No Turning Back
Participants in an Economic Literacy/Conflict Transformation Training in the Philippines engage in the Village Game. Photo provided by LeeAnn McKenna.
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by LeeAnn McKenna
from Baptist Peacemaker, Volume 40 No 3
We’ve just finished playing the “Village Game,” a rambunctious route to understanding economics and, in particular, economics as the root cause of violence. Over a couple of hours, participants have had the opportunity to imagine and create, at least on flipchart paper, their “ideal village.” The six or seven villages then give a village tour for the others, pointing out the beauty, the self-sufficiency in governance, education, health care, manufacturing and food production. They have given their village a name that reflects the passion they have put into the exercise. Suddenly, into this idyll marches a trio, dressed up as developers, international financiers and a recognisable—if not particularly trustworthy—collaborator. They are suspicious, but they are polite, inviting the visitors in for tea and conversation that becomes increasingly heated.
The villagers decline the offers of “development and assorted emoluments”—and then the action takes off as the visitors wield magic markers like bulldozers, chainsaws and tanks, destroying forests and fields, playgrounds, river beds and neighbourhoods—to “improve” them with McDonald’s, Walmarts, oil rigs and gold mining—with the tailings dumped in their river.
As the financier starts to rip off pieces of their villages, the resistance mounts. Villagers form tight circles around their villages. At one point, one of the villagers takes what is left of his village and stuffs it up his shirt. The visitors stop and everyone goes quiet. “Oh, that’s actually against the rules,” the developer says. Painfully, slowly, the young man removes it from his shirt and lays it back on the floor. The financier grabs it and walks off. The game is called.
It is difficult to wrap words around the emotion in the room. The grief is palpable. As we begin to unpack the experience, the observations, feelings and meaning, one elderly man cries out, “Why didn’t you come years ago when we needed you?” He weeps.
They talk about what their economy used to look like, their proud exports of rice and a fish caught off Panay that was a delicacy. They are now reduced to imports from Vietnam, their share of the “export quality” fish reduced to the heads. The public services are now privately owned. Their largest export now is people—people to raise other people’s children, tend to other people’s sick, to the sex trade.
It is a powerful exercise designed to invite participants into a new understanding of their own local and national economies—within a global pandemic of neo-liberalism. In the course of the training, participants move from a sense of despair to a sense of agency.
COVID-19, as with the rest of the world, has confined me to barracks, with training projects in the Philippines, Uganda, Ecuador and North East India postponed indefinitely. It took me awhile to accept the gift—because everyone doesn’t have it—for what it could be. These are, after all, days of reckoning, a “portal, a gateway, between one world and the next.”(1)
“Normal” is not our destination. This virus has irrevocably severed our future from our past. And what arrives is up to us. It is going to be either much worse under the business-as-usual types; or it is going to be much better, guided by what Otto Scharmer calls “a new superpower in the making: citizen activism.”(2)
The deficit-slayers are strangely silent.
Right-wingers are fretting about people in precarious work who might “fall through the cracks,” sounding like born-again socialists.
Leading climate-change deniers are urging us to listen to doctors and scientists.
Government leaders are frankly admitting that they don’t know what’s going to happen next.
And then people begin to say out loud: If precarious work with no sick-days or long-term care facilities cut to the bone or underpaid and over-worked Personal Support Workers and those who are keeping our supply chains functioning, cutbacks to everything that matters, is wrong during a pandemic, it’s always wrong.
There is no turning back.
Our Prime Minister stands before us every day at 11:15 adding each day to the list of those in need of help who will be getting it—and soon. Governments are listening to multiple layers of Canadians in “congregant” living spaces—from long-term care to jails and homeless shelters to group homes; to the self-employed, those on social assistance, laid-off employees and employers concerned that they will have to fold. They are listening to Indigenous communities, renters and landlords, low-income families without devices and internet to enable online learning for their student children, students without summer jobs hoping to head for university. Our safety net is being rewoven—and then some.
No turning back.
Instead of the $30 billion they requested, the oil patch got $1.7 billion—to be used to create jobs cleaning up their mess. Calls for transition funds—out of tarsands and into green energy—are coming from across the political spectrum. The crowing after the NAFTA signing has been muted as it becomes clearer every day what a doomsday machine we have created, how fragile the systems that support us. With trade agreements founded on just-in-time manufacturing, lowest-wage migration of jobs, and neo-liberal economics,(3) disaster capitalism(4) has a free hand.
Not this time. No way.
There is a great uncovering taking place, a shaking off of a deadly complacency. We know things now that we didn’t notice before or couldn’t name. We know that this pandemic is a dress rehearsal for climate catastrophe. We now know that the next time governments say they cannot afford something, a social benefit necessary for wellbeing—clean water in First Nations communities, pharmacare, home care and oral health care, clean waterways, legal aid—we will not believe them. We know that our future requires a pivot from war.
Tell Lockheed Martin that we can do without those warships; I’m sure they’ll understand. And for God’s sake, end the shipments of LAVs to the Saudis. We’ve shown we haven’t forgotten how to retool: but this time not for war but for jobs bent to human need and creation care. We must hold tight and continue to pull back the veil.
—LeeAnn McKenna is a global trainer-facilitator in Conflict Transformation, specialising in the intersections of violence with gender, race, tribe, religion and economics. A former BPFNA board member and staff member, she lives with her husband, Jeffrey, on a farm in Ontario. She is Granny to Owen and Morgan. For more information, go to www.partera.ca.
Endnotes
1. Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020; (www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca).
2. Otto Scharmer, “A New Superpower in the Making: Awareness-Based Collective Action,” Presencing Institute (blog), April 8, 2020; (https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/a-new-superpower-in-the-making-awareness-based-collective-action-83861bcb9859).
3. Stephen Metcalf, “Neoliberalism: The Idea that Swallowed the World,” The Guardian, 2017; (www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world).
4. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, reviewed in The Guardian, 2007; (www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/15/politics).
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