Nothing like a little town hall meeting to mark one hundred days in office.  A nice win one for the Gipper speech before a receptive audience to make everybody feel better in bad times.  Barack Obama is perhaps the best president since Ronald Reagan when it comes to being able to speak to the hearts of an audience.  And America needs it now.  Things are not good and everybody needs some reassurance that we can get through this crisis. 

Of course the problems of the American auto industry were front and center in his words today.  Bad decisions had led to the position we are in now and President Obama could not justify more bad decisions with taxpayer dollars.  He would demand of auto executives that they table workable plans for a sustainable recovery if they wished to dip into the pockets of ordinary American citizens.  He is absolutely correct.  Bad decisions did bring us to this point.  But much as I dislike corporate executives and believe me, they must shoulder a significant portion of the blame, they can’t be tagged for it all.  Those bad decisions were made in a social culture that demanded just the decisions that they made.  It is a social culture that still exists and was reinforced in the president’s speech. 

Obama spoke of a time when the American auto industry built the cars that people wanted but lost their market to foreign competitors due to poor corporate decisions.  There certainly was a period of complacency that resulted in poor quality design and manufacture processes.   The American auto industry was producing vehicles that were plagued by breakdowns and recalls.  They lost the trust of the North American consumer who sought out imports that sold themselves on quality and fuel efficiency.  The president is absolutely correct lazy and stupid are bad decisions.  But were they not still designing vehicles that people wanted?  The answer is yes they were.  A cursory look at Japanese automobiles (still the chief competitor) since they broke onto the North American market will show you that Detroit didn’t change, Tokyo did.  How do the 6 and 8 cylinder four door luxury sedans full of computerized crap that just means more to break down compare to the Toyota Corolla and Corona with their simple functional design and fuel efficiency.  Not too well.  It is not that GM, Ford and Chrysler were force feeding us larger vehicles, we demanded them.  Look at the highways today and you see them full of over-sized quasi-trucks.  Many of those with brand names like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and Mitsubishi.  That is what the people want.  There lies the problem.  We cannot afford to give the

Photo by David Williams, Knoxville Tennesee. Retrieved from FUH2.com

people what they want.  Just like you shouldn’t let your kid go on that all sugar diet she wants, you can’t let the childish North American have his Hummer.  The Earth is mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore.  (I know that GM is currently in the process of dumping its Hummer line.  Actually it is hoping to sell off the brand.  Take my advice, sell the brand to an adult toy manufacturer and not to some idiot that will try to make another ugly-ass vehicle out of it causing carbon and visual pollution.)

But there is more.  I said that Obama was correct in saying that bad decisions led us to this point but more bad decisions are not going to bail us out.  Bailing out the current automobile industry is an error of Earth shattering proportions, pun intended.  Obama’s speech mentioned moving to fuel efficient, environmentally friendly, blah, blah, whatever cars.  Hybrids, green cars, bio-fuels are all pacifiers stuck into the mouths of whining little brats who can’t get it through their heads that the private automobile must go.  If the money used to bail out these dinosaurs of our adolescence was put toward creating a comprehensive public  transit system (which would be both faster and cheaper) and into technologies such as carbon recovery, passive housing, etc.  it would create more jobs, make the economy more sustainable and guarantee our children and their children a future. 

Oh but wait that would make sense.  Can’t do that then.  And we won’t.  We will poor good money into this bygone contraption and when the inevitable comes we can only hope their is enough money and time left to save the planet.  And hope is all we have given the short-sightedness we continually confront and the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Eco-Catastrophe, breathing hard on our necks.  For now though we will all skip merrily over the cliff because no politician or community leader has the courage to just speak the truth.  But like the Earth I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore.  So to paraphrase Shakespeare I say ‘First let’s kill all the people who own Hummers and see where we get from there.’ 

Well, it is time we peasants gathered together with our torches and pitchforks and marched up that hill to storm the castle.  Dr. Frankenstein is making monsters again.  Actually it is our education system and the monsters are our children. 

A study of university professors in Ontario (Canada) reported students were immature, lazy and unprepared.  They also lacked the research skills that might yet save them from going blithely forth to their, and our, doom.  The so-called most informed generation had little knowledge and what they did possess was superficial at best and outright myth at worst.  For example, Canadian troops, in one form or another, have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2002.  Yet when I ask students at beginning of semester where Afghanistan is only 1 or 2  can answer correctly.  None of them have a clear understanding of how we got there and what we are trying to accomplish.  But if I ask whether they support their troops the majority answer in the affirmative.  How can you support your troops if you don’t know where they are or why they are there? 

Something not reported was that many of them are functionally illiterate.  A functional illiterate can read and write but with severe limitations.  They could perhaps read a menu (without the pictures found in fast food joints the purpose of which is a recognition of the extent of illiteracy); they could read the headlines of a newspaper but would struggle with the content.  If they get news at all it is from television and even then they are lucky to fully comprehend the story as their vocabularies are woefully inadequate. 

Are teachers to blame?  They are certainly the easiest target.  They stand on the front lines in the classroom day after day.  Surely they are aware that what passes for education today is a hollow shell.   The problem is that people outside the education system can’t see the forest of bureaucrats hacking away gleefully on the ability of the trees to teach.  Teachers have marginally more say as to what goes on in the education system than the school janitor.  Decisions are made by bean counters and other bureaucratic nitwits shuffling papers in some climate controlled paradise.  They wouldn’t know what end of a white board marker to use let alone how to fire up the data video projector.  They love flow charts but anything with real people involved like a classroom, forget it.  Those bipedal chatterboxes in the hallways are clients or products to them not kids with a life that demands preparation.  The business mentality that has invaded our schools has created good cogs but poor humans. 

This is not the first study to raise an alarm that something horrible is happening in our society.  It will likely not be the last.  What I have yet to come to grips with is why we allow this to continue.  Maybe the reaction by students in one of my classes to the survey sheds some light.  They laughed.  They had been insulted and they thought it was funny.  They had been called immature and they accepted it. 

In a separate study this generation of high school graduates was found to be closer to their grandparents than their parents in attitudes and outlook.  Fresh-faced youths interviewed for the news report merrily expressed their optimism for the future.  The current recession/depression concerned them not at all; nor did the two foreign wars that are going badly for western powers.  They seemed oblivious in their certainty that life would unfold as it should.  But is this optimism or naiveté?  When I was their age I too was optimistic.  I believed that we could create a better, more just, and more humane society.  I believed the future could bring an end to unnecessary suffering and ease the pain of the rest.  And of course I believed that I would find love and adventure.  Optimism in youth should be a given.  I still strive for that better society.  Change is slow but it is measurable.

However, I knew the dangers presented by an illegal and unjust war in Southeast Asia.  I realized the fragility of life under the umbrella of nuclear weapons.  I watched the machinations of government destroy people’s lives without conscience and knew only herculean efforts would bring about meaningful change.  I was optimistic not that things were great but that things could change; that most people were basically good and if we banded together there was little we could not accomplish.  The key was being in as well as of my world.  My father always complained that I was an idealist but it was an idealism grounded in reality.  I am not saying that young people today should rent their clothes and wail at the fates all the time.  I don’t now and I didn’t then.  Rest and recreation, which I admit was sometimes chemically induced when I was their age, has always been important to me.  I am definitely a Type B personality.  But denying the obvious is not escapism it is just dumb.

This generation thinks everything is basically wonderful and Bill Gates will fix everything else.  That truly is a telling reminder of the 1950s.  In the Leave It To Beaver era housewives wore pearls to vacuum and were ditsy redheads whose antics would attract disapproving but loving smiles from their husbands.  The 1950s was the clean cut illusion of what life in North America was supposed to be.  Ike was in the White House and he would fix any problems that might arise.  There was a sense that the world had been settled with the defeat of Naziism.  There was a comfort and certainty about society.  But it bore little resemblance to the reality.  Many teens of the era, particularly those of interest to ‘popular’ researchers, knew nothing of the world outside their immaculate suburbs.  Blacks were smiling Rochesters singing and dancing, happy in their simple life.  Mom was always home to make a hot meal and gush over the latest kitchen marvel.  These young people had not yet learned of the horrors of life in the ghettos of the North or shantytowns of the deep South.  They had no idea that after they kissed mom goodbye in the morning she would turn to a bottle or pill to get through her day, both gleefully prescribed by a male dominated medical profession who thought the little filly was just suffering from a bout of female hysterics.  While conscientious studies chronicled the dark side of society, there was an entire industry within social science to prop up the illusion and a flickering television to inject the social sedative. 

How did we end up with a generation that knows little and worships the fatuous?  Shouldn’t we have seen this coming and done something about it?  For the past 30 or so years successive political leaders in Canada and the United States have been trying to fix the education system.  But wait a minute.  When did it break?  There is the key to the problem.  An Ontario education minister in the 1990s said everything we need to know about the problems we see with our youth today.  He brought his senior bureaucrats into a meeting and told them to create a crisis in education because he was going to fix it.  I will not hold it against this particular man that he himself did not finish high school.  After all neither did I.  I completed only grade 9 while he went on through grade 11.  The difference between us is I never stopped learning.  He did.  I quit high school for social reasons; he quit because he believed education was unnecessary.  Like many on the Right, he believed the sole purpose of education was to inculcate vocational skills to suit the current job market.  But there is more.  I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories but I do believe there can occur a confluence of interests.  As the franchise had been expanded in the 1960s and 1970s to include the previously disenfranchised groups, women and minorities but also the lower classes, life became more complicated for those who wielded the instruments of power in western society.  Democracy is a messy, chaotic, inefficient, and if you are a corporate capitalist inconvenient, method of governing a country.  More people in the mix just slows the process down further.  Knowledge is power and knowledge was increasing in groups who had been cheated by the status quo. 

You can’t just stop teaching in schools altogether so you need to make it appear as if everyone is getting an education

when they are not.  The solution arrived at was a return to the 3 Rs, Readin’, Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic.  I have always loved this little phrase about education because it is the mantra of morons.  At least people who can’t spell because only one of the words really begins with the letter R.  (For those educated in our current system the three words are actually Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.)  The fact that it usually comes from people on the political Right gives me added joy.  But what do you expect from a political movement that considers Ann Coulter a seminal thinker?  The 3 Rs is Right-wing code for let’s gut the content of education.  History, civics, geography, anything that expanded the human in our young people was brushed aside as a waste.  Critical thinking was replaced by rote learning.  No wonder students get bored at school.  How many times can you recite the times table or set formulas?  Add to this little mix forcing teachers to become boosters for the little cretins and voilà a generation that can be lied to and manipulated to support any atrocity, any blunder and George W. Bush for two terms.  Stupidity should be a choice not a given. 

Well the Right got what they wanted, a crisis.  And what might you ask about the children of the people who did this to education.  Don’t worry.  They are in private schools that still provide education.  Nice how everything works out for the best for those in charge.

The Summit of the Americas held in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago focused among other things on the exclusion of Cuba.  President Obama appears ready to engage Cuba but on what terms.  A return to pre-Castro Cuba is not an option, at least for the people of the island.  Fidel Castro was an icon of the 20th century.  His legacy will live on in Cuba for generations to come.  Some people hate him, some people love him.  Castro has done marvelous things for Cuba.  Did he make mistakes?  Yes, of course he did.  But the benefits to the island far outweigh any negative. 

It is true that elections as we know them have not been held in Cuba since Castro marched into Havana to seize power January 1, 1959.  Oh wait, elections hadn’t happened in Cuba for a long time prior to Castro occupying the presidential palace.  So maybe U. S. hatred of Cuba wasn’t about democratic ideals.  I know, it was about land reform.  How dare Castro distribute land legally owned by faceless American corporations to those greedy campesinos.  Or maybe it was the public education or health care that offended the moral sense of America.  Whatever it was, for the sake of the Cuban people, I sure hope the Americans don’t get their way and dismantle it. 

The Bad

I have always wondered what the Castro revolution might have looked like had it not faced the enmity of the world’s most powerful state since its infancy.  All states while under siege from a foreign power centralize authority and keep a fairly tight reign on political factions.  For example Canadians should read the War Measure Act.  To think that U. S. behaviour did not affect Cuba would be naive to the extreme.  With the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its patron and source of much of its foreign capital.  The island has been facing economic hardships since the 1990s, not because Castro’s economic policies were flawed, but because the United States won the Cold War. 

People will follow anyone who offers them bread.  Castro gave them bread but much more in the bargain.  While he was forced to keep tight political control he did not sink to using death squads as most American supported Latin American regimes have done.  Cuban jails hold political prisoners as does America’s today.  Just ask Leonard Peltier of the American Indian Movement.  Barak Obama has a chance here to show that he is truly a different kind of American politician.  Can he reach out America’s hand in friendship without clenching the fist and forcing a wad of America political culture back down the throat of Cubans.  A minor incident gives me some inkling of what is to come.  When questioned about a book he received as a gift from Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, Obama made a joke.  The book was a chronicle of the abuses of the South American continent by American and European powers.  I know that would leave me laughing in my

The Ugly

armchair.  (The book is The Open Veins of Latin America:  Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano) 

Our intrepid leader, Stephen Harper, in his usual right off the hay wagon style said that he supported warming up relations between Washington and Havana but reassured his supporters back home that he was still an anti-communist conservative.  I must have missed that class back at university.  The one where we studied pro-communist conservatives because I have never heard of them before.  It just shows that none of us are as smart as we think we are.

For the Cuban people, Fidel Castro passing from the political scene, should be and I suspect is for most, a moment of reflection.  Fidel’s health has been failing in recent years.  He has had to hand over political control to his brother Raul although I suspect he is no farther away from the levers of power than his health forces him.  Raul reminds me of those reasonable facsimiles one could send in instead of actual boxtops to receive a baking soda submarine.  He is just not the real thing.  Regardless it is not Raul that the Americans have to deal with, it is the legacy of a giant, Fidel Castro.

After renaming a highway and a full court press by high command and the government to label each and every fallen Canadian soldier in Afghanistan a hero, in the end the Canadian military has shown they are just another parcel to be delivered.  If it is more convenient or economic to jostle them to and fro for three hours to unload baggage and another 117 soldiers, so be it.  The body of Karine Blais was returned to Canada Thursday but was forced to make a stopover in Ottawa before being delivered to her final destination, CFB Trenton, Ontario (for my American readers, Trenton is Canada’s Dover).  Many are outraged at this turn of events.  Those of us who have had friends and relatives in the Canadian military just smile.  Getting a flight home was always a problem and the fear of getting bumped by some officer or his dog anywhere along the line a constant fear.  At least she wasn’t put on a baggage cart with other luggage to switch planes as one report suggests happened in Rochester, New York with a returning American coffin.   Of course they are not heroes in the United States.  America has far too many casualties to do the whole hero thing for every one. 

But only the Canadian army could screw up public relations to this level.  First there is the waste of taxpayer dollars to convince us that Afghanistan is a great and noble cause.  I guess this incident means that plan is history.   It gets worse.  This was a female soldier which adds to the public relations fiasco.   But wait there is more, she was French serving with the Royal 22nd (Van Doos).    I can’t wait to see reaction in the French sovereigntist press.  Who is in charge of propaganda at National Defence Headquarters, Gilligan?  In its imperious ineptitude, they have managed to offend just about every group one can think of.  I am surprised they didn’t wait until it was a Black French woman with autism to pull this boner.  I mean let’s piss everyone off at once and get it over with. 

Don’t forget taxpayers.  The part of this story that has raised no comment as yet that I can find is that the governor-general and minister of defense met the coffin at CFB Trenton.  Hold on.  Think about this.  The coffin was on the ground for three hours in Ottawa.  Ottawa is where the governor-general lives and the minister of defense works (and lives while he is working, if he works, I don’t know).  So, let me get this straight.  The minister and governor-general and the coffin all travelled at taxpayers expense to Trenton for what exactly, a photo-op?  Did they all travel together?  You can drive from Ottawa to Trenton in less than 3 hours maybe one of them could have made room in the back seat.  Why do they even have to be there?  Maybe the prime minister should be there too.  Hell bring the whole freaking parliament.  They love nothing better than a free trip.  Here’s a thought.  Take the coffin home, to the family.  Shouldn’t they be the priority not protocol?  Do we need an official “Death Camp”?

Military observers (cheerleaders) commented to news outlets that it was a minor controversy being blown out of proportion.  I tend to agree.  It was an insensitive decision but in overall terms the coverage in the mainstream press is probably causing more grief to the family than the incident itself.  Military observers are worried though about their little traditions and customs being broken such as failure to lower the flags while the plane was on the ground in Ottawa.  If it was me in the coffin they could shove the flag where the sun don’t shine for all I would care.  Actually when I die the flags over municipal buildings in my town will be lowered to half mast because I once served on city council.   Honestly, if they forget I couldn’t care less.  I would imagine the whole dead thing will be bothering me more at that moment. 

Where I differ from the hotties with the olive drab pompoms is, if you make out that she was a hero, you can’t say this is a minor controversy.  Heroes are a special category of people or sandwiches if you come from New York.  Therefore this would be by definition a serious controversy.  But she wasn’t a hero.  She was a young woman with her whole life before her who died under a foreign sky for geopolitical reasons she never fully understood.  This is a tragedy; not the fall of Agamemnon.  Calling her a hero implies her death was necessary; it served a greater good.  That may assuage the consciences of the political masters who threw her life on the dust heap of history.  But it will never fill the empty chair at family gatherings or give her parents grandchildren.  Maybe if Canadians would come to grips with that we might have fewer tragedies and the Canadian military would have fewer opportunities to trip over its own braid.

Poverty is not the cause of social turmoil as the common myth would lead us to believe.  Rather, disparity is the culprit.  People generally are accepting of poor circumstances as long as they feel the pain is felt universally.  When Marx and Engels talked about the withering away of the state this is what they had in mind.  In a society where wealth is concentrated in a few hands it is necessary to maintain a highly coercive state apparatus.  If however wealth and economic power is widely distributed very little coercion is necessary to maintain a calm and secure society. 

It is interesting to note in current times that those who most argue for a minimalist state are those who also argue for greater state coercive power.  The New Right does not want the state to be involved in our lives except to keep THOSE people under control and we all know who we are.  When they talk of a minimalist state they are referring to the Hobbesian Grand Watchman.  Government should keep us secure.  Good idea on the surface.  But justice would keep us even more secure without having heavily armed paramilitaries running our streets with guns and tasers (see past articles on RCMP love of tasers). 

The slogan so commonly chanted at rallies and marches, No Justice - No Peace, is not a threat but a statement of fact.  In an unjust society motivation to violence is never far away. Where justice prevails only those few who suffer from anti-social disorders would create a problem diminishing the need for state coercive power.  We could save young people entering the police force the psychological damage done them by a training regimen that makes them the social problem they are today.  Saving not only them but their families and friends as well.  Current police personnel could be put into rehabilitation facilities where mental health experts can attempt to salvage something human in them.  Okay.  Okay.  I digress.  My ranting aside my point remains valid.  Where people feel they are treated justly, they are less motivated to destabilize the society by violence. Less violence; less need for coercion.  Simple.

As factory workers and the service workers who rely on their commerce lose their homes, anger is bound to rise.  It is not that we think that everyone should be paid exactly the same or live exactly the same lifestyles.  Equality is not sameness.  But there should be some relationship between what someone can legitimately expect to receive from society and what they contribute to the society.  Here in Canada we have a game called hockey.  It is a fun game and I have fond memories of playing it myself in a vacant lot or on the roadway.  But today grown men are paid millions of dollars to chase a frozen rubber disc around an ice pad.  Is there any connection between contribution and recompense here?  America has its equivalent baseball and football.  Today, men (mostly anyway) are receiving multi-million dollar thank yous for driving companies into the ground.   Only bad management and arrogance can explain General Motors plunge from number one to bankruptcy in fifty years.  Especially since the number of cars sold today is exponentially higher than the number sold then.  Apparently they not only did not gain any of the increase but lost the customers they had.  Quality management there, eh?  With grown men playing for millions while children scavenge to survive; with incompetence rewarded by the very people it destroyed; how can anyone expect peace and calm? 

For a practical example of a peaceful yet poor society one only need look at the Tanzania of Julius Nyerere.  Nyerere retired from office and returned to live in the village in which he had been born.  There was no coup or assassination attempts.  Tanzania is a very poor country and Nyerere died as poor as any other citizen.  Justice works.  But in North America we see increasing calls for more police, tougher sentencing, greater restrictions of citizen rights.  The Patriot Act and the anti-terrorism laws in Canada are just the tip of the iceberg.  (One thing I will give Americans, they always have neat names for their laws ).  Terrorism is a convenient excuse to accelerate a process that has been going on for decades.  Particularly since the expansion of the franchise to all formerly discriminated groups, we have seen a steady gutting of the political sphere and an aggressive campaign for control by economic players.  Can’t have THOSE people thinking they can determine the course of their own lives.  If you go back and watch the scene in the film Remains of the Day where Anthony Hopkins character is being ridiculed by the participants of the pro-Nazi meeting you will witness an example of the attitudes of any of our current business leaders.  The very concept of democracy is ridiculed. 

And there is the problem.  Justice means sacrifice.  Justice requires honour and humanity.  Police are cheaper.  So lock your doors tonight but don’t feel all that secure.  Remember the words of Phil Ochs’ song ‘Outside a Small Circle of Friends:’

Living in the ghetto with the coloured and the poor

The rats have joined the babies who are living on the floor

Now wouldn’t it be a riot if they really blew their tops

But they got too much already and besides we got the cops

For now anyway, for now.

The G20 fiddled as London burned with passion.  People from all over descended on the city.  Once more unto the breach Shakespeare said and so they came.  CNN, that bastion of unbiased and insightful news, giggled at the foolish simpletons who clashed with police commenting that the protests would have no effect except perhaps on Gordon Brown, the host.  His public image moving forward in his career might be tarnished.  Oh how sad.  Well let the CNN info-tainers chuckle away.  The result is just to put these passionate people in some pretty fine company.  Thomas Payne, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King.  All of these icons of past days were laughed at, their ideas considered absurd.  Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win!”  So I guess those of us who believe there is something to shout to or at our leaders have reached the second stage.  We are making progress .   And from recent events stage three seems to be warming up in the bull pen. 

Inside the imps of imperialism plotted their next move.  With illusion worthy of the great Harry Houdini they declared they had pulled a diamond out of the dung.  With a trillion dollars to developing economies and a vague promise of greater regulation they announced that they would avert a depression.  Translation:  they can keep the system they so love, which benefits they and their friends greatly.  By so doing they also avert what might be the greatest political upheavals since the Great Depression and the revolutions of 1848.  At least they hope they will.  The trillion dollars is to be dispensed through the IMF and the other usual suspects.  It will come with a heavy dose of liberal laissez-faire political doctrine as is the wont of these agencies of the imperial powers.  These institutions all operate on weighted voting so that the major economic powers can control the show.  Bye-Bye any concept of justice.  States will be told to reduce spending in areas such as education, health care and social services.  These things are all under attack in our own societies so it is necessary to keep THOSE people even worse off. 

Outside people cried for real change.  Shouted to have their voices heard.  The were corraled into small areas by police, a procedure called kettling.  They were not allowed to leave the area.  Parents who had to pick up their children at school were refused.  And by extension, frightened children waited, many probably terrified when parents who were always on time were hours late.  But the British courts had approved the practice.  There were no washrooms.  People were forced to find privacy where they could.  Ostensibly this was done to prevent property damage.  After all property is far more important in our society than people.  But even this formal response to the media, when questioned, was a lie.  Each individual in each area had to submit to be photographed and give particulars before they could leave at end of day.  This violates British law but as we know in Canada the “Law” is above the law. 

So why go through this indignity.  Millions of others sat at home and did nothing, content that their leaders would look after them.  It is simple.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it in a song called Ohio, “How can you run when you know?”  The people in the streets of London knew and they could find their way there, their voices trumpeting the collapse of the walls of the Bank of England.  Others know and they write their politicians.  Others write letters to editors or blogs or let their friends know.  None of us can change the world by ourselves.  But if we all do our part.  Whatever it is.  The world will change and it must.

Photos retrieved from Guardian UK online (see link in sidebar under News).

Green.  The word of the 21st century.  Everybody has the Green solution to the end of the world.  Recycle your waste.  Switch to coily light bulbs that take a while to get bright when switched on (Kind of like me in the morning).  Buy a hybrid car (Need to find a new name.  This one brings up images of a Camry and Corvette doing nasty things in the dark nine months ago).  Use public transit.  The litany goes on and you are all as familiar with it as I am.  It is being preached from the steps of parliament and the South Lawn.  Children are indoctrinated with it in the class room.  Talking heads on television run off at the mouth like a soup sandwich about it (all organic vegetable of course).  And since it is preached, that bastion of preaching, the church, can’t be left out.  Yes it is being preached from the pulpit as well.  God has become Green.  Actually I could deal with him better as a mischievous leprechaun with a sick and twisted sense of humour. 

I confess the whole thing has me a bit confused.  Global warming is a crisis and we need to deal with it.  The problem I have is that I hear a lot of talk but don’t see much action.  At least I don’t see a lot of improvement.  Sympathetic magic is a concept used by modern witches.  The theory is based on Like produces Like.  Well this looks like the environmental plan decided on by our social and political leaders.  If we talk about it long enough and wish for it hard enough then maybe the fairies of fate will grant our wish.  I can see the coven meetings in Ottawa now with Stephen Harper as High Priest complete with stag horns with John Baird his faithful familiar. 

The other problem is that each solution is being pitched as THE solution.  Whether it is the demon spawn of macho muscle cars with the little veggie car that could or a new coloured box weekly set out at the curb, do this and all will be well is the pitch.  Reality dictates that none of these really is THE answer and ALL of these are the answers.  We must comprehensively change the way we live and the way our societies are structured.  That is something none of our leaders want to talk about. 

Recycling helps and it is a good thing to do.  It is starting now to expand but more has to be done and fast.  One of the saddest facts of the recycling program is that most of our recyclables end up in landfill anyway, just not our local landfill.  Out of sight, out of mind.  (I believe most of my recyclables are land-filled around Hamilton, Ontario which should annoy some of my colleagues )That’s not going to get us anywhere.  There is not yet a strong enough market for the materials.  The way to change this is to not offer a choice between products from recycled materials and new materials.  If it can be made from recycled material, it MUST be made of recycled material.  If we want to be serious about this process that must be our mantra. 

The new energy efficient light bulbs being championed by David Suzuki solve one problem but create another.  No plan to dispose of the mercury contained in them is presented along with the songs of praise.  We cannot afford solutions that create problems elsewhere.  The global biosphere is an wholistic system.  The goal is to save it, not sweep the problems under a different leaf.  Suzuki and other proponents of these bulbs make two arguments in their defense.  Their long life means that the mercury is contained for perhaps a decade or more, there will be fewer light bulbs land-filled and therefore the impact will be minimal.  I forget.  How many billions in a minimal?  Their lifespan is impressive providing nothing goes wrong.  No incompetent handyman clips one with a ladder.  No child disobeys a parent and plays ball in the house.  No roof leaks.  You get the picture.  The second argument is that the amount of mercury is minimal.  (See my previous question concerning minimal)  We are told the mercury content is no more than that found in a watch battery.  That really isn’t very much but I have only owned about a dozen watches through my life.  Disregarding the ones that I had to wind that leaves three.  I am currently wearing one and the other two, sentimental mementos of times gone by, are resting sans batteries in my jewelry box to be taken out only in those private moments of tears and scotch.  I have only ever replaced the battery in one of them.  But light bulbs?  I got light bulbs coming out the ying yang.  I counted 35 in my little semi-detached.  Multiply that over the billion or so people in the industrialized first world and we are talking impact.  The other problem I have with Suzuki’s argument here is that it is dismissive.  He doesn’t argue that it is not a problem but that we shouldn’t worry about it.  That is straight from the playbook of the idiots that got us all into this mess in the first place so excuse me if I am not real receptive to it. 

As for the demon spawn mentioned above, hybrid cars, they show minimal carbon saving once all factors including manufacturing are considered.  Transportation is the toughest environmental nut to crack.  No one wants to give up their car.  Actually I do.  I can’t wait until I retire and go back to a car-less life.  Right now I would get rid of my vehicle if there were a viable public transportation option.  Currently we are spending billions, maybe trillions, of tax dollars to bail out an industry that must disappear if we want to spare this planet the horrors of an environmental holocaust.  The only answer is the disappearance of the private automobile.  Remove one or two lanes from the current multi-lane highways and dedicate them to public buses.  Move the terminals to major highway interchanges with local systems feeding them and voila public transit is faster and more convenient than private vehicles.  Eighty percent of the automobile traffic currently on the roads must be gone withing twenty years.  Let’s get over it and move on.  While there will be a transition of jobs with the change over, there need not be any net loss of jobs.  The naysayers seem to believe that if we eliminate the private automobile that the world will come to a stop as the people of this planet fall into a stunned silence, immobile for the rest of eternity. 

David Suzuki and others are supporting the creation of a carbon tax as a means to really get serious about the environment.  It does hold promise to reduce carbon emissions.  A carbon tax is a means of rationing by price.  That has been done successfully before .  However, in every case it has meant and will again this time that those at the bottom will shoulder the burden of lifting the world out of the crisis while those on top sail through their privileged lives with barely any inconvenience.  Heaven forbid that the people David socializes with, or he himself, pitch in.  Case in point, Suzuki was in the news this morning as part of a convention on Global Warming and winter sport I believe.  It really doesn’t  matter what the conference was about, it is the conference itself that was the problem.  Participants travelled many miles, most in airplanes to get to it.  Why?  Why couldn’t it have been done virtually given our current communications capabilities?  This would have made a gigantic carbon saving but Suzuki wouldn’t have the pleasure of staying at a luxury hotel and hobnobbing with his pals.  Before you start putting more pressure on the working class and those on fixed income to fight the good fight one more time, you should maybe enlist yourself and spend a little time at the front.

A better answer would be direct carbon rationing as suggested in George Monbiot’s book Heat(click on page on sidebar to see review).  Decide up front exactly how much carbon we can afford to expend each year and divide it up equally.  If I don’t use all of mine because I am careful and conserve I can sell the left over credit to some wasteful slob with money.  And trust me he will pay dear if he wants it.  (Actually let me thank George Monbiot for the alternative solutions he presented in his book which I have borrowed here.)  Publicly controlled rationing has also been done successfully in the past and it is fair and democratic.  But then I keep forgetting, most people don’t really believe in democracy, apparently including David Suzuki, the Verdant Prince.

There is no god.  That must be clearly understood or nothing wonderful will happen from what I am about to tell you.  For those who don’t recognize it that is a paraphrase of the opening sentence to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  I thought it would be a fitting start to my discussion of religion and politics.  Most of us deep down know that statement is true no matter how much lip service we devote to the contrary.   I have several friends who are religious and I still like them in spite of that.  So this is not a personal attack on individuals.  My friends are simply being duped partly by their own needs and mostly by a multi-billion dollar industry that invades every corner of the earth.   And worse still believes it has an inherent right to invade every part of our personal and political lives. 

Most of us were raised to be tolerant of people’s beliefs.  But is there no limit to tolerance?  In one of the books I reviewed on this site, American Fascists, Chris Hedges asks the question, ‘In a tolerant society do we tolerate intolerance?’  Most religious institutions are intolerant to a greater or lesser degree.  Perhaps we should be more clear.  I may be able to tolerate your intolerance if you keep it to yourself.  If it does not infringe on the lives of others then okay be as bigoted as you want to be.  Actually there is no way to stop someone from thinking intolerant thoughts anyway.  But we can, and should, stop the political menace of organized religion.  Believe in the Easter Bunny, believe in Santa Claus or believe in god but don’t translate that into the oppression of other people. 

Some people, I am sure are thinking that I am going overboard.  After all the church does a lot of good doesn’t it.  I don’t know.  Does it?  Ask the gay and lesbian community here whether they believe the church does them a lot of good.  Ask our aboriginal communities what they think of the church after the experience of residential schools.  Or ask the thousands of men and women who lost their innocence in a choir loft to a man of the cloth who told them it was what god wanted.  Maybe we should take off the blinders and lose the guilt trip and look at organized religion in the clear light of the facts. 

What has sent me off here is the recent announcement by the Pope, der Führer of the Roman Catholic Church, who has just enlightened the world that condoms do nothing to help the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  Christian Churches, particularly the mainstream Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, have been making great inroads into Africa.  Africa also happens to be where HIV/AIDS is most prevalent for a number of reasons.  These churches reinforce and promote social attitudes that contribute to this prevalence.  Lack of proper medical treatment, including the drugs necessary to keep patients alive, and lack of anything more than symbolic assistance from the wealthy industrialized world is doing enough damage on a continent struggling to overcome the legacies of colonialism and cold war.  We don’t need a bunch of holy rollers encouraging the disempowerment of women in the name of a Jewish revolutionary that DIED 2000 years ago.  As for the silly story of him coming back to life you can read a better version of it in Egyptian mythology, written another 2000 years before he supposedly showed up.  The resurrection story was common among early civilizations.  So pick your favourite but don’t use it to commit mass murder. 

The suffering caused by these institutions is in no way allayed by any positive contribution they make.  They give virtually nothing to society.  Any small assistance those in need receive is accompanied at the very least by a healthy dose of degradation.  Actually that is what the christian church is all about.  Everything human is evil and must be overcome.  We, each of us, individually are worthless.  Only by suppressing our humanity can we hope for salvation.  Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses.  It is kind of like life insurance, you have to die to win.  The more you suffer and endure during your lifetime, the more your reward in heaven is the pitch line.  You know that bit about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven.  But since there is no god there is no heaven and so I don’t think it is noble to suffer here while others enrich themselves.  Actually as I look at the suffering endured by so many people in this world, if there was a god I would personally kill the son of a bitch. 

“God being everything, the real world and man are nothing.  God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death.  God being master, man is the slave.  Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation.  ….. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church.  ……

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” 

Michael Bakunin from God and the State

It is time to throw off the shackles and break the political power of religion once and for all.  If we do not, millions will continue to suffer while the religious elite continue to sanctimoniously enrich themselves.  Church leaders should be imprisoned alongside the other drug dealers.  The menacing fairy tale these pushers peddle has claimed more lives than heroine, crack cocaine and all other narcotics combined.