Meeowww

Like this sign, we tend to see the world in yes-no categories. Why not "Please avoid trespassing unless you have a very good reason." Of course, that would take a bigger sign!

The conversation was about “furries,” kids who identify as animals and the schools who allegedly allow them to carry this identity into the classroom, the playground and the washroom, even to the point of providing litter boxes so cat-identifying kids can pee like cats.

Way back in the 1950s, I identified as both the Lone Ranger and his horse, galloped across the pasture with my bent-stick six-shooter under my belt, drew my horse to a rampant stop in an imaginary cloud of dust and shot the eyes out of an evil bandit before he could say, “Mennonite non-violence.” On other days, I identified as an engineer, damming up rain runoff in the yard, creating new rivers and lakes. Built bridges. Later, I’d pick up the family guitar and identify as a country singer like, well, take your pick.

My school never provided my horse-me with a stall and a manger of hay.

Identifying as something you want to be or wish you were, is a general phenomenon. Some men dress up as women, use makeup in the way glamorous women do. Some women dress in a way that projects an anti-effeminate, physically active identity. Performers preen images, politicians are only fluent when they have teleprompting, courting adults “put on the Ritz.” Hiding our shortcomings while projecting an image is commonplace.

In children, pretending, mimicking, identifying-with are learning tools. The object of “furries” identification, of course, can be disconcerting if it’s relentless and goes on and on. And granted, kids could certainly mimic behaviour to the point where it appears to spread like a virus. Schools had to ban “fidget gadgets,” after all.

People have been saying, “she/he/they thinks she/he/they is a cat, or dog, or boa constrictor.” Well, no. The only way you can see yourself in a mirror and register “body of a cat” is if you’re hallucinating, and hallucinating is symptomatic of brain trauma and cause for medical intervention. It’s far more likely that an ongoing cat-identification has to do with mimicking cat behaviour and demeanour, and that lying, walking and even “speaking” like a cat fulfills a social/mental need. Cats project calm; the world is stressful, possibly.

But that brings us to the charge that educators are accepting, even encouraging, such behaviour. I’ve read numerous credible reports refuting every one of the “litter boxes in the washrooms” stories. Given the nature of the children I’ve known, being caught by your peers sitting on a litter box in a washroom, even using an especially designated litter-room for cat-identifiers, would render every other part of school life a living hell for that individual.

As closely as I can gather from my reading, the “litter boxes in schools” propaganda dovetails with the abundant doubts being expressed about our educators, particularly via social media. Schools tend to be progressive, in part because their clientele live at the very frontier of whatever changes post-modernity is bringing to humanity. Your local principal and school staff have all had years of training bent toward educating children to live successfully in the world as it is and likely will be, not in a world seen through rose-coloured nostalgia. Keeping balance on a moving train rather than gluing yourself to the platform is an appropriate analogy.  

Reaction to change is always a given, and conspiracy theories serve nicely as tools for attacking progressivism in, in this case, education. The essence of the propaganda is this: homosexuality, transgenderism, “furries” identification, are products of the education system, which is therefor not to be trusted on any level. Misinformation can be bad, but the end goal here is to return education to the imagined past, and that’s important enough to make “the end justify the means.”

Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada has stated that “schools should leave LGBTQ issues to parents.” This “simple question, simple answer” solution couldn’t be more naïve in its conception. The “LGBTQ issues” march through schools, churches, workplaces, politics as surely as through homes, and if gays are being bullied, for instance, it’s possibly not in the home but in the school where it will become immediate and urgent. For a school to ignore discussion of human rights—of which gay rights are one item—avoiding both the social and the biological science surrounding gender/sex subjects would be a blatant derogation of duty.

It's hardly surprising that in New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, sitting governments feel compelled to take sides in questions of what should and what shouldn’t be addressed in the public school system. Among Christians, the creation allegory has Adam and Eve noticing that they are naked, right after sinning against God. In my growing-up generation, sexuality vs. biology was resolved through denial, voluminous covering of the female body, a cloak of silence and euphemism, and a tacit agreement to live in the pretense of sexualities non-existence.

That’s what all this is about; a fear that liberalizing the discussion to include frank education on sexuality and gender will—poetically put—result in our looking down at last and discovering that we’re naked, or even deciding, “Wow. Is that how it’s done? Looks like fun! Let’s do it.” This conservative push toward silencing liberalization in the area of sexuality and gender is strident and persistent … and the attempted repetition of a huge mistake.   

Parents have every right and responsibility to be guiding, nurturing influences in the development of their children. Teachers are charged with preparing them for the responsibilities, rights and privileges of citizenship, and for providing them with the tools to allow them to succeed as independent adults. The roles obviously overlap in many ways, and in an ideal world, differences in philosophy or practice would lead us to negotiate, not to demands for the resolving of differences through government decree.

Therein lies the biggest challenge I see. First order, of course, is to consult with, read reliable sources so that we know sex/gender, pedagogical subjects before firing off, or re-posting, half-baked opinions on social media.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring[i]:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again. (Pope, Alexander, in An Essay on Criticism, 1709.)

 

 

---

[i] The source of knowledge

 

Tell me a Story

Premier Scott Moe was asked by a reporter about the evidence on which the decision to require—by law—that teachers must inform parents of any student’s expressed wish to be addressed with gender free pronouns. The new directives also legislate that any parent will have the right to withdraw their child from a sex education program if they deem it inappropriate, plus a few other provisions claimed to be "parents' rights" supportive. 

His response[i] to the reporter cited a survey of some 3000+ people, the majority of whom agreed that any student’s request to have a name change or to be addressed with gender-neutral pronouns in school should be reported to the child’s parents.

It’s easy to word a question that will elicit a positive response in favour of parental rights regarding children. Of course, the people who manage the household in which a child spends most of his time are justified in claiming greater authority over that child than does a neighbour. Not the government nor his teacher can set a bedtime for my boy.

There are a number of factors that make of the premier’s defense of the policy a naïve and hopelessly incomplete. Some that come to mind include:

First: in in loco-parentis law (local parent), the adult in legitimate supervision of that child has the responsibility of a parent, and by the same token, the biological or adoptive parent cannot maintain parental supervision while his/her/their child is in a classroom or on the school playground. Are we clear about what that means in this case? As it stands, a teacher's relationship to a student's parent is not like that parent's relationship to, say, a babysitter. 

Second: “Parent,” as used in the survey for instance, conjures good, responsible, thoughtful, informed mother and father who live together and plan and cooperate in the teaching and mentoring of their children. Parents out of Dick and Jane readers, sort of. Meanwhile, every teacher knows that some minority in their class are coming to them from dysfunctional homes. It requires four years of pedagogical training including internships and regular evaluations in order to become qualified for the in loco parentis role. Heated copulation in the back of a Nash Rambler is all that’s required to make of yourself a “parent.”

Third: Is “parental rights” the appropriate term for what we’re talking about? In general, human rights are our way of defending the basic well-being of individuals, not of classes of people. If a child is badly injured and doctors determine he/she/they require a blood transfusion to survive, would an ability of the parent to overrule the doctors—in obedience to a religious tenet, say—be a legitimate right? Or is it the child’s human right to life that is in question? Likewise, if a teacher senses a danger to a child if the child is outed to the parent(s), would that be like the doctors following the parents’ wishes in the blood transfusion case if the teacher is forced to inform? Do human rights of the individual extend to, say, a ten-year-old child who has already decided that coming out to parents will bring him/her/them harm?

Fourth: Saskatchewan once had a premier whose grasp of issues went well beyond political or religious calculations. Tommy Douglas would say things like,[ii] “We are all in this world together, and the only test of our character that matters is how we look after the least fortunate among us. How we look after each other, not how we look after ourselves. That’s all that really matters, I think.” There’s no arguing that people with same-sex orientation or gender dysphoria’s manifestations form a minority in Canadian culture. Do their unchosen natures fit them into Douglas’ “least fortunate among us” category? If so, is Moe’s new legislation an attempt to “look after” their well-being? Or is it another too-hasty reaction of turning the dilemma of being born different into a simple question-simple answer, solution?  

Five: Is there any part of pitting teachers and parents against each other that can be logically justified? If a teacher is attacked verbally, pejoratively and a school is ordered by a parent to otherwise engage their child when a provincially authorized sex education curriculum is being taught, what outcome should we expect for the well-being of the child, either in school or at home? Isn’t the sex education curriculum already carefully tailored to match the students’ developmental ages? Is parent education on these curricula lacking? Are there better ways of doing Home and School?

Six: The legislation curtails schools’ utilization of outside resources in sex education instruction. Are we remembering that this all started in Saskatchewan with a Planned Parenthood presentation to a school class in Lumsden whose participation there wasn’t criticized, except for having left behind a brochure that a parent found offensive because of its explicit illustrations? “Is the decree proportional to the problem?” I ask myself. And myself answers, “No, it’s not. It’s too much like banning all people under the age of twenty-five from owning Pitbulls because one twenty-two-year-old in Melville had such a dog that bit his neighbour twice.”

Finally, opinion surveys are not research; for one, responses are far too subject to the phrasing of the question. Also, we know full well that, “the majority think so” doesn’t necessarily make an assertion wise, true, or even practical, although it can help a political party plan its election strategy. Lastly, a society that heeds Tommy Douglas’ statement on what matters, and is therefor proactive in defending the rights of minorities, by this same impulse can’t help but be a defender of every child: yours, mine, the neighbours’. Sexual behaviour affects everyone; education to help all of us get it right is key; surely the timing and content can be arrived at in better ways than through arbitrary and hasty legislation.

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[i] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-poll-policy-1.6949760

[ii] https://www.azquotes.com/author/4101-Tommy_Douglas

Retribution, Restoration, Rehabilitation

 

(I MAILED THIS LETTER VIA CANADA POST TO THE PRIME MINISTER ON JULY 21, 2023, I.E. TODAY)

Rosthern, SK.

July 21, 2023 

Right Honourable Justin Trudeau

Office of the Prime Minister

80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2

 

Dear Prime Minister Trudeau; 

If “let the punishment fit the crime,” or “an eye for an eye” were the foundational standard of criminal and civic justice in Canada, then Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka would have been stripped naked in the public square, raped by strangers in the presence of the families of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and strangled. Such a result, most fortunately, can’t happen in Canada … at least not under sanction of the justice system. The death penalty was abolished long ago and currently, even criminals with a life sentence are beneficiaries of a policy that rewards progress in good behaviour with increments of increased freedom of movement. But our grasp of our justice underpinnings easily slide back to Judeo/Christian Old Testament principles and the “eye for eye” sensibility of Sharia law.

Prime Minister Trudeau, yesterday you emphasized a point that the sensitivities of the families of victims of crime are foremost considerations when justice is meted out. That may be emotionally true, but not a good academic description of how Canadian justice is administered. Criminal cases are not between the offender and the offended; they’re between The People and the offender (Queen vs. John Doe, People vs. Jane Doe). The absolutely-necessary support of the families of victims and the role of these families in the justice process must remain separate, or else we risk opening the door to a return to “eye for an eye” sensibility. The impulse for redressing violence with counter violence is a strong impulse among us humans.

Our justice system is by no means fail-proof. It takes public vigilance and informed dialogue to ensure that it remains a system that fits the people’s consensus of what justice is. As this consensus now stands, our justice systems is guided by three signposts: Retribution (punishment enough to convince the offender of the seriousness of his/her/their acts, and to serve as a deterrent to others), Restoration (returning conditions for all involved to a state as close as possible to what it was before the crime) and Rehabilitation (training and educating the offender to be a contributing, cooperating member of society). Implicit in the bars and razor wire of prisons, of course, is the assumption that the public must be protected from offenders lest they reoffend.

We could easily be drawn into debate about the degree of importance of any one of these goals. In the wake of the most horrendous crimes—those of Paul Bernardo in this case—retribution quickly rises to be the top priority, especially since there is no possible satisfactory restoration in the case of murder or other unlawful death, and Bernardo, having been diagnosed as psychopathic, seems far from being a candidate for rehabilitation. But whether he is housed in a maximum or medium security facility is not a judgment for the prime minister, the justice minister, the minister of public safety, the victims nor public opinion to make. We train police, lawyers, judges, prison wardens, etc., strenuously to make such decisions studiously, based on legislated principles and their training and dedication to the job. If their judgment is to be over-ridden by political or social opinion gathering, why train people to make them in the first place? Why not simply make Twitter or Facebook posts the sentencing, incarceration agents? Or why not just load all convicts onto ships to disgorge them in some island far away? (Please excuse the hyperbole; been listening to the Leader of the Opposition too much, I fear.)

For opposition parties who have found in the transfer of Bernardo a juicy propaganda windfall, I would suggest proceeding carefully. Although mistakes are made and legislation has had to be revisited and revised accordingly, the Canadian justice system is one of the best and fairest humanity in its long history has been able to devise. The transfer of Bernardo is not a sign of system failure, it’s evidence that it’s working. At least, it’s working if restoration and rehabilitation are still objectives of the pursuit of justice.

And to the governing Liberals, the legislation that rewards convicts with increasing liberty as their rehabilitation progresses is vital to the entire justice program. Even if Paul Bernardo should after this transfer prove that he is irredeemable in any socially acceptable way, the transfer back to maximum security is there to be exercised, isn’t it? If the restoration of the victims’ families is as important as you say it is, then help Canadians understand that the restoration effort is not helped by granting victims a determinant role in the justice plan for the perpetrator, but in the social supports to which all citizens are entitled.

I add just two personal anecdotes:

First: In 1981, my fifteen-year-old daughter accepted an ill-advised ride with a young man, a ride that ended in tragedy when the car rolled and both died. The driver was unlicensed to drive, the car unregistered. Had the driver lived, my daughter’s death might have resulted in criminal charges and a prison sentence. Saskatchewan Government Insurance sent us a cheque for $2,500, a restorative and well-meant  but bureaucratic gesture. We were told that this was common practice in such cases.

Had the driver lived and been pilloried, or had the government sent me a cheque for two million dollars, that would have only added to the grief I still bear some forty years later.

(My daughter had very loosely-jointed fingers; I can still feel her hand in mine.)

I mourn both deaths.

Second: I spent the better part of a day at the Healing Lodge on the Beardy’s Okemasis First Nation a few years ago. It’s a pre-release, minimum security facility that forms part of an offender rehabilitation process. There are no fences, but few “escapes,” and residents must shop and cook for their “house” and are able to spend some days in a guest house with family at intervals. If we abandon the principle of incremental loosening of restraint as rewards for progress, aren’t we then abandoning the principle of rehabilitation with it?

I wish you and your governing colleagues a good and restful summer hiatus,

Sincerely,

George G. Epp, citizen, voter, happy-to-be Canadian.

gg.epp41@gmail.com

Box 148, Rosthern, SK; S0K 3R0

 

The People shall not be deprived ...

 

Book, book - GGE

I’m guessing that few Canadians watch what could be called the “talking heads” television on late night in the USA and Great Britain, or in the political-junkie cable/YouTube video-streaming world: Piers Morgan, Jon Stewart, Alex Jones, Brian Tyler Cohen, Jordan Peterson, etc., etc. Mostly their interviews air as podcasts and they are unabashedly conservative- or progressive-leaning. A favourite theme popping up regularly is that of free speech, and that’s not surprising as their podcasts are dependent on their right to speak with little restriction.

Free speech—in the USA,  the “first amendment” to the constitution—guarantees that:

 “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed. The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. The people shall not be restrained from peaceably assembling and consulting for their common good; nor from applying to the Legislature by petitions, or remonstrances, for redress of their grievances. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Text)

Most often, these days, sentiments in the First Amendment is read as opinions, which easily interprets then as “you are allowed to say whatever you want.” Perhaps that’s covered by some form of an old joke:, “In Nazi Germany you could say anything … once!” but just as the Second Amendment is misused in defense of a gun-ownership-free-for-all, the misinterpretation of the First Amendment is making of “free speech” a socio-political moré, when that was never the intent. 

The amendments are guarantees that the federal government will not enact laws that prevent states from establishing “well-regulated [armed] militias,” and that the federal government will not pass a law that criminalizes public utterances, whatever the topic. This is demonstrated in the very grammar of the amendments; it’s not a politically-driven interpretation.

Often, conservative talking heads use examples of universities denying visiting speakers a platform on campus as an example of the breaking of the First Amendment. It’s not. If the federal government enacted a law which effectively denied the person in question any platform, period, that would break the intent of the First Amendment. This confusion has given rise to the “cancel culture” mentality as it applies to the right to refuse to hear speech we choose not to hear. 

University undergraduates should not leave university before gaining a grasp of the essentials of every governance model that’s been tried, but that doesn’t mean that they should under the rubric of “free speech,” be compelled to listen to advocacy for one political philosophy or another. Propaganda is attempted indoctrination, it’s not aimed at the development of sound judgment resting on reliable evidence.

In the same amendment, the federal government is prohibited from enacting a law curtailing religious belief: Christian churches aren’t obligated to give equal time to other religions; their right to hold to their opinion that theirs is the only true faith hasn’t been abridged. Likewise, a university, being a public institution bound to uphold the laws and the rights of the state and nation, has a right—indeed an obligation—to ensure that curriculum and public obligation, expressed through the ballot box, match. Students are free to choose their university; many choose a parochial university, most a public institution. They attend or skip classes and events as they wish. It’s at these levels that who will and who will not be heard is ultimately made.

BUT, both faiths and universities must tread thoughtfully. We are a multicultural, multifaith democracy in Canada: to deny a congregation (say) an education on other faiths, to deny university students accurate knowledge of political, social alternatives is likewise foolish when the role of the citizen in a democracy like Canada is as critical as it is. However institutions walk the free speech/tailored-influences continuum, a steady diet of single-minded propaganda is unhealthy in a democracy. But the law cannot uphold the standards; only a generosity of spirit and courteous dialogue can do that. That—in a democracy—is the core curriculum so badly neglected these days.

Free speech is, after all, not license. You can go back to James 3: 1-12, then on to libel, slander, fraud and coercion laws to learn that weaponized speech is as dangerous as an AK-15, maybe even more so; that it can be means for harming individuals or masses of others practically goes without saying. 

The wary among us will recognize a flaw in much of the “free speech propaganda,” namely that it seeks to reduce or eliminate the consequences of uttering false, coercive, biased speech, the promulgation of misinformation and slanted or incomplete information to gain a political end. That one should be able to say publicly that which is untrue without consequences (so clearly illustrated in the Donald-Trump-before-the-law saga unfolding right now) is a lot like donating blankets to indigenous tribes but lacing them with the variola (smallpox) virus first. There exists no cover for weaponized speech in the First Amendment, or in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Granted, Free Speech can become a slippery subject. Jordan Peterson has taken a stand against what he calls “compelled speech” in Bill C-16, which extends non-discrimination provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to trans-gender individuals. It’s an oddity of the English language that gives rise to an apparent need for changing pronouns so that neither biological maleness nor femaleness is implied. (“Davida is feeling sick, so {she? he? they? herm?} won’t be coming.”) The  vast majority of Canadians don’t care if—when others talk about them—the pronoun used gives away their biological sex; a minority are made uncomfortable by this and wish people would use non-gender-specific pronouns when speaking about them. Peterson is wrong when he says using “they” instead of “he” or “she” is compelled speech; it only becomes an infraction when it plays into a situation of discrimination—in employment, college admittance, etc. As I understand Peterson, if a client or student would personally ask him to use a gender-neutral pronoun like “they,” he would oblige them. So would I, even though the use of a traditionally-plural pronoun connecting to a singular antecedent rasps across my English teacher sensitivities. I’ve already almost gotten over it!

Speech and writing are thought-conveyances; a bus is a physical-transport conveyance. A bus can be used to run over people you don’t like; speech can be the vehicle for gifting your good thoughts to others, but can also be the tool for inflicting slanderous, libelous, hurtful, careless thoughts upon them.

Before we decide where the boundaries for “what you can say freely” are to be found, we ought to get a better grasp on speech itself as a subject. A shallow “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” understanding is not enough knowledge of speech and writing processes and effects for a successful democratic community to base an understanding of what “free speech” really ought to mean.

But then, it’s on the petty mounds that we choose to fight and die because the mountains are too formidable and high for us to challenge. Propaganda in the political and commercial spheres is a treacherous speech mountain; reflexive pronouns, bathrooms, and sports participation for trans-gender persons are mole hills by comparison and capable of being conquered. (Some starting suggestions, re- pronouns:  develop and teach a dozen or so new pronouns to replace the sex-specific ones and get used to them gradually through schools; bathrooms: remove urinals and replace them and the current cubicles with booths with real walls and doors, substitute TOILETS for the MEN and WOMEN signs; let sports administrations decide if in their case a restriction on male to female gender transitioners poses a threat to their sport’s integrity.)

Next to the bare basics of reading, writing, speaking fluently, listening with understanding, it strikes me that negotiating skill is the most important language learning there is, particularly for sustaining a functioning democracy. Climate change, for instance, is almost universally accepted as real and human-contributed, if not human-made. The news is filled with speech on the subject: the federal voice is telling us that a new directive to fossil fuel industries to reduce the carbon content of fuels will help. Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Maritime provinces are appealing for the repeal of this policy since it will have a negative economic effect. There are many options for reducing CO² emissions, but ranking them, choosing among them requires negotiation that is less partisan and arbitrary than what we’ve become used to.

HOW TO TEACH LANGUAGE INDIFFERENCE: Give your 25 Grade 11 students Catcher in the Rye; stand in front of the rows of desks, read portions to them and explain “what they mean.”

HOW TO TEACH LANGUAGE FLUENCY AND NEGOTIATION SKILLS: Replace the desks with round tables for four. Have the four at each table read aloud selected portions of the first chapter. Have each table come up with a three-point plan of things to do first if this classroom of people were to find themselves shipwrecked on an uninhabited, jungle island, while you go table to table coaching their discussions. They should be conscious that they’re practicing negotiation just as one would practice the keyboard if piano playing was the goal.

My hat is off to the great teachers and parents who are being deliberate mentors in the art of negotiation, since it’s in the exercise of that art that free speech finally makes absolute good sense!

 

 

 

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.)