Julia Gillard and Monsignor Dean Cappo's appointment..

Letter to Julia Gillard, Australian Prime Minister, on her appointment of Monsignor Dean Cappo to Chair the National Mental Health Commission.

sent today, via her Parliamentary email.

Dear Prime Minister,

It has come to my attention that you have appointed Monsignor Dean Cappo as as the chairman of the National Mental Health Commission.

How is it possible that you could appoint a senior Catholic Official, whose primary allegiance is with The Vatican, which we all know is embroiled in a world-wide scandal - part of which has been played out to the detriment of hundreds of thousands of children, Aboriginal and European, in Australia - The Scandal of long term Institutional Child Abuse of such utter cruelty, that is well documented, that was actively covered up for many, many years, that only came out due to the bravery of Survivors, (many of whom would have been labelled as mentally ill, when in fact they were, and are distressed, and expressing that distress) in spite of intimidation, manipulation, bribery and Vatican 'secrecy' and, given that the Vatican is even still attempting to manage this scandal as a crisis for the Vatican rather than focus on the needs of survivors and the necessary work to bring those who have abused children before the courts and the urgent need to review those Catholic teachings that underpin the brutality meted out to children - Original Sin, the Devil within the child that must be beaten out, the lack of a commandment to HONOUR THY CHILDREN......?

You are being observed, by Survivors and their advocates all over the world, and your actions are being noted, and YOU WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. The Vatican IS responsible for Criminal acts, as are many State bodies, and that liability has now become YOUR PERSONAL LIABILITY.

I urge you to rescind your appointment of Dean Cappo, and to appoint someone whose concern for the welfare of children and adults is well known, is proven in the field..... someone such as Helen Caldicott comes to mind.....

Yours sincerely.

Corneilius Crowley

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Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Aboriginal Peoples and all our Collective Futures.

One of the things that inspires me the most is the message emerging from the Aboriginal Tribal Societies, from all over the Earth, who  have no desire to exact revenge for the brutal and inhumane treatment they have endured for many hundreds of years, treatment that continues to this day.

In Canada and  North America, in Australia, in Africa and South America, in China and in Asia, in Europe Aboriginal Tribal Societies peoples are extant - that is to say still living in their ancient ways - and they are still under threat; people speak easily of the threat to tigers and polar bears, yet there is a community of over 370 million peoples, Aboriginal Tribal Societies, who may well be extinct within the next 50 years.

The Aboriginal Tribal Societies seek an end to that treatment, they seek a full telling of their hidden history and an accounting, a recognition of the harm caused them and some form of reparation and justice; and in all of this they seek to harm no-one.

It is not in their children's best interest to seek revenge, and in many cases this is exactly why they refused to go to war to protect themselves - there is no honour in becoming like the oppressor. Liberation cannot come from behaving like the oppressor.

These peoples have been, and are being discriminated against even as they have been and are being forced into assimilation programs, even as so many died in those programs, even as some few survived and survive today to succeed in the oppressors way of life, even as some were and are being co-opted by the oppressor.

There are divisions within these peoples communities, divisions between those who have been co-opted into the mainstream dominant cultures version of these cultures, (the tourist version) and those who remain true to their traditions, their cultural roots, their languages, their landscapes.

These divisions are being nurtured and exploited by the Dominant Cultures, by Governments and by Churches and by Commercial Interests. The land these Aboriginal peoples are part of (they do not occupy the forest, they are the forest) is viewed as an 'exploitable resource' - and if that calls for the forced or 'accidental' removal of the people, so be it. Just as the forest gets in the way of exploiting the minerals underneath it and must be cut down, so too the people of the forest, the tundra, the plain. This is the price of progress.

A price the dominant culture does not pay. A price the consumer does not pay, and is often unaware of.

And thus, even as they are yet under attack from powerful interests, the Aboriginal peoples seeek to heal those rifts.. And these Aboriginal Tribal Cultures, they demonstrate great fortitude, empathy, honour and compassion which the Dominant Culture would do well to emulate.

Empathy demands that one never uses another as a means to an end.

I urge everyone who reads this blog to review this paper, to get a deeper understanding of the psychological underpinnings of the struggle of the Aboriginal Communities and Societies to assert their rightful place, to protect themselves and the lands thay are part of, in the context of understanding what drives the greed, the desire for progress both of which are symptoms of a deeper issue : a profound lack of empathy.

BODY PLEASURE AND THE ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE

By James W. Prescott

From "The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists", November 1975, pp. 10-20

This paper explores how the disruption of the natural child-mother bonding process, which is a  biologically determined process, and is at the heart of most Aboriginal Societies,  and is related to the emergence of hierarchical power relationships, violence, abuse and the perceived need to dominate.

I am deeply, deeply inspired by the message emerging from the Aboriginal Tribal Societies, from all over the Earth, who  have no desire to exact revenge for the brutal and inhumane treatment they have endured for many hundreds of years, treatment that continues to this day.

This message resonates with my own experience as a survivor of Residential School abuse in Ireland, seeking justice for myself and the many survivors, the wounded. We mean no harm. We do not act in revenge. We will not desist until justice is served, until those structures that abused us are transformed.

That message is that empathy lies at the heart of being human, that the natural child is a gift to all life, and that, of course, there is another way for the people of the dominant culture to live - another way is possible.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

There is a world of difference between Religiosity and Spirituality.

The roots of that divide are to be found in the ways in which natural child-mother bonding processes, which are biologically determined, are either nurtured or not.

The research of James Prescott, Phd back in the 70s into primate mother-child bonding and the emergence of violence indicated to some degree the dynamics of this.

However, the research he carried out on primates was not possible for human beings - separating a child from his or her mother and providing a surrogate for 'experimental' purposes was correctly seen as 'unethical' - though Social Services and Hospital Protocol dictate that this separation does indeed occur, and with alarming frequency... how else is a circumcision to be carried out (60% of males born in the US are circumcised....)

So Prescott decided he'd do the next best thing and started a cross cultural survey of all known Aboriginal Societies to see if there was any patterns that could be observed that would suggest that his learnings with primates applied to human beings.

Bingo.

Absolute proof, statistically solid, that the ways in which the child-mother bond are nurtured or not are an rock solid indicator of the emergence of violence, hierarchy, sexual repression, rigid gender roles, territorialism and religiosity.

The facts are that when the needs of the natural child for healthy development are not met, when natural empathic nurturance is not fully functioning, abuse flows as a direct result.

"David  Smail correctly points out, in his book The Nature of Unhappiness, that psychological theories rarely move beyond the power exerted within the family - where by the oedipal child or the tyrannical parent - and generally fail to see the importance of wider social structures. He widens the ‘power horizon’ to include the effects of politics, culture and class on personal relations, and the impact of ideology on family life and education.

If emotional and psychological distress is brought about by social and environmental powers which originate at some distance from those ultimately subjected to them, then it follows that the best therapy comes in the form of political, ethical and ideological change. We need to move beyond the microenvironment of the therapeutic space, and through our interaction with patients provide three essential things: comfort, through proximal solidarity; clarification, to undo the mystifications of power, by helping patients to remember, see and say; and encouragement to physically and materially alter their position in the world."

 from a review by Christopher Dowrick, Professor of Primary Medical Care, University of Liverpool,

Furthermore, the research carried out by David Chamberlain, Joseph Chilton Pearce and many others into developmental neuroscience with regard to peri-natal experience, birth experience and the first years of a childs life absolutely support Prescotts insights.

Religion wears the mask of empathy, yet demonstrates time and time again a complete lack of empathy.The same applies to much of Social Services and Governance.

It's  BELIEF that is imposed externally, whereas true empathy emerges from within.

It is indoctrination that typifies Schooling and much of University 'Education'. Whereas true learning emerges from unfettered and honest exploration of the world we live in.

We need no more Religion, no more belief.

We need, we are desperately crying out for EMPATHY.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe