Loyalties 5

I want to reassure anyone reading this series of posts that I am not a treasonous ingrate when it comes to living in Canada.  I do not love this country.  I do not hate Canada, either.  I certainly do not love its governments or institutions.  I don't hate them.  They simply do not, er, resonate with me?  Right now I am listening to the radio, CBC, our national broadcaster, and there is a piece right now about a Chinese mining company with interests in Canada using slave labour in Eritrea, that little country bordering Ethiopia that also has a growth industry in exporting refugees.  Yes, it's that bad.  Given how bad life can be for ordinary people in a lot of other countries maybe I should feel at least a little grateful for living in Canada?  I don't have to love this country, this myth, this beautiful fiction.  But I could do a lot worse than live here.   

There are other countries where I wouldn't mind emigrating to.  I did mention Costa Rica, and yes I speak Spanish fluently.  Perhaps Mexico or Colombia?  There would be trade-offs.  Perhaps somewhere in Europe?  Spain, where I know the language, without the Castilian speech impediment?  Great Britain, where I also know the language without the BBC speech impediment?  How about the Netherlands?  Scandinavian countries?  Maybe Germany, where I neither know nor want to learn the language.  Even though half my DNA is German (the other half is Scottish), I speak English with a light Scandinavian accent (don't ask why, I certainly can't figure it out) and Spanish with a Brazilian Portuguese accent (ditto!)  But German?  If hell had an official language it would have to be German!

Whoops, this just in!  After listening a little more carefully, it turns out that it isn't a Chinese mining company employing slave labour in Eritrea, but a Canadian company.  Canada the hypocrite!  This isn't to let China off the hook, a country legendary for its cruel and inhumane treatment of its citizens, and here is Prime Minister Junior (Justin time) all set to be Beijing`s Canadian blow boy.  Just what this country needs, while Vancouver has been made unliveable to everyone but the wealthy thanks to Chinese foreign real estate investment in this city.  Nothing against the Chinese people, by the way, for all you thin-skinned liberals who want to squeal Racist!!!!  I like the Chinese people and have generally had very positive experiences with Chinese-Canadians.  As for the millionaire scum trying to buy up my city, I don`t give a rat`s ass what their nationality.  They are millionaire scum regardless their passport.  That they happen to be Chinese is very unfortunate and hugely unfair to other Chinese people given the number of covert bigots we still have in this country who are always eager to lunge at a vulnerable target.

I could do a lot worse than live in Canada.  Did I say that this is an incredibly beautiful country despite the horrible climate?  Our cities are clean and mostly liveable and human and equal rights are enjoyed by all but the poorest and this is my single great sticking point with this country, besides the military.  Poor-bashing is still widespread in this country and despite the measures being taken, too little too late, by our federal, provincial and municipal governments to alleviate homelessness, your average Canadian is very slow to change and those are the ones who are most likely to demonize and stigmatize us, the poor.

No, I don't expect to be any less stigmatized for being poor in another country, perhaps more.  But I am a poor person living in Canada, making me among the least equal of Canadians.  I have been systemically marginalized all my life because of this.  The scars are deep and I am never going to forgive this country for what I have suffered.  I will try to forget it and move on.  But I am never going to love Canada.
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Loyalties 4

I live in two countries.  I live in Canada and I live in Heaven.  Although there are some who would take issue, they are not the same country.  I stand by my statement that Canada is a beautiful fiction and little more.  This country began as the colonizing powers, France and England, systematically robbed the First Nations of their land here, eventually consigning them to rot on reserves and making every effort to destroy them through the practice of cultural genocide, also known as Native Residential Schools.  Only in recent years, since the Sixties has Canada begun to make nice: publicly subsidized health care, social services safety nets, Employment Insurance, Multiculturalism.  Not quite the vicious survival of the fittest ethos that was then the dominant norm, though the lovely liberalism that was brought in by the Pearson and Trudeau administrations of the Sixties and Seventies has since worn rather thin thanks to global capitalism and we are still basically putting lipstick on a pig here (I don`t mean to be insulting to pigs) and we have only begun to make reparations with our Indigenous peoples as well as members of visible minorities.

Basically, until the Sixties,  this country was a British-Eurocentric, racist, white supremist entity that feared, shunned and hated anyone who was different from that mould.  We still have a long way to go, especially since the damage inflicted on this country by the Harper years.

I am a Christian, a person of faith.  My loyalty is to my God, not to my country.  I do not take the extreme measures as certain extreme Anabaptist communities: the Old Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish, by refusing to vote.  I may not love this country but I live here, among many other people, and, no, there are certain civic obligations and responsibilities that my Christian faith does not exempt me from.  As a Christian in a post-Christian culture I feel obligated to live out my faith and to express as clearly as possible the values of my faith.  I am not a pro-life anti-abortion crusader but I do feel called upon to speak out and live in a way that honours the environment and basic human rights and I will continue to do my part by voting for elected officials who best reflect my values and to do my level best to promote and endorse these values.  But talk, as they say, is cheap and it is much better to live in a manner that reflects the love, mercy and justice of God.

I vote, I write this blog, I sometimes exchange emails with politicians and journalists.  Mostly I pray and try to live faithfully and work well and compassionately with others.  I would never consider running for office.  Too many conflicting loyalties and my real loyalty is to Christ.  My real home is with Him.  Which I suppose makes me a citizen of...the World?...the Universe?  And, yes, of course, I am also a citizen of Canada, a sad and disillusioned one all the same, but I am still part of this country no matter how much love has been lost between us.  If I focus on loving the people who live here and forget about the patriotism crap I think I'll do okay.  Sort of.

Loyalties 3

Ah, yes, the True North Strong and Free.  O Canada, we stand on guard for thee...O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.  Doesn't that just give you goose bumps, Gentle Reader?  No?  Maybe...Nausea?  Before I get strung up for treason, allow me please to explain a thing or two.  I am not a traitor to my country.  I simply feel no natural love for this place.  Even though I was born and raised in this country, and even if I would be among the first to agree that in Canada people tend to enjoy a very superior quality of life...

Compared to....

Uganda?

I do appreciate and respect what Canada represents, and this is in some ways divergent from the reality that is the beautiful fiction, Canada. 

I love the multiculturalism in this country and indeed I think that Canada is the only nation that really does multiculturalism well.  It isn't perfect, but it is a work in progress.  This also squares well with Canada's still-evolving national identity.  This is still a young country.  I am also happy with the relative respect for individual rights and freedoms that we enjoy here.  I never have to worry about a fateful knock on my door in the middle of the night, of being taken away never to be seen again for writing things on this blog that some politicos would find offensive.  Despite the near dictatorship under Stephen Harper for the last ten years there is still a sense of freedom here that does make Canada the envy of many nations.  The natural beauty is almost unparalleled, and many regions of this country are counted among the most beautiful on earth.  We celebrate equal rights for all people: of all races, religions, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations.  We also enjoy relatively free public health care and publicly funded, if meagre and well below poverty level,  pensions for low-income seniors. 

There is some support for the poor and disabled, but the support available is lamentably poor and this country could well afford better care for its most vulnerable.  There is also no government funded post-secondary education and only an inadequate student loan program that plunges people into decades' worth of debt following graduation.  There is also still a general public stigma against the poor and poverty.  Being poor is still viewed as being so shameful that it is almost seen as a mortal sin, a sign of laziness, lack of ambition.  They don't want to work.  Meanwhile there is a growing population of middle class Canadians who are living from paycheque to paycheque and not really that far from finding themselves lining up at the food bank or having to sleep in low barrier shelters.

I am particularly disturbed by the subtle militarism in this country.  It has always been there, of course, and the Harper government squandered ten years trying to rewrite Canadian history, trying to frame us as a great military power.  Peace keeping was shelved and there was a process of rearming the Canadian military.  World War I was rewritten as the birth of the Canadian nation and the War of 1812 became the major turning point in the formation of Canada.  Remembrance Day observances became more de rigueur than ever and if you were a pacifist you were expected to keep quiet about it.  The war dead were reinvented as sacred heroes sacrificing their lives for Mother Canada.  If you weren't wearing a red poppy pinned to your lapel you kept a low profile.  If you had the colossal gall to wear a white poppy, a symbol of peace, you might get yelled at or even beaten up on the street.  Seriously.  Here in peaceful Canada.

The militarism in this country, however covert, is for me repugnant and is also for me the ultimate deal breaker.  If I were married to a spouse named Canada, otherwise good looking and nice, if rather boring with good manners, I would quickly be consigning myself to sleeping on the couch or in the guestroom to escape from my spouse's nasty bad breath, snoring, and tendency of farting most aromatically in the sack every night, not to mention the deplorable love-making skills.

Canada, I do not stand on guard for thee.  In war, everyone loses and the shedding of blood, no matter how apparently just the cause, is just and merely that: the shedding of blood.  Costa Rica abolished their military in 1948 and their only foreign invaders happen to be tourists and they happen to enjoy one of the most equal societies and highest standards of living in Latin America.  And if I could emigrate there, I probably would, given that I already speak fluent Spanish!

True North Strong And Free My Ass!

Loyalties 2

There appears to be a ratio between wealth and patriotism.  Or maybe not.  I would imagine that the One Percent really doesn't give a shit as long as they can profit at whomever's expense, however, wherever and whenever.  Then there are the poor and the very poor, such as me, who have always fallen through the cracks, coming out feeling somehow betrayed and cheated by our own country.  I would imagine that those in the lower-middle, middle and upper-middle income brackets would be the most likely to swallow the patriotism Koolaid.  By the way, Gentle Reader, I have absolutely no stats to back up any of these claims.  This is pure, unadulterated speculation and if you are able to prove me mistaken, then please do.  I welcome all input.

I have heard many times, over the years, about what a wonderful country I live in, the best country in the world according to armchair experts who likely have never travelled much farther beyond a shopping mall over the US border.  We have a social safety net.  That's right, in this land of food banks, legislated poverty and rampant homelessness, no one need go without sufficient food nor a roof over their head.

Here, where I live, in the glorious province of British Colombia, if you find yourself unemployed and have exhausted your life savings, except whatever you need for the mandatory six week wait for your first welfare cheque, you can partake of the government largess for a whopping $610 a month.  If you have a disability and can survive the paperwork, the refusals and the appeals you can get it topped up to around $990 a month.  You might also qualify for government subsidized housing if you survive the ten year wait list.

Of course you have to learn to budget: get everything second hand and watch out for bedbugs; get your groceries at cheap markets but shop carefully because you will probably have to skip on the expensive stuff, like fruits and vegetables.  If they do successfully hound you into finding low wage and soul-destroying work you will find yourself doing notably better should you be already living in subsidized housing.  Otherwise you will be subsidizing your rent with the survival portion of your welfare cheque for a bug infested room in an unsafe neighbourhood for up to the ten years you are going to have to wait for government subsidized housing.  If you are on the disability pension and you want to go to vocational school or college they will pick up some of the costs for you just as they will give you something towards dental care.  If, like me, you are working poor, you get nothing.  The low income workers appear to be the most overlooked and most despised citizens of Canada.  In my experience, I have only been able to get dental work done because I happen to live in subsidized housing, which also allows me to eat decently if cheaply (vegetarian) and even to vacation somewhere in Latin America for a month every year.  Fortunately, despite the abysmally low wage, I also happen to love my job.

I'm one of the lucky ones.  But after all the years I have had to endure unsafe or inadequate housing that usually swallowed more than half my paycheque, leaving me too broke and exhausted to go back to college or save any money or even be able to live a little more comfortably from paycheque to paycheque?

Because of the way this country boasts about its generous treatment of its poorest citizens while making it impossible for us to survive with dignity or successfully climb out of the poverty trap, why should I have any love for Canada?  It simply does not exist, neither this beautiful fiction called Canada, nor my love for it, and is never going to exist.  This doesn't mean that I have no sense of civic responsibility.  I vote and I hound and hector our elected representatives about housing, poverty and the environment.  I do everything I can to show love and compassion to others, if very imperfectly, not because I'm Canadian and not because they are Canadians (or not) but because it is the decent and human thing to do.  Despite this country.

Canada is a beautiful fiction and if I want fiction I'll find it in the library.

Loyalties 1

I am not a patriotic Canadian.  I neither sing, nor stand for the national anthem and Canada Day, for me, is just another day in Canada.  I do not wave the maple leaf,  I don't wear it and red and white is not one of my favourite colour combinations.

Don't get me wrong, Gentle Reader.  There is much I like about living here, other than our hideous climate, and not much to dislike, other than our hideous climate.  I simply do not love Canada.  I was born here, I was raised here, and I agree after having travelled a little that this is a pretty good country.  I just don`t feel the love

I heard on the radio this morning that home owners are more likely to feel connected to their country than renters.  I suppose that explains in part my sense of detachment.  I have never owned a home, anywhere.  I have never had enough money, nor earned enough income in order to buy a home.  Home ownersip in this country not only is considered an entitlement.  It is viewed as a right.  All you have to do is earn enough money.  I have never earned enough money.

Whatever magic formula is available to make a Canadian financially successful, I never learned it.  I understood that if you worked hard enough then you could accomplish anything in this country.  I worked.  I worked hard.  I could not get ahead.  I was not able to survive post-secondary education because I couldn`t afford it.  Publically funded education above secondary school in this country is still considered too Marxist to be taken seriously.  Neither was I able to find decently remunerated employment.  No one would even consider me for decently paying union positions and without university credentials I had to settle for what I could get.  I was too exhausted and poor to consider even taking part time courses. 

Canada has failed me.  This country opens its arms to immigrants and refugees and especially to well-heeled foreigners carrying huge bags of money.  But to offer the same generous treatment to Canadian citizens who fall through the cracks?  I don't think so.  I have nothing against immigrants, by the way, and I welcome all newcomers to this country and bear them absolutely no grudge for our government's unevenly distributed generosity.  But when I was homeless I was a refugee in my own country, the country where I was born and raised, where I worked hard caring for the vulnerable with miserable compensation and no access to training or to earning a living wage.

By the same token, I've also worked hard, caring for the less fortunate, wiping the backsides of the disabled, feeding and supporting housebound seniors, comforting and caring for the dying and their loved ones, giving support, encouragement and advocacy to the mentally ill and homeless, among many other things.

My reward? A small government subsidized apartment and a job that now pays less than two bucks above minimum wage.  Lovely way to enter my retirement years in less than five years.  I am not complaining.  I live well within my means and I enjoy my life.

But this country has really let me down.  I played by the rules and came out with almost nothing and even though I am happy that, with subsidized housing, I am still able to live in Vancouver, really, Gentle Reader, I owe Canada nothing.

What Happened?

When it was over I asked the nurse if any of her patients had ever reported having a spiritual experience.  She replied that apart from tingling on their skin or spots in front of their eyes, nothing, really.  I had just been through an MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, to get an accurate image of what is going on with my brain.  Nothing grave, I'm sure, but they want to make sure that the benign tumour on my pituitary gland is really shrinking so that it doesn't return to wreak havoc on my system.

As a person of faith I always try to go into these experiences praying.  So, lying on my back, as I was being inserted into the machine I was focussing all my attention on God as I conceive him and in ways that I still cannot conceive him.  Despite the weird electronic noises the machine was making-sometimes I felt like I was lying on the dance floor of a techno club-I didn't find this at all difficult.

Something else was happening.  I was awake but also aware of being in a rather different dimension, surrounded by light, joy, peace and love and I saw different people standing with me.  I melted into the most sublime sense of joy and resignation to beauty and was aware of tears falling down my face.  This continued during much of the session, and I never once felt bored, disturbed or restless.  I actually did get a little rest, much needed given how poorly I slept last night.  These early morning medical appointments can really mess with your sleep.

At the end of the session, as the nurse and I were talking-she was young, twenty-something-I mentioned also to her what an inspiration my mother was to me.  During my adolescence when she was in and out of hospital for a while, and years later as she was dying of cancer she always put others ahead of her.  She remained cheerful, warm, friendly and kind to others throughout, regardless of what she herself was going through.  I will never forget this and to this day I try to emulate her.  The nurse seemed intrigued by this and mentioned how glad she is to hear things like this, given how self-focussed everyone seems to be these days.  We live in a very superficial culture, she said.  Did I say that she is in her twenties?

I have to agree with her.  My generation, the Boomers, seem to have raised a brood of entitled, spoiled, self-obsessed little cowards, at the worst, though their are people of that generation who also inspire me with their altruism and their generous idealism (did I mention that my nurse is in her twenties?), so I think one should be careful about over-generalizing.  And really, my generation was probably not one bit better when we were young, and now that we are all headed towards the death zone I feel sometimes ashamed to see how deplorable many of us are.

I do wonder how much blame can be assigned to our absolute dependence these days on information technology.  That many of us are so focussed on phones and laptops and social media that some basic social skills and standards of courtesy have gone to the landfill.  I think this is pretty likely.  We are becoming less and less able to really coexist in a way that is friendly or mutually courteous and respectful as we become increasingly self-involved, tuning out everything and everyone in our surroundings.  I think this is of concern because this is not how we are wired nor how we evolved.  Our natural inclination is towards cohesion and co-operation, but this seems to have been co-opted by our equally natural tendency towards selfish individualism.

My challenge to us, this week, Gentle Reader, is that each day, we make an effort, one small solitary effort, to summon forth the better angels of our nature and of those around us.  It begins by being simply aware of the person standing or seated next to you.

Autumn Feast

It's October 1 and already I am thinking of...Food.  This happens every autumn.  My hoarding instinct kicks into gear.  And suddenly I am shopping for everything that is wholesome, cheap, stores well and makes for tasty substantial meals throughout the coming fall and winter.  I used to have big old Mason jars where I used to store dried beans and whole grains.  I want to start doing this again.  Just a few days ago I bought a bag of dried green lentils.  I have only been buying the red lentils the last few years because they are much lower maintenance than their green cousins.  Measure one cup of lentils to four of water, heat to a boil, skim off the foam, simmer and in thirty minutes it's all ready for whatever you want to add to it.  In my case it's soy sauce and garlic powder, then any number and variety of other ingredients.  I am enjoying rediscovering the green variety of lentil which is a bit fussier to prepare.  I soaked them overnight, then in the morning while having breakfast I cooked them till tender then put them in the fridge.  When I got home I cooked them, adding one and a half bulbs worth of whole garlic cloves, soy sauce, miso, wine vinegar and mixed frozen vegetables and old white cheddar.  Oh, but so savoury, and the ultimate in vegetarian umami.

I am thinking of dispensing entirely of tinned beans and just buying the dried ones.  Much cheaper and more bang for you buck.  Also if I time everything well, they are not that fussy to prepare.  I just have to soak them over night, then cook them in the morning before going to work, then when I get home put them back on the stove, add nice things and then Bob's your uncle.  I also plan to stock up on potatoes, more frozen vegetables, brown rice, whole wheat pasta, and maybe some apple sauce and sauerkraut, among other things.  Maybe dried fruit and nuts as well.  It's all pretty cheap, I'll still be getting my rations of fresh produce, but on the whole I expect to be eating cheap for the winter, hearty, healthy and tasty.

All of this I learned at the tender age of sixteen from my friend,
colleen, whom I used to call Big Bird, a hippy, turned political activist turned charismatic Christian who helped mentor me during a very difficult and very transitional time of my life.

It is amazing how many diverse and wonderful people I owe a debt to.