Icy trails, part two

I followed some of the mystery trails in the woods that I mentioned in my previous post, and I am thinking that they are red squirrel trails. Red squirrels look like chipmunks without the stripey markings. What I noticed was that the trails come close to large tree trunks in many places and if these are squirrel trails then that makes sense, the squirrel can get off the trail quickly if it suspects trouble. And when I was following one particular trail there was one squirrel screaming at me from high in a tree and another watching me from a fallen tree that disappeared when I got too close. Actually, it was probably Hapi they were watching and screaming at.

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A couple of nights ago I watched two movies, Three Identical Strangers and Edie. 

Three Identical Strangers is a documentary about triplets who were separated after birth and adopted out to three different families; accidentally discovering each other at the age of 19. The movie starts out quite joyfully as the three boys ecstatically discover and connect with each other. But it gets darker as the adoptive parents and an independent investigator look into how this could have happened. As it turns out, the boys were deliberately separated as part of a secret experiment, a "twin study". 

I must say that I always wondered when twin studies were cited as evidence for the heritability of certain human traits or nature vs nurture debates, how did twins get separated in the first place? Accidentally? On purpose? For good reason? This documentary makes it clear that in this particular case it was deliberately done for the sake of someone's research. Of course it raises huge ethical issues about such research, and I won't be able to read about twin studies ever again without being rather disgusted by the implications. In the film a pair of separated female twins were interviewed after they reunited. The interviewer commented that this was like a Disney movie and one of the twins said, Yeah but darker.

An aunt of one of the boys commented throughout the film about her reactions to the revelations that ensued; I thought her comments were insightful and wise. At the end she says—on the subject of nature versus nurture—that she thought that good parenting could overcome anything. One of the issues raised in this film is that not everybody is so lucky to have "good parenting". Sometimes who the parent is and who the child is due to genetics or whatever is at odds, and sometimes it is irreconcilable.

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Edie is a story about an old woman determined to climb a mountain in Scotland. She is probably in her late 70s or 80s and quite frail, not at all an athletic kind of person. Her husband has just died and her daughter has packed her off to an old folks home of some sort. She rebels and sets off to climb this mountain, but is poorly equiped for the venture. She literally bumps into a young man who then becomes involved—initially against his will—in helping her to achieve her goal. The film ends with the two of them on the peak of the mountain. 

There's a lot of drone footage that is quite dizzying and if you have any kind of fear of heights you might want to close your eyes for some of that. My reaction to the ending was that I am quite certain that climbing down is a lot harder than climbing up and if she had so much difficulty getting up there I sure hope she got airlifted out because I could not see her surviving the descent even with the help of the young man.

What got to me about the story was that I could relate to a lot of her back story. Essentially she had spent an adult lifetime caring for a disabled husband and a child and having to forego a lot of stuff she would have liked to have done while she still could. When the husband died she was set free but was now so old that the adventures she longed for were out of the question. Years of caring for others when she would really have rather not, turned her bitter and grumpy. She treated the people who were trying to help her quite abruptly and unappreciatively, not that there were a lot of people trying to help her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now in my 70s I look back on an adult lifetime of raising boys by myself and taking care of old dogs and, briefly, a parent. There was maybe a 12-year gap when I had no children, dogs or parents to be responsible for. Right now I am caring for my second old dog. Both my parents died in their 70s and although I am assured that my parents' age at death has little bearing on how long I have left to live, it doesn't feel like that. I feel like I maybe have five good years left, not a lot.

It is winter and while there is not a lot of snow there sure is a lot of ice. Finding places I can let Hapi off the leash is hard, all the trails are icy and she must be on leash on sidewalks. Being old she likes to stop and sniff every tree, every snow bank, every fire hydrant; and since her sense of smell is somewhat diminished by age, she takes a very long time for each sniff. So when she is on leash we plod from tree to hydrant to snow drift and stop at each one for a minute or more; it is not exactly a lot of fun. Not to mention the picking-up-your-dog's-poop bylaw. At least when we are on the trails I can let her off leash and not have to stop and wait every time she wants to sniff something.

I relate to Edie's anguish at her life having been a total waste of time. At one point she tells the young man to take a lesson from her, don't do what she did. But I figure there is little chance of that, our culture presses women into caretaking far more than men. When I was young I dearly wanted to be a boy. Although I did not know the details, I was pretty sure that living in our world as a girl or a woman did not nearly provide the opportunities available to boys and men. My mother did encourage me to think about going to university, mostly as a hedge against poverty as a married woman. She herself had had the opportunity to go to university but she gave it up to get married and I suspect that she regretted that decision very much. But I was young and keen to be free of all restrictions, including those imposed by schooling and pursuing an education, so I did not follow her encouragement until much later in life.

"Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life. " ~Ray Bradbury

I find this quote (from the whiskey river blog, Feb. 28) annoying. Sure, follow your heart and do what you love and don't pay any attention to all those naysayers. But if you are a woman that means don't get married, don't have kids and don't take on the care of your own parents when they get old because all those things will stand in the way of doing what you love, unless of course caretaking is what you love. Our culture pays lip service to the idea of finding what you love and pursuing it, but it all hinges on someone else doing the caretaking and there are precious few men doing that. It's woman's work.

Bruce MacKinnon sums it up

Halifax Chronicle Herald, Jan. 11, 2020

A peek behind the curtain

Yesterday I scrutineered at a local election voting poll and learned a thing or two about the messy side of democracy.

Scrutineering is a volunteer job, actually working the polls is a pretty well-paid job. Election workers put in very long hours, we scrutineers only show up at the end to observe. Some political parties have their scrutineers at the polls for the entire day and they do what is called "vote pulling". They have lists of people who have said they will vote for that particular party during door-to-door canvassing and they make sure those people actually show up to vote. The Green Party does not do that, they just observe the counting, and I was the official Green Party scrutineer for a nearby voting station. There were three polls there and I was assigned to one of them but I also got numbers for the other two before leaving.

So, I was amazed at how chaotic and confusing the whole process was. The doors of the poll were locked at 8.30pm, no one could enter or leave until the process was finished. Earlier in the day a Green Party representative had dropped by my place to "train" me. Basically, don't touch the ballots, do what you're told, and keep track of what is going on. Also no communication with the outside world until you leave. The poll workers had all kinds of binders and instruction manuals and envelopes and forms to fill in. The instruction manual was easily as big as an income tax manual, except they had to read and follow all of the instructions, not just the ones they thought applied to their particular circumstances. They had all been "trained", but judging by what I saw, I think they all got different versions of the training.

I had been told that if all goes well it would take maybe 45 minutes. I left after 2.5 hours and the poll workers were still there working when I left. I was barely functional at that point, I had not slept well the night before, been wakened by a strange nightmare and had a busy day doing other stuff, so by 11pm I was a zombie. Good thing there were no other cars on the road as I drove to the Green Party party.

Turns out they don't start counting the minute the doors close, there are a whole bunch of steps to be done before actual counting begins and a bunch of things that have to be reconciled. They did not reconcile. I think the big debate was, do we carry on with the count or do we spend a bunch of time trying to reconcile something we have no idea of how to reconcile? Apparently the manual had no answer to that question.

One of the three polls was very small, only 50 actual votes to count, and it reconciled and was counted in a speedy manner. Those poll workers got to leave early. The poll with the worst problem was of course the one with the most votes to count. The one I was assigned to was in the middle. We scrutineers were all sitting at a table away from the workers but one of the scrutineers had some experience doing this and he said we should go sit at our poll. It was interesting but I imagine it just put more pressure on the workers having us three "observing" them.

Finally our poll workers decided to go ahead with the count. The box of paper ballots was difficult to open and while there was plenty of paperwork and envelopes and pens and stuff, no box cutter was provided. So we "observed" the poll workers struggling to open the damn thing. Then finally the poll clerk got it open and started pulling out ballots one by one. She unfolded it, displayed the ballot to all of us scrutineers and the other poll worker, and called out the name on the ballot that got the vote. It was like something right out of "Survivor". She placed the ballot on top of the envelope designated for that particular candidate. She did this for all hundred-odd ballots.

Two of us scrutineers recorded the vote, the third scrutineer who was more experienced did nothing. He knew he could get the final tally at the end and as long as at least one of us besides the poll worker was recording this, he didn't have to do anything. Sneaky bstrd, lol. At this particular poll there had been a discrepancy of one before the actual count started, and a discrepancy of one after the count. I think the decision was made that an extra name had been crossed off the voting list that shouldn't have been—human error—but no real damage done since the differences between the counts for each candidate were well over one vote. They just had to record that as the possible reason why the numbers did not reconcile.

The poll clerk recounted all the ballots after she had read them all out to confirm the numbers. Then they were all packaged up and more paperwork done as per the manual. Meanwhile we scrutineers moved on to the last and biggest poll which was in progress. Since we were coming in the middle of the count we couldn't really confirm the numbers and since this poll already had problems with reconciliation it was not surprising that it did not come out right. But again the difference was only by one vote and the totals for each candidate differed by a lot more than one vote. I was so tired I just copied down the numbers the poll worker had recorded and left, knowing that the numbers I had were possibly out by one vote but not really caring at that point. The poll workers had to continue to recount and confirm the discrepancy and come up with an explanation for it.

All I can say is, if a simple First-Past-The-Post count is that chaotic, moving to some kind of Proportional Representation type of vote will be a horror show. We won't know for days what the final result is! But I do like that it is all done manually and on paper, and we are all just a bunch of amateurs trying to make it work.

Afterward I drove to the party and turned in my records to our candidate. We all knew she wasn't going to win, not even close, but still I could see the disappointment on her face. She had to call the winning candidate to concede and she was putting it off, her husband was urging her to get it over with. We watched the election results on TV and discussed our experiences and thoughts on the matter. I particularly liked Megan Leslie's comments on the results (on CBC), I thought she was spot on. *

The winning candidate in my riding was a Liberal, and I'd heard him at the all-candidates meeting and thought he was good enough. I also thought that the final result—a Liberal minority government—was the best possible result. Someone at the dog park this morning cynically said that although the Conservatives are dead against Proportional Representation, she bet they wished they had it now since they got the majority of the popular vote.

We now have three Green Party members and one of them is here in the Maritimes. That is fabulous news. We are coming for you.


* [Megan said, look at the map, it says it all. It was all done up in colours representing five different political parties and looked like an abstract painting. She said we are a very divided country with lots of regional differences and although we were promised proportional representation and then denied it, we gave it to the politicians anyway. The voters have spoken and they have forced cooperation on the politicians like it or not. Deal with it.]

Wild things

I was reading an article about human efforts to control the Mississippi River in Louisiana ("Louisiana's Disappearing Coast", Elizabeth Colbert in the New Yorker, March 2019). Colbert describes the various engineering projects over the past century and some of their unintended consequences. In passing she mentions the huge imbalance between humanity and wildlife. The total weight of all humans outweighs the total weight of all wild mammals by eight to one, the total of all humans plus our livestock outweighs all wild vertebrates except fish. There is no place on earth now that has not been affected by us in some way.

So when you think about it, what does "wild" really mean? I think it used to mean the natural world unaffected by us, creatures untrammelled by our influence. Does it any more? In some ways "the natural world" is just a kind of vast zoo (or garden) where creatures have the appearance of being "wild". Wilderness is a kind of illusion.

When did this happen? In my lifetime the human population has tripled, and presumably our impact on wilderness and the natural world has increased by some similar factor. Maybe when I was a small child there was still some true wilderness in existence? Or maybe it happened before that, I don't know.

I was talking to a friend on the west coast last winter (by phone) and mentioned skating on a local pond. At first he misunderstood and thought I was talking about a skating rink on solid ground and when I corrected him he called it "wild skating". He likened it to "wild swimming" which apparently is a thing in some places. I said that I disliked swimming in pools, I would rather not swim at all if there was no natural body of water to swim in (I suppose swimming at the reservoir is an exception, but it feels like a natural body of water). He was amazed and admitted that he had never done it, and this is a man who regularly engages in extreme hiking, camping and skiing in the mountains.

It would not have occurred to me to call what I did "wild". We had a good laugh about that.

What does "wild" mean now? Is it some historical concept? Or has it changed its meaning to something a little more domesticated?

Bad mother

[This photo has nothing to do with the blog post title]

The last time my book club met, we were reading Olive Kitteridge. It seems we were divided down the middle in our reviews, some readers raved, some panned. I was one of the panners. Ravers praised the complex character of Olive, the development of character, the exposure of how awfully she treated her son Christopher. But also how the author led them from dislike to understanding, maybe even respect.

The book annoyed me so much (one chapter in particular) that I had to go take a bath to cool off. Then I read that it had been turned into a mini-series starring Frances McDormand, so I went looking for that and ended up watching the whole series (4 hours) before our meeting. This is one time I thought the TV version was better than the book. In my view the author took a bunch of characteristics and smushed them into one character and called it "complex". Olive did not make sense to me. McDormand's interpretation of Olive seemed to be that she was somewhat autistic, and I could make sense of that. But I disliked the son intensely for being so judgmental. At one point he referred to his second wife's son by another man as a "piece of crap", and I thought: "takes one to know one".

In my book club one reader referred to Olive having abused her son so it was no wonder he was so screwed up. Each chapter is a kind of vignette, only a couple take place during Christopher's boyhood, and I didn't really see consistent evidence of abuse. While Olive admits to having hit Christopher as a boy I don't see that as evidence of abuse. For sure she was not anyone's ideal mother, but she loved her son and took care of him as best she could. A couple of times in the book someone says that it is always the mother who gets blamed for childhood problems, and I agree with that. Very rarely do we accuse fathers of abuse or neglect unless it is quite horrific. Mothers just have to be less than perfect to be up for judgment.

There were a few anecdotes of horrible behaviour on the part of our parents and I said, Yeah, my siblings and I tell those stories and laugh about them. One person who is a family therapist decried Olive's narcissism for refusing to hear her son out when he criticized her for being a bad mother, another member related how when her teenage daughter accused her of being a rotten mother (for not letting her do something or other) she retorted that yes she was an awful mother, now go to your room. I said that if my son did that I'd react the same way Olive did; after pouring one's heart and soul into raising a kid one is not keen to hear that the kid didn't appreciate it one little bit. The therapist thought the correct response was to be open to criticism and to apologize for the hurt caused.

Interestingly, one new member said that what struck him was the difference between how kids are treated in North America and in Europe; he described how kids are allowed to go everywhere and do almost anything with little restriction or apparent harm. It surprised him how repressive American parents are. Perhaps if parents felt free to loosen the reins a bit they'd be less inclined to oppress their kids. But gods help you if you aren't actively "parenting" every second of your life. Bad mother indeed!

I was a less (much less) than perfect mother, so perhaps I am overly sensitive on the issue. I think I come from a long line of less-than-perfect parents and there was a time when I was pretty judgmental about my own parents' mistakes and faults. Eventually I figured it out and moved on. But it bothers me when I see other people engaging in that, I feel like swatting them upside of the head for stupidity. As my father used to say, "Quit yer bellyaching!"

But I guess that qualifies as abuse too.

What we remember

Remembrance Day fast approaches, and with it my conflicted feelings about it. Different years I have chosen to honour or not honour it, this year I choose not to. I was asked to go to the local Remembrance Day service and also to usher for the Soldiers of Song performance (in honour of Remembrance Day). I will not go to the service but I will usher for the performance, mostly out of wanting to remain in good standing as an usher.

I get that Remembrance Day is supposed to honour the fallen soldiers of all our wars, from World War I on. I get that the country wants to remember them as heroes and to portray modern day soldiers as heroes too. I won't argue the point, always good to honour people who represent ideal virtues (courage, loyalty, sense of duty, etc.) However, honouring soldiers is so intertwined with honouring the fighting of wars that I just can't do it.

The men who enlisted for the armies of World War I were sold a bill of goods. That war was all about international politics, nothing more. Not freedom or democracy or protecting the defenceless, just politics. Many soldiers ended up living under atrocious circumstances and dying ignominiously. Those that could not stomach it were condemned as deserters and cowards, the penalty for which was summary execution. The women back home (in European countries at any rate) protested and marched in the streets and the news of that was suppressed so soldiers on the front lines wouldn't know about it. Desertion and cowardice were serious problems. And then of course there was the spanish 'flu.

By the time of World War II, aviation had progressed to the point that bombing entire cities from the air was possible and considered a legitimate form of warfare. Non-combatants were now fair game, in the hopes of convincing their governments to surrender. Atrocity piled on atrocity. Again soldiers were sold a bill of goods, although perhaps not quite as blatantly as for the first world war. There was Hitler after all (one can argue that he was the direct product of World War I but no matter). No one cared about genocide or holocaust until after the fact. The Canadian government had blood on its hands for its policy of refusing safe haven for Jewish refugees, and for its treatment of Japanese Canadian citizens.

It got worse. The Korean War resulted in the partitioning of Korea. The war in Vietnam was just a horror show, millions killed and the landscape destroyed. Each time soldiers enlisted for patriotic reasons fabricated by their governments. Canada did not join the war in Iraq, but in a pact with the devil the Canadian government agreed to pick up the slack in Afghanistan so American soldiers there could be reposted to Iraq. Rape and pillage have always been considered a legitimate compensation for victorious soldiers, only very recently have we thought twice about that. And good luck unravelling the complexities (and atrocities) of Syria, or Palestine, or the various wars in Africa.

Ostensibly wars are fought to protect freedom and democracy and make the world safe for peace. It hasn't happened. It is ludicrous to say that waging this war will end war for all time, or at the very least prevent the next war, and yet that is the justification. Buffy Sainte-Marie (who was in Wolfville the past few days) got it right in 'The Universal Soldier'.

It is sickening. If there were a day to remember the awfulness of war and to promote peace I think I could buy into it. Or what about honouring the non-combatant war dead (as they do in the Netherlands)? They die and are made homeless in far greater numbers than soldiers. Or how about the families of soldiers who must cope with the behavioural fallout of emotionally damaged veterans? Never mind the victims of rape and pillage.

I recently read the poem 'In Flanders Fields' on Facebook, the anthem for Remembrance Day. Ostensibly the poem honours the war dead, but here is the last stanza:

"Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."

In other words, don't let the war stop, or you will be rendering all those soldiers' deaths meaningless. I say, those deaths are already meaningless, that is the real tragedy, and exhorting us to continue the war is just the most awful advice I have ever heard.

Postscript: I wrote this to avoid doing my writing class homework and also because it is a bleak November day threatening snow. In a bleak mood.

My Kindle and Active Hope

I have started loading books on my Kindle and attempting to read them. I have to say that the experience of reading a book on a Kindle is not the same---for me---as reading a paper book. I am trying to figure out why that is.

One thing is the background colour of the page: it's an off-white colour, a kind of grey. That does not seem to be modifiable. I did modify the text to a sans serif which so far is a bit of an improvement, but the greyness of the page gets to me, it's depressing.

Another thing is that I find reading on a Kindle limiting. I am the kind of person who just cannot read in a linear manner from start to finish. I always read the end of a mystery before the middle. Likewise for most books, fiction or otherwise. I like to skim. With nonfiction I like scanning the subheadings and illustrations in as I go along, I jump around. The Kindle is just not set up for that kind of reading, it is best suited for linear reading. I chafe at that.

Nevertheless I am really trying to get over it, I really am. I have put a few things on my Kindle that I really want to read, and am hoping that the enjoyment of those books will overcome my objections. I do see the advantages of a Kindle, particularly for travelling or for sitting in wait rooms. So I recently bought a couple of Kindle books that I want to read and cannot get through the library, or at least not in a timely manner, nor find cheap used copies on Amazon or elsewhere.

The first is Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (2012). I don't know much about Johnstone, but Macy is a longtime engaged Buddhist and activist that I admire. I have read a couple of books by her, including an autobiography and The Work that Reconnects. She deals with the depression and despair that many environmental and social justice activists feel over their apparent lack of success. Active Hope addresses these concerns. I am only a chapter or two into the book, and the Kindle does not really allow me to scan ahead, so the impressions I describe here are limited to what I have read so far.

We see the world today through lenses that are in part of our own invention and in part provided to us by our society and culture. We are so used to these lenses we do not even see them as such, we think we are seeing reality in the raw, the world as it "really" is. Macy and Johnstone say that there are three major prevalent stories that provide the lenses most of us are familiar with.

The first story is Business As Usual, that our society is on the right track and we can continue with business as usual. Most of our media provide and reinforce this story, most of our daily lives are based on the assumption that this story is reality. Our culture is inherently stable and good, there may be a few perturbances but nothing our politicians, economists and other experts can't handle. And while the experts deal with the big problems, we deal with the small ones, getting and keeping jobs, raising kids, maintaining a home, friends and community.

The second story is The Great Unraveling. Our economy is at risk, our politics are deteriorating, our environment is being degraded and destroyed, our climate is on track for major disaster, social justice atrocities abound, our access to cheap energy is disappearing, ...I am sure you can add to the list, you don't need me to provide the details. In short, we are doomed.

This story is also promoted in the media, although more so in the alternative media than in the mainstream. For those who are sounding the alarm on these issues, and/or attempting to fight them, despair and cynicism about our future is rampant. For many of us, this story is too grim to contemplate personally, so we resort to distraction or attempt to focus on the small delights of daily life as the only defense against this rather overwhelming general nastiness.

The third story gets little coverage in the media, it is not particularly newsworthy, it is so big that it is hard to get a good viewpoint on it. This story is what Macy and Johnstone refer to as The Great Turning.

As a species we have gone through a few major cultural shifts---revolutions as it were---and we are going through one now. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions are examples of previous shifts. The current shift might be called the Ecological Revolution, or perhaps the Sustainability Revolution. It is the transition from a doomed economy to a life-sustaining society. In its early stages, such a major transition appears to exist only on the fringes, but as it develops it spreads and becomes the new mainstream. We are on the cusp of something we have never seen before, a way for all of us to occupy this planet in peace and security, while preserving our natural world and promoting the highest social and spiritual values.

This third story sounds a bit airy-fairyish, but Macy and Johnstone provide evidence and arguments to support it as a valid view of reality. They suggest reading Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken as further support for this story.

Many people are already involved in this third story, you may be yourself. Macy and Johnstone list three major ways that people are involved or could become involved. They seem to have an affinity for things in threes. Possibly because it is the first number after two, which is the number of duality, either-or, black-and-white. The world may be considerably more complicated than either-or. Anyway, the three major ways they describe are Holding Actions, Life-sustaining Systems and Practices, and Shift in Consciousness.

Holding Actions aim to hold back and slow down the damage caused by Business as Usual. Protest movements, raising awareness of social injustice and environmental damage, caring for the victims and vulnerable, safeguarding communities against exploitation and war; these are the nature of holding actions. Saving the bits of society and culture worth hanging onto, saving as much of our beleaguered natural environment as we can. These actions are taking place at every level, from local actions against fracking, mountain-leveling, and protesting the closure of a local school, to international movements to curtail whaling or the building of bitumen pipelines or going after multinational corporations for environmental damages or corrupt practices harming vulnerable people. These are essential actions but they are not enough.

Life-sustaining Systems and Practices are the concrete building blocks of an alternative way of life. Many people, including entrepreneurs, corporations and even financial institutions, are working at creating positive alternatives to Business As Usual. If you look for it, the internet abounds in examples. Local farm markets, ecologically sound farming practices, research and investment in alternative energy, opportunities to become involved in alternative communities, colleges, ways of living and earning a living that are both satisfying and sustainable. These things are happening all over the world, and multiplying rapidly. They provide ways of being involved that are inspiring and give positive reinforcement to the activity. Small success stories abound, and provide inspiration for further action in those directions.

The Shift in Consciousness is about connection, compassion and caring. Macy and Johnstone cite the Apollo 8 spaceflight of December 1968 as a significant turning point in this shift, this was the mission that provided the first photos of the Earth as seen from the moon.

As astronaut Bill Anders said, We came all this way to explore the moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.

It is only recently that we have come to see the world as limited, and all of us in the same boat. Everything is connected, you cannot mess with one small or distant part of the world without significant impact on all parts any more. This awareness is growing exponentially, and every new disaster of The Great Unraveling only serves to amplify and spread this new consciousness. The very fact that we lament environmental degradation, wartime atrocities, abuse of children/animals/women and a host of other evils is some indication of the Shift in Consciousness we are participating in. There is a growing understanding that we cannot survive at the expense of others, we are too connected, our fates too entwined.

Macy and Johnstone point out that for individuals involved in these dimensions of The Great Turning, failure and despair is a constant threat. Not all holding actions are successful, and successful actions are often only partially so. Nevertheless, in the long view and the "grand scheme of things", there is a kind of relentless progress. One action may be unsuccessful but the movement as a whole gains ground, regardless of failure or success.

And that's just the first chapter, as far as I've gotten so far. I'll let you know how it goes.

As one example though of that last idea, I was listening to Thomas Mulcair (new leader of the NDP, official leader of the Opposition) being interviewed on CBC's The Sunday Edition, and he was asked about Harper's recent success in ramming through the omnibus Bill C-38 this month. Mulcair's response was that the Conservatives wanted to put that bill through in secret, to not have everyone know how it would gut our environmental and social legislation, changing Canada for the worse in a huge way, all behind the scenes. The Opposition was successful in revealing the extent of the awfulness, it is no longer a secret. Yes, they did not have the numbers or the time to thwart this bill or even to amend it, but they did put it into the open for all to see. This is important, and not a total defeat or failure by any means. In every defeat there is something to take away for future action. It ain't over.

Casseroles (pots and pans)

Montreal, May 26 ...



Song translation:

You tell them
You tell them
That it was instinct that
Drove you up to here.

You tell them
You tell them
That your senses were screaming
Deeply driven
By a strange force
Let it be your base camp.
Let it be your base camp.

You tell them
You tell them
That it was intuition that
Drove you up to here
A carelessness
So necessary every now and then
Let it be your base camp.
Let it be your base camp.

Source: here

Four Brownbagger talks

Over the past few weeks I've been going to the Brownbagger's Lunch, a one-hour lunchtime free lecture sponsored by Acadia Lifelong Learning (ALL). I get regular notifications for this lecture series and for the most part have not seen anything that really grabbed me, but this month there were four lectures in a row that I wanted to hear.

The first was Marilyn Manzer's "In Search of a Moral Economy", the second Uwe Kaufman's "Kluscap, Blomidon and Wabanaki Mythology", the third Chris Mansky's "Blue Beach---Evolution's Greatest Mystery in Our Backyard", and the fourth Bill Zimmerman's "Finally, Free to Be!" The lecture this week is of less interest to me so I will happily take a break.

Of the four, Marilyn's was most inspiring and Chris's the most interesting (to me). Bill's was also interesting, his message was that as seniors/elders we are in a unique position to participate effectively in political life and have some impact on social justice issues. Uwe has done considerable research on Miqm'ah/Wabenaki mythology surrounding the character of Kluskap (Glooscap) and told a number of the stories he has gathered over the years about Kluscap. The Kluscap stories are interesting, they are not about a god but a being with supernatural powers in a time when supernatural was natural. Animals spoke, rocks moved. Each story is about some dilemma solved and the ramifications of that long ago solution. Kluscap is compassionate and caring but also just. He once had an evil twin, Malsum, but he killed Malsum in a kind of duel and regretted it ever after. One version of the story that I read was that Kluscap and Malsum lived in what is now Newfoundland, but after Kluscap killed Malsum he had to move away, to what is now Nova Scotia.

Locally, Cape Split is considered to be Kluscap's stone canoe, forever beached at the head of the Bay of Fundy. One day Kluscap will return.

Chris has created a museum of fossils he has found at Blue Beach and has done considerable research on these and related fossils. Blue Beach rocks date from the Carboniferous era, a time when vertebrates were first emerging from the water onto land. The "Greatest Mystery" that he refers to is about how that happened, there are large gaps in the fossil record that evoke a large amount of speculation as to how exactly the evolution from water-adapted to dry land-adapted vertebrates occurred. Blue Beach is a tidal beach of sedimentary rocks (mostly slate, some shale), and depending on the strength of the tides and the amount of mud, what is hidden or exposed on the beach changes daily.

I have an old photo from when my youngest son was about 3 years old; I was in first year university and enrolled in a Geology 101 course. A field trip to Blue Beach was organized by a couple of the Geology Dept profs one weekend, and I took my kids along. We got to see several sets of tracks in the exposed slate rocks, of early "tetrapods". One set of tracks was large enough for my youngest son to stand inside a single footprint while I photographed him. As I recall it looked like it had three toes.

The Geology profs said that they could tell by the positioning of each footprint in relation to the others in the track how the legs were attached to the body, a significant piece of evidence in determining whether one is looking at an amphibian or a reptile, and how developed or primitive it might be. I just thought that it was amazing to be looking at footprints created hundreds of millions of years ago, well before even the dinosaurs lived. Some living creature walked across the mud and left a permanent, almost eternal, record of its passing.

Marilyn's talk was more personal, she kind of told her autobiography and the development of her own thinking about the state of the world and her life in it. She referred to God a lot, and right at the start of her talk gave her personal definition of that word so as to avoid mistaken impressions of what she was talking about: "the spirit of love and connection between all living beings and the natural world."

Towards the end of her talk she recounted hearing a CBC radio show that really brought together her sense of what life was about. It put into words what she had been feeling and struggling with over most of her life. I had heard that same radio program and I remember that my own reaction to it was that it was revelatory, I had not thought of things in those terms before, but it made a lot of sense.

The program was "Beauty Will Save the World", an episode of CBC Ideas in June 2010. Marilyn took some notes of what was said in that program, and she does a remarkable job of capturing the essence of what was discussed, so I am going to repeat them here. The title of the program is a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Here are Marilyn's notes.

Plato argued that beauty was the revelation of God in the here and now.

John Keats wrote, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth and all you need to know." (Ode to a Grecian Urn)

Beauty has the power to redeem desperate and tragic situations. Beauty saves us from acts against humanity, against ourselves.

If I didn't sing, I'd have to take drugs, because drugs kill the pain but beauty is bigger than pain. (a recovering drug addict)

Transcendent beauty---a spiritual beauty---can come in the most obscene places. People searching for dignity and human respect is a beautiful thing. Anyone can exhibit immense grace.

Beauty brings you joy. Beauty dwells with wisdom and wisdom dwells with joy. People who have beauty and wisdom and joy are capable of enduring the most terrible things.

Acting out survival of the fittest diminishes us as human beings and we know it. We need transcendent beauty to save us.

People are afraid of beauty like they are afraid of real freedom. The price of real freedom is security. Beauty is like that too. You can't hang onto it or possess it. It opens your heart and soul and makes you vulnerable. It is scary. You are not in control.

The fate of the world depends on unleashing the beauty that will save the world.

Marilyn's talk has been published and is available on the Argenta Friends Press website (Canadian Quaker Pamphlet No. 71). Look for "In Search of a Moral Economy" by Marilyn Manzer, in the pamphlet section.

Occupy

I was in Halifax yesterday for Occupy Nova Scotia, down on the Grande Parade. Surrounded by "tall" (for Halifax) bank buildings, probably a few hundred people and a handful of cops. My friend Val and I arrived a little late, it was supposed to start at 11am and we got there around 11.30am, but in time for some of the formal speeches and then some informal speeches. We recognized one guy, Ernie, from Wolfville who got up to speak. Later I talked to another guy from Wolfville, Marke, who was taking photos.

There were Union people there, lots of CUPE flags. One kid with a purple ribbon that we spoke to said his parents work for Air Canada and they were legislated back to work, they weren't allowed to go on strike and he didn't think that was right.

They were using the Human Mic, and that worked fairly well, but sometimes I couldn't make out what they were saying. It helped to stand next to some young person with a good clear voice repeating what was being said.

Val said that today was 40 years to the day of the time she took part in an anti-war protest in Washington DC, 1971, and she felt heartened that after all this time real protest was finally, finally! happening. Worldwide!!

Marke said, This is the passing of the torch, and I agreed with him. The young people at Occupy NS were so great, and all the greyheads there were so happy to be seeing this.

At the Medical Station there was singing and dancing, there was a guy strolling with a ukelele, and another guy sitting at a spinning wheel spinning out a very fine wool thread while chatting with whoever stopped to watch. A group strung up a "high wire" (only 3 feet off the ground) and were doing acrobatics on it, to the amusement of the cops at that part of the Grande Parade. Must be kind of boring to have to watch a few hundred people milling around, a little diversion is a good thing. There was a Food Station with free food, a Comfort Station with an air mattress and lots of pillows and rugs, and maybe a dozen tents set up on the grass.

We wandered around a bit, spoke to a few folks with interesting signs and it was all just so heartening. There was this one big black cop wandering around too, chatting with folks. Two little kids were holding hands, the smaller kid, a boy, was trying to make his big sister let go of his hand and the cop came up to him and said, Hold her hand, that's The Right Thing To Do! The little boy looked way up at the big cop's face in utter awe and stopped fighting his big sister.

My friend Val made a sign that said Affordable DAYCARE, NOT Super Prisons. The cop was reading it and nodding his head. Val said, You agree? and he said, Well I'm sure not in the 1%. I asked, So what do you think of all this? He laughed and said, I'm not paid to have an opinion! Ask me another time, maybe over a cup of coffee. Then in a low voice he said, I agree with a lot of what these folks are saying.

I would have liked to have stayed for the General Assembly at 7pm but Val was tired so we went home around 5pm. It was all very cool, exciting, heartening. That's my word for the day, heartening.

I was in Paris in May 1968, and when that fell apart it was so disheartening, my first real taste of cynicism and despair. And now, 43 years later, I feel like things are finally, finally! happening. We crossed some threshold, some tipping point, and the future looks possible.

Up until yesterday I was watching Occupy Wall Street livestreaming. I got to see and hear Naomi Klein address the occupiers, live. I got to see participatory democracy in action.

Now I am watching Occupy Toronto livestreaming and that is so cool. Right now it's early morning there and some media person came and asked the guys at the livestream camera for an interview; after she left they debated the issue of giving interviews, who should do it, what they should say, and why. All the while there was a live chat going on the right side of the screen and the guys on camera were responding to suggestions and comments there. It was really interesting to see them work it through. All wearing classic Canadian revolutionary garb: toques and "Thunderbay Tuxedos" (plaid flannel shirts).

What Occupy means to me is taking back what is ours, this world, our government, our economy, our culture. "They" say it is ours but "They" don't really mean it, We do. We speak for ourselves, we occupy what is ours. It is no longer any one issue, any one political party or any one class of people. Everything is connected, social justice and the environment and the economy is all connected and we don't have to work for one at the expense of the other. Naomi Klein talked about the myth of scarcity, there is no scarcity just really bad distribution. There is enough for all and enough to make it all work, not just for humanity but for the whole planet.

My friend Val brought along some reading material for the trip into the city, and one of the articles was one about Canadian billionaires. Among other things, they are rich enough that they could easily have paid off the 2010 Canadian federal government deficit with only 20% of their wealth. And their much touted charitable giving---in the millions of dollars---is actually a pittance; that a single mom buying a $2 chocolate bar as part of her kid's school fundraiser is contributing more of her wealth to education than any of those wealthy givers lauded in sycophantic business magazines.

You can go on the internet anywhere now and find those horrific statistics about just how rich the rich really are so I'll shut up about that. And as Harper says, folks in Canada are by and large better off than those in the USA. But that's not good enough. The USA is so far off the bottom of the chart that comparing ourselves favourably to that country now is silly. And our government would very much like to follow the USA off the bottom of that chart, so, 'nuf said.

One of Val and mine's favourite signs at Occupy NS yesterday was We Can Do Better Than This. On the ground someone chalked, This Is Where We Start.

The photo is from the Halifax Media Co-op, someone there took our photo at Occupy Nova Scotia on the Grande Parade.

Oh Jack

It was shocking to hear that Jack Layton died yesterday. He was younger than me.

Jack really turned the NDP around and had a real shot at the top, being taken out by cancer like that seems so unfair. He fought the last election hard and the party won big thanks to him, but he had to have been battling his own illness at the same time and he couldn't do both.

I hope the NDP is able to build on what Jack did, I hope that his efforts were not in vain.

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.

And we'll change the world.

All my very best,
Jack Layton"

Graduating

Just read an excellent Op-Ed by David Brooks in the New York Times (It's Not About You). Brooks is writing about college commencement addresses. Graduating classes in colleges across North America are listening at this time of year to speeches delivered mostly by successful Baby Boomers, telling them how to succeed in life, and as Brooks says, these speeches pretty much sum up the whole baby boomer theology:

"Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture."

What Brooks says about that message just rings so true to me. He points out that for a 20/22-year-old the sequence is wrong, one doesn't form a sense of one's self and then go out and create a life around that self-image. For most people one's sense of oneself grows out of life experience not the other way around. There are a few folks who emerge from their education with a fully formed idea of what they want to do in life, but for most they emerge like prisoners from jail: just happy to be out and wondering what to do next.

There are all sorts of messages out there on how to be happy by living in the moment, meditating to find a peaceful centre to alleviate stress and find a solid happy core from which to operate in life. One is exhorted to stop worrying and planning and doing and just Be Here Now. Laudable, but I think misguided.

I think that Being Here Now is something that happens naturally as one ages, one gets to that point through life experience and aging anyway. I don't think it is something that one ought to pursue deliberately right from the get-go. Perhaps the business of young life is to be out there doing stuff and experiencing life, not blissing out. One lesson one learns from experience is that finding inner peace is not really something that can be taught, you have to get there from inner turmoil. Inner turmoil comes pretty naturally, usually from outer turmoil.

David Brooks appears to be saying something similar. You get to wisdom through experience, and experience is usually hard-won dealing with life's tasks and problems as they come up. How one copes with a crappy dead-end job and a mean stupid boss might just be a source of great wisdom later in life; the perfect job in the chosen field of one's dreams isn't necessarily the best outcome in life, nor the one where one makes the greatest contribution to one's community, family or society.

In addition he suggests that what our culture needs most now is not a whole lot of young people out there finding themselves, but losing themselves. That self-centredness is pretty much a core value that has run its course, maybe we need a little less of it. How to suppress one's self might be a greater life skill than how to express one's self.

Of course, most college grads are going to learn that anyway, life has a tendency to do that to a person. I think that self-fulfillment often comes up from behind, you don't get there by pursuing it directly.

Slutwalk

I heard about this on CBC Radio yesterday, Jian Ghomeshi hosted a pretty heated debate between two feminists about the value of the Slutwalk phenomenon.

The first Slutwalk was held in Toronto on Sunday, April 3, as a response to a cop advising some women that to avoid sexual assault they should not dress like sluts. So a group of friends decided they had had it up to here with that kind of talk and ended up organizing a 3,000-strong protest march (more info here). Wow.

The debate is, some feminists feel that it can't be done, you can't rehabilitate the word "slut". It demeans and shames women, particularly young women. But some others feel, yes you can. It's been done for "queer", why not for "slut"? A young woman should not be shamed for wanting strut her stuff, what is so awful about that?

You know, I agree. They're right.

Sometimes, as a woman of a certain age, I am rather shocked by how some young women and girls dress. I could never do that. And sometimes I have that cop's thought, they are asking for trouble dressing like that.

But on the other hand I am fed up to here with a world and a society that thinks how you dress is a reflection of your character, and if your character doesn't measure up then you deserve whatever ill treatment someone else chooses to dish out. It's OK to assault a woman because she looks like a whore.

My god! It is not even OK if she is a whore! And just because she dresses in a way that makes some guy think of whores, is no excuse for anything. First of all, it is that guy who makes himself think that way, not the woman or her clothes. Second of all, even if he makes himself think that way still does not give him any excuse to think he can jump her without her consent. Even a whore. She does it for money, a guy has to pay for that, he can't just take it.

A woman has the right to dress however nicely or badly as she wants. You can disapprove, you can criticize, you can be shocked and appalled, you can even bar her entrance into your home or dress-code space. But you can't assault her. And as long as there are people who think that you can connect the dots between lust or disgust and assault then we have a big problem.

The language we use shapes our thinking. When we use words like "slut" or "whore" we conjure up certain images and we respond viscerally. Our visceral responses are our own responsibility, no one else's. We can change the meaning of words, we can change how we respond to those words. Language is alive, we can change it, we do not have to be prisoners to words.

So when they say they want to take back the word "slut", I agree with them. It's time.

It snowed last night...

So, apparently there's radioactive iodine in the rain in Boston. That's just down the way from here. It hasn't rained in a while here, but it has snowed. I guess we have radioactive iodine in the snow. It's a very small world, isn't it?

They say it's safe, and I won't argue the point. Nothing I can do about it anyway. I feel like the tragedy of Japan is the tragedy of all of us, we're all in it now. Well, I still have my home, a lot of Japanese don't, so I don't mean to belittle their losses. My family are all still alive and accounted for. But I have, we all have, radioactive snow/rain.

For humanity to survive the next century or so, we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions. We are not doing that. Nuclear energy might have been a stopgap measure, we might have switched to nuclear energy to tide us over until we got our insane energy needs under control. But that's not looking too good right now. I mean, even if we learn something from this event, and figure out how to build nuclear reactors that won't be vulnerable to tsunamis or major earthquakes or human error or terrorists or whatever, and we figure out what to do with the radioactive waste, and we figure out how to pay for it all, well, the appetite for nuclear energy has kind of taken a bit of a hit. So we're in a bind, Plan B isn't really there for us.

You can forget about wind and solar. No one has figured out how that can possibly replace fossil fuels for quantity and steady reliability. It just can't. And we're not all going to just sign on for non-stop Earth Hour. Feels good to do your bit for the survival of the Earth for one lousy hour, but all day every day? I don't think so. So, no Plan B, no Plan C.

I don't fear for the world, it will carry on. Nature has dealt with far worse than us, and will again. Even if it means starting over from scratch. I take heart from Snowball Earth, the time way back when that this planet was just one gigantic ball of ice with no sign of life on it at all. And yet there was, and the Earth carried on. But I don't have a lot of hope for us, I don't think we are going to make it now.

I've been putting off posting anything here, every time I go to my blog I see my granddaughter's laughing face at the top of the page and I don't want to disturb that. Well, all good things come to an end sometime, I'll just have to scroll down a bit now.

Women are heroes

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.

I read recently about an interesting street artist who has just released a new film called Women Are Heroes. JR does huge photographic murals in public places, the film is about a recent series of photo murals he did of women from poor and war-torn parts of the world.

JR's premise in this film is that in peacetime women are discriminated against, in wartime they are targets. He does not call them victims, he calls them heroes. Because no matter what, they continue to raise the young, keep communities together and point fiercely to the evil of atrocity.

I watched the trailer* for this film and it is moving. In one scene a Congolese woman describes being raped and watching her daughter be raped and her young son murdered. In another, a woman walks up to and screams at soldiers in the street, You are killing the people!

* - This trailer has been flagged on Youtube for containing adult material, I found another site for it but now you are warned: it contains adult material.

I like that JR calls these women heroes, and celebrates their heroism. In the biggest way he can. He plasters gigantic photos of their eyes everywhere, on walls, rooftops, the sides of trucks and buses, and at the bottom of swimming pools. Heroism can be life-threatening acts of courage in moments of great danger, it can also be just keeping on keeping on in the face of unrelenting adversity.

Today is International Women's Day. Celebrate the heroism of women, and keep on keeping on.

The F-word

Tomorrow, March 8, is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.

CBC TV's Doc Zone recently showed the documentary The F-word: Who Wants to be a Feminist?, about the current state of feminism and the status of women in Canada. Apparently both are going nowhere fast, except maybe south (metaphorically).

The title of the film is a reflection of the fact that many women do not like to identify as feminists because the word has taken on a negative connotation. The epithet implies women who still loudly fight against a now-vanquished enemy, making fools of themselves raging against long gone inequities. Women who do not like to call themselves feminists still believe in equality and rights for women, but they believe that these are already a done deal and that we should all just move on in life.

One of the things I learned is that the status of women in Canada used to be among the best in the world, we occupied seventh place in an international ranking in 2005 (the USA ranked 17th), and before that we were in fifth place. But in the past few years the situation has deteriorated so that now we rank lower (horrors!) than the USA, somewhere around twentieth place in 2010. Latvia and Sri Lanka rank higher. I applaud Latvia and Sri Lanka, but still, you'd think a long established western industrialized democracy could do better.

The film discusses possible causes of that deterioration. One major and obvious cause is our current Harper government, which has systematically undermined legal protections and financial support for women and women's advocacy organizations.

The Harper government professes strong support for "family values", meaning the withdrawal of supports for working women and reduced access to childcare among other things. Newly arrived immigrant women isolated by language and old country attitudes are left to fend for themselves, the poverty of women and children is ignored, legal protections for women in the workplace are quietly withdrawn.

Certainly the general movement toward right wing politics in North America has been detrimental to gender equality, but the film also offers another potential cause for the lack of feminist action on this issue.

In the film the history of feminism is sketched in broad terms as a movement in three waves: the suffragettes of the early twentieth century, the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s, and a more recent wave of feminist action in the late '90s and early twenty-first century. Each wave seems separated by a period of self-satisfaction, wherein many women assume that the major battles have been fought and won, we can rest on our laurels and get on with reaping the rewards. This film suggests that it is as if feminism has to skip a generation or two before it can reawaken. Feminists do a lousy job of raising the next generation of feminists.

I am not sure if I entirely agree with that last sentence, I don't think feminists are particularly at fault there. I think it is true that such movements do tend to skip generations but I don't think this is a problem specific to feminists. Maintaining a steady state of outrage over many decades for steadily (albeit microscopic) decreasing levels of injustice is just hard to do. For any cause. And it is easy to quietly eat away at recently won justice when public attention has moved on to another issue.

If you live in Canada you can watch the film online by going to the CBC Doc Zone website. There are a lot of other interesting documentaries there as well.

Zooborn lions

I am a sucker for baby animals, hence my link on the right side of this page to the Zooborns website. I looked at one of today's links this morning, a couple of cute lion cubs.

According to the description, these are seriously endangered animals, which is my reason for being in favour of zoos, that in too many cases there are more members of an endangered species in a zoo than in the wild. Not because we have captured too many and plopped them in prison, but because we have either hunted down or---more likely---have ruined the habitat for the survival of the wild animals. Because there are seven billion of us, and we take up too much space.

Another thing the description says is that these animals were once widespread throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and northern India. Now there are maybe 400 individuals left in the wild, another 100 in captivity. The town I live in has a population of 5,000 (people, not lions), so I guess if we devoted a couple of streets to Asiatic Lions, the entire world population of them could live there. Is that sad or what?

Anyway, getting back to the lion cubs. The description says the cubs are shy. A couple of the photos show the cubs snarling at the camera, I don't think shy is the right word here. Maybe pissed off and wanting nothing to do with us?

"Two thousand years ago they once roamed the whole of the Middle East..."

There are seven billion of us, we take up a lot of space and we need every inch we can get just to feed all of us. I read somewhere that the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans is around one million. We have so overshot. There's not a lot we can do about that now, getting back to one million is kind of unthinkable without talking major catastrophe. But it is terribly sad.

Brave Libyans

Muammar Gaddafi brought in mercenaries to slaughter his own people. Now Libyan consular staff and Libyan ambassadors around the world are resigning, citing genocide and War on the People as their reasons.

The protestors carry on. They are joined in their fight for freedom by members of Gaddafi's government and high ranking Libyan civil servants.

Gaddafi thought that Mubarek's problem was that he was not tough enough on the crazies shouting in the street. He sure showed Mubarek.

We in the West will pay a price at the pump for all this freedom fighting, but it is time.

I read one report in which a Libyan ambassador compared Gaddafi to Hitler. When you think of it, if only Hitler's people had seen what was coming and fought back the way Libyans are doing now, world history would be a whole lot different. I'm not criticizing Germans for not rising up en masse against Hitler, I don't think they could have known how bad it was going to be. But Libyans (and others) have the benefit of history, and they are good students.

I think sometimes that we in the industrialized West think that our way is the only way and developing nations around the world have no choice but to follow in our footsteps, or at least in the prescribed way our governments have set out for them.

But it isn't and they do have a choice and they are choosing now.

Revolution

In 1967-68 I was a student at l'Universite de Rouen, about an hour's drive west of Paris on the Seine. A wonderful place, a wonderful year. Rouen is in the heart of Normandy, a part of the world that Nova Scotia reminds me strongly of. Perhaps one of the reasons I felt so at home here when I first arrived in the early '70s.

Anyway, I was there for les evenements de Mai, the student uprising in France, and because my French student friends were heavily involved, I became involved too. At first it was exciting and exhilarating, we felt we had a real shot at bringing about change. The professors were with the students, and so were the workers, there was a general strike in the country. Paris was amazing. I and some student friends would hitchhike into the city to take part in it all. You couldn't get into la Sorbonne unless you had student ID, and I did so I could. Revolutionary lectures in the classrooms, huge revolutionary banners strung up everywhere, one in particular was the instructions for making Molotov cocktails. The streets surrounding la Sorbonne, le quartier latin, were dug up so that students could use the paving stones as missiles (there was a slogan, "sous les paves, c'est la plage", meaning that if you dug up the paving stones you could be on the beach because the stones were set in a bed of sand).

During the daytime it was OK to walk around, les flics gathered at certain intersections but left you alone, but at dusk if you were still there then you did so at your own risk. There were no buses and le metro was stopped because of all the tear gas in the lines and also because of the strike and the gasoline shortages. So everyone hitchhiked to get around, and the army brought in big trucks to move people around. If you needed to go somewhere, you waved at one of the trucks, it would pull over and two armed soldiers, with guns slung over their shoulders would get out of the canvas-covered back and wave you in with their guns. You climbed in and sat on a bench there with all the other people. The only way to see out was to lift the canvas on the side a bit to peek under it. When you thought you were near where you wanted to be then you shouted at one of the soldiers, who shouted at the driver, and then the truck pulled over and they let you out.

When it all started President de Gaulle was out of the country. But when he returned the tide turned and the whole thing was quickly ended. It was demoralizing. I remember going away to England for a week, and when I returned, someone had carved a huge croix de Lorraine in the sandstone bluff above Rouen. This was de Gaulle's symbol, and it was chilling to see it. It felt like as if someone had carved a swastika over the town.

I guess that experience made me cynical about revolution at way too early of an age. I stopped believing that change was possible in that way. And certainly my experience since then has seemed to confirm that belief, that you can't expect anything good to come out of a popular uprising. But I have been following what is going on in Tunisia and Egypt, and especially in Cairo, with growing admiration and hope. Watching the protestors in Tahrir Square, listening to them speak about why they are there, and reading as much as I can about what it is all about, I am excited for them. I really do hope that this time it is different.

This morning I was listening to Q on CBC and there was a debate about the Egyptian situation, one person for and one against. The one against was all about how revolutions end badly (look at Iran, look at Iran, LOOK AT IRAN) and the people should be happy with the devil they know rather than the devil they don't. I almost felt like reaching into the radio and shaking the fellow, So What About Iran?!? Iran is Iran, Egypt is Egypt!

Anyway hardly had the debate ended and the news came on announcing Mubarak has resigned and left the country in the hands of the military. The Egyptian military has comported itself very well with the people in Tahrir Square. I wish them well from the bottom of my heart.

This time maybe this time the revolution is here.

Force of Nature

So at the height of the blizzard I went to a movie. I half-slid all the way down the hill to the theatre, there were a few other people out on the road and everybody seemed to be having a good time in the deep snow. The movie would have been sold out if it weren't for the weather, only people who could walk, ski or snowshoe in were there. On the theatre website they said that they would only cancel if the power went out. They only have the film for one day, so they can't postpone a show. It was Force of Nature.

I'm afraid I've been putting off going to see this one, I figured I knew what it was about and wasn't really up for it. The subject of the film is Canadian environmental icon, David Suzuki, and you'd have to be pretty isolated for the past fifty years not to know who he is and what he stands for. One can assume the film would be essentially a paean of praise for an extremely well-known and respected environmental activist.

The vehicle for the film is Suzuki's Legacy Speech, given in 2009 in Vancouver to celebrate his 75th birthday. Half it is his biography, half it is his thoughts on where the planet and the human race are today. I'm glad I went to see it, although postponing the viewing until a major blizzard was perhaps not the best thing.

Given Suzuki's long time involvement in all things environmental and climate change related, his activist background and his outspoken nature, it is not surprising that he paints a dismal picture of the current state of the planet. Nevertheless it is a surprisingly upbeat film that leaves you feeling quite inspired.

He talks about the four sacred elements, earth, air, fire and water. For air he tells us that a certain proportion of each breath is made up of argon atoms. Argon is an unreactive element, it does not stay in the body or bind with any other element. It goes in, it comes out on the outbreath. He says that in the time it takes for him to deliver his speech, every person in that hall will have breathed the same argon atoms that he has. Within a year, every breathing living being on the planet will have breathed those same argon atoms. We are all made of air, and we all share the same air. We are the air, the air is us.

It is not we humans here and the environment out there, we are the environment and the environment is us. Suzuki talked about the beginning of the universe and how every particle of matter in the universe is attracted to every other particle. The universe is filled with tendrils of attraction, and we can call that Love.

What distinguishes humans is our brains, in particular our capacity to remember, our memories. I'm reading a book, The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio (1999), and Damasio says that while all living things with nervous systems have consciousness, we have something he calls extended or autobiographical consciousness based on our capacity to remember. We are self-conscious. Memory and self-consciousness have allowed us to create an amazing array of technologies, cultures and civilizations. But there has been a downside to all that creativity as well.

Suzuki talks about our mythologies that connect or separate us to/from our environments, how they have changed over the millennia. He gave the example of dragons, how we once believed in dragons and when things went wrong we knew we had to appease the dragons, whether it was with gold, animal sacrifices or virgins. But now that we don't believe in dragons any more we don't go around sacrificing to them or trying to appease them. But, he says, now we believe in The Economy, and when the The Economy is not feeling well we have to appease it, make sacrifices to it. Suzuki says that we forget that we invented The Economy, just as we once invented dragons. Suzuki says that there is something very wrong when we think that appeasing The Economy takes precedence over taking care of the environment that sustains us.

These are a few of the things that I took away from watching this film, there were many other things as well.

I wanted to get home quickly after the film because as it happened there was going to be a talk on CBC Ideas about whether dealing with climate change and economic growth are contradictory. It seemed kind of appropriate. The Ideas talk was not nearly as inspiring of course, but still interesting.

One of the things that was mentioned was that when we talk about economic growth we are usually referencing GDP (gross domestic product), and that GDP is quite arbitrarily defined as including certain human activities but not others. So when we talk about economic growth it is fairly narrowly defined, and usually activities that increase consumption are good and those that do not involve consumption are not.

It is theoretically possible to have a vibrant economy based on life quality-enhancing activity rather than destructive and consumption-based activity. There are all kinds of reasons why we don't, political, historical and so forth, but none that are insurmountable.

Another thing that was pointed out was about human nature, whether it is fundamentally selfish and greedy and short-sighted, or the opposite. Again it was pointed out that we are both, and we are capable of both, individually and as societies. Just because we have defined economics on the basis of self-serving activity does not make it a given, we can change that if we want to.

It is easy to fall into despair about the state of the world and our seeming inability to transcend our baser qualities. It is also easy to beat ourselves as a species up for being so stupid and selfish in our treatment of the rest of the world. These things are true but they are not the whole story, and in my opinion nothing will change until we start focussing on our ability and capacity to change, for the good. It is time to stop giving energy to what is wrong with the world and start giving energy to what needs to be done. Our presence in the universe is a small miracle, we need to live up to that. As Stewart Brand once said, We are as gods so we might as well get good at it.