A walk around the farm yard on a cloudy day...
Saturday 26 September 2015
Wednesday 23 September 2015
FaceBook - Not FactBook
Social media is a misnomer. It should be called Gossip Cache, Rumour Haven, Tattler's Bin or something that at least better describes its function. FaceBook is not FactBook and it can be damaging. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think it's all bad, actually I'm kinda hooked. Social media keeps folks in contact, informs people of events. It has helped to open the eyes of many people to the disparities of human existence in our world. It is partly responsible for and actually aided revolutions in countries that had, and often still have, cruel and corrupt regimes. It has made the world a much smaller place. Sometimes I wonder if that's a good thing. But Pandora's Box is open. There's no turning back.
I am annoyed though with the "information" aspect of social media, e-mail and on-line news. How in the world does anyone find the truth when truth is obviously so subjective?
This political campaign in Canada - wow! All parties slamming the others. My mind is screaming for some positive input. I've made no secret of where my political affiliations lie, and I too have liked and/or shared many political rants, cartoons, etc. supporting my negative view of Harper's Canada. But I got a post the other day that really says it all. These political posts are speaking to the decided. They're not changing anyone's mind or helping the undecided. And on top of that, it's almost like friends are becoming non-friends over this election. Hey, you know all those things we had in common that made us friends in the first place? They're still there! No more on-line politicking for me.
And beyond the election - I've seen posts on FaceBook that create fear, demonize, slander or mislead, and when I fact checked them they turned out to be totally untrue. Yet, because these posts fall into place with someone's view of the world they are liked and shared, and the lies go on and on.
I've heard "news" that is so out to lunch that any thinking person would find it laughable, yet there are people out there, way too many people, who suck this trash up like a sponge. Why, because it feeds their fears and biases.
I've heard what should be trusted media use terminology that creates bias - wording that unconsciously determines our thinking.
I'm tired of religious beliefs that create suspicion and hate for people who do not share that particular religion's views. And I'm really tired of so-called Christians acting so darn un-Christian, setting themselves apart, believing they are God's chosen ones to the exclusion of all others. How do they differ from their Muslim counterparts in this? How can anyone think there is a god who would condone such behaviour?
We are unconsciously or consciously creating hate, fearing difference, demonizing other countries, religions, and political systems while at the same time failing to fact check or choosing to ignore inconvenient bits of information that don't support our views. We are creating a climate for yet another war. We're getting all riled up, learning to hate THEM, you know, those weird people who are not like us. Profiteers are licking their chops in anticipation. Ask yourself, who profits, who suffers, who wins?
Thursday 17 September 2015
We Need a Village
Why do people leave their own county? What is the intent behind their move? Are they fleeing war, famine, bombing, flying bullets, religious or political oppression (refugees), or are they looking for a better life, better opportunities, a better standard of living (immigrants)? Or both? Europe is now facing a massive migration, one caused by war and fuelled by the knowledge that there are societies where a person and his/her family can be safe and enjoy those basic human rights which all people have a right to expect as normal.
This massive influx of population is causing many problems. The West has largely washed its hands of the whole thing. But what happens anywhere in the world effects the rest of the world. It's that global thing.
So, how should these migrants be treated? Should they be welcomed, feared, sent back, ghettoized? Seems like all of these alternatives are either happening or being considered. We cannot be judgemental from our comfortable lives here in Canada, but we can have an opinion. And we can try to sway other people and our federal government to agree with our opinion. But, other than directly sponsoring an immigrant family ourselves, that's about all we can do.
I thought the Catholic Pope had a good idea - he said every Catholic Parish should sponsor a family. In Europe alone this would allow over 100,000 refugee families to immigrate. Expand that to Canada, the USA, and parishes of other Christian sects, Mosques and Synagogs and wow! Wouldn't that be something! Of course, sponsorship or not, each congregation would have to wind its way through the immigration process of their country which can be daunting. And each sponsor would have to recognize that they would be extending their charity to people who may not share their religious faith. Hmmm.
Some folks think we should be relaxing our immigration policies and welcoming a large number of these terror stricken individuals into our country. Some feel that these people would bring terror to our country with them. So, what sort of refugee do I think should come to Canada, or any other country for that matter? I think that refugees must also be immigrants. They must want to stay. They should be willing to learn a new language; willing to live within the laws of the society they are adopting; willing to teach their children to respect the history, values and traditions of the country they left while at the same time allowing them to fully integrate and adapt to their new country's values and traditions.
And what about those who are refugees only, the ones who love their country, who want to go back just as soon as the conflict they're fleeing from settles down, when it's possible again to carry on commerce, to work and feed their families, to practice their religion and carry on their traditions? It seems to me that immigrating these folks would be more or less a waste of time and resources. So what could be done for them, to help them?
I know this is naive and there's likely a thousand reasons why it's not possible, but some version of this idea could perhaps take place......
We could build a village. We could pull our troops from the countries that are in conflict and use the dollars not spent on bombs and bullets (also charitable donations) to lease a large parcel of land in order to provide temporary housing, food, and medical aid for these refugees. These people are traumatized, they need help and they certainly should not be sent back into the conflict zones. While waiting to return they need to be able to carry on commerce, worship, attend school, have dignity, have a decent place to live.
Our peacekeepers (Remember them - the peacekeepers, the troops Canada used to send overseas?), representatives from the refugee population, NGO's from all countries and officials from the host country could help to administer and keep order amongst the various factions within this temporary haven. Oversight should be provided to ensure that charitable donations are received by the refugees rather than some corrupt official. The host country should receive the greatest share of any monetary benefit arising from building and maintaining this haven. Their business suppliers and labourers should be used whenever possible. Hosting this village should be a win-win situation, not a detriment.
Conflicts are not settled overnight. This could turn out to be long term. But as long as there are refugees a place like this is desperately needed, not a ghetto with poor sanitation, poor housing, no hope. And, if the conflict continues indefinitely, if the refugees can never return, then each family, one by one, will have to recognize that the country they loved no longer exists and apply to immigrate to a country that reaches out a welcoming hand.
The disparity between the "haves and have nots" of the world needs to balance out. Religions, races, and people with differing cultural norms will have to learn to tolerate one another. If not we all must accept that there will be endless war, and an endless numbers of refugees.
This massive influx of population is causing many problems. The West has largely washed its hands of the whole thing. But what happens anywhere in the world effects the rest of the world. It's that global thing.
So, how should these migrants be treated? Should they be welcomed, feared, sent back, ghettoized? Seems like all of these alternatives are either happening or being considered. We cannot be judgemental from our comfortable lives here in Canada, but we can have an opinion. And we can try to sway other people and our federal government to agree with our opinion. But, other than directly sponsoring an immigrant family ourselves, that's about all we can do.
I thought the Catholic Pope had a good idea - he said every Catholic Parish should sponsor a family. In Europe alone this would allow over 100,000 refugee families to immigrate. Expand that to Canada, the USA, and parishes of other Christian sects, Mosques and Synagogs and wow! Wouldn't that be something! Of course, sponsorship or not, each congregation would have to wind its way through the immigration process of their country which can be daunting. And each sponsor would have to recognize that they would be extending their charity to people who may not share their religious faith. Hmmm.
Some folks think we should be relaxing our immigration policies and welcoming a large number of these terror stricken individuals into our country. Some feel that these people would bring terror to our country with them. So, what sort of refugee do I think should come to Canada, or any other country for that matter? I think that refugees must also be immigrants. They must want to stay. They should be willing to learn a new language; willing to live within the laws of the society they are adopting; willing to teach their children to respect the history, values and traditions of the country they left while at the same time allowing them to fully integrate and adapt to their new country's values and traditions.
And what about those who are refugees only, the ones who love their country, who want to go back just as soon as the conflict they're fleeing from settles down, when it's possible again to carry on commerce, to work and feed their families, to practice their religion and carry on their traditions? It seems to me that immigrating these folks would be more or less a waste of time and resources. So what could be done for them, to help them?
I know this is naive and there's likely a thousand reasons why it's not possible, but some version of this idea could perhaps take place......
We could build a village. We could pull our troops from the countries that are in conflict and use the dollars not spent on bombs and bullets (also charitable donations) to lease a large parcel of land in order to provide temporary housing, food, and medical aid for these refugees. These people are traumatized, they need help and they certainly should not be sent back into the conflict zones. While waiting to return they need to be able to carry on commerce, worship, attend school, have dignity, have a decent place to live.
Our peacekeepers (Remember them - the peacekeepers, the troops Canada used to send overseas?), representatives from the refugee population, NGO's from all countries and officials from the host country could help to administer and keep order amongst the various factions within this temporary haven. Oversight should be provided to ensure that charitable donations are received by the refugees rather than some corrupt official. The host country should receive the greatest share of any monetary benefit arising from building and maintaining this haven. Their business suppliers and labourers should be used whenever possible. Hosting this village should be a win-win situation, not a detriment.
Conflicts are not settled overnight. This could turn out to be long term. But as long as there are refugees a place like this is desperately needed, not a ghetto with poor sanitation, poor housing, no hope. And, if the conflict continues indefinitely, if the refugees can never return, then each family, one by one, will have to recognize that the country they loved no longer exists and apply to immigrate to a country that reaches out a welcoming hand.
The disparity between the "haves and have nots" of the world needs to balance out. Religions, races, and people with differing cultural norms will have to learn to tolerate one another. If not we all must accept that there will be endless war, and an endless numbers of refugees.
Wednesday 9 September 2015
High Bush Cranberries
It's been more than 20 years since we switched from wandering goats to fenced sheep, and I some-times smell the cranberries when I'm on a walk, but when I follow my nose there's never enough to pick. This year, though, while seeking a launch site for our son and his friends to canoe down the Athabasca River, we spotted masses of these berries and later went down with buckets to pick some. Two hours picking, three gallons picked, then three hours cleaning. (A friend later told me I wouldn't have had to clean out the sticks, leaves etc. because I was extracting juice for jelly not making jam! Ah well, never too old to learn!) Extracting the juice took quite a while; got enough for 3 batches of jelly. I now have enough high bush cranberry jelly to last at least 5 years!
High bush cranberries have their own special flavour. It's only the cranberry's shape and colour, not the texture or taste, that resembles those cranberries you eat with your Christmas turkey. If you want wild cranberries that taste like that you have to boing and bounce around on the muskeg and pick the wee little red low bush cranberries that grow there. Low bush cranberries are sorta like wild strawberries, about a tenth the size of cultivated berries, hard to find, very tiny, very precious.
Thursday 3 September 2015
A World Gone Mad
(Quote from an article on the destruction of ancient archaeological sites by IS, in "Current World Archaeology, #72", Neil Faulkner - "Islamic State, iconoclasm, and the destruction of heritage".)
"IS is a mortal threat to the people of the Middle East. It has grown in the shattered social spaces left by the violence and poverty of the neoliberal era. It is a monster created by Western imperialism. It is a form of mass psychotic rage unleashed by a world gone mad.
And therefore, the very last thing the region needs is yet another round in the cycles of bombing, killing, and displacement that have made IS possible."
Europe, including Britain, is now dealing with huge numbers of refugees (not migrants). It was inevitable that this would happen someday. You can't expect to have masses of people living in poverty and near starvation, in fear for theirs and their family's lives, in fear of torture, in fear even to go to the market to buy or sell, and have no reaction when they can see via media that there are places in the world where this is not happening, where life is better, where life has value.
Do we have a responsibility to take these people in? Can our social services, housing, job market, etc. manage such a huge influx of desperate people? Has the Muslim religion been so demonized that we are afraid of these people, of their beliefs? Do we think they will destroy us from within? What a mess we have been complicit in creating with our bombs, drones, soldiers, and with our meddling in the affairs of these countries.
We have exhibited a complete lack of respect for cultures, governmental systems, and belief systems that differ from ours. We have learned absolutely nothing from history. We have blundered our way throughout the world carrying our heads high in the belief that our way is the right way. And here we are now, shaking our heads, building walls, creating camps, crushing mobs with riot police and soldiers, ghettoizing, in general freaking out over a mass refugee crisis we helped to cause.
Am I saying we should accept atrocities committed by people and governments, accept genocide, accept slavery, accept obvious crimes against humanity? No, of course not. But don't assume we have never committed any of these crimes ourselves, that we are innocent. Is it not a crime to kill numerous civilians with a drone in order to "take out" one enemy? Is it not a crime to sanction a population to the point of severely lowering their standard of living because their government refuses to come to terms with ours? Is torture not a crime against humanity? How about imposing our drug war on a country whose main source of income lies in its poppy fields? Should we be profiting by selling armaments to one side or another, or both sides, in an internal conflict of another country? And the list goes on...
So here we are, the innocent West, sitting with a smile on our faces while we watch Europe struggle to deal with this huge influx of population. This is not their problem, it's everyone's problem. If Europe must take in refugees, so should we. Unless we work our asses off to improve conditions within the borders of these countries this crisis will not go away. It's serious now and it will escalate. Desperate people do desperate things. They have nothing to lose.
Do I have the answers? No, and even if I did it's unlikely that anyone in power would listen to me. It seems to me that nearly all governments in the world are self serving, that the idea of serving the people has quietly slipped to the wayside while the citizenry was too busy or too uncaring to notice. It's frightening. The world has indeed gone mad.
___________________________
I apologize for the negativity of my blog today. Sometimes I almost wish we were back in the days when we knew very little about the rest of the world, about the activities of our own governments - those dark ages before the "Net", before TV, before... It's hard now, to stick your head in the sand.
"IS is a mortal threat to the people of the Middle East. It has grown in the shattered social spaces left by the violence and poverty of the neoliberal era. It is a monster created by Western imperialism. It is a form of mass psychotic rage unleashed by a world gone mad.
And therefore, the very last thing the region needs is yet another round in the cycles of bombing, killing, and displacement that have made IS possible."
A World Gone Mad
Europe, including Britain, is now dealing with huge numbers of refugees (not migrants). It was inevitable that this would happen someday. You can't expect to have masses of people living in poverty and near starvation, in fear for theirs and their family's lives, in fear of torture, in fear even to go to the market to buy or sell, and have no reaction when they can see via media that there are places in the world where this is not happening, where life is better, where life has value.
Do we have a responsibility to take these people in? Can our social services, housing, job market, etc. manage such a huge influx of desperate people? Has the Muslim religion been so demonized that we are afraid of these people, of their beliefs? Do we think they will destroy us from within? What a mess we have been complicit in creating with our bombs, drones, soldiers, and with our meddling in the affairs of these countries.
We have exhibited a complete lack of respect for cultures, governmental systems, and belief systems that differ from ours. We have learned absolutely nothing from history. We have blundered our way throughout the world carrying our heads high in the belief that our way is the right way. And here we are now, shaking our heads, building walls, creating camps, crushing mobs with riot police and soldiers, ghettoizing, in general freaking out over a mass refugee crisis we helped to cause.
Am I saying we should accept atrocities committed by people and governments, accept genocide, accept slavery, accept obvious crimes against humanity? No, of course not. But don't assume we have never committed any of these crimes ourselves, that we are innocent. Is it not a crime to kill numerous civilians with a drone in order to "take out" one enemy? Is it not a crime to sanction a population to the point of severely lowering their standard of living because their government refuses to come to terms with ours? Is torture not a crime against humanity? How about imposing our drug war on a country whose main source of income lies in its poppy fields? Should we be profiting by selling armaments to one side or another, or both sides, in an internal conflict of another country? And the list goes on...
So here we are, the innocent West, sitting with a smile on our faces while we watch Europe struggle to deal with this huge influx of population. This is not their problem, it's everyone's problem. If Europe must take in refugees, so should we. Unless we work our asses off to improve conditions within the borders of these countries this crisis will not go away. It's serious now and it will escalate. Desperate people do desperate things. They have nothing to lose.
Do I have the answers? No, and even if I did it's unlikely that anyone in power would listen to me. It seems to me that nearly all governments in the world are self serving, that the idea of serving the people has quietly slipped to the wayside while the citizenry was too busy or too uncaring to notice. It's frightening. The world has indeed gone mad.
___________________________
I apologize for the negativity of my blog today. Sometimes I almost wish we were back in the days when we knew very little about the rest of the world, about the activities of our own governments - those dark ages before the "Net", before TV, before... It's hard now, to stick your head in the sand.
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