2 Things that show us the way towards global change

There were, I realized just this minute (ok, I’m slow, sometimes) two things that have occurred in recent memory, that point the way to change our world(s).

The first was/is the outrage older generations express to “millenials” (ie: everyone younger than them, including their own children and grandchildren) because they are (apparently willfully) “refusing” to buy the expensive things that people in *my* generation assumed would fund a luxurious retirement and keep the system running long enough to see them into the grave in comfort and style.

Houses, for example. New cars. Oil and Gas. Expensive vacations. Meat.

All the things their retirement investments are bound up in. Governments and businesses? They won’t support wind power and solar arrays, or find plastic replacements like hemp or whatever, until we force them to, and the only way to force them to is to make “business as usual” unprofitable.

And babies. Why won’t younger people keep having lots of babies, to ensure that a) there will be enough workers needing jobs and b) that younger people will be bound, as they were, to their wage-serfdom while those wages stay low, so that investors get an ever-increasing return on their money.

The other thing was the effect of Covid lockdowns.

Remember? How almost overnight some of the most polluted places began to recover? Remember how many jobs suddenly became do-able as work-from-home? And the way so many people found, after the first wave, better jobs, and how businesses are still complaining how “no one wants to work anymore”?

So here’s the thing: we could, by voluntary collective action, make the change.

Ditch your cars, as much as you can. Walk more places, and take more public transit. If your boss complains, explain how you cannot, on the money you make, afford to drive long distances. This is huge. It’s real, too, and why you need unions, but failing that, if more and more people simply refused to be bullied into the return to offices or to be even more bullied into desperately trading their lives to the managerial clock, businesses might need to rethink their models.

Shop less and shop local – small businesses, wherever you can, because they need your money, and Walmart doesn’t.

Buying less can make huge waves in the economy. After Covid, friends of mine began having “pub night” at home: everyone brought their own drinks of choice, the host house made bar snacks like nachos and wings, and either people brought their own guitars etc. and made music, or someone played DJ. Instead of $50-$100 per couple, they spent maybe $20, and had tons of good times…and could walk home, a lot of them.

During Covid lockdowns, people started baking bread, or quilting, or gardening…and a lot of them were finding joy in giving products of their labour to housebound friends. When someone got ill, their friends and neighbours made sure they got groceries, made sure they got company: I remember sitting on a friend’s back deck, while she sat inside, with the requisite six feet of distance, and we gossiped and laughed for a couple of hours, because she is immunocompromised, and we didn’t dare take any chances.

People did drive-by gifting – I got a bag of home-made bath bombs and hot chocolate mixes from a complete stranger who had just moved in down the block about a month before everything went sideways, and it made a bond that endured.

We learned to be neighbours again. We learned how to find joy in very simple things.

The fact is, inflation is driven by our continued compliance: we keep buying the stuff, regardless of price.

The fact is, corporations and governments will continue to ignore climate change until we refuse to use the polluting products they keep selling.

We can change the world, by refusing to do what “they”/”the system” wants and needs us to do.

Sometimes it seems hopeless…

But it isn’t. Believe me when I tell that the darkest hour is right before the dawn.

In my teens, we were fighting to end wars, and to see that everyone had equal rights and opportunities. We were in the streets, and in the halls of universities. We were beaten. We were arrested. But we won the battles.

Later on, we fought for women to be allowed those rights, too. And bodily autonomy, and we thought we’d won that battle, too.

After that, we fought apartheid in South Africa, and we thought that at least there, the job was done.

We were wrong, because having won the battles, we confused it with winning the war, but I tell you now, that doesn’t make our efforts and our gains insignificant.

Now some of those battles need to be fought all over again, and there are issues piling up on top of these, things like climate chaos and lgbtq+ rights, for example.

And it’s hard, I know. It feels so exhausting, but we need to stay on it. We (especially my generation) need to get back on the streets and into the boardrooms and fight like hell.

In the beginning, in each of these successive movements, we felt as though we were getting nowhere. That the people in charge would never listen, never change.

In the beginning, we were dismissed as naive, the issues were trivialized and mocked, vilified and insulted.

And then we were subjected to violence.

But little by little, we made gains. People from every age group and every walk of life began to hear our words and quietly at first and then with more insistence, they began to openly support our causes.

We changed their minds and their hearts.

So don’t give up. Redouble your efforts and shout ever louder.

Because eventually, if enough noise is made by enough people, we will scare those fuckers right down into their expensive dress shoes, and they will back down.

It was the best of times….

It was the worst of times…

It might just have been the last good time, in fact.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B8M16YW

Happy Halloween!

True Believers are the scary ones

A friend and I just had a conversation where he said he didn’t know which of the rw fascists were worse: the True Believers who don’t care what Trump does, they are “with him to the end” and don’t feel there is anything Trump could do that can change their minds and that he’s the only one “standing up for America” OR the cynical supporters who just see an opportunity for them to gain power or just hurt people they hate or fear.

I said it was the True Believers who are the real danger, because they are the ones who would go out and shoot people. They are the potential suicide bombers.

The cynical opportunists?

They won’t risk anything, and certainly not their own precious skin.

They will use the True Believers to do the dirty work.

There’s a reason that some of the Jan. 6 ringleaders were sitting at home or in a DC hotel room: they weren’t willing to put any actual skin in the game.

Bigot Apologetics

“Apologetics” is a term used by/for right wing hardline Christians to explain and handwave away the contradictions and problematic bits of the Bible and their stances on various topics and to bolster their own opposition to the growing convictions that many of us hold about things like kindness, generosity, and acceptance.

And this meme/Facebook post is a shining example of this view.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2281936675326053&set=a.2107934396059616

OK, but you never knew this before – you saw a picture and a name that wasn’t even hers, and swallowed the stereotype without a single thought.

Absolutely none of us gave a rat’s ass who she was up until people of colour began shaming all of us for erasing black history and for making the big bucks off their backs.

In the same way that fundamentalists and evangelicals cherry-pick through both books of the Bible to find that one verse or single sentence in the OT that supports their views, while screaming at the rest of us that we’re taking things out of context when we point out the hypocrisy of the way they completely ignore the parts where Jesus wants peace and tolerance and kindness out of them, and asks his followers to not go around praying in public, bigots of all stripes and their corporate masters try to pretend that it’s other people’s fault that white westerners erased pretty much the entirety of black culture and history.

It’s the way that when the ingrained misogyny of the west is pushed back against, they scream about how much worse it is for women in X country or religion – as if “not being quite that bad” is a virtue and a good reason not to improve (meanwhile trying to wrest away every gain women in the west have managed to win even the most basic of human rights they achieved over the last century…).

It’s part and parcel of the overall scheme of portraying the solution to climate chaos is down to the individual effort (Recycle your garbage! Ban plastic straws! Stop driving!) to deflect attention away from the way their private jets belch out literal tons of harmful emissions every year or how, if we divested from fossil fuels, 40% of all shipping traffic would essentially disappear.

https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels

So stop letting the 1% and their water=carriers guilt you up and distract you from the real problem, which is that they utterly refuse to find or utilize the practical solutions to the problems in favour of hate, complicity, laziness, and above all: MONEY.

Trust me. No matter how much you lick their boots, they will never, ever send you a cheque and welcome you in as part of their elite and perfumed little clique.

If you want to know more about why I feel the way I do, you can buy my book:

Why I don’t support Israel…and no one should.

Look – this isn’t about Judaism.

Seriously, it’s not. Israel, despite a half century and more of propaganda, is not synonymous with Judaism. It’s a country, not a religion.

I was born a mere 15 years after WW2 ended, and raised to believe that Israel was just this tiny enclave of “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps” scrappy little enclave a of brave freedom fighters.

And maybe that was true then. Certainly the Arab nations surrounding it were determined to crush it out of existence, and the West, laden with guilt about having ignored the hundreds of verifiable reports of just what Germany was doing to Jewish people for at least a decade (out of, I might add, the West’s own ingrained anti-Semitism), felt they had to support and defend the new country.

But the creation of Israel – the western imposition of fiat decisions displacing and deligitimising the people that had been inhabiting the region for basically forever – was fraught with problems, and these problems were all extremely predictable.

(No. Don’t @ me with bs about how “Palestine never really existed” – there are travel posters from prewar decades urging people to visit Palestine, and anyway, as Shakespeare pointed out: what’s in a name? There were people, real, actual people, who lived there.)

There were a lot of ways that everyone should have known this would go wrong.

Anyway, guilt and the fact that there was money to be made convinced the world to arm the Israelis. They were just trying to live, right?

In the beginning, I guess that was true. They were trying to build a country.

And somewhere along the line, the political class in Israel took the problem and turned it on it’s head. “Trying to build a country” became ‘annexing as much land as possible”, and then morphed into “kill those people we are scared of”, and then the fiction that the area had been a hellhole/wasteland with no one living here” was used to justify pretty much anything.

In the last thirty years or so, that justification began to sound increasingly familiar, and so did the actions that proceeded from that justification.

Lebensraum, anyone?

Look, I don’t know what the answer is. Nobody really does, but a lot of the problem stems from the major powers assuming that Israel is always blameless, that every action they take is defensive, and that because of what we pretty much let the Germans do to Jews in Europe, Israel now has every right to do to the Arabic population they displaced.

I think, after a quarter century of slow genocide and the constant appropriation of land belonging to non-Jews, it is no big surprise that Hamas re-emerged and started to fight back.

I don’t like it. I don’t think it has any chance of a good ending. But I cannot find it in my heart to blame them.

It’s entirely predictable, and considering that in the 60s, people often complained about the fact that the Jews in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia, France and all the other places the Nazis invaded never really fought back (not completely true, but, ok) it’s the absolute height of hypocrisy for us to condemn the Palestinian people for resorting, once again, to violence.

Again, Israel is not Judaism. Israel is not a religion – it’s a country. It’s a country that has been, from the very start, reliant on the Holocaust guilt of the west to garner money and arms, and far from defending their borders, have used those arms to expand into other people’s territories, and destroyed other people’s homes and lives.

It’s not a good look, and many people just turn their eyes away and stick with the fiction, but history is merciless, and sooner or later, the willfully blind will answer for this.

We need to find real solutions. Ones that don’t end with “Ooops, sorry about ignoring your genocide” kneejerk reactions, where we find another group of people we don’t give a shit about and displace them, and start the cycle all over again.

If you want to support me and keep me writing, please buy this book:

A Better Smoothie Just for the Lactose Intolerant

This is a great summer smoothie that is perfect for hot summer days!

1/2 frozen banana, cut into chunks

1/2 cup frozen berries or fruit of your choice

5-7 icecubes

1/3 cup (or more, depending on how thick you like your smoothie) unsweetened apple juice

Put everything into the blender and go to town on it till everything is – well, you know: smooth.

Dump into a glass and enjoy.

*Editor’s note: also good with vodka added, but not exactly a healthy choice. Still, there are those days when a little medicinal alcohol might be a good idea.

LOCK THEM ALL UP.

It’s time.

There comes a point when “Unity” makes no sense. There’s a point where democracy has to lay it on the line, even if the other side is threatening civil war.

Look – it’s all very well to go full-on Pollyanna and say that we need to understand other points of view, and that the only way towards reconciliation is kindness.

In a perfect world.

This world is demonstrably not perfect.

You can’t reason with people who would prefer you dead. You can’t reason with people who refuse to believe any evidence over their fondest imaginings. You cannot cajole, flatter, empathize, or understand them into civility.

Because they think that stuff is weakness. They think you are weak, and should be killed, and they are eager to do the killing.

The only way to deflect them from the goals they seek – and yes, admittedly, this is only a temporary detour, at best – is to make the cost of their beliefs so high that they get scared and retreat.

Look, a lot of what drives most people is to feel that they belong. That what they say is approved of by those around them. That they are superior to those who aren’t part of “the group”.

And what are they to think, if all kinds of media and organized religion tell them that whites are better than “others”, that immigrants are stealing their jobs, that the Democrats are evil, and that the election was stolen?

It isn’t even that they actually believe these things. It’s that for the last forty years, they’ve paid no penalty for these beliefs, but have, in many senses, been rewarded for them.

Not in money, of course: many of them are demonstrably poorer as the result of the austerity measures they vote for so enthusiastically. But socially, they’ve garnered praise and admiration, at least locally in their own communities.

Their pastor tells them they are virtuous for saying those horrible things. Their neighbors applaud their “courage” when they do those rude things, like refusing to bake a wedding cake or brandishing a gun at a black toddler in a park.

And if, as a result, they lose a little revenue for their business, or even become unemployed, they’ve generally made out like bandits by setting up GoFundMe pages and collecting far more money than they lost or could have ever hoped to earn.

Before we can reconcile with hateful people, we need to convince them to be less hateful. Before we can convince them that their opinions aren’t worth airing, we need them to see those beliefs as unpopular and out of step with their own communities.

And the only way to do that is to make them accountable, in the most extreme way that law and public opinion can muster.

You won’t change their minds, of course. At least some of them will remain unrepentant racist pieces of refuse to the end.

But there are two things that severe justice can accomplish.

One is that their children will know better, and an awful lot of them will grow up thinking far differently from their parents.

The other thing that punishment will accomplish is this:

They’ll mostly shut up.

A Word About Your Canadian Pension

Ever since I was 17, people have been telling me that by the time I retired, there would be no pension money left, and that my contributions were just a tax grab. That we were being cheated.

Fifty years later, I am collecting a comfortable monthly amount that enables me to live in pretty much the same way I would if I were working.

Because that “common-sense/basic economics/entitlements” bullshit is exactly that – bullshit.

The studies that the naysayers point to are filled with unfounded and frequently outright fraudulent “facts” and I will (naturally) tell you why.

1. The first assumption is that the amount of money sitting in the pension fund on the day the “researcher” looked it up is a static amount – that it will not grow and consequently will simply be depleted by current recipients down to nothing by the time you retire.. That is, that zero contributions will be added, ever again.
   
   And that is ridiculous, because they are simultaneously telling you that YOUR contributions are going to pay old people, so those monies won’t be there for you.
   
   I’m pretty sure you can see how that does not compute, as our robot overlords would say.
   
   
2. The second assumption is that everyone currently collecting those payments will still be alive and kicking when you turn 65. That the amount needed to pay out will simply increase forever.
   
   That not even possible. I don’t care how good our health care system is – people in their 80s today will not all be hanging around for the next 30 years. The numbers will not lie: the retired population does not grow exponentially, and an awful lot of people paying in right now will likely either never collect, or will only collect for a year or three.
   
   
3. The third assumption is that the contributions you make (average seems to be around $5 a month, depending on your salary) are the ONLY amounts involved – they seem to forget that A) your employer is also contributing, and B) (the really big omission that the anti-government shills love to skip over) is that – JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER PENSION PLAN – the money collected for CPP gets INVESTED.
   
   Sorry about the bolding and caps – but it’s important. The CPP does not rely on just your and your employer’s contributions – it uses that money to grow the pool of cash and make sure there is no shortfall.
   
   
4. There’s a fourth assumption/omission in there, too: what the “There won’t be any money left by the time you need it” doomsayers tend to not point out is that if you earn a lot and put away a lot for your retirement, your piece of this pie will be smaller than those who had to live paycheck to paycheck.
   
   We aren’t all going to get the same amounts, and that’s done so that the system can re-allocate funds to those who need them – there’s a minimum amount that the government feels you should not fall below. It isn’t really enough – and that’s yet another reason why a Universal Basic Income would be much better – but it is at least an acknowledgement that we don’t think people should starve to death in the freezing dark just because they weren’t rich before they turned 65.

So when someone tells you that you should vote for politicians who hate the idea that we should have a system whereby people do not get pushed off on a metaphorical iceberg when they are deemed to be no longer useful to the economy, you need to stop and think about what they AREN’T telling you.

Vote for people who give a shit, and stop believing that low-effort and essentially fraudulent claim that by the time you hit your golden years, the cupboard will be bare.

The only way for that to happen is if you let the greedy and the ignorant take that system down for their own profit.