This Is Sadness, This Is Anger, This Is Grief

I realized the other day I can love another person without needing them to love me back. I can care about them, want them to be happy, even if they never give me a thought.

Or worse, wish I'd just fall down a well.

The other night I had a dream in which my middle child was a kid again and being difficult. All of a sudden she ran at me from across the room.

And locked me in a full body hug and I felt wrapped in love.

What does it mean? Well, our dreams are all about ourselves, and I know what I felt.

Loved. Self love.

I still remember coming upon my oldest child, she was kid age, pronouncing apropos of nothing, "I love myself." So pleased she was. My Gord it was inspiring.

I titled this piece "This Is Sadness, This Is Anger, This Is Grief" because I heard Brene Brown say it in a talk about endings and the need to feel our emotions over them or they'll just bite us in the ass later.

I was able to experience my mother in very old age and I think that helps us miss a person less, but my relationship with my former mother-in-law ended more or less with the end of my marriage to her son, and so I find myself missing her on occasion.

All times are difficult, I guess, many of them unnecessarily so, but right now is so stupid it actually does hurt, doesn't it. A friend, a philosophy grad who seems to remember it all - why can't I remember even a bit of what I learned in university? - takes a very long term view of it all. She's watching something on Brit Box about Tudor England and can draw parallels to now. No problem.

Hang on, I did become a bit of an aficionado of Elizabeth I in university, but the obsession really started when I was a kid, with a CBC six part series on her dear old dad, Henry VIII and his wives. I can still remember how devastated I was when he had Catherine Howard, wife No.5, killed.

Good acting. She was hysterical, uncomprehending. It was all so unfair.

I guess my problem is I don't have a clear eyed view of history to help me with now. I'm illogical that way. It all just makes me mad.

Speaking of mad, everyone's mad at the Democrats for not doing enough to stop the coup happening in the US, but Republicans could stop it today if they wanted. They're responsible for all of it, really. People talk now as if political affiliation is something we're born with, and not an entirely social construct, like gender.

No one has to vote Republican. They choose to. And the Republican Party didn't have to nominate the Orange Goon for President. They chose to. Twice. And they don't have to put up with any of this madness now. They could just vote no. End it all.

The older I get the more I love the breakdown of stereotypes, the freeing of each other from made up convention, people just being people. My mother, a woman who, at age 38, had to switch from a woman's world to a man's, used to say of teaching and nursing that women should be glad when men join their ranks because the pay and respect goes up.

Is that what worries men about women joining their ranks? The pay and respect goes down?

Was there ever a time in history when people didn't believe male was superior to female?

Why, then, do so many people believe men need the state to protect them from women making money? 

All that money for OC Transpo to improve services and still women won't feel safe waiting for, getting off, buses in certain locations at night. What's so hard about this? Shouldn't we all want public services to look after our most vulnerable citizens first? Why have them otherwise?

I want to set a good example for young people about getting old because I don't want them to fear it. So much of our way of life depends on looks and it's funny because, like babies, old people all look alike.

Old.

And we all have that same reaction to young people, whether we want to admit it or not, that they matter more than we do. It's not that we don't matter, we do. But young people matter more. Babies matter the most. We know it whenever we encounter one. And it's not a scary thing, it's a life affirming thing.

I'm not sure what we're witnessing right now, this perverse behaviour by so many people, a lot of them old. The cowardice, the bullying, the sycophancy.

The cruelty to babies.

What's happening right now in the US is an orgy of sexual perversion starring an old Orange Goon, cheered on by his equally perverse fans, while he and his sycophants and wannabes act out their deepest depraved fantasies of domination over people they pretend to themselves are lesser and so deserve it.

My advice to someone today was: don't watch it.

It's a snuff film.

We will prevail, but we may as well accept the fact now, we're going to have to go through some stuff first.

So save your sanity. Don't let the sadness, anger, grief take over. Process it now so you'll be ready to stand up to this madness when it comes for us.

Cryptonite

The longer the fascist coup in the US is allowed to go on, the more the Musk Rats will have to lose, and the worse it will get for anybody and everybody trying to stop them from destroying the US government while they transfer the public purse over to their private wallets.

Bitcoin.

It's on a roll.

I don't understand it. I know perfectly decent people who have invested in it, people who can afford a few grand to lose, even true believers who view it as the way to a more democratic world, as opposed to the fascist nightmare it appears to be facilitating in the US as I type this.

Good for you. You're rich in Bitcoin. Too bad about your friends and family sent to work the tarsands for our Musk Rat overlords.

Enjoy fascism. Don't worry about us. Worry about the guerilla warfare we'll be perpetrating now we've nothing left to lose.

The US will invade Canada if Americans don't/won't/can't stop the fascist coup taking place, a fascist coup facilitated by Stephen Harper, whose name desecrates the Canadian flag our five former and current prime ministers signed in celebration of its 60th anniversary.

The Musk Rats will take what they want and burn down the rest because we are nothing to the billionaire fascists Stephen Harper helped bring to power.

They're not even real to themselves. They can't begin to imagine we exist.

The other day a childhood friend phoned me in a panic. He'd borrowed several thousand dollars and sent it to a virtual stranger who'd promised him over the phone he'd transfer it to his crypto account. But then the virtual stranger stopped calling. So my friend, who had no way of contacting him, called me, thinking I might know someone who could help him get his money back.

I don't, of course, and even if I did, and I guess I do know a couple of people who maybe could, or at least understand what to most of us is an incomprehensible process, but - no. I've been through this before, the panicked phone call, the inarticulate explanation as to what's happened, the doubling down on the pyramid scheme.

I wonder how many lives have been lost to Bitcoin.

I despise Pierre Poilievre. Instead of working in the public interest, ever, he's spent his mandate recruiting young men to Stephen Harper's big Conservative Party tent of traitors, young men heavily invested in Bitcoin, young men who've been propagandized to believe democracy benefits everyone else at their expense, young men who desperately want the Musk Rats to defeat Western liberal democracy, so us, because they actually believe they'll be Masters of the Universe in a New World Order when they do, as opposed to (and here I paraphrase a good ol' Brent Butt joke) so many hood ornaments on the luxury car collections of their groomers.

Driving Miss Crazy

It's crazy-making, the deliberate chaos being caused by the Orange Goon, the billionaire Peter Pans, their Lost Boys, running amok in the US government.

They're our new overlords, not that we factor into their virtual world order. We're not even collateral damage. Collateral damage at least assumes some worth to society. We're completely irrelevant, left behind in the real world, the one where people die without ever having grasped the Holy Grail of Crypto.

They, on the other hand, are going to live forever. On Mars. Their God, Elon Musk, will make it so.

We should never have allowed our politicians to call us anything other than citizens. It was a mistake, allowing the slip into "consumers" and "taxpayers" and "hard working families". It made it seem like democracy was really just all about money, the more money, the more democracy we're entitled to claim for ourselves.

But how to compete with billionaires?

The Lost Boys, and there are millions of them, and who knows how many of them Bitcoin Billionaires themselves, have pledged their allegiance to Elon Musk. He's their God, the only one they need. Fuck Jesus. We see a Neo-Nazi, mad with power, out to destroy Western liberal democracy, they see who they want to be.

Freedom.

For years now young and not so young men have cloaked themselves in victimhood, angry at the world, arrested development at the teenage know-it-all stage, willingly propagandized by online groomers to believe that, if not for the rest of us getting in their way, they would be the Masters of the Universe their sex at birth decreed they should be.

Trans kids terrify the groomers, hence their targeting of this teeny tiny minority of the population, the cruelty always the point with fascism.

But trans kids put the lie to fascism, don't they, and the truth to democracy, which is all about the freedom to be who we are, not who we're told to be.

Funny how it's playing out though, eh? Individual lifetimes devoted to achieving financial security for ourselves and a bunch of fascist little shits who've only ever known wealth and privilege come along and pull the rug out from under us like we're not even standing on it.

Anyway, when we get through this, with our savings most likely gone, I say we learn a lesson and take all that power we've given up to money and put it into democracy instead.

Fault Lines

One more time. Then I'll pretend we're all in against Fascism again.🙂

So, just, you know, for the record, Liberal Feminists have been trying to defend our societies against a Conservatism that's moved increasingly Right everywhere in the world for decades now, and certainly in Canada after Mulroney stood up against Apartheid in South Africa and the racist woman-haters abandoned his Progressive Conservatives to create the Reform Party of Preston Manning, a Neo-Nazi.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's no accident virulent racist and woman-hater, the South African Elon Musk, is now running amok in the US government. Fascists from across the globe, including Stephen Harper, who simply changed the name of Reform to Conservative and voila! he was elected Prime Minister of Canada, helped get him there.

So many of us were accused of having Harper Derangement Syndrome back in the day, as if Marci McDonald hadn't written "The Armageddon Factor" detailing Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party's Christo-Fascism for all of Canada to read. It was maddening. Especially when his first order of business, after cheating his way to a majority government in 2011, courtesy robo-call operative, Pierre Poilievre, was to destroy our gun registry for his American NRA sponsors.

It was the same Fascism so many other men, American men, denied in 2015/2016, when they chose to spend the fight for liberal democracy blaming Liberal Feminists for standing in the way of our collective Socialist utopia on account of the Democratic Party establishment nominating Hillary Clinton over Independent Bernie Sanders for President.

And just prior to the rise of the Orange Goon, whose sponsorship by Christo-Fascist dictator, Vladimir Putin, couldn't possibly have been made more obvious, Canadian women were mocked for supporting Justin Trudeau, as if our support was because of his hair.

Well no. It was because he proclaimed the Liberal Party a pro-choice, Feminist party, taking away the knife men have been holding over our heads since abortion was de-criminalized, to say we're not debating this anymore, abortion is a women's health issue, and peppering his campaign with the dreaded "F" word, Feminist, like it was 2015 and not 1950.

Because it WAS 2015! And bringing a gender balance to Cabinet WAS a big deal. So was legalizing cannabis, actually a Feminist issue, because now women who wanted it could just buy it legally from a store, not need a boyfriend do it for us from some guy in a van down by the bridge.

And to pretend that didn't make him a target of every Fascist from our own Conservative Party to the US Republican Party to Russia's Christo-Fascist Mob in the Kremlin is just typical denialism of misogyny and gaslighting of women by men who will never admit THEY are the ones standing in the way of our collective Socialist utopia.

Fact: There was zero benefit to Canadians for Jagmeet Singh, who had all the power New Democrats claim to want working with Justin Trudeau, to "rip up" the NDP agreement to support the Liberal government, the most responsive and accessible government we've ever had. Zero benefit. But he did it anyway. Why? And his demand that Justin Trudeau resign - the same demand being made by Pierre Poilievre and every Christo-Fascist from here to there ever since he was elected Prime Minister - has been met. He resigned. And so we have our government dealing with a Fascist coup in the US while the Liberal Party holds a fucking leadership race, our own Fascists pretending the government of Canada is leaderless when it's actually, demonstrably, been standing up for Canadians from coast to coast to coast like no Canadian government has ever had to do, and against the US, a military and economic powerhouse currently experiencing a Fascist coup.

Meanwhile, in the US, Democrats are being excoriated for not doing enough to stop Fascism when it was Democratic Party voters who failed to do the bare minimum to stand up for liberal democracy and just fucking vote ffs.

The fact is, a lot of people decided they'd rather risk Fascism than support the most progressive and inclusive and just generally all around cool and happening person ever to be in the running for President of the United States, a female GenX Liberal Feminist. It was a five alarm fire the entire campaign and they pretended it wasn't happening because, deep down, they wanted blood in the streets, not a Socialist utopia, just like the Fascists do, tear it all down, burn it all up, anything but those no fun Liberal Feminists in power with their identity politics and drag queens and support for trans kids to live as they are.

And now we have a re-elected Orange Goon claiming us as a 51st state, Greenland as his, the Panama Canal as his, and Gaza as his, while a high-as-a-kite billionaire crackpot and his teenage droogs run amok destroying the US government from within, and Stephen Harper's disciple, Pierre Poilievre - who publicly stood with the Freedom Convoy Neo-Nazis WHILE THEY ATTACKED US AND WAVED THEIR F*CK TRUDEAU MERCH - is STILL poised to win a majority government.

So tell me again, guys and dolls, how Liberal Feminists are in the way of our Socialist utopia.🙂

Ok, Haters, You Win

And so here we are, the Orange Goon trying to cause a North America-wide Depression, while his top donor, Elon Musk, commands his teenage droogs in a raid on the US Treasury.

Hello? Law enforcement? Anybody home? 

Anyway, I don't think it's a leap to wonder if the purpose of this coup is to wipe out the middle-class so we're as desperate and afraid as undocumented migrants must be feeling right now.

Way to own the Libs, Haters.

Just think, too, our very own Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada, living large on his big fat publicly funded pension, helped make it all happen.

No doubt he sold off Laureen's portfolio first.😀 (See 2008 for details.)

Remember when we were accused of being deranged for warning about that arrogant prick traitor?

Anyway, any excuse to repost the synopsis of Marci McDonald's "The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada".

In her new book, award-winning journalist Marci McDonald draws back the curtain on the mysterious world of the right-wing Christian nationalist movement in Canada and its many ties to the Conservative government of Stephen Harper.
 
To most Canadians, the politics of the United States — where fundamentalist Christians wield tremendous power and culture wars split the country — seem too foreign to ever happen here. But The Armageddon Factor shows that the Canadian Christian right — infuriated by the legalization of same-sex marriage and the increasing secularization of society — has been steadily and stealthily building organizations, alliances and contacts that have put them close to the levers of power and put the government of Canada in their debt.
 
Determined to outlaw homosexuality and abortion, and to restore Canada to what they see as its divinely determined destiny to be a nation ruled by Christian laws and precepts, this group of true believers has moved the country far closer to the American mix of politics and religion than most Canadians would ever believe.
 
McDonald’s book explores how a web of evangelical far-right Christians have built think-tanks and foundations that play a prominent role in determining policy for the Conservative government of Canada. She shows how Biblical belief has allowed Christians to put dozens of MPs in office and to build a power base across the country, across cultures and even across religions.
 
“What drives that growing Christian nationalist movement is its adherents’ conviction that the end times foretold in the book of Revelation are at hand,” writes McDonald. “Braced for an impending apocalypse, they feel impelled to ensure that Canada assumes a unique, scripturally ordained role in the final days before the Second Coming — and little else.”
 
The Armageddon Factor shows how the religious right’s influence on the Harper government has led to hugely important but little-known changes in everything from foreign policy and the makeup of the courts to funding for scientific research and social welfare programs like daycare. And the book also shows that the religious influence is here to stay, regardless of which party ends up in government.
 
For those who thought the religious right in Canada was confined to rural areas and the west, this book is an eye-opener, outlining to what extent the corridors of power in Ottawa are now populated by true believers. For anyone who assumed that the American religious right stopped at the border, The Armageddon Factor explains how US money and evangelists have infiltrated Canadian politics.
 
This book should be essential reading for Canadians of every religious belief or political stripe. Indeed, The Armageddon Factor should persuade every Canadian that, with the growth of such a movement, the future direction of the country is at stake.

Hats Off

Not to interrupt but, the Orange Goon isn't offering to buy Canada, he's threatening to take us over.

But also: Canada is not for sale? Really? Since when?

Cripes, Doug Ford just sold off Ontario Place, ffs. Now he's calling an election before the investigation into his sell off of our Greenbelt to his mobster owners we call "developers" is completed.

And no offence to Manitoba, but Ontario is pretty much Canada central, not that Doug Ford seems to know Ottawa is in Ontario... so... maybe he doesn't know Ontario is in Canada?

Peak irony seeing that "Ontario Is Open For Business" MoFo sporting a "Canada Is Not for Sale" hat.

Stephen Harper literally sold the silverware when he was Prime Minister, never mind his sell off of our tarsands to China, and by our, I mean, Canada's.

I don't say Alberta's tarsands or Alberta's anything anymore. Doug Ford may be mobbed up to his gills but he's not a traitor.

Danielle Smith is a traitor.

Scott Moe is a traitor.

The Orange Goon is bullying us, we're being bullied, but I feel it less than I did when the Freedom Convoy insurrectionists, organized by Alberta's Neo-Nazis and supported by the Conservative Party of Canada, bullied us here in Ottawa.

I'm not taking it on this time. It's not my problem to fix. I had a good run of public services, access to public space, but too many of my co-citizens don't value either, they'd rather pay more for less.

Go figure.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure why we're pretending the US bullying us is a new thing, and Canada, with all our resources and the population of California, being a 51st state hasn't long been a possibility in the minds of more than a few Canadians, most notably the American wannabes of Alberta.

Lots of American flags alongside the odd Confederate one, a Swastika or two, during the Freedom Convoy's three week white power rally that cost our local economy some $50 million, the larger blockade of our international borders a couple of billion.

Conservative politicians go on and on about loving Americans, the US, because they do. They never say anything about loving Canadians, Canada, because they don't.

You can't possibly have witnessed Stephen Harper's time as Prime Minister and not noticed his extreme self-loathing that extended to the rest of us.

America strong.

Canada weak.

Trudeau Sr. was the last Prime Minister to put his paw on the head of Alberta, just as he did with Quebec, and the last Prime Minister to acknowledge the US as too close for comfort, with its veering from isolation to involvement, and so his christening us "Citizens of the World" instead.

All this to say it's too bad he's not here to tell the Orange Goon to fuddle duddle, but he's not. Instead, while the Orange Goon threatens to take us over, and we pretend push hasn't come to shove, a wily entrepreneur - who will no doubt turn out to be a Doug Ford supporter - makes his fortune selling hats.

A Star Is Born

This past fall I decided it was time to shake it all up a bit, make some new friends, get involved with my community in some way that wasn't just going to the grocery store.

I don't want to work for money anymore. Enough already. I have faith in the rest of you.

Keep at it, please, that GDP isn't going to raise itself.

Instead, I signed up for a class, then another class related to the first class, and so it was that two nights ago I wrapped a performance in a play by a local author.

Not me and I don't have the name handy but I hope it will be me next fall.

It was fun. So much fun I'm doing it all over again. No, don't try to stop me, it's too late.

I'm hooked.

Meryl Streep get out of my way!

Anyway, the original title of this blog entry was going to be "Leaving Normal", and it was the result of being online more than was good for my well-being. We all have our rabbit holes, and mine was increasingly bleak. It's easy to lose perspective, though, which is the real problem for some of us social media users and political junkies. So to save what was left of my sanity, because it's looking pretty... not good... out there, I knew it was time for something completely different.

Real life!

Well, fake real life!

Shakespeare, who I read online the other day may have been plagiarizing Emilia Somebody, was absolutely right. Turns out, the play really IS the thing! Who knew?

Originally, my idea was to take the scariest class I could think of, which was Improv. But once started, Improv seemed right up my alley and not scary at all. Meanwhile, an Improv classmate assured me acting would be the fright I was looking for and so I took her advice and signed up for an acting class.

I didn't realize at the time, even though it says so right in the course description, it meant putting on an actual play in front of a live audience, or I never would have done.

Also, I really only took it to learn how to adapt my book into a play, not inherit TWO ROLES when two different people dropped out for this or that reason, including the classmate who'd assured me acting would be the fright I was looking for but she'd be there to calm my jitters.

It was. Oh indeed it was. But why didn't I have even an inkling how cool it is to take on a different character and act out a fiction for the sole purpose of entertaining a live audience of friends and family? Times two because two very different characters: An insecure young stage hand who accidentally outs herself during a monologue to the director and an assured and bawdy costume designer paired with an older censorious one trying to outfit the wrong actor for a community theatre production gone off the rails.

Terrifying!

Also, just what I needed, I guess, because I feel so much better than I did going into it all.

It's the people, of course, the social interaction, sense of purpose, feeling of accomplishment.

The power of the arts?

And now, bonus, I have a template for turning "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It" into a play, the process of which I plan to blog on Kathryn Writes Here so it actually happens.

(The play's the thing but only because the audience is REALLY the thing.)

So stay tuned. In the meantime, get out there and be with other people in whatever capacity you can. Hell is us, yes, we can be, sometimes. More often, though, we're the antidote to it all.

Finally, a fun story about men vs women that sums up a lot of our (women's) suffering while men live out their lives reasonably content to be anywhere at all while not doing much of anything.

A fellow improvisor asked me what I was doing for Christmas. After a long involved story of explanations, rationalizations and justifications as to why I basically don't do anything for Christmas anymore (oh except for making a grabillion dollars and hours of labour worth of organic granola to give as presents) I returned the favour and asked him what he was doing for Christmas.

"Nothing", he answered.

It was during a break in our Improv class, ffs - I could've gone with, "Christmas? Wtf is Christmas??"

Oh well, lesson learned. I'm sure there will be a next time.

Until then, though, have a Merry Merry and Happy Happy!