The Fallout, 3

Yes, Social Darwinism. Don't leave home without it. I am thinking of a brief encounter in the small laundry room of the first apartment building I ever lived in. I think I was still sixteen and my recently divorced mother had just sold the house and there we were, Mom and I sharing a two bedroom. In the laundry room was a young woman, nineteen or so who knew me from around, as the teenage Jesus Freak who wanted to save the world. I liked her okay, even though we didn't really know each other. She was more part of my brother's circle. She mentioned that she was living here sharing an apartment with her boyfriend, who was my brother's best friend at the time. "We're living in SIN! she said with a sardonic, rather sour hiss. As though it would matter to me. It didn't. Regardless of my belief in marriage and sexuality, which then was very biblical, and still remains unchanged, except that I now accept same sex marriage as part of the dynamic, I really didn't care how she lived, with whom, or what they did in private so long as it remained, well, in private. I was actually remarkably nonjudgmental for a kid my age, and especially for a fervent evangelical Christian. But those details never mattered to me. Around that time I had also been friends with a young couple sharing a small suite in a vintage house in the West End. We would sit and chat for hours over tea. I didn't care that they were living common-law. I just liked them. They were nice people, very hospitable and they were my friends. But this young woman was in no position to hear this sort of thing and there was no point wasting our time. Her mind was already made up that my mind would be already made up and you just can't talk sense or logic to some people,. Even at sixteen I seemed to know that. More recently, I knew a bogus Salvadorian Anglican priest (so sue me, Enrique Aguilar!) who insisted that sex is a right and every man needed to get himself a partner, otherwise he was somehow not fully human. Utter crap, of course, and I was already aware of how he was judging me, based on cultural bias and personal projection, as an inferior human for being asexual and uninterested in anyone. now, I don't know the dynamics around how either of those young couples first met and got together, but they likely did very well together as couples. Do I think they should have got married? It's none of my business. I have long believed in monogamous marriage as a healthy norm, but people are going to do whatever the want or need to do, and I am not going to judge someone based on their sexual expression, as long as pets and children are safe. But this attitude of sexual gratification as an entitlement? That is part of the damage brought on from the Sexual Revolution, which by the way, needed to happen, but, oh, look at the fallout! As we all know, last Monday, a sexually-frustrated loner who couldn't get laid took his rage out on ten innocent people in Toronto whom he ran over and killed in his rented van. Another casualty of the Sexual Revolution, especially porn culture and all the misogyny that comes with the package. I just quickly looked up incels, or involuntary celibates online, and very briefly I got all I feel I need to know. At they're most innocuous they are socially maladroit men who simply don't have the skills to connect with women, nor, well, with anyone else. At their most dangerous, they are manifestations of rape culture who believe that they are owed as a right to get laid. Life supports for a penis, and not much else. And those are the ones who threaten and will become violent. What saddens me is what a product of Social Darwinism this all is, and of how we have become so pervasively sexualized as to believe, many of us, that our validity is in our sexuality: of how many partners we have, how often we get laid, how good we look, etc. It's all very shallow thinking of course, but when you add to this injury the insult that if you are not getting any then you must be a socially and evolutionarily flawed loser, then that just turns this all into one bitter and horrid mess. There appear to be no real supports for such people who fall through the cracks, not for being unattractive but for being such pathetic idiots who need validation and support. We also really need to reevaluate the exaggerated importance that is placed on sex and romantic pairings and come up with a new formula for what it means to be human: something that involves such adjectives as kind, compassionate, just, loving, and pick any one. We really need to get out from under this cruel shadow of Darwinist competitiveness. We need to learn how to be there for one another. We need to learn how to validate ourselves and one another in ways that are not completely concerned with sex. But the most successful among us, like the big trees in the Monteverde Cloud Forest that support the vines and other plants, also have to be prepared to offer their lives as support and ballast to those who are weaker. We are all interdependent, and no one should have to welter under the stigma of loneliness. We have to start supporting one another.

The Fallout, 2

At some point in our human development it seems we became more like chimpanzees and less like bonobos. Bonobos, as many of us already know, are the small, peaceful and relentlessly horny siblings to the chimps. They would be the primate hippies, make love and not war. Chimpanzees, like humans, are notoriously warlike and murderous to their own species. My guess that hunter-gatherer societies tend to be more bonobo and agricultural and post-agricultural societies are more chimp. I don't think that it's as simple as just saying that this is the way we are and we are never going to change. One of the interesting features of our humanity is how mutable, or how changeable we really are. When it suits our convenience. Intense competition seems to exist at all levels: in families, friendships, marriage and romance, work, business, entertainment. It is vicious, it is intense, dizzying and ruthless. It also suggests the Darwinist view of nature, which really is a derivative of the Industrial Revolution: that nature is one seething cauldron of different life forms all in perpetual conflict and competition for survival and to thrive. Everything is at war. What an ugly, sad and depressing concept. I also don't believe in it. As I wrote elsewhere on these pages, in my last time in Monteverde, Costa Rica, I saw the opposite: life forms supporting and sustaining one another, as in the way that trees supported vines and epiphytes and other life forms. Much like the intense cooperation that is essential to human survival in hunter-gatherer societies. This is an idea we need badly to re-embrace. Otherwise, our lives under capitalism are simply going to further degenerate as more and more people fall through the cracks, unable to do well in the cruel and pitiless game that substitutes for life. There is something about being competitive that makes people ugly. There is no kindness in being competitive. No mercy. No compassion. Absolutely no love. In fact, all the qualities and features that make us beautiful and lovely are absolutely absent from this momentum of competing. In order to win, to get ahead, we are expected to make ourselves less than human. This eventually hardens us, puts to death our conscience and we all by default turn into monsters. This is the fallout of inequality. I remember how, sixteen years ago, the newly-minted Liberal government of my province completely gutted our social services system, and how many more fell through the cracks and ended up homeless, in some cases dead. Very little was done by staff or unions to correct things. No one wanted to risk their employment. Because of selfish fear they simply closed their eyes and looked away as they became rubber stamps authorizing what could easily be considered one of the most egregious assaults on human rights here since the Japanese Internment during the Second World War. This selfish fear is deadly, dangerous and toxic and if we are really going to heal as a society, then more of us are going to have to start taking some very major risks. Standing up for what is right is not easy and it can be a hazard to one's career and even to one's life. But someone has to do it, and it needs to happen fast, before we all get flushed down this toilet.

The Fallout, 1

Economic inequality is a major contributing cause to collective trauma. This, I'm afraid, has almost always been with us, or, since a lot of us stopped being hunter-gatherers. I am not glorifying primitive life, by the way, Gentle Reader, neither am I a fan of the Paleo diet. Hunter-gatherer societies may exert a certain quaint charm and magnetism to us over-civilized dolts, but really, give me flush toilets, toilet paper, long lifespans and reduced infant mortality, any old day. On the other hand, we have the ravages of social hierarchy and classism and casteism to contend with and the kind of arrogance and snobbery that comes with that kind of thinking still wreaks its damage. It's really a choice between Kim Kardashian and Jane Goodall. In all fairness, I know next to nothing about the former, and there is absolutely nothing that I have heard about that shallow and unpleasant woman that would appeal to me. But Jane Goodall? Now there is someone worth knowing! But even Jane Goodall has done rather well in life and has likely always been generously remunerated for her pains taken with wild chimpanzees. (she doesn't appear to have much to say about bonobos, unfortunately.) So, it isn't just all about social class. It's all about money. I just listened to a brief video of Ms. Goodall, who mentions that the chimps war over territory, but humans make war about money. And this is always what divides us. Hegemonies of greed and avarice, the reluctance, the downright refusal to share the wealth. And people suffer. Millions and millions suffer needlessly and enormously because of this greed. Those of us who get shut out get judged and blamed by the ones who make it, and it is small wonder that you have so many desperately poor on our streets suffering from addictions. This is how many of us cope with being shut out, not belonging, not being wanted. I have managed to stay free from addictions, myself, but I suppose that my intense spiritual and religious life, to many, would appear as a kind of addiction. I cannot think of how else I could cope. But at least I also have my health, unlike many who suffer around me. This selfish and miserly attitude towards resources has created so many problems and now we have this crisis of homelessness that is not about to go away. It's even harder than getting rid of bedbugs! Except you don't exterminate people for being homeless, though I suspect there are a few rich bastards around that wish this could happen. What is particularly galling is there are enough people around stupid and selfish enough to go on electing conservative governments that enact such policies as help widen the gap and plunge even more hapless folk into misery. If you lived in Ontario during the nineties under Mike Harris' Progressive Conservative government, or here in BC under Gordon Campbell's Liberals in the early two thousand, then you will know exactly what I am getting at. under both governments, the homeless populations in each province swelled exponentially. You cannot legislate compassion, but compassion is what we need if we are to recover as a society.

Closing The Divide, 21

Does the Divide truly need closing? I think in some ways yes, particularly in terms of economic disparity. Do we all need to be filthy miserable rich? No, but we all deserve to have enough. Should some people earn more than others? I don't know. I believe strongly in the living wage. I am also concerned that some "earn" far in excess of their needs, and in effect, are thus robbing the poor. Should a doctor earn more than the Filipina lady who cleans the office toilets? No. They should earn the same. Both involve unpleasant labour that puts personal health and safety at risk, and both are working towards public health and sanitation. Okay, Gentle Reader, I will give you five seconds to stop screaming and whinging. There, are you quite done? Are you over it? Okay...Now please keep in mind that the lady who cleans your toilets just might have practiced as a doctor in Manila. Okay... another five seconds to stop screaming, dears. Are you over it yet? Very good. If we are going to seriously consider social and economic justice then maybe we could start by reevaluating how we see and value work. We do love to play favourites. We have a fetish about money as being in itself a value. We have this mentality that the more you train for a position, and the more education it requires then of course you should be compensated accordingly. So then, a psychiatrist with a private practice can rake in a six figure salary while the Filipina woman who works at the cash till in muy local Shoppers' Drug Mart has to settle for minimum wage, or only a little better, but not a living wage. Well, have you ever tried working in the service and retail industry? It is not easy or pleasant work and you constantly have to cope with J. Idiot Public on one side and F. Monster Management on the other. And you are often going to have a family to feed. Regardless of how we value different kinds of work, professions, trades or occupations, we have to start thinking more in terms of each worker playing a vital role in the wellbeing of their communities, making each worker, regardless their position, valuable and irreplaceable. Should a waitress in a donut shop be raking in three hundred g's a year? No. And neither should a dentist. I am sick to death of this dumb brainless thinking that assumes that remuneration equals value of work and quality of performance. If each worker was valued for themselves as humans of worth and dignity, then we would also value the work they do, no matter how humble or how lofty. In fact, we would probably ditch altogether this nonsense of some occupations being more or less humble than others. Likewise with the guys operating the garbage trucks. They perform an essential public service. So, I am proposing that in our schools, our education systems, and in our news and entertainment media, that we really start to rework how we value work and remuneration. I still doubt that we will ever see real economic parity between the classes, but no one has the right to earn more than their share, and if our doctors, lawyers and CEO's would simply accept a significant pay loss, putting them in the upper middle income area of between 80,000 and 100,000 a year, then just maybe our lowest paid workers could actually get a decent raise to up around 40,000 to 60,000, and at least the Divide would be significantly narrowed. We really have to start working on this as a society, and this includes banks and bankers, as well, Gentle Reader. Let the Revolution begin.

Closing The Divide, 20

Travel has done a lot to help narrow for me the divide that I have commonly experienced between haves and have-nots. Here's why: Poor people don't travel. All our limited income goes to housing and feeding us with very little left over for disposable income. A lot of us don't even have savings accounts for the simple reason that there is nothing left to save at the end of the month. I have somehow managed to break out of that cycle, while still living on a low income. In fact, because my spending habits and priorities have always been on the disciplined and focussed side, all it's really taken is living in subsidized housing and Bob's Yer Uncle. After six years here in my building I suddenly was able to travel to Costa Rica, the year following to Mexico City, and elsewhere, year after year. Never, whether on the plane or in the hotel or bed and breakfast, do I meet persons as poor as me. Indeed, I have had to develop and refine some rather interesting new social skills in order to reach across the divide to the many fellow travellers I have met and befriended. It hasn't always been easy, especially at first. How do you tell someone that the only reason you can live in an apartment downtown in one of the world's most expensive cities, is by benefitting from the taxpayers' largess, that you are living in a social housing building full of people with mental health issues, the working poor, poor seniors and poor immigrants who are still recovering from refugee trauma? What are they going to think of you? Well, I suppose they are going to think whatever they want of me, but that is really more their problem than mine. I have learned to only explain whatever calls for explanation at the moment and to stay quiet about everything else. This is neither lying nor dissimulation, rather it is communicating strategically and effectively, and really, one of the golden rules of breaking ice and forming new friendships is in being a good, active and interested listener, which is a skill that my career as a mental health peer support worker has done wonders to help me hone and refine. Knowing when and how to punch above my weight also helps. Even though I couldn't afford to finish my postsecondary education, I have become so well read and well informed that my breadth of knowledge and my way of carrying and expressing myself indicates t least an advanced university degree. This has nothing to do with being a pretender or parvenu and everything to do with wanting to know my world, be informed, and carry myself with dignity and grace. It was also such encounters while abroad that have permanently cured me of wealth envy, which is something I never have really suffered from that much. I don't wish to categorize all better off folk as being shallow, though I still think that a lot of them are shallow, but I have found that they are all prisoners of their station in life. They need cars, personal smart phones, and to have everything planned to fit a two week itinerary. When I was in Monteverde, Costa Rica recently, I found myself feeling quite sorry for my obviously better off fellow visitors, whose reliance on pricey convenience actually prevented them from really integrating and getting to know the place they were visiting, much less the wonderful people who live there. Still, I found a lot of them to be interesting, even lovely people, and I do hope to see some of them again. I don't expect that I will ever enjoy their kind of income or lifestyle, but I don't care. I live not only well, but I live better than most people for my lack of things. This isn't to glorify grinding poverty, which itself presents an awful lot of problems, but perhaps a life of simplicity and integrity, where we can actually do more with less, and be more with less. We still need badly to close the divide and to share the wealth that is being flushed down the gold plated toilet of the One Percent. By the same token, we also have to know when to say "Enough", and work well and elegantly with the little that we really need, and to always find extra to share with others. This is something that the better off really need to learn. Those of us who are poor? Well, we need a bit more than we have, but we also have other sources of wealth that can never be bought or sold. And it is up to us to discover these riches, both in ourselves and in one another, just as it is the purview of the wealthy to really start to accept that they really own nothing, though almost anything can, and unfortunately, does, own them.

Closing The Divide, 19

There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no secret incantation that is going to cure us of our social and economic inequality. The one thing that needs to change the most, is least likely to change: this is our own selfish arrogance and our greed. There was the barmy hope in some quarters that greater wealth would help close the divide as we all share in the largess of economic prosperity, but the opposite is occurring. The greedy minority is hoarding and amassing all the more wealth to themselves and the rest of us end up with nothing. This could be from not having enough but from excess, from having too much. So we have monster mansions and luxury condos being built all over my city, and they are largely going to offshore ownership, and the wealth gets siphoned away from the quarters where it is already most lacking. Our governments are finally addressing this crisis of foreign greed, but it really seems like too little too late. I have never been wealthy. In fact, ever since my parents divorced in my early teens my life has been marked by chronic poverty and struggle. There are others like me. For whatever reasons we have never been able to improve our lives in the material sense, I think that a lot of us share certain characteristics in common: 1. bad luck; 2. poor timing; 3. lack of supportive connections; 4. lack of resources. 5. not being competitive. I'm sure there are lots of other variables, but these five will suffice. I had the bad luck of having two very selfish parents who wanted to put their own interests ahead of their children. I didn't share my brother's competitive personality, and this placed me at a huge disadvantage. I was also younger and more vulnerable. In grade twelve, when most high school students should be able to start planning for their post-secondary education and ultimately, how they are going to map out their adult lives, I was coping with a father who hated me so intensely and irrationally that I was kicked out of his home for the simple reason that he did not want me under his roof, and ended up in a small town with my mother and her boyfriend, and I ended up wasting a lot of energy there trying to protect her from getting beat up by him. Great way to launch your son's future, Mom and Dad. My mediocre academic performance (family stress made it difficult to focus on schoolwork) and lack of funds made post-secondary education a pipedream, so my only recourse was to move out on my own upon finishing high school and find whatever survival work I could in Vancouver, while coping with living arrangements shared with highly dysfunctional idiots. I worked, survived, found my way around, but after several years, I could muster but three semesters of community college before the need of paying the rent on time cancelled all other priorities. There was no one around to mentor or help me get into decently paid employment. Where were they? I don't know, but I was too chronically exhausted from simply coping year after year to know where to find them, and usually too tired and broke from low-paid employment and having to live on my own to be able to fund my way through night classes. I am not complaining by the way, just explaining what happened, especially for those of you who tend to judge others for not being able to measure up to your standard. I am not alone in my experience. There are many of us around, the working poor, and we are not all losers. However, our governments, and our Canadian culture, such as it is, tends to still be very conservative in many ways. There is nothing wrong with rewarding hard work, but on the other hand, there are lots of working poor who never get ahead and all for the five reasons I have already stated. What alone has helped keep me afloat has been faith and optimism, and a strong belief in non-material values. And this is what I am offering in this series, Gentle Reader: that along with working at ways of redistributing the wealth in ways that will work for everybody, that we also really start to examine and question the kind of materialism that marks us as shallow and selfish. Yes, we all deserve to share in the wealth. We also badly need to reconsider and remodel our lives and our notion of what it means to be human, especially if we are going to find our way out of this growingly unequal morass that global capitalism has thrown us into.

Closing The Divide, 18

I am certainly no expert, nor have I done a lot of reading about this subject. I have read a bit, but not really enough to cite my sources, so, as in many of my dear little rants on these pages, Gentle Reader, Caveat Emptor, even if I am writing from the heart, and in which case, Buyer, Really Beware! Regardless of the truthiness of my words, please do not mistake my ravings for empirical evidence. Do your own research. And send me a comment or two! I love comments! Provided they're not rude. What I am thinking about this morning, in the wee pre-dawn hours, is the fact that social inequality has been with us for a long time. But it hasn't always been with us. There wasn't much, if any, hierarchy among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and to this day, with hunter-gatherer societies that still survive in some of earth's remotest reaches, there is no hierarchy, or very little of what we would think of as a social pecking order. That came and developed with agriculture some ten to twelve thousand years ago, or so they say. I would imagine that in hunter-gatherer societies, the demands of survival are so high, and the survival margins so thin, that everyone has to pull their share. There are no committees. A deer needs to be hunted for food, so all the hunters, which is to say almost everybody, gets together. Nuts and fruits and vegetables need to be gathered. Out everyone goes to see what they can bring in to feed the tribe. Even if there is gender differentiation for these roles, they are still shared in by everybody. Now, in our technological, post-agricultural and post-industrial era, social inequality and hierarchy appear to be embedded in our collective DNA. We still have plenty of barmy monarchy lovers fawning over the British Queen and others with whom she shares her privileged DNA. In America, we have Hollywood and rock star royalty. And then there are the billionaires. Nothing buys status like money. Even the Short-Fingered Vulgarian, also known as the Dump, who squats in the Oval Office, the Great Deplorable himself, worth billions and practically buying the Us Presidency. He has all the good manners of a drunken cab driver. But he is filthy rich, and well, filthy! But I'm talking in extremes. This is everywhere. If you have money, you're important, otherwise, step to the back of the line. And if you don't recognize these absurd hierarchies, if you tend more towards being an anarchist or an egalitarian, as in my case, well, you could end up offending quite a few people. Really, Gentle Reader, even in the workplace I don't tend to brown-nose. I treat everyone the same: bosses, coworkers and clients. I try to be equally respectful towards all, but on the other hand I am not going to pretend that a fat bank account or professional status are going to make any of you matter more than I do, or my clients, or anyone else, for that matter. This isn't really about punching above my weight, but learning to see and love the humanity that we all share in common. Oh, yes, it's all very Kumbaya, and that makes it beautiful. We are all in this together, and I think that the more of us poorer folk embrace this and share this in our interactions with others, then just maybe we can see some change begin, and the ice will begin to crack as we warm this polar waste with our love.

Closing The Divide, 17

It is the small hours of the morning, Gentle Reader, and while waiting for my eggs to cook, I thought I would begin with mis pensamientos al dia, or my thoughts for the day. I am listening to the early broadcast of the Ideas program on CBC, it is not yet 5 am, and the topic today is food security. I did just hear one little thing that gives me a little encouragement. The subject of food becoming more expensive, and this being a good thing, was raised, and the guest emphasized the importance of keeping affordable food available to the poor. So, finally, they are admitting that we exist. It is quite interesting, this claim that Canadians spend, on average, ten percent of their income on food. I wonder to which Canadians they would be referring? In my case, the cipher is a lot higher, given that I, like a lot of Canadians, am not being paid a living wage, even with subsidized rent thrown in. I estimate that I spend around thirty percent of my monthly income on food. I eat carefully, and responsibly, and being vegetarian also helps. I am neither fat nor vegetarian, by the way, so please spare me the insulting insinuations of what happens when poor people like me have easy access to food. Being poor is not synonymous to being stupid or uneducated. But I really think that the eggheads in the CBC think tanks need to stop thinking of people in statistical categories and more as individuals. Perhaps this might also help them avoid their habitual embarrassment of falling into tokenism whenever they want the rest of us poor unfortunate bastards to feel included, or at least like we're part of the party. Even though we are not, nor ever will be. My eggs are about to start boiling so I will have to give this a bit of a rest for now. They are regular eggs, by the way, not free range nor organic, and that isn't because I don't like chickens but for the simple reason that this is all I can afford, if I want to eat eggs on a regular basis... it is now two and a half hours later. Breakfast was followed by a two hour nap (I got up a tad too early this morning). My non-organic and non-free range eggs were enjoyed with two slices of toasted homemade bread (made by me, of course, whole wheat, naturally) As well as healthy and enjoyable it is cheap and affordable because I pay around five bucks for a bag of ten pounds of flour. It could very well be GM, but I'm not going to worry about it. This is what I can afford. Likewise the jam, Smucker's strawberry purchased cheaper than the norm at No Frills, the Food Dollarama, and a slice of white extra old cheddar, my one real indulgence, but still affordable at thirteen dollars for five hundred grams. Eating well and decently is still possible, but it's all basics and in most cases I simply can no longer shop fair trade and organic for the simple reason that such ethical luxuries exist well outside of my budget. I am not complaining. As long as I keep my conscience in harness, I am actually pretty darn happy. I'd be even happier if I didn't have to restrict my conscience in order to live within my means, and I do plan to keep my conscience free and robust enough to keep writing these annoying little rants.

Closing The Divide, 16

Gentle Reader, I have for you some rather compelling evidence of just how bad this gap between haves and have-nots is becoming. There is a weekend morning program on CBC Radio One that I listen to on occasion, though I am having to admit that the silence of an early Saturday or Sunday morning is becoming more pleasurable for me by the week. Here is an example, pulled just from this morning. First, I will copy and paste my email to the host of this program called North By Northwest. Her name is Sheryl McKay (so sue me, Sheryl!): "Would it be possible for during the Sun Run to also announce changes in bus routes? Oh, that`s right, your target audience is all well off and they all drive cars. Well, maybe for those of us who aren`t well off and do not drive cars, and still condescend to listen to your program? Some of us would like to get to church on time. Oh, that's right, you're all atheists. Some of us have to rely on public transit. Oh, silly me, you would be absolutely mortified to be associated with members of the lower orders, such as your humble listener. Sorry to trouble you. Thanks Please start including the poor in your programming. By pretending that we do not exist, you insult not only us, but yourselves, also. Aaron" Of course, Sheryl never responds to my correspondence, I don't know if it's because she is thin-skinned or just doesn't give a shit about the poor people her program and other CBC programs studiously ignore day after day. What makes this so insulting? Well, D-uh! this happens to be public radio, Darling. And being public radio means that it is tax-payer funded, and you know something else, Gentle Reader? Here in Canada, the land of fairness and opportunity, even the poor pay taxes. Maybe not as much as others, but we still shove out our share and for this reason we also have a reasonable expectation that we are going to be included on our Public Broadcaster: not merely as tokens (this is already a very common insult that is perpetrated by the CBC on members of the LBGTQ community, aboriginals and people of colour), but as full and participating members of society. I have recently also left voicemail messages to our local weekday morning and afternoon programs on this theme: The Early Edition, and On The Coast. There appears to be among the program directors, broadcasters, hosts and producers of these programs a tacit assumption that there type of programming is exclusively for persons of these characteristics 1. generally but not exclusively white, and quite honestly Chinese, South Asians and Filipinos who have "made it" are increasingly represented sort of as "Honorary Caucasians." 2. always middle and, preferably, upper, middle class, 3. University graduates, preferably with at least a master's degree; 4. They own their own homes and hopefully live in one of the better neighbourhoods; 5. they are all car owners; 6. And they all live with White Upper Middle-Class Guilt. It would seem by the nature of the daily programming that none of the CBC's audience ever uses public transit because they have to (only to show everyone how virtuous they are for polluting a bit less); none of them live in low-end market rentals or in government subsidized housing (as I do); and they can all afford to, and often do, eat out at high-end restaurants and attend expensive symphony and other concerts at the Orpheum or Chan Centre. Whenever poor people are mentioned on their programs, we are always referred to as "The Other", or as a societal problem that needs somehow to be solved. Well, CBC, I would like us to treat this blogpost as an open letter of protest and I will be sending many of you the link. Happy Earth Day! Consider yourselves publicly shamed!

Closing The Divide, 15

I imagine, then, that personal empowerment is the way forward in closing the divide. We have to become as independent as possible from the largess of the One Percent, while simultaneously claiming and getting our share of the goods. Not an easy balance to strike. I remember this from during my three and a half years on basic welfare, from 1999 till late in 2002. Not an easy time and I was emotionally exhausted from what I came to call my Thirteen Year Nightmare, which ran roughly from 1986 to 1999. I did not have the resources to work full time, being rather fragile and exhausted, but I did what I could, though mostly I just collected welfare and painted, went for long walks and spent time with what few friends still remained for me. I cannot think of a time in my life when I felt more disempowered. I survived, and somehow always managed to eat okay without having to rely on charity, though it wasn't without a cost: no phone, no bus transportation, and only what clothing I could find in free boxes or very cheap second hand. I went without certain foods in my diet, and I think being vegetarian and living in the Commercial Drive area of Vancouver, where food prices are lower, also helped. My rent was also cheap, twenty-five dollars less than the maximum shelter allowance that welfare gave at the time, and so, in their enduring generosity, the ministry deducted twenty-five dollars from my survival benefits. I somehow got by. The provincial ministry was becoming increasingly mean-spirited and cruel, with the expectation that anyone still on welfare had to be relentlessly hectored into finding employment, whether they could cope with it or not, and that others who refused to do this would be thrown off of assistance and onto the street. That was when our homelessness crisis really kicked in, with a spike of almost four hundred percent, and it's only been getting worse in the last sixteen years that have followed. When my horrible financial aid worker became quite rabid and vicious, I left her two angry and long messages on her voicemail, fired her, and demanded to speak to her supervisor, who to my surprised, turned out to be a person of incredible insight and compassion. My file was changed, I was transferred to a different worker, whom I liked, and basically I was left alone for another year or so while I figured out what my next steps would be. I still had to do something to empower myself, so I accepted available subsidized housing when my name came up, began seeing a psychiatrist to help me untangle the weird and complex weave that my life had become, entered a job-training program, then found employment. I have been consistently employed now for going on sixteen years. I still live in BC Housing, where I pay even less rent now that I am semi-retired and collecting a small bit of my pension (though I still work four days a week.) My situation is far from perfect, and not what it could be, but I have had to play the cards I was dealt, and I believe I have played them well. I am also in the habit of voting during elections, and even if my selected candidates rarely get elected, it still reminds me that I have a voice and this empowers me to use it, and to also hold accountable other elected representatives, up to and including sometimes the prime minister. This still isn't Shangri-La. Our sidewalks, here in one of the richest cities in one of the world's wealthiest countries, are still choked by homeless and beggars. Housing is still the default purview of the rich, because almost no one else can afford to live here. And our prime minister is trying to ram an oil pipeline down our throats that will likely do more to hurt the environment than fatten our economy (which is already doing rather well, please and thank you!) So, Gentle Reader, my point is? Quite simply, that in order to effect any change that we want to see in the world, we have to begin with ourselves and with where we are and with what we already have to play with, regardless of how limited our resources. This makes us stronger and wiser, maybe not a lot richer, but it helps form and educate us in our battle with the One Percent, which isn't anywhere near over, and which, in fact, has hardly just begun.

Closing The Divide, 14

Hey Gentle Reader! Remember Eleanor Roosevelt? She had some famous quotes and quips up her sleeve. Here's a fave: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. I first read it in Ann Landers. I think I was still in my teens. I didn't realize what a handy bullet that pithy bit of wisdom would be, and it has served me well. I have lived with inequality all my life. My upbringing was decidedly proletarian and the idea of ever setting foot in university a vague pipedream. I did end up spending most of two years at a community college while in my early twenties, but financial pressures prevented me from finishing. So, my entire life has been one of survival, and hard work, and closed doors, and poverty. But Eleanor, with help from Ann, really helped save my fanny. I did have a few advantages on my side and I exploited them to the max: 1. first of all, being "gifted" and having an IQ that puts me in the top two percentile. 2. An easy manner with people, making it very easy and enjoyable to meet and mix with a broad range of human beings. 3. My faith and experience as a Christian, which in so many ways beyond telling has opened me up and given me a broad, complex and inclusive vision of our shared humanity and our role in the Cosmos (please, Gentle Reader, I do trust that you have enough intelligence to neither confuse nor conflate this with religious fundamentalism, which is the polar opposite to what I wish to communicate here) 4. The influence of the counterculture and the hippies and radical left of the late sixties and early seventies. I was fourteen, with an insatiable curiosity and un unquenchable desire to learn, experience and live life. In many ways this put me in dangerous situations at times, but I gained such a berth of knowledge, wisdom and experience at an early age that people older than me for years would comment on how wise I was beyond my years. I learned about social inequality, the environment, human rights, sensible and healthy food and nutrition with vegetarianism and whole foods (not to be confused with the obnoxious eponymous and overpriced supermarket chain), about global realities and interconnectedness. 5. An almost endless supply of mentors, people who taught and role modeled for me in ways that my parents, nor my teachers ever possibly could serve as adequate role models. all of these diverse factors and experiences of my life passage have played a critical role in learning to punch above my weight and to refuse to accept the crappy treatment from my alleged social betters. This has not been without a cost. It has often been difficult, especially when younger, for me to keep my cool and not hit back with twice the force of what I was dealt. I also came to realize that in terms of intelligence, integrity and talent, I was very much their superior. What still sticks in my craw is that even some of my friends, who happen to be incurable bourgeoisie, aren't prepared to give the respect owed to a social equal, and I am quite prepared to make life so difficult for those gormless douchebags that they will either concede or bail. I really don't care what they do, because my dignity has nothing to do with the approval of mediocre persons and everything to do with how I measure in my own eyes and in the sight of God. This might not do a lot to address the broad scale of the social and economic inequality that we are all living under, but I do hope that this little rant de jour will help inspire and empower even one person to stand up and walk in their integrity.

Closing The Divide, 13

I only wish I could wave a magic wand, and, Hey! Presto! we would suddenly all be virtuous, happy and altruistic saints, helping one another and rebuilding society into a cause for celebration and a place of refuge and safety where all could thrive without any sense of threat or harm. That is the vision of the Holy Mountain, of course, and well, Gentle Reader, we just ain't there yet. This isn't to say that we aren't better off than we were a hundred years ago. We have toilet paper. And the Internet. And tons of human rights that weren't recognized before the Second World War. In fact, back then, I don't event think there was much of a public concept about human rights. We do have homelessness o, and this has been a particular problem here for at least the last twenty years. Just the other day, on my way home from work, I ended up helping a blind and traumatized homeless man in my area get to the neighbourhood Tim Horton's. Why is that man, who is over seventy, homeless? And there is also the woman (aboriginal, I think), begging in front of my building, which is all low income tenants. There are many reasons for those unfortunate people being where they are, but I don't know them, so I know nothing about their situation: only that they are homeless (likely, anyway), and vulnerable, and very very poor. And yet, our Prime Minister Junior seems to realize that there is plenty of money in our national coffers, otherwise he wouldn't be offering to bail out Kinder Morgan, just in case they can't get their stupid pipeline built in my province. So his rich bodies get federal bailout, thanks to the taxpayers, and people like that blind man and that woman begging next door get nothing? This is what we have come to. The poor and vulnerable are always treated like an afterthought. Like the environment. And we have to yell and scream to make ourselves heard by those idiots who get voted into power by idiots to govern this country full of idiots who would rather spend lavishly on the grieving but financially well off families of dead junior hockey players, than to put the money where it is really needed! Big business and jocks always trump the environment and the poor in this country. And it's like this all over the world. The strong and the wealthy, and those who feed our imaginations with fantasies of power, wealth, sexiness and popularity always get first place. Everyone else has to stand in line. And almost everyone else gets nothing. And you can't say anything without coming across as being somehow un-Canadian and cranky. We have to keep yelling sense into those blockheads, even if it seems futile. Some of them will get it, but by then it'll be too late. We will have more and more homeless beggars choking our sidewalks while this planet becomes so uninhabitable that our only option will be to close our eyes, stick our heads between our knees and kiss our sorry asses goodbye. I hope it doesn`t come to this. It doesn`t have to come to this. But we are going to have to wake up and get to work because time is running out.

Closing The Divide, 12

I have to admit that I don`t do noblesse oblige, but this is for one simple reason: I have nothing to noblesse oblige about. I've never felt particularly aware of my being white, or Caucasian, if you will. I have always been poor. I have always lived on the margins. I only really became aware of racism, after leaving my parents, who, especially my father, were both racists, in my interactions with racial minorities, a word I have trouble with. Always approaching others with the mentality that we are all equals, and all loved by the same Maker, I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find out that my whiteness, for people of other racial identities, was seen as an obstacle to communication. Not because of my issues, but theirs. I have never experienced racism from other white people, except perhaps based on ethnicity (some people still haven't forgotten the war and dislike and distrust Germans). I have experienced racism from others, for example Africans, Chinese and Latinos. In the case of Africans I have always tried to cut them slack, given the historical horrors and traumas from centuries of slavery and bigotry many Africans have been subjected to. Likewise in the case of Chinese, although there is a tendency among Chinese to favour their own to the exclusion of others. In the case of Latinos, I think it has been mostly from lack of exposure to non-Latinos, especially in their own countries. Whatever the reason, my sense of whiteness, such as it is, only exists by default. I find it interesting that in Mexico, Colombia, or Costa Rica, I never have a sense of being racially different, only on those rare occasions when I have been treated with discrimination. In the case of Africans, well, I have been yelled at and insulted by angry black women on the bus, and physically threatened and assaulted by black men on the street, and I wasn't even thinking in terms of race during these unfortunate encounters, and only afterwards did I realize that I was being subjected to racist hate by those same individuals. Which isn't to say that all my encounters with people of colour have been difficult. I was close friends with a black American woman I knew in church. It was only when she found out that I am in favour of same sex marriage that she, homophobic fundamentalist, distanced herself and broke off contact with me. In which case, who then, was really being targeted by bigotry? On one hand I can understand the anger that a lot of people of colour have towards whites. On the other hand, I am quite sick and tired of being treated like a scapegoat for the colour of my skin, and all because of the stupid and hateful behaviour of a minority of Caucasians, though we also have to figure in the larger, collective trauma of slavery and centuries of racial hate. Neither do I think that this lets people of colour who are also racist, off the hook. There is this unfortunate tendency in the ruling classes, which is to say the upper class, academic whites, to want to collectively write off all the acts of rage and violence by people of colour, as it would seem that they are justified for acting out this way. I couldn't disagree more. By giving them this kind of carte blanch we are also treating them as being less than responsible adults. This is patronizing, it is paternalistic. And it is really a rather insidious face of racism. This of course does not justify racial profiling or other race based mistreatment and discrimination that occurs every day against people of colour. It does place an onus of people of colour to rise above this and to follow more in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, than Malcolm X. This is not going to be easy, but you know, Gentle Reader? Life very often isn't easy. We are looking here at huge collective trauma, and survivors of racialized abuse are not necessarily going to accept gracefully generations of mistreatment and abuse. There is going to be acting out. lots of it. On the other hand, there needs to be a huge concerted effort on all sides for us to come together as persons, regardless of colour, in a way to become colour blind. Race largely is a myth, a social construct. I am able to forget my whiteness, and I owe much of my success with people to this. It is harder for targets of racialized mistreatment to forget their blackness and brownness, and perhaps they shouldn't be expected to. But I can also say, as myself, a trauma survivor, that the only way out is through. Instead of running from or villainizing the other, we have to fully re-examine our hearts, attitudes and motives and have the courage to heal and to move forward in a spirit of reconciliation and love. And yes, I do happen to like the song Kumbaya.

Closing The Divide, 11

I am not suggesting here that we could create a perfect society. I only can wish. But I am hoping that in these little rants on my blog that maybe I could encourage at least a few good people to think and see what they can do in their own garden. Greed is such an inherent feature in our human nature. I am going to suggest here that the more distant we become from one another, the more selfish we become. It turns into the gift that goes on giving. I walk almost every day in our wealthiest neighbourhoods, not because of envy but because the streets are beautiful and tranquil and do much to facilitate contemplation and prayer. There are also plenty of hills making for some very good exercise. I see these giant homes. I do appreciate a lot of the old ones for their beauty and heritage value. But how many families of four really need to live in twenty room palaces? Now, I don't believe that everyone who lives in those big fancy houses are psychopathic monsters whose great interest in life is their investment portfolio, their bank accounts in Grand Cayman and Lichtenstein, and doing everything they can to keep the great unwashed out of their neighbourhood. There likely are some who are like that, but I have come across friendly individuals who like to say hi to strangers, a really sweet natured elderly Chinese man who seemed to enjoy stopping to chat with me in front of his house, and a lady who sweeps the sidewalk in front of her mansion and enjoys stopping to chat. And chat. And chat. I don't know any of these people well, but they are pleasant. I have noticed with them a kind of childlike unawareness of the big horrible world around us, given the protective shelter of their luxury homes and neighbourhoods. By the same token, it is not my wish to demonize them. Still, this living apart and away does make people rather ignorant of the realities that their less fortunate neighbours have to live with, and this can really hamper the growth of empathy. A lot of the mansions don't appear to be lived in, or not lived in that often. They are investments, I believe. Cottages for the obscenely offshore wealthy, perhaps? I don't know. But There is something inherently wrong bout these neighbourhoods, not because they are beautiful, because they are, but because by their very nature and existence, they have to be exclusive. This will probably never happen, but I really hope to see our principal wealthy neighbourhood, Shaughnessy Heights, come under public ownership. That's right, Gentle Reader, just like they did in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Especially with our growing population, it should not even be considered that anyone should have the luxury of this much living space for themselves: a ten bedroom mansion on an acre of land. The rest of us have to struggle in increasingly shrinking private and public space, so why should offshore millionaires be allowed to buy this very privilege that the rest of us are being denied. Well, the answer is, of course, in my question. It's because they can buy the privilege. It is because money, capital and wealth have prior status and if we are going to see the divide close then we are going to have to start opening this debate. The sooner the better. One little idea, here. We don't have to fill in the beautiful green spaces in Shaughnessy, but First Shaughnessy, anyway, the oldest part with the most magnificent houses, could be turned into a public park. The heritage mansions could be repurposed for public housing, community centres and museums and other public purposes. The lavish grounds and gardens could be turned into greenways with benches and walking paths (sorry cyclists, that's what streets are for), quite transforming this exclusive neighbourhood into something inclusive, vibrant, beautiful and socially redemptive. Worth a try?

Closing The Divide, 10

Given the huge sense of entitlement that most Canadians live with I am amazed that we have made even this much social progress. There is always that tension, that friction between left and right, between progressives and conservatives (and, no, Gentle Reader, there is no such thing as a Progressive-Conservative, that is a beautiful political fiction conjured by certain less obnoxious members of the Canadian right as a not very effective vote-grabber). Home owners remain a problem because they have wealth, power and influence, which comes with owning property. They are generally happy little burghers who expect the status quo to dance to their little tune because they, being home owners, have, well, wealth, power and influence. This remains an almost permanent obstacle to our moving forward because it is one of the clearest markers of social inequality. I can think of two possible solutions, and no one is going to be happy, but here goes: either we can make home ownership equally available to all people, regardless of their income or investment portfolio. Even for people on social assistance or disability pensions. The formula would be very simple and the banks would lose one of their big cash cows. Legislation would have to be imposed guaranteeing that no one earning below a certain income would have to pay more than thirty percent of their income for housing. Housing provision would have to be radically overhauled and reorganized, making landlords basically unnecessary, and instead, housing facilitators, specially trained and employed on civic provincial and federal levels. Apartment building managers as we know them tend to be poorly trained and poorly educated, and are usually unskilled at dealing with a large swathe of the community. What I am recommending is that the specially training and qualifications required in most types of supportive housing would be also relevant and helpful on all levels of housing provision. Every rental unit, now made universally affordable, could also be open to purchase on the model of rent-to-buy, not much different from paying a mortgage, but the government would have to accept going into business as a universal landlord, and every renter would have the option of staying long enough in their place, no longer at risk of renovictions, to eventually own, or have title to the apartment or house they are living in. Of course the shrill screams of outrage from the real estate industry, the banks, the developers and many equity fat home-owners would drown out all logic and reason and even the faintest suggestion of leveling the playing field would be tossed into the landfill by our paid-off legislators. I still think this option needs to be considered, and advocated, and once we get it through our thick heads that housing is a universal human right, then perhaps there will be a little bit better than a snowball`s chance in hell. the other option? That we all turn into renters, that home ownership as we know it be abolished and we all become renters, or leasers, with the government playing landlord. One way or the other, we have to work towards social and economic equality, but this business of high-end home ownership for the privileged, inadequate social housing for the vulnerable, and everyone else sweating it out between renovictions is only going to get worse, and the huge social fallout from chronic inequality is going to make this lovely city of ours unliveable and very ugly.

Closing The Divide, 9

Democracy came to us too early in our human development. We are like young teenagers, we don't want to be governed by anyone, we want to be independent and to do whatever the hell we want, but we don't have the maturity nor the skills to negotiate life as responsible and independent adults. Our democracy is very much an extension of adolescent rage, with a huge emphasis put on individual rights, and very little given to communitarian responsibilities and obligations. This is the major flaw to our democratic process. We are for the most part too selfish, too egoistic and too tunnel-visioned to be trusted with a jewel so precious and wonderful as democracy. The one problem with my argument is, in agreement with Sir Winston Churchill, all the alternatives are worse. So we have home-owners, all of them taking full advantage of their democratic rights and freedoms, working hard for the Man and saving up for that dream home, and slaving away at their often thankless occupations for up to three decades, in hock to the banks until they can have that long coveted mortgage burning party, just in time for a few good final years left before Old Mortality begins to wreak its vengeance. Those same home owners, for the most part, were born and raised after the Second World War, growing up short on ethics or any developed sense of communitarian responsibility and quite long on personal ambition and greed. They have done more damage, by default of being formed with a water-tight moral and ethical training, to our social fabric than almost anyone else. And all because they were never properly influenced or conditioned as children that the collective good should be at least as important, and sometimes even more so, than their own personal gratification and ambition. Now we are quite stuck with the bitter fruit of that ethical vacuum and the best we can do for now will be damage control. I just listened on the CBC to a rather ridiculous rant on the program "Out In The Open" from a black Jamaican woman who has decided to homeschool her kids in order to protect them from "Whiteness." Here is a splendid example of what is wrong with our education system. Rather than providing a structure where children can learn to be colour blind concerning race and to reach across cultural and ethnic barriers for a better future, we still have those same problems repeating like a badly made Ruben sandwich. This woman's children were subjected to racist taunts in their school. Being herself likely traumatized from her own experience of institutional racism, she cannot be expected to respond rationally, hence her reaction: lashing back in anger and meeting white racism with black racism. Her children are likely going to absorb their mother's hate and fear of white people, and they are going to be in danger of going through life living in fear, distrust and trauma. Our schools, contrary to the Jamaican woman's claim, need badly to be reformed for one simple reason: that is where the majority of children are educated and conditioned. I wonder what would happen if our education system began to give equal importance to social, ethical and humanitarian development, as is already given to the development of cognitive skills and the learning and absorption of facts. I would like to see representatives of all religions: all forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Baha'i, and other faiths play a major role in the education and formation of children: not to proselytize, nor convert, but to inform on ethics and morality. I would like to see field trips and exercises for children beginning from grade one, where they are increasingly encouraged to connect with others in the community, perform volunteer work, and learn the value of caring for and helping others. All of these things and more are of far greater value than learning skills that will make them good and compliant little workers. At the other end of the spectrum, I would also like to see four years added to the arc of compulsory education, where students have to learn and acquire the equivalent of degrees in the liberal arts and humanities. We need a society made up of people, where all members are equally literate in ethics, humanism, and communitarian values, and there has to be a concerted resistance against this current culture of greed and selfishness if we are going to begin to really move forward as a species. Back to home owners: I wonder what would happen if everyone had the means of owning their own home, regardless of income or wealth? Gentle Reader, something needs to be done to challenge, undermine and replace this ethos of social Darwinism that is leading us to our own collective destruction. even the relatively innocuous selfishness of your average home owner is going to be problematic, until we really start to see beyond our self-interest and to learn to work and live together in a way that moves us all forward, with no cracks left for people to fall through.

Closing The Divide, 8

Home-owners with their precious house equity have a lot to answer for, you know. This insistence on holding out for the highest bidder is nothing but pure and unadulterated greed perpetrated by individuals who really care not a straw for the collective wellbeing and only concern themselves with their own entitlement and aggrandizement of wealth. I think that it is way too easy and simplistic to write this off as basic human greed and basic human nature. It does say a lot about our values, or our values vacuum in our society and the way that people grow and are nurtured into selfish and blinkered adults whose one goal in life seems to be to accrue wealth and to consume. How did we get here? Well, lots of theories have been proffered and I think they all have merit. When religion was disembowelled and eviscerated as a uniting and influential force for the common good, I think that we also cheated ourselves and our descendants of the benefits of religion as well as its liabilities. First, to set the record straight, I am completely in favour of both secularism and the separation of church and state. I remember the daily Bible reading and recital of the Lord's prayer from my early years in elementary school, and believe me, gentle Reader, it did not work. The Lord's Prayer made absolutely no sense to my six year old brain. My father didn't live in heaven. He lived in my house. Hallowed be thy name suggested Halloween, and I could not possibly make sense of a God, who was my dad, and whose name was about witches, Jack O Lanterns, and trick or treat. Thy Kingdom Come. Huh? Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, did sort of make sense, but I didn't have a clue what heaven was, or where. Give us this day our daily bread? Well, how about roast beef, chicken and potatoes and eggs and peanut butter and lots of chocolate ice cream, too? Forgive us for trespassing on the front lawn next door on the way home from school? And the Bible readings, rendered in Seventeenth Century English being read in the indifferent monotone of an already overworked and overwhelmed teacher? What were they thinking. Or, to add a little exclamation and question mark: What! Were they thinking? The churches have really lost their power and influence in people's lives and largely through their own fault and negligence, but I'll leave the details of that little rant for a future blogpost. What we have now in our post-Christian life is a kind of values deficit or vacuum. Yes, there is a growing emphasis on human rights and gender equality and antidiscrimination and diversity and so and so forth, and this is all for the greater part something very good. But is it enough? When there is no unifying spiritually-principled force in people's lives outside of pursuing their own personal happiness and inner peace, what at the end of the day, can really bring us all together? Now, Gentle Reader, before you get into a panic, please rest assured that I am not advocating a return to compulsory, nor compulsive religious observance. I don't even go to church on Sundays and I am an observant Christian. What I am saying is that we have not yet found a substitute for the old Christian consensus that can really motivate us into really taking care of one another, nor of doing much for the public good. On the other hand, racism and homophobia and discrimination against people with disabilities is no longer publicly tolerated, so there are some trade-offs, eh? We live now, like it or not, in a consumerist, shallow and very selfish environment and this is one reason why we have such tragedy as those venal and greedy home owners who through their selfish disregard of the common good are hell-bent on only selling their precious houses to the highest bidders, thus further pushing up housing costs, making this city all the more unaffordable and unlivable and thus doing their own part through their blind and stupid greed to further widen the gulf between rich and poor, further making our city an unfriendly and hostile place for all but the very wealthy. (Pardon the run-on sentence Gentle Reader, but I am indeed on a roll today!) this is to say, that the majority of veteran home-owners, being Baby Boomers, also lay claim to one of the most self-centred, narcissistic and acquisitive generations to have ever existed in our sorry human history. Yes, they have freed themselves from religion, but instead of preserving their ethical and moral moorings have opted instead to live in an ethical and philosophical vacuum, fostered and enabled by the most insidious and lethal influences of American pop and consumerist culture. So, this is what has created the mind-set of your average house owner, and while I'm sure that not all of them are moral and ethical basket cases, there are enough of them around to go on creating some very major problems and headaches for the future. Persuading moral midgets such as home-owners rich I equity but absolutely soul-poor is not going to be easy, and in some cases, downright impossible. There is one possible measure that can be taken, but it is going to be for the long term and it is going to take an awfully long time to implement. This has to do with revamping and restructuring our education systems to make moral and ethical education the very heart and soul of our children's development. I will explore this theme further tomorrow.

Closing The Divide, 7

I think that in order to come up with solutions to this growing crisis of income and social inequality that we really have to reconsider and be open to changing our perceptions of our so-called enemies. I will begin in this post with the politicians. Now, who doesn`t love to hate politicians? Can there be an easier target? Shooting fish in a barrel! They are popularly viewed as selfish, self-serving, lacking any ethical sense or moral compass, cynical, hypocritical, corrupt, and the beast goes on....Or, does it? Politicians are human beings. (yeah, really!) They are also, even more than the rest of us, held hostage to the democratic process (there is nothing wrong, Gentle Reader, with democracy, by the way, and an awful lot that is right about it!) But politicians end up having to please, whether they like it or not, an awfully broad base of people, opinions, perspectives and political orientations if they hope to get reelected, since, getting elected continues to empower them to do all the good they can in the world, even if that gets compromised, diluted and corrupted by the built in need and obligation to please others. Otherwise, they just play to their base support, end up alienating everyone who would never dream of voting for them, as well as those who did, and then four years later they have to be changed, like a baby's filthy diaper and for much the same reason. Here in our own dear little Canada, we had nine years of that problem when Stephen Harper and his loathsome Conservatives were at the helm. I would tend to agree that almost everyone who runs for elected political office does so with the noblest and purest intentions in mind, barring certain egregious exceptions like the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office. And now we have Prime Minister Junior in charge, and he got in on a tidal wave of popular support: for his youthfulness, his good looks, his charisma, his progressive views, his good looks, and of course his need to for everyone to like him, and his good looks. Talk about charm offensive. But now that the charm has become actually offensive and the honeymoon now is nothing but a stale-smelling memory of badly stained bedsheets and disgruntled neighbours banging on the thin hotel room wall, Junior has decided to play tough, side up with the climate dinosaurs of Alberta and run that bloody pipeline through our province to our West Coast, endangering our environment and filling the planet yet with more death fuels to further compromise our environment and render our planet uninhabitable. Now, despite my less than flattering portrayals, I would like to believe that such as Justin Trudeau, our prime minister, and Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta, have also better angels to their natures. And this is what we need to appeal to. Yes, to take our stand, with our own premier, John Horgan, who has shown admirable and inspiring leadership in his stand against the Kinder Morgan pipeline. But while refusing to bend to the threats and bluster of a federal government that has lost what few moral and ethical bearings that it could lay claim to, I think it behooves us to think of what we can do to appeal to the good in these people, which, like it or not, exists. To appeal to their common sense and to do whatever we can to summon forth a dialogue that is respectful and founded on humility and goodwill. This is going to take an awfully long time. Time to dig in and persevere.

Closing The Divide, 6

We often, too often think of wonderful ideas and strategies for changing our world, rescuing our planet, and healing our broken and fractured humanity, and usually to no avail, and for one simple reason: few people, and even fewer with the power and influence to effect change, could even be bothered. Sad, isn't it? Right now, here in our own dear little Canada, we are up against this classic face-off: our federal government, which like governments all over the world is in the pockets of the global corporations, have decided that whether the government and people of my province like it or not, a trans mountain pipeline is going to be built to carry the diluted bitumen from the tar sands of Alberta to the coast of my province, British Columbia. This is a recipe for environmental devastation, not to mention the ongoing concern of the impact of fossil fuels on climate change and global warming. The government and people of Alberta have spoken: short-term investment and economic gain are more important than the future of our planet and the wellbeing of our children and grandchildren. And Justin Trudeau, our fabulously handsome prime minister (in some people's opinion!)is agreeing with them. And making threats to my province if we don't comply to this environmental disaster in the making. Common sense does not weigh in here. And the players are completely deaf to our remonstrances that there are many environmentally sustainable alternatives that need to be considered, and that will still provide generations worth of jobs and wealth. The worst case scenario, of course, is that Prime Minister Junior will strong-arm this pipeline into existence and will put the people of my province under incredible duress and hardship if he has to. This also brings to mind the old Aesop's Fable: "The Council Of Mice." Basically, a council of mice convened in order to strategize on how to deal with a marauding cat that was decimating their numbers. After many less than realistic suggestions were proffered, one bright young mouse piped up and said, "Here is what has to be done. A bell must be put around the cat's neck. We will hear him when he is approaching and this will give us advance warning so we can run and hide and save our lives." All the other mice murmured with approval. Then a very sage old mouse stood up, leaning on his cane and said in a fine, strong voice, "That is a wonderful strategy. Now, we must hold another council meeting to elect who is going to bell the cat." No one said a word. And this is the problem that always confronts even wise old idealists such as my own humble self, my Gentle Reader. How can we bring social and economic equality into a society and culture that is so dominated by ambitious and self-serving greed. How do we persuade the vectors of this social disaster that it is going to be in their better interests to become prudent, generous and compassionate. In the meantime, the divide keeps growing. We have more people leaving this city because it has become so prohibitively expensive, and a growing number of desperately homeless. How do we get through to our governments, the home owners, the developers, the real estate brokers and the wealthy foreign nationals who are buying our stairway to heaven, how do we persuade them that this is also their problem? How do we educate them, and what guarantee is there that they will change their thinking enough to become vectors of change. Che Guevara's big error, in his zeal to help create a new human being, a person dedicated to the wellbeing and health of their community over their own self-interest, was to simply take out and shoot all those he disagreed with and dislike. I like to believe that there are more creative and less violent solutions.

Closing The Divide, 5

Racism has no place in this argument. Let me repeat: racism has no place in this argument. It doesn't matter whether the millionaires buying up luxury homes and properties in Vancouver are from China, India, Romania, or Mauritania. I have heard the race card get flipped back and forth in this quarrel and it is tiresome, nerve-wracking and boring. On one side you have those who associate race with real estate and every time they see an Asian person in a wealthy neighbourhood they seem almost ready to organize a lynch mob. Equally exasperating are the politically correct thought police who scream "racism!" whenever it is mentioned that a huge majority of these luxury home buyers come from China. Funny how in Costa Rica, whenever anyone suggests that offshore ownership of real estate by wealthy white Americans and Germans, no one plays the race card. It isn't about race, but our barmy white eggheads and other upper middle class idiots seem to believe that racism is something that only happens in the hearts and minds of Caucasians. Racism is a sad and ugly reality all over the world and everyone bears some guilt. What is particularly annoying is the way some whine "racist" when it is simply their unacceptable behaviour or attitudes that are being addressed, but they assume that because they are not white, then that must be the only reason they are being singled out for being jerks: like the young Asian male on the Canada Line when I confronted him for mocking a special needs adult in a wheelchair. Instead of accepting the rebuke he called me a racist, for telling him that he was behaving like a jerk. Which is to say, the nasty Asian kid was a jerk. Not for being Asian, but for using his race as a smokescreen to hide from having to face his stupid and ugly behaviour. /although there is a certain truth to the allegations of foreigners driving up property values and by extension the cost of housing here, we really have to consider who some of them are and why they are able to do this. I have already mentioned that our governments, home owners, and the property developers have the lion's share of responsibility for letting things get this bad. Rapacious real estate agents are always a disaster waiting to happen, and the complete lack of ethics on the part of other parties have simply opened the floodgate and also to millionaires from China, some of whom are turning our city into a lovely little laundromat, but many others are likely quite innocent, and simply want to raise their families in a cleaner, healthier and freer environment than the industrially polluted charnel house that the communist government has changed China into. I do not blame desperate people for wanting to improve their quality of life and create opportunity for their children. I am completely in favour of the lovely diversity that they help contribute to our developing Canadian culture. On the other hand, these are consumer immigrants with likely little interest or investment in really contributing to this country outside of their taxes and this is one concern that needs to be addressed. Canada needs immigrants, but Canada particularly needs immigrants who are going to respond with generosity and altruism and gratitude to the very generosity and altruism that we are offering to them and to all newcomers to this country. Property ownership and housing badly need to be reconsidered and reconfigured in this country. We need to move away from the idea of housing as investment and market commodity, and to enshrine the UN endorsement of housing as a human right. Once this little bit of altruistic common sense has seeped into the thinking of our elected government officials, then just maybe enough restructuring will occur to tame and domesticate the capitalist beast of property development, to encourage house-owners to change their thinking into a more generous and communitarian construct, and to rein in the rapacious crows of the real estate industry. Much tighter controls on moneyed immigration are going to be have to put in place, with very strict and loophole proof legislation to prevent property investment that serves only foreign interests and does nothing but harm to the communitarian fabric of our cities and nation.

Closing The Divide, 4

So who doesn't hate real estate agents? Who doesn't just love to hate them? They have no ethics, no scruples, no morals. They want to turn a fast buck. What better way to do this than to parasitize off a home-owner's equity? Now, I'm sure they're not all bad, but it is fun in a schadenfreudish manner this little sweet indulgence. I have actually known some rather decent folk who also sell real estate, such as a very nice, enthusiastic Chinese-Canadian woman I knew at a church I was attending a decade and a half ago. I was even then concerned about the possible affects of market greed on this woman's life and faith expression, and one day I tactfully asked her if she could ever see the market bubble over Vancouver real estate bursting and then suddenly everything's devalued and affordable again. Oh, no! she chirped enthusiastically (likely while visualizing her investment portfolio) That is NEVER going to happen. Now this woman wasn't just any kind of church going Christian. She was very keen on discipleship and living a life of Christ that was in all ways exemplary. Except, maybe in one area: her profession. I suspect that when it comes to the deal, she, like so many others become suddenly amnesic of all the moral teachings they inculcated in Sunday school, given they ever went. Rather like an old friend of mine who wanted to go into real estate. He even blithely commented that he believed that Stanley Park, Vancouver's crown jewel of green spaces, should be bulldozed and given over to housing. And maybe a supermall too. On our last visit together, we went to Stanley Park, in his car, of course, since I just couldn't get him to visualize walking anywhere that was further than one block. We wandered around on a couple of forest trails and he was absolutely spellbound by the grandeur of some of the old cedars and firs and the sheer majesty, mystery and full out natural splendour of the place. We soon lost touch with each other and I have no idea what happened to him. He might have actually gone into real estate. Maybe during his darker, more sinister moments (to which this fellow seemed particularly vulnerable at times), he still dreams of a whole peninsula of condo towers, luxury townhouses and supermalls where the firs and cedars once towered in the morning mist. I sincerely hope not. What I am saying here, Gentle Reader, is that it is only too easy to demonize weak, gullible and vulnerable human beings who want to make an honest living, and then swallow the baited hook of greed, and cutthroat industries like real estate are especially moral and ethical minefields. I am sure that some of them are genuinely ethical and that their prime concern is being sure that their clients reap maximum value on the sale of their homes. But it is also saddening, and an indication of these particularly dangerous times we are living in, to realized that likely none of those same real estate agents are going to care a tinker's damn, much less be even aware during the financial transactions of the larger communitarian damage they are enabling through their shortsighted greed. No, I do not hold them in the same light of contempt as our politicians, nor of the developer scum, but they also need to be reined in. Big time.

Closing The Divide, 3

The property developers are a particularly virulent scum on our urban landscape. They are driven and motivated by profit, or shall we say, simple old-fashioned greed. They are the particularly insidious and reprehensible Trojan Horse that our short-sighted, corrupt and venal elected officials have opened the gates to, swallowing, or rather, expecting the rest of us to swallow the vile nonsense of market freedom and priorities over a cohesive and secure social infrastructure that can work for everybody. We saw this in our own current Mayor Moonbeam, an admitted progressive, who allowed major property development corporations to fund his campaign, provide gifts, kickbacks and other bribes, in exchange for unmitigated and unregulated freedom to raze to the ground major portions of this city, not to develop housing that would be affordable and accessible to everyone, regardless of their income, but to the wealthy, especially wealthy foreigners, speculators and property flippers. Scum every bit as vile as the developers themselves, whose only interest is to serve their own greed and hunger for wealth and power, not to mention that many of these same vectors of this pandemic of gentrification are themselves connected with international crime and money laundering. I don't need stats or references to back up this accusation, Gentle Reader, because you can read all about it in the Globe and Mail, if you want. Or just do a simple Google search. Despite their reprehensibility and complete lack of ethics and no moral compass, I am placing the developers in third place, because our elected politicians, and home owners, being themselves citizens with public responsibilities and obligations, have the greater blame, and through their own greed and lack of ethics, the gates have been opened to such powerful and socially destructive agents. Developers are not interested in social housing for the simple reason that it isn't profitable. They want to make money. Tons of money. They do not care that their morally bankrupt actions are making this city unaffordable to all but the wealthy. I can only still live here because of the blessing of government-subsidized housing and regardless of how much our city and provincial governments are scrambling to build more subsidized housing, it is too little too late. That horse ran out of the barn years ago and it is going to take us decades before we can catch up and really undo the damage that has been wreaked on our social infrastructure thanks to this unchecked and deregulated market greed that has overtaken our cities and our lives. In the meantime, our sidewalks are choked with homeless beggars with no place else to go, here in one of the world's richest and most prosperous countries. Our city is being hollowed out as low nd middle income families have to live elsewhere because they can no longer to pay rent or mortgages here while raising a family. Housing is not a luxury. Housing is not an investment. Housing is not a gift or a reward for working hard all you life at a thankless job. Housing is a fundamental human right and it is time that our country started to wake up to this fact and include housing as a human right into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and for the rest of us to integrate this fact into our way of thinking. Housing as a human right has long been enshrined in UN charters nd documents, it is accepted as fact in many other countries that ironically do not have our magnitude of homelessness and housing unaffordability and it is time for us in Canada to get our heads out of the sand and out of our asses and begin to really move forward on this vital and pressing issue.

Closing The Divide, 2

Equity. What does that word conjure in your mind? Here is a succinct definition, courtesy of Uncle Google: "Generally speaking, equity is the value of an asset less the amount of all liabilities on that asset. It can be represented with the accounting equation: Assets -Liabilities = Equity." Ah, yes, the home-owners. I have never owned my own home, nor any kind of property. I have spent my entire life renting. I have no idea what it must be like to be a home-owner, but I do understand that it changes one. I am told that you become a lot more rooted in your neighbourhood, in your community. I understand that the responsibility, and the pride of ownership will weigh on you heavily, because you are going to be basically owned by your creditor, the bank, for at least the next three decades of your life. You are also going to feel that you have somehow arrived, having met the gold standard of citizenship. Property ownership. Now especially, as owning your own home has shifted from a matter of shelter and having a place to live, to having a lovely fat nest egg, we also find among many home owners a particularly egregious abandonment of any sense of civic responsibility. In an exponentially mutating real estate market we find a growing number of home-owners sitting like fat hens on ever fattening eggs, watching and gloating as their home equity doubles, triples and quadruples. When they sell, they will be instant millionaires. Who wouldn`t want their good fortune? This is even better than winning the lottery. It isn't hard to see the irony. By owning your own home you suddenly come into a more vested interest in your community, yet by owning your own home you have also set yourself apart from others as king or queen of your own personal little castle. This is the toxic fruit of the Bourgeoisie. The common man (and woman) can now be every bit as royal as royalty themselves, providing they work hard enough for it, make lots of money, and connect well with the right people in all the right circles. Parvenus are us! But they also become separate from those who have not made it, the renters and the even poorer folk, such as myself, who are stranded living in government-subsidized housing. The value of independence and individualism. The value of opportunity, of rising above the common rabble. The irony of making good of the slavish condition that has you owing your body and soul to your employer, then earning and saving enough to buy your own home and you too can enjoy the illusion of being apart and above the lower orders. I am not lumping all home owners under this category, but it still has relevance. This is the undergirding mentality that feeds into the greed, avarice, and blind selfishness that makes it easy to sell their home to the highest bidder, even if that bidder is going to destroy your home and level your neighbourhood for construction projects that are only going to benefit the wealthy. I place our own well-equitied and avaricious home-owners, whose families have lived here for generations, second in culpability to our governments for selling out and making this city unaffordable. As members of this community, as citizens they have defaulted on their most essential communitarian responsibility, of doing their share and using their assets for the common good. Their greed gets in the way every time, because the lure of wealth swallows all ethical sense, and we are left with a city of comfortable burghers, degenerated into greedy swine, who will sell out to corporate and foreign interests, giving not a damn that they are the ones who are pushing the costs of housing out of the reach of even those who are on the comfortable side of middle incomes.

Closing The Divide, 1

Gentle Reader, now that I am back from my trip I am going to get serious again. I haven't exactly suspended the series on collective trauma, but I do wish to integrate this theme into this burgeoning crisis of social and economic inequality we are all having to reckon with these days. Today, I am going to write about real estate. Like many of us over the last two years or so, or those of us who live in my fabled city of Vancouver, anyway, I have felt a growing concern for the out of control real estate market here and how this is affecting our general quality of life and the liveability here. Property developers are given carte blanche by our politicians to wreak havoc on old established and affordable neighbourhoods, tearing down lower cost market apartments and houses for condos, townhouses and monster homes affordable only to the very wealthy. Since there is going to be a surplus of the new hog homes, as I would like to call them, and given that there are always going to be limits on the proportion of wealthy members of our society, all the surplus units and homes are taken and flipped or shadow-flipped and resold over and over again to wealthy foreigners with no intention of living in them and every intention of skimming massive profits off the escalating property values as they are resold three, four or five times. Of course, this pushes skyward all real estate value, squeezing out people on low and modest incomes and making this city liveable only to the well-heeled. While trudging through our wealthy neighbourhoods today I was giving this matter a lot of thought, as I usually do when visiting rich areas. Why do I go to those places, you might be wondering. Because they are quiet, beautiful, and tranquil and make excellent urban hiking routes. For me that is the one single value of the wealthy. They can afford to provide beautiful and peaceful neighbourhoods that the rest of us poor folk can still enjoy walking in, provided, that is, that they don't end up hiring the kind of obnoxious security guards I have had to reckon with in similar neighbourhoods (but much uglier houses) in Costa Rica. There were of course real estate for-sale signs up everywhere, and, because they were obstructing the sidewalk, I even knocked two of them over with my big golf umbrella (So sue me, Faith Wilson!). Then I did a prayerful meditation on the subject, which brought me to the following conclusion. There is a collective blame that can be applied with five distinct parties involved, but it is a pyramid, or hierarchy of culpability, and this must also be reckoned with. At the top, the apex of the pyramid, I place our elected governing officials: prime ministers, premiers and mayors. They are the ones elected and charged with the care and wellbeing of our persons and the resources of our country, province and city. They are also the ones who have invited in this monster of greed that has wreaked havoc on the liveability of our country, province and city, by accepting bribes and offering kickbacks to wealthy property developers. These same prime ministers, premiers and mayors have grievously betrayed us, the people who voted them into office, because they have essentially sold us up the river in the name of corporate and real estate greed. They have completely defaulted on their most sacred responsibility of governing with justice, fairness and accountability, kowtowing to the free market. When oh when is this socially destructive and reprehensible nonsense that was spouted by Milton Friedman and his school of greed, going to be shelved once and for all? It is not the economy, stupid. It is the people, and the people are the economy, just as the economy is the people. No matter how much money gets generated through investment, it all goes to the top and the rest of us are left with nothing, increasing the divide and creating conditions of growing stress, struggle and misery for the rest of us. I hope to live to see the day when those same prime ministers, premiers and mayors all have their day in court and end up having to serve hard time for corruption and money laundering. Even though this is never likely to happen, short of on the heels of a revolution, one can only wish and dream and keep singing, screaming and shouting till our voices are finally heard and the walls of this obdurate Jericho come a-tumbling down. In the meantime, in the words of Tom Waites, yer innocent when you dream. Next post: the home-owners and their precious equity.

Fifth Time In Costa Rica: Wrap-Up

Gentle Reader, I am back now in Vancouver, following a very successful time away in Monteverde. I am hoping that those of you who took the time to read some of my travel blog have found it interesting, entertaining, thought-provoking and educational. My whole experience this time in Costa Rica has been for me all of the above, and more. This has been a spiritual retreat. I found myself living much more in silence than what I am accustomed to in my ordinary life in Vancouver. Even though I had a small clock radio with me, I almost never played it, preferring instead the silence and the sound of birdsong in the day, and crickets at night. And there was no TV in my room. This was also for me a bit of a fast and I lost five pounds during the month I was away. Relying on my hosts to provide me with breakfast, and needing to take other meals and snacks in local restaurants and cafes made food all the less available for idle snacking, plus, I really wanted to keep a tight budget during my stay in Costa Rica. Consequently, I have come home with enough money to give me a bit more of a cushion than usual, and I am contemplating enjoying one or two extra weeks off from work as the weather improves a bit. I also enjoyed (well, not always enjoyed) a phenomenal amount of physical exercise, given the many steep and punishing hills to walk on in Monteverde. Eschewing the use of taxis and local transit (not just to save money but also on principal) enabled me to walk off a few extra pounds. It isn't as though I deprived myself. The breakfasts at the Mariposa were always substantial: eggs, pancakes, fresh fruit, toast, beans and rice, you name it, and I never went away hungry. Likewise the restaurant meals. However, I ate very little of my problem foods such as cheese and peanut butter, and also exercised better than normal portion control. I am already taking up the challenge of trying to maintain this new discipline, while still enjoying my food. This has also been for me an unusually socially intense vacation. I found myself almost every day meeting and enjoying becoming acquainted with people from France, Germany, Great Britain, Spain, Mexico, Belgium, Italy, the US and even from our own dear little Canada! I also met and had some wonderful conversations with a good number of local Ticos, the Costa Rican people, especially the hosts in the Mariposa where I stayed. I was challenged to question and shelve certain negative stereotypes I have had about some nationalities. Back in Alajuela I even got into a very enjoyable conversation with a Democrat-hating Republican from Texas. He was staying with his big dog at the bed and breakfast on my last night in Costa Rica. When he mentioned something about shooting Democrats I introduced myself as a Canadian whom, if I was American, would likely vote Democrat. We actually became fast friends, and this is also motivating me to really start to seek common ground more with those whom I disagree with and to really consider living more in a spirit of good will and reconciliation, at least as far as possible. I also think that in many cases this can be done without having to compromise on core values and ethics, but it does take flexibility and receptivity and time will tell if I'm equal to the challenge. Speaking of which, receptivity and interdependence have both become for me a kind of twin theme for this trip: staying open to others and to the many new and spontaneous experiences and lessons along the way, and also this prophetic metaphor about interdependence, as evidenced in the complex web of interdependence among the huge diversity of plant and animal species in the Monteverde cloud forest. I also had another look at some of the Americans who decide to live and settle in Costa Rica, this time with a more compassionate and less jaundiced eye. In each case, I was told that somehow they had either run out of options, or there was simply nothing to return home to. In some cases there was a sense of people who had been really wounded and bruised by their lives at home, and were needing a fresh start. Regardless of their ability or lack thereof for integrating into Tico society, they still should be praised for the courage it must have taken to make this kind of transition. This doesn't change my perspective about consumer immigration, by the way, but it is always good to get more of a compassionate scope on why people make some of the choices that they make. I did okay flying home, despite the overcrowding and cramped space on airplanes these days, but that is a First World Problem. Arriving in Vancouver and seeing rain I nearly took a cab home, but before we left the parking lot, I found out that I would have to pay up to sixty dollars for the ride, or nearly double what I was charged last year. This appears to be a scam, and I am going to ask the airport authority to look into it. So, I took the Canada Line home instead, reloading my Compass Card for the month on one of their machines. I walked about a half mile from the station downtown to my home, stopping on the way at Shoppers Drug Mart to buy milk, bread, eggs and cheese for breakfast the next day, and had an enjoyable chat with the check out staff, a very friendly and welcoming face from the Philippines. At home, though exhausted, I restarted my computer, emailed a friend and unpacked, had a snack of some cooked frozen vegetables and Parmesan, then went to bed at midnight. I slept well, about six and a half hours and have been enjoying getting reacquainted with my city following a month's absence. During a couple of long walks today, I was watching all the signs of our delayed spring this year, noting how much subtler and gentler is the natural beauty of my part of the world compared to the sensory-overload of colour, form and diversity in tropical Costa Rica. Very distinct forms of beauty, yet equal in wonder. I cooked and ate my first meal today, and I think I still know how to cook. I had an enjoyable coffee visit with a friend, bought groceries, and also had a pleasant chat with one of the assistant managers of my building whom, it turns out, also speaks Spanish and half our conversation was conducted in the Language of Cervantes. I am still strongly and starkly aware of the dramatic, almost strident beauty of Monteverde, and the image and memory superimposes over my enjoyment of the awakening spring of Vancouver like a loving and luminous shadow. It is nice to be home. It will also be lovely to return to Costa Rica and especially Monteverde for another visit.