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A year ago I birthed the peronal gowth perfromance piece, Angry David. The months leading up to that decision were filled with a rising tide of anger. My values were clashing with professional culture, a series of back to back caregiving had left me drained, queer people were dying and I was getting in touch with my own queer rage, apathy and cyncism abounded, and there was an election. These feelings of anger were becomimg more and more overwhelming, so when Doug Ford won, I said fuck it, let's embrace Angry David.
Anger has always been a difficult emotion for me. I don't know how to process it. I come from a culture that does not create a lot of space for anger. For example, the Canadian national identity is centred on us not rebelling from our colonial overlords. On top of that my family is Mennnonite, a faith centred on passivism and non-violent expression. Add into that mix me being a middle child and an older brother with ADHD and you get a self identity that is firmly rooted in opposition to anger. My brother was angry so I was anti anger. It's that time of year again. The time of not. As I get older, the biggest lesson I have learned is how limited I am. How weak, how tired, how overwhelmed I can be. I never realized how much time I would need to recover from the everyday stresses of life. How much I would need to not. Notting is very hard in our society. There are endless wheels of productivity. Can you not after work? Is there space to not on a weekend? How much of your vacation to China is spent notting?
I find the holidays one of the few times of the year where not is allowed. I can enter a state of total non-exertion. I arrive at my parents and am drifted from family gathering to family gathering exerting nothing more than food sweats as I binge for a week straight. I am so excited to not this holiday season. Ever since I moved to Toronto my life has been in full gear. I feel like I have been on a personal growth bender. Rocking from personal crisis to professional crisis to relational crisis. When does growth stop? When do I get to regain my bearrings? Notting has become an intentional activity. A necessity to cope with the too much. But I am left wondering what does it mean to not? Yesterday was an emotional roller coaster. I woke up to celebration. A judge ruled that our Premier of Ontario's meddling in Toronto's election was unconstitutional and struck it down. In particular he called the province's move undemocratic because it violated both candidates' and voters' freedom of expression (a freedom that is entrenched in the Canadian Constitution via the Charter of Rights and Freedoms).
Now diving into Canadian political science can be confusing (and isn’t the focus of this blog) but the important thing here is that the judge felt that for people to have faith in democracy people need to be able to be heard (1 councillor for a 100,000 people was found to be unacceptable), and need to have the opportunity for political expression (interfering in an election campaign disproportionately harms new candidates and those from more marginalized communities). If you interested in reading more, the judge's ruling is a hoot! This court case was started because everyday people organized and pushed their leaders to stand up for local democracy. And for a brief moment this morning there was celebration and gratitude. Faith in democracy restored. The other night I went to a public meeting at a church. I'm not sure if you are familiar with what is currently happening in Toronto, but there is a lot of turmoil as the city grapples with an attack on its democracy from the Province of Ontario. The meeting was a gathering of hundreds of Torontonians to discusss the severity of this attack and why local democracy is important.
Having the meeting in a church created an atmosphere of religion; something that was emphasized by the speeches, moments of silence, musical interludes, offering and community singing. I love when the secular and sacred intertwine (something I'll explore in a blog later). This atmosphere also made appararent our society's fundamental need for a discourse about value, especially how values are realized through action. The people I talked to came to the meeting seeking guidance. They knew something was wrong but lacked the words to articulate it and wanted to know what they could do. This is why the Joy Movement is centred on an Ethic of Joy. While the Ontology of Joy gives us a set of truths to use as a source of grounding for our framework, there is only so much we can glean from conversations on what is. Ethics is concerned with how we should live. Like the public emeting participants, we need space to discern collectively how to move forward in our complex and confusing world. How do we respond to truth? to mystery, violence, or change? How do we live together? How do we balance the self and the other? What do you believe? It can be a confusing question in our post-modern, fake news, information saturated era. Our society has a tenuous relationship with truth, exemplified by the toxic rapport between journalism and people in power.
It was a question I wasn’t really focussed on in my youth. What I knew was that I was tired of black and white thinking. I was tired of the oppressive way people used truth to limit identity and imagination. I was skeptical of faith; there didn’t seem to be room for doubt or autonomy. I privileged media in shades of grey. I championed subjectivity. I became a critic. And this was an important process. Subjectivity is concerned about freedom. It calls out the relationship between truth and power. (An important relationship, I will explore later). The challenge was people were critical of my criticism. They called me a critic for critic's sakes. Always playing the devil’s advocate. “What do you even believe in?” Yesterday, a man walked up to me and asked me to call 911. He was suicidal. Lost. Confused. Begging for help.
When someone is in that state it can be a startling experience. How are you supposed to respond? What does help even look like? How did they end up in this situation? How did our society allow this to happen? Luckily, I felt prepared to respond to that situation. It was the sixth mental health crisis I have been involved with this year, including my own. Clearly, we are in the midst of a societal wide mental health pandemic. Why is it so hard for people to be happy? Where is the joy in their life? This is an especially poignant question as our society is seemingly obsessed with happiness. Whether it be the glitz of the entertainment industry, the glossy consumerism of social media or western society’s enthusiastic pursuit of health, wellness and spiritual enlightenment; everywhere we look people are chasing happiness. Shouldn’t we have found the key by now? |
What is JoyThe experience of being meaningful. The feeling of being valued. Mattering. Why JoyDo you feel purposeless, anxious, depressed, lonely, oppressed or hurt? We need a set of tools to deal with the failures of religion and secular society, AuthorI'm currently Angry David; hosting and holding in Toronto. Creating this framework has been my way of overcoming the harms of late-capitalist living. |