There is a curious, almost rhythmic tic in the political life of the European Union. History marches forward, crises break like thunderstorms and yet Brussels appears wide-eyed with shock every single time. One could almost believe the EU is a perpetual amnesiac, constantly startled by the world outside its mahogany-lined conference rooms. For three decades, this cycle has repeated with the reliability of a metronome. But in recent years, the face of this habitual bewilderment has increasingly become that of a single figure, Ursula von der Leyen.
To be fair the Union’s short-sightedness did not begin with her. The European project has long suffered from a clogged peripheral vision. From sudden economic tremors to geopolitical quakes, the Union has shown an uncanny knack for waking up only after the roof has fallen in. It reacts; it flutters into emergency summits; it produces reams of dense prose. But foresight, the ability to smell the rain before the clouds gather, has remained a foreign tongue.
Over the last thirty years, the list of "unforeseen" disasters has grown embarrassingly long. Economic jitters that exposed a hollowed-out chest, security threats that revealed a profoundly relaxed posture and energy dependencies that were ignored until they became a chokehold. Each time, the same ritual followed, solemn faces, vows of "lessons learned" and a pinky-promise that Europe would never again be caught in its pyjamas.
And yet, here we are. What has shifted recently is that Europe’s political nervous system has become more centralised in tone. The Presidency of the European Commission has outgrown its clerk-like origins, evolving into a role that sets the Union’s pulse and projects its voice to the world. Consequently, the occupant of that office carries not just a ceremonial sceptre but a heavy rucksack of political accountability.
This brings us back to von der Leyen. Her tenure has been a marathon of fire-fighting; pandemics, geopolitical lightning strikes and a global order shifting beneath her feet. Some of these jolts were unavoidable, certainly. But a leader is not judged merely by how quickly they grab a bucket; they are judged by whether they made the building fireproof in the first place.
Too often, the European response has felt like frantic improvisation rather than a rehearsed symphony. Strategic dependencies, which analysts had shouted about for years, were allowed to fester. Institutional muscles remained slow and stiff. Policy fixes frequently arrived just as the patient was being wheeled into intensive care. When the dust finally settled, Brussels spoke with unearned bravado about "resilience" but the uncomfortable truth remained, resilience is merely the ability to take a punch; readiness is the ability to duck.
Critics across the political spectrum are now asking a stinging question, how can a Union of 450 million people possessed of such vast wealth and intellect, be so consistently blindsided by the bleeding obvious?
Part of the answer lies in the EU’s very DNA, which prioritises a slow, polite consensus over the undignified haste of clear action. Another part lies in its personality, a preference for the safety of a balanced sentence over the risk of a decisive stride.
But leadership is the Union’s heartbeat. The person atop the Commission is tasked with dragging the system forward, not merely tending to its inertia. When the same stumbles recur, when the red lights are ignored and the cupboards are found bare, responsibility cannot be evaporated into a mist of committees and councils.
Europe today faces a world far more predatory than the one it inhabited thirty years ago. The competition is sharper, the threats are breathing down its neck, and old friendships are fraying. In such a climate, complacency is a luxury the continent’s bank account can no longer support.
If the European Union wishes to stop being the victim of history, it must demand a different character from its leadership, it needs sharp eyes, a thick skin and the courage to act before a crisis forces its hand. Otherwise, Europe will continue its most exhausting tradition, learning the same hard lesson, over and over, only after the schoolhouse has burned down.
Blessed are you Earth. Bless us with stability. May we be as sovereign-strong as the Earth is round. Teach us to dwell perpetually within the truths of life’s cycles: grateful daily generous to our very bones with shining humility in the way of reciprocity To be without greed. To live without war.
Blessed are you moderation that we learn the dignity of discipline that we reinvent community and local sustainability. And prove to be trustworthy of nature being natural. And worthy of nature’s wisdom.
Blessed are you rain that bestows on us the joy of cleanliness – sufficiency for spring planting enough for autumn harvest. Blessed are you gentle rain. The fruits and the flowers and our two legged people have need of you.
Blessed are you wild herds flourishing among us freely across native grasslands on slopes of majestic mountains and in the teeming salmon-streams.
Blessed are you talking trees forests as tall as prayers. You give to our world (where children play and love is made and there is hope) the precious powerful gift of oxygen. Trees you keep our unpolluted air in sweet-breath. And there is atmospheric balance. Gracious thanks to tree! May the forests grow old millennium around us.
Blessed are you the pollen breathing voice of wind – the serenity of spiraled stars at night the hushed beatitude of garden meditations.
Blessed is your heart and mine and the miracle of heartbeats. Blessed are our senses and our souls. The dream of Earth’s healing that together we are dreaming. Like hobbits of the fabled shire. Like singing elves of mercy. Bless the work we are doing now. Bless what is yet to be done.
Blessed is this grounding place these intimate spaces and future generations – citizens and children – Earth walkers with genius to make the dream of Ecotopia come true.
Blessed are all of us whose signatures are on this constitutional document of our better selves for a viable, a reliable, and biocratic future.
*Ecotopia, the futuristic autonomous territory of Ecotopia West (a down to Earth habitable utopia made up of the current states of Washington, Oregon, California & Hawaii) inspired by the novel ECOTOPIA by Ernest Callenback, UC Berkeley.
David Sparenberg is a humanitarian and eco poet, an international essayist and storyteller. He published four eBooks with OVI Books (Sweden) and the Word Press in 2025, the fourth of which was TROUBADOUR & the Earth on Fire. David will have a fifth OVI eBook, MANIFESTO: Ecology, Spirituality & Politics in a Higher Octave, published in early spring, 2026. David Sparenberg lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but identifies as an Ecotopian & Citizen of Creation.
Don't miss David Sparenberg's latest eBook Troubadour and the Earth on fire , Download for free, HERE!
There is a certain kind of political moment when rhetoric begins to outrun reality. The words grow sharper, the accusations louder and suddenly what began as a policy disagreement morphs into a performance. That is the moment British politics seems to be entering now, as Kemi Badenoch’s attacks on Keir Starmer begin to sound less like serious criticism and more like an echo of Nigel Farage’s familiar brand of populist alarm.
Badenoch recently accused Starmer of having the “wrong principles and the wrong priorities,” pointing specifically to what she describes as a weak response to Iran. In her telling, Starmer is dithering while British servicemen and women face danger. It is a dramatic claim, the kind designed to create a sense of urgency and moral clarity. But drama in politics often tells us more about the speaker’s predicament than about the subject of the accusation.
The truth is that Badenoch’s argument feels less like a measured critique and more like a calculated pivot. The Conservative Party, bruised after years of internal division and electoral setbacks, finds itself squeezed between a resurgent Labour Party and the persistent gravitational pull of Nigel Farage’s populist politics. In that narrow space, the temptation is obvious, borrow the language, borrow the tone, and hope that some of Farage’s restless voters drift back.
But populism is rarely so easily borrowed. Farage’s political style thrives on stark contrasts and sweeping accusations. The establishment is weak. The elites are indifferent. The nation is perpetually on the brink. It is a formula designed to inflame frustration rather than resolve it. When Badenoch adopts a similar tone, framing Starmer’s foreign policy as weakness in the face of danger, she is stepping onto a stage already crowded with louder voices.
The irony is that the charge of “dithering” says little about the complex realities of foreign policy. Responding to tensions involving Iran is not a matter of issuing fiery statements or scoring political points. It involves coordination with allies, careful assessment of intelligence, and an understanding that escalation carries consequences measured in lives rather than headlines.
None of this makes for particularly satisfying campaign rhetoric. Complexity rarely does. Starmer, for his part, has built much of his leadership persona around caution and steadiness. Critics interpret that approach as hesitancy; supporters see it as restraint. In an era when politics often rewards theatrical outrage, restraint can appear dull. Yet it is precisely the quality that many voters, exhausted by years of political drama, say they want.
Badenoch’s attack therefore reveals a deeper tension within British conservatism. Is the path forward one of pragmatic governance, or one of populist confrontation? The party seems increasingly tempted by the latter, even if doing so means echoing narratives long championed by Farage.
But imitation carries risks. When mainstream politicians adopt the language of populism, they rarely outcompete the original. Instead, they legitimize the framework while reinforcing the perception that politics is little more than a contest of outrage.
In the end, voters may see through the performance. Accusing an opponent of weak principles is easy. Demonstrating stronger ones is harder. And in a world already thick with geopolitical tension, the last thing democratic politics needs is another chorus of exaggerated alarms masquerading as leadership.
A different way to check internal and external ...thoughts! 'Me My Mind & I' is a cartoon series by Patrick McWade. For more 'Me My Mind & I' HERE! For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
If one thing has become abundantly clear in the early days of the U.S. military campaign against Iran it’s this, the administration’s public strategy appears to be written in sand, blown constantly this way and that by the winds of television cycles, political calculation and reflexive bravado. What was billed as a narrowly tailored strike, justified by a handful of opaque warnings and old grievances, has quickly morphed into something far murkier, a blend of bellicose wish‑casting and improvised justification that no serious strategist would ever proclaim as “the plan.”
At the heart of this confusion are two very different impulses. On the one hand, there is the mercurial commander‑in‑chief, whose rhetoric shifts from “four to five weeks” of combat to declarations of “complete destruction and certain death,” often within the same day. On the other, there is his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, as resolute in his willingness to justify every fluctuation as purposeful as he is relentless in dismissing questions about coherent policy. Watching the two together is a bit like watching a reality‑TV host and his enthusiastic sidekick wing their way through a news cycle, sometimes confident, sometimes contradicting themselves and rarely anchored to anything resembling a clear endgame.
Consider, for example, the dizzying evolution of public rationales for the war. Early on, Trump and his allies framed the strikes as retaliation, a muscular response to years of Iranian provocations. Within days, the narrative shifted to something seemingly loftier, stamping out a missile threat, averting a nuclear nightmare and even, at times, implicitly encouraging an internal Iranian upheaval. But just as swiftly, defense officials publicly distanced themselves from the more politically fraught terminology like “regime change,” only for Trump to resurrect it in post‑strike speeches and social media posts. The result is not strategic clarity but strategic whiplash: allies, adversaries and the American public alike are left guessing what, exactly, success looks like.
This is more than rhetorical drift. The real danger is that these constantly shifting aims reveal an unsettling truth: there may not have been a serious, coherent strategy at all, at least not one that extends beyond a wish list scribbled on the back of a fast‑food napkin. A strategy, in the classical sense, is not merely what you say in press conferences, it is the articulation of achievable goals, clear pathways to reach them, and honest acknowledgment of the costs and risks involved. What we have seen instead is something closer to a grab‑bag of justifications, repurposed on the fly to fit whatever claim the administration feels will play best on prime‑time news.
And so we get serious talk about limited campaigns intertwined with rhetoric about total destruction; solemn claims of narrowly defined military objectives alongside casual flirtations with boots on the ground; proclamations that this won’t be “Iraq” paired with unmistakable echoes of it. If this is how policy is made in a modern superpower, it is a worrying spectacle. Incompetence can be forgiven when intentions are good and stakes low — but here, the stakes could not be higher.
History will judge whether the military actions against Iran were justified by events on the ground or driven by miscalculation and miscommunication. But already, it is becoming painfully obvious that what the administration calls strategy may have been nothing more than a litany of wishes, lifted from the headlines, shaped by television narratives and stitched together without any coherent sense of purpose. That is not leadership. It is improvisation
“To create is to live twice.” - Albert Camus “I used to think the goal was to be loved. Now I know it’s to be understood.” - Emma Thompson
We are kind to each other The cooking utensil to the other cooking utensils in the drawer The spoon to the other spoons, yes, everything must have its place, every trace of prey, each invisible doorway into the kitchen What is courage, what is increase? It is only a place to start The garden is cool, the tree’s shade My father’s voice I murmur a response The washing hangs on the line My brother’s daughter strums a toy guitar, we have a butternut pizza for supper We can’t get the boys out of the angry green sea, nor can we get them out of the jacuzzi The white gaze lies dormant in the shade like our brown bodies We put a plaster on her finger the wound is bloodless now I make iced matcha lattes for myself and my dad I lick the white moustache off my upper lip Overnight I have turned into a capitalist My fingers into stars, my legs into a wave, the bead of the presenter’s tongue on the television into a fig The current moves through me This time it’s personal It catches the light of the fire inside my father, inside all of us The smell of burning meat, drumsticks The kitchen is time and memory Legs are tanned, burned by the sun’s time and memory The boys and my sister play a board game My mother screams and screams at me The room grows quiet A pink geranium grows out of my mother’s throat Something within me is crushed like a pill Slowly the sun in my mother’s eyes turns into a mocking face, a laugh Its poison is killing me slowly. She is just a woman and I am just a woman The moment passes The child starts to laugh too because my mother is laughing I break, I break A wave flows into me and I lose consciousness It’s evening The game continues A woman walks by the house with her dog The dog barks There’s a white feather in my mouth It tastes like snow
World Day Against Cyber Censorship arrives each year as a reminder that the internet, once hailed as the great equalizer of speech, remains vulnerable to the oldest instinct of power: control the narrative, control the people.
In the early days of the web, the promise seemed almost revolutionary. Borders would fade, citizens would bypass state media and the flow of information would overwhelm the machinery of propaganda. That dream has not disappeared, but it has been steadily challenged by a new coalition of forces: authoritarian governments, populist strongmen, and powerful tech platforms that increasingly shape the digital public square.
Across the world, governments are discovering that censorship no longer requires clumsy book burnings or shuttered printing presses. Today it is subtler and far more efficient. A law framed as “online safety” here. A pressure campaign on tech companies there. A quiet algorithmic tweak that buries dissent beneath a mountain of distraction.
The rise of far-right politics in many Western democracies has complicated this landscape further. Populist movements often present themselves as champions of “free speech,” railing against so-called elite censorship. Yet when in power, the same movements frequently attempt to intimidate journalists, undermine independent media and label critical reporting as fake or treasonous.
The phenomenon surrounding MAGA politics in the United States illustrates the paradox. The movement claims to defend open expression, yet it thrives on attacks against the very institutions that sustain it: investigative journalism, fact-checking, and the messy but essential accountability of a free press. When the credibility of journalism collapses, the loudest voices win by default.
And then there is the role of the tech titans who now sit astride global communication networks.
Few figures symbolize this tension more clearly than Elon Musk. His self-declared mission to defend free speech online has earned both admiration and deep skepticism. On one hand, the argument that digital platforms should resist excessive moderation resonates with legitimate concerns about corporate control over public discourse.
On the other hand, the reality is more complicated. When a single billionaire controls a platform where political narratives are amplified or suppressed by opaque algorithms, the question is no longer simply about censorship. It is about power. Private power. Unelected power.
The digital town square cannot truly be free if it is shaped by the impulses of governments on one side and tech oligarchs on the other.
Cyber censorship in the 21st century is not just about blocked websites in authoritarian states. It is about the erosion of trust, the manipulation of visibility, and the subtle throttling of inconvenient truths. It happens when journalists are drowned in coordinated harassment campaigns. It happens when platforms reward outrage and conspiracy over verification. It happens when political leaders encourage citizens to treat facts as partisan weapons.
The danger is cumulative. Every time independent journalism is discredited, every time transparency is replaced by propaganda, the internet inches closer to becoming what authoritarian leaders have always wanted: a tool not of liberation, but of control.
World Day Against Cyber Censorship should therefore be less about celebration and more about vigilance. The fight for digital freedom is no longer confined to distant regimes or obvious dictatorships. It is unfolding in democracies, in boardrooms, and inside the code that determines what billions of people see every day.
Free speech online will not survive on slogans alone. It requires institutions strong enough to defend truth, journalists courageous enough to pursue it, and citizens wise enough to recognize that the greatest threat to freedom is rarely announced as censorship.
On 12 March 1930, Mahatma Gandhi began a twenty-six day, two hundred mile march to the sea with some 80 members of his Satyagraha Ashram located near Ahmedabad. This was his first large scale campaign within India, drawing international attention, especially in England and the USA. Today when non-violent methods have gained victories in the Arab world and peaceful protests in Libya have developed into armed confrontation, it is useful to look at Gandhi’s first important effort in India with its combination of spiritual and political means.
When Gandhi returned to India from his work in South Africa in January 1915, he was known among the political elite of India for his South African campaigns, but he was not part of any existing Indian organization and had no political base of his own. He was confronted with three basic facts of life: First, the world was at war and English troops were heavily engaged.Secondly, the British administration in India (who also governed what is now Burma, decision-making being done from Calcutta), were preoccupied with stability and not with the nature of colonial decentralization. A fairly liberal Indian Council Act of 1909 had given some aspects of representative government at the level of provincial governments and most British administrators thought that this was “going far enough for the moment.”
Thirdly, the one major Indian national political movement, the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 by the English Theosophist, A.O. Hume, former high administrator who died in 1915 just as Gandhi returned, was made up of elite, educated Indians such as its later President, Motilal Nehru, father of Jawaharlal Nehru but with little impact among the Indian masses.
As in South Africa, with Tolstoy Farm, Gandhi began his work in India with the creation of an ashram, a small intimate community in which life could be disciplined both on a spiritual and a physical level. Some of the members of the ashram were relatives and others had been with Gandhi in South Africa. Life consisted of a routine of prayer with reading of scriptures of different faiths, singing and talks, of manual labour, of social service to nearby villages and training in non-violence. Ashrams are part of religious life in India, but it must be noted that none of the Hindu religious leaders who had their own ashrams joined Gandhi’s non-violent efforts, nor invited Gandhi to join them.
Gandhi became a Mahatma — a great soul — to ordinary Indians and to Indian intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first to publicly use the term, but not to Hindu religious leaders.At the ashram, Gandhi steadily Hinduized his public persona and his manner of life. He quoted from Hindu religious-political reformers such as the founder of the Arya Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati (1824 -1883) and the Bengali reformer Vivekananda (1863-1902) who was one of the first Indian religious leaders to go to the USA. Gandhi spent nearly 15 years in preparation for the Salt March in training his close followers, in developing contacts throughout the country and in trying to understand the issues which would move people to action. It is from his Satyagraha Ashram that Gandhi at sixty-one years of age set out for the Salt March, early morning of 12March after a long evening prayer meeting at which some 2000 people participated. Gandhi closed by saying to his band of 79 marchers, “I have faith in our cause and the purity of our weapons… God bless you all and keep off all obstacles from the path in the struggle that begins tomorrow.
Let this be out prayer.”Gandhi had been for some months before March thinking about what issue he could select around which to organize a campaign of non-violence that would have national significance, would be meaningful to many Indians and send a strong signal to the British administrators that their rule would no longer be tolerated. The decision-making body of the Congress Party with which Gandhi had an on-again-off-again relationship called the “Working Group” had met for a week over New Year’s Day, 1930.
Gandhi drew up a grab bag of eleven demands around which he thought that Congress could organize non-violent campaigns. The first was the total prohibition of making and drinking alcohol and the eleventh was that Indians should be able to buy fire arms, there being a total prohibition on the sale of fire arms. Among the eleven demands was the abolition of the Salt Tax. The Working Group thought that the non-payment of taxes could be done without violence but had no idea as to how to carry this out in a dramatic way. Gandhi returned to his ashram and kept largely to himself in meditation. Then, as Gandhi later wrote, the answer came to him “like a flash”
The importance of intuition — of ideas that come as a flash once the form has been created in another dimension — came to Gandhi largely through the writings of the American New Thought writer Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958). His parents were from New England and named him after Emerson. Kathryn Tidrich has written an interesting new biography of Mahatma Gandhi: Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006, 380pp.). Tidrich puts the accent on the spiritual and intellectual contacts that Gandhi had when a law student in London and in his years as a lawyer and non-violent activist in South Africa. She highlights the friendship with Edward Maitland and Gandhi’s connections with the Esoteric Christian Union founded by Anna Kingsford and Maitland in 1891. It is probably Maitland who introduced Gandhi to the writings of Ralph Waldo Trine.
It is from Trine’s writings that Gandhi received the term “soul power or soul force “ – the term Gandhi used as a translation into English of his Indian term satyagraha. Satyagraha is more often translated today by the term nonviolence, but there was already in use in India the term ahimsa— a meaning non and hinsa, violence. Gandhi wanted another term that was more active, and he took from Trine the term soul force.
As Kathryn Tidrich notes “All Trine’s books contained the same message: spiritual power – also termed ‘thought power’ and ‘soul power’ – could be acquired by making oneself one with God, who was immanent, through love and service to one’s fellow men …The Christ he followed was one familiar to Gandhi — the supreme spiritual exemplar who showed men the way to union with the divine essence. Trine promised that the true seeker, fearless and forgetful of self-interest, will be so filled with the power of God working through him that ‘as he goes here and there, he can continually send out influences of the most potent and powerful nature that will reach the uttermost parts of the world.”
Gandhi seems to have remained interested in Trine. He read his My Philosophy and My Religion (1921) in Yeravda jail in 1923, and in 1933, as he recovered from his 21-day fast for self-purification, he observed that the fast had sprung from ‘a yearning of the soul to merge in the divine essence. How far I have succeeded, how far I am in tune with the Infinite, I do not know.’ In Tune with the Infinite was the title of Trine’s best known book. In Tune With the Infinite or Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty (New York: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1899, 175pp.)
For Trine, thought was the way that a person came into tune with the Infinite. “Each is building his own world. We both build from within and we attract from without. Thought is the force with which we build, for thoughts are forces. Like builds like and like attracts like. In the degree that thought is spiritualized does it become more subtle and powerful in its workings. This spiritualizing is in accordance with law and is within the power of all.“Everything is first worked out in the unseen before it is manifested in the seen, in the ideal before it is realized in the real, in the spiritual before it shows forth in the material. The realm of the unseen is the realm of cause. The realm of the seen is the realm of effect. The nature of effect is always determined and conditioned by the nature of its cause.“The great central fact in human life is coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with this infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work.
In just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange disease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength.”For Gandhi, the Salt Tax, because unjust and touching especially the poor, had already been abolished within what Trine called “the realm of cause”. Gandhi had the intuition to see that salt was then freely available for all who would take it from the sea of life (either the actual sea or from rock salt on land). Into the realm of effect one had to walk to manifest this change, and so the march to the Dandi beach on the Gulf of Camby began.
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Rene Wadlow, Representative to the UN, Geneva, Association of World Citizens
