Thursday 24 February 2022

Government Mandates Education Passport

Now that the school system is to take over daycare as "early education", the word “pre-school” will no longer be appropriate. There is only “school”, which will henceforth begin at birth and be managed by educators in the interests of guaranteeing appropriate attitudes among children.

There will be economic benefits as a result of mothers being freed from motherhood. They will be slotted instead into the employment economy, which studies show might raise the nation’s GDP.

Once parents have enrolled their newborns promptly into all-day child-care, they will receive a Universal School Passport which will allow families to participate in society. This Passport will be essential for travel and access to community programs.

Because some parents may exhibit hesitancy about Schooling-From-Birth, the Passport will be introduced in stages. There have already been some resistant remarks, such as “When are the play-at-home hours? When is the getting-to-know-your-own-family time? And the unstructured non-digital play time? And private day-dreaming-in-your-own bedroom time?”

Childcare experts feel that such attitudes are inappropriate for successful socialization of future citizens. In school, kids find shoal-mates, like fish schooling in a shallow shoal of a bay as they swim and turn as one unit. Any anti-social tendencies toward individual movement will be similarly eliminated from human students, which will ready them for equity and inclusion.

Students will not be graded on specific skills, since measuring skills and knowledge is bullying. We know that Math is racist, and Grammar elitist. In the future workplace, robots will take care of all that.

The newly established Edu-Childcare Authority assures parents that The Economy Needs Your Kids.

“I don’t want to sell my kids to the Economy,” says one mother. A worrisome minority is unaccountably hesitant in this regard.

“How will the taxpayer afford this cradle-to-illiteracy school system anyway?” asks the worrisome minority.

Officials are explaining to them that the kids themselves will be paying off the deficit when they grow up. That’s why a compliant shoaling populace is best, given future circumstances.

Even resistant parents will be proud on the day their child graduates from Pre-School, when they will hear the address from the Early Childhood Education Leader:

"We are thrilled to welcome parents, grand/step-parents and 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 sessions and professional up-gradng. Seeing your kids up here on this stage, about to receive their Childcare Graduation Certificates, you might hardly recognize them. You might be amazed at how big they have grown, how many tattoos they have, how much longer or 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 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 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. Society has come a long way since children played in back yards and spent time at home for the first five unstructured years of their lives.

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






 

















Wednesday 23 February 2022

Can You Own a Colour?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/indigenous-leaders-condemn-misappropriation-of-orange-shirt-day-by-protest-convoy-1.6349344

Yes, you can own a colour, if you live in Wokeville. "Orange" is taken. So keep away from it if you don't want to be charged with "misappropriation". It has been pre-appropriated for T-shirts commemorating Canada's residential school students. Of course, it's been taken many times before, throughout history.

This time however, oranges will no longer be sold in BC grocery stores. (That would be micro-aggression, explain produce managers.) Carrots, yams, and peppers of orange hue are similarly banned. "We take the responsibility of reconciliation seriously," shop-keepers assure customers, who are seen confusedly wandering the aisles in search of tomato sauce. 

And of course pink too has been seized. The anti-bullying cause owns pink.

Customers whose Covid masks are orange or pink are asked to leave the stores, being mis-appropriators. Some merely remove them and continue shopping. Security guards cluster in corners frantically whispering on cell phones: what to do? Which group to banish first -- the Covid-deniers, or the Wrong-Veg-eaters? 

Meanwhile, garden nurseries are hastily removing orange pyrocanthus, geraniums and red-hot-pokers from their shelves before any more get planted. White, blue, yellow and green are also taken for various causes. So let your lawn go brown. (But wait, no ... brown ..?) 

Zoom meetings are held across the land to debate the best way of "going forward" with correct ally-ship, and anyone with a spot of orange on an overlooked towel or curtain visible in the background of their Zoom screen is attacked on social media. A new branch of the Apology Olympics has begun. Competitive apologizers apologizing for protesting about the wrong things in wrong hues are being prodded into line by those now otherwise useless red-hot poker plants -- 

As for owning a colour though, orange had in fact been taken centuries ago, by Holland. They got it from France. Then they shared it with protestant Ireland. There have been Orange Revolutions everywhere in history, even Ontario (remember the Orange Wave?) What's with that colour? Must be that to the human eye orange is the brightest wave-length in the light spectrum. But after all that history it certainly doesn't seem like something to get into a possessive snit about now, just because it's in someone else's convoy.  


 

Tuesday 15 February 2022

Non-privileged Non-elite Who Made the Country of Canada

The folks who built Canada -- that amalgam of climatic regions within one parliamentary democracy, having the second largest landmass in the world and the longest coastline (on three oceans), inhabited by over 250 ancestral groups -- were not who many think they were.

They were not privileged and elitist "colonials" but often obscure, non-wealthy, and uncelebrated men and women of variegated cultural backgrounds. Even when they emerged from the obscurity they started with into positions of fame (and recently, of blame and denigration), they often remained non-wealthy.

Like who, you ask? Take David Thompson (1770-1857) who fled England as an impoverished street urchin and crossed the Atlantic to work in a freezing northern Manitoba Hudson Bay post, and turned out to be a cartographic genius. He surveyed and mapped, for the first time ever, an astounding 3.9 square km of the North American continent, travelling over mountain ranges and through bush by canoe and snowshoe with aboriginal assistants he met and befriended.

Thompson's maps are still in use, and his achievements, accomplished without modern transport or comforts, are astonishing, although that doesn't stop them being brushed off as "colonialist" by current history pundits ("pundit" being a Hindu world for "learned person"). The officially learned persons of BC (where the Thompson River was named after David Thompson by explorer Simon Fraser) have learned ideological correctness. Thompson, beginning as an impoverished orphan in London, ended his life as an impoverished senior in Montreal, in 1857. His material and reputational rewards were few; nevertheless his unique role in Canada's history is unalterable.

James Douglas too began life on the low rungs of Hudson Bay employment, without personal wealth behind him, and through sheer ability, strategy and energy became a government appointee, lawmaker, landowner, road-builder and Governor of Vancouver Island and then BC. He established Fort Victoria and later, the first elected assembly of Vancouver Island (which was elected as was customary at the time, from among landowners only).

Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had a similar life trajectory: going to work as a school-leaving teenager, becoming apprenticed to a law firm, becoming a lawyer and in time entering politics, blending warring political factions and regions into one nation through sheer force of character and allegiance-building, and steering a nation-spanning railroad through the thickets of party- and commercial politics.

And the pre-existing "privilege" of these self-impelled nation-builders was …? 

They weren't the only type who built BC and Canada. Do many people know who Sister Mary Providence was? She travelled to Fort Victoria from Quebec in 1858  to become superintendent of the first school, set up by the order of the Sisters of St. Ann. She was 22 years old. (Many current citizens still haven't "aged-out" of youth-care housing at age 22.) Hardly a member of a rich elite, she was a youthful ascetic dropped into a rugged pioneer environment. 

Mary Spencer was another teacher of humble background, who arrived in BC from Ontario in 1898 and then became a professional photographer (then a very new profession) in Kamloops and Vancouver, before becoming, with her sister, a fruit farmer in the Okanagan. Of the same ilk was hardworking boarding-house owner and sometime gold-miner Nellie Cashman, an Irish-American immigrant who famously in 1874 led a rescue team of men mid-winter to save miners snowed under by a blizzard in the wilds of northern BC. 

These are but a few of the often-anonymous professionals, politicians, surveyors, engineers, educators, farmers, shopkeepers and ad-hoc social workers (anonymous women who adopted orphans and fed the poor) who built the two colonies that became the Province of BC. They didn't bring their energy and abilities to Canada thinking "let's go across the ocean in risky boats to find some people to oppress on the other side of the world". Today, over 150 years after the nation of Canada was formed, they are being quite mean-spiritedly denied the recognition conveyed through landmarks named after them. Signs bearing colonial names are being removed, but as George Orwell and others have pointed out, we can cloud the memory of history, but we can't erase history. 

These figures were indeed an "elite", a word of French derivation which simply means "chosen". They were chosen by fate and the circumstances to which they so staunchly rose. It's interesting how our latest pundits wish to knock them down again, along with the signposts of streets named after them -- but to what end? 

It will also be interesting to see how the next elite is chosen.

(Note: this article was rejected by a Canadian History conference "due to subject matter considerations". What do YOU think of the subject? )









Sunday 13 February 2022

Playing With Censorship

 

Playing With Censorship

S. B. Julian

Cast: Board members of a community theatre:

President, Artistic Director, Publicist, Producer, plus an Assistant who comes and goes.

President:    As President of the Readers Theatre Board I'd like to welcome everyone to this meeting to select our Play Series. We'll choose three that will appeal to tourists and locals alike. Let's start with our new Artistic Director. (turns to her) What do you suggest?

Artistic Director:  (excitedly) I've prepared a list of 20 plays, but my absolute favourite would be Grease. With music, of course.

Pres.  Comments?  (Looks at the others. They pause to think.)

Publicist:     (has a camera around her neck.) I can tell you right now as your publicist, that Grease won't do. It would harm our donations, because it's been banned in the past for "drinking, smoking and a couple kissing onstage”. We'd have the CRD Health Officer shutting us down for breaking the smoking bylaw – even if not actually smoking. 

Producer:    How about something more artsy then, something like Picasso at the Lapin Agile?

Publicist:     (gasps) Even more kissing! And drinking. It has (quotes, reading stagily from a note) “people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects”.

A.D.: (dryly) Then how about The Vagina Monologues, where women objectify their own body parts?

Pres.: No. That's a non-starter, it's now accused of “offending transgender audience members”.

A.D.: Lysistrata, then? That's feminist enough for every new-fangled trans version of female you could dream up, isn't it?

Prod: No, that won't fly either, it's been considered "bawdy and indecent”. How about something more comic, like Calendar Girls?

Pub:  That's been cancelled elsewhere because of its “implication of nudity.”

A.D.  “Implication of”? Is that the same as actual nudity? Would our readers be nude?

Pub:  It could be the same. (S/he raises the camera which hangs around her neck) The posters used in Avenue Q were taken down due to “visible puppet cleavage”. You never know when nudity's going to scare the horses.

A.D.: But nude puppets ...?  Honestly, I give up!

Prod: You can't. You're the Artistic Director.

Pres:  Let's select an old-fashioned musical then. How offensive can that be? How about The King and I?

Prod: Huh! You're way out of date. It includes a “racist portrayal of Thai people”.

Pres:  Oh. Thoroughly Modern Millie?

Prod: Nope. Thoroughly un-modern – it’s a “racist portrayal of Chinese people”.

Pres:  Peter Pan?

Prod: Offensive to native Americans.

Pres:  West Side Story?

Prod: Stereotyping of Puerto Ricans.

Pres:  Ragtime?

Prod: Uses the N-word.  (The group falls silent)

Pres: Well what CAN we put on then?

A.D.  How about a classic like Angels In America?

Pub:  (shuddering) God no, we'd totally lose our funding, it's been condemned for “homosexual vulgarity”.

A.D.: Well can't gay people fund a revival then?

Pub.: (shrugs) They could, but would they want to? It's old-hat now.

A.D.  How about something “god-yes” then? Maybe Jesus Christ Superstar? Life of Brian? Mohammed Gets A Boner? 

Pres:  Don't even SAY that!

A.D.: What? Jesus Christ?

Prod: Let's be serious. Let's look at the old stand-bys. How about Blithe Spirit?

Pub:  Sorry to tell you, but it's been banned for “encouraging exploration of witchcraft and the occult”.

Pres.: I guess there's always Shakespeare.

Publ: As long as it's not Othello, given recent social-media BLM sensitivities ...

Prod.: Yeah. So forget Aladdin too ...

Publ: And certainly not The Merchant of Venice.

Pres.: Twelfth Night?

Pub.: Nope. Someone accused it of “alternative lifestyle instruction". Because of the cross-dressing, you know.

A.D.: I thought theatre was alternative lifestyle instruction ...               

(A knock on the door. Assistant enters -- man in a wide flowery hat,)                                         

Ass't.:  Can I bring anyone a coffee? I'll "set the stoups upon the table" shall I? Don't worry, the cups won't be poisoned. I may be two-spirited, but not two-faced.

Pres.:  Uh, fine . . . thanks. A coffee would be nice. I'll have a latte please.

Prod: Make mine black.

Assistant: Okay -- one milk and one African-American. Coming up. (He leaves)

Prod.: Now, where were we? (pause) Maybe it's best to stick to political plays then.

Pres:  As long as they're not anti-Israel.

Publ.: Or pro-Israel.

Prod. Anti-U.S. is always fair game.

Pres.: Or anti-Nazi. How about Cabaret? There's a well-loved old stand-by.

Pub.: Except it's been censored in the past for “onstage indecency, immodesty, immorality, and homosexual behaviour”.

Pres.: But that's why it's well-loved!

Pub.: Not now, in these ideological times. Life's no longer a cabaret, Old Chum

A.D.: (shakes her head sadly) Although we're still well-advised to “put down the book”, since words are as dangerous as dynamite. (The others look puzzled. She starts singing) “... put down the knitting, the book and the broom, come to the cabaret ...”  (pauses)  Oh never mind ...

Knock on the door. Assistant re-enters.

Assistant: I've got the newspaper on the phone, they still haven't got your play titles for the Summer Season. They want to know what they'll be. Oh -- and they also add that you lot couldn't even run a dog-and-pony-show.

Pub:  Tell them the titles are classified. Top secret censored ... hahaha ... (Assistant exits)

Pres.: So what are we going to do? What CAN we put on? 

Prod: (gloomily)  How about a dog-and-pony-show?

A.D.: (also gloomily)  How about commissioning something brand new? It could take place in a Trappist Monastery with a rule of silence. No one will say a word. No dialogue, no sex, no skin, no smoking, politics, stereotyping or witchcraft. 

Pres.: Good idea! The cast will consist of three monkeys. For two hours the audience will watch this:

(President puts his hands over his eyes, Producer puts hands over his ears, then Artistic Director puts hands over her mouth. PAUSE.  The publicist jumps up and aims her camera at them.)

Publicist:  Perfect! Hold that pose right there! (She takes a photo)    

  


                   

Friday 11 February 2022

Change-of-Name Law Looming?

Forced Change of Names: First they came for the street names, and then they came for the surnames ...  

Apparently some folks with anti-European leanings consider BC's street names "colonialist", which for some reason to them means "unsafe". (History is dangerous, it seems, so they demand CHANGE. Street signs, addresses, maps … all must be changed, at vast public and private expense. Safety-ism First!

How soon before everyone who shares surnames with certain historical figures will be forced to change them? (New Government Directive produces Discredited Surname List …  If your name is on it you must change it in the name of equity, inclusion and diversity. Plus job prospects, university admission and access to food and housing.)

If you share a surname such as as Macdonald, Cook, Holmes, Pemberton, Dean, Robson, Seymour, Dunsmuir, McNeill, Helmcken, Blanshard, Wallace, Wark, Trutch -- and many others -- you will need to legally change yours, and will then be issued a Non-Colonial-Name Passport, which will allow you to travel, receive services, and possess personal stationery.

Please be advised that Canada Post has committed to a new standard of non-delivery of mail to "triggering" addressees.

The Government will begin this name-laundering reform with public education, but if propagandistic coercion fails to work, fines and social ostracism may be considered.

Some colonial-era explorers' street names will survive (such as Quadra, San Juan, and Gonzales) as they were named for "brown people". Some Anglo-citizens have responded with a nascent #mynametoo movement on Twitter.


Investors' tip: cancelled street signs will one day become valuable collectors' items, like once-censored books are today. Above is one such sign, for a Mr. McKenzie who was the manager of early Vancouver Island's colonial Craigflower Farm (another shady Scot then ...). 

Some obstreperous free-thinker citizens are not reconciled to this name-banning:


https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-s-trutch-street-lekwungen-truth-1.6351665

Vancouver mayor looks to change street named after colonial B.C. politician Sir Joseph Trutch - BC | Globalnews.ca



This story is reproduced from LITERARY YARD, www.literaryyard.com, 2024/02/10 It's a common fairy-tale theme -- imprisonment in a tower ...