[This submission can be read in its original format on the web
at:
http://www.rainbowcoalition.ca/letter_submission_3.htm ]
Towards Individual and Collective Enlightenment & The
Harmonious Leisure State Through Electoral Evolution and Honourable
Settlement.
Submission #3 to the Citizens' Assembly
January 26, 2004
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Dear Chairperson, Mr. Blaney, Doctors Carty and Sharman, Members
of the Assembly, staff, and interested people generally:
Please bear with me whilst I address myself in a personal way to
Dr. Blaney.
I am doing this in this rather public way with Dr. Blaney's
encouragement, he being indubitably a sport. We had the start of
this conversation at the Wosk Centre Sunday 25th, January 04.
Dear Jack, I guess it is all a matter of having or not having
personal principles, and integrity. To speak to you privately and
publicly in this manner is a privilege and one which I will do my
best honor. To be honest - I was quite ticked-off as I know you
were with me for pursuing you for substantial understandings, so I
feel I have to pin you down a bit. This is the third draft of this
letter - and cooled down considerably from my earlier ones.
My skin is white but my heart is red. The white man (and now I
see myself as brown, “poor boy went
Native”) - the white man speaks often with a split
tongue because he has a split mind. He will never find peace or
balance and security as long as he ignores the spiritual, tribal
and cultural ideals of our hosts - the First Nations People. These
ideals are all too often obscured from public understanding. I
consider myself a seeker of truth and a lover of
wisdom. Fortunately for me I had brain damage at fourteen, by some
accounts, so I was too out-to-lunch trying to discover how the
world worked for my simple self, that I got to miss most of the
classes where they teach you how to hornswaggle the people with
high-sounding mumbo-jumbo. That is Professionalism or the way to
make money immorally but legally from the mugs less well-lettered.
What George Bernard Shaw called “Conspiracies against
the Laity”.
This system, based on a hegemony of one, large extended family
given to conspicuous consumption, which is in total control of the
world's money, and ensures a cradle-to-grave debt and economic
enslavement for the commons. The system is designed to keep the
farmers, the productive workers and peasantry in their proper
place, that is, fighting each other for the symbols of material
success - which is a long way from the back room deals of the Greed
Heads, those confused and fearful Creator's children like many of
us on this Mother Planet under our Father Sun altogether in the
same Soup or Surface Chemistry if you like. The very rich are more
to be pitied than blamed - most of them - are worth more to many
people dead than alive, so that many of the wealthy live squirreled
away in mortal fear. Very Sad.
But it is this overwhelming fear that they will lose what they
have, and often these are not well gotten Gains and therefore carry
guilt. Consider what the results were when the Elector of the Duchy
of Hessian made a dirty fortune by not paying the merceneries King
George bought to fill out the British Army to police the Colonies
of America. This resulted from the very sensible commons movement,
The Lollards, who refused to go to fight in overseas Colonial Wars,
which are always the result of investors following pirate
adventurers.
Negative projection onto the future is the source of all anxiety
and fear. Fear is also a result of an inadequate comprehension or
love of the forces that create the individual. Fear is promulgated
on all sides by those who would sustain the current, utterly
corupted Satus Quo. You are right, Jack. I do talk a lot. I'm born
a Bard, a Fluid Druid, which is not a religion, by the way; it is
the practice of intelligent choice-making, eclectic philosophy. If
there is a practical good idea out there, check it out - then adopt
it. It is also a very good practice to acknowlege the
source(s).
During our discussion last saturday 24th you gave me a verbal
assurance - a man-to-man undertaking - that Oral Presentations
would be heard before the Plenary Body in September, following
public interest being shown at 42 local assemblies to be held
around the province. In that chat we had, you will also recall my
expressed disappointment with the set-in-concrete Program Schedule
designed in your office with minimal, if any, input from assembly
members. This is autocracy, control and enforcement of an educative
process designed to waste the precious , and - might I add, as a
taxpayer - the expensive time of the Assembly in plenary session.
This educative process - while a product of the misapplied random
selection process - will require some coaching in a few cases. It
is an insult to the intelligence of the wider public. This Assembly
is a sample of the voting Public. They are long-suffering - as are
all Canadians - but not fools. Why not start out by asking for
their common sense and probably very insightful ideas for the
Future of Elections and start from there. Abandon this educative,
locked-in agenda. You may dumb down a few, but to insist on this
entirely academically-driven agenda is to reveal yourself as a paid
political functionary, right along with Mr. Gibson - with his fat
paycheck and the not-so smart purpose to make this style of
assembly fail - so that the franchised, professional power-grabbers
can continue to gather at the trough and sustain their mindless
political parties.
.
What you did Sunday, is in my view, hardly forgivable. It was to
further try to block the path to the possibility of Consensus for
electoral reform. Without so much as a bye-your-leave of the
Assembly you raise the question whether Oral Presentations should
ever be heard by The Assembly in plenary session. What utter
nonsense. What else is the purpose? To give Dr. Carty the
opportunity to prove before a large audience that he really can
talk the hind leg off a donkey?
I have raised public protests from the very start of this
process, particularly about the way, by means of the public misuse
of Orders in Council, Mr. Gordon Gibson - who is every extra inch a
Liberal - having been the leader of the party at one
point in the past - is given the job at $1200-a-day to quite
literally bend out of shape a particular system for Electoral
Reform, namely, the BC NOTA electoral option – an idea
which I shared freely with the Chief Electoral Officer. Mr. Gibson
did this make-over to suit the purposes of this current Liberal
Cabinet - specifically to head off those of us who are able,
because of years of experience and observation, to conceptualise
practical, intelligent electoral reform. For those of you who who
are unfamiliar with the Elections Act - it is already the well-
paid job of the Chief Elections officer to make recommendations
with help of an all-party committee for Changes in Electoral
Processes. As a social activist I have been pushing hard to get
these civil servants to do their jobs.
All of the above is respectfully offered for your serious
consideration.
Yours in the love of knowledge and Truth
Rev. Bro. John Allen West
"To ignorants obdurde, quhair wilfull errour lyis
Nor sit to curious folks quhilks carping does deject thee
Nor sit to learned men, quha thinks thame onlie wyls,
But to the docile bairns of knowledge I direct thee.” -
King James 1, King of Scotland
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Dear Doctor Blaney,
Following several fruitless efforts to communicate with you on
substantive issues concerning your chairmanship of the Assembly, I
am writing this letter to you in the style of constructive
criticism and making it available to your Citizens' Assembly - or
at least those members who make regular use of your Website - and
the wider public.
I have been present as an observer over two weekends and I have
been deeply disturbed by the style and manner in which a back-room
agenda has been forced on these volunteer members of the randomly
selected Assembly. We all agree that an Assembly, especially one
engaged in the evolution of the Electoral Process, has to show
respect for the hand that feeds it, to each other, and to those who
are hired to assist the process. However, as a grandfather and
member of the general public, I feel obliged to blow the whistle
long and hard, to ensure that you and your academic sidekicks are
prevented from usurping our brains and hyjacking the peoples'
legitimate opportunity to evolve our reform of political processes,
which is clearly the will of the people of this Province.
In regard to that I would put it to any member of this assembly,who
for what ever reason is firmly convinced that no changes in the
Electoral System are required, should do the ethical thing and
surrender their seat. This has to be a positive Process. It should
not be hard to find replacements with open minds.
The current pantomime must stop, masquerading as it does as an
educative process. Lengthy sermons and pontifications which skirt
and avoid serious alternatives to adversarial, combatative
professional politicians and all the endless corruptions, dirty
tricks and outright thefts that the current structure tolerates,
serve no purpose. There is an Elephant in the room and it is called
Common Sense. Acknowledge it.
If the Assembly is to be anything more than a fly speck on
history, Dr. Carty's and Dr. Sharman's rhetorical, meandering
bafflegab must be restrained. To be kind to you gentlemen
– because I do find you personally very fine people -
your inside-the-box thinking and palaver may be sufficient to keep
you employed in the ivory towers, but your lack of conceptual
coherency brings into question the whole intellectual legitimacy of
what is called Political Science. What exactly has been achieved by
your “This way, That Way-ing”. You should
know your oft repeated joke: “I'm sure that is as clear
as mud” - is no joke.
In the real world, outside of the walled elitism of the
Universities - outside the cozy blinkered box of tenure, stipends,
sabbaticals and the other perks, the people, your people, are
sorely opressed. People are suffering. What has political science
ever done to prevent the slide into partisan idiotocracy. What
right do you have to impose your hidden agendas on this Assembly,
to impose agendas with a particularized purpose - and that purpose
is specifically to ensure the failure of this type of Assembly to
reach accord or consensus? Have either of you two experts attempted
to invent a system that might answer our needs for intelligent
electoral restructure? If you have not, then move over and let the
peasants have a go. What is needed is a bloodless coup, a velvet
revolution. What is needed is a bit of MF (moral fortitude), trust
in the Great Sprit, and self respect. We freethinkers who have
dedicated years of our lives to bring about Electoral reform, to
promote a return to good management of collective affairs - we are
being shunted to the sidelines. Every indication is that the
Assembly is set on the course of self-destruction by a Liberal
Party agenda fronted by the Appointed Chairman.
What about a Randomly appointed chairperson each day, and an
agenda and time table decided upon by the Assembly? Or do the
latter-day aristocrats not trust the Assembly's collective
commonsense to manage the affairs of their meeting. Do they fear
the emergence of natural leaders? Bah! Humbug, Jack. Move aside and
drop the feather.
It might a good idea to “smudge” the
place with Sage and Sweetgrass before we go much further.
Peace. John
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