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.