What the Hell is Gay?

 Don’t get me wrong. I am a man who is proud to be gay, but I am sometimes confused about what exactly that is. Gays are a minority as they make up only about ten percent of the population.  If being gay didn't bring with it serious consequences, it would be no different from having green eyes or being left-handed.  People have an instinctive fear of the unknown, so ethnic minorities suffer racial slurs because it is impossible, nor would they want to, hide what they are. The mothers or fathers of these minorities might give them tips on how to survive in an alien culture, but unlike gays, these children never have to hide from their parents the reasons they struggle to fit in.    

It’s entirely appropriate that the rainbow flag has become a rallying symbol for LGBTQ people because there are so many hues of sexual preference that only a rainbow having a psychedelic dream could represent them. There isn't enough space here to unravel all of the colours so I will stick to what I know and explore the gay male part of the spectrum.

There has been a sea change in gay male behaviour in the new century.   When the sexual liberation of the 1960's bloomed, many men understood that along with women, they had the right to love whoever they wanted, and that society's backlash against this was outdated and prejudicial. Through the last decades of the twentieth century, being gay went from something secret and scandalous to showing itself off in gay pride marches.  As unabashed gay life opened up, men were surprised to discover how many others there were like them.  In the gay community they found that heir preferences were not a sin or something they should be ashamed of.  The more men who came out of the closet, the more they were accepted by the straight population.  Everybody knew somebody, or had a relative or a friend who was gay. 

This acceptance caused a sexual shift in the next generation.  Children grew up with the knowlege that it was okay to be gay.  If men wanted to colour their hair, wear nail polish, or call their friends bitches, it was nobody's business but theirs.  Along with this openness, the cultural arbiters and opinion makers honed in on certain aspects of gay culture they found worth exploiting.  What could be funnier than watching a man in a wig tottering around on unaccustomed high heels?  The problem with this stereotype, is that people come to believe that the comic character with a feather boa and wig, is what being gay is all about. They assume every gay man wishes to be a woman so they make them into figures of fun since everyone knows that the clown in the high heels will come to a bad end.  This misinformation has led many young men who suspected they were gay, to commit suicide.  They didn't behave like the mincing stereotype and had no desire to wear women's clothes.  Their sexual preference for men would make marriage to a woman dishonest and harmful.  There would be no children.  What they imagined their future would be, had been extinguished.  Some found no way out of this impossible situation except death. 

Rather than cry about tragic statistics, I believe that those who peddle ideas to media conglomerates, should get off the gravy train of humourous tropes and portray gay men and women as they really are. There have been attempts, but television still desperately milks the comic vein.  The connected world we inhabit today is made up of many people who don't fit the family mode of two parents of the opposite sex, with two children, living in a home in the suburbs. Fewer people than ever fit the example of what is considered the default. It is possible, if all the non-traditional family units, including single people were counted, they might outnumber the traditional ones. Roles have changed. People's lives have changed.  They no longer feel stigmatized for living by their own lights, for finding a way to survive and thrive that works for them in today's world.  As the expression goes, "I'll do me."

Gay couples are a part of the landscape because humans have a natural instinct to be partnered, though many gays prefer to stay single given the strictures of traditional fidelity.  People who are not gay don't realize that for a gay man to work in an office of only men, is like a straight man working in a office of only women. The sexual tension and temptation are difficult to deny.  Although it is not the same for all gay men, most of their interest in other men is sexual, some of which involves penetration.  This is not something straight couples ever have to consider.  Because of this, there are categories gay men have organized themselves into, that a straight man would never think about.  There is a minefield of sexual preferences to sort out at first contact.   If either party in this complex mating ritual draws a line and says "I won't do that," the connection can fail completely or the two might settle into being just friends, and in some cases, friends with benefits.  .  

There are tops. There are bottoms.  Some men are 100% tops and some are 100% bottoms.  There are tops who sometimes bottom and bottoms who sometimes top.  There are power bottoms who take control of penetration and power tops who are sexually aggressive and long lasting. There are transvestites, drag queens, and transgender individuals. There are men who behave like drag queens but don’t dress up in women’s clothes.  There are men who are gay but prefer an ultra-masculine look with facial hair instead of a smooth face, but who give themselves away as soon as they speak.  There are men who are gay but show no evidence of it in either speech, dress, or manners. There are men who will only have sex with another man if there is an emotional connection, and there are men who will have sex with anyone and anything.  There are daddies and sons, bears and cubs, masters and slaves, leather men and sissies. Although the gay community has always celebrated diversity, the general trend seems to be toward the asexual, neutral, and celibate.  It could be that this trend was the result AIDS and other STD's, causing some young men to judge it too risky to engage physically.  It was safer to connect online.  Apart from a strong eeewww factor in a snowflake generation who have never known the blood and guts of life, there is also an economic consideration for young people.  Setting up on their own when they have no experience cooking a meal or paying a bill, is daunting for them, and having children would be unthinkable when they are still children themselves.  A few generations of this cultural shift away from breeding, might get the world's spiralling population under control.   

Most scientists accept that homosexuality is caused by a combination of genetics, hormones, and some post-natal influences.  The genetic element is passed through the mother's side, and the hormonal influences take place in the womb.  Although the cake is baked by the time the child is born, there are some after birth factors such as permissiveness which can determine whether children grow into or away from their tendencies. 

The public aren't generally aware of all the conditions a child can be born with.  There are common problems that can be fixed with surgery like a cleft palate or a clubfoot, but there are others that involve organs not being fully connected, partially missing, or in the wrong place.  I once wrote a novel that had an hermaphrodite as the main character, and learned in my research that although the majority of people are born with the standard X and Y chromosomes in combination, XX for female and XY for male, there are also those who are born with XXY chromosomes, or XXXY.  Some of these combinations cause conditions that result in babies being mis-gendered by doctors, and some are said to cause psychological problems. 

Although medical science continues to study the causes of homosexuality, there is reason to worry about how the knowledge could be used.  Once a condition is fully understood, there are questions around whether its course should be altered.  Treatments might be developed to prevent serious diseases by tampering with an embryo's genetics, and before long the techniques might be applied to eye colour or other physical traits. At that point, how long would it take before there are similar alterations to eliminate homosexuality? It would be unethical to do this but the worst among us have been known to behave in unethical ways.  Given the uptick in singles and childless gay couples, scientific fixes for homosexuality are not only unethical and counterproductive.  Whatever it means to be gay, which is different for every man and woman, it would be a crime to rob humanity of the kaleidoscopic manifestations of the third sex. 

Book Burning

I admit to the cultural sin of burning books.  It was a long time ago, and I did it to liberate myself from the opinions of others.  At the time, my Marxist wife and I, always on the hunt for a better house with cheaper rent, had just moved for the 4th time in 2 years.  We had enlisted my family to help us move, but after carrying box after box after box of books into our new place, they suggested the next time around they would pool their resources and hire a moving company.  As we settled in for winter, we started using the fireplace in the big living room to reduce our heating bills.  One night we found ourselves in a discussion about excess baggage in our lives, both emotional and physical.  In my head I heard the words of her ex-boyfriend, a golden-haired hippie who often repeated Occam’s Razor like a mantra, that we shouldn't “complicate entities beyond necessity”.  Since my own mother was a person who hated clutter, and would throw something away as soon as look at it, my preference for travelling light came with my genes.  My wife was an army brat  who was used to moving, and unlike her parents, didn’t want the accouterments of bourgeois life.  She had saved no furniture from her turbulent life before we met, but in the ten years since she had earned her degree, she had hung onto her boxes of textbooks like they made her education legitimate.  She had paid good money for them. 

We started with these.  There was no second-hand bookstore that would accept the superseded textbooks except to be recycled for pulping, so they were the first to be consigned to the flames.  To be clear, it is difficult to start a fire with only books. One page at a time will burn, but tearing and scrunching up every page of a Bible-like tome would take an eternity, and we had boxes of the stuff to get rid of.  A crackling fire of Douglas fir split-logs was set roaring in the fireplace before the books went in, but the books could only be fed in one at a time, like spooning out food to a hungry baby.  Dumping a boxload of them onto the flames would have smothered the conflagration like a fire-blanket. 

The books we decided to burn were mostly works of criticism.  There was literary criticism, criticism of economic theories, social deconstructions, and cultural mis-readings.  The red line on which works had merit, vacillated when it came to choosing Ruskin’s writing on Venetian architecture or Sartre’s Saint Genet.  What was derivative and what was original?  It was just as well we weren’t burning the texts for heat because books don’t burn easily.  The title of Bradbury’s dystopian Fahrenheit 451 made it obvious why.  To stay alight, the books had to be poked open and flipped over like steaks on a grille.  Sometimes more firewood had to be piled on top to consume the resistant spines as if they were the heaviest bones of a cremated animal.  The next day there were a few fragments in the ash, puzzle-pieces of crumbling papyrus.  It was a liberating experience for both of us, who as educated people, had done what we were always taught was taboo.  We agreed that critiques of critiques add nothing new to the world and do nothing to solve real problems.  Tears would not be shed by anyone if the second-hand opinions were consigned to the flames.  In practical terms, we lightened our load for the next time we moved.

Since they were first published, books have always been under threat because they are vessels for ideas.  Every book contains its share of genies trying to emerge, but physical copies of books can be heavy and take up space.  These days, continents of ideas and images are accessible on the screens of mobile phones everywhere.  Who needs printed books?  Aficionados appreciate the feel and scent of a book, the handy shape of it, and the possible journey that it made land in their hands.  To them, books are treasures worth keeping. 

Bookworms aside, booksellers have had a difficult time in the digital age.  Some are still breathing, but they risk following video rental stores down the road of comedian’s jokes and closed up shop-fronts.  LP vinyl records have made a small comeback to satisfy devoted fans but vinyl will never return to the universality it once had as a vehicle for affordable musical propaganda.  Physical copies of books may soon follow the same path and what we once thought was commonplace, will exist no more.  Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and CD’s, with their history of decline and disuse, will puzzle those who see them in technology museums.  Our ancestors probably predicted the demise of the book when paperbacks came along, but the opposite happened.  Because they were cheap and accessible, paperbacks were a publishing boom, but in this technological age, the content of a book, many books, can be stored on something the size of a fingernail. Traditional publishers are in trouble and have become nothing more than advertising agencies. Giant publishers swallow the small players, and now market a four format model, with hardcovers, paperbacks, audio books, and digital files.  Digital books will make hard copy volumes into curiosities for the type of collector who also likes the needle in the groove.

Assuming our way into the future, we could see all works of art being visible digitally and not available in any other form.  There may be a physical object somewhere, like the neatly illustrated manuscript of Alice in Wonderland in the British Library, but physical copies of it will not be extant. Libraries will not have a reason to exist except as digital hubs.  Global warming may incinerate most of the trees and there will be a paper shortage. The bundles of newspaper and cardboard boxes we threw away in our lifetimes will come back to haunt us.  Examples of the visual arts like Van Gogh, will be hidden in bomb-proof bunkers in Amsterdam, though images of the paintings will be widely viewable. 

Into this digital paradise may come a massive solar storm or a virus that consumes content as fast as it is uploaded.  If this happens there will be little evidence of what came before, no YouTube videos to explain how to change a bicycle tire or to explain the causes and context of the last great war.  

Mankind is notoriously bad at learning from history.   People don’t like to dwell on the past because the present is enough of a struggle/  When a war finishes it doesn’t last long as a topic of conversation. However, if our eggs of knowledge are all contained in one digital basket, there will be nothing left if some unknown force blows a hole in said basket. 

It could be argued that keeping original works of art or literature on such unstable materials as paper or canvas, also puts them at risk of being burned up in an old-fashioned fire. But if the New York Public Library goes up in smoke and Marx’s original notes for Das Kapital are destroyed, there are printed copies all over the globe that can pass on revolutionary ideas to any future generation who might be interested.  If digital storage goes blank, and we have disposed of all books as inconvenient encumbrances, there will be no works of long dead philosophers or artists to inspire future generations.  They will have to reinvent the wheel.

            In the late 1990’s the term burning was used for the technique of transferring information onto a CD.  Whether it was a CD or a cassette tape, all of the methods used for storing information were unstable.  When floppy discs first came out they were touted as the digital storage solution for all time.  Fifty years later I still hold onto a few floppies because my computer can’t read the information on them.  In the meantime, we have gone through cassette tapes, CD’s, iPods, USB sticks, and cloud storage. The methods change as quickly as engineers can invent them, but they are all at risk from major magnetic events.

     There have been times in history where books have been burned to stamp out what the state considered dangerous knowledge.  Arts and sciences may have been set back by these events because in the times when such autocratic ceremonies were carried out, the items burned may have been one of a kind. The library of Alexandria went up in smoke.  By the time the Nazis got to book burning, they could empty the libraries and bookshops, but there were already enough printed copies in other places that it was a foolish idea to think they could stamp out ideas they didn’t agree with. But book burning has a wider objective than just the destruction of paper.  It is carried out to cause fear in anyone who has knowledge of the content of the banned and burned books.   Those who have this knowledge are unwilling to come forward, because revealing information that is awkward for a strong-arm regime, can have catastrophic health outcomes for the whislte-blower.      

Another sort of book burning is still taking place in an ideologically divided America.  While nobody could resist the backlash of an outright book burning, books are being removed from schools and libraries if they are deemed contrary to Christian values, which for the conservative bodies who decide, include mention of gay and transgender people.  We had finally arrived at a place where kids were comfortable admitting they had two moms or two dads, but the holier-than-thou fascists have snatched that acceptance away from them.   Schools and libraries are not burning books in the street because there are more discreet ways of making them disappear. No actual flames are involved but the effect is the same.  It becomes taboo again to stray outside fixed gender stereotypes, a moral stance that does enormous harm to young people.  Many teens who commit suicide do so because they suspect they are gay and don’t want to be.  When truthful information about being gay, trans, or any other way, is not available to them, they lack the knowledge to make rational decisions, and tragedy is the result. 

Before the technology of the new millennium, there was a British royal scandal that the press agreed not to publish, but fax machines had become ubiquitous in offices, so copies of the French press were easily faxed to offices across the channel.  It became all but impossible to suppress news. Various dictator’s have tried to limit access to the web, but there are always ways for information to leak through. These days everyone has a camera phone and there are worldwide social platforms, so it’s difficult to keep information secret.   Images can find their way onto whatever platforms remain in a restricted country, and even if they are taken down within hours, they are first seen and passed on by sympathetic viewers.

There is danger in the widespread broadcasting of details of unremarkable lives.  We drown in a sea of irrelevant information about what the influencer had for breakfast, what they wore that day, and what streets they walked down.  It is like watching a work colleague's holiday photos.  It has minimal entertainment value and shoulders aside perspective and context.  “This is me on vacation” doesn’t have much to do with the location travelled to, except for how the weather treated the content creator.  The average social media influencer probably doesn’t know who Karl Marx was or the effect of his writings. They probably don’t know what dial telephones were or how music came out of a cassette tape.  If we pull the plug on the digital generation, not only do we take away their daily addiction to candy, but leave them with no framework that will help them get their feet back on the ground.  The maps that could tell them which way to go will have evaporated in the solar storm and paper maps will be out of print. 

Forced to be ever more mobile for work, citizens will have discarded their heavy loads of books and other weighty knowledge containers, so if the digital world is erased, records of what existed before will be wiped clean. Those who still have memories will tell tales to their children about transcendent paintings, inspiring sculptures, and magic books that opened portals in the human brain.  Luckily a grandmother or two will still remember what foods to harvest and how to make bread, but the few minds that remember there was a theory of relativity or a theory of surplus value based on labour, will have to wrack their old brains to remember what it was about.   Those who have become media dependent will be inconsolable.  Their lives will hardly be worth living. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, so after the deluge, a figure may come along to fill the blank minds with twisted ideological claptrap, and the empty headed sheep will be happy to follow.  This time there will be no books left to burn, but like Hitler’s Germany or Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, the hunted will be the passers-on of ideas that are contrary to the new regime’s plans.  Orwell warned us that when nobody remembers history, the propaganda machine can make wrong out of right and vice versa.  Like dogs, humans can be trained to hate and kill each other.  It has happened before, and given the spiral form of the galaxy that rules everything, it will come round again.  

 

The Tangled Threads Of Colonialism

 Public sculpture is one way a society says, “This is who we are.”   Statues of faded past heroes are out in the open for anyone to take potshots at, and the shots are usually deserved.  Sometimes it is a relief to see a statue’s day of reckoning comes earlier than its exhibition. The City of Edmonton recently decided not to place the two sculptures they had commissioned for each end of the Walterdale Bridge because after they were finished and ready to be mounted, someone had second thoughts and canceled the project.  One half of the work was a simple buffalo standing on a rock, an expressionless lump that could have been laser-printed using a child’s toy as a model. The other half of the work was a fur trader sitting on a small mountain of buffalo hides.  What is surprising is not the cancellation, but that the design was approved in the first place.  The artist chosen was a Chinese Canadian American, a representative of a people the Indigenous tribes considered unwelcome interlopers who had claimed everything except the air for themselves, and pushed the buffalo to extinction, a disaster for those who relied on the animal for survival.  The sculptor was aware he was recreating an image from time when the buffalo were on the urge of extinction, but how he thought anyone would enjoy a public exhibit of a massacre is beyond belief.  He claimed that by putting the buffalo on one side of the river and the hunter on the other, that it would illustrate the gulf between the two sides. Though the fur trader is sitting on a lump that raises him to the same height as the buffalo, that almost featureless hillock should have been rendered in colour so we see it for what it is, a heap of fur, blood, and gore. Apparently the artist wanted to demonstrate that man-made disasters like the near-extinction of the buffalo and other acts of colonial vandalism are not confined to the past.   The fact that these sculptures are for a bridge and not a museum of shame, compounds the planner’s deafness.  People don’t wish to be reminded of tragedies on their way to work every day.  If they want their hearts broken they can visit a military cemetery.  The artist’s original theory about colonialism being alive and well, was substantiated when at the same time the Edmonton officials cancelled the buffalo sculpture, the mayor of Calgary approved a statue of Winston Churchill.

Perhaps these figurative sculptors imagine that their work will go down in history as new Michelangelo’s.  Michelangelo lived 500 years ago and though his work is sublime, public art has moved on from the literal to the abstract, though for the initiated even the most detailed figurative work can be loaded with symbols and ideas.  It's a direct line from Michelangelo to Anish Kapoor, whose public works can be appreciated at face value without having to work for their meaning, but what message, either subliminal or literal, does a man sitting on a pile of dead animals convey?  If the sculptor wanted to express the tragedy better he could have stood a European entrepreneur holding hands with the Prime Minister at the time, standing on a pile of aboriginal skulls.   The artist’s intention was admirable but the expression of it is unworthy and offensive.  It’s just as well the project was cancelled because it would have been rapidly defaced and the trader pulled down from his stinking prize.

Sculpture is not only a European habit.   There are carved stone reliefs from Mayan Central America to Angkor Wat.  Like Northwest totem poles, they have been created to commemorate ancestry, history, people, or events.  A spirit of a bird by a Haida sculptor is still recognizable as a bird to a Nigerian, though it wouldn’t be one he knows.  A piece of sculpture is relevant to the place it was meant to be exhibited, but in its specificity, it should also have an element of universality.  In western societies we erect up statues of those we think are deserving of honour, but as any human knows, things change.  Individuals who were once celebrated by certain segments of a population, are found later to have no right to be on a pedestal.  Whether this is for past crimes or because the culture has moved on and has deemed certain deeds to be criminal.  Regimes come and go. Whenever statues have been accessible to the public they have had their noses broken or their eyes gouged out.  The damage is done by warring elements in a society or by invaders who wish to not only occupy the lands of the losing side, but to obliterate the old culture by breaking its icons and planting their flags on the new territory.  Christians knew what they were doing when they built churches on the sites of ancient temples. Whether it is zealots like the Taliban blowing up Buddha statues in Afghanistan, or Christians chiselling crosses into the marble foreheads of Greek statues, there is a long tradition of cultural vandalism.  

The colonization of North and South America, Africa, as well as the Near and Far East began when man learned how to navigate the oceans.  There had already been similar invasions and assimilations, biblical conflicts, the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Norman invasion of England, countless religious wars,  and royal wars of succession.   In many of these conquered territories, the local people were no more than slaves in their own land, oppressed not only by having their freedom of movement limited, but by the psychological trauma of having their cultural touchstones smashed to pieces. These pre-colonial patterns of conquest were the blueprint for the occupation of worlds that were once unknown to Europeans.  To aboriginal societies, the strange men who showed up on beaches, would have been like visitors from another planet, but it wouldn’t take long for them to understand how little power they had against the invader’s weapons and diseases.

There is a mural near my home that shows Queen Victoria on a bicycle with a Canada goose riding in her basket.  The artwork resisted graffiti a while, but when it crept in, it was all directed to the face of Queen Victoria.  The artist has now repaired it by painting an octopus stuck to the queen’s face so she can’t see where she is going.  So far the mural is unblemished.

Statues erected by conquerors are always at risk of being overthrown.  Shelly’s Ozymandias must have secretly known that his mighty image would eventually be toppled and swallowed by sand.  Statues are transitory things, loved by one faction, hated by another, but because they are exhibited in public places they are the easiest targets.

People are more gentle with some public art, perhaps because there is a proliferation of gigantic hands, ears, or noses, and fewer phallic towers emerging from the pavement, so they are less political and less likely to be vandalized.  A clever trick of some of Anish Kapoor’s popular sculptures is that they are reflective, so doing damage to them is like doing damage to oneself.  Since the observer sees a reflection of his society with him in it, the message is less polarizing, as if to say “Here you are,” an idea that doesn’t take a stand one way or the other.

Public art may be the visible face of a culture, but there are more insidious ways of colonization, like the devastating practice of rape as a weapon.  This is not a new phenomenon, and though it is a reprehensible thing, it only affects a portion of the population, but for them it is a lifetime of inner torment.  The more effective way to wound a culture's heart is through its language.  Besides physical repression, it has always been in a conqueror's interest to suppress the defeated side’s dialect and promote his own.  When I spent time on the Greek island of Rhodes I learned that when the Italians took the island from the Turks in the 1930’s, schools were required to conduct lessons only in Italian.  Priests and parents had to teach Greek to children in secret.  This happened less than a century ago when Germans, Italians, French, and Dutch were expanding their empires in an attempt to replicate the centuries-old British and Spanish occupations that had stretched around the globe. 

No matter what the century, none of these invasions were justified.  They were planned and financed for economic gain with the sponsoring countries expecting to put their foot on new territories with exploitable resources, and declare it belonged to them, or their king or queen.   Any indigenous societies that existed at the time of the invasion were nuisances to be overcome, like swamps or black-flies.

Although we think of colonialism as a thing of the past, there are still powerful nations like Russia and China, who believe that putting a soldier’s foot on a people’s neck and occupying their land, is a valid way to conquer.  This way of gaining control began to fade when the United States came into existence.  Their foreign policy was to play the anti-communist policeman in many international conflicts and to topple figures they saw as dictators, but they never occupied anyone’s land beyond their borders.  They did not try to seize Canada or Mexico.  Alaska was acquired as a business purchase.  Hawaii voted to become a state.  What the Americans have done, in an effort to expand their businesses worldwide, is to gain access to other cultures through television, computers, and mobile phones.   Those who protest about American hegemony are probably making their ideas heard on iPhones.   Any nation’s attempts to limit internet access and content, are as unsuccessful as trying to catch lighting with bare hands.  Even the lowly fax machine has been used in censorship busting.  When UK newspapers were requested to suppress royal scandals in the 1980’s, faxed articles sent from other countries were available to anyone who had a machine.  The news was out no matter what the powers-that-be wanted.  These days mobile phone footage documenting wars and invasions is available to anyone with the technology to watch it.

I have noticed in news reports of immigrants arriving in Italy from North Africa, that many of the young men who arrive have mobile phones.  Their phones may be all they possess except for the clothes on their backs, but phones are not just phones.  A refugee can send a message to his relatives to say he arrived alive and he can watch his own rescue from a sinking rubber boat on a television news report.  He can listen to whatever music he likes from anywhere in the world.  He can see how much things cost in Italy and what time the trains leave for Stuttgart.  This small handheld device, with its access to dissident voices in Russia, right wing politician’s threats to close borders, immigration rules, and job opportunities, is a powerful invention, with marketing ploys that encourage a kind of cultural colonialism.  This instant access to all information, is changing the rules of conflict and showing there is no need for physical invasion, the enemy is already in their midst.  

It is said that man’s time on earth started its countdown to extinction when agriculture was first practised.  Until then nomads had survived by moving with the seasons, but when men planted seeds near their doorsteps and they grew into food, they realized there was no longer a need to battle the beasts and other tribes to survive.  However, as his family grew and flourished they needed a greater food supply.  Outgrowing their traditional territories, they expanded onto other land which was often occupied by others.  Wars insured, tribes conquered other tribes, and soon they became nations.  We have now arrived at the point when there are so many people on the planet we struggle to feed them all.

Nomads were not without troubles and had battles with each other over hunting grounds, but overall they were stable societies who didn’t need to take over their neighbours' lands to feed themselves.  Each had his area, his customs, habits, and diet, and anyone who suggested stealing from another tribe was voted down by wiser minds. Although each tribe had its traditional hunting grounds, the land was not owned by anyone.  Land ownership was as strange a concept as ownership of the air.  It belonged to everyone.  Native people must have been surprised when they saw the new arrivals put fences around their land and say “This is mine.”  It was like saying, “Don’t breathe my air.”

Colonizing other people is not a practice of nomadic tribes but it is one in agricultural societies who require ever expanding resources to meet their needs.  I would argue that with the demise of manufacturing and lifetime jobs, we have become a new kind of nomadic people, moving to wherever the work is, becoming proprietors of ourselves, without an ancestral attachment to any one place that goes back further than our grandparents.  We are learning that when we encounter another culture we should let it be, appreciate it for what it is, and not impose our own suppositions and prejudices onto it.  We travel more lightly these days, in pressurized cabins with our ubiquitous cellphones.  I would hope this wide overview of the world, the sight of the earth from the moon, leaves us less inclined to leave public statues and images of ourselves, even ephemeral digital ones, for a conquered people to worship. They have their own icons that are more suited to them than ours.

Pushing over statues doesn’t erase the damage done by colonization because its nerve-threads run deeper than physical pain, but in a healthy organism, in the absence of further aggravation, wounds heal, and we learn to bow our heads as a sign of respect to the God in the other.  

 

Life As A Bug

A young woman stopped by my house just as the cat brought home a live mouse to play with.  My visitor commanded the cat to let the mouse go but the orders fell on deaf ears.  She chased the cat but it ran off with its catch to the far side of the courtyard. Flailing with a broom, she chased it until it slipped out of a gap in the wall, the mouse squeaking in the cat's mouth.  Half an hour later as my visitor was leaving, she stopped to admire a cactus flower.  As her nose honed in on the scent, she suddenly jerked her head back like she had been poked by a spine.  She pointed mutely to the flower as if it had bitten her, and we watched a black ant crawl out of the blossom.  She backed away from the pot, brushing down her blouse and stamping her feet because she had noticed a few ants around the bottom of the pot.  

“Eeew eeew get rid of them,” she shrieked.  

When I turned over a nearby boulder, she may have thought it was to smash the few ants we had seen, but under it, was a swarm of the panicked creatures running everywhere.

She began screaming, hyperventilating, and when she could, shouting,  “Kill them! Kill them!”

I washed away the ants with the garden hose but she was still shocked and jumpy and had given a wide berth to the scene of the outbreak.  Her world had been invaded by horrible beasts.  As she was leaving, I asked her, “Can you tell me the difference between an ant and a mouse?”  

“No. What?” she asked, like I had set her a child’s riddle. 

“To some people, cats are pests,” I said.  “To some cats, the big ones,  humans are pests. We all have a place on the food chain.”

“I don’t get it,” she said, edging out the door like I was about to ask her for a donation to the Flat Earth Society.

“Maybe you will one day,” I answered.  “When you grow up.”

She tossed her strawberry blonde head and I never saw her again.

 

Recently there has been cluster of reports on the news about random killings in various cities, street murders of unrelated individuals at the hands of men who are angry and fed up with life and everyone in it.  Parents of these unhinged young men are often the first ones in the line of fire because family members are easy to demonize.  If a man can kill those known to him, it is a short step to killing strangers.  The innocent victims are annoyances, worth no more than rats.  

By nature, men don’t lash out and kill other men, but if they feel threatened, they may turn their fears and prejudices into paper tigers, which they attach to their enemies so they seem less human.  A Ukrainian general recently said about the Russians, “We are at war with non-humans.  They are orcs.”  Soldiers understand the technique of dehumanization, but they learn to use this mind trick only in appropriate circumstances.  When a civilian with a pre-existing mental imbalance begins to see other humans as less than him, he lashes out.  He might target property at first, but it is more satisfying to squash the life out of a living breathing pest as if it was an insect. Humans become bugs. If we are threatened by a tiger who sees us as prey, we can overlook his feline beauty, his value as a species, and kill him before we are killed.  Humans have survived by sorting their threat responses into compartments but sometimes these systems go awry.

We presume that bugs aren’t sentient, but we are selective in our beliefs.  Looked at objectively, shrimp and lobster are no more than large insects of the ocean yet we see them as delicacies.  There is a growing call against lobsters being boiled alive in case they feel pain.  Crayfish don’t fiddle any happy tunes when they are plopped into boiling water.  If lobsters feel pain, the same must be true for ants.  If I wash away a nest of ants, I have not only destroyed their physical structure, but created chaos of the ant’s primal need, which is to keep eggs safe so the clan survives.  There is no time for anguish in an anthill.  Catastrophe’s happen.  They all have jobs to do and will deal with the casualties later.  

The chicken eggs we eat are a sideline of that survival imperative, but the desire to protect the nest has been bred out of domestic hens.  Humans are fine with eating the eggs of various birds and fish if they are collected at the right time, but ant’s eggs have never become a delicacy.  The Aztecs built their floating gardens in the shallow waters of a Mexican lake and cultivated worms and grubs for food, which are full of protein and readily available in the environment.  There are 500 species of insects in Mexico that are consumed as food.  In other parts of the world people eat raw oysters but gag if given a worm.  They crunch on the crispy legs of a baby shrimp but turn their noses up at a pan-fried beetle.

 Creepy-crawlies surely bring bad things to humans, but the view that they should all be eliminated is willfully ignorant.  Billion dollar industries have been created around killing bacteria, but as the anti-antibiotic lobby slogan says, ‘Not All Bugs Are Bad.’  The war on bacteria has created superbugs.  If we see an electron microscope image of the skin on our faces, we are confronted with the horrifying truth that there are insects and worms going about their business of clearing and consuming debris, while we talk, smile, and scratch ourselves. We don’t want to believe it, and try to erase the memory. If all bugs and bacteria are bad, then what will turn milk into cheese, or replace yeast fungus to make bread rise?  If we could see the creepy crawlies around us, we might never leave their beds - oh wait, beds aren’t safe either.

 

Our blue planet is mostly salty seas, wind-scoured deserts, uninhabitable polar regions, and green fuzz where the prevailing winds drop precipitation.  The moss that grows on the wet and warm rocks of our planet is vegetable matter, grasslands, jungles, and forests.  It is populated by fauna that scamper under the green canopy, and range in size from elephants to insects. We humans are somewhere in the middle, closer to the smaller animals when we are born.  The earth has no plan, direction, or nature, except to remain suspended between its centrifugal pull and the sun’s gravity.  Humans, elephants, and ants, don’t figure in this titanic standoff, but are only slithering creatures just below the blotchy green skin. Perhaps a pitiless killer has the same sense that neither he nor his victims will ever rise above the slime, so whether he takes his own life or the lives of others, hardly matters.  Like the rest of us bugs, he’ll return to the organic ooze, and it won’t make any difference to the turning of the earth, only to the innocent’s grieving family.

Greenwashing

There is a recycling crisis that our governments have not found a way to manage.  The production of plastics has grown from almost zero in the 1950s to 350 million tons in 2018. Since China banned imports of plastic recycling in 2018, there is nowhere for the 100 million tons of waste to go.

When the recycling boom first started there were boxes everywhere encouraging citizens to recycle newspapers, bottles, and plastic.  It was our duty to help save the planet.  After a few years, when more newsprint was collected than could be processed profitably, the boxes disappeared. Every household once had a thick telephone book that could be recycled, but when the local charity organizations who did the footwork of collecting the books learned they had earned nothing, they stopped doing it. Luckily a few years later, the internet made phone books obsolete.  When too much of the glass recycling was contaminated, the glass bins disappeared as well.  There were innumerable government programs and PSA’s about recycling, because “That’s what we do.”  After a few years, news came back from China and the far east,  that they didn’t want our trash any more.  There were red faces and containers were sent back to North America but waste companies who are willing to risk getting caught continue trade.  As long as there are profits to be made and the troublesome stuff disappears, nobody wants to dig too deep. 

The recycling sham continues with government encouragement and very little to back up the fact that any significant volume of recycling is taking place. The government says that 97% of Canadian households use at least one recycling program, which makes it sound like 97% of rubbish is recycled.  Statistics suggest that less than only 10% of discarded plastic is recycled. A recent consumer test asked three companies to recycle identical bales of plastic.  One incinerated the plastic, one took it to the landfill, and one recycled it into pellets.  The waste from incinerating any plastics has to be buried in landfills because it is toxic.  Most plastic can only be recycled once.

We rely on package delivery more than ever.  For reasons of health and safety, many more people stay home in their cocoons. Digital media has killed the daily newspaper delivery to the door, people rarely send letters in the post, bills are sent and paid electronically, so the only person who comes knocking is the delivery man.  He is not the one who takes away the packaging or the old item that is being replaced.  Running alongside this boom in online purchases is a supply chain that keeps the digital hardware operational.  Computer hard drives, monitors, keyboards, POS systems, and communication equipment, all need replacing when they wear out or become outdated.  Most businesses have a minimum of a printer and/or a photocopier.  An industry of logistical games has sprung up around deliveries and returns.  To atone for polluting the environment with used electronics and plastic toner cartridges, a system of return waybills has been created to send the replacement parts back to their distributors.  When these materials are returned, they are sorted, re-used if possible, and the rest find their way to landfills. The delivery companies appear to be towing the line, to cover their backs, but in truth there is a profitable side-business in tracking these returned items.  This uses both human and mechanical resources, the cost of which is borne by the shipper, as an environmental tax.  Given that most of these items are smaller than a loaf of bread, all of the packing, shipping, pickup, and delivery is a losing financial proposition.  But the companies involved, pat themselves on the back, and tell us that they are helping save the planet, when really their clever plan to squeeze more money out of the consumer, while waving a blue flag, only compounds the problem.  It is probably better to send a toner cartridge to a local landfill than to send it halfway across the world, only to have it end up in a foreign landfill.

Big businesses like soft drink companies imply that their bottles will be transformed and reshaped into useful things.  It is a romantic idea but that is not the case.  A recent study by Environment Canada suggested that more than 90% of plastics end up in landfills.  Recycling companies will not recycle anything unless there is a profit to be made.  Canadians throw away 3 metric tons of plastic waste a year, and 2.8 metric tons end up in landfill.  I live in a city which has had a single-use plastic ban for several years.  There are no plastic bags available in supermarkets, only paper which are awkward and don’t stand up to weather.  I used to recycle my grocery bags as rubbish bags, but now I have to buy rubbish bags that also end up in the landfill.  This is illogical, unless the companies who manufacture rubbish bags have cleverly lobbied the green faction into a policy that helps their profits. 

The supermarket where I shop makes extravagant use of plastic clamshell packaging for pastries and vegetables.  Where fruit and vegetables are not prepackaged, there are rolls of free plastic bags to contain them, but at a checkout plastic bags are forbidden.  There is an option at the checkout to buy a heavy-duty reusable shopping bag with the supermarket logo for a high price. We are free to consume that particular plastic if we pay.  This is deceitful, like the current practice of selling packages at the same price as before, but reducing the amount in the package.

Although landfills have been used extensively in North America since it was settled, it has never been an ideal way to dispose of trash.  Out of sight out of mind does not mean the danger has gone away.  For many years people dumped things including rubbish into the sea, believing that it would magically disappear into nature’s great washing machine, but as time goes on we have discovered that dumping nuclear waste into an ocean doesn’t make it disappear. 

Landfills can leach into waterways if they are not properly situated, and some elements end up in the water table no matter where they are buried.  There is a large supermarket in my hometown built over a landfill that for 30 years was the city dump. Anything and everything went in there until the gulley filled up and the city opened a more massive fill on the clay banks above the river.  None of the shoppers or employees in the supermarket know they are working over a brew of toxins, and nobody publicizes the fact because it would be bad for business.  Most regular shoppers know that the underground parking stinks but they don’t know why.

Where are organizations set up under the umbrella of NGOs who deem themselves the ones to bestow eco-friendly ratings on businesses who want to crow to their clients about how green they are.  The application to participate can run to several pages with detailed questions about heating, cooling, power use, and waste management.  It is easy to exaggerate the truth to nudge statistics to the positive side.  Does the business have a geo-exchange system?  Most managers don’t know if they have or not, but imagine if they  say yes, if it will land them a better rating.  Three green keys instead of two.  The ratings company rarely does inspections, but if a business does get caught out in its lies and the green organization rescinds its rating, another eco-talking greenwasher would be happy to put his sticker of approval on a window.  The general public don’t know the difference, the business owner will be happy as he appears to be doing his part, and the government boasts about statistics they have had no hand in measuring. And so, the pleasant illusion of environmental righteousness continues. 

A third of our waste comes from households, while two thirds comes from industrial, commercial, and institutional sources.  Regulations, like single use plastics in shops, concentrate on private citizens because individuals are easier to convince than corporations. Our mountains of garbage have only been around for a short while.  My grandparents retired to a lake in the 1950’s, and made only a weekly trip to the dump for the few small bags of real rubbish they could not use.  Much of this was tins that had been flattened so animals wouldn’t get stuck in them, but all excess paper was used at home to start fires to cook meals, glass bottles and jars were re-used, and organic scraps went onto a compost pile.  Plastic barely existed so we had nothing to throw away.  Yet plastic, which we are so bad at recycling, and which has a shelf life of usefulness in our environment, comes from petroleum, which is in limited supply.  We generate so much rubbish that our grandparents would be astounded at the waste.  Along with the arrival of plastics, came its marketing tag word of ‘disposable’, which sounds convenient but is a lie.  Before Einstein’s words on energy, Lavoisier in 1789 discovered that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only change its state and form.  Ignoring that, we are busy extracting minerals from the earth and spreading them in microbeads all over our planet.   The age of plastics might go down in history like the age of dinosaurs, which did not end well.

From the beginning, humans recognized there were environmental problems to be solved.  It didn’t take long to learn that throwing scraps outside the family cave would attract the wrong kind of attention. In the 20th century, the penicillin century, when more people lived longer, so many new materials, including nuclear options, were developed with little regard to their afterlife.  In the early 1960’s when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she was standing on the shoulders of others, but even with this foreknowledge, the speed with which the earth continues to be buried under garbage and toxic waste is astounding.   The best response our society can come up with is greenwashing, which encourages lip service and pouring money into policies that demonstrably don’t work.  We fiddle with regulations while Rome burns. 

The solutions to these problems don’t rest with individuals or governments as they are onlookers to the multinational business engines that drive the world’s economies.  These global companies have the skills and intelligence not only to fix the recycling crisis, but to take innovative steps toward getting us back to the uncontaminated garden we humans once enjoyed as our home. Instead they choose to exploit everyone and everything as they have always done, and to parrot the greenwashing lies because real solutions generate less profit.