economic power holders, but also threatening to the status quo.

Regardless, a secure and healthy democracy thrives on freedom of expression by all voices rather than censorship. Also important is learning how to `deconstruct’ the spreading tentacles of American right-wing fear-mongering and, instead, encourage culturally diverse learning materials in more schools.

`Deconstruction’ is one of the media education practices that I have demonstrated above, to expose Huppenthal’s distorted characterization of Friere and MAS, and Horne’s misrepresentation of a statement from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 speech.

`Deconstruct’ means to analyze a text, linguistic or conceptual system, in order to expose its hidden internal assumptions and contradictions, and subvert its apparent significance or unity. In other words, I `subverted’ Huppenthal’s interview on Democracy Now, by identifying how his language was politically biased even though he tried to present his position as totally neutral and common sense, implying it to be universally acceptable.

As for Huppenthal’s presentation of the Euro-American approach to education as the only acceptable norm, it is simply `cultural racism,’ also known as `systemic racism’ and `institutional racism.’ Such racism is described by the Women’s Theological Center, in Boston, MA, as: “A situation in which one race maintains supremacy over another race through a set of attitudes, behaviors, social structures and ideologies,” as well as “standards for appropriate behavior [that] are ethnocentric, reflecting and privileging the norms and values of the dominant race/society.”

More than ever before in human history, we truly need to open our minds and hearts to understand cultures other than our own, by exposing ourselves to each others’ stories, whether in books, films, theatrical performances, music and/or through the joy of social gatherings, and personal encounters in which we give presence to each other.

Let us also work side-by-side in restorative activities on behalf of our beloved planet.