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The Clock Strikes Christmas – An Alternative Christmas Tale

This piece originilly appeared on V’s blog

“You have to understand, we didn’t want this” said Berry nervously. “Every elf in the workshop chose this job because we are passionate about bringing hope, joy and laughter to people all around the world-“

“Yet here you are, threatening to strike days before Christmas.” said Santa, stroking his beard. Something about the movement made Berry nervous, reminding him of a Bond villain stroking a cat. “Happy to disappoint every child in the world, and for what? To make some kind of political point?”

Berry tried to swallow his nerves. He wished more than anything that it hadn’t been him that drew the short candy cane.

“With respect sir, it isn’t about the politics. Whether we agree with the expansion or not, things just aren’t workable as they are.” He scrambled around for the words to explain, words that would make him understand. Santa rarely visited the shop floor, preferring instead to sit in the grotto with his sexy secretary Mrs Claus and some of the perkier elves, counting out cookies and mince pies and basking in the adoration of the masses. He rarely saw the worker elves sobbing with exhaustion as they tried to work out how to craft the latest piece of gadgetry.

“We’ve become so focused on the side venture that we are losing sight of our original mission statement.”

Santa snorted, then leaned back in his seat, tucking his thumbs into his red braces.

“We have to move with the times Ber,” he said. “Joy and hope are nice, of course, but that’s not what the modern consumer wants. They want HD ready, virtual reality compatible real time gaming experiences. They want the latest smartphone, suitable for socialising and work on the go. They want status symbols, material proof they are loved. The market has spoken.”

He said it with an air of finality that booked no argument, as if he had said “it is written” or “God wills it.” Berry took a deep breath, clenched his bladder against Santa’s thousand yard stare and said;

“With respect, we don’t serve the market. We never have” he flinched as Santa leant forward, then ploughed on when he realised the big man was just taking a fat cigar out of the gold plated case on the desk between them. “We serve Christmas. Our primary job has always been to gift enough hope, compassion and joy to the world to see them through the year. We can’t do that when we are tied up making drones and smart phones.”

Santa chewed on the cigar, raising a single, fluffy eyebrow. Berry tried to fill the silence.

“We’ve always been about bringing people what they really need,” he said. “It’s the reason most of us came to work at North Pole Incorporated. I mean, we could cope with the workload when all we had to make was a small wooden train and a yo-yo. But this is beyond a joke, it’s all too big, this isn’t what our job is all about.”

“Your job,” Santa said, “is to make whatever the fuck I tell you to make. Hope? Joy? Laughter? Outdated concepts not fit for a modern workforce.”

“But it’s our primary purpo-“

“But nothing. Wittering on about love and peace like they are saleable commodities. Going on like the humans are the important part of this-“

“But sir,” Berry interrupted, trying not to pee in his stripey tights, “the humans are the only important part of this. They are the reason the firm was founded. Joy is what Christmas is all about-“

“Wrong.” Santa sat forward in his chair suddenly. “You know what Christmas is all about? Me. I am Christmas. It’s about what I say it’s about. And I say it’s about $14billion sponsorship deals from coca cola. It’s about $200 billion per year contracts with toys r us. It’s about Samsung and Apple entering into a bidding war with each other over who gets my endorsement. You think people care about joy and love and goodwill toward men? People care about going one better than their neighbours. No one cares about our invisible gifts. People want things they can hold, and show off and sell on eBay.”

“But without our gift of hope, humanity will fall into darkness…”

“I’m not saying don’t give them the hope. We will do that alongside the material gifts, like always.”

“We can’t keep up with the demand, sir.” Berry said “We don’t even have time to pee! Holly gave birth on the shop floor, she was too scared to stop work. When the Festive Joy-O-Matic crushed Buddy to death, we didn’t dare shut the production line down. We had to return the body to his family in a set of jumbo sized crackers. We have no joy to give. We just can’t go on like this!”

A pair of blonde, giggly she-elves burst in, but when they saw Berry, they stopped, uncertain of whether to come in or not. Santa raised a finger at them to wait. Berry eyed them distastefully. Tall, leggy wood-elves had no place here at the pole. They weren’t suited to the climate like the small, pointy eared snow elves that traditionally ran the workshop. They were too flighty to work the shop floor, and too noisy to fill stockings. No one knew why Santa bothered employing them at all.

“This just isn’t sustainable sir.”

“Listen here you little shit” Santa growled. “We might have started out as a two-bit not for profit, scraping together a living on stale mince pies, but I’ve moved on. I’m a someone now.” He beckoned to the wood elves. “and I’m not going back to being a small time demigod scraping a living in the snow. You can do what you want as regards hope and joy and all that shit. As long as you keep my profit margins up. I have shareholders to appease.”

He pulled the identikit blondes onto his lap.

“You’re dismissed Berry-“

“But-“

“Berry. Either run my corporation how I say, or I’ll sack the lot of you. It’d be cheaper to outsource your jobs to China anyway. Go ahead, give me an excuse. You think no one wants your job?”

Santa fixed Berry with his ice blue stare. What more could he say? Berry was defeated.

“Understood sir”

“Good. I make that 16 minutes you’ve been in my office. You can make that up at the end of your shift.”

Berry sagged, sighed, and trudged out to give his coworkers the news.

“Now then my lovelies” Santa said, nuzzling into one of the elves necks. “Which one of you is naughty, and which one is nice?”

Twenty Four

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Wow! What an advent it has been. If you’ve been following along with Ungagged’s Activist Advent, you’ve done some amazing things, raised awareness and even saved lives.

It may not feel like individually you have made a massive difference but collectively we can apply pressure, raise each others voices and force change.

Today’s task is equally important. This month you’ve run around shopping, wrapping gifts, preparing food, put other people first and you’ve found time to follow along with this, doing what you can to make the world a better place. You are an absolute super hero! You must be exhausted. So today’s task is to have a self care day.

Take some time to chill, in whatever way leaves you most relaxed, even if only for half an hour. If you frazzle yourself out, you can’t help other people.

Be as kind to yourself as you are to other people. You deserve it.

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Merry Christmas from the whole Ungagged Team

If we’ve inspired you to keep it going, we’d love to hear all about your acts of kindness and activism. Whether you have found an amazing local charity, activist group or cause, are performing small acts of kindness to improve your community, or are writing to your MP on a regular basis about issues that matter to you, we want to hear about it. Tell us what you are up to, tag us in pictures videos and statuses on our Facebook or twitter and we will share the best ones.

Image by Debra Torrance

Written by Victoria Pearson

Death of a Vampire

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For far too long we have lived under the rule of the Parasite.
For too long the Parasite has dictated to us who we are and what we are capable of.
For too long the Parasite has ruled over a mental wasteland of his own creating.

And in order to make us subservient to his twisted aims of total spectrum dominance the parasite has poisoned the waters, infected our minds with his own perversities and denied the existence of anything beyond the corporeal body-state, whilst simultaneously launching a never ending vicious and ruthless war against the human soul he repeatedly informs us does not exist.
He has, bit-by-bit removed the free-thinker, the philosopher, the wise man from centre-stage; replaced him with a gibbering, fame-obsessed body fixated retard, and held this idiot up as a role-model. And many have aped the self-concerned moron, even tried to outdo him on the stupidity-stakes, hoping that by simply being more stupid, more vain, more sexually-deviant, they will rise to the same stage as their parasitically-created hero. And yet –

‘Imagination is a glimpse of the divine’
William Blake

-These insipid mimics fail to realise that fame is not democratic. It is an orchestrated spell intended to take us away from our own potentialities. It is a closed-club, existing only to offer us a ready-made escape mechanism, its ultimate aim is to restrict our innate desire to self-create, and utilise the endless possibilities of our potentially-boundless imaginations.
We are prisoners of the limitations set for us by our parasitical, self-appointed master.
In order to transcend our limitations all we have to do is realise that our master is not like us, despite the illusion of superiority, he is, by definition a ridiculous inferior.
His only strength is his psychotically-relentless pursuit of self-advancement. Having sapped our desires to self-advance is it any wonder that he has the power to dominate us?
It is merely our surrender that makes us slaves.

‘The greedy, ugly people are not like us,
They don’t feel the love,
That she and I would die without’
Hefner.

And as for those life-affirming sensations of intense bliss and contentment – the sense of ‘outrageous good-fortune’ that breaks through our lives oh too rarely, and yet when it does, whispers to us of a divine truth long-forgotten – well, once we come to the realisation that the Parasite is incapable of such life-affirming feelings, that he is in fact completely devoid of empathy and contentment, then we realise the tragedy of his existence – the sheer, hollow ringing emptiness of a man who denies the existence of the human soul, chiefly because it is absent in himself.

Suddenly, upon this realisation, we begin to see the man behind the curtain. A man who best befits the old saying: ‘The small man cuts off the heads of others, in order to make himself seem taller’.
-Then, if we have any autonomy left at all, we refuse to stand in line for the chopping-block. Or to revert to an earlier metaphor, we refuse to continue offering our necks to the vampire.
And there is a reason that myth says that a vampire has to be willingly invited into your home in order to drain your energies and feed off of your life-force: we must first acquiesce to our own surrender. In order for the vampire/parasite to hold dominion over our souls, we must first give our permission.

But here’s the good part—-in the last years, months, weeks, days…the Parasite has been exposed on so many fronts for the vile predator that he is. Each day brings another revelation. And with each revelation a thousand more souls reawaken from the drugged slumber he has held them under. We are in the middle of the much-anticipated ‘acceleration’ that Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson and countless others had predicted and expected. It is happening right now.
The masks are falling to the floor, the internet is uniting like-minded souls across the globe, and in doing so is de-facto releasing the souls themselves, and the internet is merely the forerunner, moving us toward an understanding of our true oneness. It is an important step towards the soon-to-occur Unification of the Cosmic Mind, which will open the way for a telepathic-interconnectedness that will ultimately shrug the vampire from our necks, and reduce the parasite to dust.
You can feel it now.
Among the debris of a tumbling, crumbling Empire of Lies, you can feel it.
Despite the day-to-day sordid revelations and exposes of the Predator’s vile and endlessly deceitful practices, you inwardly know that these are merely the death throes, the dying gasps of the Vampire Parasite whose long-held claims to immortality are being exposed for the lie they always were.
There is another myth about the Vampire; he withers and dies when exposed to the full glare of sunlight.
Well, an awakened populace will burn with the strength of a thousand suns.
So you better look out Parasite —
Coz we are the light.

Twenty Three

The Trussell Trust reports food bank use is at an all time high, with over a million 3 day emergency food parcels given out to families in the UK over the last year.

Thirteen million people live below the poverty line in the UK, with individuals going hungry every day for a range of reasons, from benefit delays to receiving an unexpected bill on a low income. Stopping hunger is about more than food though, which is why the trust work with foodbanks to provide a range of new services like money advice and Fuel Banks, helping people to break the cycle of poverty.

It is shocking that we even need foodbanks in the UK at all, and their use is exploding. It has been reported that the DWP is leaving new claimants weeks in between being considered eligible for benefits and receiving their first payments and, instead of offering social care grants or bridging loans to make up the shortfall, they are referring people to foodbanks. In the Tories austerity Britain, hunger is rife. Several vulnerable people have been reported as starving to death this year, and record numbers of children are suffering the effects of malnutrition.

Foodbanks partner with a wide range of care professionals such as doctors, health visitors, social workers and police to identify people in crisis and issue them with a foodbank voucher. Foodbank clients then bring their voucher to a foodbank centre where it can be redeemed for three days’ emergency food. Volunteers meet clients over a warm drink or free hot meal and are able to signpost people to agencies able to solve the longer-term problem.

Foodbanks wouldn’t be able to function without schools, churches, businesses and individuals who donate non-perishable, in-date food to foodbanks, and the 40,000+ strong army of volunteers who sort through it all and pack it into boxes ready for people in need.

There are lots of ways you can help support Trussell Trust- from shopping at or donating to their charity shops, donating to their Christmas appeal, donating food at your local collection point, or donating money to Trussell Trust.

You can volunteer to help pack, deliver and distribute food, or even set up your own foodbank.

As ever, we encourage you to write to your MP and tell them that over a million people relying on foodbanks is not acceptable in the UK, in 2016.

Image by Debra Torrance

Written by Victoria Pearson

Twenty Two

Today we are asking you to spare a thought for those who know that this will be their final Christmas, and the nurses, doctors, carers, cleaners and caterers who give up Christmas with their families to make sure that people recieve the care they deserve at the end of their lives.

There are so very many outstanding organisations and charities we could highlight that work tirelessly to give people dignity in death, and we encourage you to find out about any that are local to you and the different ways to support them. We have chosen three to highlight here.

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St Margaret of Scotland Hospice is the oldest and the largest hospice in Scotland. They not only support patients with advanced life-limiting illness and older people with complex medical and nursing needs in their Clydebank hospice, they also offer Out Patient Facilities, Community Specialist Palliative Care and Counselling Services.

One of our contributors has experience of the care and compassion shown at St Margaret of Scotland Hospice, and how the staff there helped a dearly loved relative end their days with dignity and without pain.

You can support St Margaret of Scotland Hospice by getting involved with their events, visiting their shops, or donating to their shops. If you’re inspired to do even more, you could volunteer.

♡

49,000 children and young people are living in the UK with health conditions that are life-shortening or life-threatening—and the number is rising. That’s one in every 270 children—the equivalent of one in every school. Together for Short Lives are the leading UK charity that speaks out for all children and young people who are expected to have short lives. Together with everyone who provides care and support to these children and families,they are here to help them have as fulfilling lives as possible and the very best care at the end of life.

They also support all the professionals, children’s palliative care services and children’s hospices that deliver lifeline care to children and families across the UK.

You can help by donating to their Christmas Appeal 2016 , taking part in one of their fundraising events or by volunteering.

♡

Rennie Grove Hospice Care is a charity providing care and support for patients in Herts and Bucks diagnosed with life-limiting illness, who wish to die at home, and is another charity close to one of our contributors hearts.

Through their 24/7 responsive hospice at home service and day services they make it possible for people to choose how and where they want to be cared for towards the end of life. The support they provide for families both during the illness and after bereavement is very valuable to the families they support.

Our contributor said;

The Iain Rennie nurses helped keep my grandfather comfortable through emphysema and the final stages of cancer, but their care went beyond that. They were on-call at all times and were an unobtrusive but calming presence through the very private moment of what, thanks to them, was a comfortable, dignified death. They weren’t just a support to him, but to the whole family. The care, compassion and support they gave my grandmother was invaluable both while she was caring for my grandfather and through her bereavement. We could never thank them enough.

You can find out about the many ways to donate to Rennie Grove Hospice Care here.

Image by Debra Torrance

Written by Victoria Pearson

First We Take Manhattan

Guess who’s in my news feed?

The Jews, the Jews, the Jews.

I’m being told to wake up to the Jews.

But all I need to wake up

is the chill wind at my neck and the sirens.

Still, you tell me Leonard Cohen wrote

First We Take Manhattan

to warn us that the Zionists are taking over.

And you say you really admire Leonard Cohen.

What’s the implication?

Do you want to claim Cohen as a Jew-hating Jew?

Here come the links, the YouTube reflux

rehabilitating Adolf Hitler.

It’s meme-legitimate: Not Responsible

for World War Two.

You tell me Rothschild wrote off the Titanic.

Did he purchase the iceberg cheap from a trader?

Or did he steal the iceberg

and underpay a century of crisis actors?

Did they fake the moonshot with Kubrick using

that cryogenic Zionist iceberg?

Then Rothschild snorted down his Semite proboscis

so hooked, so crooked, according to the cartoon

of dirty bankers published by Anonymous,

sexy, scary Fawkes-masked Anonymous.

And, dependable, reliable, those ancient dollar dynasties

still cackle. Isn’t that a comfort?

And wake up, sheeple, wake up spaceship-full

of fools believing Titanic was Titanic.

That ship full of shekels was really the Olympic.

You say they switched sister ships for their own ends.

You say they switch it all for their own ends.

You say they spread the lie of their own ends.

You tell me, you tell me

you fucking tell me

that it never happened. Six million?

A Zionist lie to the Jewish Question.

Old money, old tricks. No question.

You say Leonard Cohen foretold 911.

It took 16 years but he knew it was coming.

He was in it up to his sweet circumcision

with the Jewish cabal, Talmud rabbis,

Zionist bankers, Hollywood producers,

Israeli politicians, ordinary Jews and white race traitors.

We should have executed Mr Leonard Cohen.

Leonard Cohen killed two-and-a-half thousand.

We should at the very least have sued him

before they claimed he died.

You stick a Star of David on Albert Einstein.

Talmud Jew, you say. Liars, all liars.

Next we take Berlin.

Twenty one

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We have the vote, the right to drive, contraceptive choices and more choices with regards to our education and employment prospects than ever before, so we are often told that feminism is no longer necessary in the UK; the battle has been won. We are equal now, ladies, time to put our feet up and have a nice cuppa.

Except that if we scratch the surface, even slightly, we begin to see a very different picture emerge.

Still now, in the uk in 2016, women earn significantly less than men in the same role, with the same qualifications and experience. This is across the board, for women in part time unskilled work, and women in full time, highly paid positions alike, and affects Women of Colour significantly more.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was an issue of education or qualifications, but that gap actually widens the more skilled a WoC is.

Britain has one of the worst records on gender equality at work, according to a new report that highlighted the high pay gap for working mothers.

Researchers ranked Britain 11th out of 18 countries – behind the US, France, Spain and Sweden – in a league table that took into account pay, board level representation and the gap between male and female employment, among other factors.

From November 10th this year, women effectively stopped earning and started working for free, compared to their male counterparts.

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Even in Iceland, the country many experts consider the world’s leader in gender equity, the gender pay gap persists. Women employees make 14 to 18 percent less than men in Iceland — a discrepancy that unions and women’s organizations say means women effectively work for free after 2:38 p.m. In October, in protest of the pay gap, thousands of Icelandic women decided to work the hours their pay merited — by leaving their workplaces promptly when the clock struck 2:38 and taking to the streets to show that without women workers – doing unpaid labour in the home and shouldering most of the childcare – society ceases to function.

The government did try to make childcare more equal – in order to benefit fathers and babies as well as limit damage to mother’s careers by allowing them to take less time off work. Shared Parental Leave has been a spectacular failure though – with as few as 1% of new fathers taking the leave. This is mostly because to do so reduces the mother’s time at home with baby (with WHO guidelines recommending infants are breastfed for their first year, a return to work is neither comfortable nor practical during that time), but also because 50% of men surveyed thought that taking time off to bond with their babies would damage their careers.

Women are culturally expected to take a career break and raise the children, but are also vilified for doing so. The single full time mother is sneered at, accused of being a scrounger, told she should have kept her legs shut if she couldn’t afford kids without help from the state. The single full time dad is praised as some kind of hero at the school gate, offered support from the other parents on the school run, told how brilliant he is for giving up his job to care for his children. The mother in full time work faces a constant guilt trip for not spending enough time with her children, putting own career before school plays and sports days. The father in full time work is lauded for providing for his family. Mums just can’t do right for doing wrong.

We claim that society is equal – yet America has just voted for an outright misogynist who openly admits sexually assaulting women, rating women on their looks, and has made some seriously questionable comments about his own daughter.

We claim society is equal – yet Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon have more column inches dedicated to their footwear and clothing choices than their policies.

We claim society is equal – yet as many as 1 in 3 women in the UK have been sexually assaulted.

Still, at least it’s christmas. We can all have a nice holiday and put our feet up.

Except that when it comes to labour division, Christmas is probably the most misogynistic time of year. In the vast majority of cases (and we know that it’s not in all cases, of course, before we are buried under a barrage of #NotAllMen!) women will shoulder the brunt of the Christmas work. Women do the majority of the gift shopping, food shopping, Christmas baking, present wrapping, organising the calendar to see all the relatives, cleaning the house to Great Auntie Muriel’s standards, wrapping presents, writing and sending cards, making sure all the little darlings look suitably presentable for visiting the grandparents, making or buying nativity costumes, Christmas meal cooking, Christmas washing up, mediating disputes between children, mediating disputes between Nan and drunk Uncle Tom, putting the house back together after Christmas…and that’s on top of our usual duties.

how to help

Gender inequality is a massive issue, and we aren’t going to fix it overnight. That said, there are still lots of small ways you can make a difference.

If you live in the US, you can support the million women expected to strike on January 20th in protest at Trump’s inauguration (details here)

In the UK you can support Women’s Aid Women’s Aid, a charity that aims to offer practical support for women and children in a variety of ways, from volunteering, donating goods, adding your voice to campaigns or running for Women’s Aid. You can find out more here.

The Everyday Sexism Project website has a really comprehensive list of support organisation services (here) which you can support financially or through volunteer work – or find support from yourself. The list covers support for men as well as women and covers everything from rape crisis, domestic violence support and support for victims of FGM to support for LGBT+ people, support with housing and support for refugees.

Remember that misogyny is, in many cases, considered a hate crime. Don’t stand by, call it out. You wouldn’t tolerate your friends and relatives being racist, bigoted or ableist, so don’t stand for them being sexist either.

Help keep the women around you safe this festive season. That means not leaving women, intoxicated or otherwise, to walk home alone at night, helping women keep an eye on their drinks while out celebrating, and ensuring the women in your life have a safe, reliable way to get home ofrom an evening.

And remember, Christmas is for women too. Heave yourself out of that armchair and go peel some spuds. Run the hoover round before Great Auntie Muriel’s arrives. Do some of the wrapping (the kids wont mind if it looks a mess). Women put a lot of pressure on themselves to make Christmas perfect. Remind them that all we need for a perfect Christmas is to be around the people we love. Tell the women in your life what a fantastic job they are doing, and how lucky you are to have them. Christmas is stressful, but being appreciated makes all the difference.

And remember the golden rule – whoever does the cooking automatically gets out of doing the dishes – even at Christmas!

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The ungagged advent team want to make it clear that we are very aware that there are lots of guys who take on caring roles in the family, work just as hard as women and are victims of gendered violence. We do understand that there are lots of ways the patriarchy impacts negatively on men – from boy’s increased risk of suicide, the lack of provision for male victims of rape and abuse, through to toxic stereotypes about what it means to be male and self-worth being tied to earning power. We couldn’t do the whole of feminism justice in a single ungagged advent piece though, which is why we chose to focus on just a few issues for this piece. We are likely to add much more on a range of topics within the subject of feminism to our Ungagged Writing page in the new year.

If you are (or know) a man experiencing domestic violence or abuse you can get help from the Men’s Advice Line (0808 801 0327) or the Mankind Intitative (01823 334244 [including helpline services for deaf people using text relay]) and if you are a man seeking information, support or counselling after being raped or sexually abused, you can contact Survivors UK (0845 122 1201).

Image by Debra Torrance

Written by Victoria Pearson

Beinn Irbhinn

Beinn Irbhinn (anglicised: Ben Irvine) is a Scottish socialist, originally from Greenock. He is known in Greenock for his activity while a member of the SSP, where he campaigned for the socialist case for Scottish independence, as well as being vocal on issues such as fuel poverty in Inverclyde and strongly opposing Inverclyde Council’s insidious cuts to local jobs and services. During this time he was also the host of a local radio show “The Voice of Scottish Socialism”, on the now defunct Inverclyde Radio.

In the last few years Beinn has “gone international”. He has been working in the former Soviet Union, mostly in Russia but also spending time in some of the other countries in the region. While over there Beinn has been active with various left wing groups, including communist and socialist parties.

You can read more from Beinn on his blog

Frank Waln

14141722_565439646978214_8311533229118627340_n — Frank Waln

Photo by Tomas Karmelo Amaya

Frank Waln is an award winning Sicangu Lakota Hip Hop artist, producer, and performer from the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. A recipient of the Gates Millennium Scholarship, Waln attended Columbia College Chicago where he received a BA in Audio Arts and Acoustics. Waln’s awards include three Native American Music Awards, the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development 2014 Native American 40 Under 40, and the 2014 Chicago Mayor’s Award for Civic Engagement. He has been featured on Buzzfeed’s 12 Native Americans Who Are Making a Difference, USA Today, ESPN, and MTV’s Rebel Music Native America. Waln has written for various publications including Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society and The Guardian. Frank Waln travels the world spreading hope and inspiration through performance and workshops focusing on self-empowerment and the pursual of dreams.

Find out more on his website

Or follow him on facebook

Twitter

Or instagram

Twenty

Sectarianism is defined as: ‘Bigoted or narrow minded in following the doctrines of one’s sect’ (Oxford English Dictionary) and in Scotland has traditionally been viewed through the prism of disputes between members of the Protestant and Catholic communities.

Nil by Mouth (NBM) is a Scottish charity which seeks to challenge sectarianism wherever it manifests itself in society.

NBM was set up by Glasgow teenager Cara Henderson in response to the brutal sectarian murder of her friend Mark Scott in 1995 as he made his way home from a football match in Glasgow. Mark was killed simply because his attacker viewed the colour of his scarf as symbolising a different religion and culture from his own. Rather than seek revenget, Cara sought change. She began campaigning in the media; telling her story at community events and lobbying politicians and policy makers. She launched a ‘Charter for Change’ which outlined our vision for challenging sectarian attitudes in Scotland. This was a bold step and it is important to note that after decades of religious intolerance in Scotland the first person to really stand up and do something about it was a teenage girl. Cara won a Philip Lawrence Award for her work in empowering young people. She remains the charity’s Honorary Patron.

Former First Minister Lord Jack McConnell once described sectarianism as Scotland’s ‘Secret Shame’ and the arrival of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 presented an opportunity, indeed a challenge, for a society which had collectively shied away from this deep seated and complex problem. Like any bout of individual or collective introspection this has not always been an easy process. Grudges are passed down from one generation to the next, often with limited understanding of why they ever existed in the first place, each passing year adding new pages to an already depressing chapter of Scottish history.

In recent years sectarianism has once again become a topical issue, following the conviction of two men for sending suspected parcel bombs to three prominent public figures and a number of incidents in and around Scottish football. In response the Scottish Parliament passed the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications Act which sought to address the issue in and around football matches and on the internet.

However, laws alone can never solve the problem. The real battleground is the hearts and minds of people. Thankfully, we are seeing change in the national mindset: a 2011 survey, carried out by TNS-BMRB, showed that 91% of Scots recognised the negative impacts of sectarianism and wanted to see action to address it.

Nil by Mouth seek to work with people to break the depressing cycle of bigotry which has plagued Scotland for too long.

They are currently funded by the Scottish Government to deliver workshops and their ‘Champions for Change’ accreditation scheme in schools. This scheme recognises and develops best practice and encourages regular contact between young people from different religious and cultural traditions. They recognise that change cannot be limited to the classrooms and they involve teachers, parents and local communities in order to embed values of respect within school and wider society.

They also deliver similar sessions in colleges, prisons, young offender institutions, community education projects, workplaces, midnight leagues and youth groups across Scotland. These are supported by the charity’s own fundraising efforts and there is no charge to their partners for any of their services.

NBM seek to use these sessions as opportunities to break down many of the mental barriers which have divided communities and families for too long. Their workshops begin by asking participants to define what sectarianism means to them in 21st century Scotland. Some of the most regular themes include football, religion, schooling, marches, history and cultural intolerance. They then explore these themes through interactive activities, group work and personal reflection. While there are often strong views and frank debate, NBM stress the importance of participants asking as many questions of their own actions & beliefs as they do others.

NBM continue to deliver their pioneering ‘Beyond Religion and Belief’ workplace package which seeks to provide employers with training, advice and a framework for tackling intolerance in the workplace. They also offer ‘train the trainers’ sessions providing advice and support to nominated staff who in turn will go back to their organisations and create their own approaches to tackling sectarianism.

Additionally, NBM actively campaign in the media, engage with academics and researchers and last year published a nationwide ‘Action Plan’ to tackle sectarianism. They regularly appear in the media to provide informed comment and analysis of incidents, policy decisions and to promote their own campaigns. Nil by Mouth engage with politicians and NGOs to build alliances in order to defeat religious bigotry once and for all.

You can find out more about, and donate to, Nil by Mouth on their website.

Image by Debra Torrance

Written by Victoria Pearson