Not black and white.

You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.
Malcolm X


I was reading a book that tried to predict how the geopolitical landscape will look like over the course of the twenty-first century. The author showed exactly why our society has progressed to the point it is today just by looking at birthrates and infant mortality rates. In the 1800s, the birthrate was estimated to be somewhere between 6.5 to 8.0. Women at that time did not have the same rights, her role in society was to bear children from her teens until either her death or the time when her body could not bear children any longer. The population did not have the exponential growth rates it had in the 20th century simply because of the mortality rate. Medicine was nowhere near as advanced as it is today. Out of the 8 babies that were born, 5 to 6 of them did not live long enough to reproduce.

Eventually medicine advanced and the mortality rates dropped. The birthrate did not go down with it, there was much incentive for people to have lots of children. My father has 3 sisters, 2 older brothers, and a twin. His mother also had at least two miscarriages. They grew up on a farm in northern Saskatchewan. In those times it was profitable to have children. More hands to work on the farm and thus more profits, and social security was having many children to take care of you.

In urban areas, back at the start of the industrial revolution, children as young as 6 years old were put to work in factories. The factories were far more primitive, and their workers did not need any skills or special training. This meant that the population did not have a great education.

But things changed again. The agriculture industry started advancing to the point where not nearly as many hands were needed. Factories started becoming more and more complex. The managers had needs for people trained to run complicated equipment, trained to operate computers, they needed people with MBAs and advanced marketing skills. As children started to increase the amount of years they spent getting educated, they started to go from making economic sense, to becoming an economic burden. Today it would be pretty tough raising eight children without having a reality television deal worked out.

In this country, there was once a time not too long ago where 66% of the workforce was employed by factories and farms. Nowadays that number is 6%. Labour jobs are being replaced by skill jobs every day. A college education is vital to success in Canadian society today.

As people grow up with a better education, they become more and more tolerant of other people, and accepting of diversity.



This song is Amanda Marshall's take on prejudice against the black community. Her father was white, and her mother was black. I really like this song, and I got to thinking that this has many similarities to the problem gay people face in our struggle for equality and our rights and freedoms.

Amanda touches on the prejudices against the black community. She said her grandmother thanked God that Amanda was born with white skin. Inter-racial marriages were controversial back then because of the problem of racism. People believed, on a much grander scale, that some people were just not equal to them. The southern states fought against the north for 'rights'. Really, they fought because the north was starting to have a negative attitude towards the engine of the southern economy... slavery. The vice president of the confederacy stated that the CSA was built upon the idea that the black man was not equal to the white man, and that the black man should remain submissive. Prejudice and discrimination melt away when a population becomes educated. It was much easier to maintain slavery because the population was not well educated, so the rich upper class could convince the lower class that slavery was OK. The CSA provided blatant proof that this was a case of tyranny of the upper class when they said that if you owned a certain amount of slaves, then you were exempt from the draft.

Had the population been educated, that war would not have started, and black people would not have had to suffered as greatly as they did, and certainly not as long as they did. Eventually as the population's education and awareness increased over the 20th century, segregation and discriminatory policies were eliminated in America. The population became more and more educated, and realistically, nothing could have maintained the grip religion had in dictating who could and could not have equal rights.

She refers to Malcolm X in her song. Malcolm was a smart and idealistic man. He was a great human being who taught us so much in so little time. He understood what caused real change. He knew exactly what was needed in order to end racism and begin a new age of equality. He knew that the key was education.

He continually stressed that black people could go nowhere if they did not educate themselves.

You can't change a stubborn mind
You can't see the world if your eyes are blind
What does it matter anyway
In our
darkest hour we're all just shades of grey

I believe the world has been continually bettering itself, perhaps it has been evolving while not even realizing exactly how or even that it is. We have been on a course that is taking us from the dark ages to an era of enlightenment and equality. We are not there yet. There are many more problems that we face and inequity in the world. There will always be those ignorant people who believe black people should be subjugated to white people. There will always be those people who say that the state should execute LGBT persons. We cannot change all of their minds, all we can try to do is try to educate them. We need to make sure that we never go back in the closet. By being out in the open, we force people to think about us as human instead of the demons that preachers claim we are. An educated population is better able to understand how wrong it is to marginalize an entire group of people. When we are ignorant, we are a much easier animal to manipulate. I believe that this change and advancement of human rights is an inevitable process. No matter what we do to try and fight against the process, we will not find success in the long run. Reagan and his cronies may have set back the USA in the short term, but I believe that it makes no difference in the long run.

Fighting over resources, and the exploitation of people are a terrible aspect of the human condition, and I am not saying we should not be fighting against it... but I am saying that it will inevitably come to an end because of our ability to educate ourselves and develop tools. Human history is on an inevitable course. When it comes down to it, we are all on this planet looking for basically the same things. We are looking to fulfill our physical, emotional and spiritual needs, and Amanda is right... the real world is not the black and white world the ministers and politicians preach about. We are all just shades of grey.

The Heart of the New West

(click to listen to New Wild West by Jewel, this was the best version I could find, it has some other stuff in the middle and end, but whatever)



I thought about this song after attending the grand opening of yet another mall in the city of suburbia. Few cities on this earth have the problem of urban sprawl like Calgary. We are a people that has moved into houses in packed communities void of culture and filled with vain materialism. We value strip malls more than museums. We like ample parking space instead of well developed mass transit systems.

Calgary's motto is 'The Heart of the New West'. What is the new west?

If Calgary is the heart of this new west, then it can best be described as the land that believes in Social Darwinism. Every man for himself. We have a political monarchy in Alberta, no party could ever challenge the right wing conservatives. King Ralph could throw books at little girls and spit at homeless people all he wanted, as long as he kept taxes low, he was going to be the King until he voluntarily vacated the throne.

Albertans seem not concerned with the plight of those who are less fortunate in society. We give to charity far less per capita than the much less affluent Newfoundlanders. We let our social infrastructure crumble all around us. A study completed a couple years ago found the majority of schools in Calgary to have leaking and otherwise damaged roofs. Classes sizes continue to swell, and not enough is being done to open up more spots in Albertan universities. Ralph Klein saw the demolition of the hospital of my birth, and did not build another one to help ease the shortages of beds in Calgary. He has done nothing to help curb the massive cost of overtime pay to nurses because of major nurse shortages province wide.

Alberta stands on the most economically important land on this continent. The Calgary-Edmonton corridor is the most prosperous region in North America and one of the fastest growing in the world. Alberta's massive oil reserves have ensured that Alberta remains prosperous for years to come. We are the only province that is debt free. So why do we have so many social issues?

Klein stated that his biggest regret during his stint as premier was that he never brought about two-tiered health care. It sounds decent on the surface, but it was really about having the rich be able to bump everyone else to the back of the line. The waiting list for patients who need care would actually end up getting longer if you could not pay. That is what Tommy Douglas fought against in Saskatchewan decades ago. The same fight happening in America, happened in Canada. In the end, universal health care won out and spread across the country after the Pearson government mandated it nationwide. This was a settled question. But Klein wanted it to end to favour the rich.

He was sitting on multi-billion dollar surpluses thanks to our being on top of a great deal of oil. He could have worked to fight against the decay he oversaw, but instead he used it as an opportunity to further the class distinction between rich and poor.

This is not one politician. This is the mindset of my province. This is the mindset of today's conservatives. Selfishness. Little regard for your fellow citizens. For your fellow man.

Pearson had a goal for this nation. He wanted us to give 1% of our GDP to foreign aid. He built a country whose diplomatic corps was astonishing for a country Canada's size. He got the UN to step between the British/French forces and Egypt's during the Suez crisis. We were a nation that never ignored the call from the UN for peace keeping missions. We were a nation that strived for global peace, and we made a huge difference.

Under Trudeau, we got the closest we ever were to reaching Pearson's target. It was little more than half. Today it is 0.28%. We eventually had to end our streak of always taking up the UN's call for peacekeepers. Our military crumbled to the embarassment it is today. We had the third best airforce and fourth best navy coming out of WWII. That obviously could not be sustained, but it shows how far it has fallen to insignificance. If our military capacity were greater, could we have heeded our own general Romeo Dallaire's plea for help in Rwanda? What about Darfur? Could a strong Canadian peacekeeping presence have stopped the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995?

I see my people as jaded and caught up in their own small worlds. No one is concerned about the impending crisis as we near the point of no return in climate change. We do not seem to care about the problems plaguing the health care and education systems. There is no urgency on our part to fix the third world conditions on first nation's reserves in Canada. Calgary is a city that actually increases its electricity consumption during earth hour.

As long as we keep getting new shopping malls to buy new shoes, we could not care less about other people.

Optimism

I have a box that I keep full of things I had when I was younger. I found some poems and thought I would try to analyze them.

This one was probably written in middle school.


In my world
A day lasts forever
And one thought
Is immortal

The skies of my mind
Are boundless
Never do they maintain
A solid shape

When the clouds enter
A prominent view
The surface slips
Into darkness

When the clouds
Dissipate out of view
Then, only then
Do I know they were there

What are clouds
But a mortal mass?
What is pessimism
But a state of mind?

I now know
I must always remain
In the presence of light
Sunshine will rule the skies


I think I was describing how I felt when I would get a wave of depression. This is how pre-teen me felt like. I titled the poem 'Optimism in My Skies'.

I think I have become a very optimistic person in comparison to others I have met. Some other people see the world full of hunger and desperation, controlled by a human population that desires dominance and fights for control of resources. Someone told me they had no faith in humanity. That humanity uses war as a part of natural selection, like it has been bred into us. He said that there is only war, and when there is peace, it is not really peace, just a time to prepare for war. He said this will continue to be us for millions of years.

I do not think that way. It is natural for me to be optimistic. The Jesse of today believes in diplomacy and democracy, and believes the human condition will improve along with the advancement of technology. I see the ever contracting world as a good thing. As something that will bring us together, help us to have a better understanding of one another... and a desire to coexist peacefully.

I think this natural optimism within me, helped me overcome depression. I described the clouds as something that I could not see when it arrived or when it was hovering over me. That describes a state of mental distress. I could not recognize the signs, and this chemical imbalance held my optimistic spirit hostage. (It may not have been an imbalance, it could have simply been anxiety over the battle taking place within me as I tried to repress my sexuality)

Eventually I did start to recognize these patterns, and realize that these clouds are not something that will always be harming me emotionally. I knew I could fight through it and become a better, healthier person.

One day those clouds went away... for good.