Die Happy

It is a fact that we will all die.  Dying happy is considered a good way to go, but happy is a relative word, describing a fleeting emotion.  Death can happen at the same instant as a moment of happiness.   We hear talk of those who died while doing their favourite activity, which could be anything from having sex to skydiving, dying for a cause, or for a loved one.  There can be happiness in sacrifice, and there can be joy in pushing a passion to its limit.  A race-car driver may have an instant of anger when he is about to hit the wall, but his chagrin is more about being prevented from his goal of winning.  Like coitus interruptus in the moments before orgasm, the driver is stopped at the peak of his passion.   

Young people don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex until after the age of 25.  This region of the brain is responsible for risk assessment, judgment, planning, and impulse control.  Young people believe they are immortal and take risks without examining the consequences, because their brains are not mature enough to do so. This is a good and bad thing.  Where would armies be without a pool of young men who can be swayed by patriotic propaganda to put their lives on the line?  Where would countries be without such an army to defend themselves when they are attacked?  Mothers have an instinct to defend their children and even to sacrifice their own lives for their offspring if necessary, but this is a different impulse from what makes young men flirt with danger.  

Love can play a role in a young man's risky behaviour, as he can be so besotted that he will follow his new love anywhere she desires. He is her puppy.  If she is involved in radical things, whether they are extreme politics, extreme sports, or extreme consumerism, he will put his life on the line to please her. A young man in love would be willing to be run over by a train if it would make his love happy.  If his love is happy, he is happy. 

There are many ways a young man can die happy, convinced he is doing exactly what he wants to do, following his ego, which is all that matters. He puts his health in danger by climbing a mountain just because it is there, escaping from prison, skiing a difficult course without breaking bones, be blasted into space in the name of exploration, surf the highest and most treacherous waves that will throw him onto sharp rocks if he overestimates his capabilities, devote himself to a cult he is willing to die for, be an ecstatic fan of a winning team, or immerse himself in nature and allow himself to be absorbed into it.   He will die believing he had a noble death and the cause was worth the sacrifice.  He will go down accepting his fate yet not quite believing it is true.  

A young man can risk his life without a care, thinking he is in full control of his capabilities. If he fails, he will have tried, which is a satisfaction in itself.  A man can die laughing in the company of good friends, and if he goes that way, it is no less a happy death than a man who throws himself into a dangerous situation knowing he could lose everything. A young man is happy to die for a noble cause, while an older man learns to live humbly for one. 

Recently, there was disorder in the streets of Paris because the local football team unexpectedly won a match against a historically stronger rival, which prompted young fans to race around the city hanging off motorbikes, jumping onto moving cars, climbing lampposts, and shooting fireworks at each other.  They were full of joy and years of pent-up frustration, and in the midst of their delirium, had no thought of dying.  In that elevated state, they were more connected to the life force than in their humdrum, regimented lives.   If they had died in the middle of the celebration, it wouldn't have been important to them.  Their side had won, and they would be happy to go out on that high note. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they realize they have control of their very existence and are happy to push its limits.  They are adults who are no longer bound by parental restrictions, so they have the luxury of throwing away their lives if they wish. For them, it is not a sad death, but an affirmation of youthful power and an illusion of control. Unlike their parents, they will not be around and have to struggle to accept the banal circumstances of their man/child's death. 

Happiness is not only fleeting but is subjective.  A person can be happy with little and another unhappy with too much.  An aspect of this happiness, one that is longer lasting, is satisfaction. This can be said about any of the daredevils already mentioned, but it is tempered by an equally strong pull of dissatisfaction. We try to be better at what we do, to be better people, yet without this ogre of dissatisfaction and potential unhappiness hanging over our heads, we would make little improvement. We need a ladder to climb, a scale of achievement, a goal that may or may not be reached.  Like tightrope walkers, we teeter on the thin wire of existence, striving for health, wealth, and satisfaction.  If a young man has survived into true adulthood, he learns where to place his feet and how to keep his balance.   Thoughtless, ill-considered, or boastful steps can lead to poverty, ill-health, and unhappiness, which is not the way for young or old to die. Those who are not overachievers may only be able to hang onto a scrap of the holy trinity by a fingernail, but that snag of contentment for even the smallest achievement is enough to happily embrace the sliver of light at the end. 

The Manosphere

The rise of the Manosphere can be traced to the feminism of the 1960's, which was triggered by the widespread availability of oral contraception.  The status of women was due for an overhaul, and in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960's, women decided it was their time to throw off the chains of male society.  As Mao Tse-Tung so eloquently put it, "Women hold up half the sky."  However, in every struggle for power, there are exaggerations.  Some feminist battle cries declared that all men were rapists, a pill hard to swallow for the average man and this left many men asking what it was that women wanted. As the first excesses of feminism waned, most men admitted it was time women were given their fair share of power and credit, but there were some men who resented every advance for women because it meant a retreat for them. 

In primitive societies, men were responsible for certain needs of the tribe and women for others, but when women declared themselves as equal and wanted to participate in male rituals, to go hunting or to war, men saw this as not only an encroachment on their traditional roles, but as a way for women to neglect their duties like cooking, cleaning, and child raising.  This was an invalid argument because we know in many societies, female duties are shared collectively, leaving some women free to participate in men's activities while their sisters stayed home to look after children and gather or tend crops. Most children grow up with some knowledge of so-called Amazon women, who were dedicated to protecting their tribe and were willing to sacrifice half of their feminine attributes (a breast) so using a bow in hunts or battle was less awkward.  

Men have long excluded women from traditional male pursuits because they were not physically strong enough, but our experience of women in Olympic competitions have shown that in a contest of strength, a woman shot putter could make short work of a male marathon runner.  Women can be as effective as men in battle as demonstrated by women Kurdish fighters.  A woman who grows up and is trained as a warrior, makes a better combatant than a man who has been conscripted as cannon fodder.

As men see women gaining in strength, they perceive it as undermining their own.  They don't want their rituals and traditions taken over by women.  Although it is tolerated in some circles, a group of raucous football fans are inhibited by having a woman in their midst even if she is as loud and aggressive as they are  They don't want women to be too much like men, and think these women should stick to their lane.  Anyone who has seen a group of women on a bar crawl, knows that women can be just as out of control and obnoxious as men, but women's groups like that don't want a man in their midst (unless he is gay) because he acts as a damper on their behaviour.  In the last decade of the 20th century a book and film came out called "Sleeping With the Enemy", a story of a woman escaping an abusive husband.  This labelling of men as the enemy didn't sit well with many men, who found their habitual roles eroded, but didn't know what they were supposed to be.  Women's magazines went on at length about the perfect man who would be strong but sensitive.  They wanted a man who would be open about his feelings, though this was a trait that was not wanted in male dominated societies.  Women have always had each other as confidantes and exploit the bond with their sisters to help them carry the burdens life deals them.  A man's nature, as is obvious in the animal kingdom, is to view other males as competitors for the females and therefore as potential threats.  Sharing their feelings with other men is a display of weakness, a dangerous advantage to give to their enemies.  In the wild, females are usually cooperative, while the males stand apart from each other, waiting for one of their brothers to weaken so they can dominate.

The word "Manosphere" came along in the second decade of the twenty-first century when social media became ubiquitous, but the roots of a men's liberation movement followed quickly on the heels of 1960s feminism.  Fathers in divorce proceedings felt women were being unfairly favoured and men financially punished by the courts. The diverse elements that now make up the Manosphere were a reaction to men losing their influence over women.  Men's groups began to form, calling themselves Men's Rights Activists, Incels, Men Going Their Own Way, and Father's Rights.  The common thread in all of these groups is men's belief that society has been turned on its head by feminism and that it now promotes the hatred of men.  As women organized nighttime protest marches called "Take Back The Streets," men believed they were pushed out of what little territory left to them.  Women had taken over their sports, their workplaces, their governments, schools, and streets, and even traditional men's clubs were forced by the law to admit women.  Men were like cornered animals with no real outlet, purpose, or safe all-male place to go.  They were expected to be mindless sperm donors and uncomplaining financial providers with no rights of their own. Many women believe this was just and right as men had been in control for too long so now it was their turn to dominate.  In online branches of the Manosphere, men found community, but it was a community based on grievance.  Men didn't see any problem with this because feminism in its 1960's incarnation, had been just as radical. 
 
Many who frequent the Manosphere, think there are male spheres of interest where women aren't welcome.  The tech world is governed by men, extreme sports are a place where men can freely express their testosterone-fuelled aggression.  Although most women are probably more able than men to extract consensus from a group, many men don't believe women should be in politics.  In the US there has never been a woman president as most men believe a woman would be too emotional to act rationally in a crisis.  At the moment, the US is in a deep depression of poverty and unavailable housing,  and many men believe it is unfair that the weak, disabled, and disadvantaged should be favoured by being allowed to the front of the line. Men are more inclined to believe in the survival of the fittest, and they see not only women, but also emasculated men, as not fit to govern.

Although some of these ideas of men as victims of an unjust society have always been around, it wasn't until the Internet entered every household, that these groups have been able to easily communicate and bolster each other's theories.  The more radical of these groups promote slogans directed at women like "You body, my choice," as a counter to the women's pro-abortion movement who chant "My body, my choice."  Some are radical enough to bring back the old idea that women are the property of men, that they should stay in the kitchen, look after the man's children, and keep their mouths shut.  This extreme propaganda is not surprising as it flips on its head the things that so-called progressive women have said about men. 

There has always been a battle of the sexes, with women and men wanting different things, but religion has stoked this war. It is an odd  dichotomy that the church is governed by men but the most devoted believers are women.  Men are more skeptical of the imaginary.  Yet it has been male dominated religion that promoted the ideas of monogamous marriage, sexual fidelity, humility, forgiveness, and honesty.  With the scandals that have beset the church, many men have become disillusioned with organized religion and all of its teachings, yet they still claim to be the children of God. 
 
Some in the Manosphere believe America has gone soft and weak because of the influence of women.  The US declares itself to be a Christian country, with some presidents insisting a person who is not a Christian cannot be a patriotic American.  An unusual phenomenon is taking place these days is an uptake of young men joining the Russian Orthodox church because they consider it more masculine.  The American adherents to this religion believe it is not right for men to indulge in such female habits as wearing skinny jeans, crossing their legs, using an iron, shaping their eyebrows, or eating soup.   Many of these new adherents see Russian men as superior examples of masculinity because they weren't subjected to the most extreme forms of feminism.  Unfortunately, many of these restrictive binary attitudes overlap with a belief in white supremacy, racism, and Christian nationalism which are not only toxic to women but society as a whole. There is now a stalemate in the skirmish of men against women, which is a reflection of a wider polarization in society. 
 
As people look around them these days they see the eroding of male and female stereotypes as many young people declare themselves to be gender fluid.  To those in the Manosphere this is everyday visual evidence of the eroding of traditional values.  Given the alarming American statistics that every 45 seconds, a youth who is struggling to find their comfortable gender or sexual orientation, attempts suicide.  These lost souls see no role models, nobody in society that is an example of how they wish to be when they grow up.  Young men may feel masculine but have been brought up by their mothers to love and appreciate women, but at the same time they feel emasculated by them. Other young men may sense they were born in the wrong body and have nothing to look forward to but a lifetime of abuse if they follow their instincts.  Although men in the Manosphere are against anything that smacks of transexuality, they are not so harsh on gay men.  They may have a revulsion to being approached for sex by a gay man, but they understand the man to man rapport and feel comfortable and justified in saying "No," without their response being judged in a negative way.  They may turn up their noses as effeminate gays, but they are barely aware that there are a lot of men who are sexually attracted to other men, who adopt clothes, habits, and lifestyles that are even more male fetishised than those in the Manosphere themselves. They can hardly imagine that a handsome man with a beard or moustache, dressed in leather, riding a motorbike, one who embodies what the masculinity, a real man, are actually lovers of men.  This segment of the gay community has found its equilibrium, which in the old days was called straight acting, not to conceal anything but because they were born male and feel male in their souls and bodies.  They have no need for women, which aligns with the Manosphere's attitude, but they cannot be part of the Manosphere because they are happy with their male fetishes and have no wish to make women subservient. 

My belief is that when one sphere pits itself against another for reactionary and illogical reasons, there are no winners, only losers.

Losing My Religion

In the pivotal boyhood age between 10 and 12, when we are long longer children but not yet teenagers, a combination of events occurred that led to me losing my religion.  I must have been a skeptic from a young age, perhaps stalled at the age of a toddler, continually asking "Why?" My brothers, sisters, and I were sent to Sunday School as a way to give our parents peace on weekend mornings as they both worked all week. I had heard stories about God and Jesus and his disciples and seen illustrated books, and the church did its best to stress the humble life of Jesus, but I was happy I had not been born on a pile of straw.  God was the stern grandfather who watched over us frail humans and took the form of a thundering authoritarian Moses by Charlton Heston, his grey locks flowing in the wind, brandishing his big stick and forbidding the masses to sin.   When I graduated from Sunday School I joined the choir of twelve pre-adolescent boys like me, whose voices hadn't deepened yet.  I already knew the lessons of the epistles and tried not to doze off, but at signals from the organist, we were called on to sing before kneeling in prayer.  The kneeling was my downfall.  I tended to faint if I was on my knees too long and this caused a commotion that attracted the entire congregation.  I learned to quietly exit the choir stall when I felt this was about to happen and sat in the sacristy with my head between my knees.  Though I wanted to blame these episodes on the rigours of religion, I also fainted while waiting in line to watch "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison," or "Sad Sack" with Jerry Lewis, so the blackouts must have had another cause.  I had to quit the choir but it was easy to walk away from it with a physical excuse rather than admitting I had never been interested in church and thought I had learned all I needed to know.  I could read well by then and there were books to enlighten me if I was curious about details of the Biblical story.

Around the same time, I had the opportunity to go to Vancouver and stay with my mother's sister and her pilot husband.  They lived in Richmond near sea level where there were deep drainage ditches in front of the modest houses so each home had its own bridge.  These were not retractable and were often scenes of tow trucks pulling yet another inattentive driver out of the ditch.  My aunt and uncle had a huge black and white television that I spent hours so close to it must have been a blur.  I'd seen television in fits and starts but only because our neighbours had one, and if we helped their son with his weekend chores and mowing the lawn, he would let us watch Zorro with him, while the Econolite revolving train lamp on top of the cabinet began a new journey every few seconds.  Having the television to myself was a step up to being a spoiled rich kid instead of being one of a tribe.  My aunt even asked what I wanted for lunch, which was a huge responsibility for someone who had always been instructed to eat what was on his plate and be quiet about it. 

The real adventure of the summer was being asked if I would like to go with my uncle on one of his flights up the West Coast.  I had flown to Vancouver from my hometown so the flight wouldn't be my first, but my uncle flew a smaller plane, an amphibious Grumman Goose, that took off from the Lulu Island base and landed at Ocean Falls.  He let me sit in the copilot's seat.  I can't remember where the real copilot went or if there was one, but there were passengers on board so my uncle wouldn't have flown alone.  The wonder of looking down on turquoise mountain lakes, deep inlets, sparkling seas, and tiny ships below, made me realize how well man had mastered the art of flight.  My uncle only had to turn dials, push buttons, pull levers, and we were airborne.  I would never believe again fundamentalist claims that if God had intended man to fly he would have given him wings. With man's ingenuity, which some might say is God-given, he had figured out how to make wings.  Powered by the roar of the engine as we skimmed across the surface of Cousins Inlet, the shackles of a life restricted by every religious prohibition fell away. 

That same summer I visited the Vancouver Zoo.  I was not unfamiliar with animals because apart from pet cats and dogs, our neighbours were ranchers with a townhouse, and they would bring vulnerable calves and lambs home to nurse back to health.  Together we played around the stockyards so even huffing big-horned bulls were only marginally intimidating.  At the zoo I saw sea lions in an enclosure, some of them using a waterslide that spilled onto a wet pool deck, but for years my brain at bedtime toyed with the awful thought of the pool apron being dry and the sea lions scraping the flesh off their bellies.  It was horrifying but I eventually learned to push thoughts like that away, although I knew in the rawness of the animal kingdom, worse things happened.  The most surprising attraction at the zoo was the spider monkeys that hung out in the arched structure above the sea lion pool.  Not only did they make a racket like a kindergarten with the volume turned up high, but effortlessly swung from high perches and sometimes came down to sit on the rocks and peer across the moat at the crowds behind a chain-link fence.  Looking into the eyes of one of the monkeys as they looked back, was like falling into another universe. There was no question that monkeys were our relatives.  With their wide inquisitive eyes, nervous sideways glances, and personal habits like scratching or picking their noses, they could have been my younger siblings.  They were not human but were a frozen stage on the way to being human.  I wasn't sure what they knew or what they felt if anything, but I suspected it was more than we gave them credit for.  I'd already had a hard time going fishing with my grandfather who gave us boys the honour of clubbing the fish he had caught over the head until they had stopped wriggling.  Could I do that to a monkey?  It would be murder. Why would God make a creature like a monkey and stop halfway?  The only answer I could come up with was that God had nothing to do with it.  Life evolved like Darwin proposed, sometimes slowly, sometimes in fits and starts.   The monkey was also me.  We looked into each other's eyes for a moment until he got bored and screeched away, but I would never look at my fingers, toes, and eyes the same way.  Sixty-seven years on, I have not wavered in my belief.  We humans are simply an improvement on monkeys and no higher being is coming to scoop us away to reside in paradise when we die.  We are already in an earthly paradise, on a wondrous planet with as many interconnections as stars in the sky.  If a mortal sin exists, it is in allowing an invented deity to turn us away from the earthly reality of the essential goodness in man when he is of sound mind.  Instead, the self-appointed spokesmen for these deities have tricked us into battling each other.  I couldn't do other than conclude that organized religions were nothing more than gangs of fanatics who were eager to enlarge their flocks to increase their prestige.  My soul did not belong to a God but to a chain of knowledge and understanding that stretched back to my earliest ancestors.  Men have survived millennia using only their wits and capabilities.  When they needed help they asked their neighbours, not a bearded man who lives in the sky.  We are intelligent and capable and will go on creating marvels. Nelson Mandela said, "Everything is impossible until it is done."  We need to leave aside primitive beliefs and live in the real, present, global world. 

When I knew I didn't believe in God anymore, I expected to be struck by a bolt of lightning for my insolence, but the punishing bolt never came.  By then I understood that lightning is not thrown about by some violent vindictive God but is an "electrostatic discharge that occurs through the atmosphere between two electrically charged regions."  Knowing the true source of nature's wonders does not make them less magnificent, but they have nothing to do with an invented God. 

Femicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackfish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Rocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Banality of Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America's God Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Levers of Control

Control can be external and internal.  Some prefer confinement to freedom while some react badly to any restriction, but freedom is an abstract concept that doesn't translate into a concrete way to live. To many, freedom represents a liberation from control, but freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose. Like happiness, freedom is a fleeting sunbeam that touches us and is gone.  It is not a permanent state of being.  

 A murderer, abuser, or exploiter might justify his behaviour by convincing himself he is above the constraints of normal society, but his freedom to act outside the law results in damage to another person.  Some people like to have the church and state decide things for them, to tell them what to believe and how to behave.  In military service there is strong evidence for this.  Some are comfortable in the armed services and some are not. Many discover when they leave the services that they are without direction and that they were less anxious when they had someone organizing their lives. Being organized and logical is among the set of human survival skills, but some people need help putting and keeping their lives in order so are more comfortable when the rules of duty and behaviour are imposed on them.  

Orders from above bring us into the religious sphere because the same principles of control apply there.  Those of a spiritual inclination prefer a God who explains the world to them and tells them what to believe and how to behave.  Without the guiding hand of religious morality, they are at a loss and flounder from one 'ism' and excess to another until they find the control they need. Religion has always been a crutch that people use to prop themselves up with, a mantra for deflecting the void of free will.  

Most people don't understand how controlled they are.  Cultural norms are a form of control, as the passive aggressive statement of "We always do it this way," is a tool for keeping members of a society within bounds. Belonging to a group is more comfortable than being ostracised by them.  Mutual cooperation means survival, so villages, towns, cities, and nations have existential reasons for maintaining law and order.  If an individual decides to act of his own free will in a way that damages the community, he is not welcome as part of the herd and puts his own survival at risk. Being pushed out to the margins of a society is the price a free thinker pays.  His society and culture would prefer he accept the imposed control even if it is against his nature. He is confident enough in his own world to go against the trend.  He may have once been a religious person who realized there was no destructive lightning bolt when he said aloud he didn't believe in God.  He may have learned that putting his nose to a daily, soul-destroying grindstone, did him more harm than good.   There were positive ways to live that didn't involve the more crushing forms of societal control.

Control is not only a political position but is essential in our emotional and psychological lives.  Everyone knows, in a relationship there is often someone who loves more, or someone who is easygoing and someone who is more demonstrative. In any pairing, there is one of the partners who prefers to have control and one who is willing to acquiesce. Many would deny this about themselves, though would grudgingly admit that living with another person requires accommodations on both sides.  Some will hold their ground on certain territories while recognizing that compromise is necessary to keep the couple in balance. Bargaining begins. "I will give this but not that."

If a man is abusive toward his wife, why except for kids, would she stay with him?  Often it is because she has a strong desire to please a man, perhaps a substitute for her father whose attention was never enough.  Her need and willingness to be controlled can be stronger than her own safety.  A man doesn't want his partner to be a doormat but neither does he want to continually fight. If two people who are together feel they each need to control identical aspects of their lives their relationship is doomed. Only a  sensible preference-based division of control can make a workable partnership.  If both parties are free spirits, the stars may move in the heavens but the cohabiting connection will ultimately be lost.

In most marriage-like relationships, when one partner is happy about something, the other one is as well.  If the two are in love they want the best for each other.  When one partner acquiesces to the other's wishes it is because they want to see the other happy.  People who are truly in love will sacrifice themselves for each other.  In the dynamics of these negotiations, control is the main element.  From a distance, a partnership can appear to be a perfect balance of power but there is always a nuanced interplay of dominance and surrender below the surface.  Dominant and acquiescent dances are all about control, with rules and benefits that are needed for it to be acceptable to both sides.   

I've never enjoyed wedding ceremonies because I feel like a witness to a conclusion, when for the happy couple it is only the start.  I don't want to know how the movie ends as more than likely it will be sad.  Sometimes by accident, we stumble across a person who instinctively knows how to navigate the byways of power and control in us and they become permanent parts of our lives. Rousseau wrote that "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains." This has been misconstrued as a war-cry for freedom but it is not Rousseau's complete idea.  In "The Social Contract" he argues that our societal chains must take precedence over individual freedoms.  He supposes that we have to accept restrictions until the needs of society are met, which may be never.  Control is part of the social contract we have agreed to, whether it is religious, military, or cultural.  These days it is almost impossible to survive totally isolated from so-called civilization. Some people can live inside the confines with a minimum of control while others need all aspects of it to help them function. An office-working, church-going parent is less threatening to society than an atheist free-lance outsider with ideas of revolution. By examining the unifying laws of the social contract, it is easier to understand and accept the levers of control.  A parent who disciplines a child might say "It's for your own good," and though as a child we detest these admonishing chains, we grow to realize they are necessary. There is such a thing as the common good, where the majority of society's needs are met, but it requires small sacrificial surrenders control from each of its components.

Here's Looking At You Kid - Artificial Intelligence

    Artificial intelligence is being touted as the next existential threat to mankind.  The press jumps on doomsday scenarios to grab our attention, but this is old news.  "The end is nigh" goes back at least as far as a predicted biblical apocalypse, and has always been a big seller on the religious circuit.  The alarm is not any more or less worrying now that it was in Jesus's time.
    Artificial Intelligence as we know it, is a way of mimicking thinking that is based on data collection.  Data has no life of its own, but is a collection of things known or assumed as facts. Communal data was probably first assembled by tax collectors, and that information was used to decide how much citizens should be taxed.  The pharaoh was less interested in how many people were in his kingdom than in how much money they could bring him.
    We are in the infancy of learning how human intelligence works, how it is created, nourished, augmented, diminished, passed on, damaged, and diverted. This is in line with how little we know about our bodies. Why do some people get diseases and others not?  Do we know how much is nature and how much is nurture?  In their prescriptions for health, doctors have followed assumptions that are based on perceived communal knowledge, which turns out to be wrong as much as it is right. Using leeches to draw out bad blood, drilling holes in skulls to relieve headaches, or administering shock therapy to disrupt anomalous behavioural patterns, are treatments that have all but been abandoned.  Their foundational data was limited and selective, or those who collected and interpreted it, had motives to skew the conclusions.  Back then we were mostly ignorant of the body's processes, but though we may boast about our advances, we have still not come far down the road. We can talk about nerves, synapses, and electrical impulses, but who really knows how a memory, a signal, or an image, is transferred through material that is like the goopy white of an egg?
    Compared to the capacity of the brain, our present technology doesn't have the resources to store and compute the amount of memory and experience that exists in a single human body.  A computer and a brain can both process information, but most humans are better than computers in some ways and worse in others.  While it might take a computer a long time to calculate the galaxy of options and possibilities of a single body movement, a human can do it in a split second and does so countless times every day. Apart from a storage capacity problem, the collecting methods and processing parameters for data would leave room for human bias in the heart of the machine.  Like computers, people decide things based on what they know and what they have learned, but humans are endowed with the wildcard of emotion.  A computer can't be angry, sad, or happy.  Human decisions are made using not only data and experience, but every other tool in the homo sapiens kit, much of which a computer doesn't have access to. 
    A computer can learn that there is a threat to its resources and take evasive action, but this is no more intelligent than a car giving a warning signal when it is low on fuel.  There is no emotion on the part of the car.  In "2001 A Space Odyssey", the computer Hal objects to being unplugged and disabled.  In the story he can do nothing but threaten.  This is a reassuring scenario but Arthur Clarke could also have made Hal kill the human who wants to unplug him.  Hal has already managed kill the crew and send the second astronaut off into space. In the film there is a tiny but gigantic leap Hal can't make - the ability to see into a human's brain to guess its motives and planned actions.  He only discovered the plot against him by reading lips. Artificial intelligence will be dangerous to humans when computers are able to look inside our brains and know what we are thinking.  This is a bridge we should never cross. If Hal had been able to read minds, he would never have allowed parts of his brain to be disconnected. A computer can make guesses about us, recommend shopping choices based on what we have shown interest in, but it will never understand entirely why a person buys a certain jacket beyond attributes like colour, comfort, and price.  Algorithms can't know that the jacket reminds the potential buyer of a similar one they once had, or be like the jacket of an admired friend, or conform to the image of themselves they have created in their own mind. Some shopping apps let buyers virtually try on garments but this is no different than playing with dress-up cutout dolls. It lacks the psychological and emotional input for what we ultimately choose. 
    Artificial intelligence can do many good things for humans, but its information gathering skills can also be abused. Like a knife it can be used for good or bad. With the arrival of surrealism, television, and computers, people became more attuned to the difference between reality and artificiality.  Dramas as artificial creations, the news is supposedlyreal, though using the surrealist argument, whatever we see on our screens is an image and is not the real thing. A century ago Rene Magritte made the point with his painting of a pipe, whose title is "The Treachery of Images."
    Nobody believes they are seeing the real world when they look through virtual reality glasses, but if we destroy our planet and are unable to venture outdoors except with cameras and drones, we will lose touch with reality.  We will be comfortable in this second hand world being fed images that are easy to manipulate.  We won't be able to smell the poisonous air through a drone image or taste the bitter wind.  These nightmares aside, we should only be alarmed when artificial intelligence takes a step away from the artificial and tries to get inside the human brain. 
    We need to be on the lookout for what until now have only been science fiction scenarios where computers can download the contents of our brains.  In the film Total Recall, based on a story called "We Can Remember It For You," citizens can have false memories implanted in their brains, which creates the idea of having been somewhere or done something. Clients wake up believing they have lived through their wildest fantasies with no risk to their physical bodies.  We are easily lulled into thinking the next great product will revolutionize our lives and give meaning to our pointless existence, but in our rush to fill that void, we don't always think through the implications and possible eventual abuses.  Our technological advances are amazing achievements, but we need guardrails on how technologies are used.
    When cloning became possible, it was seen as a potential threat to existence, and it caused UNESCO and the WHO to ban human cloning. Some may believe this moratorium is holding up potential research, but many science fiction works have warned us about the unexpected implications of the wholesale production of organs.  We don't yet know all of the fields that AI can be turned loose in and its power is growing exponentially, but we need to listen to the voices that remind us of mankind's worst tendencies and how easily ambition and the lure of profit, can sweep aside common sense.

Untruth In Advertising

In looking for a name to call untruth in advertising I arrived at the word "disinformation", which by itself is indecipherable. Examples are the best way to illustrate these advertising tricks.  Whatever is being sold, whether it is cars, snacks, sunglasses or kids vitamins, might start off with a line like,  "Next time you take the family out on a road trip...." which assumes many things that may not necessarily be true.  The marketer targets his statistics-proven audience by assuming that they are married, have children, live in the suburbs, and have disposable income.  Often it is difficult to understand at the beginning of these ads what the item being sold is going to be, but it doesn't matter because the same marketing techniques work for everything.  The "take the family on a drive" slogan leaves out single people, inner city dwellers, bus riders, the unemployed and the poor.  It insinuates that a person is not 'normal' if he doesn't have or doesn't want the latest car, massive television, or display of holiday selfies. This exclusion creates a mass of unsatisfied people, who are chasing after a dream that has been created by a marketing team.  It is an open secret that advertising works by creating its own markets.  The billion dollar perfume industry has prospered by using this concept. The consumer is not being sold the actual bottle of scent, but the image of someone who is a Hugo Boss man or a Chanel wearer.  What chance does an ugly duckling from Cincinnati have?  She buys the perfume and deludes herself with Instagram duck-face filtered photos that she has the glamourous life of a Parisian model.  It all starts with the first lie about who people are and what they want.  Like the claim that we in the West live in democracies that are approved by the majority of the people, the narrative being sold is a lie.  If voting is only done by 60% of the population and those votes are split into parties, governing rights can be claimed by those who have the majority of the voters, but are not the majority of the population.  Democracy ends up being governance by minority. 

Watching a commercial for Volkswagen, I saw a type of bullying advertising that made my blood boil.  We see a man in front of his house retrieving the morning paper and as he does so, he sees "your'" new Volkswagen in the driveway next door.  The newspaper is already a clue that undermines the man's credibility.  Having a newspaper delivered to his door every morning is a signal that says 'old school'.  Newspapers are a waste of paper.  An up-to-date man would check the news on his phone.  Clearly this man is not in sync with the times.   A female voice that is sure of itself, even a little righteous, says, "Your neighbour (meaning the man with the paper) thinks Volkswagens are expensive to maintain."   Next we see him in his kitchen pouring lumpy milk into his coffee.  We wonder why he would do this and we are meant to think he is too stupid to tell the difference between good and bad.  The man appears to be single.  Why hasn't his wife checked the milk as he seems to be inept at doing so.   The false reality of a single incapable unshaven man in a slightly messy house, is designed to undermine whatever the man thinks.  Volkswagen is a progressive company so they'll accept single men even though they are clearly faulty.  Maybe he is married but he is an early riser, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  The female sales voice says, "He also thinks the milk is perfectly fine so maybe don't listen to him." This implies that anyone who thinks a Volkswagen is expensive, is a dolt who doesn't care if he poisons himself with sour milk.  It is a type of groupthink that was used by the Nazis to make people believe that if they didn't think like the rest of the group, a group who had already been brain-washed and conditioned by the state, that they were crazy and misguided dissenters.  The Nazis put them in concentration camps, the Russians in insane asylums.  

It is a fact that some cars are more expensive than others.  Nobody would dispute that a Ferrari is costly to buy and maintain.  A Volkswagen is not a Ferrari but it is not a bottom of the range vehicle.  The company is not denying the car is expensive and lets itself off the hook by having 'your neighbour' as just one stupid person, but it skates close to the edge of semantic hair splitting, which in this case could be construed as lying. Compared to some cars, Volkswagens are expensive.  They are good cars, but they cost more than many other brands, and rightly so because they are well made.  But to imply that anyone who thinks a Volkswagen is expensive overall must be ignorant, misguided, or insane, is a technique that is as old as propaganda. Unfortunately, there is a world of weak-minded, easy-answer, gullible, and brainwashed consumers out there, who will be intimidated by the company's insinuation that they too could be sour milk drinkers.  It is impossible and undemocratic to outlaw double-speak since diplomacy is based on it, but the psychological games used in marketing should be taught in grade school. A degree of critical thinking can save a lot of  heartbreak and disillusionment later in life but the companies trying to sell products would prefer that the underpinnings of their seamless lies are not visible.

In a more crass and equally dangerous arena, politicians are often straightforward liars.  They will say things like "Under this leader the country is on the road to ruin," when the opposite is true. Some people believe what politicians say, since they must be upstanding enough to get elected and sworn into office, but telling the truth is not something politicians promise to do. Either side is capable of the one-note propaganda which tells lies not only by omission but as bald-faced untruths.  Being caught in an outright lie should be grounds for shame and censure, but in the political world the ability to lie without blinking is considered an asset rather than an impediment.  We have become so used to untruths being told by advertisers and our governments that pundits consider we are living in an age of 'post-truth' which I can only take to mean an age invented reality.  This disconnect with objective facts has the effect of isolating people in their own magic bubbles where everything they chose to believe is true, while what they chose not to believe is a lie. A society that drifts too far into the distortion of provable facts, creates a disunited, bickering population that is easy to control.  That is the objective. 

Chasing The High

    America's inner cities are dying from a drug overdose. City centres that were once the backbone of commerce were abandoned as the suburbs expanded and industry moved away.  These urban wastelands have become home to legions of modern-day zombies.  Some of these neglected downtown areas were already known as hangouts for the drunk, addicted, and homeless, but since fentanyl hit the streets in 2005, the population of vacant humans has spread like an uncontrolled infection.  This is the American dream come home to roost.  
    Unique in the world, America's Declaration of Independence in 1776, included not only the right to life and liberty, but the right to the pursuit of happiness.  It also stated that all men are created equal, but this was in an age when "all men" didn't include women, blacks, or men without property.  The phrase about the pursuit of happiness was meant as a right that certain men should have to enjoy their property in safety, security, and happiness.  It was never intended as a guarantee of happiness for the entire population, which is how many in the last century have rigidly interpreted it. When people believe their government owes them happiness, they are disappointed when this doesn't turn out to be true, and believe that their government has betrayed them. How often have we heard Americans protesting that something is their right as citizens, as if the accident of their birthplace has given them special status among humans?  The Bill of Rights says in so many words that Americans have been endowed with these rights by the Creator.  Dragging the name of God into the rights of man obscures the fact that man is only allowed rights that are assigned to him by his master, whether that be his government, his employer, or his peers.   It is apparently not a human right to kill his fellow man unless his government declares the opposite and sends him to war.
    The expectation of certain things by a population inevitably leads to disappointment.  To lessen the disillusionment when things don't go as planned, Americans have come to expect that there will be immediate easy remedies, and if there are not, it must be someone's fault.  In the early rampantly capitalism of infant America, snake oil salesmen promised a cure for every ailment and so the pharmaceutical industry was born.  Feeling unhappy?  Drink this.   Feeling depressed? Take a pill.  Feeling hopeless?  We will show you God.  America has never stopped chasing the high of a promised land that never was. When politicians shout about Making America Great Again, they are selling a dream that was never a reality.   There have always been holes in the dream.  The dream is only conceded to those with money, property, and the willingness to exploit others.
Schizophrenic America can have a presidential campaign that thunders on about Saying No To Drugs, while the main street of every small town has a neon arrow pointing to glossy storefront pharmacy and that spells out in huge letters,the word Drugs.  Schizophrenia is the policy.  Take drugs, don't take drugs.  Maybe just take the ones that are socially acceptable like alcohol or others that the doctor prescribes but don't take the ones that mother says are bad.  
    Those who are disappointed with their lives are encouraged to seek remedies outside themselves because they can't find answers elsewhere.  Some turn to religion, some to all-consuming phobias, from obsessive cleaning to hoarding, hoping to block the emptiness of their existence. Many of these lost souls have reason to be untethered.  Their religion and state have let them down, and the drugs aren't a permanent fix.  Unfortunately, many are not brave or intelligent enough to understand the origins and objectives of their governments or religions, and mistakenly believe that these institutions should be responsible for their well-being.  
    There is another problem with the slide into drug consumption to keep the disappointment and unhappiness at bay.  Once a person is prescribed certain medicines, there is a fear on the part of the drug taker, that if they give them up they will relapse and might be unhappy, something that is unacceptable in Thomas Jefferson's Bill of Rights.  If a doctor prescribes medicine for high blood pressure it is understood that this medication needs to be taken for life.  There is not a doctor alive who will advise a patient to stop their hypertension medication.   Patients are led to assume that if they stop their meds they will die, and doctors don't contradict this notion.  "Of course you can stop," they say, "but it's your funeral."  Antidepressant medications are much the same.  A doctor might go so far as to suggest that a patient could taper off antidepressants, but the reluctance this time lies with the patient.  Will I go crazy again if I stop?  Many are unwilling to take that chance.  Drug companies would prefer that once we are on medication, we are on it for life.  That way their profits are certain.
    America is chasing its own tail.  Drugs are needed to survive the emptiness of existence, but the drugs, and the attempt to use them to find nirvana is an empty solution.  Not all turn to drugs, as some go overboard with fitness, religion, games, and a thousand other distractions, rarely getting at the root of the problem. A man can be a shining example of health and fitness and have a spiritual and emotional life that is as desolate as a burned-out inner city.  Adrenaline can temporarily satisfy us, but like many drugs it requires more to get the same effect.  
    It has been said that the constant search for a high is a hedge against boredom, or maybe proof that we are alive in a restricted society.   The only solution, the way off of this treadmill of chasing a high that never was, is to take aim at the pillars of society that keep every citizen in a mortal struggle for survival.  There are enough resources in America to pay everyone a generous living wage, but that does not suit the higher powers as they are afraid it will rob them of their control over the desperate masses who will kill each other to get the best place in the machinery. Churches are not as focused on a man's spiritual health as they are in swelling the numbers in their congregation.  More members bring more money.   With so much emptiness in their lives and with no vision of how to make things better, the perpetual search for a quick fix to make things better is as American as apple pie and just as unhealthy.  It will not be a surprise when future nations without the same poisonous baggage come along to supersede mythical but flawed America.