Hope ...

Hope …


In a previous post “Further out of view … further out of mind …” I talked about my ongoing struggle to find meaningful ways to live in hope instead of fear.

Margaret Somerville, in her recent book “The Ethical Imagination: Journeys for the human spirit.” (Anansi Press, 2006) in a chapter titled “Past Virtues for a Future World: Holding our humanness on trust.” (pages 199 to 248) mentions hope as one of the “human qualities that I believe will be essential in taking ethical paths into our human future. ”

The five “old virtues” Margaret Somerville considers essential are “trust, courage, compassion, generosity and hope”(p 208).

This ethicist articulates the pain and harm experienced when others dash our hopes as we try to bring safety, security, support and justice into our children’s, and other mothers and children lives after experiencing domestic violence, and then systemic and judicial abuse.


See the following excerpts from pages 235 to 239.


P 235
“Because hope is linked to the future, it’s linked to potentiality. For this reason, the ethics of potentiality and the idea that it can be ethically wrong to deliberately negate potential are relevant to the discussion of hope. We can describe hope as a sense of possibility – the sense that our best dreams, no matter how short term they might be, are open to fulfilment. Helping others to find hope requires imagination and creativity on the part of individuals, institutions, and societies; our enemies in this enterprise are apathy, boredom, inactivity, and nihilism. I believe acting in ways that cause such a loss of passion should be viewed as an ethical “mortal sin.”


P 237

“Hope and the search for meaning in life are linked, in that each helps us find the other. … They are also linked in that the absence of either has the same impact on us: without meaning or without hope, we believe we cannot go on living.

Robert F. Kennedy linked hope and justice, saying:

Each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
(Kennedy, Robert F. “A Tiny Ripple of Hope.” Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University. Delivered June 6, 1966 Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rfk-capetown.htm.)


P 238 - 239
“… I have written elsewhere that hope is the oxygen of the human spirit: without it, our human spirit dies: with it, we can survive appalling suffering and surmount incredible obstacles. A statement attributed to Saint Augustine might explain why hope functions in this way. He said, “Hope has two lovely daughters: anger and courage. Anger so that what must not be may not be; courage so that would should be can be.” Those emotions cause us to engage with the world and doing so nourishes our human spirit – life and what we do with it matters to us and others, that is, we find meaning. Reciprocally, we must have a sense of the human spirit if we are to have the capacity to find hope. The issue is, how can we nurture that capacity?

I understand evolutionary biologist and futurist Elisabet Sahtouris to be addressing this question when she writes:

Recognizing our responsibility and opportunity for creating our reality is the only way I see for making the shift from fear to love – from a world of scarcity and greed to one of abundance in which all people are empowered to fulfil their needs in sustainable ways. To achieve this, we must break through long cultural conditioning on our lack of power, our willingness to accept, and thus co-create, economic and political inequities that disempower people, currency systems that promote these inequities and anything else preventing the full expression of human potential in sustainable ways.” (Sahtouris, Elisabet. “Humanity 3000 Participant Statement. ‘ Foundation for the Future. http// www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/humanity3000.html)

“Sahtouris is speaking from an altruistic point of view, but even if we were to adopt a selfish point of view, creating the possibility of hope for others may be the best – or perhaps the only – way to find hope for ourselves, especially if we are to leave a legacy of hope for our children and their children.

Hope for one’s children has been a primary experience for most people across the generations.”

* * *


Take care ... take heart .... Merinda

As it is written ...

As it is written ….

Some of the written laws, regulations and conventions that supposedly protect immigrant women and their children who have experienced domestic and family violence in Canada and would supposedly mean that Australia would have the responsibility and ability to “interfere” to protect Australian children and women trapped overseas by domestic violence and systemic and judicial abuse when countries break their own laws by not protecting and responding to these innocent and vulnerable peoples abuse.


Canadian Criminal Code, Domestic Violence Act

Standards in Custody/Access Reports for Registered Social Workers

Standards in Ethical Practice for Professional Social Workers

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms



Relevant Conventions Australia and Canada Have Ratified

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
Platform for Action United Nations World Conference on Women, Beijing
Charter of the United Nations

Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women 1993

Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women
Commonwealth Plan of Action on Gender and Development

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,

Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power

UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers

UN Guidelines on the Role of Prosecutors

UN Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organisations to Promote Universally Recognised Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms

The perils of indifference....

“The Perils of Indifference.”

Elie Wiesel
Seventh White House Millennium Evening, Washington, 12 April 1999.


“Of course, indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbours are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to abstraction.

…. In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always a friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment….

In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders…

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire…

If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction…

And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew…

Does it mean that we have learnt from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learnt from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far?”



As quoted in Alan J Whiticker’s “Speeches That Shaped the Modern World” , New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd 2007


Elie Wiesel’s sentiments apply to all forms of social injustice and human rights abuses.

One of the incredibly challenging and traumatic aspects of children and women’s experience of domestic violence and systemic and judicial abuse is the indifference displayed by those we have begged to assist and protect our children and ourselves. The total lack of response. For us it would seem that indifference is indeed a punishment – a punishment for speaking our truth, a punishment for breaking the silence around abuse, a punishment for inviting and challenging people to have their actions meet their words, for calling them on their hypocrisy … their sin becomes our punishment.

Following is an incomplete list of those who I have shared extensive information with in regards to the experience of Australian children and women trapped overseas by domestic violence and systemic and judicial abuse and begged for assistance. Those listed have shown their indifference to the trauma and suffering of these innocent and vulnerable citizens by not responding, not speaking out, by ignoring us – by their indifference.


In Australia …

UNIFEM
Women’s Electoral Lobby
GetUp
Amnesty International
Children’s Rights International
White Ribbon Campaign
State Women’s Legal Services
Anglican Church of Australia
YWCA
Australian Lawyers for Human Rights
Council for Civil Liberties
Australian Institute of Judicial Administration
Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse
Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre
Key Centre for Ethics, Justice, Law and Government
Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law
National Research Centre for the Prevention of Child Abuse
VOCAL Victim’s of Crime Assistance League
Australian Centre for Child Protection
St James Ethics Centre
Public Interest Advocacy Centre
Domestic Violence Committee Coalition

Researchers/academics at Sydney University, University of New South Wales, Charles Sturt University, Griffith University, University of Canberra, Bond University, University of Newcastle Legal Centre, Monash University, Melbourne University, University of South Australia, University of Western Sydney.

Australians who also attended the World Conference on the Prevention of Family Violence 2005 (Banff, Alberta), International Conference on Child Witnesses to Domestic Violence (Vancouver, British Columbia 1999 and London, Ontario 1997).

Australian Embassy, Ottawa, Canada
Prime Minister
Attorney General
Shadow Attorney General
State and territory Attorneys General
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Office for Women
Commonwealth Ombudsman
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
Premier of New South Wales
Former Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner
Home town MP and Senator
MP’s and Senators who claim to care about children and women’s safety and human rights, politicians who held the government responsible for ensuring David Hicks received “judicial fairness’ and returned to Australia, those who believed the government had a responsibility to intervene for the “Bali Nine”, Schapelle Corby, Than Nguyen and others charged with drug trafficking and those who believed the government had a responsibility to bring Robert Jovicic promptly and safely back to Australia.
Leaders of the Liberal Party, Labor, Democrats and Green Party

Media


… and in Canada

Provincial and National Action Committee on the Status of Women
PATHS Provincial Association of Transition Houses
NAWL National Association of Women and the Law
LEAF Legal Education and Action Fund for Women
Family Service Canada
White Ribbon Campaign
RESOLVE Research and Education for Solutions to Violence and Abuse
The FREDA Centre for Research on Violence Against Women and Children
Centre for Children and Families in the Justice System
Sheldon Chumir Centre for Ethics in Leadership
RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police


Attendees, guest speakers and committee members/organisers of the World Conference on the Prevention of Family Violence 2005 (Banff, Alberta), International Conference on Child Witnesses to Domestic Violence (Vancouver British Columbia 1999 and London, Ontario 1997).

Provincial Justice Department
Federal Justice Minister
Provincial and Federal Office on the Status of Women
Federal Critic on the Status of Women
Provincial Children’s Advocate
Provincial Ombudsman
Provincial Human Rights Office
MLAs, MPs, Senators from all the main provincial and national political parties,

Numerous lawyers, social workers, counsellors….

Researchers/academics specialising in law or gender studies at numerous Canadian universities.

Media

“If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction…”


* * *

What will you do after you have read this, now that you know?


Take care … take heart … don’t be indifferent to injustice and suffering – your actions will show whether or not you care … Merinda.