Is This Any Way To Treat Your Children?

I am using the word, children, here in a more metaphorical sense, Gentle Reader.  In a way we are all children of the world, and of our country, of our city, etcetera.  Today, this morning, I was walking in downtown Vancouver along Granville Street.  On one block alone there were at least three homeless people sleeping on the pavement.  This has been going on here for the last fifteen years, or ever since the then newly-elected BC Liberal government kicked people off of welfare and onto the street and swelled our homeless population by nearly four hundred percent.

Meanwhile the premier of our province obnoxiously crows about how great our economy is doing and that we are well in the national lead.  This while our homeless population is now higher than ever.  Why are we not outraged about this?  Why has this government full of ethically bankrupt losers who sold their moral compass for bags full of foreign money not been voted into political oblivion?  Oh, there are the usual excuses: the market must decide and a lot of our homeless population comes from out of the province and the market must decide and yes a lot of people of all income levels come from out of the province but the market must decide and a lot of our resident homeless were born and raised here but the market must deside.  Since When?

So, I have here a question.  When did market forces and money values come to replace basic human decency as the supreme priority?  Why is there still so little political will to address the kind of market greed that has so swamped our systems that we have as many as sixty percent of families here saying they will be moving out of Vancouver in the next three years because it is too expensive to survive here?

Where is our outrage?  Our economy grows, more real estate is sold to wealthy foreigners who care squat about contributing to this society, there is no guarantee that the new fifteen percent tax on real estate sales to non-residents is going to do a lot to make things more affordable, and our sidewalks are being choked with a swelling population of homeless adults.

Today I was walking along the Cambie Corridor with a friend from another country.  While we were admiring the lovely new condo buildings going up near the proximity of Queen Elizabeth Park I slipped in the comment that average wage earners cannot afford to buy any of these condos.  There is absolutely nothing offered for people on low incomes.  The market must decide.  I read in this weekend's Globe and Mail about a growing population of homeless university students because they can't afford to live anywhere.  Because the market must decide.

Screw the market.

After fifteen years of homelessness from legislated poverty, government bungling, and the absolute heartless greed of our current batch of clowns in the BC Legislature that make up our provincial government we have a growing street population of disenfranchised people.  They are not numbers, nor statistics.  They are human beings.  They are someone's son, daughter, father, mother, spouse, sibling.  Their mental and physical health is being compromised and ruined and their lifespans shortened because we are still not working hard enough and worse we still don't care enough.

This has to change.  The market forces have to be tamed, they have to be conquered by a resurgence of human values.

To all of our elected representatives and to the people who put them where they are now: get off your ass and do something.

And start caring.

How To Be Assertive

Gentle Reader, them's can be fightin' words.  How to be assertive.  We are not, in gentle, passive-aggressive Canada, renowned for assertiveness and we are often so namby-pamby that we ourselves can't tell the difference between assertive and aggressive.  I suppose it is well-known among you that I am assertive.  Some of you may think I'm aggressive.  Well who the fuck are you calling aggressive!  Now, that's aggressive.  What I would really say is this:

There is a difference between aggression and assertiveness, just as there are also differences between being passive and passive-aggressive.  Here's what I've learned along the way.  When you are passive what you are really saying is "I suck". everyone else is okay.  Therefore you can do whatever you want with me.  My back is your welcome mat.  Your name is on it.

When you are aggressive what you are really saying is that all the rest of us suck and you're okay.  Every person who has a back also is my personal welcome mat.  With my name printed on it.  When you are passive-aggressive what you are really saying is that I suck, you suck, we all suck and go ahead and wipe your dirty shoes on me because while you're at it then I will whip the mat out from under you and watch you go flying.  Sure I'll call an ambulance if you need one but just watch how quickly I have forgotten my first aid.

When we are assertive we are really saying I'm okay, you're okay, we're all okay.  Now please wipe your feet on the welcome mat before you come inside and then would you be so kind as to remove your shoes.  What would you like in your coffee?

Assertiveness is usually not aggressive or sarcastic.  It is always respectful.  It is not always quiet, sometimes it is angry, but it is always accompanied by self-control.  Assertiveness is also a good listener.  The key word is communication.

I had today four experiences of having to be assertive with people.  It started this morning when I was taking out the recycling.  A tenant in another building in our complex was doing something with his car.  He had also left the gate open with a brick.  I asked him politely what it was about.  He explained that it was to give his buddy in the building full of hard to house addicts free access.  I explained to him that there might be a security concern and that he might want to speak to our building manager about this.  I was polite throughout and assured him that I wasn't trying to play boss.  I did, unfortunately, have to apply a bit of passive-aggression when I returned to my apartment and wrote an email to the building managers.  But sometimes we need to borrow from the enemy's handbook, eh?

While walking the four miles between the coffee shop and the supermarket a young man was walking his two pug crosses.  One started aggressively barking and growling at me.  I smiled and said, "Hey, it's a killer-pug!"  He was apologetic and explained that it was still a pup and was needing more training.  I mentioned that pugs are usually gentle.  He said that he was part Boston terrier and I agreed that Bostons can be a bit feisty.  I did tell him that I thought his dogs were lovely.  I was being assertive but borrowing a bit from the passivity handbook.

In the supermarket a young fellow reached his hand right in front of my face for a plastic bag by the broccoli.  I asked him if he could say excuse me before putting his hand in front of someone's face.  He seemed concerned and asked if he'd startled me and I said yes but it's okay.  We exchanged comments on broccoli finally being affordable again and went our separate ways.  I did borrow a bit from the anger handbook as my initial tone was a bit abrupt, but still useful.

I hauled my heavy load of groceries onto the crowded bus.  There was nowhere to sit and as usual there were some very healthy looking young people hogging the courtesy seats in the front.  I announced in a calm but clear voice that this bag is very heavy and I needed a seat.  A young man immediately complied.  I thanked him.  Later as I got off the bus I thanked him again and said that he might have saved me from an arm injury.  He smiled and I think he felt better from hearing me say that to him.  That was pure and unadulterated assertiveness.

Tattoo This!

Yesterday I was seated with one of my clients inside a Starbucks.  I don't ordinarily go to Starbucks except when it seems the best alternative for my clients, otherwise I prefer to support local coffee shops.  Two women at the table behind me were talking about tattoos.  One, who seemed maybe forty-ish was saying how she used to like tattoos when they were still considered edgy but now finds them to be boring and mainstream.  The other, who might have been ten to fifteen years younger liked all tattoos and found some of them beautiful.  I, of course, kept my mouth shut.

I heartily disapprove of tattoos.  They are a waste of ink and money and, sometimes, good artistic talent.  It isn`t that I think they are inherently bad or offensive.  I don`t.  But by the same token, given the beautiful divine artistry involved in making human skin, I can only imagine tattoos as a kind of graffiti, or vandalism.

When I was very young, only prisoners, soldiers and sailors. gang members, criminals and other losers got tattoos.  And they were almost uniformly worn by men with the exception of certain butch lesbians and prostitutes.  It all began to change in the eighties when almost every punk rocker seemed to have at least six tattoos each.  Artists and musicians were getting them.  They were edgy and redolent of rebel chic.  It seemed rather like the process of neighbourhood gentrification.  A rundown slum full of trailer trash folks attracts edgy artists and other creative outsiders and the vibe they generate attracts investment and redevelopment and young creative class types (creative in name only) pushing out the original inhabitants who can no longer afford to live there.

I am reminded here of a television commercial from BC Tel (Telus' forerunner for those who were born much later than I) from the early nineties.  It featured a teenage goth chick phoning up her grandfather to complain bitterly about her intolerant, strict and overprotective mama.  Her very kind and rather stodgy looking conservative grandpa listens with an indulgent smile on his face.  Then he says to his edgy little granddaughter, "Let me tell you a thing or two about your mother."  He goes on to describe his daughter's teenage rebellion and exploits with a biker gang during the sixties and then mentions the tattoo she got on some unmentionable part of her young body, and how this all turned his hair snowy-white.  While his granddaughter is smirking and giggling on her end of the line, grandpa concludes with "Ask your mother to show you her tattoo."

It is true that tattoos have gone mainstream.  Now everyone of every gender seems to be getting at least one.   If you are under forty you are considered rather odd if you have virgin skin.  I remember one woman who, some twelve years ago or so, asked me what I thought of her getting a tattoo, if it might be something that God might not approve of (we're both Christians).  I replied that maybe God would be more concerned that the money she would be spending on self-adornment might go to a worthy destination, like maybe the food bank, or a shelter for battered women.  I don't know if she ever got the tattoo or not since our friendship soon went south (I wonder why?)

I would never even think of getting a tattoo. I'm already an artist and I would really far rather decorate a canvas or a blank piece of paper than my own skin.  I can also think of far better things to do with my money, like donate to the food bank or save for a vacation.  And besides all that, I already have a personality.

What The Hell Is Democracy, Anyway?

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill, British House of Commons, November 11, 1947.

I try to remember these famous words whenever I feel on the brink of incurable despair over the future of our global democratic institutions.  Here in Canada we have the first past the post electoral system that often turns into a dictatorship of the minority, as we suffered through for almost ten years of the Harper nightmare, and now, without a doubt, there are tonnes of Canadian Tories grumbling and gnashing their teeth about Junior Trudeau's majority government with minority support (thirty-nine percent, or exactly the proportion of voters that gave Harper his coveted majority government.)

Then we have south of the border Donald Trump as a serious threat to the White House.  How did he get to where he is?  Why, through the democratic process, of course.  There just happens to be in that country quite a big enough demographic bulge of poorly educated old white men who vote to make a difference.  Well, he didn't get there through his personal charm or his lovely personality.

I don't often find myself in agreement with the police state also called China but I certainly haven't blamed them for citing the rise of Trump as a convincing argument against democracy.  We do remember Adolf Hitler don't we?  How did he get voted German chancellor in 1932?  Why, people voted for him.  And it took a war resulting in the systematic slaughter of up to one hundred million people to convince him to step down.  He actually resigned, as we all know, by putting a bullet in his head.

I sometimes wish that ignorant, uneducated people were prohibited from voting. and that making post secondary education with an emphasis in the humanities and social sciences should be made a prerequisite for the polling both.  This is of course problematic and it would, never nor ever should,  be considered.

I do have two little ideas that might at least help enhance and improve our experience of democracy.  One idea is to make post-secondary education universally available, that's right, free, and mandatory.  Even those students who would prefer to work with their hands and spend their spare time stuffing their pie holes with chips and beer while watching the game would be required to attend and learn the humanities and social sciences.  They would be compelled to engage and to acquire the knowledge and intellectual skills that are so essential to living in a participatory (not just representational) democracy.

My other idea? Create a university program, equivalent to a master's (for provincial politics) and a PhD (for federal) for anyone considering entering public service as a political representative of the electorate.  You have to spend up to ten years studying law or medicine in order to qualify as a lawyer or a doctor.  Running a country properly should require every bit as much training, preparation and knowledge.  If anyone running for elected public office was first required to be vetted through ten years of meticulous university training in the full range of the social sciences and humanities with a balanced and centrist perspective incorporating ideas and disciplines from both the left and the right then maybe we would find ourselves, as a much better educated electorate, better governed and much better at governing ourselves.

Raise the bar, but make good and sure that we can all get raised up with it.

Living, And Vacationing, Within A Strict Budget

I only just thought of this, this afternoon while on my way home from work.  I have mentioned, I believe, in other places on this blog that I do manage to get an awful lot done while living within a very strict budget.  This includes foreign travel.  However, there are always restrictions that apply and this becomes very difficult to communicate to a lot of people.

Life for me, Gentle Reader, has been one ongoing series of trade-offs, as I suspect it has been for many of you.  When I decided that I finally had a generous enough bank balance to facilitate travel it was with the understanding that I would have to accept certain trade-offs and sacrifices.  I was certain about one thing in particular: I was not going to take the all-inclusive resort route.  Neither was I going to behave like a foreign sybarite.  My whole notion of travel consisted in getting to know a new country, a new culture, new people and a new language.  It meant, as it still does, arriving with an open mind and an attitude of respect, as a guest in another's house.  It also has meant taking a non-consumerist approach to travel.

This is what makes it difficult to talk about my trips with others, unless they take the time to read my travel blogs.  Most people I do talk to have, or seem to have, a rather different understanding of travel from mine.  They also don't live within the sometimes extreme budgetary limitations that I have long accepted as daily life and I think if a lot of them knew how much, or how little, I earn they would be absolutely flabbergasted that I am able to travel to Vancouver Island, much less to Colombia or Costa Rica or Mexico. 

I am often asked why I don't travel to this city, or that town, or take in this site or do these things and those things.  A lot of times, I just don't feel like it.  I don't like to travel when I travel.  My preference is to find one place to stay, for a month or so, and get to know the area, the people.  To make my home there, as it were.  However, it is also a matter of economics.  I can't afford extra air travel except on maybe occasional vacations.  For example, both times I was in Colombia, I stayed only in Bogota.  I did want to visit other cities and places but it was expensive so I settled for a place that is not widely considered much of a draw for tourists.  Likewise when I spent three weeks in San Jose, Costa Rica.  It was a gritty, hardscrabble kind of city, but it fit my budget and I really got a good grasp of Costa Rica during my time there.  At times it was also enjoyable though I was really glad to make it up to the mountains in Monteverde for a week.  It was also like this during my several visits to Mexico City.  I usually stayed in one area because it was affordable but I could also make it work for me.  There have been a couple of exceptions: the two weeks I spent in Chiapas, but expensive because of the extra flight costs.  Also the two weeks I spent in Puebla, very affordable because it was an inexpensive busride from Mexico City.

It isn`t that I have anything against traditional tourism.  It is simply not a good fit for me, economically or spiritually.  On my limited means I am still able to push open doors that often take me into places without limits, such places as I am able to carry home with me to Vancouver where my life is made all the richer and where I have all the more to offer the world around me, from the world within me, enlivened and enlarged by the many parts of the world I have had the privilege of visiting.

Surviving The Fire, 3

Finding my way through life on my own began effectively when I was eighteen.  I moved back to Vancouver that summer where I stayed in a ramshackle house full of losers.  I was by far the youngest.  The place reeked of cat shit and baby piss, and the baby belonged to the dysfunctional couple running the place.  We were by the railroad tracks and every night the midnight train would serenade us while simulating a six magnitude earthquake.  I wandered in and out of the lives and homes and soap operas of a plethora of beautiful losers, a dry sponge absorbing life and experience.  I quit my first job and struggled with poverty but kept my small apartment, and returned for a while to experimenting with drugs, notably acid, and moved to Toronto a year later for six months where my life continued to take on the ambience and intensity of an experimental film.  It was living in a three-dimensional painting by Salvador Dali.  I also became a very able vegetarian cook and really began to learn how and what to read, discovering simultaneously Virginia Woolf and Herman Hesse.

Seeing no future in Toronto I returned to Vancouver and having rediscovered my Christian faith, returned also to my church where I discovered that I was going in one direction and everyone else in another.  They had all become boring, neo-fascist rightwing stuffed shirts, or so it seemed.  I got kicked out of the house I was living in under the church's authority for being just a little too beautiful for their comfort level.  Finding and keeping decent employment was an ongoing struggle.  Employers didn`t seem to know where to fit me or what to do with me.  Needless to say, I wasn`t doing at all well financially but still did okay and managed to surround and fill my life with beauty.  My church split in two due to various scandals and theological conundrums.  I left both entities the church had split into but remained in contact for a few years with other survivors and we met together regularly to pray, worship, sing and support and uphold one another.  The Holy Spirit was very strong among us and the sense of the beauty of God`s loving, merciful and reconciling presence was often very strong and very intense.

At twenty-two I lived in a very oppressive Christian community while attending community college.  It all ended badly.  I was kicked out, onto the street but for my mother being available to take me in to her home that same night, I otherwise would have been sleeping on the street.  (It was winter.)  My crime?  I suspect it might have been unrequited love.  The leader of the community appeared to be a closeted bisexual with a strong affection for me.  I never really reciprocated and eventually became cool and withdrawn from him, also out of respect for his wife.

Still, I was traumatized.

Surviving The Fire, 2

Life as a teenage Jesus freak was not a cake walk.  I had been demoted from my recently won status of cool to an absolute weirdo nutcase religious fanatic.  Which I was.  There was suddenly persecution everywhere, some of which I sat up and begged for, but for the most part driven by other people's fear and ignorance and, I am still inclined to believe, Satan's hate.  Some actually welcomed the change in me because I had suddenly changed into a person happy, open, honest and loving.  Such was the power of the Holy Spirit.  One kid relentlessly persecuted me and got in the habit of spitting at me whenever he saw me.  One day, early on a Sunday evening, I saw him hitch-hiking at the bus stop where I was waiting to go to a church service.  I was fifteen, I think he would have been sixteen or seventeen.  I asked him if he had money for the bus.  He said he didn't.  I offered to pay for his bus fare.  He accepted my offer and we rode together downtown, talking like old friends.  I can't remember what was said between us but there were no further problems afterward.  He was always civil and sometimes friendly when we saw each other.  Better than his saliva.  I think he had already had very little experience in his short life of knowing what it's like to be loved.

The Jesus People were not going to be for me a stable or reliable gig.  In the late summer they were swallowed up by a dangerous cult that nearly got me as well.  It was traumatic but I found another church, Spirit-filled but also more grounded and full of sane and very welcoming and lovely people.  This was a healing salve for me as I was recovering from my parent's bitter divorce followed by my mother's health concerns complicated by an abortion she never told me about.

I ended up at my horrible father's for four months and he kicked me out within five weeks of grade twelve.  I stayed with my mother and her new boyfriend in a small town where he turned out to be a violent alcoholic with a criminal record.  I just finished high school and had to move out on my own, back to Vancouver, while my mother also got ready to leave this monster before he could kill her.  She did escape and I was just finding my way in the universe.