Traveling Dreams

In the past, when I lived in Ontario during the winter months, during those dark cold days of February, when the possibility of long, bright, warm sunny days were only a remote, barely possible fantasy, I would start to dream of standing on the side of the road with my thumb out; of the myriad of spots that I had stood before, some of them ten or more times. I dreamed of getting the perfect ride; of the conversations that I have had/would have in the future. I would dream of spots that I would sleep at, of Husky gas stations where I had grab a quick sandwich and some more water; or of that sudden excitement as I round that one corner somewhere just west of Calgary and the first of the mountains show their peaks, or specific moment when I first glimpse the shores of Vancouver Island. These dreams are what sustained me in those cold dark nights and they are what made me delightfully vulnerable to a sudden attack of spring fever on the first day of near spring. 

Last year I didn't have those dreams, or at least not in the intensity of other years. I publically bemoaned the fact that because Vancouver Island does not have seasons in the same way as does central Canada, that because winter is not as harsh - that perhaps my lust to hitchhike was reduced, that there was less psychological need to escape if only in my dreams. I missed those dreams.

I am glad to say - the dreams are back. I find myself looking at transport trucks as they pass through town and having to remember to pay attention to my own driving. I have to almost literally shake myself awake as I slip into a day dream as I am writing or reading or spinning, as I realize that I have gone off somewhere in my mind - dreaming of the perfect ride or of those extraordinary conversations. It feels delightful.

I am not sure why the dreams have come back at such intensity or even so early. The weather has been normal here - wet and grey most of the time with only occasionally glimpses of the sun. If there is a promise of an early and noticeable spring - I am not aware of it.  I perhaps have been more aware this year of the geese flying north, of their calls that when large flocks fly over my house it sounds almost there are a bunch of kids dancing in the distance, but I don't think that would be enough. It may be that I am considering going north to the Yukon - to complete my tour of Canada that is accessible by road and the sheer thought of such a trip is enough to stir my dormant hitchhiking dreams.

Regardless of why - I am glad that in the darkness of the early morning hours, or during the quiet times of my life - I can escape into a delightful fantasy that every summer for the last 15-16 years has come true.

Tuberculosis, Inuit and Getting it Right This Time

In the last couple of days, CBC has run a few stories about tuberculosis, Indigenous people and how the Canadian government has responded to the ongoing problem. And it has been an ongoing medical problem. In 1989, a CBC program reported that it was estimated that in the 1950s at least one third of the Inuit were infected with TB. The same program also suggested that one seventh of all Inuit (1600) were in a sanatorium in southern Canada. More recently, in at least one community on Baffin Island, it has been reported that 10% of residents are infected with TB.

The only cure for TB before the discovery of antibiotics was isolation from the community to prevent the disease from spreading, good food and lots of rest. For the Inuit, this meant being taken from their families and shipped to segregated sanatoriums in southern Canada. In these sanatoriums individuals would have been completed separated from their communities, their families - left with no way of contacting their families for at least two years.  The professional staff would not have spoken their language, no one could explain what was happening to them, no one could understand their questions. To make things worse, at least some (most?) of the staff were abusive either in terms of punishing the residents for speaking their own language to each other. Other staff physically or sexually assaulted them.

I have no doubt that even the most benign of the nursing staff were, in their Christian based righteousness absolutely sure that what they were doing was the right thing, that the Inuit people, perhaps especially the children, were fortunate to be able to live and to hopefully get better in the wonderful sanatorium  - supported by a benevolent government. Even the most kind of the individual working there would have been judgemental about the language and the lifestyles of the people under their care. Even the best of them would have been by today's standards, a racist.

The Inuit were taken from their homes, with very little if any explanation, families were left not knowing what was happening to their family member and in some cases never knew that they had died. The fact that it was "for their own good" is exactly the type of colonialist attitude that has tainted our relationship with First Nations people.

 But in spite of acknowledging that the TB epidemic was poorly handled - I am left unclear as to what should have happened. T.B was a major health crisis, one that a century earlier had been leading cause of death in Canada. In 1953 there were 18,977 sanatorium beds in Canada.  On the surface, the pictures of segregated sanatoriums do not look all that different from the ones other Canadians went to. Separating individuals from their families and communities was the "cure" for everyone. A far better alternative would have been to invest the time and energy into either training doctors and nurses from Inuit communities and then building sanatoriums in the north so that people would not geographically have been so far away. Or failing to at least insure that insuring that all of the staff some of the language of the people that they were taking care of.  

But in 1950, Canada had a population of approximately 14 million people (stats). Just under 50% lived in rural areas. The cost to create special facilities in the far north, given the lack of transportation, the lack of materials and the lack of trained staff would have made the cost prohibitive. Waiting six or seven years (at a minimum) to have any trained Inuit staff might have meant the destruction of whole communities. Given  the information available  and the amount of ignorance - it seems to me that the method of treatment was probably the best that could have been done at that time. It is troubling that such facilities continued to exist while other alternatives were not pursued.

Should the government have done far more to insure that there were competent translators available - yes. Should they have done a better job of screening prospective staff - yes. Should the government have insisted that families receive regular updates -yes. Should patients have been returned home as soon as possible - yes. There is a long list of what, we looking back over the last 60 years, should have done better.  We need to acknowledge our collective failures.

On the other hand.....

Next week in Qikiqtarjuag, Nunavut, there will be a mobile clinic to screen and treat the residents for TB. The operative word will be treatment - people will get the medication they need while living in their community. The clinic will remain in place to ensure that the treatment (7- 10 weeks) is effective. The cost for the mobile equipment is $1 million, but the clinic is mobile and can be moved to another community to repeat the process.

Hopefully this time we have got it right.

Dialogue

This past week the leaders of Ontario's and Nova Scotia's Progressive Conservative parties resigned due to allegations of inappropriate behaviours. The federal Minister of sport and persons with disabilities has also resigned for near similar behaviours. For all three of the men, their political careers are over.  In the short term I would guess that no company that has any sort of public profile will hire them. In spite of there being very few if any facts available, it is now the norm that groups, political parties or organizations quite rightly quickly dispose of toxic members/leaders. Certainly in Canada, no ruling political party (or one that wanted to be) could ever hope to withstand the firestorm of criticism if they did not force a resignation.

It was not always this way. In fact, for virtually all of Canada's existence as a political entity, our politicians have been give immense grace to do what they wanted to do. For example, our first Prime Minister -Sit John A. was more than occasionally drunk. Our tenth Prime Minister, Mackenzie King was in regular communications with his deceased mother and other equally as dead relatives. The first Trudeau made an obscene comment in Parliament and got away with it, Mulroney, I expect, hung out at rich people's homes during the holidays and Diefenbaker may have had a relationship with his secretary- the list could go on and on. Historically it has been the policy of the Canadian press to not to focus, to in fact ignore what was happening in the private lives of our politicians. Civil servants while they may at their peril leak details of government plans, would never have discussed what went on behind closed doors.

No one talked about all of the above things partially because it just was not done but also there were no the mechanisms to quickly disseminate the information. The only way of sharing information about anyone or anything was initially the newspapers, later the radio and still later television. All of those types of news media, while they may have been incredibly biased, needed to ensure that their fact were correct. That is no longer true. Individuals who have information can now bi-pass all of the news gatekeepers and go directly to the people.

For example this week an individual who use to work with Mr Hehr (the above mentioned federal minister) while he was in the Alberta legislature, on Twitter discussed his inappropriate comments to her. While I am in no way suggesting that either his comments were anywhere near acceptable or that the individual is not telling the absolute truth - it strikes me that Twitter is a particularly inappropriate platform to make a statement about something that happened a decade ago. It allows no dialogue, no context of the events and because there is no defence against something that is posted on Twitter or any other social media page.

The issues that are being raised are long over-due. I suspect that there are thousands of women who could tell similar stories. I also suspect and hope that there are thousands of men who cringe at what they said or how they acted 20, 30 or 40 years ago. We need to find a platform so that women and men can have these conversations. But somehow we need stop it from being just about those who are rich, famous, powerful or have just got jobs within the public view. Surely the conversation cannot just be about getting famous men fired.

It would seem to me that at least part of what we need to talk about is how men and women are raising their daughters and their sons. The errors of the past can be apologized for, the worst perpetrators can be publically shamed and humiliated - but I need to know that my three grandson will never do or say anything that offends, humiliates or threatens a women and I need to know that my granddaughter will always be both safe and live in a society where she can easily say when she is not.

Do We Expect Too Much From Those Who Aspire To Lead?

It struck me the other day as I was reading some news item, that we expect our politicians to be brighter than us, to have fewer faults than us and to never, ever have done anything dumb in their lives. I think that those are fair assumptions - we just shouldn't be terribly disappointed in those folks when it turns out that they are not quite as perfect as they suggested they were. I sometimes wonder if our disappointment in them is at least partially connected to our feelings of  us, one more time, being so stupid as to believe their self-stated perfection in the first place.

It feels as if there are more and more politicians publically being exposed for the humans they are - flawed (sometimes fatally), full of weakness and missteps, incapable of making a clear decision and sticking to it and generally being as incompetent as the rest of us. Some of these revelations are of course, the politician own fault. In a technological era of social media, where every pundit harps upon the importance of candidates and elected politicians to be connected to the "people" via various social media platforms, it is hardly surprising that some people fall into the trap of putting things "on paper" that they shouldn't.

One could wonder (and perhaps even guess) what the first Trudeau thought about the Queen or the separatists in Quebec or some of his ministers, but we did not get to know until he decided to tell us. For that leader and the thousands of other politicians, dissemination of their thoughts could not be instantaneous. The process of sharing their thoughts was filtered by the process of writing. All of us who write know that typing is faster than writing in longhand. The actual acts of holding a pen and having to reasonably carefully shape the letters slows down the thinking process. One actually has to think before putting the words on the paper. There was no delete button on the pen.  This process stopped or at least limited whatever stupidity that was circulating in our brain from leaking out.

While the blond headed buffoon/leader in the country to the south of Canada is perhaps currently the most famous/infamous politician who spews out what ever enters his limited mind - many politicians seemed equally as compulsed to share their thoughts and activities to anyone who has a Twitter account. We perhaps should be less judgemental as to what they write in the spur of the moment. If we want real, raw, unfiltered thoughts - if we expect them to be honest about what they are thinking - we probable should not expect particularly clear or logical thinking. Perhaps we should just accept that social media is at best a mechanism that at best, provides a superficial view of an issue, a view that is limited by both the lack of facts and a substantive discussion.

If we stop trying to use such platforms to have meaningful conversations and if we stop pretending that connecting to "friends" is a valid substitution for relationships - perhaps our politicians will attempt to communicate with us in ways that are more useful and less fraught with the risk of misunderstanding.

Robot Trucks

I know a little bit about long distance trucks and the men (I know there are many women drivers - I just have never met one) who drive them. As I hitchhike across parts of Canada, truckers have kindly offered me a seat in their trucks for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres.  They have told me their life stories, offered to buy me a meal and more often than not offered me place to sleep in their top bunk.

I was therefore pleased to see in the December issue of The Walrus, an article about truckers and the future of the industry ( robot trucks). It is an interesting article from the perspective of what may be happening in the next decade or two in terms of how goods get transported between cities in Canada - more importantly for me, it gave a small glimpse of what life is like for truckers.

In my experience for the most part, truckers are an unusual group of men. For some of them, they are gone for weeks at a time. For many of them, their weeks are comprised of a fixed rotation of drive, eat and sleep. All too frequently, they spend their day off in some truck stop amongst a hundred other drivers, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their families. On more than one occasion a trucker has told me that he is meeting a friend at the next truck stop – someone who every week or ten days he meets for a coffee at some truck stop or another. In all likelihood, that might be his only human face to face contact of any significance for that week. I suspect that many truckers are lonely much of the time.  Truck driving is a hard job. It is hard on the body and the temptation to eat poor food and to exercise little is overwhelming.  

In my experience truck drivers are a fairly conservative lot. They adapt slowly to change and are frequently fierce critics of those who do. For example some sort of automatic transmissions have been around for large diesel vehicles for years (think buses), but until recently most truck drivers have, at best, been disparaging about drivers who use them. Those who do use the new transmission love them - especially when driving in the cities. There are certainly a lot more of them on the road than there were ten years ago. Some technological changes are happening without the truckers' consent. Big trucks in Canada are limited by law, in how fast they can go. Usually it is just a few kilometres over the speed limit. On so many of the major highways in Canada, this regulation means that the drivers can make less money (especially if they get paid by the kilometre), it is harder work (a lot more shifting through hilly country) and for the most part is not needed. When cars, are going 20-30 kilometre per hour faster than the truck they are zooming past, putting a limit of truck speed seems more than a bit silly.

In spite of some of our semi romantic version of truckers, in part engendered by such old movies as “Smoky and the Bandit”, where everyone is on the CB and they all have interesting nick names, more and more truckers are controlled not just by federal regulations but by electronic devices that allow the company to know exactly where they are and when their allotted driving hours for that day have been used up. Truck drivers are no long those lone wolves, those mavericks, the last of the cowboys and Don Quixote all rolled up into one.  So many of the newer drivers no longer see their profession as a noble one, one that was of value to the community.  Now they are just someone doing a job. They, like so many other Canadians, just feel over-worked, over-regulated and underappreciated.

I find it a bit scary and more than a little sad that at some point in the future, some hitchhiker will be standing on the side of the road and the trucks passing by him/her will have no driver. Part of that is I am less re-assured than others that a computer can always make the right decisions, that one can store enough possibilities in an electronic brain to make a quick, life affecting decision; but I am also sad that a way of life will be changed, in fact destroyed, because someone has found a way to be more efficient - to make more money with fewer people involved.

Robot trucks may serve the commercial needs of the companies, those stores and manufactures who survive using the "just in time" model (means that one does not have to build large warehouses to store items when trucks arrive every day with fresh deliveries), but that does not mean that we should openly embrace driverless trucks.

And in the future - who will pick up that hitchhiker?