Governments' Apology to Nature

Governments, churches and corporations are falling all over each other to apologize to whoever demands it. Is it some sort of self-help exercise -- admitting guilt to groups they have ostensibly harmed? 

If they wish to apologize for harm done, Government (and public bodies) should be apologizing to Nature:

Sorry Forests, for logging you

Sorry Ocean, for filling you with plastic

Sorry Soil, for stealing your water and covering you with concrete

Sorry Wildlife, for stealing your habitats

Sorry Birds, for poisoning you with pesticides

Sorry Fish, for genocidal fishing that's wiping you out

Sorry Whales, for stealing your fish supply

Sorry, Factory-farmed and Laboratory Animals, for false imprisonment and cruel treatment

Sorry Fur-bearers, for not outlawing leg-hold traps

Sorry, Human Children, for depriving you of experience of nature, beauty, and quiet private outdoor places 

We admit that in the pursuit of profit and ethics-free corporate alliances, and by irrationally ignoring conservation science, human psychology and animal ethology, we have trampled on everything that many hold dear. We promise to restore what has been stolen from other species, compensate victims, and hold ourselves to a higher standard in future. We ask for your forgiveness -- and hope you'll consider us in future elections.

Education Comes Down With Absurdity-Virus.

Christmas seems a long time ago (everything pre-COVID seems a long time ago), but I well remember the dire annual Christmas warnings from lifestyle coaches and mental health experts who flooded the media with warnings about the "depression and anxiety" we we're suffering due to "seasonal stress". These experts fell all over each other giving us tips for "survival". What a relief to find when it all died down in the new year that we had survived. How glad the mental health Cassandras must have been to have a new bundle of warnings to issue, when by late February COVID had raised its crowned (corona) head. 

With the lock-down phase came a whole new raft of stresses: isolation, loneliness, financial anxiety, boredom, fear of the future, fear of coming within six feet of others ... Then, the schools were closed. Now they're partially re-opening, but unfortunately the stress-and-anxiety industry is telling parents (and kids) to be fearful and worried -- because it will be "different". 

Telling kids they can't survive something being different, that they're allergic to change, is a recipe for emotional enfeeblement. Tell the kids they'll be fine, and they will be. The desk is in a different place? The hours of attendance have changed? That's not a reason for mental breakdown. But of course to say this is to reveal uncaring insensitivity toward … whoever. Yet someone has to mention the un-mentionable: stiff spines, bravery under bombing, and so on. (You want stress? Ask a WWII survivor.)

Some of us are old enough to remember when kids always lined up at the school door before entering. (Remember not running in the halls??) Being told by a teacher that something's going to be done differently never used to be a reason for a nervous breakdown. Teachers ran classrooms, and students didn't have a daily meltdown when told what to do. Those meltdowns are more contagious than coronavirus, that's for sure. Just see one and the next kid catches it (copies it).

Sitting in rows of desks at a distance instead of clustering around a table for "group work" was routine in the old days, and kids learned to work independently, not to mention to spell, use a pen, read books and do math. A therapist in the emotionology trade recently announced on CBC radio that schools during the COVID partial re-opening must practice "emotion-focused learning". That is code for no learning, or for learning to whine about feelings like the adults around you do.

It would be more reassuring for students to look outside themselves, to study a subject other than "feelings". How about … Geography! Learning where mountains and oceans are, and learning the capitals of ten countries a day. Or history! Memorize the kings and queens of England since 1066 (okay ... of Israel, India, Morocco or whatever ethnic place you favour). Learn how many moons Saturn has, how many substances appear in the Table of Elements (and what an element even is …).

The post-pandemic "new normal" in Education is to avoid the "old normal" of disinterested knowledge. There was already fear that knowing stuff is a privileged, elitist and colonialist affectation that marginalizes those who need to tend to Self due to stress and anxiety. If you shrug and turn your mind to impersonal study, well then you're just stigmatizing … someone.

Whether new or old, the word "normal" comes from "norm", a geometrical term for an exact angle, such as a draughtsman needs to know. A right angle is the norm because there is only one measurably correct right angle. The word "correct" is linked to rectitude of course, and implies standards as well as exactitude, and is therefore not a concept people feel comfortable with. It's not "emotion-focused" or marginalization-concerned. (Interestingly, teachers used to graduate from what was called "Normal School", meaning a college upholding established standards in skills and knowledge.)

But sarcasm aside, it would be helpful for kids to focus on math as something inarguable, measurable and reliable. If they're bobbing around on the sea of adult emotionology, something impersonal and outside self could be a life-raft. They won't be scared of germs, of school, of every minor change in routine, if we don't tell them they should be.

What's So Bad About Being Marginalized?

Politicians, publishers, spokespeople and advocates of all kinds try to rescue the "marginalized". Congregating tightly in pursuit of an apparently high-minded goal of inclusivity, they've made a big new centre. Observing this, some people prefer to stay on the edge, outside the fray.

Some margins seem nicer than the middle. A middle is an undifferentiated blob. The mainstream's a deep river you could drown in. Margins are more defined, tentative, subtle and geographically interesting.

A margin is the sandy shore beside the sea where the messenger birds drop hints. It's the grassy verge along a highway, a strip of green standing out against the concrete-grey. It's the white space on the printed page surrounding the text where you pencil in your own ideas. It's the vantage point at the theatre from which you scan the whole room. Take advantage then of a good position. 

"It's often true that those who sit in the wings can see more than the players," said Nellie McClung. 
If you've been "marginalized" then, don't be too quick to give up your space. 

Door Knob Phobia in COVID-time

Psychologists have noticed the emergence of a new mental illness, and wonder why it doesn't get the attention all the others do. People suffering from Door Knob Phobia need help. They need understanding. They lose the ability to work, socialize and make a living. A Foundation has formed to apply for funding to help them.

What door-knob-phobics fear is germs on door handles. As we know, coronavirus can be anywhere. It hangs in the air, it lands on surfaces, it seethes in lobbies, shops and buses … and door handles. Not only should you not touch these, you shouldn't even go near them. Shouldn't even look at them. When you go through doors that open automatically, shut your eyes. The danger though, is that you might bump into someone coming the other way. And they might have coronavirus. And you might die.

So you don't go out.

The sight of door handles is so distressing that you can't even touch the door handles inside your house, those that only you have touched before and that you've scrubbed a hundred times. You know you're being irrational but you can't help it; you're addicted to imagining germs multiplying obscenely on door handles, no matter how often you wash them. In fact, the more you wash them the germ-ier they become.

You're told by experts a hundred times a day to wash your hands (hand-washing is itself no longer obsessive-compulsive -- it's now healthy) but what's the use of washing, if you have to touch a door handle? So you're trapped inside. You have nightmares in which you're desperate to get outside -- you must go outside -- but you can't escape because going out means going through the door. Which you won't do.

People with claustrophobia are especially hard hit by this mental illness, because their knob-phobic desire to stay indoors now has to do battle with their desire to go outdoors, and the stress of keeping their phobias straight can be overwhelming. It can lead to divorce and family breakdown, especially when family members are unsympathetic.

Sufferers however just can't stand being inside and can't stand going through the door. Not if they have to open it. But when they consider not closing it in the first place, they fear being watched. They feel exposed, and then they get agoraphobia. These pan-phobic victims are ripped apart as if by a pack of wolves: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and doorknobophobia battling across their precarious mental universe.

They are told to join self-help groups -- online of course -- but research has shown that those who fear door handles also come to fear invisible germs on computer keyboards and cellphones. Experts are studying the linkages but research is in its infancy, and is under-funded. Sufferers therefore have appealed to donors to kick-start some crowd-funding, but donors have failed to respond. They suggest sufferers have a door kick-down instead.

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"Be Well" -- Or Be Unwell?

       "Be well" we sign our emails now, even in business messages to total strangers. But what does it mean? How do we "be well"? During the coronavirus epidemic it means don't get coronavirus, and the sub-text is "stay away from me". Go home. That's what the doctor ordered, and fear has made us obedient.
       But is it making us more well or less well? "Well" is one of those ancient monosyllables with a richly suggestive host of meanings. In English the word comes via Saxon from the Old German "welle", meaning wave. Health and good fortune well up like water in a well, or waves on the sea, or they sink like the water table in a drought.
       Famous wells such as those at Bath, Wells Cathedral, or Struell Wells in Ireland are fed by actual underground springs, and carry spiritual connotations. Religious structures like cathedrals are built on them. They illustrate the inseparability of the physical and the spiritual.     
          The COVID19 pandemic has licensed a hazardous flight from the physical. From the biological world we flee to cyber-space, and find that an easy, slack, undemanding and habit-forming place. We are rewarded for withdrawing indoors in front of computer screens, pretending that online networking is no different than meeting others in a cafe or lecture theatre. 

 Sedentary idleness too is an epidemic, and spreading ever-faster. Something is lost when scholars, knowledge seekers and philosophers don't communicate face-to-face. “Virtual” life is sterile life. We need body language, unconscious perception of hidden cues, the emotions below words, the expressions on faces. Our sensory-neural equipment evolved along with our need to be social, adept at sensing moods of those around us.

We also need cues from other species: the scents we pick up while forest-bathing, the pheromones of plants and animals, the sound of birds whose songs probably birthed human language. Did early feminid mothers not chirp at their infants, lulling them with the lilts of birdsong? In the fullness of time lullaby became verbal and words spun epic stories: religion, drama, literature were born.

       These could all but die in isolated cells where people merely watch computer screens. Poets made verse to the rhythm of walking, musicians created wind instruments with the living breath in their lungs: we've always tied creativity to physicality, we've never been robotic – until now. Now that we've created robots we've let them become the teachers. We follow them, instead of the peregrinating philosopher talking to the crowds in village after village. Maybe our future world ruler will be Top-Robot-Doctor, who welled up from the poisoned springs of digitalia. 

       There's no agora in the middle of town now; it's closed. No village green for the players to entertain us on, no spicy, sensuous and variegated Silk Trail, only the online retailer. Its delivery drones save us the trouble of going outside, getting up from the couch, being physical. It's not only our muscles that get flabby but also the parts of our brains that register muscular sensation, and the parts stimulated by smell, touch, vision and hearing.

Fearing that our bodies might catch a virus, we abandon bodies. We live without enchantment, a word related to “chant” and “cantare”, to sing. We don't sing and we don't recite; we merely speak to “Siri” and “Alexa” in their language: cybernetics. We have abandoned our inner animal, but our wild selves still keen and howl at night in dreams of lost physicality, dreams of longing.

The region of the brain supporting memory lies alongside the area devoted to smell. Leaves and flowers, humus-y soil and salty seas give off smell for a reason. They trigger communication among species, and they stimulate memory. Without physicality we become dumbed-down prematurely senile amnesiacs.                                       

Solitude too deepens life and mind, and hibernation provides rest, but immersion in online chatter is not real solitude, and the point of hibernation is to wake up refreshed. Let's not consent therefore to the theft of sensation and the freedom to roam, for physicality is our robust core (“robustus” -- strength). Without strength you cannot fight any virus. So let's call up our physical being, out of doors. That's what “be well” means.

  Stay strong - let nature be your guide

Social Distancing as done in Qualicum Beach, BC

Living the good life on Vancouver Island.



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Tree Spotted in Downtown Core Frightens Residents

“Haven't we progressed beyond that nature shit yet?” asked a high-rise building security manager when a tree was spotted in the neighbourhood. It was growing behind a nearby community association's daycare centre. “I mean: nature? Birds? Seriously, in this day and age?”

“We live right around the corner from it,” said one tenant of the high-rise, mouth trembling, on the verge of tears. “Does it harbour disease? Bugs? Poisonous songbirds?”

“And right beside the daycare centre too,” added her companion, disgusted. “Right in front of innocent urban kids. We don't pay high taxes to live in a dense smart city for this. This is dumb.”

City officials couldn't say whether the tree was an overlooked survivor of development or a new sapling unaccountably sprouting from dusty, chemical-laced earth: no biology-trained staff who might have a theory remain in the City's employ after recent staff changes. 

“What I don't understand,” said one City Councillor, “is how this outlaw tree escaped the surveillance cameras. As guardians of the public purse we need to hold the surveillance service-provider accountable. We love pavement here, but we won't allow anyone to pave over cracks in official transparency and accountability. The next thing we know, freedom will replace bureaucracy and leaves will be falling in gutters. They'll land on top of safely-injected homeless people just lying in their sleeping bags, minding their own business.”

Police suspect that Someone might be extracting Something from the bark of the tree in an archaic process once used by illegal substance labs. The Mayor promises to acquire Bark Recognition Cameras for the city. Volunteers from the “Leave Leaves Out” campaign applaud this announcement. “We'll never go Back-To-Bark in this town,” they assure the Urban Purist Support Group.