Halloween

Friday Oct. 31, 2014

Halloween. 

I grew up in a large eastern city, in a working class neighbourhood where everyone lived in apartment blocks—some might have called them tenements—or fourplexes.  None of my friends lived in houses with lawns and garages and their own side walk.  The nearest park to my home was right blocks away, so we played in the lanes and on the grounds of the mental hospital at the end of the street.

We did this sans parents or babysitters or guardians.  By the time we were 6, the routine on Saturdays during the school year and every day in summers was to be out the front door by 9 and not return until lunch or dinner.  We played endless games of cowboys and Indians, and stando, and horse, all impromptu, all without adult supervision or intervention.  We entertained ourselves ourselves.  No one felt the need to organize our time or our activities, and no one worried about us coming to harm—beyond the odd skinned knee or chipped tooth.

On Halloween, from the age of 6, all the kids in the neighbourhood tricked and treated with their friends.  My memories of those times are filled with images of streets filled with children dancing around and singing or shouting, and consulting about which homes had the best treats.  Candy apples were especially coveted, and no one bothered to check them for razor blades.  And there were no adults.  Parents didn’t feel the need to hover over their children, and if the child was not old enough to go out alone, then an older brother or sister or cousin was recruited to let their younger sibling tag along on their candy search.

Amazingly, a similar scenario played out here in Midden Harbour tonight.  There were some parents out with their kids, but very few.  I find that strangely heartwarming; a confirmation of the value of small town life.  Places like this have retained so much of what we used to see as the hallmarks of our society.  We don’t have a Starbucks or an Apple store or a Montessori school, but we do have a community.

American Democracy

Thursday Oct. 30 2014

Move all done.  Took the whole of Tuesday to transport my stuff from the boat, and settle it and myself into the cabin.  Wednesday was spent draining, flushing and stowing, and otherwise winterizing the boat.  Felt too warm to be doing it, but better sweat than sleet.  Have tempted the weather gods a few times over the years, and inevitably they pull the old bait and switch—cloudless late fall warmth for gale driven icy rain.  The work still has to be done, only it has to be done with frozen hands in soaking clothes while storm swells make what should have been a few easy hours of pleasant tasks into a day or more of torture.

Enjoying my week off.  Only get a couple a year, my time to become vegetative.  Gives me time to peek over the coastal mountains for a glimpse of what the rest of the planet is doing.  One of these times I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but not this week.

With the American mid-term election less than a week away, it seems that democracy’s “Shining city on the hill” has become a ghetto.  With electoral districts gerrymandered to ensure maximum power for powerful groups by locking minorities into meandering patchworks of districts, there is no chance that the Democrats can retake the House of Representatives now or at any time in the future. 

Making matters worse is the campaign to change voter registration processes and the rules around advanced voting.  Without exception, the registration changes have made it more difficult to vote, particularly for the poor and the elderly, both Democratic constituencies.  The advance voting rule changes have also impacted these groups, but reducing voter access to alternative times and means for casting a ballot.  

And if all this wasn’t discouraging enough, there is the spectre of the Citizen’s United Supreme Court ruling that essentially opened the flood gates for special interest money—read “corporate”—to spend as much as they want to influence the outcomes of elections.  

Congratulations America!  At a time in human history when oligarchy, ideological, political and corporate, is making its boldest move since Mao and Stalin, you have managed to discredit the best hope we had against these powerful forces. 

There are times when I wish the mountains were higher.

Fall move

Cold tonight; time to move. Struggle with this decision every year; it’s my change of seasons.  When I pack up my stuff and move off the boat it means I’ve accepted that the summer is over.  Butkus doesn’t struggle at all.  When I show up at the cabin, with my life in the bed of the pickup, he’ll be sleeping on the porch.  But as soon as I open—nobody ‘locks’ in Midden Harbour—the door, he’ll be on his feet and inside inspecting each room for summer settlers like squirrels and rats.   He’ll wait until I light the wood stove before claiming his spot on the braided rug.

I’ll move tomorrow.  It’ll take the whole day to clear my gear off the boat and stow it in the cabin, but it’s a familiar process and in a way comforting. Wednesday will be a completely different kind of day.  One filled with wrenches and oil and drain plugs and water tight bags and coiling ropes and putting a coat of grease on all the external metal on the boat.  We don’t take boats out of the water for winter around here even though there’s piles of snow and weeks of sub zero weather and big wave storms.  You never know when we’ll get a week of sunshine and shirt sleeve temperatures in February.

Won’t be a Shoreline this week.  But everyone is expecting it.  They know that the seasonal ‘Move Week” happens twice a year, fall and spring, and there’s no time for writing or page layouts.  Next week’s edition will be that much bigger.

Geez, Butkus must have found a creature back there.  Better go see.

Terrorism by any other name

Sunday October 26 2014

Terrorism.  The word has taken on a new status since 911, coming to mean acts of violence against targets in the Western world.  But not all acts of violence, just those committed by individuals or groups claiming to be Muslim.

To illustrate the distinction: 
Killing a soldier standing on guard at Canada’s National War Memorial is terrorism.
Killing three high students in a high school cafeteria is not terrorism.

And the distinction is significant.  No one seems to object to spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to fight terrorism, yet there would be an outcry and heated public debate if anyone proposed spending that kind of money on school safety. 

There is another important thing to know about terrorism: 
It can never be committed by us.  When we undertake actions designed to protect our way of life against threat, these acts are described as defence, as in “We need to defend ourselves now before evidence of the threat shows up in the form of a mushroom cloud.”  This argument gives  permission to bomb large urban areas, inevitably killing thousands of innocent children and women, and to celebrate the act with large public and media displays.
Terrorism is always committed by others.  They can’t fool us by claiming to use violence as a means of protecting their way of life. They are terrorists.  If they kill one individual in a barbaric manner and post a grainy video online, they are portrayed as beasts without conscience. 

The lesson here is that terrorism is not simply an act, it is an act committed by someone else against us.

And on a similar note, news outlets are reporting today that ISIL captives are being tortured, that they are being waterboarded.  Can these be the same newsrooms which most loudly rejected the ‘torture’ label when the same tactic was used in Guantanamo?  

Killing innocents or torturing human beings is wrong, no matter the excuse.  If you condone the deed, you own the consequences.