Nostalgia: the dark side

 

But first, some music. Links for hearing what's posted are provided:

A love Ballad for Millennials (born after 2000)

STAY (excerpt)

The Kid LAROI, Justin Bieber

I do the same thing, I told you that I never would
I told you I changed, even when I knew I never could
I know that I can't find nobody else as good as you
I need you to stay, need you to stay, hey

I get drunk, wake up, I'm wasted still
I realize the time that I wasted here
I feel like you can't feel the way I feel
I'll be fucked up if you can't be right here

Oh-whoa (oh-whoa, whoa)
Oh-whoa (oh-whoa, whoa)
Oh-whoa (oh-whoa, whoa)
I'll be fucked up if you can't be right here.

 

A love ballad for Baby Boomers (born in the 1950s)

I'll Never Find Another You (excerpt)

The Seekers

There's a new world somewhere
They call the promised land
And I'll be there someday
If you will hold my hand
I still need you there beside me
No matter what I do
For I know I'll never find another you

There is always someone
For each of us, they say
And you'll be my someone
Forever and a day
I could search the whole world over
Until my life is through
But I know I'll never find another you

Try on this explanation for the “culture war” as we are seeing it unfold in the USA:

Seeing the world in hindsight invariably results in a nostalgia reaction, the donning of rose-coloured glasses as we leaf through old photo albums. The nostalgia reaction exaggerates the good we remember as compared to the much-changed world we’re living in. This phenomenon is older than ravens (Hi, Doug!) and any historian will tell you that it has the power to paint mind pictures of WWII (for instance) that are heroic, glorious even. Nostalgia revises history.

Have you ever heard a senior say things like, “Kids these days have no respect,” or “Why is there no good music anymore?” These sentiments understandably magnify in proportion to the speed and extent of change and are subject to the rose-coloured-glasses nostalgia, the corollary being that kids were respectful once upon a time, and music was melodious and meaningful “when I was a kid.”

Again, the speed and extent of change exaggerates the dislocation of values in our minds. What characterizes our age (mine for instance, 1941 to today) is warp-speed change, ergo, our age is bound to experience unprecedented chaos, driven mostly by rage at the imagined loss of a world … that never really was. The disappointment at what appears to the large older-middle-aged group and seniors to be a burglary of an age made golden through nostalgia, easily turns to a collective rage and a search for the villains who are blindly ruining everything! It’s the right-wing “fascists” for some, the “woke” neo-Marxists for others; you might as well say “any crook will do in a storm.”

None of this is meant to say that the losses that come with change are all imaginary. The internet gave us texting, video conversation and email, but it also opened the door to a loss of privacy, scam opportunities and virulent trolling, plus being complex enough to leave all but a few of the oldest generation frustrated. I certainly feel nostalgic sometimes for the days of letters, postage stamps, wall phones and paper newspapers. I’m a proud curmudgeon.

It follows that the personality with a decidedly conservative bent will feel the burglary of the past the most. It might explain, for instance, why Republicans in the USA are as militantly angry as they are while Democrats are characterized as suffering from a lack of unity around a cohesive plan. Expectation of change that can’t be avoided should engender creativity in riding the changes in the best way possible; American Republicanism in its rage is focused firstly on preventing unliked change and, secondly, rolling public social policy back to an imagined earlier “golden” age.

The two “love songs” with which I opened this post were intended to illustrate the typical intergenerational frustration that’s at the heart of this thesis. I listen to music by my contemporaries: Neil Young, Paul Simon, the Carpenters, Carly Simon, Joan Baez, Don Maclean, Eric Clapton, etc. I shudder to imagine the clientele in a seniors’ housing project attending an Avril Lavigne concert, painfully enduring the Girlfriend song, perhaps.

A more salient illustration can be had by following court decisions on abortion, on gender dysphoria and the pronouns that have emerged as a result, even on the sanctity of keeping Mens’ and Women’s washrooms “as they’ve always been.” And we remember that a combination of factors have over more than a century made universal metrification of measurement in the USA impossible. Further, we’re well aware of the dynamics that led to a pro-choice ruling in Roe v. Wade, and what gigantic effort was put into turning the clock back on abortion.

We want to escape the hardship of change: global warming, national debt, social disruption, pandemics, artificial intelligence, population dislocation, etc. We want it to be like it was before the shifts became apparent. We want solutions without pain, without sacrifice, “like it used to be.” It’s natural. Trouble is, reality will assert itself despite mountains of wishful thinking, and it’s liberal (arguably), logical thinkers like Jesus Christ who will do what they can to point us toward our best future, but not without pain or sacrifice.

Seems to me that summarizing the “culture wars” by hating Donald Trump is both illogical and futile. Reaction—including rage—against change will happen and will seek out its justification and its heroes. If not Trump, then some other person who knows how to manipulate, magnify popular frustration into money and power will worm his/her/their way into the White House or other seat of authority.

Possibly you have a brother or sister who rails against the limiting measures being taken to slow climate change, while you’re frustrated by people who won’t “get with the program” like you’re trying desperately to do. Your sibling probably will attach politically to Poilievre or Bernier while you support the Liberals and/or New Democrats. Thanksgiving dinners at your house are probably  interesting.

You’ve no doubt noticed that arguing our half-facts, conspiracy theories and social media pronouncements isn’t getting us anywhere, so you may have decided to avoid the touchiest subjects.

A couple of things in conclusion: 1) Scientific assessment is nearly unanimous that global warming is broadly dangerous to humanity’s future, and 2) Your brother is objecting out of a very real psychological syndrome, a panic over changes he doesn’t understand fully, plus nostalgia for a time when climate change wasn’t talked about. And 3), it’s important that your sibling change his/her/their actions, if not their mind, at least if the future suffering and dying of people is important.

How that’s done is an even more urgent topic than this one.

  

 

Who's in Control?

 

“Woke” is about only one thing: control,” Pierre Poilievre says in a recent ad for the Conservative Party of Canada. An example the ad uses is the decision by a Quebec school to substitute “Parents’ Day” for “Mother’s Day” in the interest of the children with single fathers or who have lost their mother or who are sadly trapped in a dysfunctional family or for any other reason experience the day as a trial. What Poilievre doesn’t mention, of course, is that election campaigning is all about only one thing: gaining control, and that invoking the “woke” myth is part of a strategy to displace the dictator of “woke,” Justin Trudeau with me, Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the “not woke.”  

Neither does the ad mention how the “Parents’ Day” event would have unfolded differently if he and not Justin had been “in control.”

What the CPU and the US Republican Party have in common is the pursuit of control; no political party can enact its policies without it, after all. To complete such an achievement in a democracy, masses of people must either vote for you because they prefer you over the others, or they must vote for you because they have good reason to fear all the others. “Woke” is useful as a catch-all to refer to those others of whom we should be afraid. So, Poilievre doesn’t need to debate the policies of New Democrats and Liberals separately, he can use the “woke” shortcut to include them both.

The trick is to say “woke” repeatedly, always implying that it is to be feared and to convince the largely-uninformed citizens that “woke” or “not woke” is all they need to know about the political schemes being floated. That seems to be the plan for getting into the seat of control for Republicans and Canadian Conservatives these days.

And they come by it honestly. Since politicians were either Whigs or Tories in early British parliaments and the Whigs sat on one side of the aisle and Tories on the other, it’s been a fight between the Whig’s “adapt to the times” and the Torie’s “keep doing what we’ve always done because it was working” positions. What this adversarial model has turned into in many democratic countries is a tragedy.

Voting in a democracy today is a lot like supporting a sports team. Although there may well be community-bonding benefits to thousands of fans excitedly supporting the Winnipeg Jets or the Saskatchewan Roughriders, fan loyalty defies logic. Pro sport is an entertainment industry; the actors traded like chattels, responding in their life choices more according to remuneration possibilities than to Winnipeg or Saskatchewan loyalty. For better or worse, pro sports fandom is the choosing of a myth, discarding a harsh or boring reality for an alternative world for a time.

A party system of choosing political leadership easily turns into something like that. A loyalty to a brand that removes the need to scrutinize the motivation and credentials of a player with, “He/she/they play on the (Conservative/New Democrat/Liberal) team; that’s good enough for me!” That elections are “won” or “lost” pretty much sums up my point.

The US Congress and Canada’s parliament should be places where conservative and progressive views meet in the presence of objective academics to hammer out directions for the country. That they’ve turned the dialogue chambers into rancorous quarreling, backbiting, and opportunistic one-upmanship renders them practically useless as problem solving institutions.

Adversarial systems make adversaries of citizens, train them to think about their common home adversarially.

In the mouth of Pierre Poilievre, “woke” sounds a lot like “so*s of bi***es,” or “snivelling cowards,” or any other playground taunt meant to denigrate a target. The irony is that it’s decidedly the wrong word for the purpose intended. It’s got black, southern origins where “staying woke (awake)” was an admonition to stay alert to what’s really going on, in that case to the suppression of the African-American population. The teachers who chose to honour all parents (including mothers) on the traditional Mother’s Day were being “woke” to the different ways in which their students experienced that day … and responded compassionately.

Give me a teacher who’s awake over one hide-bound to the past meanings of things any day.

The irony lies, of course, in the elementary observation that the opposite of “woke” is asleep.

You should have stuck with so*s of bi***es!

I, Artificial Intelligence

 

By now, we’ve probably all heard about the advances in AI—Artificial Intelligence—most recently regarding the warnings about, roughly, this argument: If the computer has internet access to mountains of information and hundred-thousand times more data than many, many individual humans working together, and if it has the capacity to synthesize all this data in a millisecond, is human control over outcomes even possible?

I know, the very thought seems to say that when we humans think, evaluate and decide, that process is about electrical impulses being routed through synapses. We’d like our intelligence to be more god-like, more “ethereal” than “mechanical.” We’re not averse to imagining ourselves as possessing a spiritual quality that informs our intelligence, thereby motivating or restricting our actions based on empathy, sympathy, fairness, compassion … a moral sensibility, in other words. How can a living person be without that, and how can a material object come with that? And how can an intelligence that’s artificial (invented) ever be influenced by “feelings” of right/wrong, compassion/indifference, emotion/objectivity, etc., for instance?

A search engine called Bing is force-feeding a new advance in browsing that incorporates a number of AI features like voice recognition, etc., developments that have made “ask Siri” a commonplace feature of most smartphones and computers. “Ask me anything” pops up on the screen when you open Bing and it does a data search (using key-word recognition, I gather) and will answer the question by quoting a source, or—failing a satisfactory search—suggest an alternative way of finding an answer. 

I asked it, “What is the capital city of Mozambique?” It took about 10 seconds until a Wikipedia page on Maputo popped up and links to five other sources appeared as well, and the difference between asking a question and having a mountain of information appear compared to going to the library, finding a source there, etc., gave me an amazing speed and effort advantage.

The fact that George Epp asked for the name of Mozambique’s capital on May 11, 2023, immediately became data to be saved for future reference, sold to retailers, etc. Search “Outdoor fireplace” on any search engine and watch for ads on social media, even on your news app. This process is governed by man-made algorithms that run on their own; as AI improves, these computer-regulated processes will proliferate, will write themselves, probably, and the scope of their management by humans will be out of reach. Any algorithm, obviously, reflects its maker.

There’s a whole lot more to be said by the experts who have worked with the fine details. A website lists six potential problems that could arise as AI becomes more and more sophisticated. “These include invasion of personal data, risk of cyberattacks, discrimination and bias, opacity and lack of transparency, accountability of AI-driven decisions, and replacement of jobs and unemployment.”

If you’re like me, you feel a certain inevitability in the advances of technology. Madame Curie’s work on radiation beginning a march toward the nuclear bomb being but one example of how the material advances capitalism enabled also led to destructive ends in the hands of those who see each new invention as a gateway to wealth appropriation or enhanced power. AI will advance as long as it’s profitable, and we will marvel at the convenience and speed it lends to ordinary tasks … and we’ll buy and buy.

Or maybe, AI will be regulated so that, for instance, it’s number one, overriding rule is never to hurt a human. (Sci. Fi. writer, Isaac Asimov formulated the three cardinal rules for robots: “(1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”) Or maybe, it will be able to unravel the most effective combination of actions for mitigating the effects of climate change. Or maybe, it will become an invincible tool for diagnosing complex illness, even directing the scalpels that correct problems surgically, prescribe drugs with nary an error. And what if it could learn a better process for negotiating international relations, would actually map out a method for getting to yes in a given conflict?

 Would we come to ascribe an authority in AI that we've historically granted to the brilliant minds among us? Would we erect statues in its honour, give it a name like Baal or Zeus and worship it?

I think there’s a need to “proceed with caution,” don’t you? Also, please don't leave us with nothing to do, no thoughts worth thinking, no accountability for our actions.   

 

WE don't like it! Ban it!

 

Bookbook - Geo G. Epp, copyright

In Texas (I read in the news,) public and school librarians are stressed right now over what books may remain on their shelves and what books may have to be removed. The choices will be driven by legislation and whatever enforcement mechanisms the state deems necessary. The selection of reading materials to be banned centers on issues of sex and gender this time, and whatever influence a book might have in promoting a liberal attitude toward gender fluidity. Underlying the controversy is an assumption that reading a book in which a trans-gender person is pictured positively might raise children’s questioning of their own gender identity and/or innocently embarking down a path that will leave them gender-identity confused or damaged.

We have a history to refer to in this regard. Examples galore exist where book banning/book burnings, have occurred in an attempt at suppressing unpopular developments socially, culturally or politically. Stifling objectionable ideas, speech, activities by force seems to be a predictable response to change, particularly in volatile times like the “world war years” in Europe, for example.

I find it ironic that accusations of “cancel culture” (generally aimed at the liberal population) is so clearly exemplified by the book banning segment of the public in the USA. Seems to me,  these are the same people who accuse the fictitious “woke” cohort of cancelling (banning?) right wing expressions of opinion. I agree with Jordan Peterson on little more than this one thing: we need liberalism to help us adapt to changing conditions, and we need conservatism to help us regulate the pace of our adaptation. For one to gag the other by, for instance, banning their written speech, is surely unwise for this reason alone.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t books in which gay and/or trans people are depicted positively written for different reasons than for unsettling cis-gender persons? We all know how traumatic school can be for kids who don’t fit conventional norms; good teaching doesn’t pretend the differences are non-existent or meaningless; its aim is to guide the class and each child in it toward a life of social acceptance and personal dignity. One important goal of public education according to the Canadian PeopleforEducation.ca organization is to “Build a society that values the wellbeing of all its members.” To teach children a healthy approach to the wellbeing of the student in the next desk isn’t in question, even though how and when to teach this remains a relevant consideration.

We must be careful here. Book burning and banning have never, ever done more than stifle the efforts of a community to adapt in changing times. For that, both educational expertise and parental involvement are crucial. Setting the standards for what is and what isn’t justified in the classroom is not well served by legislated enforcement.

But some humility and some compassion on the part of us who have embraced the need for educating for “a society that values the wellbeing of all its members” (emphasis mine) wouldn’t go amiss. The advocates for banning and burning are reacting to fears that are currently being stoked, namely that multiple conspiracies are at work against citizens’ interests, in this case through the children. Unless we dialogue openly and for however long it takes—with parents and teachers and administrators facing each other across friendly tables—the children will suffer for our fearful responses to charges that are educationally illegitimate.

And as I’ve conjectured before, aren’t we all in favour of book banning at some level? Isn’t it true that our controversies only arise because we disagree on the threshold where acceptable and unacceptable divide? I agree with those who would maintain that Hustler Magazine has no place in an elementary or high school library. I would not agree that Huckleberry Finn should be taken off the high school curriculum because of racist content. To become a culture that attends to the wellbeing of every person, our upbringing must show us the face of racism, sexism, ageism, etc., so that we may learn empathy for those who are different. A kind of “walking a mile in their shoes.” Books provide the stories; teachers are trained to understand their students well enough to make of the stories learning experiences that promote “a society that values the wellbeing of all its members.

It’s a bit of truism that books don’t jump off shelves and read themselves to people; the patron of a library chooses what book will and what book won’t be taken home. This principle doesn’t provide comfort in the case of the internet, where any child with a smart phone is accessible to those who would wish to use him/her/them wrongfully. There the stories do jump off the shelves and present themselves to wide-eyed innocents without the benefit of a responsible adult interpreter. Resolving that kind of intrusion into children’s development is going to be a much more complex issue than simple book authorizing/banning has ever been.

Teach the Children Well ... or else.

 

David - Michelangelo

This morning’s (April 1, 2023) Global News app is reporting the resignation of the UCP’s election candidate in Lethbridge West, Alberta. Apparently, the United Conservative Party determined a video she posted online—including a claim that teachers were showing pornography to their students and influencing them toward gender ambiguity—was harmful to their party’s chances in the next election. She is said to have resigned her candidacy without apologizing for the unsubstantiated claims in the video. 

I recall another story of a principal, I think, who was fired over a question of whether one of his teachers should be disciplined for showing a picture of the full-frontally-nude David statue by Michelangelo.

Both stories lack a great deal of what’s called context, but that won’t prevent us from dividing into camps on the subject matter, which is typical of the great culture wars plaguing our politics these days. For one, the telling evidence of what lesson plan included the displaying of the David photo, or what pornographic imagery and teaching happened in which classroom and by which teachers, none of that seems necessary enough to be entered into the question which could—and here’s an important consideration—be real concerns. 

Teachers (not unlike police, businesspersons, doctors, airline pilots, etc., etc.) are drawn from a diverse population and sooner or later, a pedophile, a misogynist, a sociopath or a poorly- informed-and-so-incompetent practitioner will creep into the mix of the profession. At the same time, the child-guiding prerogatives of biological parents versus schools and teachers provides a greenhouse for the growing of conflict: it always has. 

Good public schools educate for citizenship in the country in which they exist; they teach about ideologies but don’t indoctrinate their students in any but the one under which teachers, students and administrators are governed at the time. 

Based on the content of a single news story, do I have the right to an opinion on its meaning, let alone to repeat my interpretation online or to people I meet? If I spread a biased interpretation of an event, a person or an idea, am I doing the same thing as the people who fired that principal, or who made a video about teachers teaching pornography and gender fluidity? Rushing to judgment, that is, while either neglecting or discarding context?

What would have happened if the UCP candidate for Lethbridge West had gone to the local school principal and said, “I have a concern about how sexuality and gender are being taught in this school. Can we talk about that?” What if she’d done that before making the accusatory video, and if the principal had called the involved teachers to a meeting with this person to explain their curriculum choices on gender-related subjects, thereby giving both positions a context?

Agnes and I were in Belfast for a few days during the “troubles” period in the 1980s. Our MCC colleague there told us that the teenaged boys particularly were addicted to conflict. If a week should go by with no smashing, burning, fighting, etc., they would invariably fill the gap with some act of violence; the previous week, a group of them had tossed a transit driver out of his bus, driven the bus out to an open area and set it on fire. 

Addiction to conflict can be as real as a dependence on cocaine.

There’s much in our era in the West urging us toward a combat of wills, undoubtedly fed by a tendency to seek out incidents—unsupported by evidence, if need be—that act as bullets in the culture war: woke against not-woke and vice versa, for instance.

I have acres of sympathy for the people whom we’ve mandated to educate our children in such a time. I imagine myself a music teacher in a smalltown elementary school. A faction of the population listens to classical music and considers country music beneath them. Another group maintains that this is a country-music kind of town, and the music curriculum should reflect that in its choices. Most parents are indifferent to either faction.

As the music teacher, I’ve felt the pressure both ways, and having my own tastes and my unique training and history, I can’t for the life of me think of a way to satisfy both sides. Banjos or flutes? Violins or guitars? Surely teaching kids to understand and appreciate music doesn’t boil down to this kind of choice, does it?

The principal calls me into his office and relays the concerns—primarily those expressed by the loudest faction—and proposes some 50/50 arran…

… but I’ve stopped listening, daydreaming about how I might live a relaxed life by giving private instrument lessons and playing in the city orchestra….

“... what do you think?” he says.

“I think I quit,” I reply.

And I do.

 

ARRIVING AT MAYBE - ON ABORTION

 

 

American Elm Tree: Leaves, Bark (Pictures) - Identification and Care (leafyplace.com)

When does an elm develop to the point where it can be called a tree? Is it already a tree when as a seed, it spins through the air in a tiny, fragile frisbee to land on a concrete roadway, in your eave trough, or in a field of wheat stubble? Can it be called a tree when  a warm spring sun and an April shower awaken it and it thrusts out a root cell after having lain dormant through a winter? And if it should wither or be swept up and burned, or be plowed under in a field, could we say that it was a tree cut down?

Or if the cocky rooster should mount a hen so that she would lay fertilized eggs, and if we should poach and eat such an egg, would it taste like chicken?

Or if a human sperm fertilizes a human egg and cell mitosis commences, is it more like the elm seed flying from the mother tree, already fertilized? Or is it more like a new human person, like an elm sapling, say, seeking sustenance so that it might one day be a tall, standing tree … one day?

Or why do mother elms produce a million seeds and a human man’s body produce a million sperm unless nature has already determined that of the million, 999, 998 will, on average, fail; will land on sidewalks, in toilets, in a condom or a stubble field?

In the Western World, people’s ubiquitous preoccupation is not for getting food, but for mitigating the effects of too much eating. Similarly, birth prevention preoccupies us far more than does birth planning. This seems unsurprising to me in a world where food and sex are in surplus. Frankly speaking, we humans seek to control when and who and how many new humans will be produced, only we do it very sloppily so that abortion becomes a consequence of repeated failure. We are—collectively—as dumb as elm trees when we ought very much to know better.

How much demographics and economics—the big pictures—affect how we look at birthing or not birthing children is a subject for another day. The Chinese government rewarded couples who limited their new-human output to one per  because the population was growing faster than services could be provided, but they overshot, and now they’re rewarding the new-human output of three per couple. A growing population is prerequisite to a growing economy, and, well, the economy is everything, isn’t it? But that’s content for a big, fat book all by itself.

For a time in our evolutionary development (if we think that way for a moment), the powerful copulation urge must have served as a necessary defense against population extinction; in our time it’s a “benefit” we’d probably be better off without. And if we imagine ourselves beginning from a blob of plasma millions of years ago, or if we’re thinking we’re just one rib away from Adam, would either help us understand the dilemma of the greatest miracle—life—as either a blessing or … a curse?  

The threshold at which a fetus assumes the rights and responsibilities of an independent person is something we disagree about. It makes a big difference to the women who bear most of the responsibility for gestating and nurturing what may become an independent person.

By our actions over the centuries, we seem to have decided that the emergence of a new person happens at birth. We’ve named new persons at birth, not at conception. We have no cultural ceremony to mark the passing of a spontaneously-aborted fetus. We know full well that our memories don’t extend back beyond our birth, indeed that our consciousness is not developed enough in our neonatal time to record memories of our infancy, let alone our gestation.

We are not invited into formal schooling until we’ve lived for five years or so. We reach puberty around twelve or thirteen, are forbidden to drive before we reach sixteen, are wards of our parents until we’re eighteen—with some exceptions, of course. In other words, the independent human takes a long time to develop. The thresholds to stages of growing independence are decided by adult humans and it’s no surprise that humans would imagine conception to be the first anniversary in the continuing development of a specific human person. But if that’s true, then aborting an infant, or a teenager or even an adult would be of similar moral weight as terminating a fetus, and v.v. But we know that the death penalty persists in many cultures and that in war, the immediate objective is to “abort” the armed human minions of an enemy state.

Self-abortion is legal in many states.

Do you see what I mean about the dilemma in reaching a judgment about the independent rights of a fetus? If not, let me complicate the question further.

Stories of accidental or forced pregnancy in women who don’t wish to--or can't--make the sacrifice necessary to gestate and nurture a child at the time, well, that’s the most common scenario for which abortion is seen as an option. (I’m not forgetting here that all pregnancies, save one, have implicated a man as well. A man who may as easily see a pregnancy as being restricting to his options, and therefore—having no wish to father and nurture a slowly-developing human—may reach out for an abortion option.) Common as the stories are, they can’t be assumed to be identical, neither in their first, middle nor last chapters.

But here's one story: A band of rebels in a fictitious country kidnaps teenaged girls from a school and spirits them into a remote camp where they are repeatedly raped. For various reasons, some are ejected, some escape and some find their way back home. The horror visited upon these girls, their families and community might well seem to clarify that abortion can be an ethical choice, but is it? If conception is the initial stage in the development of an independent human, then the determination to abort a blameless fetus conceived by a rape carries the same moral weight as does the therapeutic abortion of an inconvenient pregnancy. Doesn’t it?

But can there be a morality that preserves a right for one person (at the fetus stage, say) to thrive only with the plundering of another person’s physical, emotional, spiritual resources? Is the teenaged child obligated to abandon hopes for a future, lose her own right to independence for the sake of an unwelcome fetus growing inside her? And if a young couple engaged in establishing a household and nurturing budding careers find themselves pregnant through a failure of precautions, is the medical termination of the pregnancy of the same moral order for this couple as for a rape victim? BUT, the fetus is innocent, you’d say, and it doesn’t deserve capital punishment. And you’d be right, I think.

Both yes and no (to the question of abortion as a lawful choice) are supportable with sound arguments. Only, your conclusion—your choice of arguments—will depend on your initial position on a number of things. Are we as individuals masters of our destiny or are we beholden to conform to a moral standard beyond ourselves? Do we see community as the arbiter of ethical behaviour, or do we tend more toward, “it’s none of yours or anyone else’s business.” Do we see the life of a human as sacred or as negotiable? Is being human primarily about walking erect and sporting opposable thumbs, or is it marked by levels of consciousness? And—most telling of all, seems to me—do we think of our lives through a biological or a mystical lens?

Perhaps—in our confusion about when a potential human, who then becomes a viable human, and then becomes a conscious and independent human—we could conceivably agree that in law, at least, a human is beneficiary to all of “human rights” at birth, and that “human responsibility” shall be recognized, learned and embraced by eighteen or so years of age. (Wait, what? Isn’t that exactly what we hold to now?)

Family planning—that is, deciding how many children a couple or an independent woman will have, and when—is not only allowed, but applauded. There is no penalty for producing none or only a few children when one is capable of producing many. Taking steps to prevent a sperm consorting with an ovum is not seen as denying life to a potential human, is it? Every age creates conditions of the succeeding age in many ways: how many humans there will be sharing space and resources is one way, but how much or how little any given female contributes to the desired population level is her call, even though its manipulated by government indirectly because it can’t be controlled directly: child support, cheap daycare, outlawing abortion, free condoms in schools, you name it.

What we may sense, but choose to deny, is that the procreation project is human-directed. Humans grant life, deny life, squander life, destroy life and/or nurture life at will. They plant elm trees and they cut them down, not because God or evolution wills it, but because they do. When an independent human life begins and ends is human-decided and human-directed except when aging or illness or war or natural disasters demand their due.

Another story: A village is located in a remote area, five miles from the nearest fresh water source. Necessity requires that all those who are able make the trek to water every Saturday and return with ten, twenty or forty litre containers of water. So the chief and council set up a guide: men eighteen to sixty carry forty litres, women eighteen to sixty carry twenty litres and children ten to eighteen and seniors sixty to eighty carry ten litres. Refusal will result in a household doing without the common water supply.

Protests arise. How can a rule govern what individuals are capable of? Only I know whether I have the physical resources to make that long walk, carry that weight.

And if a woman or a couple determine that they lack physical, spiritual or emotional resources to handle a pregnancy and the parenting responsibility, should a rule, or the persons involved decide?  

All this almost persuades me that even if I see my life as a human to be end-product of a creative or of an evolutionary process, clearly reproductive issues are relegated to the control of the independent-but-community-acknowledging-humans in our midst. Let’s hope they are smart, and if possible, smarter than I am.

I’m still stuck on yes, or no, or maybe, much of the time. It depends. It always depends.

One thing I know. As a fully matured human person (actually past ripe by quite a bit), I think my chances in life were enhanced greatly by being wanted, loved, cared for from the moment my mother and father sighed contentedly and lit cigarettes, until and beyond the feast they prepared for my wedding day. I've never been a person who was begrudged or commanded into birth, or into a life of continual deprivation or suffering, so I can't compare, never having walked even an inch in those shoes. 

(Here, I admit to lying: my parents didn’t smoke.)

 

 

 

 

Time theft

 

Coffee Time

An article on the escalating concern of some employers with time theft caught my attention today. The COVID pandemic and the resulting “work from home” option has underlined the possibility that the office worker you’re paying a full wage is not spending the agreed amount of time working for you. Since a wage is paid on the basis of time on task, your work-at-home employees may be stealing hours from you. Time theft.

Unions worked hard to limit the number of hours a worker could be compelled to work in a week; forty seems to be the current standard. But hours worked is not a reliable measure by which an employee’s worth to an employer is determined. It might be if we were all equally skilled, equally motivated, equally self-directed and if we all had the same commitment to honesty and fairness.

Working on a commission basis, i.e. piece work, measures worth by productivity, i.e. you’re paid X dollars for each widget you assemble, each vacuum cleaner you sell. But how do you pay a teacher, a pastor or a politician by the piece?

Merit pay has been suggested, whereby a teacher, for instance would be paid a bonus or no-bonus based on students’ standardized test scores. That has too many pitfalls to be seriously or broadly applied.

Typically, individuals and families exchange a portion of their strength, skill, experience and time for housing, groceries, a car and fuel, clothing and leisure-time options. We call it work or a job. The description of paid employment has and is evolving through automation, robotics, changing needs and wants, and more and more people will find themselves unemployed in the traditional sense and more and more of the capable will join those unable to work or hold a job: the elderly, the children, the handicapped. How will we distribute food, shelter and myriad necessities in the years to come? Who’s working on a paradigm for the future if and when “get a job” ceases to make sense?

What if I should become a church pastor whose job description and pay scale are negotiated with the council of a local church? Is that “a job?” Is it clear as I begin my tenure how many hours of work I owe in order to match the salary I draw? Am I “on the clock” from 9:00 to 5:00 Wednesday through Sunday and “off the clock” at all other times? Will I be remunerated for my productivity, $150 per sermon, $50 per home visit? I’ve seen enough pastors over time to know how quickly this would turn out to be an absurd way of exchanging work for means.

There must be a sweet spot where distributing living sustenance to people is neither the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” of a Marxist ideology nor the conservative strident resistance to change, as in defending the age-old simplification inherent in, “work … or starve!” It’s safe to say that as long as we have jobs, that stealing time by employees and stealing labour by employers will remain crimes … and will remain endemic.

Every community needs its members’ contributions of time, skills and energies in order to prosper; this is probably true. Every individual has more or less of time, skills and energies to contribute. But every individual needs good food and a warm, comfortable, safe place to sleep.

A measure of how much dollar value any individual’s work is worth is, by its nature, arbitrary and inexact. In the end, without general good will, a cooperative (as opposed to a competitive) ethic, genuine empathy and compassion, some will be rewarded with way more abundance than their work deserves …

… and others will sleep on a park bench, hungry.

 

                

Shoot-out in the Supreme Court Corral - Take Cover

… And in Sports...

 When I was a practicing “teacher,” I accumulated licenses to work in that capacity in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario. Not in BC nor in Quebec or the Maritimes or Newfoundland-Labrador. You see, Education is a provincial jurisdiction in our constitution and to be trained as a teacher in Saskatchewan might not make you competent enough to teach in Manitoba schools, so they’d let you work “on probation” for two years before you were eligible for a Manitoba permanent certificate. Needless to say, I taught in those four provinces at one time or another; I was not, as has been rumoured, running from the law.

Distributed governance by region makes sense; the tricky part is the division of jurisdictions and taxing power. Educational priorities could be different region to region, but different enough to prohibit education’s placement in the national basket? And what about natural resources? Do provinces with lots of these have any obligation to share that unmerited wealth with Canadians living in other provinces? Or should Canada—as Pierre Trudeau believed—have a National Energy Program (NEP)? [i] Anyone following Alberta politics back since the Leduc oil strike knows that the fight for revenues from the rich oil fields of that province has been an ongoing battle for a long, long time.

Some of the jurisdictional divisions seem obvious: defense, waterways, treaties with indigenous nations, border regulation, international relations and others clearly don’t fit into provincial or municipal jurisdictions. But what about day care? What about roadways? Airports? Medicine? Is it good to have a national health program that pays medical costs out of general revenues while hospitals and medical training are provincially/municipally governed?

The perception giving rise to Alberta’s Sovereignty Act and the Saskatchewan First Act is that the lines between national and provincial jurisdiction in those provinces are blurred, particularly on the subject of natural resources. Well it would be, wouldn’t it, given the constant provincial interest/national interest dilemma that’s unavoidable in any nation that distributes jurisdiction as we do? The mining of fossil fuels falls under provincial jurisdiction while international trade and climate-change-related policy are primarily federal. To the Alberta government, the oily substance in the oil sands looks like money they can’t get at because of environmental protection policies.  

The premiers of both provinces are banking on the flexing of provincial jurisdictional muscle to change the application of the constitutional powers, if not the constitution itself. In order to achieve this, the recent actions have set up an adversarial approach, the outcome of which will depend on continuing public support (Alberta has an election coming up in Spring, 2023) and the interpretation placed on the constitution by the courts in specific cases. In Saskatchewan, the premier enjoys a 56% approval rate and the main hurdle to the effectiveness of the Act there will likely be the courts. In neither province is it clear which specific issues the governments mean to act on/litigate.

First Nations are protesting provincial sovereignty acts, of course. Their treaties are with the federal government, for one, and they see little good coming their way from provinces overriding, for instance, federal obligations to consult and to regulate environmental impacts of provincially initiated projects. (Clearly, the whole question of whether the ceding of land in the treaties included mineral rights might be an interesting debate now, but far too late to revisit seriously.)

I’m in no position to know how this will all pan out. I never learned water-witching nor the reading of the future in chicken guts. I worry though, that sovereignty acts might become a tool for provinces more generally, at least if the two mentioned achieve their stated goals. We don’t need a constant, quarrelsome competitiveness among our provinces and/or between provinces and our federal government. To ask citizens to choose between them when all our interests are best served by their cooperation can turn out to have been a “shooting ourselves in the foot” mistake.

I will predict, however, that I won’t be carrying a Saskatchewan passport anytime soon.

---

[i] National Energy Program - Wikipedia

The Sweet Spot in the Middle

 

A few things stood out for me in the one-and-one-half-hour-long interview Dr. Jordan Peterson did with Pierre Poilievre recently. If Poilievre becomes Prime Minister, he will defund the CBC and along with that, the new wave he will bring to Ottawa will deliver the repeated talking point that he will reduce government, taking it out of its interfering role in the business of citizens, thereby setting them free to manage their own affairs.

The first is a threat that’s become tiresome in its repetition by a host of earlier conservative contenders for power. Peterson drew attention to that fact, to his credit, but like the current Alberta premier rising to power via extreme talking points regarding, primarily, Alberta sovereignty vis á vis the government of Canada, so Poilievre is currently able to wave the whip of an imagined cultural, political coup d'état to the cheers of diehard reactionaries.

Clearly, the curtailing of personal freedom as a legacy of progressive governments is a myth that’s hard to dispel. The opening up of greater choice for individual citizens has always ridden on the backs of progressive, not conservative, political policies. Child benefits lifting millions of children out of poverty, Medicare that provides illness treatment for everyone, tuition-free basic education for everyone, even the freeing of slaves can be argued logically to have been a victory of progressive politics. In each case, freeing strategies have been opposed by status-quo-loving conservatism that to this day wishes even to reverse, for instance, the public education system in favour of promoting theme-based, private schools (USA) and initiating a greater role for private medicine.

It’s no surprise that Jordan Peterson and fellow reactionaries are opposed to, for instance, non-cis gender accommodation. Indeed, life was easier for many when individual liberties--like living one’s life in accordance with one’s make-up--were denied, when left-handed people were made to write with their right hand, queers made to hide or be thrown in jail. Individual freedom for everyone to live comfortably and to be respected for who and what they are is a progressive ideal, and a mightily liberating one for sexual and gender, racial, ethnic and other minorities. Peterson’s public refusal to recognize queer people’s individuality with new pronouns is just one petulant gunshot in the war to reverse citizen freedom for all but the conforming.

The kind of hypocrisy that characterizes Canadian reactionism was on full display in the interview. Making of the economy and climate change separate spheres and speaking about one without critical connections to the other ran rampant. Not to minimize the dilemma faced by fossil fuel workers as the transition to clean energy plods onward; attempts to make omelets without breaking any eggs is simply not on. Progressively, Jagmeet Singh is proposing a dedicated transition program (Jagmeet Singh promises programs, funding to get new jobs for oilsands workers | The Star) for people losing their jobs to this change.

The hypocrisy was on full display in the Freedom Convoy, where occupiers compromised the freedom of Ottawa Citizens and vaccinated truckers at border crossings in order to force a legitimate government to grant them what they called “freedom.” 

In the debate, Poilievre waded knee-deep into the “free enterprise” and “self-regulated marketplace” territories and apparently saw no contradiction when promising to do something about the high price of housing and the construction of low-cost housing. House building, rental rates, mortgage rates are largely consequences of the normal functioning of a free market and one can easily interpret his comments on that front to be advocating for government interference in the housing marketplace. Affordable housing as a government matter is decidedly progressive policy-making. 

You can find the interview with your favourite search engine by typing in “Peterson interviews Poilievre.” You and I should care about trends in the village square that is Canada, particularly if we know that the Canada we love is neither an unreserved capitalist state nor a socialist “nanny state,” but that its strength has always lain in its ability to combine the best of both leanings and reject the extremes. Not “personal freedom” or “civic responsibility,” but “personal freedom and civic responsibility.”

Occasionally we’re shown charts illustrating where Canadians lie on the Socialist to Capitalist political spectrum and by a vast majority, we hover right around the centre, not because we can’t make up our minds, but because it’s the politic that works in our democracy. We alternate between Liberal and Conservative governments nationally (and in several provinces) and the difference in how our affairs are being administered differs hardly enough to notice. 

Results of our elections seem to be driven much more by personality than by policy, the effectiveness of the ad hominem strategy in campaigning illustrated by the repeated denigration of Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and the Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, by both men in the interview.

At times like this, when events beyond our control have encouraged an immense, biting dissatisfaction in so many of us that we want badly to go back to a time before, governments get blamed for so much because, well, who else could be to blame? 

Pierre Poilievre, Jordan Peterson very clearly crave attention and influence and in Pierre’s case, power. The assumption that there’s enough of a reactionary wave to carry them where they hope to go may turn out to have been an astute calculation.

In the end, very basic principles are at stake here. We’ve faced them over and over and still are: is it OK for people of certain religious persuasions to see their choice of dress regulated by the state? If a man or woman refuses to take up arms for this country in answer to a wartime call-up, should there be consequences? Is a storekeeper or a pastor justified in allowing only masked persons to enter premises during an epidemic or pandemic? If authorities advise all residents to leave immediately to avoid an approaching fire, should fire fighters be obligated to rescue those who ignore the warning? Can a national government legitimately enact a citizen-wide directive to minimize the effects of, say, a pandemic, or must it allow individual citizens freedom to respond to the risks as they wish or believe, and are there exceptions? 

The workable range of our words and actions as independent individuals on the one hand, and as community members on the other, will always be very basic to the functioning of a democratic country. We need always to be wary of concerted efforts to push the population closer to one or the other poles; it’s just not who we are.

 

Heavy themes in the Foyer

 

I was listening to the final chapter of the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings yesterday. They took a fifteen-minute afternoon break and I took the time to compose and print a sign-up sheet for the condo Christmas dinner. I took the sheet down to the foyer and posted it on the bulletin board. 

Two residents of the condo were sitting in the foyer and chatting as residents often do, and I thought, “Why aren’t they at home, listening to the Commission proceedings, like I am?” A silly question, of course; a more relevant one might have been, “Why am I spending hours listening to the repetitious, predictable questions and answers when there’s so much more to do?”

In short, we know that people engage in the big questions of democracy in direct proportion to the degree to which they’re directly implicated. “They’re raising the carbon tax,” may come to us as coffee gossip and we take note, but gasoline prices fluctuate wildly, we see ourselves as involved in the grand debates about climate change and economics supporting the tax in the same way that we’re involved in the science of quirks and quarks: it’s all up there and out there and nothing I could do—even if I understood it—could possibly make a difference.  

An independent trucker may take greater note of the tax increase because his/her/their livelihood is directly affected. But if the principle and the need for it isn’t understood and acknowledged, he/she/they may see it primarily as a personal affront and--being unable to affect any influence--might well be reduced to a “f*** Trudeau” rage and to attempt influence in this matter by joining an enraged convoy of truckers to Ottawa. 

When the collective interest and individual interest conflict, protest, even outrage, are to be expected. In a democracy (a politic where each individual has an equal voice in selecting leadership) the tyranny of the majority can’t be resolved by substituting for it a tyranny of the most vocal minority; this conundrum will always need to be addressed, particularly in stressful times.

In the Freedom Convoy case, a vocal minority (according to Trudeau’s testimony) “… didn’t only want to be heard; they wanted to be obeyed.” Could the democratic “will of the people” be broadened to include an exception declaring, “Notwithstanding the border-crossing mandates, truckers will be allowed to cross from the US to Canada without giving evidence of vaccination?” To have the general citizenry debate the principle behind a question like this—a question that goes to the heart of decision making in a democracy—would only be possible if the majority were informed and engaged, which might mean not sitting in the foyer chatting about winter tires or the price of coconuts, but sitting up in one’s apartment, watching, listening and taking notes on the perspectives being expressed there.

And then, going down to the foyer to compare views on these subjects. 

Good luck with that.    

The Emergency Act: an impression or two

Winter ca. 1978, Paint Lake, Manitoba

 I’m watching the Inquiry into the invocation of the Emergency Act on CBC Gem, particularly the interviews with the Freedom Convoy organizers. Most of Thursday and Friday, it was Tamara Lich’s turn; she’s spent 49 days in jail on various charges including mischief and counseling mischief.  

Paul S. Rouleau, the Commissioner, has run a tight ship. He’s been flexible when it comes to time allotments for the interveners to question witnesses and has insisted on keeping to the focus of the commission, which is to ascertain whether the government was justified in invoking the Emergency Act to end the demonstrations in Ottawa.  

I don’t need to say this, really, but Canada is seriously divided on the issue of the need for mandates relating to vaccinations, masking, distancing in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The news that a protest convoy was being organized drew far more numbers and far more financial support than was anticipated. The convoy organizers and participants being questioned at the commission hearings tended to paint the demonstrators as peaceful, loving and kind and to deny reporting that drew attention to racism, threats and harassment. That’s completely understandable. Cross examiners for the police and Ottawa citizens tended to justify their viewpoints and actions as you’d expect. 

What became apparent in virtually all the testimony was that the sheer number of people participating in the protest was both a boost and a handicap for the central organizers, particularly Lich and Barber who presented as likeable, reasonable people with strong convictions regarding personal liberty. Maintaining the overall focus on ending the mandates as they related to unvaccinated truckers was practically impossible; that goal was muddied by the numbers of diverse groups, hangers-on and individuals with broader objectives. This apparently became very frustrating for the Freedom Convoy leadership.  

Blaming the mainstream news for distorting reality will always be an issue, but the presence of “F*** Trudeau” signage, the maverick messages of the hangers-on existed in abundance on social media and in common discourse so that Canadians probably assumed that they had a relatively clear picture of the chaos in Ottawa. To explain the events as “just a mob action” would certainly be unjust to those participants who sincerely believed that mandates represented government overreach and that their actions were simply demonstrations of this belief.  

I know too little in detail to opine on the core question: was the Government of Canada justified in implementing the Emergency Act in February of 2022? I expect that a “yes” answer will raise loud protests and possibly street action by the supporters of no-vaccine, no-masking, no-social-distancing mandates. If the answer is “no,” then citizens who approve of health measures directed toward the general population in a pandemic may well be incensed. The problem that makes this so divisive is not as simple as it might seem; whether we cooperated with mandates or not grew out of our perspectives on community cooperation and individual liberty, perspectives that lie peacefully side by side until something like a pandemic brings them into the open.  

Throughout the demonstration, I wished that Trudeau and the relevant ministers would take a day for a round-table discussion of the protestors’ grievances. That they had no obligation to do so is obvious, but according to the organizing leadership of the Freedom Convoy, being heard was their paramount objective. What the hearings suggested to me was that the Convoy leadership failed for several reasons to achieve their objective, and that the Government of Canada failed in exercising a leadership that would have decreased the division rather than boosting it.  

The Commission is expected to take eight weeks before it concludes deliberations. Most Canadians won’t spend that time glued to their TVs to watch and learn. The outcome, however, will be significant in the light of the Freedom Convoy’s and others’ challenges to the future of democracy in Canada.  

As legitimate as protest is in any nation, the rule of the ballot box must remain foundational. There’s good reason to argue that the Freedom Convoy and the groups that attached themselves sought to overturn governance rulings made by an administration placed in Ottawa by a free and peaceful election. Working to replace or re-elect that government is a legitimate democratic activity; protesting the decisions reached by the duly elected government is protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well. Occupations and blockades that seek to inconvenience private citizens, governing authorities and businesses in order to force a minority agenda is neither a democratic nor a human right.  

At the same time, a democracy will always be measured against its attention to the well-being of its minorities. Otherwise, it finds itself in danger of becoming a tyranny of the majority. This becomes particularly significant where the prime minister, the entire cabinet can be selected from a party that received only 40% +/- of the popular vote.  

The Emergency Act, if I understand it correctly, requires that its use be impartially examined after the fact. The question of whether its invocation was justified is not without problems of bias and personal and group interest, seems to me. Against what principle or set of rules is it being tested? We’ve heard much conjecture that the “occupation” could have been concluded using existing tools, but for three weeks the OPP, the RCMP, the Ottawa Police Service and the Parliamentary Police Service, the possessors of these “ordinary tools,” did not achieve what Ottawa citizens and administration, the Federal Government, the Provincial Government and Canadian citizens generally knew to be necessary. Does that justify the invoking of powers of the Emergency Act?  

It’s true, many fellow Canadians suffered loss of jobs, income, and security because—for conscience or whatever their personal reasons—they chose not to be vaccinated, or they chose not to mask in places where it had been mandated, or they gathered in numbers that didn’t conform to the guidelines of the day. Although human rights and freedoms were invoked as defenses for the Convoy action, that defense rings hollow without an equivalent appeal for the rights and freedoms of those cooperating and in favour of the mandates.  

Whether or not the restrictions on Canadians were the correct ones for countering the pandemic threat is arguable, and in hindsight, it's clear that how decisions were made by governments on the advice of virologists and immunologists must be reviewed. To say that governments “should have known,” however, is disingenuous … unless one can show that it was conspiracy, not planning, that drove decisions. In law, a conspiracy is an agreement among two or more persons to carry out an unlawful act, with the intent of carrying out the unlawful act. Hence, the Freedom Convoy’s understandable efforts to show that theirs was not an occupation (illegal) but a demonstration (legal).  

The witness of participants supports the view that what began as a planned demonstration went out of control because of the large numbers of participants with differing agendas, turning what began as a demonstration into what was reasonably judged to be an occupation. This was unfortunate for everyone involved (all Canadians, in reality) because it made negotiation, even dialogue between government and protesters impossible. With whom was a government supposed to even begin a dialogue? Can a gathering of thousands even have a single, trustworthy voice with whom one can reasonably carry on a negotiation?  

So, was the Emergencies Act justified? It depends on imagination, in part at least. How would Canada be different if the demonstration/occupation hadn’t been dispersed by force? Would ordinary policing without the power to freeze funding have brought the event to a conclusion that was satisfying to all? Would an offer of a dialogue with organizers have been sufficient incentive for the demonstration/occupation to disperse voluntarily? Would the various area police forces have been able to disperse the demonstration/occupation if there had been more cooperation? We’ll never know.  

There can come a point where dissent and the demonstration of that dissent begins to degenerate into what has the appearance of anarchic behaviour, a refusal to recognize or accede to the authority governing the country. The refusal to obey the “back to work” order of the Ontario government by educational support workers is a case of teetering on the brink of anarchy. Where is that line?  

For me, the most poignant historical example of protest from which we might generalize some principles would be the participation in—or refusal to participate in—armed conflict. Principle One is that you cannot make a person carry or use a weapon on another person, just as you cannot drag a person to a clinic and hold him/her/them down while injecting a vaccine. No democratic government can control citizen behaviour to an unlimited degree. The second principle is that being excused from a national directive doesn’t come without a cost, so that if I refuse to bear arms, it is both logical and legal that I contribute to the welfare of the country in another, balanced way. Conscientious Objectors gave up their freedom to serve in mandated programs of work in the forests, mountains, farms and fields of the country ... as a civic duty. Many who took the conscientious objector option gave up more than some others who enlisted. Those who refused military and alternate service were imprisoned.  

And an overarching principle: the world is and always will be chaotic as opposed to orderly, at least until humans are replaced by robots. What kind of hell would that be? How to be a good person in a chaotic world is, in a nutshell, the Christian Gospel at its best. To love God and God’s creation and to wish for your neighbour peace and plenty amid the chaos is the incontrovertible kernel inside the nut. When a truckers’ convoy and the Canadian government set this kernel aside and make something else their truth—power, personal liberty, the righteousness of governance, the righteousness of protest, money, notoriety, whatever—chaos will always laugh its way to the bank.