Means Vs. Ends

I am sure that everyone has now seen this:

It has been all over Facebook for the past day.

What are your thoughts? Is it a bandwagon worth jumping aboard? How are we (as Christians) supposed to interact with movements like this? Specifically, those of us who profess to be "pacifist" and see nonviolence as a large portion of the Christian call. What are your thoughts on supporting military missions such as this?

Personally, I continue to be torn. Invisible Children is an organization I have supported in the past. I think their goals are noble and worth supporting, but the means they sometimes use to reach their goals I question. So I pose the question (feel free to challenge the binary I set up): what is worse? To use means I do not fully support to accomplish a good goal OR to sit and do nothing (because I am currently not doing anything or coming up with any "third way" options).

I encourage you to watch the video, if you have not done so already. As for me, I am going to write a few e-mails tonight, and pray that they do a little bit of good.

Turning 27...

Late last year, I was at a Sarah Slean concert and she assured the audience that 27 is a great year, but that you pay for it in year 28 and 29. When one is 27, adulthood has definitively set in and there is no escaping it, although perhaps it is the last year in which denial is quite socially acceptable. I find it difficult, as I believe we all do, to not compare myself to those around me in a variety of spheres and contexts. Some of my more famous fellow 1985 babies include: Lily Allen, Fefe Dobson, Zac Hanson, Kiera Knightly, Lady Sovereign, Frankie Muniz, Ashley Tisdale, T-Pain, and Madeline Zima. Other superstars like Miss Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) are a year younger. While we could have a lively discussion regarding the degree of adulthood these celebrities have achieved, certainly their success and cultural influence is spectacular. Friends of mine own houses and are having babies... My parents had finished school, bought a house, and found the job my Dad continues to work at, given birth to me and were pregnant with my sister. These are examples of those who while less globally influential are discernably settled, rooted. I, however, seem to be stuck in the midst of the same existential crisis I have been in for the past at least 10 years, except 10 years ago I was more optimistic regarding the future. At 27, I am feeling both the desire and terror of settling... I am feeling distinctly exhausted with the uncertainty and transience of many peoples early and mid twenties.

Please let me be the first to be cynical regarding my own cynical out look. From any other perspective but my own, my own pathos is near inexplicable. I am married, I have travelled the world, I am currently enrolled in grad school and I have concession style popcorn machine, I live in Vancouver; life, by any reasonable external standard, is fantastic. Despite the often uncertain and unexpected series of events that have been the last decade of my life, they have been far from dull, uneventful or unproductive. However, from a young age I have had my eyes set on a world stage, and rather than making progress I find myself living everyday with angsty teenage uncertainty regarding what I want to be when I grow up. And here we are and I still don't really know or am too afraid to say or am afraid that the ongoing ambiguity determines me a failure regardless, doomed to be blown by the wind.

My eternally embarrassing confession of competing in figure skating up to the age of 16 never ceases to cause me discomfort. It is in this context of competition, my eyes always directed to national and international success, that I spent some of my most formative years. The height of my success was not a gold medal but qualifying for nationals (perhaps you can hear my disappointment). Anyway, I retired at 16 in order to more fully devote myself to school and art. My ambition for a world stage did not disappear, it merely shifted toward film and television. I have now spent 6+ years formally pursuing spirituality and theological education. But my vision/desire for global impact remains undeterred. On a side note, 4 years ago I recognized in myself a great longing to escape. This is mostly expressed in not wanting to live in North America. Despite and because of this I seem to have confined myself to the very context I both love and loathe, Vancouver.

Ambition is considered both a vice and virtue in modern society. I have mixed feelings about my own ambitions. Oh I could call them "hopes and dreams" and that would be far more acceptable but realistically it is the same. My desire to engage an audience is, perhaps, innate to my identity. There is not a time in my life that I can remember when some aspect of my time was not directed to this end in some fashion. And yet my young desire to perform and entertain has shifted to a desire to express and communicate. This blog succeeds in quenching some of that need. However, blogs and internet communication are often unsatisfying outlets, as they can feel like performing Shakespeare in the dark. Can anyone hear you? or see you? Does anyone care what about what you are doing or trying to do? These fears are somewhat alleviated here by group authorship...

My question, which perpetuates my own frustration and dissatisfaction is not: Do you care? or Can you see me? but, What am I doing? According to Dorothy Sayers I might be classified as an artist all energy and no idea... Although in reality I am exhausted and rarely energetic. I move amongst my own shadows of doubt looking for something... Perhaps we will have a child and I will find focus, perhaps I will be given an opportunity which will crystallize things, perhaps I will meet someone who will make things clear... But after 10 years of pursuing God for these things, learning to think, and discerning in community,  it is my conviction that we must learn to live in the shadowy reality of our own subjectivity. I must continue to step into the darkness by faith, because all is darkness. It is my hope to walk while holding hands with those I love. It is the deep torture of my soul to be weighed down with the call to speak and simultaneously deep uncertainty about what to say, or perhaps my uncertainty is a mask for inability to commit to a subject or perspective...

So I am most curious regarding your thoughts of ambition as a subject and its role in the Christian life...
How common is my sense of dissatisfaction? I perceive, perhaps wrongly, that many other people are much more content within life's mundane routines and much more capable of finding joy in the doldrums of the grind...
Is existential discomfort good or bad? Some might say that comfort and lack of personal tension should be considered a bad sign. 
Is the my decision thus far to confine myself to a context (e.g. Vancouver) that I do not particularly like, in order to attempt to work out my loathing of North America, reasonable or does it make more sense to run off somewhere and hopefully shatter my naive and romantic illusions regarding other parts of the world? This seems a common experience of many people.
Is my restlessness genetic, merely skipping a generation, and now simply expressed in the anxiety of my postmodern generation?
I apologize for what, perhaps, is far too personal a post for the public nature of this setting. 

#OccupyWallStreet - "the right to peaceful assembly"

As I am intending on going to the art gallery tomorrow to visit/participate in #OccupyVancouver I thought I should check into some of the legal issues at stake in protesting. As Canadians we have the right to peacefully assemble. Note that we do not have the right to assemble as such, only peacefully assemble. In fact even the right to peaceful assembly may limited with "good reasons." The way all this is written up in both the charter and related legal documentation results in the reality that the police have HUGE amounts of discretion in both their interpretation of the laws regarding protests as well as the physical situational realities.

Laws regulating protests in Canada give the police a lot of discretion in deciding, first, what assemblies are peaceful, and second, when peaceful protests are not allowed. Police discretion contradicts the values of accessibility and precision that gave rise to the s. 1 requirement that limits on Charter rights be prescribed by law. The idea is that citizens should have a “reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited” (Peter W. Hogg,Constitutional Law of Canada, Student Ed. 2007 at p. 798)—that’s accessibility of law, and that officials must not engage in discriminatory and arbitrary breaches of rights—that’s precision of law.

But in R. v. Hufsky and R. v. Ladouceur, the Supreme Court held that as long as police discretion comes from law, it meets the s. 1 standard of “prescribed by law,” even if the discretion is unfettered. - lawiscool.com

Does anyone else find this disconcerting? Throughout the related legal documents the ambiguous terms like peace, reasonable, justified, tumultuous, are used repeatedly. The result of Canada's failure to more specifically define words like peace and tumultuous is that the police have all the power in protest situations because it is at their personal and corporate discretion whether your actions and language are peaceful... The bottom line is that they can effectively disperse a protest or assembly whenever they want because they are granted enough discretion under the law to be able to act first and explain later. The result is that they may be influenced significantly by personal or government or even corporate influence rather than the public or social good or opinion. When in doubt the police enforce "peace" not freedom but peace without freedom is no peace at all, it is soulless mandatory order. Real peace, the peace that we want and need, must be more than a lack of physical violence.

The final analysis by lawiscool.com:

Canada is not a police state—far from it. Our ideal is the rule of law and protection of civil liberties. But just like with ideals, we shouldn’t take our eyes off frightening possibilities. In a police state, armed agents of the state are free to limit freedoms and rights as they please. Their discretion is completely unfettered, almost like the discretion our laws grant to the police in dealing with street protests.

Our police forces are professional, highly trained, and generally honest. But it is not their job to determine the content of the Charter freedom of peaceful assembly. Provincial legislatures and the federal parliament must step in and give clear guidance to the police when they can break up street protests. The police can make mistakes and may have its own institutional interests that are not necessarily the same as the public interest. The people have a right to clear notice of what is lawful, and we all have a fundamental freedom of peaceful assembly. Our legislators must set out with much greater precision what the police powers are in regulating street protests.

All of this is particularly interesting due to recent Vancouver riots and the Toronto G20 fiasco... Tomorrow will be interesting. I'll be out there in the morning, Silas and Danielle are hopefully driving in after work, let us know if you will be there. Get your church involved.