Feeling Small and Helpless These Days

      There was an article in the Washington Post on Friday written by a man who fled Kosovo when he was 16 years old. It contained quote that I Immediately understood and have been trying to convey in my real life, which sadly, seems to contain a few (thankfully only a few)  fearful, hateful racists.  It was this:

        "Abandoning your home during wartime is not a choice or a political opportunity. It’s a survival instinct, a frantic attempt to protect yourself and your children from violence, starvation or death. "

      I am tired of people with such small imaginations and such luxurious lives that they cannot fathom what suffering must be like, and worse, cannot even consider helping. I am furious that harper's first response was that continuing the war effort in Syria was the most helpful thing Canada can do. I wondered why no one commented on the fact that we had just agreed to sell a whole bunch of arms to Saudi Arabia. (I hate Stephen Harper and his supporters with the heat of a thousand suns.  He is a small, small nasty man with no heart and I will never forgive him for the social damage he has done to this country.)

      I can go to meetings to get 2 freaking years worth of paperwork started to be able to bring a family to my community.  I can give money to the Red Cross.  What I want is to do this:

        I want to get between all those people and those bullets.  I want to shout "STOP!" And what real use would that be? How can I get between a whole neighbourhood and a barrel bomb?  

     When I read about people who think the refugees are a bunch of jihadists and that North America is in some kind of peril I think it is nothing but a self fulfilling prophecy.  I think the more we react to this situation with hate and fear and unkindness, the more reason we give them to fear and hate us. There has been  a great deal of war and destruction throughout history in Europe, Asia and Africa. I often wonder how long it will be before it comes here. Because it will come here.  

      Climate change is a huge factor in what is going on in Syria.  Climate change is driving great masses of people out of their homes. No nation is addressing its contributions to climate change quickly or thoroughly enough that we will ever stop that. When our homes become utterly hostile to our existence, we have no choice but to leave.  And when we in the north who have NOTHING BUT SPACE! for Christ's sake choose to turn the fleeing away, I think we are only ensuring that we will eventually be met with violence.  

     The right thing to do is feed and shelter and care for our fellow persons. 

     The whole history of humans is about subjugation to some small, hateful group.  It is always a struggle for some kind of freedom.  I doubt that its going to change.  Maybe I'm an idiot, but when I don't know what to do, I ask myself, "what would love do?" And then I just do that.  Today I just feel so monstrously impotent.  Some day I hope I will figure out which tank I need to stand in front of.  

     Last weekend Michael Enright played a reading of Warsan Shire's poem "Home."  I knew two lines of it, but I had never heard the whole thing.  

Home - by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you

breath bloody in their throats

the boy you went to school with

who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory

is holding a gun bigger than his body

you only leave home

when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you

fire under feet

hot blood in your belly

it’s not something you ever thought of doing

until the blade burnt threats into

your neck

and even then you carried the anthem under

your breath

only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets

sobbing as each mouthful of paper

made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms

under trains

beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled

means something more than journey.

no one crawls under fences

no one wants to be beaten

pitied

no one chooses refugee camps

or strip searches where your

body is left aching

or prison,

because prison is safer

than a city of fire

and one prison guard

in the night

is better than a truckload

of men who look like your father

no one could take it

no one could stomach it

no one skin would be tough enough

the

go home blacks

refugees

dirty immigrants

asylum seekers

sucking our country dry

niggers with their hands out

they smell strange

savage

messed up their country and now they want

to mess ours up

how do the words

the dirty looks

roll off your backs

maybe because the blow is softer

than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender

than fourteen men between

your legs

or the insults are easier

to swallow

than rubble

than bone

than your child body

in pieces.

i want to go home,

but home is the mouth of a shark

home is the barrel of the gun

and no one would leave home

unless home chased you to the shore

unless home told you

to quicken your legs

leave your clothes behind

crawl through the desert

wade through the oceans

drown

save

be hunger

beg

forget pride

your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

saying-

leave,

run away from me now

i dont know what i’ve become

but i know that anywhere

is safer than here

The Summer Post

Hey! I kind of survived my move, and I have a new tree, as promised.  Two, in fact.  There will be pictures.  I seem to have lost my cursing (cursed) cat, though.  We only moved 4 blocks.  The cat thinks the new place has too many cat neighbours and not enough raspberry bushes and if we let him out he beelines for the old place.  We are growing weary of dragging him home and listening to his misery.

The Offspring was home all summer.  Well, kind of home. She cooked for a tree planting company *and she was only really home every 4 to 10 days.  But I did get to see her!

My Beloved's beloved uncle and aunt are here from  New Brunswick and we are trying to show them all the beautiful things we can in BC.

I am annoyed about this doubleplus long election campaign. I hate election campaigns. Mostly they serve to remind me how many morons live here. We**have always been conservative country around here, which was not so bad when I was a teenager and the conservative here was actually a good guy who bothered to listen to his constituents.  We used to reject the Reformatypes of various kinds, but apparently we don't read the fine print around here and no one noticed both the federal and provincial co-opting of Conservative and Liberal names.

Anyway, I hate election campaigns. No one ever says what they really mean, for fear of causing a scandal, and now we have this bunch of ratfuckers to whom words seem to mean nothing at all.  If you want to know who to vote for you should have been paying attention for the last two years.  What they have DONE in the last two years is their real agenda.  What they SAY to get attention (or get out from under that attention) matters not one single whit.

AND  I am extra annoyed this time because there are NO DECLARED CANDIDATES YET IN ANY RIDING IN ATMON EXCEPT THE FUCKING CONSERVATIVES.

Over and out to drink beer with my Eastern relatives.  I'm drinking a little extra, because I am annoyed.




*Remind me sometime to tell you about the two weeks I worked as the Offspring's cooking assistant in a tree planting camp. It is hard work!  She is a good cook!

**By the by, when I say we, I am not actually talking about me.  Remind me someday to tell you about the time my grandfather made Tommy Douglas climb up on the roof of my grandfather's barn to talk to him.  I have deep socialist roots and strong anarchist leanings.  Furthermore, I have been paying attention to the Orwellization of BC and Canada.  Just call me Winston. And pass me a beer.

The Irony

There was a bit of excitement around here this week.  Prince George changed the name of one of its parks yesterday.

Yesterday morning, the park was called Fort George Park.  It's a very pretty park quite near the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers.  It's a good sized park with picnic tables and walking paths and gardens and a band shell.  There is also a very small fenced off area that is a First Nations graveyard.  The park is called Fort George Park because it stands partly on the site of the old Fort George, a white trading post.  Fort George was established at the site of a First Nations village called Lheidli T'enneh, which means "people of the confluence." The Lheidli T'enneh were removed to a reserve to the east, but they didn't particularly want to go and didn't hurry about it, so the Fort George founding fathers burnt the village to the ground.  This is a crappy bit of local history I did not learn until just a few months ago and it makes me feel a little sick.

Yesterday evening, though, the park recieved a new name: Lheidli T'enneh Memorial Park.  This name was suggested by the nation of the Lheidli T'enneh, on whose traditional territory Prince George stands.

It was a bit of excitement because a whole lot of racism raised its ugly head.  The protests were variously, "I can't pronounce that!" (You can learn to pronounce Tchaikovsky and fucking Kardashian, I bet you can learn to pronounce Lheidli T'enneh.) "Changing the signs will be expensive! Think of the taxpayers!" (Last week, city council changed the name of another park - The Hudson's Bay Slough - to The Hudson's Bay Wetlands with absolutely no fanfare or protest regarding costs.) "It's been Fort George Park all my life!" (So?  When I was a kid, Myanmar was called Burma. We managed to get our heads around that. We can get our heads around this.)  And finally, "They're trying to erase 100 years of white history!"

Dear god.  If only we could erase 100 years of white history as easily as just changing names...

The Earth Does Not Need Us

Old House, New House

My Beloved and I have bought a house.

This is the first time in my life I have owned property.  I feel a bit hyper-ventilative about it.  I am a commitment-phobe.
The evidence in my life for this is practically nil - I have never been at a job for less than 2 years.  My long jobs have been 6,7 and 14 years, plus I have stuck with the carpentry trade for 21 years, sometimes concurrently with other jobs.  My first long term relationship was 17 years.  I raised a child - she'll be 26 this year.  Nevertheless, the idea of settling down for some long term future freaks the hell out of me and makes me want to bolt.

We don't get to move into the house for another 8 weeks.

I have lived in the too small, closet challenged, shopless house we are currently in for 25 years.  It is too small. It has no closets.  It has no shop or garage or facsimile thereof.  It has no spare bedroom.  (No, I don't want to talk about all the books and yarn that are taking up inordinate real estate in my little house, thank you very much.) My bedroom is so small that we actually have to leave it to get dressed.  But I lived here for 25 years and raised the Offspring here, so now I feel sad to leave.  I'll get over it I'm sure.

My little house actually belongs to my grandmother.  She had a bit of money and she bought it when the Offspring was a baby.  The deal was I would pay the mortgage and she would leave it to me.  Who thinks to get grandma to sign a contract like that?  Not me, that's who.  Grandma lived 3 blocks away.  She watched the Offspring when I went to work, I shovelled her driveway in the winter, she taught me to knit.  Now Grandma is 94 and spry as a 60 year old, but doesn't recognize anyone anymore and can't take care of herself.  Grandma's kids are already having nastiness over the whole thing, and the best I can hope for is that they'll sell it to me. But I've already paid the mortgage on this house twice, and it would be considerably higher now.

My dad and I built a deck on the front of it.  We gutted and rebuilt the kitchen and the bathroom together.  My first partner and I worked on the roof and built the fence together and we painted cars and did mechanics together in the driveway.   My Beloved and I renovated the basement to make a sunny office and a bedroom for an orphan we adopted, and we gutted and rebuilt the Offspring's bedroom.  We planted trees.

But it is very small. It has one bathroom.  It has no shop-type space. In order to make things we have to drag a bunch of tools out of the shed and set up in the back yard or the driveway.  We can't accomodate out of town company if the Offspring is here.  And it is in part the subject of nastiness in my mother's family.

The new house has closets. It has a garage (which will be a shop).  It has three bathrooms.  It is advertised as having six bedrooms, but two of those bedrooms are only a little bigger than a large closet.  It will have two spare bedrooms, so that our families and out of town friends can all stay at the same time. It is big enough to have parties and the yard is laid out so that we can have garden parties.  I don't have any pictures of it that I want to share yet, because at the moment it is someone else's home.   The things that made my little house my home are the things I did to it and in it, alone or with someone I loved.  Once I have done some things in the new house it will be our home.  One of the first things I am going to do is plant trees.  I want to look out my front AND back windows to see something like this every day:

"You Win Some...

And some you don't do so good."

Was a thing a friend of mine used to say.

Omar Khadr may not have been granted bail on Monday, but he was today and I am happy for him.  I am glad his lawyers, David Edney and Nathan Whitling fought so hard for him and I was pleased to learn today of all the people who have visited Mr Khadr and helped him all this time.  I know there are really great, kind people in the world (the blogosphere is full of them, as is my real life!), but I love reading about them in the mainstream media.

The NDP pulled off a nice majority in Alberta, which floored me a bit.  I continue to be guardedly hopeful.  I remember some business group musing during a BC election that they were willing to let their businesses go fallow indefinitely in order to thwart an NDP government.  I'm sorry, I don't have a link for that. I noticed on DeSmog Blog the other day that Licia Corbella tweeted that “The oil patch will pack up and leave."  Surely she was kidding?  Isn't that pretty much what they've been doing and trying to ramp up besides?  I hope the NDP in Alberta stick to their platform and are able to sort out the mess.  

Harper is still an asshole.  Now I might get targeted by some security agency for saying so, but not saying it doesn't make it any less true.  

Justin Trudeau has confirmed that he is just a conservative in liberal clothes by voting with the cons for bill C-51.  Honestly, what was he thinking?  I suspect he is more interested in power than in good governance.  

So, those are the big things.  In local things, I'm semi-unemployed, the Offspring is home from the east coast for the summer and my Beloved and I have bought a house.  There was a fire in downtown Prince George last night that destroyed two nice businesses and damaged a nice restaurant, but I hear they have all been getting plenty of offers of help and they are feeling more like beloved members of the community than tragic victims.

 The world is not an entirely horrible place.

For The Record

I think Omar Khadr should have been granted bail today.
I still think Harper is an asshole.
I am looking forward to the Alberta election results with a bit of trepidation.  I would love to see a big political reversal, but having lived through the last polling/election debacle here in BC I am afraid to be hopeful.

It is spring in Atmon, but I am knitting mittens.