My Covid Trauma

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Covid-19 is in retreat here in North America, where populations are vaccinated. After more than a year of staying home, holding Zoom meetings without bothering to wear pants, and streaming shows on television until brains are leaking out our ears, most people are glad to return to crowd activities: eating in restaurants, attending musical performances, ambling around street fairs and flea markets, heading out to the theatre. 

     Not me. I am reticent. I want to see my closest friends and family members, most of whom I have not seen for sixteen months. But I do not want to join groups of people that I do not know.  I am reluctant to go to the folk concert at the playhouse. I do not want to attend the talk on old barns hosted by the county historical society. I do not want to join fans at the stadium to cheer on the beleaguered minor-league baseball team. You won’t see me at the Raspberry Fest. nor the Balloon Fest. I expect not to join the crowd to see the Rockin’ Old Codgers on the outdoor stage down at Lake Desperation. You will not find me soon at the clam-bake at the firehouse.

     There have been many articles written about mental health strains arising from the isolation of Covid. Obviously, people react to isolation in different ways, and many have experienced severe loneliness. In my case, I am by temperament a satisfied introvert, not normally prone to feelings of loneliness, and so staying home during the pandemic has not been hard on me, and anyway, I’ve had a stellar companion. I will even say that in some ways it has been a pleasure. So, it is possible that I have just reverted to a more natural form as a result of not going out.

     My reticence is not worry about catching Covid. The vaccinations have proven to be very good, and I am confident in the data. I know there are unvaccinated people in the stores in the village taking advantage of the mask-optional guidance, wandering around, spreading their germ and virus-laden emissions with absolute disregard, but so what. Those creaturely emissions, coming from both upper and lower regions of the human body, although not always thrilling, do not worry me any more than they did in my previous life.

     Another possibility: an article in The Guardian discusses the idea of how our brain, the hippocampus, needs to be reset.[i] The brain’s ingenious plasticity helps us to adjust to changing situations. In this case, neuronal networks that we use to engage in social activity shrink during periods of isolation. We arrive at a new homeostasis in order to cope with less social connection. Then, once isolation ends, we again have to adjust, and initially interaction produces anxiety, until we achieve another homeostasis wherein these networks are restrengthened. Fair enough, though this strikes me as more of an extravert’s narrative than solid science. Regardless, I am not so sure that is the case for me. After all, I felt no anxiety at staying home in the first place.

     My own theory is simpler. What I think is that that the comforts and serenity of being home for sixteen months have become linked by contrast with the external political and social trauma of these last years. Mix that in with intrinsic introversion, and perhaps an excessive amount of time to think about the insanity of the larger world in absentia, and I have ended up not wanting to be part of that world. From afar, I have lost trust in people.

     I said to my daughter recently, in jest: I am suspicious of most people I don’t know, and the rest I don’t trust. There was a time when I thought that human beings were mostly good, mostly creative, mostly thoughtful – with shortcomings: warfare, exploitation, prejudice, zero-sum competitiveness, indifference to the plight of others at least, and stunning cruelty at worst.

     But these last years have eroded even that understanding that I had. Needless, unjust wars rage everywhere – Yemen, Ethiopia, Syria. Oppressive regimes proliferate: Belarus, Myanmar, China. Dangerous idiots run countries: Bolsonaro in Brazil. Islamists kidnap school children in parts of Africa, especially girls. The Taliban is taking over Afghanistan again, after twenty years of fruitless warfare. Half the population of the U.S. remains loyal to a defeated demagogue. A large number of American legislators, supporting the lie of a “stolen election,” attempt to subvert the American Democracy. Hooligans, misfits, conspiracy theorists and “ordinary” people storm the American Capitol in a deadly riot based on…nonsense. All the others: Xi Jinping and the ruthless suppression of Hong Kong’s democracy activists; deranged Q-Anon believers; the preposterous militias – Oath-Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, New York Lightfoot Militia; the yahoos in our nearby village charging around in their giant, gas-guzzling pickups with big Confederate and Gun flags mounted in their truck beds; the crypto-militia people from Connecticut, in their compound behind our house, flying their huge flag upside down on the hilltop for a month after Joe Biden was elected;[ii] the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags mounted on garage roofs; the Fox Propaganda network being the most-watched “news” network in America; the shameful exhibition of the now dead Rush Limbaugh receiving the Medal of Freedom. The climate -change deniers.

     The anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers, the Covid-deniers: I expected that we would pull together in the face of our life-threatening pandemic, but no, not at all.[iii] Looking with a sociological eye, if society is a tapestry made of good-willed cooperation for mutual survival, then that tapestry is careworn and very frayed.

     No. I say to you that the big world of people is not to be trusted, thank you very much. It is not fear; it is aversion.

    

I sit outside at the table with its big blue, yellow and orange umbrella; the sun shines high-hot overhead, but the air is cool because of the just-passed thunderstorm that left the Ostrich ferns sparkling with heavy drops that make them tremble. The yellow yarrow plants and the pink bee balm are dripping too, as are the purple coneflowers, the white Shasta daisies, the delicate blue hollyhocks, and the pink joe pyes. Swallows are soaring and diving, eating their requisite 850 mosquitoes a day, with my approval. I have a new book in one hand, a freshly lit cigar in the other, my Panama hat on, and snazzy reading sunglasses dangling at the end of my nose. All set.

     K comes out in her bush-whacking outfit of old jeans, beaten flannel shirt, and red bandana, sickle in hand, and socks over pant legs to ward off ticks. She is off to thwack some underbrush in the back. I turn my old mug to gaze in wonder at her beautiful face, which is the same age as mine – wonder at the grace that has been bestowed upon us. We are old, old friends, and lovers twice: this time the second, last, and only time now forever.

     I still look for our small white dog who used to come to lie on grass as I read. Sandy died last spring of nothing in particular: old age, her body just stopped working. It was a sad day. It is possible she was the sweetest dog in the world. She was a rescue from Kentucky, who had lived her first six years at the end of a cruel, short chain and been abused there: beaten, one supposed. She was wary of most men other than myself; one assumes her abuser was a man. Who the hell does that to a little white dog?

     One of the cats, Dudley, is in the yard – I think he’s a tabby, although people here call him a Maine Coon Cat. What do I know, I’m from Canada. He is black and brown and tan and silky and so very friendly; it is a pleasure when he comes to sit on your lap. I call him “Big,” to honour his large front paws with the extra toes. He is crouched beside the shimmering Japanese willow tree that K and I planted as a Tree of Peace.[iv] Rather than burying a hatchet underneath the plant, we laid in a homemade, partially-bent pipe shillelagh made by one of K’s wackier Irish uncles. A ghastly-looking weapon, we buried it, followed by a short ceremony, and the newly planted willow over it has flourished ever since.

     I keep an eye on the cats – they are as loveable and funny as cats can be, but they are both hunters, and when I can, I interfere. I scare off the chipmunks, robins, and the brown rabbits – who this year have come into the yard in numbers larger than ever. Wild turkeys – strutting and confident and yakking to one another – cross the road in front regularly. Now and then a turtle: this year I have seen both a painted and a small snapping turtle. They cross from the pond and swamp behind us, passing through the yard – the cats are no threat to them, but the gravel road that they have to traverse to get to the second pond has danger. I have known of people who run over them intentionally. I wonder why they take this journey from one pond to the other – to see relatives, perhaps? The woodchucks: I love their rolling, musical gait – the cats might try to bother them, but I think the woodchucks would hold their own. Still, I am watchful.

     We had a comical possum who for a time made a sojourn every day about noon, coming down out of the field behind us, crossing the yard from the north-west corner, inspecting the compost pile, rolling down to the front of the house through the thicket of bishop’s weed, and then to the road. I loved his saunter. There was no trouble with either of the cats. He would walk along the side of the road – heading east toward Vermont, one might think. He made it back later, because the next day, there he would be, repeating the journey – until one day he didn’t. Alerted by a big, black turkey vulture, I found him on the road, halfway down the hill. He had been hit; his head squashed. I dragged him off the road and into patch of orange daylilies, muttered an apology for the human beings to the Animal Master, and left him for the vulture, who all the while had circled, riding the air streams, in no hurry, a picture of ancient patience.   

     The black cat Golly, the better hunter, recently caught a young rabbit, early in the soft evening. I saw him carrying it, and ran after him, hoping that it was not yet killed and that I could force him to drop it. A mistake, as it turned out. He deked left, but I went after him, and drop it he did. But the rabbit did not move as I approached, although I could see that its eyes were open, and it was still breathing. As I picked it up, I realized that it was paralyzed; I could tell from the limp, crossed legs, and because it did not wiggle to escape me. Golly had been carrying it by the back of its neck, and obviously the spinal cord had broken. I thought about killing it myself but could not bring myself to do so. All in all, it would have been better to have left the cat and the bunny to their deadly dance. Sadly, I placed it in the tall grass at the edge of the yard. To me, the small being seemed calm, but that could have just been the paralysis or shock. I went out later and it was dead. Once again, I mumbled an apology to the Animal Master, this time noting that it was in the nature of this cat to hunt. Golly cannot do otherwise.

 

Can human beings do otherwise? Is it just as natural for human beings to wage war with one another, to commit atrocities against other human beings? Perhaps it is in our nature also, to believe in crazy ideas, and then act out against one another based on these absurd conceptions, causing no end of harm. Perhaps this is as much part of us as taking more than we need, and purposely denying others as we do so. But if so, we are cruel and unlike the cat, we are capricious in our cruelty. For we do have our frontal lobes that provide us with alternatives, with the capacity to anticipate, to assess, and to judge, and ultimately to act with moral understanding. Normally, unless deprived or abused in childhood, we have reason, and we have a conscience. Compassion is every bit a part of our nature as human beings, as hunting is part of a cat’s nature.

     Yet far too often we turn our backs on these finer qualities and refuse to use them. Or, worse, we mis-use them, as for example, when supposedly for moral and religious reasons, Taliban men stone to death a woman for trying to educate girls, or a self-identified Christian stands outside a gay club with a sign that says, “Jesus hates fags.”

     Our human condition is that we suffer. We must labour for our survival. Women suffer pain and danger in childbirth. We suffer losses and disease. In evolutionary terms, older and newer parts of our brains are in conflict, resulting in ongoing psychological distress, as Freud described. Most of the time we desire more than we have, and our wanting pains us. We experience love and beauty, yet all the while knowing that someday we will die and lose all. But the worst of the human condition? It is the suffering that we humans intentionally inflict on one another.

     I want no part of the latter. This is what my time alone during the pandemic has brought to consciousness. This is my Covid trauma. In solitary thinking, I have come to understand that I remain a naïve idealist, as I have been since I was a fresh-faced student. Thus, I am often disappointed with human behaviour. I find it impossible to blow this stuff off and just live.

     Yet, we must be in the world, if not of it. Nobody lives outside society and culture, just as nobody lives outside nature. And so, what to do?

     Keep the lights on, at least, in the museum of human compassion. Stand and speak and act for what is good. We must choose kindness whenever possible. And of course, personally, I know I have to just get over it: starting by taking small steps to be in that world. Go to a diner and have a toasted club sandwich – with fries, of course. Go to a Sunday afternoon chamber music recital at the old music hall. Take a drive with K and a camera to Burlington, Vermont. Look forward to the possibility that we see good old Bernie Saunders on the streets of that town.

     Above all: remain calm. Meditate. Tend my own garden. Be in the world but keep part of myself separate and sacred from that larger world.

               Know the personal

               yet keep to the impersonal:

               accept the world as it is.

               If you accept the world

               the Tao will be luminous inside you

               and you will return to your primal self.[v]

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[i] Clark, Kareem. “The Neuroscience Behind Why Your Brain May Need Time to Adjust to Un-Social Distancing.” The Guardian, July 9, 2021.

[ii] In American flag protocol, the flag flown upside down means: Dire distress: Imminent threat to life and property.

[iii] I was naïve to have been surprised at the lack of thoughtful civic cooperation. It has been no different previously. See, for example: Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2018.

[iv] The “Tree of Peace,” the Great White Pine, is the symbol of peace-making in the traditions of the Haudenosaunee.   See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Peace

[v] Mitchell, Steven. Tao Te Ching, New English Version. HarperPerennial, 1988.

 

The Pandemic is Ending: I’m Disappointed

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Here in the U.S., the Covid-19 epidemic is winding down as more and more people are vaccinated. Canada is somewhat behind, but after the country’s faltering start in vaccinating, things are going well, and rates of infection are coming down there, too. This is wonderful news, and I am so very grateful. I hope to see my Canadian family and friends. And I am glad that people I know and love, and so many other people, are more-or-less out of danger. Vaccines are our way out of this, and they are working.

     World-wide, things are less rosy. India is in trouble. Rates of infection are sky-rocketing in South America; Brazil, led by a fool, has a total death number second only to that of the United States, and the situation is worsening. African countries, despite remarkable competence learned from previous dealings with epidemics, are struggling with no vaccine supply to speak of. Still, even for these areas, there is reason for optimism; we, the wealthy and privileged, are starting to share vaccine supplies and help with cash and supplies for medical infrastructure, and our leaders including Uncle Joe and Justin are showing a taste to do exactly that.

     And so, we can look forward to a time in the not-so-distant future when this terrible pandemic will be under control, at least, if not entirely wiped out. Most likely, just like the flu, we will get our annual shot, and go on our merry way. We will return to normal life.

     Yet, I am disappointed. It is “normal” life that concerns me.

    I had hoped – naïvely, perhaps – that the pause, as difficult as it was, and as much hardship as it caused, would give us a chance to rethink how frenetically we live, and about our relationship with the planet. (See my earlier posts: Imagine, Parts I and II in July and August, 2020.) I had hoped that we would consider the benefits of a more settled life, with more space and time to be human beings. More important (since what you do with your time is not my business), I had hoped that we would use the the experience of clearer skies, fresher air, and the uncluttered streets as an opportunity to change our behaviour and reduce our carbon output permanently.

     But no. It is apparent that this is unlikely to happen. It seems that we can hardly wait to get geared up and carry on, with even greater intensity, a way of life that is devastating earth. I know: Debbie Downer.

     A good friend, who is a New York State employee, has been working from home for well over a year. It has gone well. Productivity has been high, and life has been easier. Yet, it seems the department, and his bosses, cannot wait to get him and his hundreds of fellow cubicle-dwellers back under direct scrutiny. I can’t think of another plausible reason for it. The petite Mussolinis of bureaucracy and commerce cannot tolerate the thought of not having their charges back in the cubicles under “panoptic surveillance,” to use Foucault’s term, even though electronic monitoring could rather easily satisfy the neurotic compulsion[i]. And so, consequently, with that will come the stalled traffic, the time lost and the oppressive frustrations of commuting, along with the wasteful burning of fuel and the emissions of carbon dioxide and all that this entails.

     It appears that we just can’t wait! We can’t wait to drive all over the continent. We can’t wait to cram ourselves into airplanes and start flying all over the place. We can’t wait to herd ourselves onto cruise ships, all the while burning shocking quantities of fuel (28 thousand gallons of fuel per hour, in the case of the ship, Freedom of the Seas).[ii]  We can’t wait to pack ourselves into tourist cities like Barcelona and Venice, stampede into museums and cafés, and while we are at it, once again make these cities unlivable to the people who reside there. It would be comical, really, if it were not so destructive.

     The great writer and editor E. B. White penned an essay in 1956 entitled Sootfall and Fallout, which focused on his concern, even then, about environmental degradation, but especially, at that time, radioactivity that was being put into the atmosphere by nuclear bomb testing. (The fact that we no longer do this is evidence that we can stop doing harmful things if we decide to.) In that essay, he talks about “forms” – meaning the standard, habitual way we do things, often despite all the evidence that these forms have failed us and continue to fail us. Here is what he says with reference to the end of WWII and the era (the fifties) that he was writing in:

     “Are we for ‘new forms,’ or will the old ones do? In 1945, after the worst bloodbath in history, the nations settled immediately into old forms. In its structure, the United Nations reaffirms everything that caused the Second World War. At the end of a war fought to defeat dictators, the UN welcomed Stalin and Perón to full membership, and the Iron Curtain quickly descended to put the seal of authority on this inconsistent act.” [iii]

     This is exactly what we are doing. Before the pandemic, our form was that we trapped ourselves in stalled traffic, crammed into cubicles, crowded onto cruise ships, packed into airplanes, and swarmed tourist cities like locusts – all maintained by alarming levels of resource consumption and emissions that threaten to make the world unliveable.

     During the pandemic we had some respite from this. We experienced a new form. We had time to come back to ourselves. We travelled less, or not at all. Those whose work permitted it, did it at a distance, and commuted less or not at all. Monstrous cruise ships were docked. Airplanes were parked alongside the runways. Cities and other spaces suddenly became liveable once more, and quiet. Streets were free of cars. Oil and gas consumption reduced; there was a noticeable decline in the production of greenhouse gases. We slowed down and were in our world as human beings. Relatively speaking, it was a return to the Garden.

     But are we keeping this form? Quite apparently: no. We are determined to go back to the old form – with a vengeance. It is reported that after declining during 2020, carbon dioxide levels have rebounded, and in May carbon dioxide emissions rose to 419 parts per million, “the highest such measurement in the 63 years that the data has been recorded.” [iv]

     This looks like it will be an opportunity lost, and that is a great shame.      

     Many expect that technology will save us. Indeed, technological improvements are coming, and we need those badly. But the problem cannot be solved by technological fixes alone – and every new technology comes with its own, new set of problems. (Gas-powered buggies solved the problem of horse-manure pollution in nineteenth century cities.) Now, electric cars are touted as the fix-all so we can keep driving as we wish: but surprise! – they require power (coal? gas? solar? nuclear?) and their battery materials will necessitate mining on a scale that I doubt we have ever seen before. I know what mining is: I grew up in a gold-mining town.[v] Kirkland Lake was built in the nineteen-twenties on the side of a large, beautiful lake. I have a picture of my father rowing on it in the nineteen-thirties. By the fifties, when I was growing up, the lake was gone. It was filled in with a shiny greenish sludge that we called “The Slimes,” and that we, as children, played on: a mucky swill of crushed rock, chemical-laden tailings, cyanide, arsenic, and God knows what else. There are other such Slimes all over Northern Ontario and Quebec.

     No: in addition to technological improvements, we need to change behaviour if we are going to fix this problem. We need a new form: a form of doing less and consuming less, a form of sustainable economics and sustainable life.[vi] As many have pointed out, it is not possible to obtain infinite growth from a finite system (earth). And so, what to do?

     We can start by buying less stuff, and when we do buy stuff, acquire things that last longer and that can be repaired. We can travel less. Zoom to work; Zoom to out-of-town business meetings. If your recalcitrant employer resists, fight hard for the right to stay home. If we have travelled twice a year for breaks or vacations, make it once a year. I would say park the cruise ships, but if we must cruise, make it a biannual trip rather than an annual one. And we know the rest. Simply drive less. Combine trips. Don’t idle our cars while Suzie dashes into the 7-11 for a Big Gulp. Take the train. Go to into twenty-eight-day rehab, if necessary, to recover from our addiction to monster-sized SUV’s and pick-up trucks; drive smaller, more efficient vehicles. At home, if we mow our lawns once a week with a gas mower, make it every week and a half, or even two weeks. If we eat beef twice a week, make it once a week…and so on. It is not about denying ourselves. It is about moderating.    

     Canadians – and I know this will be painful – could get rid of their second fridges, those beer fridges in the basement, and recycle them.  It is a lot to ask, I know, but we could hold ceremonies to assuage the grief.

     While we are at it – if you are a person with an actual investment portfolio – dump the fossil fuel holdings and put your money in renewables or ask your mutual fund managers to do the same. And it goes without saying that we need to support and pressure our politicians to move aggressively on renewable energy infrastructure and climate improvement targets.

     It is not easy to change habits; I more than understand this. It is all about human “wanting.” We all want to get ours. It is a trait built into us, and one that is cleverly exploited by marketers and the corporate colonizers of culture. Part of me (if I had the money) could jilt my trusting and faithful seven-year-old Subaru and trade it in on a hot, gas-guzzling, 800 horsepower Saleen “Black Label” Mustang and drive the beast at over a hundred-miles-an-hour all the way to Texas. A ’68 GTO with that saucy ram-air 400 cubic inch V-8 and the four-barrel carb would do also. Well, no wait – not Texas: too many gun-toting, Covid-denying, anti-masking, voter-suppression knuckleheads there, so no, never Texas. California, then. Yes! – a big road trip to California: I’ll roar across the Golden Gate and then I’ll floor it all the way back via Oregon and the Dakotas, thereby burning up a few hundred gallons of gas. Fun!

     But in truth, I expect that I would feel no better after the binge. No doubt I would call up my Subaru and ask if I could come over, hat in hand, to see if we could reconcile and get back together.

     In any case, if we want to save ourselves and the planet, those times are over, or ought to be over. Time to find other ways to have fun, closer to home.    

     There is a fatal flaw in our culture. It is that we share this tacit belief that if an individual wants to do something, and is able to do that thing, then that person should do that thing, or has a right to do that thing. But this is faulty logic, because it leaves out a very fundamental component: the consequences, intended or not, of the action. So, if you can afford a Lincoln Navigator, then by all means, get it. If you are billionaire Bill Gates and his soon-to-be-ex, Melinda, and want a 66,000 square foot home (Xanadu 2.0!) for two people, go for it! If you are smiling Jeff Bezos and want to fly yourself into space in your own rocket, do it! There is no thought at all for the social and environmental consequences of these actions. Of course, it is not just the wealthy and their extravagances; I include myself. We all do this, all the time, and salve our consciences by telling ourselves the consequences are small or don’t matter because we have a right to “ours.”

     And so, it is a moral matter; but it is also a spiritual matter, a matter important to our simple human wellbeing.

     We really know in our hearts that materialism and the acquisition of things, beyond an essential level of comfort and security in our lives, do not make us any happier.[vii] That is old news. We never run out of desire but satisfying every want does not necessarily benefit us. The Buddhists point out that desires are inexhaustible, and their practice is to vow to put an end to them, knowing that the best we can do, in fact, is to steward these. The great Yogic teacher, Paramahansa Yogananda said to “put a hedge around your wants.” However, we do not have to look to Eastern cultures for this wisdom; in the Western tradition, from the Stoics on, the philosophers have recommended not necessarily the abandonment of desire, but rather the regulating of it. [viii]

     A moral matter: going forward, we must think of consequences not just for ourselves, but also, consider our children and grandchildren and beyond. In the aboriginal cultures of North America, a common precept when considering a course of action is to reflect on not just ourselves, but the “seven generations” that will follow. [ix]

     We do know what we need to do, where we need to go. It is only a question of will, of whether we will do it. Many are doing this: people who are already moving ahead on this good path. I invite myself, and one and all, to accompany them.

______________________________

Notes

[i] Meaning, in its simplest terms, a state of constant monitoring. Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1977.

[ii] De Santiago, Edward. “How Much Fuel Does a Cruise Ship Use?” Love to Know, www.cruises.lovetoknow.com /wiki/How_Much_Fuel_Does_a_Cruise_Ship_Use. Accessed 5 June 2021.

[iii] White, E. B. “Sootfall and Fallout.” The Golden Age of the American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, 2021, pp. 171-182.

[iv] Gammon, Katherine. “Global Carbon Dioxide Level Continued to Rise Despite Pandemic.” The Guardian, 6 June 2021.

[v] McDonald, Joshua. “The Island With no Water: How Foreign Mining Destroyed Banaba.” The Guardian, 8 June 2021.

[vi] Victor, Peter A. Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. 1st ed., Edward Elgar Publishers, 2009.

[vii] Long-term happiness studies, such as the Harvard study begun in 1938, have confirmed this repeatedly. As material wealth increased over the decades, median happiness stayed the same, and was related to other factors, such as quality of relationships, etc., not wealth and spending. Noethen, Robin. “A Study Lasting Over 80 Years Might Change Your View of Happiness.” Curious. https://medium.com/curious/a-study-lasting-over-80-years-might-change-your-view-on-happiness-33a28cdc6611. Accessed 9 June 2021.

[viii] Loori, John Daido. The Eight Gates of Zen: Spiritual Practice in an American Zen Monastery. Dharma Communications, 1992, p. 249.

Yogananda, Paramahansa. The Science of Religion. Self-Realization Fellowship, 1982, p. 28.

The idea of “moderation in all things,” is attributed to the Greek poet Hesiod (c.700 bc).

[ix] I first heard this in a workshop with Jake Swamp-Tekaronianeken, a Mohawk Chief, an ambassador for peace, and the founder of the Tree of Peace Society. It is a simple idea changes how one think about the consequences of one’s actions in the world.

______________________________

Resources

– 350 Org. https://350.org/. Founded by Bill McKibben and colleagues with the hope that knowledge and campaigning, we could limit carbon dioxide emissions to 350 parts per million. As noted in the essay, we are now at 419 parts per million.

– David Suzuki Foundation. https://davidsuzuki.org/. Suzuki is a scientist and a naturalist; his foundation educates, and advocates for sensible environmental policy. Suzuki himself, over 80, is a Canadian national treasure.

See “Ten Reasons to be Hopeful About Climate Action.” David Suzuki Foundation. https://davidsuzuki.org/what-you-can-do/ten-reasons-hopeful-about-climate-action/. I am not as optimistic as Suzuki is, but then again, he is smarter than I am! 🙂

– Gates, Bill. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. Ideas on technological fixes to help avoid catastrophic climate change.

– McKibben, Bill (Ed.). A Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing about Climate Change. OR Books, 2011.

– Kolbert, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006. A “boot camp” primer on the real situation we are in. Of course, it is now 15 years later.

– Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2011. Concerns the mechanisms that contribute to denial of the situation.

– Rosen, Julia. “The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof.” The New York Times, May 12, 2021. A terrific summary.

– United Nations Climate Action: Climate Reports. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/reports. These reports are ongoing and updated regularly.

The Last Drive

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

It is late August, 2008, and I am heading north from Utica, New York, toward the Thousand Islands crossing: this time in my blue Subaru. My mother has died in her Kingston nursing home, her heart finally giving out. It has been a long haul, but in the end she went fast – instantly – which is what we wish for them. One minute she was up and about, her pockets bulging with the loonies I had given her for the purpose, preparing for her favourite new vice – bingo – and the next minute she was on the tiled floor: a good death. All the turmoil, the pain of arthritis, the memory troubles, the irksomeness of the hearing aids, the shortness of breath, the incontinence of the last months – it is all finished.

     Gone too is the last anchor of the family, all the love, all the history and all the drama. Gone are the recent quiet moments when we sat together on our lawn chairs in the sunshine and amidst the blue and yellow flowers of the nursing home’s courtyard. We talked and languished in an eternal present, along with a picture-postcard past, reminiscing about the double rainbow that Dad managed to photograph, that stretched over the bay on that late summer day at the log cottage at Lake Kenogami, so many years ago. Gone are the little jokes that she had enjoyed since her laughter had come back to her in old age – after the ritual ride around town, on the way back to the home, I would pull up in front of the Kingston Pen and tell her that they were waiting for her. She laughed each time anew – whether it was the alcoholic amnesia or her delight at the thought of being that bad, or both, was hard to tell.

     I am sad, but not heavy. We had gentle times in her last years and she knew, in the end, that I loved her and that I would take care of her, and I understood also at long last that she loved me. It wasn’t greeting-card perfect, but it was something. In the future I will miss her more than I can realize at that moment. I will miss the mother I did have, and I will miss the boyish dream of the mother that I longed for.

     I cross the border and the Subaru heads first west and then north, out of Belleville toward Haliburton, where her body has been taken and where she will be cremated after my sisters and I view her.

     Whatever it is that we said to each other; whatever it is that we did – it all has to stand, now, on its own. There is no chance to say, or do, anything further. What we did and did not do will now always be such. The long road has been driven. There is nowhere further to go.

 

  • excerpted from We Never Say Goodbye: A Memoir (unpublished). Copyright © Peter Scott Cameron, 2021

From Magdalen

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

                              (after Rihaku and Pound)

 

Five days

beyond my nineteenth birthday,

you brought me to this island.

In tumbling stars

we lay,

skins upon the sand.

I gave what I could –

     you flew from me

     like a frightened bird.

 

This fall

the crickets stilled their song;

in the brown yard, the Boules de Neige

were weary and gray.

The grass grew long

around the cottage walls;

I had not the feeling

to cut it,

nor my own hair.

 

Today

the snow came;

it lies thick upon

my sad heart.

 

     Hear me, my love:

     Our child stirs

     within my womb.

 

     Each day until the buds burst,

     I will wait by the ferry gate.

            If by then you do not come,

             do not come at all.

Snippets V: Fishing with Poppy

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

I am in the parking lot of Hovey park that includes a pond, in Glens Falls, NY. A young boy, about six, is with an older man who appears to be his grandfather. They are loading fishing rods into the back of a white Chevy pickup.

     “It wasn’t a very good day of fishing, was it Poppy,” the boy says.

     “No.  No it wasn’t,” Poppy replies.

     “It’s okay, Poppy, don’t worry,” the boy says: “we can come back another day.”

I Answer All Your Questions: Part II

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Question: Welcome back. Shall we return first to the news and some more brilliant ideas circulating on the Internet?  But later I would like also to ask you some personal questions, such as “are you a misanthrope? Are you happy?” Is that okay?    Answer: It is okay. Thank you.

Question: So, let’s talk about social movements. Tell us, are the Proud Boys and other such groups patriots, or are they cases of arrested development?      Answer: I am inclined to say that too often those are the same thing, but instead I will just say yes to the latter. Research has shown that members of such groups have trouble with complex problem-solving and have a strong preference for simplistic explanations of complex phenomena. [i]

Question: Since you are a person who has studied psychology, what developmental age would you say they are?      Answer: Per Piaget, early “concrete operational” stage. Emotionally, per Erikson, I would say the stage of “industry vs. inferiority,” which places them at about the same developmental level both cognitively and emotionally: about eight years old. Their anthem that they sing for their mothers, Proud of Your Boy, from Aladdin, gives them away.

Question: Is it true that the Proud Boys were founded by a Canadian?      Answer: Unfortunately, yes. A stain on the country. They were founded in Brooklyn by the scoundrel, who was supposedly educated at Carleton University, and who high-tailed it from Ottawa. Scottish parents, I understand, which makes it even uglier.

Question: Speaking of Canada, what about Prime Minister Trudeau?      Answer: Decent guy. Has his mother’s heart, though he is not quite as smart as his father, who was, after all, a leading Quebec intellectual, which says a lot. Gets into hot water unnecessarily. Loved the famous hand-shake with Trump. Brilliant! I agreed with the 85-year-old woman in the seniors’ building I was living in at the time: I asked her how she liked him, and she replied, “Smokin’ hot!”

Question: If an election is called in the next months, given his minority government, will Trudeau win?      Answer: Yes. He will win a minority government, and thereby Parliament and the country will be in precisely the same position as before the election. This is not uncommon in Canada and Israel. Both countries seem to enjoy having a lot of elections in which nothing changes.

Question: I have heard the term “proroguing Parliament,” and both Trudeau and the Conservative Prime Minister before him, Stephen Harper, did that. Proroguing sounds like something you would eat, possibly Polish, and perhaps on a stick. Would you explain what it means to the Americans in the group?      Answer: Certainly. “Proroguing” is a mechanism with which you can send Members of Parliament home and start over when you don’t like how things are going, say, for example, when opposition members are closing in on a corrupt deal the government has made, etc. Then, when Parliament reconvenes, the game starts over with a clean slate. Of course, in our real lives, we are not allowed do this, but those clever politicians are smarter than us and so have availed themselves of the playground equivalent of a “do-over.”

Question: The Canadian Conservative Party rejected a resolution that would have recognized that climate change was real, and that we should do something about it. What will happen to them?      Answer: They will go the way of the Dodo bird and the 50% of Republican men and certain health care workers who are refusing a Covid vaccine. It is Darwinian natural selection. Unfortunately, they may take the rest of us with them.

Question: But is climate change real and caused by human activity?      Answer: Yes, along with accompanying weather extremes, species extinction and habitat collapse.

Question: Do we have the capability, with relatively straightforward and not unduly difficult fixes, to halt climate change and impending ecological disaster?      Answer: Yes.

Question: Will addressing climate change harm the economy?      Answer: No, it will help the economy. If we pursued it, it would be like the boom after WWII.

Question: Great! Given that, will we take necessary action on climate change soon enough to avoid devastating ecological collapse, with considerable human suffering and the decimation of other species?      Answer: No.

Question: ??? But what about all that is happening right now? Biden’s plans, the fantastic drop in solar power costs and so on?      Answer: It is great; what Uncle Joe is trying to do is terrific. But we are thirty-years-plus too late to avoid serious troubles. We are already experiencing some of them, in fact. The permafrost and glaciers are melting and already we have lost three billion birds in North America alone. We knew about this problem going into the eighties. The Kyoto protocol was, after all, was signed in 1992, and it has only gotten worse. Even now, I see a lot of unwillingness by people to change or to inconvenience themselves – things like horrendous cruise ships, gigantic suburban pickup trucks, all that flying around, bottled water, etc. So, no, we will not avoid suffering.

Question: Does that mean we should give up? Are you a pessimist?      Answer: No. Of course not, to both. Remember Gramsci’s and Rolland’s dictate: “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” We can mitigate, and everything we do helps the planet and all sentient beings on it.

Question: Okay. A different subject: can established main-stream news providers be trusted?      Answer: Yes: employing, of course, your faculty for critical thinking acquired in college.

Question: What about Fox News?      Answer: No. Fox is not a news provider.

Question: Speaking of Fox News: do supply-side economic policies with big tax cuts, aka “trickle-down” (aka Reaganism or Thatcherism), work as claimed?      Answer: No. Four decades of evidence show that its effect is the reverse: it is “trickle-up.” Or rather, wealth floods up to the already rich.

Question: Speaking of Thatcher, has Britain harmed itself by pursuing Brexit?      Answer: Yes, substantially. Although I am sure it is not the case for those living through it, it has been a bit comical to watch from the outside. I suppose because it is self-inflicted. But I am sorry they have made such a colossal error and are making their citizens suffer. And it is most unfortunate that they are being “guided” through the process by a buffoon with weirdly tousled hair.

Question: Why, then, did they pursue it?      Answer: Domestic chauvinism, fear of outsiders. But a correction: I’m not sure one can say “they,” speaking collectively of Great Britain. Wales tilted “yes” for obscure reasons including a large influx of conservative English in recent years. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted “no,” and it appears that a significant number of English “no” voters stayed home, considering the idea absurd, and so the true believers won. As one wag said, watching the English pursue Brexit was like seeing them gleefully sawing off both their legs. Sorry, I may have added the adverb, “gleefully.”

Question: Okay, a big one, as this continues to be contested hotly on the Internet: what about the Holocaust? Did Hitler really exterminate six million Jews?      Answer: Most likely more than that if you include both the camps and the killings outside the camps – along with at least five million others outside of “regular” war casualties: Poles, Roma, gay people, the mentally ill, mentally retarded, and sundry other unfortunates. In addition to the millions killed in the concentration camps, there were untold numbers of Jews and others murdered in fields and towns of countries like The Ukraine. When there were children, the Nazis simply buried them alive, throwing them in with the bodies of their parents, to avoid “wasting” a bullet.

Question:  Does this history bother you?      Answer: Bother me? Bother me, you say? It stops me in my tracks. My mind freezes. It wakes me up at night. It makes me grind my teeth. It is horror, the stuff of nightmares, like the Japanese rape of Nanking,[ii] the genocide in Rwanda, the attempted genocide of the Indigenous People of the Americas, slavery, what neighbours did to each other in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, ISIS beheaders and rapists, and dreadful Taliban women-stoners. It goes on and on.

Question: What can we do about it?      Answer: Personally: what Buddhists call “lovingkindness,” or the Christian Golden Rule. Publicly: atonement and active reconciliation. Politically: the determination to prevent and stop occurrences at every opportunity, with force, as necessary and possible.

Question: Some people say that “history,” as we call it, is just a constructed narrative. Or as the Postmodernists claim, and all the students in the 90’s were indoctrinated to believe, that there is no truth, just “truth.” What do you think?     Answer: Social and historical reality exist. Truth exists. Postmodernism is a catchy idea, but it goes too far. “Desconstruction” became a parlour trick. Derrida, the great showman that he was, overstated the case.[iii] To test this proposition, try standing in front of an oncoming locomotive.

Question: Does evil exist?     Answer: ? You just asked me about the Holocaust.

Question: Does the Devil exist?     Answer: Look in the mirror.

Question: Does Goodness exist?      Answer: Of course. It is both all around us and inside us. The remarkable thing about goodness is you do not even have to exert yourself to get it. All you must do is open yourself to it.

Question: What is virtue?      Answer: Consult Socrates.

Question: Can virtue be taught?      Answer: Yes, according to Socrates.

Question: So, there is hope! What about love?      Answer: It is the best thing we do, and the capability for love is the best quality we have.

Question: Now you sound like a Humanist. Are you?      Answer: Yes, Enlightenment rationalism and humanism is one of the West’s greatest gifts, including liberating us from organized religion. Despite that, I know that there are larger and deeper aspects of existence that we cannot understand.

Question: Now you sound like a Mystic.      Answer: I am all too aware that I am but a miniscule fragment of an incomprehensibly larger whole that is beyond my capacity to comprehend. And in the face of that, the best thing I can do is to experience great awe.

Question: Earlier, you sounded misanthropic. Are you?      Answer: Misanthropic? No, I deny that. But I admit that each additional year that I continue to exist, my esteem for humanity lowers a few percentage points. It is now at 31.4%. But perhaps I have been watching too much television news. The past five years of American politics have taken a toll.

     Of course, there are many one-hundred-percent people, although I sometimes have trouble recalling whom, other than dear friends and family. Well, no, I take that back: there are all sorts of ordinary, everyday hundred-percenters walking around – kind, generous, loving people, I see them in the grocery store.

     And there are Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai for sure. Uncle Joe Biden is certainly looking like a hundred-percenter. Historically, so many: Haydn no doubt. Dickens and Dostoevsky, of course. Voltaire, and Frida Kahlo. Nelson Mandala. Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. Martin Luther King, Jr. All those great Canadian women, like Emily Carr, “Canada’s Van Gogh,” and the aboriginal poet Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), or the Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak, who was born in an igloo on Baffin Island. Then there was Viola Desmond, whose refusal to move from her seat in a movie theatre, in 1946, began to the end segregation in Nova Scotia. It took forever. The last segregated school in Nova Scotia shut its miserable doors in 1983! Don’t be smug, Ontarians, you had segregated schools from the late nineteenth century until 1965, when the last one closed in Colchester! Don’t get me started!!

Question: Okay, not a misanthrope, but touchy, if I might say so. So, given Covid and all the concerns you have mentioned, are you happy? Have you suffered with the pandemic? Answer: Let me start with the second one. No, I have not suffered with the pandemic.

     I am a privileged person in all this. At most, I have merely been inconvenienced by having to stay home, not seeing family and friends, and not going to movies or out to hear live music. Mostly trivial disruptions. I have been helped by my essentially introverted nature.

     I do miss those friends and family members very much and at times I feel sad about it. And I have had bouts of anxiety about when I will see my daughter and grandchildren again. I have gotten fatter, which bugs me. But unlike so many who have really suffered, I have lost no job, no business, nor income. I have not been sick, and most important, I have lost no loved ones. Instead, I have had a greater opportunity to be with myself, and have been able to make improvements, such as lowering my carbon footprint by not driving anywhere. I want to find ways to build on that.

Question: Okay. Then, happiness: are you happy and do you have a philosophy of happiness?     Answer: Again, I will answer the second question first. I will have to start charging you double.

     I understand that, contrary to the U.S. Constitution, happiness cannot be attained through pursuit. Nor is it “choice,” as new-agers claim. Try telling that to a Syrian refugee or a person suffering from major depression. You will risk a sock on the chin, and rightly so.

      Rather, happiness is an understanding, a realization coupled with gratitude. For me, being unhappy would be a monumental act of selfishness. I am reminded of a saying, attributed to the Ojibwa, or properly, the Anishinaabe people: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.”

     So yes, I am happy. I am a most fortunate person. Aside from being carried across the sky by a great wind, my gratitude list has become encyclopedic. Let me expound in detail. Despite all the usual human defeats and disappointments, I have made it to my overly-ripe mid-seventies, with no cancer, no heart attack or diabetes, and no Parkinson’s. So far, I have all my marbles. I am a citizen of not just one, but two of the West’s candy-store democracies. I am not, say, a Rohingya refugee living in shit-soaked squalor in Pakistan, a Uighur suffering “re-education” in despotic China, or a single mother trying to protect her children in gang-infested Honduras.

     Instead, I live in freedom and tranquility in a little white house in Grandma Moses territory, the rolling countryside near Vermont’s Green Mountains, sharing life with a wonderful woman who loves me, all my alarming deficits included. I have a remarkable daughter and two stellar grandchildren, two terrific sisters and families, and good friends – and, as I said earlier, every one of these people so far has survived Covid.

     All my life, I have been given unlimited opportunities to do meaningful work. And now, every month the American government, in its beneficence, deposits a nice sum of money into my chequing account. I never have to remind them. Mundane stuff really, but I have Beethoven on the radio, Stan Getz and Tim Hardin on the old iPod. Through the real miracle of the Internet, I can listen to my favorite radio station in the world, Jazz-FM from Toronto, any time I want, while remembering fondly when I lived there. I will never run out of books to read. For breakfast, I can sip fair-trade coffee, spread jam on my toast and devour an egg from free-range chickens. I can enjoy a modest cigar in the late afternoon and an Irish whiskey in the evening, while watching television in tranquility with my sweet partner. We have a 100-year-old rescue dog who does not bite, though God knows she would be entitled to, given her early history of abuse.[iv] We also share life with two foundling cats, one of whom thinks the dog is his mother, and the other who thinks he is part dog. Dudley walks around the yard with me when I do my daily inspection, and then when I go sit on the large stump to smoke my cigar, he jumps up and sits beside me, taking stock of things, as I do. Just that. It is amazing. So much to be grateful for.

     I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.

     But I do not live just for these “tranquil pleasures,” as Manuel Vilas said of his father. [v]

     Instead, like most human beings, I know that there is a great light within me. And every day I grow one day closer to setting it free.  

________________________________________________

[i] Grover, Natalie. People with Extremist Views Less Able to do Complex Mental Tasks, Research Suggests. The Guardian, February 21, 2021.                                                                                                                                                                                               

[ii] Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking. Basic Books, 1997.                

[iii] Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (transl.). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

[iv] Dear Sandy died on Wednesday, April 21, 2021. I left this sentence written as is, in tribute. I continue to hear her patter in the house, and to look for her poking around in the yard, blind as she was, navigating by her sniffing, very fine doggish nose.

[v] Vilas, Manuel, op cit., page 179.

I Answer All Your Questions

Posted on by Peter Scott Cameron

Hello!

Theories, explanations, and revelations swirl in the maelstrom that is the Internet! They confuse us – it is difficult to separate falsehoods from truth and reality! And this bubbling cauldron of toxic thought-swill contains problems that exist in addition to everyday thorny conundrums that have perplexed even philosophers and theologians for millennia, let alone the rest of us everyday knuckleheads.

     But relief is at hand. Today I am going to answer all these questions. Some are quite simply answered with facts, but others are difficult, defeating some of the greatest thinkers on the Internet. Nevertheless, I answer them here.

Part I (Second Installment Coming!)

Question: Was the American election stolen?      Answer: No. However, Trump and the national Republicans did everything in their power to do exactly that.

Question: Will Trump run in the 2024 election?      Answer: Maybe, if he is not in jail.

Question: I read on Facebook that the Clintons belong to a secret cabal of mainly Democrats and “Deep State” pedophiles who not only have sex with children in a pizza parlour basement in Chicago, but also eat them. Is that true?      Answer: No.

Question: As an avid reader of the Weekly World News in the nineties, before the Internet, I have always wondered: did Hillary Clinton really have a love child with Bat Boy?      Answer: No. Bill’s shenanigans kept her too busy to think of having an affair of her own.

Question: How about the Alien–      Answer: No.

Question: Did Jews, assisted by Democrats, aim lasers from outer space to start the California fires?      Answer: No.

Question: About Covid-19. Is it spread by 5G towers, the same way radar, even though it had not quite been invented yet, caused the 1918 flu pandemic?      Answer: No.

Question: Was it invented by Bill Ga–      Answer: No.

Question: Did the Chinese create Covid-19 in a laboratory?      Answer: No, probably not. It looks like Covid-19 was accidentally passed from animals, probably bats, to humans somewhere near or in Wuhan.

Question: Did people believe as many strange explanations during the Great Plagues and the 1918-1919 flu epidemic as they do now?      Answer: Yes, though it appears not quite as many that are as bizarre as those propagated on the Internet at present.

Question: Did that flu, the “Spanish Flu,” start in Spain?      Answer: No, it started in Haskell County in Kansas.

Question: Why was it called the “Spanish Flu,” then?      Answer: Prejudice. It is like the French, who in the old days, called syphilis “The English Disease.” The English called it “The French Disease.” In Zaire, in more modern times, H.I.V. was called “The American Disease.” Americans thought it came from Haitians.

Question: Are the Covid-19 vaccinations safe and effective?      Answer: Yes. With AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, there is a one in a million chance of a blood clot. You are more than nine times more likely to get a blood clot from Covid-19. You should get vaccinated with whatever vaccine is available, if not for yourself, then for the rest of us.

Question: Do the various Covid vaccinations contain microchips that governments will use to control us?      Answer: No, although perhaps there are some people who would benefit from such a thing.

Question: Do vaccinations cause autism?      Answer: No. This idea came from a long-discredited study published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield, who is not necessarily a quack, but is a fraudster. The finding has been determined to be an “elaborate fraud.” But unfortunately, the idea was picked up and propagated by famous people who should know better.

Question: What about all those other problems that vaccines cause such as auto-immune problems in children, along with all the money drug companies earn and a bunch of other bad stuff outlined on the Internet, etc.?      Answer: Vaccinations along with other public health actions are among the greatest contributors to human longevity and wellbeing that we have ever known. And they are remarkably safe.

Question: Given all the conspiracy theories and half-baked ideas floating around, are smart-phones and social media doing humanity any good?      Answer: Social media: some usefulness, but overall, no, not very good for the species. Seems to me it will be the final nail in the coffin of inner-directedness, making us entirely other-directed as David Reisman, the sociologist, predicted all the way back in 1950.[i] Although it is true that helps budding musicians build a reputation for themselves and make sales, as in Justin Bieber.

     The phones? Hard to say, although there is considerable comedic value in seeing all these people with their noses in their phones while walking, at concerts and sporting events, eating in restaurants, and riding around on tour buses. I feel sorry for the kids though, whose total reality is being mediated by social media and smart phones. I’m glad I grew up before these things happened. Seems like my young life was more interesting and more fun.

Question: But isn’t the immediate connection of human beings, that the phones offer, beneficial?      Answer: It is a bit of a stretch to call it an “immediate connection,” I think. As I consider this, I am reminded of the great Charles de Gaulle who, when he was asked why he did not answer the telephone, is reputed to have answered: “Because if I had wanted to talk to him, I would have called him up.” I like texting; however, I find I have a limit on how many I can tolerate in a single day.

Question: Okay. People question whether scientists and doctors can be trusted. Can we trust them?      Answer: Yes. Almost all of them, although not Andrew Wakefield, obviously.

Question: Can science itself be trusted?      Answer: Yes, with the recognition that it is a step-by-step process and always a work in progress. Science is saving our behinds in this pandemic.

Question: Are human beings intelligent?      Answer: I would say clever, but not exactly intelligent. The invention of non-fungible tokens and then the selling of same at astronomical prices makes my case splendidly. We are certainly not nearly as intelligent as we think we are. We are rather primitive and paranoid with our old reptilian and mammalian core brain areas, but with frontal lobes making up stories, telling us all the time that we are the smartest creatures in the room.

Question: Does this apply to you?      Answer: Of course.  

Question: Speaking of different areas of the brain, are you saying life evolved, or was it created?      Answer: Evolved.

Question: How could that happen, given evolution to the point of human consciousness?      Answer: It is a remarkable mystery.

Question: Do astrology and numerology have any validity?      Answer: Only for the bank accounts of Astrologists and Numerologists, as well as providing something enjoyable to read in newspapers.

Question: Are there spirit-beings on other planes of existence that we can communicate with who can help us with our personal problems?      Answer: No. Although it makes sense to invoke, within ourselves, the essences of great dead people as guides and for inspiration.

Question: What about pet psychics? Past-lives-regression therapy?      Answer: Codswallop. Hogwash perpetrated by flim-flam artists and balderdash perpetrated by frauds.

Question: Is psychotherapy helpful and effective?      Answer: Very helpful! In-depth self-reflection with an objective helper: what could be better?

Question: Is meditation good for you?      Answer: Oh very. I do this, in an effort to still the “puppy-dog” mind and to sit for a while with the great mystery.

Question: What about yoga? I read in the New York Times that in support of a twenty-eight-year-old ban on yoga in public schools in Alabama, evangelical Christians argue that yoga causes injuries, psychosis, and Hinduism. Is this true, does it cause these problems?      Answer: I’ll ask my daughter, who is a thirty-year practitioner – she is currently in the broken- bones unit at the Toronto Hindu psychiatric hospital, ha, ha! But seriously folks, all jokes aside, I have always wondered what causes Hinduism, ha, ha! But seriously folks, all–

Question: Okay, we get it! But tell us then, is yoga beneficial in any way?      Answer: Yes, all that pretzel-like bending and mental focus is good for the body, the mind, and the spirit, especially so as one ages. I regularly consider practicing it.

Question: Is Buddhism useful?      Answer: You mean, does it cause you to speak on riddles and kōans and cause mindfulness, har, har? Okay, yes. Some really good ideas. Hilarious stories and good mind-puzzles, too. Big on compassion, and we sorely need that.

Question: I have heard you used to practice Zen Buddhism. What does Zen say about what happens after death?      Answer: It says nothing about life after death, only that you should anticipate dying.

Question: What does happen after death?      Answer: Although we make up all sorts of stories, spooky and otherwise, about it, nobody knows. I believe that it will be silent.

Question: How about reincarnation?      Answer: A dubious proposition. If this were true, given the law of karma, logically there would be a lot fewer human beings in the world than there are currently, and a lot more bugs, bats, and bullfrogs.

Question: Is there an individual soul that survives, then?      Answer: A gratifying idea, but I have my doubts. Decide for yourself.

Question: But, what about the testimonials of near-death experiences, you know, the white light and all?      Answer: Last-minute activity of our oxygen-starved, marvelous, story-telling frontal lobes.

Question: Does God exist?      Answer: That is not something I can say. You will have to decide for yourself. Please don’t consult the Internet on this matter. I’d say go for a walk in nature on a sunny day. Or a rainy day.

Question: What about Jesus?      Answer: Oh, I trust he existed alright: a stupendous person and philosopher, or the Son of God, depending on your belief. Too bad we seldom really understand him, due to Biblical nonsense and the endless prevarication and confabulation of believers.

Question: As an aside, would you say Jesus approves of gay people having sex?      Answer: It is impossible to imagine, given all the real and horrible problems in the world, that Jesus would spend his time worrying about how people play with each other’s private parts. If he did pay any attention at all, I’m sure he would enjoy any and all of the imaginative consensual coupling and frolicking that people indulge in.

Question: Okay, then, back on track: does life have meaning?      Answer: Certainly, and it is our job to create it, as Viktor Frankl says. I admire his take on this. He survived the concentration camp. His wife did not. See Man’s Search for Meaning. But in addition to that, it is as the great Spanish writer, Manuel Vilas, realized: that life “was worth living even if it was just to sit in silence.” [ii]     

Question:  So then, the Hokey-Pokey is not really what it’s all about?      Answer: No, but it is an excellent place to start.

Question: I gather from the previous question that you are an existentialist. So, what do you believe?      Answer: I believe that students should know, after 12 years of extensive schooling at considerable public expense, when and where to use the apostrophe. I think adverbs are useful, and the passive voice is perfectly serviceable in the English language. I also believe that we should go back to the correct use of the verb “to lie,” as in, “I am going to lie down,” as opposed to “I am going to lay down.” Bob Dylan’s song should be Lie, Lady, Lie, not Lay, Lady, Lay. The lady, in whatever state of undress she is in our imaginations, should lie across Bob’s big brass bed.

Question: Given your lack of faith in a religious system that gives you succour; how do you get up in the morning?      Answer: After I wake up, I have a cup of coffee, listen to classical music, read a poem, and then make breakfast.

Question: Okay, thank you. I, and surely the readers, have many more questions we would like to ask. We have inquiries about the Proud Boys, Brexit, whether we will avoid climate catastrophe, and whether or not you are happy. Will you come down from the mountain top again soon to answer these?      Answer: Indeed, yes. How about three days from now?

Question: Great! Thank you! Your cheque is in the mail.      Answer: Okay, good, my Internet service provider payment is due. And you are most welcome. See you Thursday.

[i] Riesman, David, et al. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Doubleday, 1950.

[ii] Vilas, Manuel. Ordesa. Andrea Rosenberg (transl.). Riverhead Books, 2020. Page 57.