Hockey Canada: Two Minutes for Unsportsmanlike Conduct.

 

Do I look like Gretzky? Huh?

Canada’s Minister for Sport is reported today (CBC News app) to have declared that there’s a “systemic problem” of sexual violence and toxic masculinity in Canada’s hockey culture that Hockey Canada has failed to address. Pascale St-Onge also said, “The stories that we’re reading about are deeply disturbing and sickening, quite frankly.”

Triggered by one story of members of Canada’s Junior Hockey Team sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman, tag-team-wise, an avalanche of stories illustrating the “sexual violence and toxic masculinity” have surfaced.

Clearly, our Minister for Sport is not going to let Hockey Canada get away with “a few bad apples” arguments; she’s using the systemic word which must mean something like this: you’re organized in such a way and your practices are such that you’re encouraging the violence and toxicity to happen.

Is that fair? At the local level, sports programs are generally organized into same-age, same-gender teams. Peer groups, in other words. It makes sense. Competition needs to be fair. At the same time, educators know that when a child begins to live a part of life outside the home, peer acceptance and bonding become powerful forces in his/her/their development. Add to this a zero-sum competitiveness and the garden may have been tilled for growing a triumphalist, toxic, sports “militia.”

If this could be proven to be true, then the systemic part of St-Onge's lament would be self-evident.

And herein lies a dilemma: professional sports watching is deeply entrenched in Canadian culture. To reorganize children’s hockey to meet goals of physical fitness and the inculcation of habits of sportsmanship/citizenship as opposed to competitiveness considerations, would grate across the sensitivities of thousands of sports afficionados. The Ministry for Sport can withdraw funding from Hockey Canada—which it has—until it makes meaningful changes to its practices, but can do little else.

Sports existed back in the 1950s; I lived the recess and after school games of softball and soccer, the annual field days in town, the makeshift ice rinks and ball diamonds. There may have been sandlot ball in town, but in our one-room country school, all grades and all genders played; with only fifteen students in Grades One to Eight, peer divisions were impossible. 

We have other models of play, exercise, sports, beside the Hockey Canada model. St-Onge's reference to systems that prove harmful is timely; organized hockey must take a hard look at itself.

I haven’t said anything yet about “sexual violence” or “toxic masculinity,” St-Onge’s words for the side-effects of whatever the system is getting wrong. There certainly are campaigns to counter feminism; such a campaign is evident in American Evangelicalism’s tendency to prefer a return to whatever in the Bible supports male hegemony. As to “sexual violence,” I think that in its debasement, its humiliation of victims, it serves to reinforce male dominion over females, a practice exacerbated by the peer camaraderie of the pub, the military, the traditionalist RCMP, etc., and now—according to St-Onge’s pronouncements—in a sport poorly regulated by Hockey Canada.

I’m far too short of knowledge to expound on the details of a typical child’s experience going through the levels of minor hockey programs before arriving at the AA or AAA levels where it gets really serious, especially for those parents who are pushing their young men toward a possible professional NHL career. While grooming young men for the remote possibility of a place in the big time, are we also grooming them systematically—possibly inadvertently—for an attitude we abhor? That seems to be St-Onge’s concern and should be a serious consideration for every family contemplating hockey as a part of their child’s education.

"I fell into a burning Ring of Fire..."

 

The Cinderella Planet

I spent part of the morning reading a superb piece about yet another instance where corporate/industrial development and Indigenous land use are in conflict. The article concerned the “Ring of Fire,” a rich deposit of minerals, some of which are being sought for the manufacture of electric car batteries. Located in the James Bay Lowlands of Northwestern Ontario, the deposit can’t be developed without overland access infrastructure. Rivers will have to be bridged, bogs torn up, forests cut down, all those things northerners recognize from past experience of, for instance, building and maintaining a highway link from Thompson, Manitoba to Winnipeg or from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan to Missinipi. Roads can exact tremendous ecological change, particularly to the delicate balance of land, water, plant and wildlife that has evolved since the last Ice Age in the harsh climate and conditions of the Canadian Shield.

In its pristine state, the Shield can be a paradise of clear, cool lakes and rivers and endless spruce forests.  The land teems with sturgeon, walleye, muskellunge, beaver, muskrat, moose and bear while providing an idyllic habitat for humans who have over many generations learned to live full, satisfying lives in harmony with nature’s largesse. They travel in canoes that leave no dent in the water, fish and hunt only what’s needed to survive, rely on roots and berries to supplement their diets. And in the wilderness where a meteorite deposited the Ring of Fire eons and eons ago, populations still experience that quiet life that is the north, they still dry sturgeon fillets, still hunt the mighty moose and lay in a winter’s supply of food. And the thought of “owning” any of this great north is still anathema to them,  knowing as they do that it all belongs to its creator. That they would wish to have a say into both the if and the how of development should come as no surprise.

Sturgeon Fishing on the Neskantaga First Nation (CBC News)

Shift to the national and international corporations salivating over the possibilities represented in extracting scarce minerals from the Ring of Fire. They will succeed; they have the backing of the Ford government for whom the sturgeon population, algae blooms, drained or flooded bogs and decimation of habitation doesn’t emotionally, personally register. Gross Domestic Product, profitability and jobs are the telling landmarks of progress in a settler colonialism that relies on ever-growing consumption. Settler colonialism that goes hand in hand with corporate capitalism evolves rapidly and decisively toward an end that won’t be pretty; on a limited planet, no system can keep growing indefinitely and the Ring of Fire is just one more example of consumerism’s attempt to stave off its inevitable end, at least for one more generation.

Electric cars and the batteries that they require represent one more attempt to kick the can down the road, to avert disaster without the inconvenience of reducing our wants.  

There may be only one sensible way to approach the looming climate change disaster, and it’s to reduce our consumption to match our needs instead of to our advertising-fed wants. Why, for instance, would we transport kiwi from New Zealand when our just-as-nutritious berries grow naturally where we live? Why would we fly halfway around the planet to attend a meeting on subjects that could be dealt with on the internet? Why would we holiday in places far away when creature-comfort venues can be created locally? Why would we tolerate built in obsolescence in our appliances when the means to manufacture longer-lasting ones are already in place and running? Why would we ship rice from Asia when oats, for instance, provides better nutrition than rice ever has?

Growing for export rather than for the local food market feeds into the consumption-growth-profit model. Much of Saskatchewan’s arable land is used to grow canola, from which the oil is extracted and shipped abroad for the most part. In principle, that same land could be growing oats for oatmeal, wheat for baking, potatoes for local consumption with surpluses marketed more broadly. Freight transportation is extremely unfriendly environmentally; more than profitability must eventually drive our priorities. For the population of the James Bay lowland, profit/loss motives simply weren’t considerations historically; only sustainability, conservation mattered.

Harping on the urgency of the need to shift to needs provision while reducing wants consumption may already be little more than a futile thundering against a lost cause. Breaking personal negative habits is hard enough; smoking, drinking, hamburger & bacon gorging, and lethargic living persist among many until their wants kill them. But that’s still nothing next to the breaking of bad habits in a global economy.

Localizing of economies is a must in a sustainable, renewable future on planet earth. For learning the how of this, the Ojibway of the James Bay lowlands might well serve us as teachers of Chapter One. 

For a more objective description of the Ring of Fire mineral-rich deposit and considerations for its development, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Fire_(Northern_Ontario) To read the article cited in paragraph 1, visit https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/a-divisive-road-to-ring-of-fire-ontario. 

P.S. I've borrowed the term "settler colonialism" from Enns/Myers Healing Haunted Histories. It refers to the relationship between those who historically gave something up through colonialism and those who continue to benefit from that historical fact. 

Why We Almost Always Get Stuff Wrong

Let’s say Martin Booby takes a vacation to the Grand Canyon and while there, falls over the edge and bounces to his death, his body ending up in the Colorado River. And suppose the headline in the local Courier News reports, “Local citizen dies for lack of restraining fence.”

·           Cause: State of Arizona doesn’t provide restraining fence for Grand Canyon tourists.

·           Effect: Local man pays with his life.

You might well say, “Now hold on a minute. I’ve been there and I know there are multiple signs warning of danger and multiple ways you can view the canyon safely. Booby was just being his usual ‘devil-may-care’ self!”

OK. So now we have two causes, until someone points out that Martin Booby always wore cowboy boots which would certainly have compromised his footing on the cliff edge, plus, probably, he’d been drinking since he was known to tipple before lunch.

Well that makes, potentially, four causes without even mentioning what led Martin to choose the Grand Canyon as a vacation site or how Martin vetoed his wife’s preference for Puerto Vallarta, etcetera, etcetera.

We prefer to close the book on causes with a single choice. Inflation is the government’s fault, the neighbour’s kid is in jail because his father beat him, the price of gasoline is so high because the petroleum industry is greedy, Grandma died of a broken heart. Generally, the cause we choose fits one or both of two criteria:

• ·       it’s closest in time and/or distance to the event, and
• ·       it reinforces as many of our beliefs and opinions as possible.

As I wrote this, my spouse knocked over a cup of coffee resting on the arm of my recliner. She had just fielded a visitor intercom-call from the street and when no one answered, rushed to the window, passed my chair and knocked over the coffee cup. 

To go back in the chain of coincidences to her great grandparents’ decision to emigrate to Canada seems ridiculous. Although, if they had remained in Russia, she wouldn’t be living in Rosthern, Canada in a Condo on 7^th Street, and would almost certainly not be married to me, who loves his coffee and often rests it precariously on the arm of his recliner. I could with some reason blame her great grandparents for spilling my coffee. Or my great grandparents who emigrated from Russia at a different time. 

Or, I could blame her for allowing haste to compromise her usual level of care. Or, or, or. Or I could explain (not blame) all of many events forming a chain in which the spilled coffee is but one, seemingly-insignificant link, but what an enormous catalogue of contributing causes there would be!

All events occur at the end of a chain of potential causes swimming in a sea of coincidences. It’s sometimes called “Chaos Theory,” and for simplicity’s sake, let’s say that causation has two parts:

·           Initial position: In the case of the spilled coffee, the initial position includes the layout of the room including the placement of the recliner and the window, the mood in the room (relaxed, tense), the degree to which the expected intercom call was important, the possibility that the intercom was acting up again. And that’s just to name a few elements in the initial position.

·           Connected chain of conditions and events: Spouse answers the intercom call (I might as easily have done so). The intercom volume had been silenced for some reason so a caller could not hear a response. We had decided to have coffee on the balcony but I returned to my recliner because it was too hot outside, etcetera, etcetera.

Not providence, not design, but serendipitous coincidences in a chain account for the spilled coffee. So why would I yell at my spouse? Only because she was closest in time and place to the event, and if she’s not to blame, then I must be, and I can’t have that. There is no blame here. It’s why we invented the word, accident. Any seemingly-insignificant variation in any single link in the chain would have had the power to alter the outcome completely.

How many marriages never happened because a statement made at a crucial moment was misunderstood or misstated?

This becomes tricky in criminal negligence law, where for practical reasons we’ve adopted “the last person before the event to have been in a position to prevent the event is most blameworthy.” A chaos view of causation doesn’t do well in an adversarial justice system where “somebody must pay” seems to be the overriding mindset. And when a court resorts to apportioning percentages of blame to an assortment of people and circumstances, it can never really be more than educated guesswork, full of chances for major injustice to happen.  

Because we are addicted to single-cause explanations, we almost always get it wrong. We lay blame and punish based on half-truths and misinformation--or lack of information, we bypass logic and reason and head straight for easy answers. We say America is bitterly divided because of Donald Trump without considering the initial position (including US history, geography, cultural development) or the chain of events that led to his becoming president against the odds. Unfortunately, to analyze the “culture war” realistically, factually, and to search out a remedy requires scholastic knowledge and who has time for that when the single, easy cause is so, well, handy?

Why was the war lost? Well, for lack of care the nail was lost; for lack of nail the shoe was lost; for lack of shoe the horse was lost; for lack of horse the cavalryman was lost; for lack of cavalryman the battle was lost and for lack of a battle victory, the war was lost.

Who’d have guessed that a sloppy blacksmith could carry a share of blame for the losing of a war?

Regarding Martin Booby’s case, what actually happened is that his wife asked him to stop the car at a place where the highway skirts a bend in the canyon, they got out "to take a closer look" and she pushed him over the edge. An extended series of slights and hurtful, rancorous incidents over years, of course, led up to the moment when Mrs. Booby’s tolerance-barrel simply couldn’t hold any more.

Maybe blaming Arizona ends up being the fairest outcome after all? Eh? Too cynical by half?

Please note: The narrative concerning the Boobies is fictional; the story of the spilled coffee is not.

   

Longing for a World that Never Was

 

It’s not that Mounties and soldiers are alone in their propensity for coughing up disgusting sexual interference and assault stories. Doctors, teachers, construction workers, businesspersons, clergy have been known to feature in such dramas. All these scenarios—especially those in which children are involved—disgust us; the tentacles of sexual exploitation reach out and affect so much: family & work relationships; mental health of individuals; loss of dignity and respect; undeserved feelings of guilt and worthlessness, courtroom time, etc. I’m reminded of an onerous clause in Deuteronomy 5: “For I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me.” Specific in its wording, this passage (repeated in other places and nuanced by Jesus in John 9:1-3) serves as a reminder, both in ancient days and in ours, that iniquities often have far-reaching consequences.[i]

               My revisit of this topic was triggered by a CBC news article on August 1, 2022 in which a case of sexual misbehaviour of a Mountie was the focus. Established as fact was that a fine, upstanding Mountie was drinking with colleagues in a bar after a training exercise, and that he forced a hand under the shirt of a female colleague and fondled her breasts, was rebuffed and then repeated the act with another colleague. (Search “Nova Scotia Mountie sexual” to read the story.) The issue of an appropriate sanction for these acts by this one Mountie is the question the news story addresses.

               Many a misdemeanour has been blamed on alcohol, and there’s good reason to consider alcohol’s contribution in impairing judgment and lowering inhibition. Combine that with the effects of group dynamics in bars, relationships of those participating in the group, the trends in the conversation and you might have a broader, more complete picture of what transpired to allow this Mountie to commit personal sexual interferences on colleagues. (At the least, a “mad dog” rule must be considered: If a dog unexpectedly bites a person, only the dog is to blame. If the dog later bites another person, the owner bears the blame and pays the penalty. You can only blame alcohol for your misbehaviour once; thereafter, excessive drinking at any time is tantamount to wilfully releasing the mad dog inside you.)

               More sinister to me is the creeping myth of an age of chivalry in Western Society and its effect on the general mindset. Medievalism, or a return to the values of pre-Renaissance sensibility, seems to be running rampant, manifesting in a strident defense of inherited male domination (knights) and female subservience (damsels in distress), poisoning even the Christian Church in North America. The Devil’s Historians by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevan makes clear that this longing for a medieval revival is based on a myth, that the noble knight and the damsel he protects belonged to an elite upper layer of the population and that in society generally, a rape culture was common. Knights were chivalrous to women of their own stratum; peasant women existed for their amusement.

               I would go further and say that our military and the RCMP are heirs to a medievalism that has long since passed its best-before date. The uniforms, the marching in-step and in formation, the implied "knightliness" in the scarlet tunic while mounted on a horse, the male camaraderie, all this is going to be attractive to people with varying degrees of the medievalist mentality, seems to me. The “knights in shining armour” are selected by recruitment’s flogging of an image. That good people, people of conscience and commitment, form the majority of those who find themselves in our “knighthood” occupations is a saving grace. At the same time, the likelihood of stories rising out of the dark side of the myth of chivalry are bound to escalate in frequency if the new medievalism has its way.

               I want to be understood, so let me be plain. The “Devil’s Historians” are exemplified in North American Republicanism, where an ideological elite of medievalist-style thinkers wish the world to again be a binary of knights-lords-and-pretty-ladies elites alongside a vast peasantry, most of whom are easily brainwashed to think it's all in their best interest, while being denied the vote if deemed to be unworthy. We should be grateful for Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz and Alex Jones and that vast array of wealthy evangelicals who have determined that their future lies in licking the boots of the Lords of the new chivalry. These all give us prototypes to look out for; they’ve already tried to teach us that truth is whatever they say it is—that facts are negotiable. That women must conform to a medieval-patterned, restricted, domesticated role is part of the propaganda and as much and as often as Jordan Peterson wants to preach that this is biologically mandated, and as much and as often as the medievalist church wishes to flog its Biblical basis, neither takes into account that my very competent female pastor, for instance, and Mary Magdalene or Martha Washington are not simply grapes from the same bunch.

               There’s something decidedly distasteful in men pronouncing on women, or in women pronouncing on men as if each were products of a biological or religious template.   

               The RCMP decided through its investigative processes that the individual in question deserved a chance to prove that his indiscretion was a one-off and done. I don’t know nearly enough to make a judgment on that decision, but I maintain that in the structuring, recruitment, training and supervision of our defence and policing forces, there are plenty of reasons to be aware and wary of how far they lag behind socio/cultural evolution, and how little or much their very structures encourage the creeping, insidious nostalgia for an age and worldview that … well, that never actually was.

                

---

[i] Merriam-Webster lists these synonyms for iniquity: corruption, debauchery, depravity, immorality, iniquitousness, libertinage, licentiousness, profligacy, sin, vice.

 

The World is a Playground ... Really!

 

WARNING: This post contains reference to male bovine excrement and a barely disguised F bomb. 

How can parents be assured that their children are safe on the school playground? They can’t, is the short answer. The potential hazards to an active child’s physical and/or psychological health are many, and so there can hardly be a “safe playground,” although there can be “safer playgrounds,” certainly.

               The way we normally deal with hazards is by reacting after an event in which injury or an obvious near miss presents. A man solicits a child on a playground and we build a chain link fence around it. Another child falls off the ladder on a slide and breaks an arm, so we order newer, safer slides. A playground is too small to accommodate all the classes without fights and bullying breaking out, so we stagger recess times and search out parent volunteers to boost supervision. All adults with access to children have to have criminal record checks, all must mask during epidemics, misbehaviour is punished and yet, if a child is to be protected 100% from all the dangers parents can imagine, what strategy short of keeping them at home, in bed, 24/7 is there?

               Mind you, there are helicopter parents who look out for their kids to the point where they themselves become hazardous to the child’s self-reliance-skills development, and there are others whose childcare amounts to little more than counting the children at bedtime to make sure no one is missing. When it comes to risk tolerance vs. intolerance, we’re all over the landscape so that a level of safety precautions assumed to be necessary by one parent is a ludicrous over-reaction to another.

               Our world is a playground; COVID-19 variations pose a hazard to everyone’s health; like a school administration seeks to protect children from exploitation, our governments are charged by us with doing what’s possible to protect us from illness or death at the hands of a virus sneaking around in our playground. Most of us will acquiesce to restrictions and precautions if they make sense to us; our wish to stay healthy and alive is a great motivator. But there will always be those who balk at safety measures, who will reconstruct the situation in their own minds to justify non-cooperation in vaccinations, mask wearing, limiting gatherings, etc. They will always be right in declaring that communities’ safety measures don’t make the playground safe anyway, and will justify non-cooperation that way. That will always be true, because lechers can find a way around a chain link fence, bullies can hide their nefarious acts from teachers, any child at any time can slip and fall.

               Point is, if a completely safe playground is impossible, is a safer playground worth the effort?  Must a vaccine protect 100% or be thrown out? If after installing better slides in the playground, a child still falls off the ladder and breaks a limb, is that proof that replacing the slides was a bullshit idea? And if a church insists that you wear a mask as a precaution against spreading COVID if you wish to participate in a service, does that contribute to safety, and does it rob anyone of a fundamental freedom?

               Children on a playground are not equally at risk. Some are amazingly attractive and therefor walk around with unearned cachet, while others feel homely as picket fences by comparison. Some are learning-gifted while others have a hard time with concepts. Some run really fast; others invariably come last. When we try to make playgrounds safer, do we have the gifted in mind, or the vulnerable? And when as a nation we enact measures to make the environment as health-safe as possible in time of pandemic, are we thinking about the robust population or the vulnerable minority? Or do we play one against the other?

               How we think about the right way to react to critical needs in a population that’s as various as ours turns out to be the big challenge. A man once said to me, “Why are they charging me a school tax when I no longer have any kids in school?” He didn’t say, “I happily pay the school tax because my community believes that every child benefits from a good education, and then we all benefit.” The balance between thinking of myself and mine as independent of my neighbours or nation, and visualizing emerging events as community challenges to which I owe a contribution, that’s really the only important question here …

               … unless, of course, I don’t—as they say—give a flying f**k unless it’s my kid that falls off the slide. When that level of selfishness becomes the norm, democracy and the communal spirit will be well on their way to extinction. A playground where a few teachers and a bunch of kids have formed a gang bent on undermining the principal's playground protocols ... well, you can finish this sentence. 

                

The See-saw Principle

 

The Quetzalcoatl, Gudalajara, Mexico

The Smith familyⁱ had been meeting in St. Onk’s Provincial Park near the village of St. Onk every July long weekend for a dozen years now, long enough for the gathering to qualify as a tradition. In 2023, a remarkable dry spring meant that the Province of Saskatchewan was forced to issue a “no-fire” prohibition for all provincial parks and the Smith family had to rethink the bonfire barbecue that had until now topped off their reunion.

They decided to go ahead with their plans, but when the final evening arrived, the opinion that since they were always careful with fire, and that the government had no business regulating what was a private and personal tradition, they were justified in having their bonfire barbecue. The most vocal purveyors of this opinion used the word “freedom” as the centrepiece of their argument.

Since this story hasn’t happened yet, I can’t end it. I imagine that frustrates you, my reader, who may be hoping that, a) the fire gets out of control, burns down 1,000 hectares of forest plus the village of St. Onk, thereby proving that community well-being trumps personal liberty, or b) that nothing untoward happens as a result of the fire, thereby proving the opposite.

Separating community responsibility and personal liberty into independent categories is a foolish mistake. The two are bound together like the ends of a teeter-totter. Absolute personal liberty is achieved only at the expense of the exercise of community responsibility. Being absolutely bound to only that which benefits community comes at the expense of personal liberty. The see-saw is never guaranteed to be at absolute equilibrium; from time to time and circumstance to circumstance, the position changes. In wartime, for instance, personal liberties are foregone in the interest of community survival. In times of peace and prosperity, individual liberties can expand in proportion to the well-being of the community.

There’s no doubt that current crises like the COVID-19 Pandemic or climate change have put their thumbs on the individual-liberties end of the see-saw. That a proportion of the population would resist the reduction in personal liberty is nothing new. During the World Wars, eligible men by their hundreds refused the call to do military (community) service, refused to give up that personal liberty falling under the rubric of religious freedom. The Trucker’s Freedom Convoy occupying Ottawa in January to February of 2022 was not much different from the conscientious objection in wartime; participants refused to be drafted into what the governments had declared to be a community war on the virus. In both examples, the “conscientious objectors” were dealt with relatively leniently in Canada (there were no forced vaccinations and war resisters had to pay with alternative labour). In both cases as well, the non-cooperators remained a minority and paid a price in lost esteem in the broad community, which sensed that the refusal to participate in a communal struggle meant the dissenters owed the community an unpaid debt.

I began with the thought-experiment of a bonfire episode during a hot, dry summer’s day. I’m sure others can dream up better examples to illustrate the see-saw connection between individual liberty and community responsibility. The long and the short of it, though, is that humanity has as its only home one single planet. If life is worth anything, then preserving it is too. As populations rise and resources shrink, we need to understand the see-saw principle well and learn to live with the rise and fall of individual liberty when the human community’s very survival is at stake.

iNames and places are fictional.

Just Deserts for Dessert

 

A jury decided that Amber Heard committed 10.3 million dollars of defamation on actor, Johnny Depp, and that he in turn inflicted 2 million dollars of defamation upon her. If you followed any of this, you might well have concluded that together they defamed humanity for a great deal more than their judgments added, multiplied by whatever number you choose to pick.

Had their moms been in the jury box instead of a seven barely-interested citizens, it wouldn’t have surprised me if both got sent to their rooms, got grounded for a year, with words like apology, honesty, reconciliation, truth and humility prominent in their release-from-mom’s-house-arrest documents.

I’m fascinated by the meaning of justice, from the age of Old Testament prophecy through the medieval, then the Renaissance and the modern eras to the present. Old Testament justice takes exception to using false weights and measures in trade and bearing false witness and trying (fruitlessly, I might assert) to enforce compliance with cruel and unusual penalties for breaking laws: Leviticus 20:10 decrees that both parties to an adultery shall be killed. 

In fact, a trip through Leviticus reveals a justice system heavily weighted toward defending a peoplehood against contamination by foreign, idol-worshiping neighbours, and in the stoning of miscreants, an ancient iteration of the firing squad in which the people register their support for the justice of the punishment by participating in its execution. Generally put, criminal justice in Leviticus is based on the “life for a life” principle: should you happen to shoot a neighbour’s prized Holstein mistaking it for a moose, fairness says the neighbour is entitled to your prized Jersey. There’s some restorative justice in that, alongside an arguably good way to make justice fair.

How the jury came up with the differential in the dollar value of one defamation compared to the other is well beyond me, except that it caters for a sensibility of how much each of the combatants could have earned had they not been defamed … where Depp’s loss would arguably be greater than Heard’s.

I listened to some of the cross-examination of Heard by Depp’s lawyers. I saw video of the Depp idol worshippers outside the courthouse cheering every blow upon a woman obviously struggling with some serious mental issues, crying out to see her blood spilled, her entrails hung in the public square. To say more than this about that would be well above my pay grade, but I saw little of justice in the outcome, possibly because Depp’s “this jury gave me my life back,” seemed to miss the obvious corollary that he gained his monetary, star-life back at the expense of hers.

If that’s justice, it certainly isn’t the kind the prophet was talking about in Micah 6:8, where the admonition to “do justice” is followed by “love mercy” and then “walk humbly.” A closer look at most criminal and civil court “justice” so often displays an underlying assumption that justice must be stern and unflinching, and give no nod to mercy or humility or any other signal of weakness. We tend to like our justice adversarial, not restorative.

A truck driver fails to stop at a crossing and this failure results in the death of sixteen hockey players, the driver and coach and many more injured. We’d be right, I think, in assuming at the outset that restoration to a previous state for those involved is simply impossible, while at the same time, acknowledging that there is no eye for an eye, Levitical- or Sharia-like “justice” to be applied here: the driver cannot be flayed, mocked and crucified sixteen times. But how many years of incarceration would smell enough like justice? And if he and his family were deported to a country from which they fled in hopes of a better life, would that help to satisfy the thirst for justice? Or are we talking about retribution, revenge here?

In the Depp/Heard civil court trial, justice—or its lack—was measured in dollars and cents. That Depp said the judgment in his favour gave his life back is a reminder that injustice touches much more than the pocketbook: dignity, standing, self-respect, reputation, for starters, and assigning dollar value to any of these is very tricky. The value justice systems place on intangibles is telling: that Amber Heard has no money to pay the settlement, was shown by evidence to be truth-telling unreliable, (possibly a compulsive inventor of “truth”)  yet “fit to stand trial,” none of that figures in the judgment and indeed, can’t. To be restorative in the case of estrangement between Hollywood marriage partners, of course, invokes the question, “which of this person’s marriage arrangements are we supposed to be arbitrating here?” To speak of justice in an unjust, capitalist-consumerist environment is another story, but highly relevant in most every case where justice is being sought.

Food for thought: CoSA is a program meant to prevent reoffending by persons released from prison after a sentence for sex crime. Circles of Support and Accountability, it’s called and it’s largely funded through local donations and the federal government. CoSA has had to lobby hard for continued federal funding and is facing pressure to do with less and less support from that source. The principle of restorative justice is central to CoSA; statistically, it’s been highly effective in reducing recidivism among released sex offenders. Read about it here.

Some would say that the switch from eye-for-an-eye to adversarial to discovery to restorative justice is the central theme of the New Testament. I tend to agree. Isn't "being reborn" itself an acknowledgement that I've been a recipient of undeserved reconciliation, restoration? A justice borne of mercy? 

"You can't beat a child into behaving gently." -Klavier Onk 

 

The problem of guns, and a solution template. It doesn't have to be like this.

Put in its most generous form, the insistence on civilians being allowed to accumulate an arsenal of deadly weapons, including assault rifles and handguns, has to be connected to the perception that to give up the right to do so would be a stage in the theft of individual, personal freedom. To that mindset, the nostalgia for an imagined Wild West of courageous men with holsters and weapons on each hip and a rifle in the scabbard is enormously appealing.

The preservation of an imagined past, refusal to accept the changes happening in the present, and the human hunger for status and power all play together to provide us with the current dilemma surrounding, for instance, gun laws. It echoes the oft-cited assertion that a focus on individual freedom without the accompanying responsibilities easily devolves into licence. The reluctance to adapt to change in the face of progress (as in a refusal to take into account the advancing destructive capability of weaponry) is immobilizing USA politics, where those with conservative viewpoints and those with progressive impulses are roughly equal in numbers.

It's futile to recite statistics to show that gun saturation in a population massively increases danger to ordinary citizens living ordinary lives. The conservative mindset seems stuck on an image from old John Wayne movies, where the fictional hero is highly individualized, is made safer by the six-shooters on his hip and could only be made finally safe and invulnerable if he had a cart behind with a nuclear weapon on board.

If it could be shown that citizens in countries with strict gun laws feel their freedom is in danger, if Canadians, Norwegians, the British, Australians were crying out that their countries had become destroyers of individual freedoms, would that reinforce in American conservatives the conviction that the sacrifice of innocents was worth their insistence on a perverted interpretation of the Second Amendment?  Not necessary; by its actions, conservative thinking on gun laws says daily that the deaths of innocents—men women and children—is unavoidable collateral damage in a just war.

People of North America: if you want the gun carnage to stop, and if you really mean it, here’s how you may need to go about it:

1.      When you see statistics comparing gun deaths in other developed countries to the USA, believe them; they can’t be faked.

2.       Organize into a “Peace Nation,” grassroots movement where every member signs up with a pledge not to vote for a candidate for public office who won’t commit to fostering a ban on military-style assault weapons except they be under the control of a “well regulated state or national militia.”

3.      Maintain “Peace Nation” as a non-partisan, one issue, one goal movement, and defend it against any attempt to attach it to a party or ideology.

4.      Do not organize beyond what’s barely necessary. Be aware that as humans, we can be corrupted by money or power. Any donations made to support this effort should be turned away if they exceed $5.00.

5.      Support your local school actively. Nothing beats a solid, truthful, broad education except for that kind of school education bolstered by the modelling of a solid, truthful, tolerant community.

6.      Use the internet, social media discretely. Announce local activities by word of mouth and by telephone wherever possible. Internet postings can be hacked and data bases—including individual names—sold to be used for commercial or nefarious purposes. Many will be tempted to exploit “Peace Nation” in any way possible.

7.      The goal is to ensure that elected persons will actually be the instruments of change. Keep that as your focus and don’t be deterred by party loyalties and don’t attack the party loyalties of other members.

8.      When this movement has done all it can do, terminate it entirely; its history will be archived in the memories of those with the courage to finally be “We, the people.” Don’t let it live as a straw man for QAnon, Fox News, Alex Jones and others to attack with baseless conspiracy theories … and they will.

“Where do I sign?”

Sorry, it doesn’t exist yet … and never will … unless a few people with determination and courage establish a centre and focus, give it birth and nurture the movement. Could that be you?

And if you’re Canadian and think that’s nothing to do with us, think again. Do a search for and read the for and against articles under "Canada's Gun Lobby" before picking a hard and fast opinion on gun control.  

 

 

   

An Image from Spiritus Mundi

 

An Eigenheim pasture, 2006

Some time ago, I wrote a speculative opinion piece about what the world might look like after the agonies of climate change mitigation and the COVID-19 Pandemic would be behind us. In it, I suggested that gasoline might well be priced at $5.00 per litre in the foreseeable future, that local business and services would improve as travel and transportation becomes expensive enough to drive us all to look—even  harder than we already are—for local alternatives for our food and necessities, fun and games, leisure and shopping, education and faith practice.

               Most of us don’t want to read or hear that kind of prognostication; particularly as we get older, our psychological energies are bent toward fighting change, not creating it. This is a dilemma for all people living in the 2020ish era of human time; rapid transitions are needed; defiance of changes such transitions require is fought tooth and nail. “I’ve always been able to fly to Barbados for a month-long break in my winter, but now the government has let travel prices go so high, I can hardly afford it!”

Poor you.

That governments feel they must add a carbon tax to fossil fuel prices is witness to our stubbornness as citizens, an obstinacy causing us to resist cooperating with absolutely necessary changes unless we’re forced. Perhaps this obstinacy is endemic to human makeup along with the usual handy excuses like, “So I could reduce my carbon footprint by driving less, but my neighbours won’t make this sacrifice, so what’s the point?”

The Industrial Revolution drove people to abandon their peasant, share-cropping agrarian lives for day labour in mills and factories. The Enclosure movement put an end to common-land sheep grazing, and other related changes shepherded people into massively-changed ways of living in the British Empire. I can still remember when the predominant means to a living was for the man of the house to “go to work” doing physical day-labour. Now professional, technical and a myriad of service jobs predominate, and women’s numbers in the “work force” are nearly equal with men’s.

All this to remind ourselves that we are in the throes of one of those periods of significant change for humanity. At 80 years of age, I’m likely to live only somewhere into the time of current turmoil. But I can faintly see some of the ends these early steps are predicting, ends that will be the shapers of the lives of future generations.

For the sake of the children, the participation of the global community in cooperative effort is absolutely essential. Will that spirit of cooperative, can-do finally prevail?

I doubt it. Too often, the spiritus mundi [i] has called to us … and been treated to a middle-finger response.             

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[i] From W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming. Hard to define, but closest probably to the Christian Holy Spirit. The truth-core of the universe? I understand Spiritus Mundi to be like “the Word” in the opening salvo of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The general theological assessment of John’s Gospel is that it seeks to show that Jesus is God. I think Yeats would probably think of John’s Gospel as showing that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word, i.e., that Jesus came to "read" the word to us who were illiterate. In any case, I read that Yeats saw Spiritus Mundi as the source of inspiration for great art and poetry, two manifestations of spirit-inspiration we mostly “don’t get.”

Status hoarding, Runtification and other things that go bump in the night

 

Tamara Lich is on trial for breaking bail conditions by attending an award ceremony where she was honoured for her part in the Freedom Convoy demonstration/insurrection.

               This is not news, really. What would be news would be that we’ve acknowledged what it is in human nature in 2022 that’s behind the angry unrest which we’re experiencing daily.

               I have the answer and so do you if you’ve raised children or managed a classroom. But I can’t claim to have the solution. The underlying trigger for social unrest lies in the hunger for status, pure and simple.

               “Status: the relative social, professional, or other standing of someone or something.” Note the world relative here. An island where everyone works all day every day just to survive will never have a political insurrection because “relative standing” is no issue. Poor communities can provide a happy atmosphere for residents until one unlucky bastard wins the lottery, builds a house big enough for fifty and buys a Ferrari.

               To be without status is to be like a runt of the litter who’s constantly shouldered away from mommy’s teats by the bigger sucklings; denial of status for piglets can be a death sentence. What would you do if you were that hungry little runt? Sneak up and tear out the jugular of the sibling with the most status? Organize a runt convoy?

               Power to effect change is one of the key characteristics of status. In Canada, we choose people to exercise political power for us. The net effect, too often, is that minorities who disagree with the choice come to sense their powerlessness and seek ways to compensate, pick out areas of vulnerability where change can be effected … by them. Trump rallies, truck convoys are logical responses to being “runtified”[i] by the socio-political structures that fail to address status starvation. Keep favouring the same sibling over the others and "the runt" will find ways to “level the playing field,” and it won’t be pretty.

               But if this is the answer, what’s the solution? Sorry, I don't know one solution. A good teacher identifies status starvation in her/his/their classroom and finds ways to ensure no one is “runtified.” Parents who can’t see what favouritism is doing to a child have no right to the power parenthood has bestowed on them. Governments that write off, even scorn minority opinions are no longer democratic, but are leading their countries on the way to oligarchic thinking and acting.

               When it’s Christians who are practicing hierarchical, status-hoarding models of community, we should all be shaking our heads in disbelief. One of Jesus’ most important and repeated teachings was that in his kingdom, everybody shares status, period. He washed the disciples’ feet, for heaven’s sake!

               For us as individuals and communities, the “think globally, act locally” ideal might be all we have to offer. If parents and teachers model the zero-sum principle of winners and losers to kids, the next generation will repeat what we’re going through. On the other hand, if teachers and parents consciously practice status sharing and avoid the runtifying of individuals, the peace kingdom has at least a chance of coming closer in the future.

               I can’t leave this subject, though, without acknowledging that we have made progress, particularly if we remember how we reduced the indigenous population to “non-status” (pardon the pun) life through reserve and residential school systems. We have spent millions to bring electricity, phone, radio and internet to remote communities, all of which efforts enhanced their status in our national community. Women no longer need to feel like second class citizens since so much has been done to eliminate their runtification. 

               These are but three examples that point out at least some progress in wiping out status hoarding. Creative minds will come up with next steps … I hope some of us survive to see it.  

              

                 

              

              

              

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[i] A made-up-for-this-occasion word meaning being forced to accept your nobody status.

A playlet for people mourning the imagined demise of freedom in Canada

A playlet for people mourning the imagined demise of Freedom in Canada.

Pierre: When I’m your Prime Minister, I’m going to make Canada the freest country in the world. I …

Skepticus: But Canada already ranks in the top 5 in the world in terms of personal freedoms, along with Denmark, Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, and Ireland. (I guess that makes 6, sorry.)

Pierre: Yah, but you put on a demonstration in Ottawa and the tanks roll in, people are crushed and …

Skepticus: You’re thinking of China, Pierre.

Pierre: … and we have an election and only one candidate is allowed onto the ball….

Skepticus: China again. Sorry.

Pierre: And the liberals don’t allow any real opposition, and people who try get jailed, or poison….

Skepticus: Russia, Pierre. Russia, not Canada.

Pierre: And the Liberals own that propaganda machine, the CBC….

Skepticus: Ditto, Pierre. You’re thinking of the Russian News Agency, TASS.

Pierre: Well, anyway. We can’t cross the Canada/US border so we’re not free!

Skepticus: Thousands of Canadian and American citizens, trucks, airplanes cross that border every day. You’re reading only the sentence in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that says, “Canadian citizens have the right to enter, remain in, and leave Canada,” and not the part that says, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society (emphasis mine). You cannot cross the border without the recommended vaccinations for the same reason that you aren’t allowed to drive at whatever speed you want through a school zone; the restriction on border crossing without proof of vaccination (rightly or wrongly) is justified as a measure for saving lives in the time of a pandemic. The ability to set conditions on mobility rights in dangerous times is an essential feature of “free and democratic societies.” Just like “Free Speech” doesn’t extend to hate speech, slander or libel.

Pierre: I don’t get that. A bunch of liberal bullshit, is all.

Skepticus: Why am I not surprised, Pierre? Maybe just talk to some people who have fled countries where they weren’t able to enjoy reasonable rights and freedoms. When they imagined freedom, they imagined Canada, or Ireland, or Denmark, New Zealand, Switzerland, or Estonia, the United Kingdom or the USA. Not Syria, not North Korea, not Russia, not Cuba, not Venezuela, not Communist China, not Iran, not Hungary or Bulgaria … well, you get the point … I hope. Good luck in your campaign, Pierre, but please don’t encourage Canadians thinking that we’re turning into North Korea; compared to countries with oligarchies, single party dictatorships, oppressive theocracies, Canada is personal freedom heaven. There’s nothing here for you to fix in that regard.

 

  

A post having absolutely nothing to do with Mother's Day

 

Stagflation: n. the act of blowing up male deer by filling them with compressed air ‘til they burst. A subset of inflation, which refers to the blowing full of compressed air a deer of any gender.

I took my one and only freshman course in Economics at the University of Saskatchewan from a text called Economics: Canadian Edition, 1967. Our prof was a curly-haired, youngish master’s candidate with a serious lisp so I still hear our text’s author’s name as Thamuelthon Thcott. Had I been his dean, I would have suggested he choose a text by someone whose name had fewer S’s in it. Funny how the mind is so easily distracted, how it Velcros to memories of trivia while discarding essentials one moment after the final exam is written.

Stagflation, I think, hadn’t been coined yet and I wouldn’t have known what it was meant to mean except that I have this bad habit of reading text whenever a block of it passes by. It’s a combination of stagnation and inflation, obviously, and it refers to a period of well-above-average inflation that persists for a long time. Like the 1970s, when the only mortgage I could get was for one year at 17% interest until Pierre Trudeau instituted wage and price controls and my mortgage payments dropped to something closely resembling reasonable.

So here it comes again. Luckily we have another Trudeau on the hill unless he’s accidentally run over by a mile long convoy of trucks before he can save us. It reminds us that there are levels of hell: Level one, pandemic leading to Level two, unemployment and mountains of misdirected rage, leading to labour shortage on top of continuing pandemic and inflation and even worse and escalating and louder swamps of misdirected rage. (To what hell is the devil sent when his judgment day comes. It would have to be worse than the fire and brimstone one he invented. Perhaps Northern Canada … in winter … with nothing to wear but s shorty nightie and shoes with holes in the soles and no laces? Brrrr.)

With my background in Thamuelthon Thcott, my extensive—if unfocused—reading, I can tell you exactly why stagflation may be descending upon us like a cloud of stand-up, sadistic comics with misogynist attitudes shouting "Freedumb, NOW!". Could be that our spending habits dropped during the pandemic (for obvious reasons), we inadvertently saved cash and now we’re hell bent on spending it on pleasures COVID denied us. Too much money chasing too many shiny trucks and motorcycles, trips to rotisseries of heat on sandy places where you can stare at ocean and land at the same time, gadgets and gimmicks that are obsolete in months, trips to places that are disappointingly similar to home (possibly because being there means we have to take ourselves along with all our foibles and feelings.… Maybe it’s all our fault … or the virus, or the president of the USA, or the Russians, or evangelical Christians, preservatives, or, or, or.

I’m pretty sure if we figure out why gophers evolved to live in small, underground colonies, we will also have figured out pretty much why living well as a colony of 7.5 billion of what are facetiously called “humans” can be as frightfully complicated and often devastatingly disappointing as it is.

All of which suggests a massive broadening of the English vocabulary: stagstration, stagcusations, stagrage, stagmask, stagstreaming, stagscreaming ….

Think I’ll go out into nature, blow up a few stags.

You busy?

Wear a mask.

Say Goodbye to the holy-whore

 

Claude Monet: Sunrise Impression

A recent leaked paper in the US capitol suggests that Roe v. Wade will be overturned by the Supreme Court sitting in judgment over some states’ wish for the legalization of a ban on abortion. Given that Canada suffers a cold any time the US sneezes, it looks like any such reversal on abortion rights there will reopen the conversation here. Knowing the past history of the debate before abortion was de-criminalized here (remember Henry Morgentaler?), it’s bound to be nasty … again! (See Why Canada's Roe v. Wade didn't enshrine abortion as a right | CBC News for a commentary on the legal situation regarding abortion in Canada.)

               Arguing the points for and against legal abortion will be futile as it’s always been. A demonstrator for the anti-abortion side gave as her reason the belief that abortion was murder, and she was only trying to save lives. A pro-Roe v. Wade demonstrator carried a sign saying, “You value lives before they’re born, but not after,” or words to that effect. Thoughtful, logical, courteous discussion on which approach governance should take on this issue is not to be expected; these trains ride on rails of outrage.

               What shouldn’t be forgotten is that anti-abortion pressure is driven much less by a passion for the life of the unborn than by an obsession with restoring men’s dominance over women. All through the 90s and into this century, the evangelical right in the US has waged a campaign to draw a clear line between what God wants men to be, and what God wants women to be. Reflected in the gun culture is the militant, powerful, head-of-the-house, head-of-the-nation vision of what constitutes God-ordained manhood. To say that women exist to be on call at all times to service men’s nutritional, sexual, emotional needs is no exaggeration of some of the rhetoric thrown around in circles calling themselves Christian. A good wife is destined by God to be maid, cook, au pair and 24-hour, on call holy-whore to her husband. (Numerous websites featuring testimonials of women leaving the Southern Baptist Convention style of “evangelical church,” can be found,  See one such at Beth Moore Says She Is 'No Longer A Southern Baptist' : NPR)

               And if his seed has started a pregnancy in her, she’d better suck up whatever pain, inconvenience, indeed any personal contingencies it entails, and bear and care for his child. Nothing can change; that’s the way God planned it. Obscure verses can be found in scripture to support every contention of the binary, male-dominant view of human gender and sexuality. That scribes of old put into God’s mouth “I have known you (Jeremiah) before you were born; I knit you together in the womb,” is, to one Texas preacher, irrefutable proof that a human life begins at conception. Ironically, the book of Joshua putting into God’s mouth the order to massacre all the already-born of Ai is not touted as proof that a genocidal massacre of one’s enemies is the right way to go. (Read about it at BATTLE of AI | Joshua 8; Achan's sin; Stealing the plunder; Tithing (godswarplan.com))

               Let’s be brutally honest: the so called “evangelical church” as we see it operating in the USA  doesn’t follow Jesus; it has put a leash around Jesus’ neck so that he shall follow them wherever their self-righteous rages take them.

               Were I to recite all the Biblical passages that do not support the binary gender spectrum, that don’t celebrate male gender superiority and militancy, I’d fill many pages. I might start with Second Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land,” and go on to “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:29).

               It may surprise you to hear me say that I am anti-abortion and pro-choice. Abortions are painful, distasteful medical procedures with multiple overtones of shame and guilt attached. I know no woman who would ever say, “I think I’ll get myself impregnated so I can have a delightful abortion, maybe blog about it!” The challenge for societies that can land a person on the moon and split the atom is to offer a science that gives any woman a way to prevent pregnancy until giving birth is her … oh, wait, we already have that.

               A CBC news story on this subject today cited a study saying that the reversal of the Roe v. Wade ruling would reduce the number of abortions in the US by 12%, +/- 2%. Legislating abortion and advocacy for abortions as crimes will not achieve what proponents are hoping for, anymore than murder laws eliminated killings or highway rules eliminated road accidents.

               Given the current climate of culture wars and political militancy, leaving pregnancy decisions up to the persons directly affected strikes me as the choice with the most integrity. Call it “the best of a bad lot,” if you must, it holds the best promise of children being started, birthed and raised in a nourishing, welcoming atmosphere … and avoids the folly of men who never face the physical, mental or emotional rigours of pregnancy haughtily deciding from their high towers what others shall and shall not do and think.

               I apologize to all those men who have done their thought and reading homework and have arrived at the conclusion that “lord of the manor simply because you have a penis” doesn’t reflect the suffering servant model your fellowship claims to follow. If y’all find yourself in a church that makes of women second class children of God by, for instance, banning them from the pulpit from which leadership is practiced, understandings dispensed, I strongly advise you to leave, find a church whose men have discarded illusions of their god-ordained superiority.

               I also apologize to you women who have done your thought and reading homework and concluded rightly that forced abandoning of self-esteem and personal integrity is not God’s will for you. Perhaps you’re one of those confident women who have been cajoled into the role of sycophants to the rantings of male militancy and have begun to take the road back to personal integrity. If you’re torn between uncomfortable acquiescence to men you love and the right to exercise freely the talents and understandings creation gave you, I empathize totally with your dilemma. Think of your sons and daughters; refuse to be silent when you’re pressured to make of them stereotypes of what others think they ought to be.

               That is, after all, the only thing that so many of us find ourselves able to do.