The statements, opinions, or views in the articles may not necessarily reflect that of the Goan Voice Canada.

Racism still with us
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/634552
Excerpt from Editorial in Toronto Star | May 15, 2009 04:30 AM

We take pride in our ability to absorb immigrants from every culture, live together harmoniously, and bring up our children in a country where racial diversity is normal. But every so often we need a reminder that skin colour still holds some Canadians back and weakens their sense of belonging.

A new study of multiculturalism by Jeffrey Reitz of the University of Toronto and Rupa Banerjee of Ryerson University provides disquieting evidence that members of several visible minority communities don't feel at home here. In their survey of 41,666 Canadians, the two researchers found blacks felt highly stigmatized and South Asians experienced some degree of discrimination.

What was most disturbing was that these feelings didn't subside over time. They got stronger. Second and third generation immigrants, identifiable by race, felt less attached to Canada than their parents.

Clearly, we need to work harder in our classrooms, workplaces and all our institutions to make prejudice unacceptable and unCanadian. Fifteen years ago, Bob Rae's NDP government introduced a comprehensive anti-racism program into Ontario's schools. Mike Harris's Conservative government scrapped it and it has never been revived.

Now would be a good time. We know that poverty is disproportionately high among visible minorities. We know that highly-educated immigrants are falling behind their Canadian-born peers economically. We know that kids are using racial epithets in the schoolyard. And now we know that racism is a multi-generational curse.

We can't afford the delusion that we're doing well enough.

To everything there is a season, especially our spiritual growth
http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/rolheiser/2009/rolheiser051109.shtml
By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

A friend of mine likes to explain his religious background this way: “I have powerful conservative roots. I was raised in a strong conservative, Roman Catholic, immigrant, German, farming family, with all the inhibitions, protectiveness, exclusivity and reticence that this entailed.

“It would be hard to find a more strongly conservative religious background than mine. I’m grateful for that. It’s one of the greatest gifts you can be given. Now I’m free for the rest of my life.”

There is something both healthily conservative and healthily liberal in that assessment. The instinct within the liberal wants to push edges, to widen the circle, to move away from narrowness, to be more inclusive, to not always see the other as threat, and to protect the ineffability of God and God’s universal salvific will.

The conservative, however, intuits the necessity of being rooted in truth, in grounding yourself in the essentials, in having proper boundaries and in not being naïve to the fact that everything that’s precious and true will invariably be under attack. Both protect the soul. The soul, as we know, has two functions that are often in tension with each other.

On the one hand, the soul is the source of all energy inside of us, the fire that fuels everything we do. We know the precise moment when the soul leaves a body. All energy ceases. On the other hand, the soul is also the source of unity and integration. It glues us together. Decomposition begins the second the soul leaves the body. Without the soul, every element goes its own way. The liberal instinct is mostly about the fire, the conservative instinct is mostly about the glue. The story of the man who was raised in such a strong conservative background and who now feels rooted enough to be more liberal illustrates that both are necessary. There is a time to be liberal and there is a time to be conservative. It is important that we know which time is right both as regards to our own growth and as regards to the growth of others.

Malcolm X once said something to this effect: I have a strong allegiance to both Christ and Muhammad because we need them both. Right now, so many of the men to whom I am trying to minister need the discipline of Allah. Their lives are in such disrepair that they need clear, hard rules of discipline that are spelled out for them without ambiguity.

Later on, once they have their lives more in order, they can turn more to the liberal love of Jesus. First we need the discipline of Allah, later the freedom of Jesus. He understood that there are stages to the spiritual life and that what is needed in one stage will sometimes be different than what is needed in another. What are the basic stages of the spiritual life?

The Gospels, the mystics and the great spiritual writers, with some variation in how they express this, concur that there are three clear stages to the spiritual journey or, in another way of putting it, three levels of discipleship:

The first level, which might aptly be termed Essential Discipleship, is the struggle to get our lives together, to achieve basic human maturity (which itself might be defined as the capacity for essential unselfishness, the capacity to put others before ourselves).

The second level can be called Generative Discipleship and is the struggle to give our lives away in love, service and prayer.

The third level can be called Radical Discipleship and consists in the struggle to give our deaths away, that is, to leave this earth in such a way that our deaths themselves become our final gift and blessing to our families, churches and society.

The first stage, Essential Discipleship, is about essentials, about getting our lives together by properly channeling our energies through discipline (the origin of the word, discipleship). By definition, that task is mainly conservative: learning proper teaching so as to have a healthy vision, submitting to rules of behaviour that ground us and move us beyond our instinctual selfishness, and being a learner within family and Church community. Metaphorically speaking, at this stage we are learning the “discipline of Allah.”

But, once this stage is achieved with a certain proficiency, the challenge becomes different. Now the task is to give our lives away — and to give them away ever more deeply and to an ever-widening circle.

That’s a more liberal task and it becomes even-more liberal as we move towards that truly great unknown, death, where all that we have grounded ourselves in must be left behind as we are opened to the widest circle of all, cosmic embrace, infinity and the ineffable mystery of God.

In our discipleship, our spiritual journey, there is an important time to be conservative, just as there is an important time to be liberal. We are not meant to pick one of these over the other.

PAKISTAN -Wanted: A People’s Leader
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan
Dawn Editorial | Friday, 15 May, 2009

IN days of yore when royals paid a visit to foreign lands, they often did so to escape the stress and strain of ruling an ungovernable country. Then interpersonal diplomacy caught the fancy of leaders and the need to communicate in private became reason enough to travel. Today, communication has moved far ahead of the Morse code, and foreign trips by dignitaries are seen as an exercise that must be undertaken only when the purpose is solid and justifiable and the period of absence limited. This specially holds true when a leader’s presence in his or her country is needed because of uncertain political, security and economic conditions there.

How then can one justify President Asif Zardari’s innumerable visits abroad, which have also included extended periods of private breaks? In the first four months after assuming the presidency last September, he made nine foreign trips costing Rs150m. He took off within a week of taking oath. This matter is a serious one and cannot be ignored. The country is in flames, hundreds of thousands are being uprooted from their homes in the north because of the army action in the Malakand division, the Taliban are retaliating and an economic meltdown is looming large.

It is shocking that the person at the helm who should be instilling courage in a despondent nation is not at the scene and is away on foreign jaunts. It is but natural to expect a person in a position of leadership, especially holding high office, to have a visible presence among the people in their hour of crisis. No captain worth his salt abandons his ship at a time of crisis. He remains on the deck. This analogy can be extended in part to Pakistan which is like a rudderless ship. Leadership by remote control doesn’t really work. With the 17th Amendment in place, the president wields the actual power. The prime minister publicly puts all key decisions on hold to await Mr Zardari’s attention. What this country needs are leaders with courage, compassion and a vision — leaders who do not shy away from crowds and are not averse to visiting conflict-hit areas be they Swat or Balochistan.