Tough Few Weeks

The last few days of October and the first twelve or so days of November have been tough. Perhaps I am not as resilient as I thought I was - or maybe I am just getting older but some days it feels harder than it used to be to find a reason to smile.

A few weeks a good friend of mine died. I spent some time with Sally the day or two before she passed and another few hours sitting with her after she had passed. We were good friends. For the last perhaps fifteen years I had spent a few weeks every summer with her, arguing about politics, working in her garden and doing odd jobs around her house that she was not able to do. Twice we drove down to a National Rainbow Gathering in the States - my master's thesis was greatly enriched by the contacts she shared with me. We also hung out at a few regional gatherings. I also visited her a couple of times at Christmas when I came out here to visit my son. Since moving out here almost a year ago, I tried to visit her for a few days at least once a month. She always had a chair that needed fixing or a lamp that needed wiring. I think she looked for things for me to do so that I could feel busy when I was there. Perhaps the best times were when we went on a road trip - she in her power wheel chair and me trying to keep up with her as she showed me the parts of her much loved Salt Spring Island. I find myself still arguing with her - I will miss her.

Then there was the USA election. Just a week ago - I sat in front of my computer monitor and watched Peter Mansbridge from the CBC along with assorted commentators and correspondents try to explain how everyone could have been so wrong about Trump's chances. It is not clear as to why I, along with so many other Canadians, felt Trump's victory so viscerally in the pit of our stomachs. While there is no doubt that some of his policies will affect how the Canadian government deals with such things as climate change, and, as it has become apparent, Trump's victory appears to have given permission to some Canadians to be as racists and obnoxious as he is - it felt as if my reaction was unwarranted or at least over-stated. Perhaps we just don't like to acknowledge that it is possible that someone who is at best not very bright, lacks the capacity to think critically and has opinions that come from a different era could get to be a leader of our neighbour. For whatever the reason - I felt more than a little bit numb on Wednesday.   

Hearing about Leonard Cohen's passing just felt like one more kick when I was already down. I have been a fan of Cohen for almost 50 years. I first heard about him in a North American Literature course in high school. Our teacher who knew Cohen (the gossip was that he came back to school late one September because he had spent the summer in Greece with Cohen) was upset because the one poem of Cohen's that was in the assigned text had a misprint. We didn't believe him so the next week he brought in the original manuscript and showed us where the comma was suppose to be. Cohen's book of Poetry - Flowers for Hitler was the first book I ever bought for myself and if Suzanne was not the first song I learnt to play it was certainly in the top two or three. Thanks to my daughter I got to see him perform twice. Both shows were magical. But my favourite memory of Cohen is watching my friend Liz's smile as she listen to one of his CDs and as we "danced" in her room - oblivious to the staff or the other residents that were walking by.

And finally Leon Russell died. I wasn't a big fan and in fact I probably had not heard any of his music for years. But in 1970-71 I was working at a group home in Toronto. The eight teenage boys who lived there, along with the live-in couple and two live-in staff, were a handful. Most of them had a chronic glue/solvent sniffing addiction, had had run-ins with the law and in general did not want to be there. One evening we all went to the movies and saw Mad Dogs and Englishmen with Joe Crocker and Leon Russell. I don't remember much about the movie but I do remember the music. Even more importantly I remember how great we all felt leaving the movie theatre. For the first time it felt as if we were, if not a family, at least some sort of cooperative unit that could work together. I think it was that night that I decided that I had found a career that I could believe in.

Tough few weeks - but I went out today and bought some crocus and tulip bulbs to plant so that in the spring I will have flowers - partly because Sally loved flowers but also because I believe that the light does shine through the cracks. We just need to both remember that, and to make sure that when the light does shine through - there is something ready to grow.

Analysis of An American Election

I feel sad....that sort of sadness one feels when someone - someone you don't know very well but who you have known for your whole life, dies. There is a general sense of something lost, of something that may never ever be the same again - although you can't exactly explain what it is.

In reading the various bits and pieces on my traditional media sites as well as the social media sites, it seems as if many observers are blaming Trump's election on misogynistic and racist voters. There is a general sense that somehow Trump just barely got in by some sleight of hand, some trick that he used to fool easily mislead voters. Others argue that Clinton just did not have what was needed to mobilize the opposition. One Facebook posting even suggested that if the Democrats had allowed Bernie to run - this would never have happened. But such comments avoid the truth of the election.

It is no doubt true that a  number of Trump's most ardent and vocal supports were white males who were poorly educated and under employed. It is equally as true that a number of them are racists, misogynists and angry that they have lost their elite status in their world. It is true that Trump spoke directly to them and promised them a promised land just beyond the next election. BUT not only did Trump earn almost 50% of all votes (in Canada any party getting 50% of the popular vote would be deemed to have won by a landside), the Republicans won the majority of seats in Congress and in the open seats in the Senate. They even won seats in ridings where the Republican candidate denounced Trump. The Republicans won the presidential race as well as in both houses in spite of the fact that the leadership of that party were less than enthusiastic about their presidential candidate.

Almost half of the American people who voted, voted for a political ideology that argues that those that have - should keep it; that if corporate America becomes untaxed and unfettered by regulation - then all will prosper; that a specific group of voters have the right to prosper and to be considered elite, and if they lose that status then it is someone else's fault; that the very people who are marginalized by class, ability, religion, ethnic origin, gender or race are somehow responsible for their own marginalization and that failure is always the fault of the person except when it happens to them; that more guns will mean that communities are safer; that only the self designated elite should have access to services and that their version of the Christian God is always on their side. Trump may have played out that hand in a particularly virulent manner, but half of the American public were just waiting for someone to publically head off in that direction.

Trump is the personification of the "me first" philosophy. But he did not invent it - he just said what approximately half of the public who wanted to vote were already feeling. While we should be concerned and even alarmed at all of the dangerous possibilities that may confront us as neighbours and as world citizens, we need to be careful that we do not vilify Trump while absolving those who elected him. Trump is the President-Elect perhaps in part because there was not a more palatable  alternative but primarily because nearly half of the population who voted agree with him and what he said. And while we should be deeply concerned as to what Trump may do, we should be even more concerned about the values of the American voters. When Trump does not deliver on what he promised- who will they chose next?

Another Election - What Have We Learned?

As I write, citizens of the USA (it would be so much easier to just say "Americans" but in fact all of us who live in the Americas are Americans..... those of the USA  have inappropriately assumed that label) are in the process of electing their next President as well as their Congress and some senators. I, for one, am glad that the damn election is over. Perhaps Canadian news services will now have more space/time to discuss some news that is relevant to Canadians. I am always surprised at how much interest Canadians are suppose to have over American elections. In this particular election cycle I have been even more surprised at the number of Canadians who have come out on various social media sites condemning one of the presidential candidates and begging US citizens to vote.

I am surprised mainly because it would appear that some Canadians who are posting on those sites actually believe that those to the south of us give a damn as to what we think. Really? In the fifty or so years that I have spent following political stuff - I can never remember a time when the USA created a policy or responded substantively to a Canadian issue that was not to their benefit. And why would they? Our neighbours seldom listen to the what the rest of the world thinks they should do. As a matter of fact it seems quite obvious that most of them don't even listen to each other - in part because they are bombarded with too much irrelevant information and even more irrelevant opinions.

There is a large, powerful and financially lucrative industry whose only function is to convince voters to vote for a particular person or party. In every election cycle millions ( in the USA it is billions) of dollars are spent on distributing/propagating information designed to sway the voters. I am not sure that those billions of dollars are well spent if for no other reason that I am not sure if anyone really understands why people vote. For example. in Canada there have been a number times when there have been large swings in the popular vote such as when the Mulroney Conservatives or the Martin Liberals lost power. But I suspect that people who switched their vote from Liberal to Conservative or vice versa would have done so anyways as they were tired of the previous government. Voters had already decided that there was a need for a change (under the guise that change is a good thing every decade or so). It took almost nothing to push enough voters over that line. I suspect that most of us, most of the time vote generally the way we always have. It is perhaps only those at the very centre who switch their votes slightly to the left or to the right.

Those of us at the extreme left or right of the political spectrum do not, very often, change our position. My guess is that those of us who voted for a socialist-like-platform when we were 20 - still do so; those who, as they were coming of age, believed in a social and economic conservative platform - will not have changed their minds thirty or forty years later. While platforms of a particular political party may disappoint us - we are committed voters. Any attempt to change our minds is probably a waste of money. It is only at the centre where people do not have a clear political/economic values that there is room for movement. It is there that that the sellers of influence focus their energies.

While it is less of a problem in Canada than is the USA, we are still afflicted with uninformed and irrelevant people providing information that can shape that soft middle core of voters. I am always surprised that singers or actors  in the USA are allowed so much influence but then this a culture that validates a barely famous actress's tirade against vaccinations.

If we are to have elections that contain useful debate and at least interesting policies proposals, then we need, not just during an election cycle, but all of the time participate/create a dialogue about what is important and how we can invest in change. We need to stop seeing politics as a blood sport for us to watch from the side lines. We need to learn to engage both our neighbours and our politicians in conversation. If there is anything to be learned from the election to the south - it is that when people stop listening to those who think differently - then chaos can and will evolve.

Priorities in Caring

It is no surprise that my Facebook page has been flooded with people posting items about the First Nations anti-pipeline protest at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Most of my  "friends" are of the political left and therefore they are people who have, at least on the surface, similar views as I do about the environment, human rights etc. But while I agree with their general attitude, I do wonder but how some of them choose their priorities, and in some cases how blindly they follow other peoples' lead.

For example - a day or two ago someone posted that the authorities were monitoring the Facebook accounts of the people who were protesting at Standing Rock, presumably so those same authorities could use that information to arrest those people. The request was that others around the country should post a line saying that they too were at Standing Rock under the assumption that if thousands posted such comments, the authorities would be unable to track so many people or to determine who was there or not there. A number of my friends did so. I am not sure if any of those friends wondered why and what good would it do.

It would seem to me that tracking Facebook pages is a particularly inefficient way of monitoring peoples' behaviour partially because there are so many hundreds of law enforcement personnel (both private and public) on the ground taking pictures of the participants as well as the fact that most cell phones have a built in GPS component. If the authorities want to track people, the GPS is a much more efficient way of doing it. I suspect that flooding a Facebook page would be seen by those authorities as something less than a minor annoyance. People did it because they wanted to do something to help - but they did nothing useful.

However, at the very least it probably does no harm if someone wants to say they are at Standing Rock. I am more curious as to why Canadians spend energy focusing on the outrageous acts of American corporations and politicians in terms of their actions against First Nation communities while seeming to ignore similar type of actions in Canada. Lord knows we have enough to be concerned about;

The Grassy Narrows First Nation community has for decades been protesting the clear cutting of their traditional lands. At one point this protest was the longest running such protest in North America. The same community has spent an equal amount of time demanding - with limited success - to have someone clean up the mercury spill that occurred in the mid to late 1960s.

The residents of the Shoal Lake First nation community have had to boil their drinking water for 18 years. In fact at least 80 such communities across Canada are under such orders (http://canadians.org/fn-water).

Adam Capay, an indigenous Canadian has spent four years in solitary confinement - with no trial (CBC)

There is of course the continuing issue of a police, legal and correctional system that is consistently biased with the consequence being that there are both an over representative number of Indigenous Canadians in our correctional system and a lack of justice for indigenous victims.

And the list could go on and on.

There is no doubt that for First Nations in the US, Standing Rock is an important issue. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be an election issue which would suggest that for the vast majority of Americans, the pipe line is not particularly relevant. For Canadians, while it is nice that we cheer on other groups who are defending their rights - I really wish that we would devote some of our energy to fixing our own problems first.

Or perhaps I just need a new set of friends on Facebook.

Over-whelmed

I am depressed.... not in a clinical way that would perhaps require some sort of intervention but rather the state of the world is over-whelming me. I think one of the reason why I have stopped writing is that there seems to be so little point in doing anything - the endless tragedies of this world just continue to pile up. On anyone day of the week, I feel as if I need to be concerned/worried/do something about:

·         The fact that one individual in Ontario has spent four years in solitary confinement and has yet come to trial

·         Young people in First Nations communities continue to commit suicide

·         Tug boats sinking and polluting our west coast

·         Some people are paying 33% of their income on child care cost

·         Some/many young people can't afford to buy houses as the baby boomers and the rich continue to inflate the cost of housing

·         The nightmare elections to the south where even if Trump does not get in, there is no guarantee that that country will get on with the business of governing itself in a rational manner

·         It is predicted that a significant number of animal species will not be present in this world (outside of zoos) for my great grandchildren to see or even know about.

·         The First Nation protest in North Dakota over their lands being illegally appropriated to lay an oil pipe line

·         The hundreds of thousands of individuals in the Middle East who have been made homeless by the greed and obsessions of a relative small handful of people

·         The countries of Europe who along with the USA appear to becoming more and more xenophobic every week.

As I said....the list is endless. It is enough to make a grown man weep.

On the other hand, as Jonathan Kay, the editor of the Walrus reminded readers in the October issue - one of the reasons why we feel over-whelmed by the constant display of bad - even horrendous news is that the news is so much more graphic/explicit than it used to be. Editors display little or no sense of what should be displayed or discussed in the media. Do we need to (as one could this morning on the CBC website) know that there are some Americans thinking or at least saying they are thinking about armed revolution if their candidate does not get elected? Do we need to see endless loops of buildings being bombed in the Middle East? I suspect that such coverage only hardens some of our hearts against human suffering and in others in confirms that all other humans except for ourselves are idiots. 

My great-grandparents would have had to wait weeks to know about an earthquake or hurricane in Haiti. They may never have known if they missed the newspaper edition it was mentioned in. They never saw in real time the horror of war or the various absurdities of the human condition. I am not convinced they were substantially worse off in terms of their sense of the world than I am.

It is not that I am advocating that the various editors of mainstream media censor any more than they already do, nor am I suggesting that social media such as Twitter or Facebook prevent citizens from posting what news (no matter how distorted it is) they wish to. But if we are to be bombarded with this constant litany of horror, then we need to either be given or to within ourselves develop a set of tools that can help us keep things in perspective. As noted by  Jonathan Kay (Walrus), for the vast majority of us, in most parts of the world, things are far better for us now than at any other time in recorded history. When one takes into account that 30 million Russians died in WWll or that in 1918-1920 a third of the world's population were infected with Spanish Influenza and up to 50 million people died (http://www.history.com/topics/1918-flu-pandemic), or that in 1837 one third (approx. 30,000) of Irish immigrants died on the sea passage to Canada, our lives seem pretty okay.

The very fact that we have the time and the resources to worry about and to try to change some of the stories that surround our lives is because our lives are so much better than were our grandparents' lives.

We need to remember that in the dark days.