Femicide

 In 2023 the Italian government passed a law making femicide a crime, which in my opinion was redundant.   Killing a woman is no less prohibited in European culture than killing a man.   Whether the victim or the perpetrator is a man or a woman, the result is the same — death.  The legal measure making femicide a crime parallel to homicide, was put in place to mollify those who were alarmed at the high incidence of women being killed by their male partners or ex-partners, but the law puts women in a unnecessarily separate category.  Making a special law, marching to take back the streets, wearing red shoes or dresses, and taking up self defence, are backwards responses to the problem.  Women can make all the noise they like, but they are not the problem.  The men who kill women should be the focus to change the narrative.    

Patriarchal Western societies are not far away from a time when women were chattels with no more rights than slaves.  Like cows to be raised for the production of calves, women were the property of their husbands and fathers.  The laws have changed to expand women's rights but many men have a difficult time adjusting to women who assert themselves because they learned from their fathers that women are meant to be obedient servants.   If a woman is not submissive, she is called difficult and if the man she belongs to can't control her, it reflects badly on him. When a woman breaks a man's rules, she is treated like a faulty robot whose wires have become crossed or questions are asked about whether she was defective from the factory.

When children are involved, the separation of families adds the burden of alimony of child support to a man's wallet, even though he may be struggling to justify working for a family he is no longer allowed to be part of.  Many men commit suicide at this stage.  Their dreams have evaporated because their dreams were based on the myth that if they worked hard they could have a life and a partner that conformed to what they were taught to expect. If the relationship breaks down, men feel like their image of themselves has been snatched away.  Everyone finds it difficult to admit they are wrong so a relationship becomes a standoff that cannot be resolved.

The difference between men and women, is that women usually don't pursue their ex-husbands to get back to the lives they once had.  They know when a glass is broken it is never the same.  Men will try to return to a past before things went wrong, apologizing and minimizing the disagreement, but if their women refuse, or try again but fail again, men blame the woman and believe the only way they can resolve the problem is by force because that's what they know.  If they aren't giving women a punitive beating, it's a dog-in-the-manger action that says, "If I can't have this nobody will." Either way it is a bad outcome for the women.

If a man and a woman begin a relationship, it is often the woman who decides whether to continue or not.  Women are the quality control agents because it is women who give birth, so they are particular about choosing their partners.  Whether seeing each other romantically or being happily married, many couples stay together because it makes them appear normal in the eyes of the world.  If they have 2.5 children, two cars, and a house in the suburbs, the image is complete.  If this goes wrong, the partner who is banished, often the man, can be angry, resentful, and feels unjustly cast out of what he helped build.  If a man doesn't have a wife or a girlfriend he is less than a man and he finds that impossible to accept. He may move on quickly to another woman or remain bitter and poisoned with blame.  In the Incel movement, the celibate state of those without a female partner is always somebody else's fault, usually someone who has what they want. Some men are so insecure in their masculinity that they can only see themselves as a legitimate man if they are with a woman.  If their girlfriend or wife leaves them, their masculinity is in doubt and they must do something to correct that.  They would rather kill the woman who gave them legitimacy than admit they might not be the 100% masculine man they would like to be.   There are very few cases of women killing men because if women feel less female without a male partner, they don't often react by killing someone.

If there are to be less killings of women by men, the change needs to come from men.  Women are better at forming communities and supporting each other, while men have maintained their removed individualist way of dealing with their problems.  Men don't like to talk to each other about their emotions and as long as that continues they will take their frustrations out on women.  One of the logical places for this change to begin is in the home, but although mothers can teach their boys respect and understanding, they don't always get support from fathers who perpetrate no-tears behaviour and a reining-in of so-called feminine emotions.   Less and less we live in societies where men need to be brutes and fight physically to stay alive, so if there is any chance to reduce the number of femicides, it has to start with men.  One of the best slogans to come out of Communist China was attributed to Mao, who said "Women hold up half the sky."  What is there about this truth that men have such a hard time understanding?  We are all different but we know it is not right to take a life because of jealousy or power dynamics unless it's on a battlefield fighting for survival.  In Italy the law changed in 1981, men often received lighter sentences for killing their wives or girlfriends.  If their women were unfaithful it was called a crime of passion and was forgivable.  Unofficially the practice hasn't died out and sometimes its ghost influences judicial sentencing.  If a woman steps outside her traditional role, whatever happens to her is her own fault.  It is an unusual dichotomy to have a law specifically against the murder of women by men, but the same society accepts men's actions that are based on male jealousy.  Until this contradiction is resolved, women will never be free from their killers, but the responsibility for fixing the horrifying statistics isn't a woman's problem, but a man's.  Men and the concept of masculinity need to change.

Jackfish

On the bus that left from the mall, I sat across from a native guy wearing a Pink Floyd prism t-shirt. He sprawled across three seats like he owned the place and since he was a tough-looking, shaved-head, scarred-up hefty guy, nobody took exception to him occupying whatever space he wanted.  Halloween was a few days away and as we passed through a suburban neighbourhood with pumpkins, witches, and skeletons on porches, he said. "I like to see them little ghosts and goblins coming to the door."
Nobody else was sitting in that section of the bus so he was either talking to himself or to me. I was surprised to hear him embrace a white man's festival but native cultures had ceremonies of their own like the braid bundle dance for remembering the dead. His childhood experience of Halloween probably wasn't different from mine even if he'd grown up on a reserve.  The one near my hometown could be mistaken for any group of houses in a small subdivision with their carports, cathedral entrances, and living-room picture windows.  The handmade costumes the kids wore would be the same. "My favourite part of Halloween," I said, "was the candy."
I was relieved he didn't go off on a naturalist tangent about apples, granola bars, and bags of sunflower seeds.  We both liked the sugar rush.  I thought the conversation was over and that we had been like insects briefly touching antennae to make sure the other wasn't a threat before we went on our way.
"There's a lot of pickups for sale cheap," he said.  
"Maybe they can't afford the gas," I suggested.  "Or they're people's second vehicles and the insurance is too expensive."
"I'm going to get me a 150," he said and I knew he was talking about a Ford 150 because I once owned one.
"It's a good time to buy if they're cheap,"  I said.
"I won't use it for a while," he said, "but it will get me to Regina."
Regina could have been his home, or near his home, or maybe he had a girlfriend there. I wondered why he wouldn't use it right away and figured it was probably because he had to earn the money for the trip first, or his drivers license might be suspended.  With his forthright, calm, yet defiant manner, I wouldn't want to see him drunk and if he was, it wouldn't be easy for a sober person to convince him to surrender the keys to his truck.  
  When our bus turned onto a street whose one side bordered a  meandering coastal waterway, we both looked out at the alluring sparkle of sun on the still water and he said,  "I'd like a boat.  Maybe do some fishing."
"This wouldn't be the best place for it," I said. "It's polluted."
He didn't comment so I continued.  "All those houses on the opposite shore had septic tanks before they were connected to the sewers.  When the tide is low you can hardly get through it with a rowboat or a canoe because it's choked with seaweed." I knew the overgrowth of seaweed was promoted by phosphorus and nitrogen, not only from years of septic fields under the green lawns that sloped down to the water, but from the chemical fertilizers that were thrown around like they were sand.  Phosphorus and nitrogen in themselves were not poisonous but with such a concentration of runoff from these suburban houses, it wasn't clear what other chemicals had found their way into the water.  I wouldn't be inclined to eat a fish from there.  No doubt my bus companion knew more about fishing than me, and was thinking about what clever creatures the fish were who lurked among the underwater forest of seaweed.
"I go for jackfish," he said. "My mum's got a picture of me wrestling one out of the water."  He allowed himself a trace of a smile for the first time, either in memory of his mother or the pride he felt at besting a monster.
"I don't know what jackfish are," I said.  "I don't think we have them out on the coast."
"We can't eat ours," he said.  "They're poisoned with mercury."
Unfortunately I wasn't surprised to hear this.  Although there were jackfish in fresh water all over Canada, his home territory in Saskatchewan must have had industries that dumped their waste into the rivers and lakes.
"My back's shot," he said.  
I wasn't sure if eating tainted fish could give someone a bad back but mercury probably didn't do much good for the bones.
"Twenty years doing rebar did it in," he said. "It hurts just to sit down."
Sprawling across the bus seats wasn't a demonstration of macho ownership after all.  The man was in pain.
 "The things we have to do for a buck," I said.
"I had to quit," he said. "I'm a flagman now."
"That's a boring job," I said.  "Stuck out on a road somewhere.  And all those idiot drivers."
"It beats the hell out of rebar," he said.
People didn't usually engage in conversations with strangers on city buses and as more people got on, we were aware they were listening.
"I'm helping a friend remodel his house," he said.  It seemed like he was trying to tell me he was gainfully employed in something more complicated than setting rebar or flagging traffic.  "Been working on it for a while now."
I wondered if he was expecting me to ask him to remodel my house. He'd boast about how he'd picked up business on the bus by being more talkative with a white guy than he usually was.  Networking they called it, and he had been around, so why not try it?  Unfortunately I don't have a house nor any need of remodelling so I had no use for his non-specific talent.  Was he a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a drywaller or a roofer?  Or could he turn his hand to all of them.  People who grew up in the country learned to do some of everything.
I don't ask him about house remodelling and he lapses into silence as if he has wasted his time talking to me.  When I get off the bus I say goodbye to him but he won't even look at me and I don't want to insist.

We live in a world that is being progressively poisoned and perhaps one day soon the only food available to the poor will be ultra-processed, pre-cooked,  pre-packaged, and long-lasting - so durable it can be used in place of currency.  Fresh foods would be limited to the well-off who had the money to buy food products raised in protectively scrubbed atmospheres that filter out the toxins.  These people would be healthier not only because of their healthy diet but also because they would have access to better medical care.

Media would be segregated into rational correct information, which would only be accessible to those with money, while those without, could only access media that was so cluttered with misleading advertising and cultural misinformation it would be useless.

It would only take a large enough meteor to land at an inconvenient spot to knock out the global digital network and local power networks that rely heavily on computers to operate. Waterwheels have been superseded by giant hydro-electric plants that are digitally controlled. People would soon find themselves without supplies to meet their basic needs. Parks would soon be stripped of firewood, petroleum products would no longer be available because there is no way to transport the raw materials let alone process them. There would be looting and gang warfare for dominance.  In the midst of the chaos it would be impossible for people to find what they need and there would be mass starvation. Our modern societies are a whisker away, a chance trajectory of a rock in space, from reverting to the primitive tribes they once were. The native man on the bus was only a couple of generations away from those times.

I recently watched a Netflix series called "Unlocked" that experimented with giving prisoners who had been kept in their cells for 23 hours a day, open cell doors and free access to their common area whenever they wanted.  After their isolation there were hiccups along the way as they learned how to live among other men again.  After several missteps, order was restored by reminding the prisoners by example that they would be locked up again if they didn't learn to get along.  A few men stepped up as mediators and had some success in bringing factions and individuals together, but these civic minded men were often criticized by the others because they had learned to mistrust of the motives of authority.   

In an environment where money was not available, the men found ways  to acquire the extras they wanted by using a barter system.  Not only could they hoard their commissary rations and leftover food to trade for preferred items, but they made alcohol out of carbohydrates, and cigarettes from paper towels soaked in coffee.  With almost everything taken away from them and reduced to a primitive barter system, the prisoners found ways to survive and coexist.  Mostly composed of fierce individuals who for various reasons had never fit the standard role society had chosen for them, they were joyful at their first taste of freedom with responsibility, like it was a thing they had created themselves.  Eventually the more intransigent ones, usually the youngest, finally understood if they surrendered even the smallest piece of their egos, they could live in peace and safety.  If global systems did shut down, after a difficult period of adjustment, people would find a way to live and eventually to thrive.  Primitive man had done it and if modern man was left alive after a catastrophe, he could also adapt to his circumstances.

There will always be young people full of the juice of injustice who will let emotion rule them and will go for the nuclear option even if it kills them.  They are young and believe they have no future anyway so it doesn't matter if the world burns.  Mature voices suggest it might be better to live humbly and work from the inside to change what is possible because if the young destroy their societies, they won't necessarily die in the struggle but will be forced to live in even harsher conditions.  Those with experience suggest it is better to keep what little they have and make the best of it rather than torch everything and kill everyone.  In adverse conditions, animals hunker down and wait for less harsh times.  With the human's illogical polarized strategy of all-or-nothing, one side would technically win the war but there would be nobody left alive to acknowledge the victory because everyone would be dead.  The prisoners in the open jail understood it was better to cooperate for the common good, but the polluters and the nuclear adversaries don't know, or don't care what happens to humanity.  

On The Rocks

Recently,  British TV personality and author Michael Mosley died while on holiday on the island of Symi in Greece.  He had been with his wife and friends at a beach they had arrived at by boat.  Sometime after midday, Mr. Mosley decided to walk back to the town of Symi.  It was a 40°C day, and though Mr. Mosley had taken an umbrella with him for shade, it's not known if he took any water for the trip.   Symi is a small island that is mostly barren rough bedrock, with a form that could be a many-petalled flower, a coastline of sharply indented deep bays with tiny beaches and barren points of land.  On his hike back to Symi, Mr. Mosley reached a small village of Pedi, from where it was a 2km hike over a saddle of hills with a rise of about 100 meters. Because Mr. Mosley was unfamiliar with the island's geography and hadn't taken his phone or a map with him, he seemed to have ignored this direct route and taken a path that led along the narrow bay he had just traversed one side of.  Perhaps on such a hot day he thought he would stay near the sea instead of making the climb that would have led him to Symi.  Along the route he walked, he may have seen far below, another beach with a cafe and umbrellas.  When he discovered that his path didn't lead anywhere and he would not be able to hike around the point which had become steeper as he went along, he doubled back with the intention of going down to the cafe.  It is presumed that he lost his footing and rolled down the almost vertical rocky slope, coming to rest beside a stone wall that marked the perimeter of the beach property.  His body was spotted from a boat four days after his disappearance because it had ended up behind the perimeter wall.  It was estimated that he died on the same afternoon he fell.

This tragedy has stirred up difficult memories for me because it is so close to what could have happened to my nephew when he visited me on the island of Rhodes in the late 1990's.  He was a young man and as soon as he arrived I had a talk with him about Lindos in summer being a place where if he indulged in bad behaviour, there would be nobody to lecture him about it when he got home.  He should behave like an adult and set his own limits so he was not one of those sun-roasted cocktail-swigging casualties who had scraped their way along the white walls as they stumbled home.  Sometimes they didn't make it to their accommodation and passed out in the middle of the street, where the other tourists, after checking that the drunk was still breathing, would step over the casualties on their own way home.  

One night, my nephew Ben, met some people in a Lindos bar and went with them to their apartment in Pefkos so they could continue their party.  At the first sign of morning, my nephew decided to go back to the girlfriend he had left in Lindos, so with a bottle of Sprite in hand, he set off for Lindos on foot.  Rather than walk home 5km along the paved road, he decided to take a shortcut.  Unfortunately he had not looked at a map and assumed that Lindos was "just over the hill" from Pefkos, which it is not.  With this in mind, he began climbing the steep rocky hillside behind Pefkos.  Somewhere up the steep slope he lost his footing and fell, injuring himself worse than he thought.  After sitting for a while to recover his senses and decide what to do next, he started off again on his upward trajectory, but he fell again.  He remembered waking up again, and trying to get up and carry on but had trouble doing so.  Sometime later in the morning, perhaps around 10am, a carpenter named Manolis Koukouras who has a house at the bottom of the slope, was out on his back terrace having a coffee when he thought he saw something move far away up the hill.  He thought it might be a plastic bag stuck on some rocks and thorn bushes, so called one of his sons to look.  With binoculars they searched the hillside until they found the strange object, and after passing the binoculars back and forth, decided that what they could see might be larger than they thought.  There seemed to be some movement from whatever it was, perhaps a goat that had fallen.  Manolis sent one of his sons up the hill for a look, and he soon came running back to report there was a man up there, a tourist who was dazed and injured, with a face covered in blood and who was unable to remain steady on his feet. He was thirsty because he had lost his bottle of Sprite in the first fall.  Since Ben had set off about 4am and wasn't found until after 10am, he had been up there for 6 hours in the morning summer sun.  Ben insisted he had only been there for five minutes.

That day I had been in Rhodes shopping, but when I got back to Lindos, everyone was looking for me to tell me about Ben, and that he was in Rhodes hospital.  I jumped in a borrowed car to go find him, and caught up with him in a bed in the emergency department of Rhodes Hospital.  His head was covered in dried blood, his arms and legs were scraped and dirty and he had lost his shoes.  When I was finally sure it was him, because I wasn't convinced at first, he immediately asked where his shoes were.  They were Vans and he had bought them especially for the trip.  Considering the state of him it was surprising he was so concerned about his shoes.  An air ambulance had already been arranged to take him to the hospital in Athens because some of his injuries were serious enough they required specialized attention.

Back in Lindos that evening, I managed to arrange a flight to Athens for the next morning so I could follow Ben's progress in Athens.  I already knew from visiting acquaintances in Rhodes hospital that families were expected to assume some of the workload of patient care, and to supply extra food and drink if the patient wanted it.  The hospital in Athens was an old hospital, where we were introduced to the future prime minister Karamanlis who was visiting hospitals on behalf of his party.  Like the rest of us, he had no choice but to overlook the battered condition of the place.  Ben was conscious when we were able to visit him and though he had a bandage wrapped around his head, he was as dirty and blood covered as I had seen him in Rhodes Hospital.  As next of kin, one of the doctors called me into his office to tell me that Ben had fractured his skull, and that the next few days would be critical in determining how well he did.  He also cautioned me that Ben may not make a good recovery, that his brain might be permanently damaged, and that perhaps his behaviour would change. 

On the second day we visited with McDonalds' hamburgers in hand, Ben was in the same condition we had found him the day before.  Peeling back the neck collar that had been on him since he had first been put in an ambulance, I saw he had a huge gash on his neck which looked to be festering as if it had not even been cleaned.  When I asked the nursing staff why nobody had attended to him and cleaned him up, I was told they didn't have time.  When I pointed out the ugly wound on his neck, I was assured they were doing what they could, but that his head injury was of more concern than the neck wound.  One of the nurses was kind enough to inform me that it was possible to hire a private nurse to come in to look after Ben, and I immediately asked the nursing staff to organize it for me.  The next morning, a kind and motherly Romanian lady was there when we went to visit Ben. She had been there since the evening before, had washed his entire body, cleaned up the dried blood on his face, dressed his neck wound, and made sure he stayed hydrated and fed.  Things were looking less desperate, so we could only hope his fractured skull knitted together properly with no complications.

Ben was in the hospital for 5 days and was discharged into my care back in Rhodes. He could have gone back to Canada but didn't intend to cancel the rest of his summer vacation.  Although he carried on drinking too much along with most of the rest of the tourists his age, he never went hill climbing again.The aftermath of this was that although he seemed not to have any permanent damage from the broken skull, he was deaf in one ear, which put paid to the career he had intended to have in the military.  He also still has a keloid scar on his neck that looks like an unsightly gash, and needs treatment and reduction occasionally.

When I heard about the disappearance of Michael Mosley I was reminded how treacherous a sunny hillside under a blue Greek sky can be.  It also brought back to me the fate of a handsome Greek man I knew who had goats that grazed on the hillsides around Lindos and Pefkos.  Sometimes the goats jumped over garden walls and decimated gardens.  I complained to the mayor that the village needed to do something to keep the goats out of the local properties.  One of my clients had woken one morning to find a huge smelly billy-goat in her bedroom, chewing on her sundress.  I told the mayor it shouldn't be us who were living behind concentration camp barbed wire fences, but the goats.  A few years later the owner of the goats disappeared, only to be found a week later, deceased at the bottom of a crevasse where he had fallen while chasing after his wild flock. He had injured himself in the fall, but the crevasse he was in had a false bottom so he was not visible from above.  A searcher eventually noticed the glint of his wrist watch.

As we grow up, most of us learn to respect the power of nature, be it land, sea, or weather, but miscalculations are made and the results can be disastrous and even tragic.  My sympathy goes out to anyone who has experienced this kind of tragedy, and I am aware that if it hadn't been for the attentive carpenter who noticed something strange on a hillside, my nephew Ben, who now has two teenage children, might not be around today.  Others who have ventured out of Lindos Bay on pedalos or air mattresses have been carried far out to sea and had to be rescued.  The beautiful scenery makes people forget that they are not in an enclosed protected resort, but in a place with a climate, landscape, and sea conditions they know nothing about, and which can, if taken lightly, prove deadly.

The Banality of Evil

Nothing is good or evil in itself.  Evil is a concept that people who are not religious have trouble understanding.  It can be thought of as an absence of good, but action or inaction can push things to one side or the other.  When they hear the word evil, non religious people might think of torturers, murderers, dictators, or regimes, but what puts these villains on the wrong side of the fence is their actions.  Those who have power are adept at justifying their actions, whether they are for the common good or the common ill.  Their actions will be judged negatively if they are based only on expediency, selfishness, ignorance, or neglect. 

The tabloid press was recently occupied by a 35 year old mother who in a hot July went on a trip to another city with a new boyfriend and let her 18 month old child die of thirst and hunger.  She originally gave birth to the baby in a washroom because she didn't know she was pregnant, and had been heard to say the baby was an obstacle to getting on with her life.  She defended herself by saying "Nobody liked me when I was a child, I had no friends." but she had employed enough mental gymnastics to allow her helpless daughter to die.  Some mothers suffer from postpartum depression and have been known to kill their children.  Was her inaction evil?  Was it a mental illness?  

People who do evil are aware of the consequences of their actions but mentally ill people are not cognizant of the results. The evil one is assumed guilty while the person with a serious psychological problem is not. Psychiatric conditions are considered to be involuntary, while in behavioural disorders, choices are made.  One of the choices available is inaction with full knowledge of the probable consequences. If a person has a toothache they can go to a dentist to have the problem resolved or they can do nothing.  Their inaction will probably result in even more pain, but there may be factors that stop them from doing the right thing, like fear or finances.  Their teeth might completely decay and they will have painful abscesses, but they will not act as if by closing their eyes and ignoring the evidence, magical thinking will make the problem go away.

The mother who allowed her baby to die, was able to convince herself to stay away from home longer than she knew was reasonable, but she deceived herself into believing everything would turn out fine.  She left the child with two bottles of milk, two of water, and one of iced tea for the few days she was away, but when day three came around and she couldn't get a ride home, she figured the baby would be good for another day.  If anyone she knew asked her about the child, she told them her sister was looking after her daughter. Perhaps in her mind she believed it. She was afraid to ask her new companion to take her home because he didn't want to know about the baby and was full of insults about her stupidity.  When enough days had passed and she began to doubt her own fantasy that someone had gone into her flat to look after the child, she also knew it was too late and that the child might be dead.  If the child was already dead, there was no hurry to go home, so she stayed away for 6 days, while a small part of her brain continued to believe she would find the child alive. The deceased child had eaten part of her diaper.  The mother said she never meant to harm her daughter.
"I was worried about her," she said, "but I was afraid of my boyfriend's reaction. I was afraid to talk to him because he was aggressive. Once he pushed me against a glass shopfront in an argument. I was nervous about asking him again to take me home.  He said he loved me, but it wasn't true. He just used me.”

She claimed she was abused as a child at the hands of a family friend, shunned by her family, and was sad and solitary.  There were drunken parental fights, missed birthday parties, no gifts, and no school friends because they all thought she was too serious.  She said she failed at school because she had no interest in studying, married young but miscarried and her husband divorced her because he said it was her fault.  Her family disputed all of these claims and said she was a normal child, perhaps on the slow side.

As a writer I am curious what her thoughts were while she put off going back home to save her child.  "If he's in a better mood tomorrow morning, I'll ask him again if he'll drive me home. I could take the train but that costs money I'd rather spend on other stuff.  Maybe the baby hasn't hasn't finished all of her bottles.  I left her five, which should be almost enough for at least two days.  Yesterday would have been the right day to go back, but my boyfriend was really affectionate in the afternoon and asked me to stay for another day.  He told me if I loved him, I'd stay, so that's what I did.  Sometimes the baby slept so soundly she went through the night without a bottle, and that was ten hours, so she could go for a while before she got hungry.  She was a chubby little thing anyway, everyone said so, but I really must go tomorrow one way or the other."

"It's already the fourth day and I should have gone back yesterday, but he didn't feel like going out to take me to the station.  Maybe my sister stopped by.  She knows where I leave the key.  Did I leave it there the last time I used it?  The baby would be so happy to see my sister because she would have been lonely and calling for me. I knew what being lonely was like.  I'd gone away for a day or two before and the baby wasn't any the worse for it when I got back.  She'd have to be an independent sort to make her way in this world.  Maybe she'd even found her way out of her crib.  She could stand up if she held onto something, and if she was hungry or thirsty enough she could get out."

"I really should get home no matter what he says.  Maybe he'll have time tomorrow.  The baby's going to be really hungry by now.  I know I would be starving after five days, but then she's just small and doesn't need much to keep her going. For sure my sister must have passed by and the baby is all right.  It would have been polite if she phoned me to tell me what she'd done, but then she was one of those who said I should have given the baby up for adoption so I don't  trust her. My phone is out of minutes and I asked to borrow his phone to call my sister but he told me I needed to learn to be independent.  What did I care about my family?  They'd never done anything for me.  He was right.  If I called my sister and she hadn't checked on the baby, she'd give me an earful I didn't want to hear."

The ability of a person to convince themselves of something that is contrary to all logic, is boundless, even if it means the death of an innocent.  "They probably had it coming," they'd say.   People are killed in so many tragic circumstances one wouldn't think the human race needed to add to the carnage by engaging in wars for territory or resources.  The way humans are able to mobilize their populations to go off and kill other people, is the same way that humans are able to kill their fellow man, is by Othering.  If a person, a tribe, or a nation are not like us, it is easy to put them into a box called "Them."  They are less human than we are.  If these people look different from me, dress differently, have different customs, worship differently, it is easier to keep them at a distance, and our fear of the unknown encourages that.  Governments are adept at manipulating their people into believing that the others are the bad guys, while the opposite government does the same.  Judging others as separate from ourselves is easy to do, and some factions, let's call them the evil ones, or the bad actors, encourage us to exaggerate our differences instead of appreciating our differences.  So-called evil, or incorrect behaviour can lurk just under the surface of any of us and is usually kept under control by our society's expectations, but it doesn't take much of a scratch in the surface of a supposedly good citizen, to reveal a darker nastier selfish side.  The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrates this idea.  The surface of Dr. Jekyll's respectable life is disturbed when he ingests a drug.  Although the good doctor can't remember the details of the nasty things he did as Mr. Hyde, this does not excuse the fact that he was the one who took the wrong action. He and not Mr. Hyde is the guilty party because the sane Dr. Jekyll knew there was a risk but he took it anyway.  Hitler and his ilk knew the consequences of their actions but undertook them anyway.  Whether we are soldiers marching off to a so-called patriotic war, or shrinkers from the truth and responsibility, the scales of good and evil can easily be tipped in the wrong direction.

When the court gave the neglectful mother a life sentence, they accepted the theory of evil, and ruled that although the mother had certain delusions, she was sane enough to know what she had done was wrong.  Once the sentencing was over and the mother was back in prison, she went on a hunger strike, which some thought was fittingly ironic, but she was in the hands of the judicial system, who didn't permit her to make a serious error of judgment on their watch.  She should be alive to remember what an evil thing she had done.   

America's God Problem

 I grew up nominally Anglican, an inheritance from both my parents.  My mother grew up with a Scottish Presbyterian father whose religious observances were in line with his other severities, like sitting up straight at the dinner table.  Religion for him was all about how it looked to the neighbours.  I never heard him talk about God.   My parents rarely went to church, except on Christmas Eve for the carols.   Neither of them went to church on Sundays though they sent their children to Sunday school, believing they should know something about religion so they would be informed when they were old enough to embrace it or reject it. They weren't bothered either way.  God and Jesus weren't people whose names came up in everyday conversation.  I understood later they just wanted their kids out of the house so they could have a few precious hours to themselves on Sunday mornings.   We were trained to say grace before meals but the only trace of religion in it was in the "May the Lord make us truly thankful."  For all we knew this Lord could be the guy who issued the paycheques that allowed us to buy food.  There was no spiritual connection in this recitation of grace.  The Lord's Prayer that we learned at school was more specific, but was too archaic for our young minds.  Who wants daily bread when there are so many other interesting things to eat?  Did trespassing mean raiding our neighbour's garden?

Although we lived north of the border we grew up on American television. Among the cultural references that jumped out because they were different from our own were the ubiquitous twin beds of married couples and televangelists like Oral Roberts.  Supposed miracles from the laying on of hands and the blatant pitch for money seemed to cancel each other out and make fools of these people and their message. In my teens I became even less religious than my parents who were barely there at all, and was vindicated when I finally renounced organized religion and wasn't struck by a thunderbolt from God.  Although I had heard terms like the Bible Belt when talking about the eastern US, I also knew there were pockets of Bible thumpers in Canada, not only in the farming communities of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver, but in pockets in the prairies.  I saw these people as misguided because although I had no objection to what anyone believed, I didn't agree with their aggressive ministry which was only a short step below the pests of Jehovah Witnesses who came to the door on Saturday mornings. 

American television networks didn't blatantly broadcast all of the evangelist's more strident messages, but their norms were inserted in more subtle ways.  American television networks rely on sponsors and are sensitive to feedback from their viewers, so words or images that might offend delicate sensibilities are omitted.  In the movies people can swear and say they don't  believe in God, but these were usually the bad guys.  Blasphemy didn't make it onto television at all. 

Not only the Christian religion, but many others besides, at their inception understood the power of fear and isolation.  They spoke as if their Gods were the only way.  Everything else belonged to the evil other side.  They nurtured the philosophy of "If you're not with us you're against us."  There was not an option of accepting their misguiding beliefs without participating in them. For Christians in the last half of the 20th century, the choices for fair minded people became even more restrictive by using a clever tactic.  I learned at my mother's knee about what she called "motherhood issues."  She was scathing about politicians who got on their soapboxes and said "I'm all for motherhood."  This would get huge cheers from the crowd because it was an obvious good thing.  The dirty side of this sort of message is that it implies anyone who doesn't agree with them must be a monster who thinks that motherhood is bad.   

In the 1950's the American Pledge of Allegiance was altered to insert the word God into it.  The original pledge of allegiance to the flag was written in 1892 and made no mention of God or which flag people were pledging allegiance to.  When the Cold War heated up in the 1950's, Eisenhower agreed to add the word God to the text to make a statement that Americans believe in God, while those who didn't include God in their pledge were by definition Godless communists.  Even as late as 1987 George Bush Sr. said, "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."  Americans had claimed God as their own and anyone who didn't share their capitalist value system, must be a child of Satan.  Bush may or may not have been aware that America had only been one nation under God since 1954, only 33 years earlier.  

In America, politicians are expected to be, at least in name, God fearing citizens of one stripe or another, mostly Protestant Christians.  90% of US congressmen identify as Christian, leaving the rest to be taken up by 7% Jewish, negligible Muslims, with hardly a non-believer in sight.  In short, it is impossible to hold any of the levers of power in the US unless a person is religious.  There are probably those who lie about their beliefs to save awkward questions and make themselves acceptable to electors, and there or those who profess belief in a religion while blatantly doing the opposite of what is acceptable in any religion.  Selling a holy book to raise money for legal fees to escape from crimes committed, wouldn't wash anywhere in the world, yet in brainwashed America it gains a political con man millions of dollars and followers.  This is a perversion of morality as defined by any religion or any secular society. 

America's God perversion was nurtured by an exploitation of people's fear that if they didn't follow the herd, they would be condemned and sent to some mythical hell. They raised their children to be God fearing just as they had been, and not to ask rational questions.  The children believed their parent's fanaticism was normal.  However, statistics show that 23% of the public in the US,  privately admit they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”. Where are these people in the political discourse?  Not only do they have no voice in government, according to some like Bush they should not even be considered citizens. Non-believers are considered militant extremists and should have no right to take place in public discourse.  Although the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,"  there are many ways beyond the legal system that a religion can become a state sanctioned religion.  

It has been said that, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and wearing the cross."  Using people's natural fear of exclusion, America long ago wrapped itself in the flag with the 1804 chant,  "My country, right or wrong."  This outlook promotes loyalty and devotion to a country, prioritizing the nation's interests even if they are not morally or ethically justifiable. The evangelists and other so-called God fearing Christians are not much different from the Ku Klux Klan and their fiery crosses, with their calls for exclusion, intolerance, and retribution.  "When the rapture comes, those who were against us will burn in Hell."  Simple souls believe this rhetoric and are happy to carry out their God fearing master's wishes in real life. "Kill the Godless judge or politician and his unholy children."  Religion has been twisted beyond recognition and has come to live in America.  Americans watch in horror at theocracies in other parts of the world with their medieval prohibitions, while being blind to their own restricted fundamentalist outlook.  They have painted themselves into a corner that it will be impossible to recover from without education, but generations of children continue to be brainwashed and told that to ask awkward questions is unpatriotic and unAmerican.  Intelligence is a dirty word in America, an attitude that successive governments continue to foster.  Uninformed people whose ignorance is glorified, don't ask questions, but blindly obey their church and state.  "God is on our side," they say, "therefore whatever we do is right and justified."  This is not the path to a fair and equal society.