What is happening to us?
Humans are unique. We can see things through
dark or rosy glasses, but we must maintain a balance. If you go “all-out”
either way you lose credibility. I see the slogan “No justice, No peace”
and it scares me. A historian knows the price of revolutions and wars. There is
a peaceful solution available to those who listen, not just talk. It makes
Heaven available on Earth.
I go outside and look around. There are
flowers in the forest, purple, yellow, white, and pink. The birds are chirping
and a squirrel is running up a tree. I see a doe with two spotted fawns and
another laying down on my lawn observing my wife trimming bushes. On the edge
of the hill, a fox is trotting busily, going somewhere. Above is the forest
crowned by mountains. I can hear a train disappearing in the distance and when
it has gone, the rushing water of the river.
What I see and hear is most beautiful, but it
is only a tiny part of reality. I am living in a country that most people envy.
The world itself is improving as I look. People live longer than ever; poverty
is being reduced and hunger is no longer rampant as it used to be. There are no
major wars and technology connected us all together. I am alive to see this
paradise thanks to medical advancements. Am I grateful? I say yes with all my
might. The overall picture is better than I could ever even imagine in my
youth.
I remember listening to a preacher some years
ago. He was describing Heaven, but he didn’t have it right. His paradise
couldn’t be reached in this life, but here it is. The only difference is that
his was perfect with no possible improvements and ours here always leaves us
with something to strive for. I think it’s good.
I blink and look again. My perfect world is
threatened by a deadly virus. People are suffering and many are dying. Fear is
paralyzing the economy while politicians strongly influence events to solidify
or gain power. I see people around me destroying nature for profit or simply to
change God’s creation to satisfy some personal needs or wants. Some people can’t
leave anything alone.
Generations before me fought against slavery
and genocide, while my generation battled to eradicate inequality. I observe a
perfect world, but it looks as if we must fight a lot more or return to slavery
and servitude. In the preacher’s Heaven, it is not so. Heaven is perfect and
poses no challenge. Is that what I want?
I seek a place where people like me, born
without privileges and perhaps marked by racial disadvantage could be happy and
not feel inferior. Why is it not happening I ask? The word on the airwaves is
“systemic discrimination.” It is most obvious when based on skin color but
spreads to most people. What is it? In my mind, it is a system that favors some
people ahead of others without being obvious, so people accept it. I am looking
for an easy example.
I could use the example of the US breaking a
peace treaty with Iran and forcing Canada to treat the Chinese as criminals for
doing business there, but it’s too complicated. Let me use an example from
here.
When I first saw Blairmore in 1995, it was a
thriving little town. Mountain sheep and deer were wandering around, tourists
were walking the streets and most downtown stores had little businesses. There
was also a little indoor mall and two local newspapers. What we didn’t have
were corporate franchises. Look at the town now.
We have two quaint little coffee shops owned
by locals employing locals. They suffered greatly from the Corona related shut
down and may survive if we support them. In comes an opportunity to help them. The
Alberta government purchased too many disposable masks, out of our money, and
decided to distribute some free back to us. A noble gesture, if you ask me.
However, the government could have helped our private little coffee shops by
letting them distribute the “free” masks and give them some free advertisement,
but instead, they chose to support the Tim Horton’s chain. They forced us to
wait in drive-through line ups. Most people who waited bought their daily
coffee in the outlet they waited in line for.
This is just one minor example of how the
powerful who are rich already receive benefits from our taxes while the
hard-working family-owned businesses make do with the crumbs. I wouldn’t be
surprised if some of our elected members who made the choice own places
that distributed “free masks.”
I have conflicting emotions about the News
these days. The pandemic is a horrible thing that has killed some of my friends
and is a great threat to me and those I love dearly. At the same time, it did
some good. It showed us truths that were hidden. We can feed ourselves and keep
the country going while producing much less pollution. We discovered that the
primary engine of our economy are the low wage essential workers, not the great
money traders and investors.
It has exposed the abuse of our seniors in
care homes for what it is. Austerity measures against the most helpless often
by those proclaiming to be the best Christians. Society realized the actual
value of educators and childcare workers. We found out that our food is
produced by foreign workers who can’t be replaced by our citizens who will not
endure the low pay and poor living conditions.
Systemic discrimination is affecting most of
us and must be dealt with, not by more policing but by balancing social powers.
I only hope that it can be done peacefully. I wish for heaven on Earth made by
our choices, not by a miracle or by force.
Stars above or below.
Most of the people in my social circle pride
themselves on how many places in the world they visited. There is a competition
to tell where you have been and where you are planning to go next. My daughter
talks about holidays versus “airplane holidays.” I understand. Society shapes
us from an early age and we don’t realize that we do what is expected of us,
often to line the bank accounts of others with money that we borrow. Lately, we
found out how much of our economy is fed by tourism.
I have another way to enjoy my time on Earth,
which doesn’t cost money. I enjoy looking at the stars. Those shiny specks
above me that are visible at night fascinate me. We call famous people in
entertainment and sports stars, but they are far from it. Often I will look at
the stars above Turtle Mountain and move my gaze to see more. There is always
more.
Most of those shiny pinpoints of light are
far in a hostile universe. An unprotected human can’t survive away from Earth.
Seven are planets, many are stars like our sun and many more are galaxies made
up of billions of stars but visible as one speck of light. Recently we the
humans figured out that material which we call matter can’t accelerate faster
than the speed of light. Building spaceships and rockets will not take us to
the stars. Also, if we managed to go, time would work differently. By the time
we would return, the world we knew would be forever changed.
I look above me and think, most of the
visible universe is no longer the way I see it. It takes light so many years to
travel to my eye and what I see has changed by the time I see it. If I could
travel faster than light, much faster, I would not find the stars I am looking
at in the same place. Are there other planets like earth somewhere out there?
Possibly, but there is only one planet that can sustain the kind of life that
we know exists. It is Earth and we believe (mostly) that it was created by a
deity we named God.
I couldn’t find any records of ancient humans
who didn’t believe in God. The modern-day atheists talk about Karma referring
to what we used to call God. We have a great wealth of prehistorical and
historical records of very advanced civilizations on our planet. The
Babylonians and Sumerians seem to be our ancestors and they recorded some
beings called Anunakies. Those are depicted in ancient art as having wings, and
our Christian angels have wings. Our most holy people are recorded ascending to
the heavens above. Of course, we could say that they went down depending on
which side of the earth was up. People built the tower of Babylon to get closer
to heaven. It is always people trying to get higher up, to be closer to God.
Why do people who are supposed to be made in
the “image” of God wish to go “up” and be like God? He, or some say she, is
almighty and eternal. We are told that He creates things out of nothing. All of
us would like to have those qualities without considering that we would all be
God like and we are not smart enough to deal with that kind of power. In the
meantime, we just work to get higher and higher like a moth flying into a
flame.
The most sophisticated existing thing that we
ever observed is the human brain. We know relatively very little about our
brains, but we are trying to increase its natural power by using Artificial
Intelligence. We know that we are consciousness and there is a power greater
than what we understand that we call subconsciousness. It operates our bodies
and possibly the universe. If it evolved or was created it is superior to the
part of our brains, we know how to use.
Biblical stories often refer to dreams. In
dreams, humans interacted with God. Primitive people were using natural
substances to heighten their natural abilities and even travel out of the body.
As we gained scientific knowledge, we neglected the study and even killed those
who specialized in the arcane before they could pass on their knowledge. The
modern “science-religion” won over the old science of Shamanism spiritualism
and magic, now considered primitive. An age of consumerism triumphed. We lost
important supernatural know-how in favor of owning lots of manufactured
“things” and airplane trips. Was it a good trade-off?
I think that the God part that is in us
permits us to create and to travel to and beyond the stars. What we need to do
is shift our great potential power to another channel and work in the right
direction. There is no need to own a lot of useless material things at the
expense of poor people who make them. We don’t need to always be in another
place than where we are either. It consumes our resources and destroys our only
world.
Instead, we have the option of working
towards improving the lives of all who are around us, providing what they need
to simply live an enjoyable life. It will bring down the ever-increasing
population numbers.
There is an option to study the human God
power inside us and the mysterious consciousness which never dies. It can
change as we see in dreams and hypnosis or under anesthetics, but it is
spiritual, not material. The soul which is the real us can travel to the stars
and we can be more conscious of it than we are if we try.
My soul, which I call “me” is able to
grow me a body, travel, and according to my religious faith, be with God. I
don’t need to be dead for it to happen, but I need more effort to discover its
mysteries.
Social Rebirth.
I feel privileged to be able to communicate
with my chosen community in the Alberta Rockies once a week. I am blessed to
have a limited space of half a page in a local newspaper and I hear comments
from readers all the time. I don’t mind doing the work, it’s a pleasure, but I
have a hard time choosing the most relevant topic.
My favorite subject has always been something
philosophical or spiritual, but events hijack my focus. Politics and economics
are so important yet often ignored. The state of our world, be it peace or war
or environmental justice must be dealt with or there will be an end to God’s
creation as we know it. It may happen in the lifetime of my precious
grandchildren. COVID attacks people, the economy is in ruins and politicians
are demanding air time in the name of Democracy.
My fingers holding the pen above the paper,
or something like that, and I am ready to write about “towers and the holy
spirit.” I have been preparing for that. NO! The hand of God waves back and
forth, ordering me to change the subject. I am an obedient guy, so I switch my
computer screen to news and see what the Lord may want.
The world is up in arms about a
well-publicized killing of a US citizen in the hands of police. The video is
horrific. It shows a very tall, muscular African American submitting to police
in every way, killed slowly. No mistake here. This is police brutality. Soon
there are more videos surfacing and other cases are brought into focus.
In the last few years, I watched a constant
increase in civil unrest. People seem to have reached a point in which they say
enough is enough. Personally, I interpret the impatience as discontent with the
way things are, based largely on the obvious and ever-increasing inequalities
in society. I could be wrong.
The day after President Trump’s inauguration,
we witnessed the largest women’s protest ever. The Black Lives Matter has been
steadily growing. A “Me Too” movement sprung up when some very influential
people were named for abusing girls and there is economy based unrest. People
all over the world, especially in the US, are protesting measures designed to
prevent or influence voting rights and the appointment of judges is being
questioned.
Here in our province, we saw a great reaction
to the way the government treats education and health professionals. In
Ontario, the Premier reversed course and now people are talking about the New
Doug Ford and the Old Doug Ford as if they are two different people. It is
obvious that people no longer believe that the regular methods of advancing
social change are working for their needs.
George Floyd’s funeral was televised
everywhere. Many thousands of people in other parts of the world, including
Canada and America, were protesting his killing, often facing police violence
themselves. Some used the opportunity to create additional mayhem by burning
and looting. George’s niece, a pretty girl who looks sixteen gave an emotional
speech about the gentle giant who cried for his mother as they choked his life
out of him. She said in a husky teen girl voice full of tears, “no justice, no
peace.” The huge cathedral was full of silent Americans. They all looked human
to me and I was thinking, their lives matter, as any human life.
Later a golden casket was carried by a
horse-drawn carriage through the streets of Houston lined with people. I found
myself thinking, here is a man who died for $20.00. Will the billionaire now in
the White House have as many people at his funeral? I remembered the words I
heard on June 5th, 1970, from Apollo 13th. “Houston, we have a problem.”
“When the US catches a Cold, Canada sneezes.”
It looks as if people in both countries are ready to explode. I remember the
sixties and the seventies very clearly. We had what became known as the Middle
Class. Then something changed. No one event riled people up, only slow change.
Here we had the usual switching over between Liberals and Conservatives every
few years and so did the US, but life changed.
One day my kids were grown and starting
families and I noticed a significant difference. In the seventies, working
folks could afford an education, keeping up with inflation, and even saved
towards retirement. Some of us even managed to work a four-day workweek and
most had delightful holidays. Slowly but surely the working class lost ground
while earth-shattering profits of Corporations rose. Some people tried to
protest, so they equipped the police with riot gear and ordered to fight the
poor. We are a land of law and order, said those who purchased lawmaker’s
positions. The laws favored the powerful, not us, in the name
of “jobs.”
People were ready to rebel as soon as they
would find a just cause and now they do. What could be more just than systemic
discrimination, first towards minorities but also against an entire class of
people? Some educated people are predicting another vast setback for the
working class after the COVID crisis. Together we who work make a majority and
now can all see it.
I feel sorry for the righteous people who
have the job to police this mess. They are being hit from all sides. The left
fights them, the far-right fight them, and they are often punished for
following orders. In New York, a whole lot of officers resigned already.
The way we do policing will change now by
public demand. What we need is to bring those brave men and women back into the
fold. They are like us, the lost middle class. We should all be working
together to fix a system that no longer serves us. I urge people in my
community to step over towards any of our police officers, even if he/she
gave you a ticket, and say: thank you for what you do.
Fear, hope, and reaction.
Fear is an emotion that is physically
changing functions in the body and taking over the mind. I think it is a
feeling that we may be harmed, perhaps seriously, but we can’t do much about
it. The first time that I can remember being struck with fear happened on the
farm in my pre-school days.
We lived on the farm, and it was summer. The
window was open and louvered shutters were closed. I was in my bed and could
see light reflecting on the wall from the kerosene lamp in the kitchen where my
parents were. Outside I could hear the jackals (wild dogs like coyotes) howling
at a distance. The most powerful animals in our environment were the hyenas.
They are similar to a big dog and make a distinctive sound that is like a crazy
man laughing hysterically. Scientists believe that the sound paralyzes nerves.
One of these beasts somehow got close to my
window and howled/laughed, leaving me frozen with fear. Immediately I heard my
dad opening the closet where he kept a shotgun. I heard it click and the front
door squeaked and slammed shut. In seconds there was the flash and a shell
exploded followed by some crunching of his feet on the gravel followed by
another shot and the night was silent more than ever. Young me had been
introduced to one major human emotion called fear.
There were many more brushes with fear in my
life. I learned that we can ignore fear, inflict it upon others, and use it to
control humans and even animals. It is not always rational yet very powerful.
Often fear is connected to our imagination. We imagine a scenario that may
happen and compute the probability of its materializing. In other cases, we are
just paralyzed with fear yet unable to explain it.
Fear is contagious and can easily infect
enormous groups of people. I, for example, have a fear of communicable
diseases. I never had one worse than the flu but I have seen movies of great
plagues and I will go through great trouble to try to avoid being infected.
I remember in my childhood when so many kids were inflicted with Polio. I
had a friend in school who lost the use of his legs. I know that invisible
little critters can do a lot of harm to us, the almighty humans. My imagination
makes fear mightier. I assume that a virus with the ability to mutate and
quickly reproduce could destroy all humans.
My other great fear is that humans will
destroy themselves. My parents, and all the people I knew as a child, were
refugees from Europe. They survived since they were smart or lucky enough to
escape the two greatest enemies that threatened humanity, both ideologies. My
parents escaped both Fascism and Communism and I fear both.
I know that to avoid the two most dreadful
ideologies we must keep a healthy balance. People must have a reasonable way to
stay alive, be safe, and raise children while also taking care of the old.
Without that, we will abandon our love of life and head towards extinction. The
opposing emotion to fear is hope.
The survivors of the great war, who raised
me, all had hope in common. They faced the armies of both Hitler and Stalin.
Most have been in concentration camps or war prisoners’ facilities, yet they
always had an escape plan or devised possible scenarios of coming out alive.
They all knew instinctively that the way to beat fear is by fighting. It is the
nature of humans. The other most important ingredient is sticking together. You
can’t win alone but sure can in numbers.
Last week I watched with horror the President
next door, acting seemingly without understanding the basics of human nature.
His own people came in great numbers to make him aware of a huge social problem
in his country. Discrimination against poor people, mostly visible minorities.
As always, some hotheads acted criminally, but most were doing what they
should, letting the government know that a change must happen.
The President first displayed fear and later
came brandishing weapons, gassing and attacking. The government is a tool of
the people designed to organize action that the people want. This time the
President did the opposite of what is logical. He threatened to use the defense
force to subdue the people. Does he not know that the army is made of people
from his country?
The ruling class of the greatest country,
which I admired all my life, has just deteriorated a great deal. I have friends
in the US whom I care a lot about. There are Americans who live here and they
are good people. Now I am helplessly watching as steps are being taken towards
what could develop into a civil war. I have seen it before in other places and
studied it in school. How can anyone risk taking all those wonderful people
towards such a significant danger? I feel fear creeping into my bones.
I am witnessing a possible breakdown of all
that I believed could not break down. We humans reached a new point in
which we demand action and improvement. We are fighting for the environment,
for life on the planet, for an end to systemic discrimination, and for an
economy that will sustain us instead of build empires.
With information breaking through, no longer
dependent upon the official media, our dreams and hopes are now attainable. In
comes, the “old guard” threatening to rule by fear and force. Consequently, we
see millions of people demonstrating all over the world. The “old guard” are
trying to use their laws and our armies to subdue the popular movements, but it
will not happen.
Calling the armies at this point will only
bring war and violent revolutions. I pray that peace and love will win the day
as was predicted in the bible that Trump was holding upside down in front of
the White House.