Chagal4's Blog

Watching a few agonizing minutes of the second impeachment trial of Donald J.Trump it occurred to me that the venue was all wrong. It shouldn’t have been happening in the Senate Chamber in Washington D.C. in February of 2021, it should be taking place on the international space station or Area 51 where Alternate reality tells us they keep the flying saucers that made the tragic error of thinking all those bright lights in Las Vegas were signs of an interstellar gas station. And the trial should be happening out there because we have drifted so far into alternate realities and alternate facts and fake news and inverted logic that the only way this creature can get a fair trial is if it takes place on the planet that he comes from.

So let’s get it straight from the beginning. Donald J.Trump and, by association, his family are not human beings. They belong to an alternate universe where many of the things we might find strange , abnormal, illegal, or totally fucking inappropriate , are completely normal. And so, from their perspective, they’ve stumbled through the looking glass where we live and they’re being punished for just…being themselves.

They look like human beings because who says alternate universes are only inhabited by giant spiders. It seems to me that lots of creatures resembling humans slip into our world and as long as they don’t break anything or start eating the shrubbery…we don’t even know they’re there. There’s Rudi of course…but we always knew about him . I don’t know what kind of medication they found for him but when he doesn’t take it he drools and one leg gets shorter than the other so he tends to walk in circles.

I’ve argued for years that the filthy rich and the astronomically wealthy are not human beings either. They’re a separate species . Some of them definitely come from an alternate reality and they have used their wealth and power to create for themselves a replica of the planet they came from. Apparently there are some nice oceans there because they have these huge yachts the size of football fields…that have cockpits that look suspiciously like space ships. They don’t drink American beer because even the most distant planets know that stuff is piss. No they drink champagne and expensive wines that were made before there was an internet and I think they must know something we don’t.

O.K. back to the Trump creatures and their inability to have a fair trial. The problem in jurisprudence terms is finding a jury of their peers. It also means that the accused needs to understand the nature of the offence and it’s clear that they don’t. If you could listen like a fly on the wall you would hear a lot of loud voices shouting “what the fuck are these people talking about?” or “I won that fucking election by a landslide”…which might have been true on his alternate planet…so you can’t blame him for being upset. What he should really be saying to these Democratic human yokels…is “send me home so I can be President among my own kind”. Although when his own kind see how badly he screwed up in our world they may want re-run their alternate election.

I think deep down all of those Senators and Congressmen, who are not too far from alternate realities themselves, I think they understand that convicting this space creature would be unlikely. His punishment will be to be sent to bed without his cookies and milk and a stern letter should be sent to his home planet….via Fox Fucking News. Otherwise we humans should quickly get to work on learning to recognize these alternate reality /alternate universe beings…Some of them might be good creatures with much to contribute to our often demented and backward species…Maybe they already are….but this dude wasn’t one of them.

I always thought that the Third World War would be precipitated by the same stew of politics, economical adventurism, a megalomaniac leader or some desperate poverty exploitation. It was always going to be big money power versus no money power until somebody saw an opportunity to help the no money power and turn the whole mess into a much bigger game. Whenever historians talk about the first and second world wars they either offer simplistic cause and effect scenarios or come with convoluted explanations of multifaceted conjunctions and end with “it’s complicated” meaning that ordinary human probably wouldn’t understand without years of deep meditation. In fact it seemed to me that there was only one world war with an intermission between part one and part two and all preceded by a stupidity so colossal that it had to be buried in our cultural gene memory in case anyone watching from elsewhere in the universe conclude that humans are so fundamentally stupid that it will be only a matter of time until chickens or geese or duck billed platypuses takes over.

This morning the EU announced that it would move to control the exports of Covid 19 vaccines from production facilities inside the EU until they were guaranteed that their member country needs were met and that the preexisting contracts agreed with pharmaceutical companies were honoured regardless of an other preexisting contracts with countries outside the EU. There are plenty of exceptions noted…primarily on humanitarian grounds and for other non-member states on the continent.

Of course there was always the possibility that vaccine supply would be too slow to catch the speed of the pandemic at least for the first year or so. The vaccines had to be made from scratch and in quantities in the billions of doses. Perhaps the announcements that vaccines were possible and would soon be available were premature…offered too much hope, too soon. The news that the major supplier would need to shut down its main production in order to expand its capacity meant that delivery deadlines were thrown out the window in countries that had already started inoculations. That main production facility is in Belgium. Deliveries throughout Europe and the world are effected with only slightly less effect in the U.S. due to the company having a major facility in Michigan which because of Trumpian policies is shipping mainly within the U.S.

Another large producer based in the U.K. has also announced a slowdown in their production, Astra Zeneca also has their production in Belgium and it was this slowdown which triggered the third world war. A.Z. failed in communicating the issue at their plant and the EU bureaucrats wanted explanations on behalf of their member states . A.Z. was unable to provide either adequate explanations or projections for when the juice would flow again in the volumes promised by contract with the EU. Since the EU had invested millions in the development of the vaccine and more millions in the pre-contract for supplies…they were understandably pissed and this is where those species standing around the outer universe watching human endeavour to emerge fully from the primordial ooze… found themselves shaking their heads and agreeing that stupidity must be a fundamental human characteristic. The EU leapt into action, first moving toward an export monitoring system that would compel the big Pharma companies to reveal all exports of vaccines out of EU member States to third party countries. O.K. in the interest of transparency they want to know if other countries are getting supplies of vaccines while the EU is getting shorted on their agreed amounts. But once you open the box marked “me first” merely monitoring was never going to be enough. All exports from anywhere to anywhere have to pass through some sort of customs export control process… and individual countries have the authority to question, investigate and stop exports. SOOOO…today the EU took the next step and said that they will “control” exports. The Pharma will have to apply for exports permits for vaccines shipped anywhere outside the EU (where they were produced) and the approved list of exceptions noted above. Since I’m Canadian, I’m hoping we’re exceptions on that list but I’m guessing that we’re not and that our expectations of when we might get needled has just drifted further into the future.

Over the next few days and weeks we’ll see whether the EU actually blocks some shipments but already since this morning one could hear the same kind of collective deep grunt of rage that a herd of raging bulls make when somebody takes away their cookies and milk.

For my part, I think if this war is starting we need to get ready . First we need to set up the same mechanism of monitoring and export controls here in Canada on maple syrup. maple candy etc. then , because it’s winter Canada Goose clothing should be on the list. That should be a good start but…we need to be prepared to control our biggest export…people. We send millions of people to Europe loaded with money that they drop on streets and alleys all over Europe…tourists. Yep we need to think about that. Even after we get a vaccine here in Canada, whenever that might be.

This pandemic has been running for more than a year now. Millions of people around the world have been infected and hundreds of thousands have died. Vaccines are seen as the best option for bringing it under control and perhaps restoring our societies. It is certain though, that millions more will be infected and thousands will die even with a vaccine available. Anything that slows or impedes the production and distribution of those vaccines will be counter productive and elevate the risk of infection and all of the associated anxieties. Regardless of how you see history, whether in simplistic, or more complex nuanced perspectives…world wars can be precipitated with much less cause than this. History may eventually record this as a vaccine war or a pandemic war or something else but it will unquestionably be a war involving the world.

Slow down, take a breath, wear a mask, wash your hands, keep your distance, look in on lonely friends, stay alert, and don’t expect this mess to be over any time soon.

Oh yes…and stock up on maple syrup…might have to trade that stuff for vaccine.

It’s like that echo that hangs in the air after big fireworks…when your ears are still shocked by the blasts and silence hasn’t quite recovered. Adrenaline pumps as if your hearing has something to do with your breathing, your heartbeat . Your chest thumps, my chest thumps, from those big blasts and we hear it with our whole body and suddenly…it’s gone and no sound wants to rush in to fill the vacuum. So it seems like an echo…fading…fading…all the way to fucking Florida, where it whispers through palm trees and over sun filled fairways to the weeds where alligators wait for pampered pets with Rhinestone collars. Rich white dragons sip gin and botox cocktails wearing scarlet sequinned MAGA caps (so cute ).

A stuffed Elvis impersonator , unzipped to the waist , sweaty in a white, fake leather, jumpsuit, snarls, mumbles and shimmies on a small stage trimmed in bunting, lip syncing to a raggedy assed tape of the king. Platinum ladies fresh from the body shop or the neck spa, sanded and filled and buffed and repainted like vintage Cadillacs, sail into the club house, eager for a peek at you know who…”that poor man who did so much and tried so hard for his country…only to have it stolen at the last minute…by honest to god motherfuckers”…and they’re waving kevlar chequebooks and wondering…where did it all go wrong?

Back in the bar, under humming ceiling fans that windmill clouds of Cohiba smoke, the husbands, ripe with perspiration and that Aqua di Parma that all the secretaries love, are drinking bourbon in crystal glasses, sitting at high tables, wrinkling their pants and staring stupid at the mirror on the wall . Their mistresses are bingeing Netflix in apartments all over town. Smoking weed and waiting for the cool priest to appear , they know the score , they know the clock is ticking down .

Bottles , cans, plastic cups and scraps of pizza boxes, trampled signs and trampled flags and trampled rags, crumpled clumps of stolen notes from desks inside the capitol, littered, scattered and blown like drifts of debris from a storm. The peppery burn of tear gas whisps linger on the lawn. Ten thousand soldiers shiver in the parking lot, arriving just in time to find the circus had all gone.

Nero and the entourage march like royal refugees from the chopper to the plane, well upholstered women and their weasel tailored men, clutching bags of artifacts and souvenirs and the precious family jewels. “We’ll be back” the dark lord said…”See ya later then” the audience replied.

A new and roaring silence slips over Washington as the twitter shriek dies down and the clown cars have chased the big black pickup trucks back to Tennessee or Georgia or Nebraska, back to some dismal swamp where the the KKK are chopping wood for bonfires because…by god… just as soon as the barbecue is over and the beer starts running low…they’ll all get down to planning for the next great minstrel show…just as soon as the boss wakes up from his daily nap and gets his hair just right and calls them all to go looking for a fight .

Reporters stand in clusters on corners, corridors and parks sharing masks and cigarettes dreaming up new sound bites and remembering…what’s his name? And all we want to do is go to sleep and wake up in the morning and try to turn the page…and to turn the T.V. on and not to see his face.

It’s cold here in the north and there’s a pandemic in the land…forgive us but we’re tired and this bullshit makes it worse.

January was a bitch…but it got a little better.

By now millions of words have been published and hundreds of pundits around the world have spoken and collected their first cheques of what is supposed to be a new year. For me it doesn’t feel like a new year. It feels like the old year is continuing. It’s the tenth of January and a toxic president still sits in the White House until January twentieth. The ghastly onslaught of Covid continues in spite of the arrival of vaccines. As one of my pals pointed out last week, the opioid crisis hasn’t gone anywhere. In short the problems that plagued 2020 are still very much with us. If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel we need to hope that it’s not the flick of a Bic with a crackhead taking a hit.

Most of us have lived through a year of fluctuating fear fuelled by warnings and cautions, rules, regulations, lockdowns and closures, distancing, masks, missing friends and family, Zoom calls and FaceTime , empty streets and weird humour on the internet to help us cope, bad t.v. and old black and white movies to marvel at…late night bingeing and books stacked and forgotten recalled and remembered . We got busy indoors, polished the skin off floors, dusted every nook and cranny, considered painting, ordered new sheets online, worked from home in neckties and gym shorts, turned pets into memes and insta-stars and tried hard not to be idiots. Alas…it was too hard for many. The almost daily evidence of ass-holes flouting common sense was disheartening , frustrating, even though it’s understandable that young people have energy, feel invulnerable and can’t bear being trapped in a house with parents or a small apartment with video games for days, it’s harder to understand fools who claim the pandemic is a hoax and refuse to wear masks or distance. The anti-vaxers who fear that micro bots can be injected with the vaccine in order to track their movements…as if anybody gives a damn where these trolls go on Saturday night.

And all of these things have changed us in ways we don’t fully realize yet. The way she see the world and each other has shifted. The ways we relate and communicate are different. There’s a lot of talk about how things will get back to “normal” when this is all over. “Normal’ depends on the circumstances. What we’re experiencing right now is “normal” for these circumstances and when the circumstances change there will be another “normal”. It will not be a “return to normal” .

In a way we have been trained for this. In the past sixty or seventy years we have seen and experienced huge changes at a speed never seen before. We had to learn to adapt to cultural, economic, social and political changes and perhaps the biggest surge in technological change ever known. These are no small adjustments and yet we endured, survived, learned, and kept on going.

Yes the pandemic is catastrophic , yes the events of last week in Washington are shameful, yes there is more to come on both fronts but perhaps no other generations in history have been better schooled to hang in and hang on.

Be smart, be safe, be well.

Blues, Jan. 10 2021

Here’s the thing with Henry
No one ever called him Hank

I woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago and I couldn’t remember what day it was. It wasn’t as if I’d lost a whole week or month…it was just…was it Tuesday or Wednesday? Didn’t take long to figure it out with all of the personal technology around here…smart phones and I-pads, and lap tops…even my watch knows what day it is. Still, it was a little disturbing. I’ve reached beyond the age where the accumulated abuses to my body and brain ought to have induced a significant amount of forgetfulness…and I’ll admit that I have lost the occasional name or date along the way but usually they haven’t gone completely missing…just wandered into a darker corner of my mind. When it happens it gives me a little twinge…like a sharp pain in the chest will send a chill into the pit of my stomach. (usually a pulled muscle) .

It dawned on me that Tuesday and Wednesday had come to look pretty much alike. This is partly because of Covid fatigue. (I’d blame it on global warming if I could…it deserves all the blame it can get). And retirement of course. I’ve been retired long enough to be used to it but it turns out that there’s a downside to the freedom that comes from not having to wake up every day and run off to work. There is plenty to do and plenty that needs to be done but the deadline urgency just isn’t as intense as it once was. With the restrictions of Covid…social distancing, closed businesses, no lunches with friends, no house dinner parties, and for a while, since we’re in that vulnerable age group, we were supposed to put ourselves in a modified house arrest. It’s serious shit, this Covid. Eventually fatigue sets in and we all begin to look for the boundaries of fear. Do I have to wear a mask all the time outside? can I ride my bike without a mask? can I have a conversation in the street without one if I stay six feet away? Can I go shopping? Turns out that a lot of things are possible while still maintaining a sensible approach. There is no doubt though that our life-styles and daily lives have changed. for me one of those changes is that Tuesday is starting to look a lot like Wednesday.

That day a couple of weeks ago I had nothing urgent to do and I sat down at my drawing board and met Henry. I happens that way some times. I start drawing with no idea and here comes somebody or something I wasn’t expecting. And as he revealed himself I kinda got to know him. He seemed to be the sort of uncomplicated guy I might have known when I was a kid growing up down south. Of course they’re never all that uncomplicated…but back in the day it seemed like a less dismal world with far fewer billionaires and far fewer billionaire megalomaniacs sitting next to the proverbial red button (or whatever colour the end of the world is). And yet Henry’s face contained a sadness and maybe disappointment maybe even defeat . Like me he sees the great problems facing us and our planet and he doesn’t have the answers but like me he hoped that we could maybe work together to try. And all he sees are powerful people creating and exploiting divisiveness and fear, making shit worse. 

Looking at Henry, I could see that he just wasn’t the kind of fellow that people would want work together with these days. When you consider that there aren’t many people who want to work together at all …yep, he’d be pretty far down the list. Not that they’re any better than old Henry, they’d say…but he just doesn’t look like he has the skills .

They’re wrong though…it wasn’t Henry’s skills or lack of skills that got us into the mess we’re in…and it’s not some twitter troll in Washington who will get us out.

We’re learning a lot of new things from this pandemic about ourselves and the way we live. Tuesday is still Tuesday and it’s not Wednesday but the difference is maybe not as important as it was a year ago. I’m glad I met Henry and as I get to know him a little better…I think if he turns up on a Zoom call or Skype…I might just listen to what he has to say.

Today is Tuesday, by the way.

A sudden cold snap…they said. Minus twenty in early November. It has been that cold before around here but on these dates? Not since the 1980’s. There’s a lot of discussion about climate change these days and I follow it with interest. I have time on my hands. I suppose that if I had less time on my hands I might be less likely to follow it at all. Like almost everything else the discussion is hedged about with polarized perspectives and not a lot of constructive options. People look at the flooding, fires, fierce storms, droughts, flash freezes and all of their consequences…then depending upon ones point of view it’s either climate change caused largely by humans…or natural phenomena that occur cyclically. There are scientists that support both positions with a growing number favouring the former. But this is not my point today…the arguments and division will continue and disaster will follow disaster while governments will dither and rationalize. No…my point today comes from driving through my neighbourhood on this deep frozen day. I live three blocks from a shelter and a safe injection site. If you don’t know what those are stop reading now and go back to sleep.

There are ten thousand homeless people in Ottawa according to some sources. I don’t know how they know because I’m pretty sure nobody is counting. Could be a lot more. The shelter space is a fraction of that number and they’re dangerous places. Young people, new to the streets learn quickly to avoid them. It’s deep poverty coupled with drugs and the dehumanizing despair of living on the furious streets…so you can be beaten, robbed, raped, killed in those places. The street does not tolerate “stupid” because stupid people or gestures put others at risk…I have lived on the street in much kinder times. I know that there are rules. In these much harder and meaner times I don’t even want to know what the rules are. They’re brutal.

Most of us have an automatic set of blinders that enable us to move through the city without looking to closely or seeing too clearly. “Those People” are almost invisible and it isn’t because they’re not there. If I wanted to be surreal about it I might say that it is us that aren’t there…while they are are very much there. They are not passing through our territory…we’re passing through theirs. They occupy doorways and alleys, side streets and the corners of garages, sleep on cardboard under filthy blankets wrapped in tarps . They wander all night and beg on corners. They see us in ways that we are unable to see them.

I don’t know what to do about it. That bothers me. I try to take care of myself and my friends and that is sometimes hard enough. All I want to say is that maybe we can make a start and figuring out something to do…by seeing what we’ve been deliberately ignoring. By seeing them. And not…falling into that old trap of saying “there but for the grace of god…” god has nothing to do with it.

It’s cold out there.

Don’t forget your gloves.

Hello from a wet and windy Friday….They say it’s going to rain forty or fifty mms. over the next twenty hours…and the snow pack is still melting, so the chances of flooding are high. Probably not where I’m sitting but along the rivers…for sure.

Days like this, the sun stays hidden and I’m morose…I’m reading Philip Kerr (Metropolis) and it’s chasing memories through the fog. Most of all it has Jeffry Kaplow back to my mind. Along with a great friendship Jeffry and I shared a love for Bernie Gunther stories and in particular the wild and crazy period of European history between the first and second world wars. Philip Kerr captured the milieu perfectly and while Bernie Gunther isn’t always the most sympathetic character…he’s exactly the guy needed to guide a reader through this seedy, erotic, insane, desperate, tortured world that gave birth to the Nazis. There was an explosion of creativity and a revolution of culture born out of the total destruction of illusions…so many dead…so pointless…so badly resolved. Artists of all kinds from painters to photographers, architects, film makers, musicians, dancers, all escaping the chocolate box romanticism of previous eras and bringing a new and more terrible reality to their work.

They had a message and a mission. They knew that it would all happen again…that the second Great War was inevitable. George Grosz, Otto Dix, Fritz Lang, they were reading the tea leaves of the streets. For me it was the period in art that most affected my work…and my thinking. And it held the same challenge for Jeffry.

It was a period like a fat aunt with scarlet lipstick and lilac perfume who could hold your head in her hands and kiss both sides of your face at the same time…when you looked in the mirror…you looked like a clown. That’s what the world looked like.

Jeffry liked Bernie Gunther because he thought Kerr had made him an honest German cop…whose eyes saw things clearly without being squeamish or voyeuristic. It’s a world that has no easy comparisons today…but we should be warned. We’re not living in the Weimar Republic of Germany but there are some cautionary signs popping up around the world. The shift to the right has generated populist leaders whose policies are becoming more and more Draconian…When we look around we see people having a good time…new cars, loud music, bigger and wilder shows, shopping sprees, legalized gambling, legalized weed, world travel, cheap money…Looks like we be rolling. But then there’s more homeless, more poverty, more abuse, more guns, more shootings and stabbings, more corruption, more venal politicians, more thoughtless bureaucrats, more greed. And don’t let’s get started on the environment.

All of this is generating a frantic anxiety that finds outlets that are unpredictable and scary  and the official responses are more and more militarized. Even small towns that used to have three cops and left their doors unlocked, now have SWAT teams with more equipment than a platoon of infantry…because one never knows when a finally fed up  housewife is going to finish chopping celery and notice that her abusive husband has dozed off at the kitchen table. The point is not the housewife…a stupid example, really, but that there’s an unfathomable disconnect everywhere…a fear that things could explode anywhere…and that we need some heavy defences against the dark arts.

So I’m reading Metropolis and missing my pal Jeffry…I’m not so much in despair as feeling thoughtful…and I’m seeing signs and portents that should be warnings. This isn’t a book review…it’s rainy day ramblings. What I’m thinking is that while global warming and environmental disasters are a huge danger….the biggest threat we’re facing right here right now…is people…

Winter is Here and Break Time is Over

Like a lot of writers I write to make sense of my world. It doesn’t bother me if nobody reads it, although I hope that some will. It’s the process of writing that helps me to come to grips with the things I experience. I took a break for a while because I reached a point where the world had seemed to stop making any sort of sense that I could understand  and writing about it didn’t help at all. The Trump phenomenon was so reminiscent of other more drastic periods of history when demagogues seduced whole populations and split off and isolated “enemies” they marked for destruction, “re-education” or worse. I found I couldn’t write anything that wasn’t filled with despair or anger. I still have the anger. I’ve reached an age where anger is a necessary companion. It enables one to summon the energy to climb on an exercise bike before sun up and drive the body in sweaty submission. I know that this is good for me because I actually feel better when it’s over…although that might just be because it’s over.

When I was much younger the world made way more sense to me. I was both confident and stupid, two great attributes for white males right up the end of middle age. That’s when you learn the depth of your stupidity and confidence flees. It’s also when one learns that making sense of the world requires a lot more work than one was led to believe. I also think that youth needs a smaller world to move through and one which is not so complicated that its solutions and answers are impossible…even wrong answers are better than no answers at that age…maybe especially at that age. It’s much less forgivable when you’re older…wrong answers and no answers need to lead to better answers and I can’t help thinking that one of the reasons that the world isn’t making much sense these days is because “better answers” are not appearing often enough. When I was much younger I remember hoping that if and when I got older the things that didn’t make sense would…somehow. Many of them didn’t. They just slipped off the charts of importance into oblivion and were replaced by much more difficult and terrible things that didn’t make sense.

When I look at the political and social situations around the world today I see a lot of people who are also struggling to make sense of it all and a great many have decided that  the answers are only going to be available if they slow the complication and confusion down and roll the clock back to more simplistic times. Unfortunately. Social, political, economic and cultural change has moved at an incredible rate over the past few decades and the acceleration has been fuelled by technology…the internet…the apps…the connectivity. I heard the other day that “knowing about something is not the same as knowing something”. I thought I should have that tattooed somewhere on my body. The thing is that the speed of change has been almost more frightening than any actual changes taking place. In almost all of the developing countries immigration has been a necessary process which brought skills and diversity. Most countries had an organized systematic policy with target numbers and often, also bonus points for certain skill sets. However…with the advent of the European Union and with the proliferation of small scale wars (small is not small if it’s happening to you) immigration accelerated and over whelmed the immigration policies of some countries. A kind of saturation point was reached which had more to do with visibility of “immigrants” than actual numbers. If it appeared that there were more “alien” faces on the street…that must mean that some kind of balance had been breached. It was this sort of perceptual change…and the speed of it that became a rallying point for anti-immigration agitators and for the Brexit mind set…and of course for the “Build The Wall” warriors of America. Society is deciding that it cannot absorb immigrants…and they think that their governments have lost control of it. The fact is that these countries , our countries, still need the skills, diversity and vitality of immigration…but fear is shutting the doors.

The core of conservatism is the need to slow change to a point that is deemed to be manageable. Liberalism, on the other hand sees change as positive and while it also needs control…the control should not be so rigid. These two philosophical and cultural differences are in fact much more complex but the splintering of hard core positions over the past few years has led to a very rigid stand off between liberal and conservative camps that no longer allows for reasoning.

And that is a main cause of this old man not being able to make sense of his world. At first, like many others I was ready to blame it on Trump. As despicable as I may find his bombast and total lunacy it is not solely his fault that all of this is happening. He may be a consequence…one of many consequences of years of wrong headed policies and stupid beliefs. Never-the-less, I’m afraid history will see this as the Trump era…and he will be the symbol of some tragic decisions and events to follow.

Meanwhile I’m going to start writing again to try to make sense of it all and because it’s winter in the north…too cold to be outside.

The Moon is full and

I can feel its pull and

Mars is close to the Earth.

We don’t need any excuses to be crazy…we should jump into clown pyjamas

and go running in the streets with a candle in each hand.

I read a comment on a website the other day that stopped me in my tracks.

This was the comment:

“I’m white…don’t shoot”

I can remember when cops didn’t wear body armour

Maybe before they got scared and believed their own myths

We need to stay fit…or get fit…or be fit

We need the strength and stamina to resist despair

I try to tell people, young people, that the sixties and seventies may have been crazier than this.

They don’t buy it. Truth is subjective. Reality is relative.

There’s no such thing as fake news…it’s all data. Old data and new data…and lies

Of course. These days I miss Hunter Thompson and Albert Einstein…well, may not Einstein.

I miss Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart though.

I used to think that one needed to be stoned to understand the irrational.

That was because there was so much that was irrational.

Being stoned just helps you understand being stoned.

Irrational stays irrational.

I miss being stoned too.

The world needs to take a “time out”.

Maybe a glass of milk, a cookie and a nap.

Put the bullets back in the box

Leave the gun outside the door.

Dream of strawberries and lemonade…under a shady tree

with a cool breeze…wake up sane.

What does it mean when a culture is imbued, surrounded, immersed, in images of militarized figures? Soldiers in body armour, armed to the teeth, police in bullet proof vests, armed with pistols and tasers and batons, swat teams with military equipment and armoured vehicles and snipers with helmets and balaclavas. Police in airports and government buildings and high-schools. Endless images of soldier heroes on T.V., in video games, in movies assault our senses constantly. Camouflage clothing became a fashion statement . Popular T.V. shows (And how many of those are cop shows? Cop Operas) are increasingly violent. The bad guys are increasingly shown as vicious and brutal and terrorist or drug cartel connected while the “good” guys supposedly restrained by the inhibitions of due process and legality are nearly thwarted but for the brave actions of rogue cops or clever violent avengers who work tirelessly on the borders of the law. And because the “criminals” are so fiendish…we applaud the heroes who may step over the line…to put and end to evil.

We shouldn’t be surprised to find kids obsessed with guns. Kids are generally powerless in our society and guns are icons of power. They haven’t yet earned or learned their own power. They can’t participate as adults even though they have as much access to information and they need to make incredibly complex decisions in their own environments. And some of those environments move much faster with much more immediate consequences than many adult environments. Still “power” and “authority” are needed among kids and they are expressed in very different ways than in the adult world.

Kids need solutions to problems that are desperately urgent to them. Unfortunately some of the problems and solutions would seem utterly simpler to many adults. As a consequence adults make the mistake of trivializing the problems kids face…and that tends t make the dilemmas worse. If you’re the kind of kid whose heroes wear armour and carry weapons…and if you’ve been allowed access to or ownership of guns…then frustration and anger can make for dangerous decisions. (No, not always.)

The President of the United States recently declared that the massacre at a Florida high-school was perpetrated by a person with mental health issues…that the kid was, in effect, crazy. Kids in his school and environment knew that his frustration and anger were reaching critical levels…not that he was crazy…but that he was experiencing kid dilemmas that they understood because they all had those dilemmas to a greater or lesser degree. Their options for solutions, for coping under similar circumstances may have been better than his. They knew that too, as well as knowing his fascination with guns. He even warned them…repeatedly, in terms that kids understood, where adults might not. And the kids alerted the authorities. And we now know that the authorities in question didn’t take it seriously enough. Maybe they thought it was just kids being overly dramatic…who knows?

The point here is that we have woven a web of violent cultural references around ourselves and no one is more immersed in it than our kids. Some choose violent options because they’re the most powerful ones available and their life experience hasn’t provided enough non-violent alternatives to them yet. But they can’t wait until they’re older to solve a problem that’s happening now.

As a society we need to stop seeing these things as isolated individual acts by crazy people and see them as they are. They are a consequence of the society and culture we’ve built and maintained. And we need to build with them, a support structure that enables them to participate fully in society…and to have access to tools and solutions that work in their environment.  We cannot resolve their problems as adults…and they can’t solve their problems as kids…but together we might be able to see that our adult problems and their kid problems are very much connected and maybe we can look for ways to solve both…together.