First Day (Never Do Anything By Yourselfie)

First day of the term, and Mom drives you to the University. She wants to meet all your new teachers. She wants to make sure they all have her email address. She drives you up to the main door and says, "Now don't move 'til I get back, don't get lost while I park the car."

She manoeuvres around others parents' vehicles, and then dashes back waving a large bag: "You forgot you lunch!" You enter the building together, crowding in with other students, parents, grandparents, social workers, guardians and counsellors. 

"Is there a 'fridge where you can keep your medication?" Mom asks anxiously. 

First day of kindergarten? No: first day of university. 

Remember the old days when First Year students went to University by themselves? Finally free of adult supervision they could pilot their own educational boat and plot their route through adulthood.

They didn't need counselling because the buildings were big and there were other students they hadn't met before, and they had to find a room on a map and choose a desk to sit at, all without consulting a therapist. They arrived in their own second hand car, bought with money made in summer jobs. Or maybe they arrived by bus, and picked up its schedule because they'd be coming here every day -- by themselves. With parents here, they wouldn't have been seen dead.

Maybe they'd be living in Student Residence -- where Mom had not performed a hygiene-sweep ahead of time. Or maybe they'd still be living at home, but no one would tell them when to get up in the morning and what time their first class was; they just had to know that, as if by magic!

What has happened to independence and growing up? To being "able," instead of fetishizing "disability"? Such nostalgic concepts for those who started University in the 1970s and '80s. High school classmates melted into memory as we left our home river for the big ocean, like human salmon (me, I was entering a Biology program …) Salmon have a juvenile stage and adult stage in their life cycle, but it seems humans have evolved an endless recycling of juvenile stages. (An evolutionary decline?)

For us those first heady days of university were a rocking roll-over from grade school to independence, experienced against the throb of The Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin. We picked up our course reading lists (we read books back then) and checked out the masses of cute guys who had materialized all around us. 

Today, Mom is here, asking, "where are your anxiety pills? Have you got your smartphone? Have you taken any selfies yet? Here … let me take one of me! Got one! Straight to YouTube! Here, let's take one for your ex-step-father who said he'd be here but of course isn't ..."

"Look at all these cute guys!" adds Mom, and she doesn't mean the 18 year olds; she means other parents. "There's one heading for the Starbucks across the street," she says. "You know what, I should get a double latte to celebrate -- this is such an important day for me! So I'll just pop into that Starbucks -- if you'll be okay on your own for a bit? Have a look around, but don't get lost. I'll be back soon -- text me if you need anything, okay?"

Project Amnesia

Welcome to Trigger Town 

-- but enter at your own risk. You may see a sign, place-name or something colonial that offends, like a statue, library, court house or legislative building. We're doing our best to get rid of them. History is trouble. A noxious weed. Best to re-write it. 

Should the name “Victoria, BC” survive? It commemorates a Victorian monarch, which triggers PTSD for some. Arguably, native Victorians should have their birth certificates changed. (“Place of Birth: FORMER-Victoria”, like "Former-Yugoslavia) The Province is demanding the federal government come up with COVID funding for this (since history too is a nasty virus.)

Trigger Town will eradicate street names so people don't get a shock every time they read Douglas, Tolmie, Blanshard and Finlayson. Few know anything about the character, achievements, education and dedication of these people (history hasn't actually been taught all that much), but they've got to be disappeared.

Since it's safer to forget than understand History, the education system has launched Project Amnesia, to help students come to proper conclusions (i.e., forget about) the values and accomplishments of "settlers" who had put too much emphasis on things like parliamentary democracy, habeas corpus, education and mass literacy. In the school setting, enquiry is dangerous but group-think is safe, less likely to trigger curiosity or independent ideas. Ideas offend. Best to ban them, inclusively.

The Alphabet War

The world is "swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/ where ignorant armies clash by night" wrote Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach in 1867. 

That was the year Canada was born. However it was in 1867 England, in 2020 Canada "struggle and flight" seems a pretty wide-ranging war among alphabetical armies who fight with non-civil slogans slashed across walls in CAPITAL LETTERS. 

Ordinary people (you know who we are) are tired of constant confused alarms from BIPOC and LGBQT, tired of being told that ACAB, and that BLM (like all lives; we know). We feel like we're being sloganized to death by the PC with OCD, although we know we'll be labelled with all sorts of "-isms" for pointing it out. (So, best to speak as ANON, if at all.)

We're already tired of COVID, with it's self-isolating work-from-home blending of days into sameness and a sort-of-working, sort-of-alone lifestyle … We can't even keep that TGIF feeling we used to have at the end of the working week. How's the end different from the beginning and middle, now? What's a week, in life lived on  ZOOM and SKYPE?

So we're not in the mood-disorder for warfare via wall-splashing graffiti and text-abbreviation. Texting isn't writing, and slogans aren't thought. Capitalized abbreviations are sub-literate amputations for an ADHD generation.  If I see one more I'll get PTSD.

You might think that arrogant and don't want to hear my plea for peace and whole syllables, but nevertheless that's my final WORD, delivered, of course, as ANON. 

Please don't RSVP.

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Does society suffer from hypo-adultism?

Many of the psychological ailments people complain of today (and get disability allowances for) are normal phases in childhood:
mood swings
anxiety and uncertainty
social awkwardness
identity confusion

Taken together, these are normal signs of immaturity. In theory children grow out of them: they become adults. In practice however, many no longer do. Does contemporary society nurture a culture of perpetual childhood? A condition of hypo-adultism?

It's fashionable to claim some form of "disability", which has in turn spawned accusations of "ableism" ("discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities"). To be disabled (or "handicapped" as they used to say) once meant being blind, deaf or in a wheelchair. Now it includes gender dysphoria, bipolar disease, OCD, generalized depression and anxiety, substance addiction, and "racialization". 

People used to be praised for overcoming handicaps (polio survivors, for instance, common in the mid-20th century). The Helen Keller example was the gold standard of "rising above". Now people are encouraged to cultivate emotional disabilities, in other words to prolong childhood, perhaps forever. This is the "puer aeternus" or perpetual boy syndrome (whence "puerile"). What people feel threatened by now is adultism -- the expectation that youths become adults.

Maturity, self-reliance, independence, life-long character development … once considered normal goals, these have fallen into disrepute, an ideal of a suspect culture, a "privileged" or "non-inclusive" one that inequitably tries to dominate other cultures. 

If adulthood doesn't dominate, then childishness will. Immaturity will be rewarded in an increasingly dependent class, probably a heavily medicated one. And self-medicated. From the practice of pharmaceutically treating behaviour disorders in children has grown the habit of self-medicating in adulthood. 

Screen-addiction is notable for feeding into this, of course: life as distracting entertainment is another juvenile desire. Demotion of literacy is also part of the pattern -- but that's a larger area of research to explore. Suffice it to say that kids' vocabulary is shrinking in a zooming and texting era, yet kids who know few long words have learned the word "dysphoria". Their disability is not dysphoria however, but hypo-adultism: the fear of growing up. There always was something creepy about Peter Pan.

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Getting Over Name Disputes

We name things to take ownership of them. When we build or buy a house we may give it a name. Someone else decides on numbers but a name is bestowed by you, and may reflect hope, celebration or nostalgia.

As soon as you adopt a cat or dog you give it a name. Children of course are christened with care, and children themselves spontaneously name places to make them more real, more significant. In one neighbourhood there was “Jumping Cliff”, where kids jumped into piles of leaves, “Witch's Garden” on which a stooped old woman looked down from a window, and “Midnight Boat”, a boat-shaped rocky outcrop on which many imaginary journeys were taken. The naming habit isn't lost in adulthood: one couple (probably many) call the BC Ferry on which they met “the Love Boat”.

The trouble starts when public buildings or sites are named for historic figures, events, or places from which settlers arrived. Always, some group comes along wanting to re-name them. The purpose of re-naming is to take a place away from someone else. It's about possession.

We could avoid this by choosing nomenclature not from historic figures or episodes, but from names of non-human entities such as the plants and animals found in a place. We could raise the process of labelling above the level of human squabbling to the level of flora, fauna, geology and weather.

How about naming streets Raccoon Row, Wild Dog Way, or Storm Street? And if someone objects to “privileging” the English language, how about (instead of privileging another one) using a language no one now speaks, such as Latin and Greek? How about Ursus Alley (where bears used to roam), Mt. Quercus (where oaks still grow), Canis Court, or Fort Felix, standing where cougars still sometimes prowl? (In schools, a teachable moment about classical languages?)

We already name some places after natural features. Consider Trout Lake (in Burnaby), Sunset Boulevard (in California) and Oak Shade Lane, Oaklands School and Willows School in Victoria. Why not stick to that? Today's heroic historic figure will be tomorrow's villain – to someone. But a trout's a trout and a willow's a willow – and no one need stoop to childish nomenclature conflicts which amount to “he took it – I had it first”.

Naming schools, buildings, libraries, streets and towns after other species acknowledges that we disputatious humans are only one species among millions, and that the landscape belongs as much to the others as to us. By naming places for natural features rather than for human history, we recognize that nature (Earth) owns itself. In Earth-time, we are creatures of a moment. No ethnic group “owns” a place for we are all but tenants here, quickly passing through.

If schools were named for local wildlife and trees, especially endangered ones, the students could take ownership of campaigns to protect them. Think of all the science and art projects that could be built around it, if schools were named for intriguing plants and animals rather than for a person that someone, somewhere, will dislike.

Toppling Statues of Privileged White Guys -- Civic Bylaw is in the Works

VICTORIA CITY COUNCIL EXPECTED TO HAVE 

BYLAW IN PLACE THIS WINTER

In case we're to be cursed by a snowy white winter this year, Victoria is introducing a bylaw forbidding Frosty the Snowman figures in private yards and public parks. Families are asked to respect the multi-cultural sensitivities of their neighbourhood.

"Frosty is a snow-white icon of privilege. The sight of him triggers PTSD in some members of the community when they walk by," say councillors. "This symbol of oppression has no place in our parks and gardens."  

"And why is he always male?" ask #metoo supporters.

"And why does he get a scarf when our homeless population is experiencing coldness?" ask activists.

"And why, what with the CRD smoking ban, is he smoking a pipe?" ask health officials.

Pro-Council journalists ask and answer the classic journalists' questions:

Who?      White male

What?     Middle-class throw-back

When?    Colonial dark ages

Where?   Gardens of single family dwellings

"The detached house and garden harbour negative anti-social elements," declares Council. "Housing should be crowded, inclusive and multi-use."

A local university History prof agrees: "Frosty snow-statues are a dangerous symbol of privileged white-guy supremacy. Topple them!"

"With that top-hat, Frosty even looks like John A. Macdonald, whose statue was fortunately removed from public view outside City Hall to spare passers-by the obscenity of its presence," added the prof's colleague.

"If you build a Snow-White-Man and someone throws red paint on it, don't come to us with complaints," say Councillors. "We will begin with public education, but continued non-compliance with the Frosty Ban will result in fines."