In our everyday language we use the word ’culture’ in at least three different ways. The first use of the term is sociological or anthropological: Culture refers to the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another. This includes our institutions, normative values, and daily practices such as how dress, what and when we eat, whom we hang out with and where we spend our time, and how we use technology.  And then there are the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of particular social, ethnic, or age groups or sub cultures such as the youth culture and the drug culture.

The second use of culture has to do with the arts and with how people perceive the arts. We call paintings and literature and symphonies ‘culture’ and we call people knowledgeable in these areas as ‘cultured.’

And then there is popular or pop culture, which includes pop music, popular tv shows, pop idols, and so on.

The sad thing is that over the past half century or so we have separated the three uses of the term and, as a result, we have created gaps in what we know, how we know, and what we think about things not included in our own subculture. In other words, we have fragmented our lives so that when we participate in our everyday pop culture world, we don’t realize that we are also participating in our sociological and political cultures. Nor do we realize that our pop cultures are based on so-called high culture.

To use an old fashioned term, by fragmenting our lives in this way, we have become alienated from our own culture.

So how do we go about reconnecting things? The first step is to try to understand why things have fragmented. A great deal has been written on the subject, so we can present things quickly.

One reason is that each generation wants its own identity, so it creates its own music and fashion and even language. A second reason is that the market place takes advantage of these trends. For example, in most places in Canada there is no radio station that plays classical music or jazz. And when we do find stations that play these kinds of music, they tend to play the safe music, so serious listeners still have no place to go to. And the third reason is technology. The way such things as ipods and cell phones and web sites such as facebook and twitter are used tend to isolate people from other groups so members of a specific group are not even aware that other things exist.

Now, there is nothing wrong with using technology. But all too often technology, which was developed for a specific purpose, gets used for other purposes which the inventors did not even think of. Thus individual groups use technology for their own ends and thereby isolate themselves from the society at large.

The great paradox here is that without the great society these people would not have the technology they use, since it comes from that technology. A secondary paradox is that once these companies find out how their technologies are being used, they market their products to these groups. Thus the market place then starts to control how technology is used.

The role of the market is significant here for two reasons. One is that in a market driven society such as ours we tend to understand things in terms of their economic value. Things that do have an obvious economic value are not socially valued. Since we cannot put a price tag on the value of classical music or jazz or of painting, our society does not value such things. They are fine for the ‘cultured’ people but not for everyone else. The second reason is that we live in a society with a puritanical heritage which is suspicious of pleasures or of frivolities. Which is how the arts are seen.  Just think of students’ attitudes when some one studying technology has to take a literature course. “How is Shakespeare going to help me be a better mechanic?” is what they say. And the answer is that it may not make you a better mechanic but it might make you a better person.

We cannot dictate how people use technology. And we cannot dictate how companies market their products.  But we can educate people and make them aware of what is going on in the society outside their subgroups.And we can educate them as to how the market is actually manipulating them. Schools and parents must play more active roles in exposing children to the greater culture. But, all too often, even parents are not aware of various aspects of our culture.

Even symphony orchestra goers tend to reject contemporary music. They do so for two reasons. One is that they are unfamiliar with it and the other reason is that much of it sounds discordant. And how many people actually enjoy looking at abstract art?

All pop music and pop art forms from comics to tv shows are based on the so-called higher culture. As I like to put it in my history of music class, there would be no Beatles if there had not been a Beethoven.

So the ultimate answer is education, not just for people in school, but for everyone. For those who have jobs and cannot go to school there publications such as this one to get you thinking about these ideas. I hope to follow this article with pieces on culture and how learn how to appreciate the so-called higher things.

Social Networking is a new phrase for a very old concept. It has also been called community or grassroots organizing or, simply, working with the neighbours.

The basic principles are always the same. 1. Everything is connected. 2. Some things are even more connected at the local level than at the elite level. 3. The technology changes over time but it is all about moving information around and mobilizing people.

In the 21st century, thanks to computers and the Internet, we have a totally jumped up version of the old strategy. Now we have protests in a repressive country and citizen journalists are reporting instantly via cell phone cameras and solidarity protests erupt around the world.

This article will focus on London and the surrounding communities and is from the perspective of social networking for progressive left wing causes.

The first place to start is your neighbourhood.

If you live in an apartment or townhouse, do you have a tenants’ union? Do you live in a co-op or a condominium with a board of directors?

If you live in a house, is there a community association like Woodfield or Old South? All of these organizations have annual meetings, elections of officers and social events. The community organizations in London are organized into a citywide group called the Urban League.

The next social networking structure is your ward. Composed of a number of neighbourhoods, your ward (1-14) has an elected city councillor with elections every four years. The next city election is one year from now.

City Hall is the next level. A tremendous amount of community networking is done there with the city councillors and the city staff. There are often public consultations about new developments in the city. Small groups of people with a clear vision of what they want can often make dramatic changes in which alternative way the city develops.

Even the annual budget of London is a big deal at $1,000 million or $1 billion a year. Grass roots organizers can have input into how that money is spent and taxed.

At the city level we also have a number of special interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce, The Labour Council, developers, landlords, union locals, environmental groups and service clubs.

Another part of the social network is the non-profits or the non-governmental organizations (ngo’s). The Unity Project is a not for profit charity that runs a homeless shelter in East London. It has 15 employees and a board of community leaders. There is a citywide group for many non-profits called The United Way.

Religious organizations also play a key role in our community. They are involved in the food banks, social housing, education and social justice.

Social networking at a local level can also take on a provincial, national or international character. An example is the political riding associations.

There are four riding associations in London for each level of government. Each riding has an association for each of the three major parties. They provide feedback and money for each party and local campaign during elections.

An international example of local networking would be Amnesty International or Oxfam Canada working on prisoners of conscience or world poverty.

The London Coalition For Social Justice has links with Social Justice groups in Chatham, Woodstock and the Waterloo Region. These groups are also linked with a provincial organization called the Ontario Coalition For Social Justice (OCSJ) The OCSJ lobbies provincial and federal governments. The labour movement has a similar structure with the Ontario Federation of Labour.

No tour of local networking would be complete without a look at London’s original artistic and cultural scene. Many of the hundreds of volunteers at The Home County Folk Festival and Sunfest are community organizers during the rest of the year. Home County shows its cooperative spirit in loaning equipment to the Dragon Boat Races.

We also have year round venues like The Music Club, The Aeolian Hall, The Palace and Grand Theatres and The Arts Project which are all linked to each other.

Another part of networking is the community food movement. This includes organic and local food vendors at farm markets like the Western Fair and Covent Garden. There is also a mushrooming Community Garden or City Farming movement where people grow their own food in parks and open areas around the city.

The final piece of the community organizing is the communications part. There is a hierarchy of network communication. The most effective will always be personal contact in real time and space. It is much harder to say “no” to some one standing in front of you than it is to one of two hundred e-mails that are days old.

We should also be wary of getting side tracked by the flashing lights of high tech. What is the point of putting weeks and months of work into a web site seen only by a handful of people? The logical thing to do is simply phone or visit .

All too often community organizers ignore the existing tools of mass communication like letters to the editor or talk radio. Create a protest, invite your friends and the TV station and get on the news.

Here is one final observation about e-mailing and web sites. There seems to be an iron law of communications. The easier it is to communicate, the lower the value of the message. That being said, a couple of good tools in London are the London Activist Network (via e-mail) and The London Commons Web Site.

So, there you have it-a brief tour and critique of social networking in Western Ontario. Put it to good use by creating more social justice, equality and democracy.

My name is Irene Mathyssen and I am the federally elected representative for London-Fanshawe.  It has been my honour and privilege to represent this riding since 2006.  I am the New Democrat critic for the Status of Women and the deputy critic for Public Safety.

Over the years I have been involved in and supported many community events and campaigns including the Women’s Community House, the Coalition of Canadian Immigrants, housing advocates, the friends of Meadowlily Woods, RE-Forest London, the London Coalition Against Pesticides, First Nations and the multi-cultural community.   As a former English teacher I am also very supportive of student clubs and activities designed to educate and motivate students about multicultural, anti-racism and equity issues.

I am very proud to represent the New Democratic Party here in London.  New Democrats are committed to ensuring ordinary Canadians are treated fairly.  We are very much concerned that good jobs are disappearing, and many of our jobs are being shipped overseas.   Thousands of hard-working Canadians are struggling to pay the bills and support their families because they are forced to rely on a succession of insecure, low-wage jobs.  We can do better. Every worker deserves a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, respect in the workplace, and a secure pension.  New Democrats are committed to provide leadership to keep jobs in Canada, encourage innovation, and help you balance your budget by putting a stop to consumer gouging by banks and credit card companies. We will invest in new energy solutions, security for seniors, affordable housing, and education and training for workers and young people. We will ensure that opportunities are shared with working families and individuals, not taken away through tax giveaways to those who need them least.

After a decade of limiting family reunification in favour of professional skilled labour, Canada is mired in mediocre productivity. With the declining birth rate and an aging population, it would be logical for Canada to increase annual immigration targets from the current goal of one percent of its population. The focus of Canada’s immigration policy should be to bring in young families and their relatives. Instead, Canada has been bringing in fewer immigrants and family class applications, which now makes up only 24 percent of new immigrants each year.

Huge backlogs at Embassies, Consulates, and High Commissions overseas are creating unnecessary and excessive delays, particularly for family sponsorships. Sponsoring your spouse or partner overseas can take over two years to process, while sponsorships of parents and grandparents can take more than five years. The Harper Conservatives continue to demonstrate that family reunification is simply not a priority for this government.

New Democrats are committed to implementing an effective and efficient process for family reunification. In 2006, the NDP introduced the Once in a Lifetime Bill in the House of Commons that would allow any Canadian citizen or landed immigrant the opportunity to sponsor, once in their lifetime, a family member who does not fall under the family class as defined by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. This would include a son or daughter over the age of 22, an aunt or uncle, a sibling, a niece or nephew, or a first cousin. This bill would reunite families that, in many cases, have spent years apart.

Big corporations looking to cut labour costs are winning the fight to expand the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. This program allows these corporations to bring individuals from abroad to work in Canada for a short time. These workers come to Canada and often work for lower wages and under hazardous conditions that Canadian workers are unwilling to accept. In Alberta alone, there has been a 300% increase in the number of temporary foreign workers. In 2007, employers brought over 200,000 temporary workers to Canada to be used and sometimes abused and then sent home.

These workers have limited rights and are not eligible to bring their families to Canada when they finish their work. Once a contract is over, workers are sent home. For example, farm workers, even those working in Canada every year for ten years, still have no rights or the opportunity to raise their families in Canada. Poor working conditions, low wages and abuse are well documented; because workers who leave their employers are deported, they often remain silent.  The Experience Class is a new program that allows workers who have significant educational credentials to stay in Canada permanently. However manual labourers, such as farm workers and kitchen helpers, will not qualify even though they constitute the largest need in our labour market.  New Democrats are committed to stopping the expansion of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program  and changing the new Experience Class program so foreign workers in Canada have a chance to become citizens and bring their families to Canada.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) which is responsible for deportations spends $34 million every year to track down Canadian residents and deport them.  Whether you’re an undocumented construction worker who has lived, worked, and raised a family in Canada, or a spouse being sponsored by your partner awaiting a decision, the Harper Conservatives aren’t interested in fixing the system. The Auditor General recently reported that the CBSA makes arbitrary decisions, obtains incomplete information and is not very efficient or effective.

Only 10% of removal orders are against criminals living in Canada. However, the Harper Conservatives spend millions deporting skilled labourers and spouses with families. This is the case even though their employers or their loved ones spend thousands of dollars to bring them back into Canada, mostly successfully.

My colleague Olivia Chow passed two important motions through the House of Commons that the Harper government should respect. First, Parliament voted to support her motion to put a moratorium on deportations of undocumented workers and their families while a new policy is created.  More recently, her motion to immediately stop any deportations against spouses living in Canada who have outstanding applications for permanent residency passed in the House of Commons.

As New Democrats we are committed to regularizing the status of those who have been in Canada for years and are fully employed, stopping the deportation of spouses of Canadians while they wait for their immigration applications to be processed and cleaning up the Border Services Agency according to the Auditor General’s recommendations.

I am so proud to be a New Democrat.  In all of the issues, truly important to my community, it is New Democrats who are on the side of the people I serve.  It was the NDP caucus that said no our involvement in Afghanistan, put forward concrete proposals to help unemployed Canadians, maintain our universal health care system, help impoverished seniors, help families needing affordable child care, provide access to affordable housing and assist students who deserve affordable post secondary education.    It is New Democrats who have proposed the jobs strategy we need to build the environmentally sustainable and prosperous economy of the twenty-first century. These are the commitments to community in which I believe and for which all New Democrats will always work.

It is rather the indifference and the lack of action of complacent majorities that has contributed to the fall of many an Empire. Ours is a rapidly changing nation that needs more good men and women at the helm to make our passage safe through the perilous rapids of a tempestuous future.

Speaking for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have had to flee from nations at war, this is cold, hard fact. And speaking for those of us who settled in London, Ontario, we are most fortunate to be far from the far-fetched “realities” for which many Latin American nations have substituted what was once a peaceful and mostly bucolic coexistence.

In this first new edition we want to reflect on the possible connections between political power and the corrupt manipulation of reality as a way to explain what is happening in many countries to the south of our continent.

It is first of all necessary to define what “power” means for the purpose of these thoughts. The impulse toward dominance is a genetic condition that is not exclusive to the human race but is found as a driving force throughout the entire history of evolution of all live beings.

This inherent urge or instinctive drive leads to the exercise of power over others. This, in turn, leads to the figure of the dominant person, which in the human breed became an essential icon of its psyche.

The important thing to consider is that this natural motivation is necessary so that societies can produce people capable of guiding them down the paths of positive development and who can influence others in search of a higher standard for the benefit of the community.

However, this social and genetic drive can be distorted to such an extent that it becomes destructive and turns into a vehicle capable of producing serious social and psychological conflict.

The fact is that in order to satisfy the instinct for domination, the need arises to control persons or groups, and as this influence over a society grows it becomes more pleasing. Control is expressed in ways that are not very evident as they conform to more subtle social and cultural “standards”. Activities like political rallies, intellectual get-togethers and religious festivities are ways to express this hunger for control. If the urgency of a certain individual to influence others and enhance his sense of power is very acute, then several of these manifestations are combined in the effort to master the sense of domination.

In certain cases it all corresponds to pathological instances where personal satisfaction is the main goal of the dominant individual. The fixation in the search of praise from others is so great that these people are incapable of listening to anything other than words of tribute and admiration and will never admit anything that may suggest criticism of any kind.

In hand with these manifestations there is yet another typically human expression of the genetic drive towards domination that expresses itself as a magical belief in the omnipotent power of the leader.

For such leaders, anything becomes justifiable, even if it means having to manipulate “reality”. It is at this point that the personal desires of a character like Mussolini, or Hitler or many modern-day American, African and Middle Eastern “leaders” turn into blinding fixations that leave out all consideration for the welfare of families, institutions or societies. It is then that Intelligence is placed at the service of the pathological purposes of an individual who sees her/himself as the supreme and sole owner of essential truths. Suffice it to remember the many times in history -both past and recent- when the dormant, lethargic state of abandon of their societies have allowed it, many leaders and rulers around the world have turned into semi-gods at the service of flawed causes.

The pathological expressions of this drive towards absolute dominance will of course depend on the possibilities that society gives an individual to attain a status through the imposition of his flawed character.

This individual psychological process turns catastrophic when it mixes with a potentially harmful antisocial behavior, because then the leader will try to manipulate all the conditions he/she needs for the satisfaction of his/her underlying passions without much consideration for the moral or ethical implications of her/his actions. For these people, the ends will justify all means used for the achievement of their goals.

These negative processes can be overcome through democratic practices. In other words, all good citizens must participate in the process to make it work.

It is in consequence not only convenient but of the utmost importance that we Canadians be prepared to recognize and discourage the pathological use of power by our elected and/or potential leaders because tolerance of these deviations of purpose has catastrophic effects on the stability and legitimacy of the Nation’s system of empowerment..