Here’s some cosmolocal community power in action. Leith Community Centre (North Edinburgh, Scotland) is having an in-person voting event next week. After a few weeks of voting on-line, the locals who prefer accessing the ballot-box with their legs will have a chance to choose five projects for the local council to fund.

Right at the top of the randomly listed projects is The Men of Leith Men's Shed. In a modest pitch, asking for £1400 (all italics ours), it says:

We are celebrating our seventh year as a charity helping men avoid loneliness and isolation and engage with other men and our local community.

The purpose of The Men of Leith Men’s Shed is to provide recreational facilities to advance the social needs, health and well-being of men of all ages and backgrounds living in Leith and surrounding areas, enabling them to feel valued and part of the community.

We offer workshop activities, a Music Group, a 'Repair Shed', Tai Chi, Cycling Group, Lunch Shed and the opportunity to participate in many other activities.

Beyond this, the possibilities are endless as we develop our new premises at The Heart of Newhaven Community, where we can extend the opportunities available to members and to the local community.

Research both here in Scotland and overseas indicates that men who connect with other men in the community live happier, healthier lives.

Why are we sharing this small and caring ask with you, our regular readers? Maybe because when looking at the daily headlines of violence and atrocity, feeling the risk of overwhelm and helplessness, we have to wilfully give attention to the signs that suggest that change is possible--and, in fact, occurring--in places you would not imagine.

No doubt many readers will find it a massive stretch that we should link, for example, the unspeakable atrocities currently occurring in the Middle East, with this tiny shed in Leith. Yet we can't help but do so.

For most of us, witnessing the tragedy of Israel/Palestine is beyond words - an explosion of anger, leading to the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people. It’s not only desperate for individuals and their families in situ, but for the hopes and dreams over decades to heal the hurt and trauma experienced globally during World War 2 and its aftermath.

You will notice we are not speaking of this as a fall out between two tribes - people, nations or beliefs - but the failure of humanity itself to get beyond violence as a response to conflict. The evidence is that anger and righteousness does not only cause one person to strike another, but builds up an armoury of weapons with which to punish all the people with which that person is associated. And that armoury becomes an industry that is capable of shaping our national and global economies—so that those without any relationship to the original anger find themselves investing in that violence for monetary gain.

The connectivity between anger, greed and the arms industry depend hugely on one other mental construct - ignorance. Not so much ignorance as the absence of facts, but in the wider meaning of lack of awareness. Ignorance as the dissociation between the strong desire to control events at any cost with the impact that urgent need has on others. And by extension, the impact such controlling behaviour will have on the self.

How else can we explain a father shouting at his child, not understanding the lasting impact of that aggressive force on their mental health - their ability to become whole? Then later down the line, becoming the object of that child's own anger and frustration and desire to control back? Without empathy, or the capacity for feeling the vulnerability of the other, anger is always a feedback loop and a trap.

How can we explain government leaders - elected to protect not just the citizens, but democracy itself - ordering the bombing of large areas of land where innocent civilians live? In both cases, large and small, there is a disconnect between the certainty and satisfaction of “being right” - and the impact that will have on others and later, ourselves. Witness the USA using its prodigious military powers to 'discipline' 'rogue states', later wondering why 'everyone hates America'.

There’s an elephant in the room here. We have to mention how the overwhelming preponderance of violence is committed by men, within structures - governmental, corporate and social - designed by males over centuries. Of course, many will chime, women too have anger; given the chance, they will use their power over others to control outcomes, often unaware of - or oblivious to - the consequences. Of course we are speaking of an 'essential’ human capability.

Yet we can't ignore the historical divide between male and female labour - originally nature, later nurture - which kept women in the home, attentive to the needs of children, family, community, while men left the house to 'build' the public space. While women built relational networks to create the possibilities of socialisation (without pay), men were paid to become parts of the machine driving each country forward. Mines, assembly lines, offices, armies - each one highly regimented.

This history has left its imprint on women who still bring different qualities to leadership, even when the structures they inhabit were designed for and by men.

Meantime, with the exception of the 1% most privileged, men were required to switch off their emotional needs and submit to a hierarchy of authority. The priority of delivering on often mindless industrial and bureaucratic tasks in order to 'provide’ for the family, left men enslaved to the economy, only waiting for the weekends to come back to their whole selves. How many men reach retirement, having done all that was required of them, only to find they barely know themselves?

The statistics show that the knock-on effect for men has been endless. The disconnect from family, community and, more importantly, from their own whole selves, created a need for - and often reliance on - habits and substances to numb the mind for most of the week. Whether through alcohol, compulsive gaming or cardio, the need for distraction from the chasm of emptiness fills every minute of the day. Failure to do so has left men four times as likely to commit suicide and twenty four times as likely to go to prison.

A society that takes the disconnected labour of men for granted, has left them vulnerable to manipulation in ways women often find hard to understand. For example, the willingness to put on a uniform, march in unison and kill on command can be mind-boggling for those who have trained themselves to do all they can to be sensitive, to use deep wisdom and to protect lives - child, neighbour, service provider - at any cost.

To listen to those ready to 'fight in the name of freedom', knowing the impact it will have not only on othersbut also on themselves is to observe the highest delusion of our disconnected societies. Or maybe destroying our environment in the name of our survival would take that prize.

While we may describe - day by day, week by week - real progress in the changing narratives of what is possible for humans in our cosmolocal societies, the mainstream media gets more extreme. As we write, the leaders of the deluded 'free world' are drumming up the possibility of war, barely acknowledging that any war now involving the USA and UK could lead to a whole world in flames.

But is this inevitable?

The media has yet to acknowledge another, newer elephant in the room. The difficulty in achieving this aim may well be that men have already begun a journey towards greater awareness and away from violence. Not only are they signing up to the army in ever decreasing numbers, trying to avoid conscription and escaping countries at war but they are also putting down their guns in the police force. As men see our societies increasingly judge them for violence they have little control over, they want out.

Backing up this action is the increasing numbers of men in rehabilitation, , trauma work - all the labours of emotional and relational work that women have long been nurtured for. However, this is not something that can be banked upon. Until these emergences are written about widely in the mainstream papers (despite the risk to our national institutions of violence) it needs extraordinary attention and support.

Which brings us back to the Men of Leith Men's Shed - itself one of 200 Scottish sheds that have opened up since starting in 2015. Originally an Australian initiative, there are now 3000 number of men's sheds in 16 countries around the world. All sharing the slogan of "from strong and silent, to strong, vocal and wholistic!"

While that’s a relatively minor project, it's loud evidence for the 'idea' that men need to help themselves and each other to overcome their disconnect, reaching the wider culture. Let's give them their £1400 for:

a Music Group, a 'Repair Shed', Tai Chi, Cycling Group, Lunch Shed (for talking and relationship building) and the opportunity to participate in many other activities.

And then talk it up everywhere.

Alternative Editorial: The Real Front Line