Wednesday, December 02, 2020

Coming In Second

Canadians are often the butt of jokes about placing second in international competitions. We would like to win, but we are fine with second place since it means we are up there with the best. Third place works too, though it is only a close shave away from disappearing into the anonymity of the pack. When we compete, we give it our all, but we are not maniacally driven to win or die trying.

We applaud those who are the best in their field, but we are not an exceptionalist people who will push others around in a childish need to claim victory. When nominated for a prize, we are flattered yet embarrassed to be in such illustrious company. We have been, and will be, decorated for first place, perhaps by fluke, and only for a brief moment, but we will bow to our neighbours in the sincere belief that the trophy could just as easily have been theirs. Second place, third, or even tenth place is a badge of merit, earned through persistence, determination, and skill. We don’t need to take first place to win.

People, teams, parties, and nations are strongly motivated to win whatever races they enter. Our social structure encourages us to find ways to feel superior to others. Consumerism waves promises of success at us that are available only to a few. Invisible caste systems still exist. Our governments have long understood the tactic of diverting its citizens from concrete problems by pitting them against each other on issues that could be easily resolved. Pockets are easier to pick when everyone is busy watching the game.

There are strong men who cry uncharacteristic tears when their flag is raised or when the flower of their nation is on the podium. Team sports generate scenes of blind and ecstatic loyalty. Fans are tribal aggregations moulded from the same clay as the players, bursting to celebrate a win for their side. Politicians call opposing parties evil incarnate and try to win by scaring the wits out of their equally shrill rivals. Losers sulk and winners gloat. The toxic effects that a competitive society produces are all around us.

The urge to compete, to judge who is better at a specific task, has often been blamed on testosterone. Yet in these times of inclusiveness, it is obvious that women, with only a fraction of male testosterone, have demonstrated an equally strong desire and capacity to win. There are other inborn factors that push humans toward competition.

There is competition in the animal world but it is based only on survival, a competition for resources. Extravagant mating displays and proof of fitness tests are engineered by nature to keep a species reproducing and viable, not to win medals or trophies. The Lion King’s only motivation is to ensure the survival of his offspring. There are no dancers and drums for him except in a Disney universe. Reality is tooth and claw. Humans have similar instincts that drive them to compete for different sets of resources, though food and safety remain at the top of the list for both. Humans understand the roots of their behaviour and attempt to channel it into ritualized competition. Except in war, we do not take our games so far as to kill each other, but there is a tragic undercurrent in all competition that is based on the law of diminishing returns. How much do we sacrifice in order to win? Will the victory be worth the price?

On a personal level, we are touched by the plight of someone who is in need of help. Competition doesn’t enter the picture unless desperation has made us twisted enough to steal from blind men. To offer assistance is in our better nature, but if we take a few steps back, and look at the unfortunate person as The Other, as someone who is in competition with us, as someone from the other team, we are capable of exhibiting mindless cruelty. It’s either him or me.

When George Orwell fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, he was never sure if he managed to kill anyone. His best chance came one day when a soldier ran across a clearing directly in front of him, but the man was so close, and holding up his trousers like he had been caught in the middle of a nature call, that Orwell couldn’t shoot. The soldier was too human, too much like him. If he had been unrecognizable in the distance, trying to pick him off would have been like target practice.

Winning is a human instinct, at least that is the thinking of the colonial west, but in reality it is a patriarchal answer to channel the urge to compete. Somebody must come in first place, and it may as well be me. But there is a more satisfying way forward than the habitual path of guts and glory. It takes the form of another human instinct that has been proved in the crucible of evolution, and it’s name is cooperation. Doing things for the good of all. It is not nearly as exciting as a good fight; there is no drama. There are no winners and losers, but only a quiet reasoned resolution for everyone.

We know that on a personal level, if the desire is there to do so, appropriate concessions can be made on all sides. The natural instinct to cooperate is demonstrated in times of disaster. Nobody asks a drowning person who they voted for or what is their favourite football team. If a scarcity of resources is the problem, an arrangement can be worked out to accommodate the needy. This is preferable to the poor fighting the poor, the anarchy of cold and hungry neighbours breaking down each other’s doors to steal each other’s hearth and home. While robbery might look like a win for the bully, it is a destructive win, the fingerprint of a personal coping mechanism gone wrong, a behaviour that will not serve the bully well in the future. Bullies love competitions, because they separate the weak from the strong, but what they don’t understand is that their judgment is based on their own limited opinions, and that they grossly underestimate the nuances of weak and strong. Their truth is relative, it is not absolute.

Correctly fielded, another person’s need to be first can be easily undermined. I had a friend who worked as a nanny for a mother with a stubborn competitive streak. Her husband was a successful writer and though she wasn’t jealous of his realm, she needed something of her own, a dominion that she hadn’t yet found. She was often irritable and would pick fights over little things and my friend, as a defensive strategy, would stop her in the middle of her furious polemics to tell her, “Okay, you win.” This infuriated her, and she would shout “That’s not fair. Stand up and fight!” When he would walk away calmly she would shout “Come back and fight like a man!”

“If she needs to win so badly,” he said. “I let her.”

Her children had already learned to back off when she behaved like the bull of her astrological sign and that left her further isolated with nobody to pick on. She would slam out of the house in a rage to find a place to calm down and assess her options before she would rejoin her flock. When she came back it was like nothing had happened. Bullies have their own demons to conquer.

I don’t see people fighting on the street unless they are drunk or trying to shake off the police. Disagreements in families are usually confined to private spaces; public arguments between neighbours are rare, but people will turn violent over property disputes. In Mediterranean cafes I have seen families threaten murder over the perceived theft of a strip of land only wide enough to plant a row of artichokes. Death is not the usual outcome. Solutions are found, either by correcting the original sin, by paying reparations, but sometimes there remains an eternal simmering war between families. These disagreements are often based on honour rather than the value of the object in discussion. Both sides want to win, nobody to back down, even if it is better for the welfare of the group. This buried rancour can poison any reasoned attempts at solutions, because in their crusade to pull down their neighbours, they pull down the entire tribe. Village life is a microcosm of all lives. Cooperation is always better because competition poisons the well, and should not be given first place.

Chimpanzees live in male dominated societies, but every so often the succession goes wrong. A ruling alpha male may be injured in a cross-tribe battle and be weakened and diminished, so his next in line takes charge. The successor may turn out to be a tyrant of the first order without little understanding of the fragility of the social structure. His reign of terror tests the females and less powerful males, but none of them will fight him directly because he is stronger and will beat them severely. After a few seasons of being pummelled, pushed around, and seeing their relatives maimed and killed by the dictator, the females and secondary males do what needs to be done, and the aberrant alpha male disappears.

It is not wise to concede to bullies, who in their own twisted way believe they have won, even if they have broken unspoken rules to do it. Hitler would have been happy with world domination. But with the right tactics, bullies can be punctured and deflated as the puffed up clowns they are.

Canadians don’t think that a competition is worth dying for, so we don’t always find the last ounce of momentum that will carry us first over the line. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. We tried, we enjoyed the experience, maybe we will win the next time or maybe not. Life does not pivot on a moment of victory or defeat. There is always another game. Whatever the outcome, the loser and winner will both leave the field and return to their humdrum lives. As life knocks some rough edges off them, they mature and learn that there are richer and more rewarding pursuits than extreme games, and that coming in second can be a blessing in disguise.


Thursday, November 21, 2019

The Art of The Workaround


I recently pitched over the front of my bicycle and broke my collarbone which forced me to find ways around the limitations that the injury presented. As soon as I could dress and undress myself I was back doing exercise at the gym. I had to work around the steel plate with screws that held my shoulder together. My rotator cuff hadn’t fared well in the fall either. Looking around the gym, I realized that I wasn’t the only one with a handicap. Most of the rats had wrapped knees and wrists, or wore belts, but like any injured athletes, they didn’t stop training. If they had to cut back on leg exercises for a while to favour their bad knees, they concentrated on upper body workouts until they could add some lower body to the routine. I took to calling my workouts, my workarounds. Because I had to back off my weak spots until they were healed, there were tedious hours of light weight lifting, feeling like I wasn’t making progress, but I couldn’t stop. I had to baby my injuries until they were better and build up slowly once they were. The clavicle and shoulder were gradually less painful and the doctor they assured me that the fix was stronger than the original bone, though I wasn’t convinced, now that it had so many screw holes in it. Anti-inflammatories were also useful.
Having the ability to find a workaround requires both vertical and horizontal thinking, an important skill in a host of professions from the petty thief, to the holder of a corner office. Problems arise in the real world and conventional systems suggest straightforward logical AI remedies, which when dealing with humans are not always the best idea. In order to advance, a society needs to let its past injuries heal in peace. Every citizen needs to work around the handicaps he is given. Some people rail against their limitations and bang their heads on the sky, others surrender and drown in substances, while others sweat like unheralded paralympians to show, if only to themselves, that there is a way around. Our society often stumbles, but we always find a way forward, a fix, a path learned the hard way through false starts. If we aren’t ready to alter the structure of our society, we need to connect the unifying elements in the wreckage of the present to build bridges, otherwise we will shake each other to pieces in never-ending, mutually damaging war. The body, the soul, society, and even the marketplace run on compromise, or as I like to call it, the Workaround.
An early parallel to the Workaround is the Jury Rig, which brings to mind ship repairs, with sailors lashing a broken booms with rope so the ship can sail home There is a theory that the Jury part of the phrase comes from the French word for day, jour, implying that the repair might only last a day. One of the weaknesses of the workaround is that putting undue pressure on a fix may cause another system failure. The ship needs is a new piece of uncompromised timber.
A Jury Rig, given full rein, can end up as a Kludge, defined as an “ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole." A mechanism like this may continue to function but it is clumsy and temporary, and related to the words bodge or fudge, which brings to mind MacGyver, the king of the workaround.
Hackers are in the business of workarounds. Software developers build systems, and hackers, from curiosity, notoriety or profit, delight in finding holes in the system that they can slide into, like cars merging on a freeway. Before the system is aware, it finds itself serving another master. Programmers know that to block hackers, they sometimes have to burn down their houses and start again.
In the world of entertainment, Prince called himself a symbol because his name had been sold to Warner Brothers. Networks routinely bleep words they don’t want viewers to hear, leaving the impression of free speech intact except for the odd forbidden word. The act of censorship itself is a futile attempt to cover up the truth, but the reality still exists behind the fig leaf. An iconoclast would destroy the offending statue, but the humanist finds a workaround that saves the entity and appeases the censor.
We see products on supermarket shelves that are designed to imitate original brands and skate close to the wrong side of patents and trademarks, so that only the original producers of champagne and parmigiano reggiano are allowed to use those names. Shady producers sell merchandise with brand-similar names and imitative packaging, though any attempt to sell a McDonalds burger or a puppet mouse with a particular face, brings down the legal weight of ferocious brand defenders. An obvious and clumsy workaround can be easily dislodged.
In some countries, people who build houses leave unfinished construction rods poking out of their roofs to indicate that the building is not finished, because completed buildings are taxed at a higher rate. To an outside eye, the rusted corner ornaments are a cultural curiosity, but they are visible signs of a broader social breakdown. The authorities suspect the building may never be finished, but they have no certain knowledge of the owner’s intentions, and can’t prosecute uncertainty. Until a government realizes the need to rewrite a law, people will find ways around it. In this same country, cynicism is rampant. People believe that when the government decides to make a law, that they make an escape window or workaround for themselves and their friends, then build the law around it.
Recently it has been brought to light that rich parents can have their children accepted into name universities even if the applicants don’t have the qualifications for admittance. Because those caught were celebrity parents the story had more traction than it might have in another time and place. Not long ago, an English aristocrat would have assumed he could purchase a place for his son at Cambridge or Oxford by making a large enough donation to either University. His son could learn eventually. That’s what tutors were for. The workaround practice of buying university places isn’t new, but it came as news to some.
Workarounds are used so often in our lives, that we hardly recognize them for what they are. Objects that have been invented to help us, like eyeglasses, originally started as workarounds. Somewhere in history a man noticed that rock crystal in the right shape could become a tool for starting a fire. The best fire starters had magnifying qualities, which over a thousand years of refinement were ground into eyeglasses or even contact lenses. We have adapted materials like quartz, silica and petroleum to make a smart phones that exceed the thinking speed of the human brain. The use of these building blocks began as a way to overcome difficulties, like distance, speed, and human frailty. If one day soon we can’t go outside, it won’t take long for tinkerers to adapt VR and drone technology to let our eyes go out to explore while our bodies are indoors, safe and protected. Whatever happens we will find a way around.
Some basic social supports like daycare began as workarounds. It was a logical fix in early societies that the duties of motherhood could be shared with a network of sisters and relatives, so that more women were able to participate in activities that benefited the group, like agriculture and hunting. The children benefited by having an extended family with its broader range of educational input.
The best of intentions can have unintended consequences. In Italy, the government passed a bill to protect worker’s rights. The new strict labour laws applied only to companies with more than fifteen employees. As a result, many companies limited their growth to avoid being subject to the new rules. The change worked well for artisans and unionized employees, but economic growth stagnated. To fill the gap in industry, the government courted multinationals who initially performed well, but were in turn subject to the pressures of worldwide supply and demand. When the markets changed, the big companies were as loyal to the country who courted them as a hen is loyal to an egg. The hosts had been used, but they should have seen it coming. They had shot themselves in the foot in the first place with flawed rules that business found easy to work around. The original ill conceived law, a workaround in its own time, had been a detriment to everyone.
One of the most lucrative markets in modern times cashes in on the problems people have in coping with their lives. Solutions that range from anti-depressant medication to wellness marketing, are nothing more fixes to get around our feelings of inadequacy and sadness. We turned coping methods into big business, but in the end the offered solutions are all workarounds that prop up something temporarily but do not fix the original problem. If someone suffers trauma, there is no way to reverse the original injury, so we find ways to work around it and live with it, but the memory and subsequent pain will never disappear until we learn how to cancel memory.
There are a wide range of coping techniques involving drugs and therapy. Humour is one method for exorcising pain, perhaps because we can transfer our pain to someone else. Their misfortune is our healing laugh. When I was young, I often went to the movies on Saturdays with my older sister. To stop myself from crying during sad passages in the film, I would look over at her, sure that she was well ahead of me in tears, and the sight of water running down her face would make me laugh. It kept the sadness on the screen from entering my heart. I didn’t want to be sad, so at that young age was already learning to find ways around the embarrassing phenomenon of tears. .
When politicians suggest imperfect fixes for long term problems, they may not be aware that they are stacking one jury rig on top of another. Social democrats wish to eliminate the flaws in a system that permits inequality but are less inclined to accept a patchwork of temporary fixes than traditional politicians. Those on the more radical left, advocate changing the system from the ground up, advocating for fundamental change rather than putting more fingers in a failing levee to protect territory that is already under water. The wisest of those who resist radical change, probably know that their wilful blindness will come back to bite them.
Temporary fixes and workarounds were never meant to solve problems permanently. Sooner or later structural changes need to be made. When change comes, any workarounds in place become unstable or fail altogether. Workarounds are brittle constructions. They are not positive or negative in themselves, but are tools that can generate beneficial or disastrous results.
The further we go into our future , the greater the effects of stress become apparent. Stress has always existed, but its force has grown in proportion with our ever expanding shared knowledge. It is useful to understand your adversary, but when you know that he has a 500 kiloton bomb that he can drop on you if he is in a bad mood, it can be stressful. Throughout history people have shouted that the sky is falling, and it has not happened. Now we know that it could happen and how it will happen, but so did the prophets know, based on hearsay of all sorts of celestial rain. Probably the most well known and used stress reliever is religion, followed by alcohol. People find ingenious ways to cope. Making beer is an art.
Tobacco, since its worldwide diffusion, is another method of dealing with stress in an instant. A quiet cigarette is a moment to stop and reflect, and a nicotine hit on the run, is for someone who has no time, but needs a calming top-up fix. But we all know what many years of using cigarettes as a stress reliever does to the lungs. As can happen, that particular workaround might be worse than the monster it is trying to avoid. Alcohol plays a similar insidious part.
The obvious way to relieve stress isn’t to find new coping mechanisms, but to eliminate the stressor that causes so many to turn to workarounds. Historically, people have taken the drastic step of leaving home for better economic opportunities, and because of wars or natural disasters. Climate change will provoke new generations of refugees. The outside forces that cause people to pull up stakes, are either because they are persecuted in their homeland, or because there is no way for them to produce enough to stay alive there. Whether the reason for flight is violence or hunger, the main driver behind these migrations is always money. Wars are fought over control of territory, because territory generates wealth. In a new world order, people would not need to move to stay alive, because they and their neighbours would have the same benefits of clean running water, electricity, transport and communications. The proliferation of mobile phones has all but accomplished the latter, the evidence being that a video can be posted online from a dot on the map in Africa, and be seen immediately by the rest of the world. Food, water, and employment are taking longer to catch up. When a man who lives in that dot on the map sees how the rest of the world lives, he wants the same benefits for himself. Along with the promise of adequate food and productive employment, he also wants health care, education, infrastructure and a fair rule of law. Regardless of what the Bible says, it is natural to want something that is better than what you already have. If you have a broken down, jury-rigged plough, you wish that you had a sturdy, unbroken one. When they want more and can’t have it right away, people become jealous, vindictive and make bad decisions. To attain the promised land, people who don’t steal from others, are forced to work as wage slaves because that is the only road open to them. They hope it will be a temporary solution, a fix, but they end up living the rest of their lives living with the workaround.
Men have tried to construct societies where nobody suffers from want, but it has been demonstrated that uniformity kills initiative. In the end, these utopias fail, because people have a tendency to work around the rules to reinstate a hierarchy of wealth. They want more than their neighbour and are willing to become outlaws if that is what is needed to achieve their objectives. In an unjust society we look for fixes to the system. In a just society we look for workarounds to destabilize the equilibrium if we think it will improve our lot.
The cautionary sting in the tale of workarounds is that we should not depend on them, and if necessary, should consider discarding the entire Kludge and rebuilding a sound structure from a new set of plans that do not totally revolve around money. If we ever manage to conquer our petty jealousies, envy and greed, war will be relegated to an awful curiosity of the past.




Wednesday, October 02, 2019

Race & Culture

       
         These days, darkening one’s skin to pass for someone of another race, is considered disrespectful and wrong-headed.  Unless worn by true aboriginals, the wearing of feather headdresses and Mexican sombreros as costumes has fallen out of favour.   The collective sliding scale of acceptability has pushed them to the naughty list.  A web-connected public plebiscite decides what should be relegated to the back drawer of history, and what will be allowed to stand, for the moment.  At one time or another, everything comes up for analysis, and it has always happened that totems of the past are thrown onto the bonfire by the guards of the new revolution.           

Things that were once taboo are now out in the open.  We behave as if prohibition never existed.  Behaviours that were once commonplace have been ruled out of order.  But pushing that least favourite article of history to the back of the closet doesn’t cancel it.  No amount of nose holding or looking the other way will make it disappear.   Being aware of the past is a necessity for survival.  How many times can we make the same mistake?   The past shouldn’t be something mysterious, unimportant, remote, or forbidden, because humans have a knack for forgetting.  Their psyches tell them that it is unhealthy to revisit bad experiences too often, but they shouldn’t take the balm of amnesia too far.  When memory is erased, mistakes are repeated, and new strains of bad old ideas come along and take root again.  

Toppling statues of icons like Saddam, Stalin, or Nero, is a post-conflict knee-jerk reaction to life under a dictator’s heel, but it does not change history.  People have always had to use what little they were given and what they could learn, in the race to survive.  It is easy to ignore history when the greatest personal accomplishment is to stay alive.  Defeated people have no stomach for remembering the gory details of the past; they only hope that the present and future will be better, but they have forgotten that a hungry, intimidated, and uneducated populace is easier to control. The indignant can vent their anger on statues, but it is the ideas, not the statuary that need addressing.  

There are many statues that should be consigned to the scrapheap, but pulling them down won’t erase the sins of the past.  The buzz about cancelling offensive images from the culture is a distraction from the real thing.  There is probably laughter, margaritas and tortillas at a Cinco de Mayo party, but many American’s don’t know that it celebrates a Mexican victory over French troops, who would have gone on to join the US Confederacy, helping the slave owners defeat Lincoln.  Yet even in Texas they mindlessly celebrate Cinco de Mayo while protecting statues of Confederate generals.  These sharp differences of opinion, usually based on mutual ignorance, which keeps people fighting amongst themselves, a useful result for those who hold power.

Nobody has put forward a fair and workable political system, but the idea is dead in the water simply because it is a system.  People are not systems.  They are round pegs trying to fit into square holes while experts debate whether it is better to make the holes more round or humans more square.  Meanwhile, to survive, humans find their own ways to adapt and move forward.  Along the way they may ask themselves if there could be things they are doing now that will be considered unfathomable errors by historians of the future. They drink beverages from open containers when it is known that exposed liquids are bombarded by harmful viruses. They wear eyeglasses, an outdated technology, akin to a pirate having to strap on a wooden leg.  They fail to provide free healthcare, housing, and food to the weakest members of society.  They send soldiers to kill other soldiers over remote pieces of land so they can move another square on the chessboard of domination. They fill the atmosphere with poison.  

Looking back and judging things according to today’s standards is like accidentally driving down a cul de sac.  It is true that there are some sins too big to wash away, that no matter when or where they happened, they will always be unforgiven. “Just following orders,” is less convincing today than it once was. Concentration camps have always been hell.  Traumatized soldiers were once shot for desertion.  Hungry thieving children were sent over the edge of the earth to Australia.  

In a tightly organized society, anxiety is a problem.  Presumably bees and ants don’t feel the frustration of constant collisions with their own kind but experience the event as a bonding ritual.  People also look for ways to keep themselves calm in the mêlée.  Tobacco was once the most widespread worldwide remedy for anxiety but it has become a health taboo. Like CocaCola, its addictiveness was an early experiment in product loyalty.  But smoking, drinking Coke, and chewing tobacco had willing consumers, early adopters of microdosing, playing Alice in Wonderland, a bit more of this and a bit less of that until they had found the right balance to help them navigate their unintelligible lives.  But even smokers don’t know that in the First War, soldiers used cigarette smoke to cover up the stench of rotting corpses.  Lung cancer was the least of their worries.  

If a long dead, barely remembered man like Al Jolson were to come back from purgatory, he would be sent straight to hell by the latest cultural posse who would lynch him as if he was the antichrist of blackface.  He would be greeted by howls that his face paint is insensitive, hurtful, and dehumanizing. But it is dehumanizing to forget that Al Jolson was an actor and a singer who was trying to put food on his table.  If he thought that painting his face green and pretending to be a Martian would help get him work, he would probably have done it.  People did not believe he was an actual black man, blackface is never convincing, but he was a good singer and that’s what mattered to his audience.  He didn’t think he was offending anyone.  When he was at the height of his popularity, the American Civil War had ended fifty years earlier, and though black entertainers were becoming known, they were not allowed the same access to the public as white artists.  Jolson paid homage to his black brothers; nobody saw it as mockery.  He played a character who knew how to tug at the heartstrings and the audience thought he did a very good job of it whatever colour he was. Disney probably copied Al Jolson to create Mickey, but there has been no outcry about mice in blackface.  There may have been black singers who were angry that Jolson was taking work that should have been theirs.  He would probably have said “Everyone’s gotta eat,” and they would have left it at that.  Worse damage was done to the image of blacks, by entertainers like Stepin Fetchit, who had no need to put on blackface.   Like many actors, he discovered that he couldn’t find work unless he played a stereotype.  Some actors with big noses only find roles as bad guys.  

As a post war child I saw some of these early performances repeated on television, though by then there had been some breakthroughs in the theatre and cinema by having blacks played by blacks.  Who could imagine that ”A Raisin In the Sun” could be presented by any other cast except one of colour?  It would not make sense if it was done in white.  Although blacks playing black in works from the 21st century is correct and admirable, in the beginning it was controversial, like the current discussion of handicapped actors playing roles as handicapped characters.    

I grew up in a place that never had a black inhabitant until the mid-nineteen sixties, so the earliest impressions I had of black people came from stereotypes like Amos & Andy, and old clips of Bill Robinson teaching Shirley Temple to tap dance.  I didn’t know if the radio actors who played Amos & Andy were white or black.  It wasn’t a question I asked myself.  I was aware that they poked fun at each other and their wives, like Ralph and Ed on The Honeymooners. They could have been like the Happy Gang, always good for a smile and a laugh, but I didn’t ask if their characters represented anything.  

With the taboo of blackface, brownface, or any other kind of cultural appropriation, people find other ways to step out of themselves on occasion.  They paint their faces blue, copy sci-fi  creatures, and make tails out of pool noodles.  But will some real alien come along and tell them off for being disrespectful?  Children who dress up for Halloween would be mortified to be laughed at.  They are paying homage to their idols, and to them it doesn’t matter if the skin is green, painted like a skeleton, or a pleasing shade of tan like Princess Jasmine.  Blackface in show business may have been a lame imitation, but it was never comical based solely on skin colour.  

In more innocent days, I was friends at school with a skinny native boy with a mop of unwashed hair and dirt-streaked skinny arms.  We played marbles on the pavement around the school building and counted our wins together before the bell sounded to end recess.  One day I came home with a yellow cats-eye cob that my friend had given me. 

 “That’s nice,” my mother said.  “Did you win it?” 

“No,” I piped up in my six year old voice.  “Fleabag gave it to me.”

“Who?” she turned to look down at me and gave me a hard stare that made me shrink.

“Fleabag,” I said, unsure of myself.

“That’s not a name,” she spoke sternly.  “He must have a name.”

“Everyone calls him Fleabag,” I tried to excuse myself.

“Well you are not to do it just because everyone does.  Better to find out his real name.”

My mother was a nurse and a democratic woman.  She had seen enough sickness and death to know what was good and important and what was wrong.  I was embarrassed by my thoughtlessness, but the event triggered a different and better way of looking at things. I have been allergic to nicknames ever since.

Recently, while researching a story set on the North West Coast of British Columbia, I had occasion to spin through many reels of microfilm from a small town newspaper printed in the early twentieth century. In these photographed broadsheets, I regularly came across evidence of racism that now jumped out as being on the wrong side of history, but were accepted back then as normal.  The ignorance passed down from one generation to another had prompted the Canadian government to pass race exclusion laws, though not all citizens were convinced.  World news was surprisingly well covered, with the latest in European battles, troubles in Ireland and Russia, as well as the latest Chaplin film at the Empire theatre, but between the ads for stomach remedies and cigarettes, there was an ongoing litany of small stories about men being killed in fishing, lumbering, railroading, drinking, and fighting.  

There was an alcohol prohibition in the province at the time, so the papers reported a constant parade of bootleggers before the judges.   Many of the accused were repeat offenders, bartenders who were only allowed to sell near-beer, workmen caught on a binge, an old widow selling spirits to buy food, and even a few policemen accused of selling contraband. There was a Chinese community who came off very badly in the papers, because the court reports were also full of opium cases.  The accounts gave the impression that all Chinese were were dope fiends, a title only slightly less respectable than running a laundry, a place where people took their dirty clothes even though they were nervous it could be an inscrutable front for nefarious dealings. Most Chinese had originally been brought to Canada as disposable labour to construct the railway that was supposed to bring prosperity, and it was assumed that they would leave when the job was done.  When they wanted to bring their families over, the government put on the brakes and imposed a head tax. 

I read about one or two blacks who ventured north from Seattle on the steamer and ended up in street fights prompted by racist remarks.  Locals fought with outsiders, even though all of them except the natives were outsiders themselves.  There were women of no fixed address who were shown the road out of town when an unseemly disturbance made their profession clear to the court judge.  There were backcountry men who went mad and tortured or killed their families, and there were stopovers by minor royalty.  Breathless reporters gushed over celebrated transcontinental biplane pilots who had touched down just long enough to refuel on their way to Alaska.  Both local articles and items picked up from the worldwide press, reeked of such blatant racism that a millennial would choke on his bubble tea. 

The Chinese workers that Canada had used to build the railway had done a good job but some complained there were too many of them.  But then in the First War,  the government imported eighty thousand young Chinese men, destined to be shipped to European War to work as sappers, were quarantined and trained at William Head in Victoria.  There were riots and escapes from the harsh conditions.  Politicians wanted a 2% cap on Orientals.  White women were not allowed to work for Chinese employers. Chinese were required to sit in the balconies of movie theatres.   After the war, Canada passed the Chinese Expulsion Act,  which disenfranchised any resident Chinese.  Struck from the voters list, they did not have the right to join professional organizations as doctors, accountants, dentists, or nurses.  Since they weren’t officially recognized and certified they weren't allowed to work.   

During the same war, 8,500 civilian prisoners, most of Ukrainian descent, were arrested and held in internment camps across the country, only because they were originally from Eastern Europe.   In certain periods Canada encouraged immigration, but only accepted the right kind of people, Western Europeans mainly, preferably women who could be brides.  Germans and Russians were not welcome.  

There were the Sikh  passengers who arrived in Vancouver on the Komagata Maru, who after two months at anchor, were sent back to India to be arrested and shot. The official word was that “having been accustomed to the conditions of a tropical climate, immigrants of this class are wholly unsuited to this country.”  

While researching the Miller Bay Indian Hospital near Prince Rupert, I discovered that the site was originally a farm belonging to a family called Miller or    Müller, who were believed to be Swiss, but because they spoke German their property was confiscated.  

I knew there was worse to come in more recent history.  The internment of the Japanese in the Second War, had traumatized the parents of some of my schoolmates.  They told me their parents had been lied to and robbed, and never felt safe again in Canada.

In 1936 a test case before the Supreme Court about a bar in Montreal refusing service to blacks, concluded that it was in the interest of good morals and public order to refuse service.  

Canada’s own aboriginal population were herded into residential schools to “civilize” them, and they were not given the right to vote until 1960.  The last racially segregated school in Canada closed in 1983, which brings us close enough to the present to make it clear that there has always been racism in Canada.

 It used to take an invasion or revolution to shake up the structure of society,  but the ubiquity of the digital revolution has accelerated the exposure and drawn up battle lines.  With a sense of history that only stretches back to the last ephemeral trend, new generations might come along and ask, “Who are these guys and why did they do that?”  They will learn that the world is, and always has been, full of good, bad and questionable characters.  The bad ones are more fascinating but their stories have already been told, so the sleuths go looking for chinks in the armour of those who have been judged to be good.   They want to stick their lances in to see what spills out while the spectators huddle round pretending to be aghast.   These pokers and prodders are not looking for context, but sound bites, the more shocking the better.  Online scandal-hungry communities attract like-minded moral bankrupts to their flame, until their indignation becomes a hurricane and causes a shift in the current moral compass.  Another figure in history is stripped of his good intentions and pushed naked into the same human swamp that the critics inhabit.    

When the ego-inflated, indignant boots of online crusaders march in, schools, streets and parks are renamed and statues are pulled down. This general or that governor had views he shouldn’t have and needs to be stricken from the record.  Every person, living or dead, is fair game for the lawnmower of public opinion.  There are reasons that states are not governed by public referendum.  People are too easily manipulated.  The title of demon of the month moves as fast as fashion.  As Heidi Klum would say, “One day you’re in. The next day you’re out.”   

 Collectively, Canada likes to think of itself as a tolerant country, though we are made up of people from every part of the globe who landed on someone else’s native shore and imposed our way of life on them.  We are no different from the tribes from the steppes who swept over Asia, or the Normans who invaded England. 

In Canada the English prevailed, so colonial tactics were adopted to subdue the troublesome natives by selling them alcohol, infected blankets, and by stealing their children.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the imperial machine was at full power.  Canada was sparsely populated and needed people, so various schemes were cooked up to attract the right immigrants.  Unlike the now hollow American boast of “give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses”, Canada tried to be selective and open its borders to those who might settle successfully and participate in the experiment.  They didn’t want dreamers or idealists, revolutionaries or Bolsheviks; they didn’t want Chinese, Italians or Slavs who would stay on after their backs were broken.  Canada offered free land as bait, but the conditions were harsh.  There was a high failure rate and many could not fulfill the conditions to keep the property they had been given, but they were allowed to stay on as wage slaves.   

Politicians have always pandered to voters and given voice to xenophobic theories by playing on the insecurities of populations struggling to make a living, who want someone to blame for their condition.  The implication behind these ideological campaigns is that the doors to the country should have been closed behind their ancestors who were the last of the good immigrants.  

Canadians are fed pablum half-truths about their country and its history, so it is no surprise when a long forgotten shoot of racism sprouts from the stump of a tree that was supposedly cut down long ago. We can never remedy the mistakes of the past, but before we trumpet ourselves as a do-gooder immigrant haven who never had a bad thought for anyone, we need to be aware of what we have already done.     

If others are offended by cultural practices that are no longer acceptable, we need to listen to their reading of the situation, but we should not be too hasty about throwing everything onto the fire.  If blackface intends no harm, is not meant as a joke or a mockery, there should be nothing wrong with playing a part that pays homage to another race or culture.  

I watch a lot of Italian television.  There is a popular evening program in its ninth season that challenges contestants to imitate popular singers from the past, a mix of Italian, British and American artists.  These are not parodies, but genuine attempts by the performer to create the magic of the original.  It is difficult even for an olive skinned Italian to be Louis Armstrong, early Michael Jackson, or Donna Summer without some sort of makeup.  If the contestants are from the south of Italy, some need thick makeup to pull off a convincing Adele, Mick Jagger, or Taylor Swift.  There have been both tanned and powdery white versions of Lady Gaga.  The point of the performances is not to make fun of the popular singers, but to be as true to the originals as possible, to find the soul in the song.  There is racism in Italy as there is in all countries, and some comic sketches that poked fun at ethnicities have been recently censored by the state media.  It could be said that the makers of this content didn’t understand at the time, the sin that was being committed, but more likely they went for the low-comedy cheap laughs.  However, as they do with food, Italians take music seriously, and musical interpretations are not intended to be disrespectful, hurtful, or insensitive.  Italy has its own painful racist history, and a present that finds its shores the principal landing point for African migrants, so it is in the thick of coming to terms with its own multiracial society.  In the 1950’s a man who moved from Sicily to Milan was called an immigrant.

The US news reported recently that Orange County’s John Wayne Airport should be renamed because he made racist remarks in his time.  Actors are often unreconstructed examples of humanity, and some promote ideas which are questionable at best, but actors like all of us, are human and sometimes have bad judgement.  Perhaps the solution to constant cultural revision is never to put anyone’s name ever again on a building, a street, a park, or airport, and that they be called building A, B, or C.  Even that might be exclusionary to those who don’t use the western alphabet, so we are reduced to symbols like an illiterate people.  

There have been bad players in history, and their errors have been pointed out, but there is a mistaken assumption that everyone in the past should have acted according to our modern standards.  Dredging up forgotten sins and passing judgement on them, doesn’t serve the present or the future.  The motto for the Province of Quebec is “Je me souviens” which translates as “I will remember,” and is good advice for the entire country.  We should not forget the past, because it explains how we got to where we are now.  We can never be free from our history, nor should we be.  

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Worlds Collide

When a sperm fertilizes an egg, one world merges into another to create the miracle of a new entity.  But eggs and sperm are not the only organisms with a propensity to merge; all cells have needs and influences.  Viruses, bacteria and medicines circulate through our bodies provoking electro-chemical reactions, keeping what is needed and discarding the rest. If there is an overwhelming invasion, a serious trauma, or disease and things get out of hand, the body calls in a bigger army of antibodies to keep order.  All cellular encounters have an element of invasion and surrender that result in the establishment of new hierarchies like animals joining a pack.
When the government of East Germany tottered and the wall came down, the former Soviet appendage collapsed into the West.  Perestroika looked better than another failed five-year plan, and those in the East saw the West with its flashy Mercedes success as rightly theirs.   They wanted what other Germans had, even though the Westies had worked hard for their elevated standard of living.  The East had stood still in time, chunks fell from buildings, and the wartime infrastructure was crumbling.  When the rudderless government capsized into the West, it was joyous and but painful re-birth.  And like the right sperm meeting the right egg at the right time, the invasion and surrender was difficult but inevitable.    Those in the West weren’t thrilled to be overrun by job-hunting banana-hungry Easties, but in the end all Germans were forced to resign themselves to the new reality. 
As European countries fight to keep their Union alive, there has never been a longer period of freedom from war and want.  The illusion of wealth and stability looks attractive to those on the outside who have been crippled by war and corruption.  From Africa to Asia, there are many governments who can’t or won’t help their citizens to lead dignified productive life.  The old are resigned to stagnation and the young look North and West, lured by a wonderland of things that appear to be available to everyone.  Unfortunately, many young souls with dreams don’t know that the Mediterranean is not a river, and that they will not be able to swim to the other side.  In North Africa they are held hostage by traffickers until there is nothing left to squeeze out of them, and are then herded onto sinking boats that are pushed off toward Europe.  Decrepit fishing boats and cheap inflatable rubber craft are draining the youth of Africa and the Middle East into Europe.  Some who arrive are disillusioned that they can’t have everything as soon as they hoped, but many make a decent life for themselves, coping with nostalgia and the slings of assimilation like millions of migrants before them.   These days the current of population flow is directed North and West, though someday it may flow in another direction. 
The merging of different worlds happens by osmosis.  There are clashes along the way, resistance and insistence, but the new order becomes a historical fact.  When the Ice Age retreated and Cro-Magnon man took over from Neanderthals, it was a process of assimilation and elimination until modern man prevailed. 
If there is ever an arrival from space, the two worlds will fight and make peace and fight again until a hybrid species emerges by incorporating useful qualities from both parties.  Every new generation sheds its parental skin of outmoded preconceptions and finds no barriers to accepting new realities.
 The principles of one entity merging into another can occur on a human emotional level.  When people first meet they use invisible antennae to look for signs of aggression or agreement.  People may become friends and participate in a complex dance of two souls who have not merged on a cellular level.  If the parties are pulled toward a more intimate bond, their exchange of genetic material and strong sense of unity epitomizes one world melting into another.   Like a sperm knocking on the shell of an egg, East Germans going West, or Africans going North, the tendency to merge personally and socially, dictates the path we need to take if we wish to survive.  Isolation is death. 
But Nature has some twisted tricks up her sleeve because she favours attraction between unequal forces. As Darwin demonstrated, the invader doesn’t need to be strong nor the defender weak.  When worlds collide, the species that proliferates is the one that is most adaptable.     
If two similar worlds meet they can be like two suns or two male dogs, circling each other at a wary distance, looking for weaknesses to exploit.  If they are equally matched and engage in a fight for dominance there is the risk that they will destroy each other.  Nature prefers pairs made of disparate elements because their union produces more adaptable offspring than those of identical homogeneous partners.  There is no attraction in sameness; we were not mean to couple with ourselves. 
The universe is full of moons, planets and suns caught in the orbit of stronger powers, and this configuration makes for both stability and instability in the universe.  Being caught in an orbit is a delicate balance, too close and you burn up in the face of the sun, too far away and you become cold and lose the grip of gravity so that you fly off into empty space.  Our universe is an active environment that is governed by laws but it is subject to accident and coincidence, a grab bag of factors that can precipitate dramatic change.  The process of one nation merging with another is a minuscule illustration of universal inevitably.    It is not a bad thing, but a necessary process that propels us forward, an inevitable change that many struggle to accept. 

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Lingua Franca

Language. We all hear and learn words from a very early age. We learn to express ourselves by imitation and the realization that if we can name something we have some control over it. We absorb this vocabulary as a useful tool and we don’t think much about the words themselves very much, but we soon learn their power. Anyone who has been in a situation where they were surrounded by a language other than their mother tongue, will know the frustration and powerlessness of being without speech.

Words are a passion for me, and this has led me to learn languages other than English. I studied Latin, French & Spanish is school and tried like every other student to learn the foreign words as if they were new mathematical formulas to master; and like much of the math we study in school, I couldn’t see a way that these hard to pronounce words had anything to do with my real life. After graduation I started to travel, and soon wished that I had paid more attention in school. It was humbling to discover that a 2 year old could speak his language better than me, so I made a serious effort to learn and use more words.

After forcing yourself to speak a new language for a while, the easiest words just come out of the mouth without thinking – especially words with which we are all familiar. Nobody in North America has to rack his brains to come up with words like “adios, amigo, manana, rapido, or bueno”. Most of us don’t have to and make a complicated excavation of memory to know that “adios” is just another way of saying “goodbye”. It is from this point that I begin my theory of languages.

They say that children can learn a second language more easily than an adult, that a child is in a more receptive state and can absorb more new information. Adults tend to sort and categorize new experience into manageable compartments – an information filing strategy learned while growing up. It seems that when people try to remember something they pull it out of a drawer somewhere at the back of the brain, and that the useful organization of information can only be maintained by not mixing up the contents of these labeled information packages. Luckily the brain is more fluid than filing cabinet and we have the capacity to merge folders.

At some point in my language studies, having added a Greek, Italian and a bit of German to the languages I have lived in, I realized that categorizing a word in another language into the overall box of Non English Language, was a mistake. I began to learn words as if they were a part of my mother tongue. If I learned the word “casa”, I didn’t think of it as a Spanish word that means house, I thought of it as just another word that symbolizes “house”. I tried to eliminate the translation factor with the knowledge that when I see or hear the word “house”, I don’t first think of it as a word, but as an image - my house, the house where I live, the house where I grew up, my dream house, a composite image of a houses. Therefore when I hear the word “casa” I skip the step of thinking of it as a Spanish word that means house, but it bring up a visual image of a house. If I hear or read the word “spiti” which means house in Greek, I think of a house. Spiti is just another word in my vocabulary that symbolizes house. It doesn’t matter what language it is. In this way, I found language learning easier. Now if I hear a combination of words in another language, I can visualize what is meant without having to translate that phrase into English.

Therefore, I believe that the greatest error in language instruction is to re-enforce the natural categorization that happens in the adult brain. We shouldn’t study French, but study other ways of saying things using other words that just happen to be French.

This of course is a simple approach, and generally deals with just vocabulary, but the further we delve into any language we realize that differences in grammar are part of the rhythm and essence of the culture to which the language belongs. Sometimes this requires learning rules of structure but these, like any rules of language are only systems that have been developed to explain usage.

One of the first and most inexplicable pitfalls for an English speaker is to understand gender designations in another language. Why is the moon feminine in Italian and the sun is masculine? Again, rules have been proposed but rules are always broken, so in the end one is forced to imprint the idea of a feminine Italian moon onto the understanding of an Italian way of being. We could learn “la luna” by rote, but the knowledge sticks better if we think of the moon in its Italian incarnation as a beautiful mysterious female form. The key is to avoid translation and language separation and to think of all languages as one language. We human beings have developed an rich vocabulary to express ourselves.

My Greek teacher often emphasized that you can’t separate language from culture, and the more I know about languages and their cultures, I see that this is true. In the connected world of today, all cultures and languages are beginning to blend. As we come closer together, we understand each other better and realize that there is only one language and it is not English or French, or Italian, or Russian, but a plethora of words which stand for ideas, feelings, objects, hopes and dreams. It would be best for us all if we understood each other.

Saturday, August 04, 2007

Generation Y Work

Following on the habit of naming successive generations, the Y generation follows generation X and the baby boomers. Each has its own attitudes, outlook and morals. Generation Y has a problem in the workplace. The economy is good, jobs are available in a host of occupations which would leave a generation X’r jealous that he only had an option of one McJob or another to choose from. Generation Y members have benefited from the shortage of workers and are hired for jobs for which they have little skill and are poorly suited.

The generation born in the 1970’s have been coddled and rewarded for mediocre behaviour because while they were growing up it was considered cruel to hurt anyone’s feelings by judging someone on his merits. All were rewarded equally, leaving those who were lesser lights, believing that they were gifted. Certainly it is wrong to crush all self esteem with unnecessary criticism, but as often happens in American, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, and all criticism became wrong. Therefore a generation has grown up and entered the workforce who believe that all work is beneath their worth, that they only are required to make a token effort, that they are not rewarded handsomely enough for their lackluster performance, and that even showing up for work is an imposition on their specialness. If they are not coddled as they expect to be, they leave, often with no notice or thought to what their sudden departure does to their colleagues. This tactic works for them as long as jobs are plentiful, but because they have no sense of history, they act as though their actions have no effect on anyone else, and least of all do they understand that their own history will follow them.

This self centered attitude – which is common in the youth of any generation – will be more difficult for the Y’s to overcome, because they are a generation which has been nurtured on the need for environmental cleanup, the rightness of anti-racism, the spread of technology and other “One World” philosophies which are all in direct contradiction to their personal attitudes. These 20 somethings exclude themselves from this One World through technological devices that don’t require eye contact, smell, touch or taste. They want to be paid well so that they can consume the products whose manufacture makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. They grew up with children of all races but wouldn’t marry one. In the workplace, they look out only themselves and pursue their advancement with a self-belief that defies proof and borders on the fanatical. When they don’t get their way they pout like spoiled children and blame everyone else for how unfairly they are treated. It never occurs to them that if they have rubbed everyone the wrong way and are called out for their behavior, that this has anything to do with them – it’s just their fossil boss who doesn’t understand them. What they will have to learn is that the world is not their indulgent mother – that it has no great love for them and than in the mass of humanity on this earth, they are nothing more than another grain of sand. There are always others who are more adaptable who can easily take their place.

It has been said that the workplace needs the technological skills of generation Y, since they are the only ones who understand the rapidly advances in this field. This is an insult to any person with normal intelligence. Nobody in any situation needs to be at the mercy of a petty tyrant like this who believes that only he has special powers and cannot be replaced. Technological skills are easy to acquire, children can learn and therefore so can adults of any age. Generation Y makes the fatal error of believing that they are unique and have some secret knowledge which gives them power and superiority, but in truth their special status is based on an illusion.

Generation Y like all other generations before them will grow out of their bubble, and it will take very little for that to happen – a few eye opening realities of life for which they have no coping skills, a world economic downturn, a little more experience of how the rest of the earth’s population survives, and they will wake up from their coddled existence. The great leveler of course, is time, and in a few short years they will be forced to deal with their own children who will ridicule everything that they as generation Y believed. Their arrogance will come back to bite them.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Why I am not vegetarian

When did primates begin to eat meat? Perhaps after they learned to harness fire and were able to cook meat so it became soft enough for uncured teeth to masticate and digest. In some areas of the world there isn’t much of the vegetable world to choose from. The tribes who lived in the Arctic had a short season to gather fruit, seeds and roots. If there was game all around them, and they observed carnivorous species surviving on meat, their logic must have led them to try meat on it’s own. Certainly a plentiful sources for meat was the sea, and with a hereditary knowledge that humans needed some fat to thrive, they added fish to their diet and found that they survived.
Meat eating probably developed from a need to use what was available to combat hunger. Vegetarians contend that we are more advanced that these primitive people and don’t need meat. In the richer countries there is a ready access to a variety of food groups, making it possible to live healthy without eating meat. Many people in the world don’t have the luxury of these choices. Somehow vegetarians believe themselves superior to meat eaters - hopefully this superiority only extends to those of us who have a choice.
I choose to eat meat, having passed many periods of a strictly vegetable diet, because it is a ready source of good protein. I was born with a digestive system that can make good use of the fat and protein for energy. I choose not to deny my biology.
There are those who don’t eat meat because they believe that killing animals is cruel. Depending on how the act is done this is more or less true. Death for any living thing is tragic but inevitable. We all die, animals die, and plants die.
Humans perceive life on a fairly limited level. Dogs experience the world differently from than we do, and so does every living thing. I subscribe to the hypothesis that just because we can’t sense something with our limited faculties, doesn’t mean that the thing doesn’t exist. We can carry on munching carrots deluding ourselves that nothing died and nothing suffered in order to feed us. But the carrot died, we interrupted its life cycle in harvest, pulling it up in the best of health. I accept that things die so that we can live. This is true whether I eat meat, or vegetables, or both.
I silently say grace with every meal to say thank you for everything which gave up its live so I could live. I don’t argue that vegetarians should change their ways, but I believe they are somewhat misguided. However, if being vegetarian keeps these people’s bodies and consciences clean, they are welcome to their folly. In all aspects of life it is important to remember that whatever we do or eat, we should do it in moderation, with an ever present awareness of what we are doing and why.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

The End of the Age of Plastic

Plastic as a word means malleable, but most of us think of an image when we hear the word - a bag, a cup, a container for something, a disposable thing. Plastic however is a petroleum product. Considering that petroleum is a non-renewable resource, we must begin to think of a world without plastic. What is now manufactured as a commodity as insignificant as paper, will sometime become a collector’s passion. Like a grandparent’s remark, “When I was young we walked everywhere,” our present use of plastic will become a curiosity of the past.

It is difficult to predict what might replace plastic as a major material in the future, but whatever that is, we must consider in our commerce driven world, what is can replace it and remain economically possible. We probably already use plastic’s replacement but it has not yet replaced the oil based cheapness of the real thing. Once we imagine plastic as a rare commodity, we have to consider what else in our lives will have changed as an effect of scarce petroleum, including limited short hop mobility, altered work situations, the import and sale of cheap products, alternative heat and light sources. This slow demise of the petroleum culture will cause a major shift in the lifestyle of North Americans. Although we won’t return to a savage existence, we will be forced to subsist on a smaller scale, in a more world conscious way. The items we use in everyday life will also change. Will we return exclusively to stone, wood, metal, glass and plant materials?

The tools we think we need to accommodate our daily lives, will always employ basic materials, either renewable or unlimited. We may presume that light, wind, rock, earth and water are unlimited but not renewable options. What grows on earth is a renewable resource – plants, animals & trees. We will become more dependent on both of these resource options in the future and we will find ways to exploit them.

Plastic may have a different fate. Instead of being the throwaway material of today, it will return to specialized use which exploits it’s nominal value – that of malleability. It is possible that plastic could be used almost exclusively for replicating living things like the human body. Our technology may advance to reproducing simulations of life from cells of anything that lives or once lived. Petroleum products, like plastic will simply become a rare catalyst in the construction of inventions that promise to assist our survival.

It staggers the imagination that the capabilities of a natural gift like petroleum, now squandered in products like shopping bags and trips to will be a thing we as grandparents will speak of with nostalgia.

Monday, July 31, 2006

Situational Awareness

Situational awareness is a term often used in aeronautical and military training, to instruct combatants and pilots to be aware of everything around them. It is a skill that is all too infrequently employed by much of the population in everyday life. Many people go about their daily lives without being aware of their surroundings or realizing what is happening around them. Situational awareness is like a mother’s claim of having “eyes in the back of my head”, but multiplied to include all of the senses. When walking down the street, many people unconsciously watch where they put their feet (and some don’t) and subliminally assess anyone coming their way – usually taking the measure of the person they are about to meet, and adjusting their reaction to the meeting on a sliding friend or foe scale. This instinct comes from the animal kingdom. We humans can fine-tune this simple scale into many tones on our way to making the decision about how to react to the approach of another. Do we ignore them, make eye contact, cross the street, or stop and speak to them?
Our awareness and reaction is also influenced by the general surroundings. Is it day or night, am I on familiar or strange territory, are there other people present, what are the cultural habits of the place I am? We use this skill of situational awareness to pass safely, to communicate whatever it is that we need and want. We need this skill in order to learn.
When one is begins driving lessons for example, an instructor my raise the point of situational awareness, because it is critical to safe driving. Bad driving is a perfect example of how many people aren’t observant, which results in an inability to judge situations and act appropriately. The worst case of a driver with lack of situational awareness is a driver with tunnel vision – he drives straight ahead, looking only in front of him - but not too far, he doesn’t look side to side, or use his mirrors, but drives his car like he has no control except stop and go. The tunnel vision driver may suffer from compromised motor and observational skills, so that staying inside one lane of traffic puts him at the maximum of his capabilities. He fears that if he looks sideways or back, he may lose control of his forward motion, which in his state of reduced capability, may happen. Some people find it difficult to multi task, but driving is a multi-tasking skill. Apart from some differences in speed and capacity to retain information levels, humans can be trained to multi-task. A new mother must learn this out of necessity. To multi task while driving is the ability to control the speed & direction of a vehicle, while being fully aware of what is happening on the rest of the road, and trying to anticipate what might happen. Some drivers believe that the skill of multi tasking while driving is eating, drinking coffee, applying makeup, window shopping, talking on a cell phone, while changing lanes, gears and radio stations. These dangerous habits would be better substituted by thinking about where they want to go on the road, what is the best way to arrive, driving responsibly with awareness that there are other vehicles on the road whose drivers have their own agenda.

One important point about situational awareness is that those who lack it may be not only a danger to themselves, but also a danger to others. What will happen to a child whose mother isn’t aware of the child’s needs? What would happen in traffic if all drivers thought in only forward mode? What would happen if we perceived all who approached us as an enemy and reacted violently toward them with no reason?

Situational awareness also can be used to maintain our own physical and mental health. A doctor will often tell a patient to pay attention to his own body, repeating this obvious reminder because it is too often ignored. When an obese or thin person looks in the mirror, do they see the truth, and do they act on what the objective truth of their condition? If a person experiences constant headaches, do they examine their life and try to discover if the cause is mental, physical, environmental, or do they just take a pill to cover up the pain?

There are three stages of situational awareness – the perception of situation, the placing of the perceived factors on our own personal scale, and the decisions we make about our actions in this situation which usually involve projecting any situation into the future – how will this situation play out.

Several factors figure into our ability to react appropriately to any given situation. The first is experience, the second is knowledge, the third is processing velocity, and the fourth is the degree of transparency of any situation.

In the absence of professional counseling, many people are unable to apply the concepts of situational awareness to their own life choices, and many people subvert the obvious. We know by information received from the outside world, from our own experience that smoking is bad for us, yet we may carry on with an addiction like this in spite of all information that it is harmful. Overeaters continue to overeat and either admit that they do this, or they delude themselves about what and how much they eat, yet continue to make unhealthy choices. Even in illogical situations like this, situational awareness plays a part. We may consider our life to be valueless so we eat, drink, & smoke to comfort ourselves while we pass the time. We all die sooner or later, and if the future doesn’t look particularly bright, we chose to indulge ourselves along the way. This bleak perception of the future is particularly prevalent in the young. Negation of the future is a common state in adolescents and young people – they don’t often see themselves as capable of great things or their world to be heading for great things – so why try, better just enjoy the ride – even if it leads to their own destruction. It is particularly damaging when this nihilistic approach is carried into full adulthood. These people may or may not be aware of the state that their negative beliefs have brought them to, but willful self-destruction is not a tenet of life – it is anti life.

Our society doesn’t encourage people to think for themselves, nor to examine the causes of things that happen around them. Governments know that people are more easily controlled if they are accustomed to being told what to do. This creates a situation in which people often don’t know how to react unless someone else tells them. People feel comforted when they can easily categorize an event into a belief box that allows them to assimilate the event, and righteous when that particular box is a widely held belief in their own culture. They feel unified and validated even if they are mistaken, having lost the personal skill of judging information for themselves. They are not encouraged to be aware, to think for themselves, to act of their own volition, to trust their own reading of a situation and act appropriately on what they know. When people have lost situational awareness their own survival is at risk. Many people live their lives so entangled in petty dramas that they lose sight of who they are, where they are going, and how to get there. Like the Tarot fool with one foot off a cliff, they don’t realize that their lack of attention to necessary things has severely compromised their survival.

Monday, June 26, 2006

The Poverty of Speech

While in the process of learning the Greek language, I was surprised that in the small village where I lived, many times when I asked for the correct word to describe something new, I was told an old word which I already knew. This is not because the Greek language isn’t as rich as other languages, but because in a village where people only need language to converse in their small circle, the same words are recycled to take on multiple meanings. There are complicated precise terms in any language, but most people have no need of them as they are too difficult to remember, and people think that their neighbours wouldn’t understand them. People have a tendency to speak in simple terms.
I once made the comment while in Italy, that Italian seemed like an easy language, but was reprimanded by a German speaker, who correctly pointed out that although the language may appear simple at first bloom, the more one learns, the more one realizes that Italian is as complicated as any other language.

Not only does a language have its idioms and dialects which are enough to stump any learner, but it also a plethora of words that are not heard on the street every day. Think of the English one uses in daily communication as compared to the English in scientific or technical writing. Someone who has studied a language in school would probably have an easier time deciphering technical terms than they would have understanding a grunted, idiomatic, fractured conversation on the street. One can always tell if a non-English speaker has learned the language from lessons or from the street, because his English is always more precise, even if no one on the street understands him.
Languages always evolve, but often this is for worse instead of better. I see nothing wrong with invented words if they describe something better. I see nothing wrong with the habit which has developed in the U.S. in recent years of using nouns as verbs, for example “How does this impact our budget?” Words change their meanings according to usage. How else does “bad” become good? Technology also adds words and these are necessary to describe entities which are new.

English has lessened its descriptive power stems from the tendency to limited vocabulary. A prime candidate for this in English is the word “get”. We use it so much that it must be accompanied by a multitude of helper words because by itself it means nothing. Try describing what “get” means to a foreigner. Get out, get busy, get by, get over, get through, get down, get back – the list is endless. All of these “get” phrases have better single words to describe the same thing but we don’t use them. Do we prefer the poorer “get” because “get” is more common, tougher, more street, or is it that in American society to show any sign of intelligence is considered an elitist weakness. This tendency to simplify things for whatever reason causes a language to lose words. Who nowadays uses “arise” for get up? We simply don’t have a word anymore for getting out of bed – the original word has disappeared.

Most people who speak only English tend to believe that English is some kind of mother language which is the best at describing everything. English is in fact a great thief of words from other languages which is one of the reasons it can be so rich. When one learns another language however, one begins to understand that English is poor in describing many things. An example of this is the word “love”. Other languages have several words for love which describe various states. English speakers blather on about how much they love their car / dog / McDonald’s hamburger, using the identical word “love” for their children or their spouse. The love for children and hamburgers are clearly not the same thing, so why then do we use the same word? Love has become catch all word which in the end means nothing.


The word “know” in English is another example of our laziness. Most other languages have one word for “know” in the sense of understand (do you know how to ski) and another word for “know” in the sense of be acquainted with. Not many people use the word “acquainted” anymore and would be thought old fashioned for doing so, but the word “know” by itself is imprecise.

So many of our words now depend on context for meaning. That is, you can’t understand what they mean unless they are used in a phrase which explains them. This leads to many words which either mean nothing by themselves or are essentially non-words like “get”. If a language fills itself up with non-words which depend on usage for meaning, the language loses its power.

Just as some people who a habit of over using expletives in conversation, the power of a word is diminished when it is used a filler, and lends nothing to the meaning of a particular subject. If we use the “F” word as our only adjective the shock value disappears.

Years ago when I emerged from the cinema after seeing “Quest for Fire” which was scripted with inflected grunts for words, I realized that our everyday conversations had not changed much in 10,000 years as I listened to comments about the film which consisted of “Yeah, mmh, huh, uuh, kinda, y’know, like, wow!