Our grandkids will p*ss on our graves.

A PARABLE:  An elementary school initiated a new way of evaluating student progress after observing that the individual students’ grades were being compared, that students with low grades were being taunted, and parents were pressing for medal awards to students with the highest marks. Teachers were beginning to recognize that a negative atmosphere was permeating the school after testing times as a consequence.

               The plan they came up with was to put the focus on group—rather than individual—achievement. They switched to numbered scores on tests, then added all the scores and gave the school a total score made up of all the student’s numbers. What was hyped via a huge banner in the hallway after testing times was this total score and whether and by how much it exceeded the earlier testing-time’s score. Every student’s grades contributed to a win for the student body.

               It didn’t work. Grade fours figured out very soon who contributed how much and the staff realized quickly that the achievers wanted desperately to be recognized as winners, expected their moment of glory.  Despite knowing what penalty the achievement-handicapped students had to bear so that the achievers and their parents could win gold, the staff sought other ways to reduce the zero-sum mindset these children were bringing to school with them. (Zero-sum simply means that every win must be accompanied by a loss. For instance in hockey, a win is recorded as a +1, a loss as a -1, the two added together equal zero.)

                The winner-loser mentality is endemic to most cultures, possibly at its most pronounced in Western societies. Not only sports but politics, economics, justice systems, even education are deeply affected by the win/lose mentality. Political parties shamelessly campaign to win; success in commerce is measured by profit/loss numbers with little said about a business’ community contribution. You’d think restorative justice would be embraced as a common-sense approach, but no, courts must produce winners and losers.

               A final exam in my Teachers’ College year had only two questions. I aced the one but couldn’t for the life of me get the other one, which asked me to do a basic Arithmetic operation like 2,855/75 in the decimal (base 10 numeration system) and in the binary (base 2 numeration) number systems. My mark, of course, was 50%. I’m pretty sure that the binary system (which, by the way, is the numeration system of computing) was never taught to me because my elementary and high school math teachers also got 50% on basic numeration, probably, and they couldn’t do that puzzling problem because their teachers in turn hadn’t fundamentally got it. Whether it’s numeration, or zero-sum thinking or the pros and cons of the parliamentary system of democracy, we pass our knowledge, our ignorance, and our misconceptions and biases down, generation to generation.

               I visualize here the proverbial “hockey-mom,” screaming at the coach to put her boy on the ice, screaming at the referee for putting him in the penalty box, screaming at her son later for taking a stupid penalty that cost them the game. Character building sport? Granted, this description is stark and unfairly misrepresentative of much of the hockey world, but like the teachers trying to help large classes of differently endowed students to become the best they can be, zero-sum thinking starting in the cradle isn’t helpful … not by a long shot.  

               There’s an argument of support for winning/losing in sports, in politics, even in musicianship. Zero-sum competition encourages us to become the best we can be, it says. We need to talk about that: moms and dads don’t become the best parents a child could have by competing with the neighbours; teachers don’t become the best teachers through popularity contests. Furthermore, what application follows from being the one in the whole world who can throw a discuss farthest? And let’s be honest; it’s not about fitness either, which can be had without cutthroat competition. 

            What it is about is the repeated gratification of our “zero-sum addiction.”  We satisfy our lust for zero-sum stimulation by watching winners humiliate losers in sports, mainly, but also in music competitions, elections, wealth accumulation, etc. “Take that, you deadbeats!” Movies that feature good guys annihilating bad guys are way more popular than those which climax with a reconciliation.

               There are those whose primary leisure occupation is watching sports on a big screen TV. Better that then drinking to excess in a bar that features the humiliation of women by paying them to remove their clothing, I suppose, but we ought to remember at least these two things:

·       Professional sports, the corporation-driven fleecing of fans hooked on zero-sum spectacles, is not sport, it’s commerce. A professional hockey player I won’t name earned almost exactly as much as I did in my entire 25-year career as a teacher … in one month! And when he was offered more, he moved to a rival team and left his fans crying.

·       Every Saturday night, a father of elementary school-aged boys gathers with some work friends on the rec room couch to watch Hockey Night in Canada, drink beer and eat pizza. Depending on the nature of their actions and conversation, the boys will absorb their dad’s attitude toward televised “sports.” Perhaps they will come to believe that zero-sum competition is where it’s at, bring it to school, and perhaps they’ll feel luckiest as adults when whole weekends are made up of beer, pizza and wall to wall hockey, curling, basketball and football … watching, that is, not playing.

THIS MATTERS: The future we’re facing demands that we continue educating ourselves from reliable sources; it takes time and effort to be a lifelong learner. We also need to be participants; doers more than watchers. We’ve got to put more effort into reducing our demands on the environment, curb our appetites for owning the best, the most, the “funnest” gadget on the market. We won’t save the planet for our grandchildren by frittering away our time with beer, pizza and the zero-sum crap all around us. Above all, we’ve got to stop making excuses for our indifference to events “out there.” For future generations, the historic imagery of baby boomers shuffling around the house in pyjamas because “we were just so busy, busy and so we were so tired, exhausted even.”

We’re not tired, our aimlessness and the world we’ve allowed to develop in our indolence has left us guilty, stressed, anxious and feeling tired, and we’re apparently not smart enough to know that more indolence is not the cure for what ails us.

              Our grandchildren will p*ss on our graves when the full force of our self-indulgent lethargy becomes apparent, when their world burns, then floods, then refuses to produce food, and half the planet’s surviving people are refugees. The history books they study will tell them that even when it came to rescuing and restoring the planet, our generation saw the dialogue as yet another zero-sum game. Why not? Perhaps the fossil fuel people won and went jubilantly into their dotage with their pockets full of money. Those environmentalists are such losers! +1 + -1 = 0

              “Ah, well. Forget all that. The Olympics are on. Canada’s probably gonna win a gold medal in the pool today.”

              “What?? Canada swims??”

 

This Changes Everything, possibly

I'm reading This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. A big, fat book with nothing on the front fly leaf but the title in a big, bold font. It needs to be big, I guess. Its subject is bigger than Santa Clause, terrorism, Buddha, democracy, free trade, the weather or the healthful benefits of regular exercise—all rolled into one.

            Lots of people have read it; but I'm guessing lots have also started it and put it down. Too much like surgery with no anesthetic. I'm only up to page 100 and my hands are already dripping with metaphorical blood.

            For example: the devastation awaiting civilization as a consequence of climate change may have reached the point of no return and all we can hope for is that we will soon muster the will to begin mitigation. We're pretty much into the chemotherapy/radiation stage of climate change and the prognosis for full recovery is not good. We've smoked too many cigarettes for too long; prevention can no longer be considered a viable strategy.

            Klein demonstrates a whole whack of stuff that we've been denying/neglecting/hiding-under-the-bed-from. For instance, she outlines with examples how the whole free trade/globalization movement of the last few decades is diametrically opposed to environmental protection; an Ontario company making state of the art solar panels is going to go under because free-trade partners protested that its hire-local policies transgressed the fairness rules of the free trade agreement. Extrapolate that to all the other regulations that will make it impossible to follow independent, innovative environmental policies and plans and it's obvious that the corporate, capitalist machine has us by the short and curlies—exactly where they've always wanted us. "Consume, consume, consume and shut up!"

            Well, that's just an example. For me, the frustration of reading material like this without any apparent means to influence the consequences of the capitalistic, free trade/growth juggernaut is pretty debilitating by now. Makes me want to crawl under the bed with a pail full of chocolates, a stack of Archie comics and no reason to come out from there . . . ever.

            Come to think of it, that's exactly what I'm doing, actually. Personally curtailing self-indulgences won't be nearly enough: driving to the city to pick up a parcel that could have been mailed, leaving unused lights on, engaging in unnecessary, extremely polluting air travel (twice as much per passenger as by car; four times as much as by train). None of this is going to solve the dilemma our unborn great-grandchildren (of which I will never have any, but you might) will be facing when all the world's resorts are submerged, drought-ridden third world countries turn on the West for having created the mess and all the food-growing ecosystems have been thrown completely out of whack.

            What Naomi Klein is suggesting here is no less than a political/economic reversal, a revolution if you will. What is tragic for us is that a compliant population in Canada today hasn't the information, the courage, the will—or all three—to insist that a realistic appraisal of the menace of free-trade/growth/capitalism vs. the future be done. It's becoming more and more clear that we won't even insist that the government we elect begin to plan for the mitigation of what is already manifest in terms of human life on the planet. Polls are showing that we're headed for a minority Conservative or Liberal government, neither of which possess the smarts nor the will to come to grips with the enormous problem we're facing. Throw the NDP into that basket as well, while we're at it. All three are clearly planning little past their strategies for winning election.

            And today, messing with the status quo is not seen as a vote getter.

            Sigh!

            Anyone want to join me under the bed? Oh, sorry. I see you're already here with me. Have a chocolate.          

           

  

Humans are: a) Gods, b) highly evolved vegetation, c) swine, d) none of the above

The view from Helen's apartment - January 26, 2009

I was traveling to and from the landfill yesterday, discarding scraps of lumber and accumulated sawdust and garbage, and listening with one ear to Sheila Rogers’ interview with some person whose name I didn’t get because the conversation took longer than the garbage run. His points—as far as I could gather—included that:
1) we humans pretend to be in conscientious control of our environment, responsible caretakers of the earth, when actually, we are raping and pillaging the earth like rampaging morons, and that as a result,
2) life on earth will eventually (maybe shortly) discard us and life will go on without us so that,
3) the earth and its other inhabitants will be happy to see us go.

In 1920, poet Sara Teasdale wrote:



There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,


And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;





And frogs in the pool singing at night,


And wild plum trees in tremulous white;





Robins will wear their feathery fire,


Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;





And not one will know of the war,


not one will care at last when it is done.





Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,


If mankind perished utterly;





And Spring herself when she woke at dawn


Would scarcely know that we were gone.



Ray Bradbury based a short story called “There will Come Soft Rains”on Teasdale’s poem, a story in which “mankind perishe[s] utterly” in a nuclear war. A recent TV documentary explored the restricted area around Chernobyl, and quite astoundingly discovered that animal and vegetable life was thriving there; the abandoned animals had gone feral and were doing well despite the high levels of radiation in the food chain.



The Biblical record tells us that the Children of Israel repeatedly strayed from the presence of the Creator and went their own way. A condensation of this oft-repeated story might be that such straying always leads to destruction and sorrow. We do well to pay heed to the prophetic voices warning us that we must humble ourselves before the creator and pay attention to the prophets of our time: Sara Teasdale, Ray Bradbury, David Suzuki, Al Gore, and the many in my church—the Mennonite Church—who have warned us that earth-care is people-care and that we can’t please our creator by pillaging his creation.



Most of us—I expect—live daily with what’s called “cognitive dissonance,” the stress that results from believing one thing and doing another. I was determined to disassemble the four palettes lying on my yard from construction and recycle the wood (good thing) but they were so stubbornly nailed together (bad thing) that I gave that up (bad thing) and hurled them all into the pit at the landfill (bad thing) where they will be burned (really bad thing), releasing a great deal of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and fly ash into the atmosphere (unforgivably bad thing). I am feeling really dissonant—cognitively—as a result.



Another word for this feeling is, of course, “guilty.”

Some interesting reader responses

From friend and reader, JB

Trickle down economics

I am somewhat familiar with the economics of Vietnam having lived there for a number of years. After 1986 when Vietnam changed its policies at the 6th party Congress, foreign companies were allowed to invest and set up factories. It took a while but by the mid 1990s there were many corporations that took advantage of low wages and generous government tax laws.

The 4th generation phenomenon occurred. Companies that invested in Japan first, moved to Taiwan and South Korea when wages in Japan rose. They then fled to Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Now that wages are too high there to make a maximum profit, Nike and dozens of other companies have moved to Vietnam. I have visited factories in the south of Vietnam. Poor villagers prefer the Nike jobs because the conditions and wages are much higher than in locally owned companies. This may sound strange but this is what people told me. Are there unfair practices? Of course. Are people dismissed when they complain? Yes. Even so, there is no problem getting people to work.

So does trickle down work? Probably yes and no in Vietnam? The people benefit and have disposable income. While that is happening lax environmental laws allow companies to dump untreated wastes into rivers and streams. Short term gain at a long term expense. This phenomenon repeats itself everywhere

JB

Saskatoon

From friend and reader, JY

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_intro

response to your blog question , especially 3rd and 4th points - I read
this issue of Wired on way home from Ontario, intrigued by perspective