Compensation Demanded For Protest Fatigue

Protesters Claim Fatigue, Demand Compensation

People Experiencing Marching are getting tired, say media reports. Lives may Matter, say protesters, but are people paying attention to mine?

Media Interviewer: What are you marching for?

Protester: Respect, housing, guaranteed income, platforms, neuro-variant rights, POC, inclusion, attention. And I, like, come home exhausted every day. Stopping traffic on the street today, I almost got run over by a climate-changing polluting car.”

“It was driving on a street?”

“Yeah, right through the intersectionality where our allyship was holding banners.”

“Oh.”

“I'm so exhausted. I don't get enough attention, income, sleep, I've missed job interviews, I've been dis-respected ...”

“If you went to the job interviews, might you get a job, income and respect?”

“That's an offensively ablist remark. I've got PTSD.”

“Oh. And your traumatic stress is “post” what?”

“Protesting. I'm seeking compensation.”

“From whom?”

“This shitty, privileged, colonialist, white supremacist country. I'm going to court.”

“Expensive.”

“My allyship will pay.”

“Ah.”

“Protest Fatigue is a thing. It should be in the DMSO list of victims' disorders.”

“Victims of what?”

“Social Injustice. Bias. The government needs to compensate historically marginalized, de-centered two-spirited racialized protesters.”

“So, compensation for anyone who holds up a protest placard about ... anything?”

“That's ridiculous. I'm talking about my things.”

The Great Mass Garden Soak -- a Suburban Tale of Wicked Insurrection

Resisting Floracide

Hell is other people's places. I want to walk out my front door and see trees and birds, while others prefer crowded squares and high-rises. They want hyper-urban (which they call vibrant and I call noisy), while I want hypo-urban (which they call dull and I call aesthetic). My leafy paradise is their hell, my garden of Eden their pit of snakes.

When a region becomes densely-populated a civic government typically imposes water-restriction. Then, once the authorities have established a drought-dictatorship, the gardens die. Only hardy plants survive, and colonize the space as migrant plants have always done. These are often “foreigners”, so now the native-plant species-ists come out armed with axes to hack at non-native incomers.

In response my neighbours and I staged a peasant uprising. We defiantly watered all the gardens on our street, which were full of lovingly raised exotics dying due to water-restricting bylaws. Our peasants' revolt was soon met by forces of horticultural law and order. These treated us like drug addicts who couldn't stop "using". Water was a controlled substance, corralled into a reservoir in case of "emergency".

The death of urban nature is already an emergency, we tell the bylaw officer who arrives to give us warning tickets. He pecks menacingly on his tablet, not answering. Then he leaves us a municipal flyer explaining that certain plants have entered by the wrong habitat.

"Plant native species," is his parting shot.

“F....g anti-habituationist,” growls Gertrude, my next-door neighbour. We gasp at her language: she had used the H-word. What if the bylaw functionary heard her defending plants that habituate to new environments?

Native plant purists share the floracidal tendencies of drought-merchants, we concluded. They spend weekends hacking at Himalayan blackberry, English ivy and Scottish broom: at the habituated.

“If human immigrants 'built North America', then immigrant plants and animals shaped its landscape,” said Gertrude. “Consider the earthworm. Non-indigenous, it arrived on ships. Would we really want to garden without it now? Consider the honeybee, which was imported for the excess honey it produced; it now pollinates some 80% of our crops.”

“We couldn't do without bees,” shuddered Mr. Green, another neighbour.

We nodded and dispersed, returning hoes-in-hand to our own beds. A garden is a pop-up project, I reflect. It has its own mind, its own script of improv and ad-libs. What's that funny smell out there? Perhaps the aromatic insect trail laid out by plants attracting pollinators so as to increase their dominion: the smell of rebellion. Nature is insurrectionist, and from her we take our inspiration.

Lawless animals too fail to stay within ancestral borders. Rabbits for instance trespass everywhere. Hardly separable from England in literature and lore, rabbits are not actually native to England, to the surprise of everyone who grew up on Beatrix Potter tales. Nor are sheep, which only arrived in England after the Norman Conquest. And dingoes aren't native to Australia; they're descendants of dogs brought by Asian boat people 5000 years ago.

How long does a species have to live in a landscape, intricately threading its way into the ecology, history and culture of a place, before it is accepted? Neither the iconic American tumbleweed nor the Kentucky bluegrass is native to America. Nor are apples or rhododendrons: those came via Spain, which got them from the Himalaya. Would we now send apples, rhodos, hay, worms, sheep and honeybees back where they came from?

As climate warms and habitats change, species will migrate at least as quickly in future as they have in the past. We might as well get used to it, in suburbia as in wilderness. So the neighbours and I, after staging the mass garden-soak for which we got the bylaw warning, now hold a letter-writing potluck at which we express these views to powers that be. Holding a potluck means picnicking in someone's illegally-dripping backyard and writing letters to city councillors. Then, having disobeyed the municipal gods, we await thunderbolts but do not stop our subversive behaviour. Not only do we water our gardens to their green hearts' content, we deliberately seek out illicit Himalayan blackberries, so juicy for the pies at our garden parties. We applaud the bright yellow splash of Scottish broom on suburban hillsides, its heady fragrance the very soul of spring. We admire the green English ivy that will turn richly red in fall, softening the sides of brick buildings, and the holly whose scarlet berries will brighten our Christmas wreaths.

It's not god who would throw us out of paradise, it's the developers who pave the ground and move the mixed-housing and condo crowd in, people whose front doors open to hallways and whose buildings extend to the edges of the lots. There's always a new one, another rough beast slouching toward permission to be built. These rough beasts are politicians' babies and my neighbours and I harbour infanticidal fantasies. We wouldn't throw out the bathwater with the baby though, for water is precious.

"I'll drink to that," says Mr. C. Brown at the next garden party, at which we plan the yard sales we'll hold to raise the money to pay the garden-watering fines we continue to receive.

"Too bad we can't turn wine into water,” says Gertrude as we raise our glasses. “That would be a miracle for today."

Dogwood gets a passport

New School Year: Granny Goes to Parents' Day

Granny phones the school.

-- Good morning. My name's Iris and my grand-daughter Venetia goes to your school. I wondered what time the Parents' Open House begins?

-- We don't call it “Parents' Open House”, we call it Blended Families and Significant Influencers Day.

-- Oh. Well what time does it start?

-- Our open-ness goes on all day every day, but today's September celebration starts at one o'clock --ish.

-- “Ish”?

-- Too much exactitude is stigmatizing for members of our community with variant time perception.

-- Oh. Well, I'll be there at one o'clock, non-variantly.

*

“Kate, why do you send Venetia to that weird school, Children's House? I've just had the most peculiar phone conversation with them.”

“It's best never to phone them, Mom. It was Venni's choice, all her friends from pre-school were going there. Friends matter, when you're in Grade One.”

“Of course. So I'll meet you at the Open House at one then.”

It wasn't hard to find the place. It was painted in rainbow colours and looked as if it had been broken into -- windows with jagged glass, half boarded up -- but looking again Iris realized these scenes had been painted onto the exterior walls. She learned later that this was “low income neighbourhood design curated by Grafitti Artists”, which was meant to reassure the marginalized. Iris had parked some distance away because the parking lot was blocked by a banner saying NO PARKING ("GLOBAL-COOLING"). The sidewalk was blocked by enormous bikes with bulky child seats, hitches and trailers.

Mounting the steps to the front door Iris passed PEACE PLAY PLAZA. At the entrance, a young woman in a short dress, exhibiting multiple tattoos, nose rings and pink-streaked hair, was with one hand distributing flyers saying “SAVE SUDAN”, while scrolling through a smartphone with the other.

“Save which part of Sudan and from whom ...” Iris began to ask, when the woman gave a joyful whoop at the sight of friends arriving behind Iris, at which point Iris realized from the flute-y tenor of her squeal that this woman was a boy.

In the foyer was a Children's Creativity Wall. Across the growing crowd of visitors Iris saw her daughter Kate arrive.

“Did you get the Sudan flyer?” asked Iris.

Kate looked at the paper she was holding. “Mine says Somalia.”

“Where will we find Venetia?”

“I think her room's down this hall ... ”

Iris followed Kate but the rooms they passed were filled with older students, half of whom were wrestling while the other half hunched over smartphones. “This is a madhouse,” said Iris. “Let's ask somebody. Which are parents and which are teachers? They all look like freaks ...”

“SHH,” hissed Kate.

“Excuse me,” Iris said to a middle-aged woman staring at her smartphone, “where would the Grade One room be?”

“We don't have grades here. Too prescriptive. We're all one community.”

Iris caught sight of a sign with an arrow. TO LIBRERY, it said. “I see you have a school library, anyway,” she said with an effortful smile.

“A community librery. For kids not connected at home.”

“No books at home? How sad.”

The woman stared. “No wifi,” she said.

Venetia and three of her friends burst out of a room. “Granny! Mommy! Come and see my art!”

“Are these your friends?” asked Iris. “What are their names?”

“Roughi, Merlou, and Reveel,” said Venni, pointing at each in turn.

Another middle-aged woman presided over the room to which she led them. “And is this your teacher?”

“Companion,” said the woman. “We don't call ourselves teachers here.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“A pretty colonialist label, don't you think?”

“Well ...”

“Mom,” Kate interrupted, “let's look at Venni's art work.”

Iris looked at a swirl of blues. “That's the sky,” said Venni. Next to it was a slash of greens. “That's a tree,” said Venni. Next was a smudge of browns. “That's Margaret's puppies.”

“And who's Margaret?” asked Iris. Finally, a friend with a normal name.

“Margaret's the mother dog.”

Surveying the art, Iris said to the Companion-In-Charge, “You don't teach drawing skills, I gather?”

The woman shuddered. “God no. Skill is so limiting.”

“I guess you have to teach skills in the Math class though; some things just can't be non-limited, without being not themselves.”

“Math? We don't do Math. Numbers are so confining.”

“Oh. Do the students learn languages then?”

“Oh yes! There are five indigenous languages to choose from.”

“Oh. And that's because ...?” but Iris knew not to ask.

“To make up for history,” the Companion explained anyway.

Iris had been, before retirement, a Professor of Economic History, and before that, a professional economist. “Make up for ...” she repeated.

“History's all lies,” explained the Companion. “It's just a story of bullying.”

“Yet quite a bit of history consisted of standing up to bullying ...”

“We don't repeat the lies told by the victors.”

No, you repeat jargon, Iris wanted to say, but she stopped herself for the sake of anxious Kate and oblivious Venetia.

“Where are these puppies then?” she asked Venetia.

“In the Animal Therapy Room, of course!”

“Of course,” said Iris.

It was full of cages, some of whose occupants – lizards and snakes -- didn't look alive. There were cats, dogs and rabbits, segregated in separated zones. Some dogs were barking. Cats, ignoring them, lounged on top of carpeted clawing posts. “They have to stay in here because of allergies,” said Venetia, importantly. “Lots of kids have allergies, you know.”

“Yes,” agreed Iris. “So we're told. And do you know what an allergy is?”

“I think it's, like ... autism? ... It's ... um ... oh yeah ... bi-polar!” She looked down at her shoes. “I think. But we can't have polar bears in the Animal Therapy Room, they're too big. Even Margaret is too big, says the Assistant to Teaching Animals.”

“So, wait, you're saying the animals teach, and humans assist?”

“Mom ...,” said Kate, warningly. “I think it's to save money,” she whispered, shepherding her mother out of the Animal Therapy Room. “Teachers' salaries are high. It's cheaper to call them Teaching Assistants, who aid the animals, who lend wisdom but don't ...”

“Speak English. Know Math. Assign homework. Grade papers. Kate, what are you thinking, sending Venetia to school in this mad place?” Iris asked as she, Kate and Venetia left for home.

“It's not mad, it's ideologically experimental. You know, equitable and inclusive and ...”

“... 'diverse'. Right. On second thought, maybe the animals are the most qualified teachers there. They should make Margaret the principal.”

Kate, relaxing, laughed at last as they made their way home along the sunshiny street. “But don't call her the 'principal'. That means 'first in rank'. Much too elitist.”

“It is a madhouse.”

“If we did have polar bears they would get very mad at the dogs' barking,” offered Venetia. She skipped ahead. “Quick, let's get home and read my polar bear book!”

Pre-School Early Learning Graduation Day

 

Pre-School Graduation Day

A Welcome From Early Learning Daycare

As the Team Leader of your children's Early Learning Daycare I'm thrilled to welcome parents, grand/step-parents and all other significant influencers to this celebration. Your five-year-olds have successfully graduated from the national Early Learning Program. They have had a wonderful first five years of life, transitioning seamlessly from the womb to our richly intersectional training environment.

You and your children may not have seen much of each other over the past five years, as they come and go from daycare and you come and go from work, meetings, Zoom calls, fitness regimes, therapy, and professional upgradng. Seeing them up here on this stage, about to receive their Childcare Graduation Certificates, you might hardly recognize your kids. You might be amazed at how big they have grown, how many tattoos they have, how much longer, or maybe shorter, their hair is, and how their eyes are still that deep colour that Grandma's were!

Maybe you have stayed in touch with your kids through the regular texts they have sent you (we encourage maintaining close ties between students and family), so you know how many acronyms and emojis they have learned at Daycare! 

They have learned to fit into a crowd and navigate time. That means they go online a lot, and rarely stray into time-wasting day-dreamy private introspection. Becoming fully absorbed into our inclusive and equitable shared learning environment is key to their social adjustment. They have had opportunities to play with blockchains, enjoy digital inclusivity games, and do real-time anti-bias role playing. 

They have practised performative allyship in non-racialized learning rooms, so you know they're prepared for primary school. It's hard to believe that that used to be the beginning of schooling, back in the unprogressive era of half-day kindergarten. It's amazing how far society has come since children once played in back yards and spent time at home for the first five empty unstructured years of their lives.

You will be proud of the graduation which takes place today, and there is of course nothing competitive about this Awards Day: every child will be the winner! Each child will take their place in the rainbow. So get out your smartphone camera, and in case some non-custodial parents aren't sure which child is theirs please refer to the display of selfies projected onto the wall behind the kids, with the name of each one displayed (with pronoun preferences) under their head-shots.

Driving Into a Police State in British Columbia

Dear Premier Horgan and BC's Cabinet Ministers,

Please help us dreamy aging-hippy soggy-minded west-coasters understand what the New new normal is, according to the latest COVID rules.

Please tell us whether we cheered too soon when you bailed out the Wilson Transport bus service which goes up and down Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island is all one Health Authority and we looked forward to going halfway up it from Victoria by bus for an escape to the beach. But if we do that will we, plus the tourist operators we would patronize, be thrown under the very bus you so lately rescued, and be fined for … going on the beach?

If we drive our cars up-island will we find ourselves driving not to the natural outdoors that Dr. Henry says is the safest place curing COVID, but into a Police State? Will we be stopped randomly by cops and fined for going the illegal number of miles away from where we live without knowing what exactly the illegal number is? Or the place we're not supposed to leave (Health Authority? region? community? neighbourhood?) There is something Kafka-esque about all this, you might agree. I pity friends who are trying to raise kids without Nature Deficit Disorder, trying to give them happy childhood summer memories. Excitedly arriving at the campsite in the woods only to find a severely ugly gate shutting them out, won't be happy.

It's not that we deny the severity of the virus, it's not that we aren't afraid of it; the problem is that your shape-shifting instructions and evasive answers to media questions are adding to our stress. Where exactly is my "community" considered to be? How wide, in circumference, is it? Who gets to decide which travel is "essential"? Is it okay for my family to drive up-island to wave at the window of the care home where our 99 year old aunt lives, before she does a Prince Philip on us?

Is it okay for me to deliver the self-published books I sell up-island, since there's no way I could afford the cost of postage? Will the fine I get for driving make the cost of distribution more or less than the cost of postage would be? Does your help for business include help for micro-businesses that struggle along for a decade but make almost nothing? On such knife edges live many of the entrepreneurs not in one of those fields doing well during the pandemic. And the response we get is to be threatened with fines, as if rising costs of everything from groceries to fuel wasn't hardship enough.  

"In the same pandemic we're in different boats" you say, Premier. Mine's being shipwrecked on the reef of rising prices and falling income -- and now an expanding reef of fines as well. Thanks for the wise and caring pilotage across the Pandemic Sea.

'Bye Tree -- it was nice knowing you

The Rules of Laughter

A magazine recently invited essays about “how we negotiate cultural expectations around what it's acceptable to laugh about”. 

Laughter is defined in dictionaries as a spontaneous physical outburst of sound and upper body movement in response to something amusing. It may be spontaneous, but in today's social climate you must control it anyway. Only acceptable laughter is welcome, and the rules are getting stricter about who can laugh at whom about what. If you get them wrong you may find the consequences non-funny. You could be sued -- seriously.

So here are some tips to guide you through the Rules of Laughter:

Do not laugh at anyone marginalized. “Clowning” is marginal behaviour by definition, clowns being characters on the margin -- but forget definitions. Don't even laugh at your own feelings of marginalization. It may trigger someone. Others may see themselves in you (or worse, to them, not see themselves in you).

Do not laugh at anyone identified as “BIPOC”. “Bi-” has nothing to do with seeing both sides of things, especially the funny side. “BI” in this context means single of attitude, which as a definition may seem funny-peculiar but is not considered funny-humorous. (Grasping the difference is no joke.) 

And by the way, never laugh at jokes considered to be "off-colour". Jokes have to be ON colour, but don't call them jokes, call them social commentary. Certainly they can't be funny if People Of Colour aren't laughing. So people of no colour (PONC), whoever they might be, can't laugh either.

Do not laugh at any remark which may be construed as political. Your laughter might be interpreted as happy agreement, or shocked disbelief. Either may cause others to feel happy or shocked in turn which might lead to a chain reaction of ... reactions. So do NOT react to anything using spontaneous upper body sound and movement.

Do not laugh at something if laughter would make you sound Privileged. Remember that the slightest smile may, in some circumstances, be taken as a blazingly lit-up billboard of Supremacy. If this seems ridiculous, hide that thought. “Ridere” is Latin for “to laugh”, but there are many ridiculous things you're not allowed to laugh at it (see above re. “triggering”). In fact, also do not use these Latin-ist words: it may be construed as “privilege”, which has the same Latin root as “private”, by the way ... and private jokes are politically unacceptable. They don't meet the "inclusion" rule.

Do not laugh at other people's allyship, even if you find that ludicrous Frankenstein's monster of a non-word a source of merriment. “Ludens” is Latin too by the way, it means playing ... but sorry, I forgot: NO LATIN, no matter how bons are those mots. (Better skip the French too, unless of course you identify as Francophone.) 

Do not collapse into hysterical giggling at the stress of losing track of these rules. Don't even giggle silently behind your hand. Do not whinny like a hysterical mare if you are female (in the narrow sense of person with a uterus), and if male, do not honk like a crazy loon (I mean, a loon experiencing mental difference). And do not even think of cross-laughing, no matter how shared you think everyone's craziness is. 

Do not laugh at anyone's gender, or lack thereof, for whatever they wish to engender with their genderisms, it won't lead to the birth of mirth. 

In summary, always keep a straight face ... er, a rainbow face. I didn't mean, you know ... straight ...

Taking the Long View -- climate is long, humanity is short

They tell us to be afraid -- be very afraid -- about so many things.

Especially, now, everyone's afraid about Climate Change.

Me too. But I mean that I fear leaving my coat at home when the weather shifts, losing my scarf, being caught in the rain with no umbrella. I live day to day; they mean Global Warming.

Me too: I fear global hot debate, heated dispute and an international conflagration of all-out war … and then an answering freeze, a pendulum swing to freeze free thought and speech, a chill of mass surveillance, of impolitic policy and impolite police.

Mother Nature's Global Mood Swing won't be changed by us, we can only change the weather of our own lives and communications. An inner calm creates a temperate zone.

They fear Rising Seas.

I fear the sinking slough of despond.

The seas up-rise frequently, geologically speaking. Quaking mountains have often tumbled cities into earthen depths, to be discovered by future archaeologists. Will the next future ones be robots? Artificial intelligence set loose by plague-struck humans arguing about pronouns while civilization collapses?

Again.

So many civilizations are "lost". So many civilities are on the way out, today.

They fear Carbon appearing in all the wrong places.

I fear dying of thirst, while water evaporates from lakes and soil and language evaporates before it, a mindless conscripted vanguard decimated -- one in ten words lost, one in ten shades of meaning -- leaving us thirsting for ways to explain, to understand.

They fear a spread of Climate Poverty.

I fear the litter of bones, dead birds and beasts spread in our wake. But Nature will plough them into the dry soil, re-harvesting the minerals for new life forms to be enjoyed by new viruses making cell-factories operating anew, building life in novel ways.

She'll be okay, Nature. She and atmosphere are partners, able to go about their business just fine without humanity under foot.

Where will we have gone? We can't start again as "primitives": you can only be primal (first) once. Maybe we will pervade ("go on through") as pure consciousness. Per-haps. ("Through luck").

Maybe consciousness is what we descended from in the beginning before beginnings, before time was created by the weather of change.

The Climate is changing? What else would it do?