Looking for Normal

"The peace comes when it doesn't depend on the other person."

That's advice Gabor Mate gave to a mother of an estranged adult child. I've blogged it before but wanted to put it out there again, this time as a sort of general "to thine own self be true" bit of advice.

I've been told all my life I shouldn't care what other people think, but it's really just another way of telling me I'm living my life all wrong. So I'm going with "to thine own self be true".

Is inner peace even possible in a world at war with itself?

Last night we watched famous people grappling with what other people think of them on Netflix. First up was Ellen "the meanest person in show business" DeGeneres in "For Your Approval". She's hilarious, of course, but it's her openness about what was an awful time in her life that makes her latest standup so brilliant. Because, of course, caring what other people think is part of the human condition. Certainly it's part of the female human condition. And being Ellen, she knows how to bring the funny to everybody thinking she was the worst.

Next up was "Will and Harper", a documentary of Will Ferrell and his friend, Harper Steele, a former SNL writer transitioning at 61 to womanhood, taking a road trip across America to visit Harper's old haunts. It's such a moving film, and it's their vulnerability, Will's as much as Harper's, that makes it so. Watching them both try to be who they want to be, and are, is inspiring but also really sad because it's so unnecessarily hard. Will sees it as his job to protect Harper from the America she loves, the dive bars and lonely places, and at one point he cries, worried he's let her down, let himself down.

As for Harper, there's a scene where she confesses how difficult make-up is. She wants to be pretty but as she says, it's so hard with her masculine face. I wanted to tell her it's age, make-up and being pretty gets tricky with age, but I've had a lifetime of living as a woman and making myself pretty with make-up to get to this age where I don't wear make-up at all anymore. She's playing catch-up in her 60s.

And, of course, there's social media, where basic human decency goes to die. 

I finally read "The Myth of Normal", referenced in so many of the interviews I've watched of Gabor Mate on YouTube. It's basically a 500 page indictment of how we've been made to live, particularly in the US and Canada, and what our priorities have become, thanks to social constructs like patriarchy, capitalism, gender, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc, still going strong.

For instance, Dr. Mate argues normal is communal and cooperative, how we lived for thousands and thousands of years, not individualistic and competitive. And I particularly like his take on addiction, although addiction isn't the right word for our various behavioural disorders, I don't think. Distractions? His method is one of compassionate inquiry. Why do we behave the way we do? What problem is our behaviour solving for us? What childhood wounds are we soothing with happy hour?

I have to admit, I really had to park my biases to fairly consider his take on our world. And although he claims none of this is about blame or judgement, as a parent who used the sleep program to put her toddlers to bed, it does feel a little personal. But maybe he isn't referring to the sleep program of the 90s, intentional, reassuring and re-settling of toddlers with minimal interaction, but rather of the 50s and 60s, when we were left to cry ourselves to sleep.

I just read an article on CBC's website about the sleep deficit too many strung out parents are experiencing, too, along with their toddlers keeping them up all night. For my own part, I doubt our third child would've been conceived if I hadn't done the sleep program with the first two.

Also, I couldn't help but notice he doesn't extend his no blame or judgement, because we're all experiencing generational trauma, to Liberal politicians, and his singling out of Justin Trudeau and Hilary Clinton, alongside Stephen Harper and Donald Trump, struck me as both unfair and problematic. He name drops, too, and some off-putting ones like Russell Brand and Marianne Williamson, which, in my opinion, he needn't and shouldn't do. It only takes away from the rest of his teachings, backed up by study after study after study, and makes him appear infatuated with celebrities who flatter his political leanings.

There are way too many studies cited, because Dr. Mate is nothing if not thorough in his research, and I diligently skipped over every single one.

But I still came away from "The Myth of Normal" more enlightened than when I went in, and realizing how wrong it is our round bodies are being made to fit into the square holes of an economy that not only doesn't work in our best interests, and never really did, but is actively hurting our health and well-being while destroying our collective habitat.

I forget if he mentions WWIII, I don't think so, but I have friends now at odds on social media over which is worse, Russia committing genocide in Ukraine or Israel committing genocide in Gaza, with some even pitting Ukrainian refugees to Canada against Palestinians trapped in Gaza, so now a real life get together with people who used to be up for one is no longer in the cards. For my part though I want to expand my social circle, do more connecting in real life, more breaking of bread, starting with Facebook friends in Ottawa.

My plan is to eventually hit the road to meet and greet beyond our capital city.

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. I hope you find yourself in a good place, too. We really are all in this together.

Just the Scraps, Ma'am

Climate change, thanks to our greenhouse gas emissions, is costing Canadians billions of dollars, and our premiers and Singh and Poilievre are busy pandering to voters, the poorest of whom get a rebate on the carbon tax we pay, by pretending the federal government has it all wrong putting a price on pollution and including all of us in the fight against climate change with industry carrying the load.

The odious little shit, Pierre Poilievre, pretends not to believe in climate change, and the rest of the parasites in the Conservative Party go along with it, because he doesn't care about anybody or anything except money and power and neither do they.

But he's going to be the next Prime Minister of the Great White North because he's successfully fuelled the irrational rage of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

Remember when the world stopped due to the pandemic and we got a break from greenhouse gas emissions proving we could do something about climate change if we all cooperated in the effort?

Whoever advised Trudeau to cave to those over-represented Maritimers should be beaten with a board with a nail in it. He should've told them to get stuffed because he'll get no gratitude for it. Those old seadogs will kick him to the curb for the Christo-Fascist gun lobby calling itself the Conservative Party because, even though they've been subsidized up the wazoo since Confederation, they don't want to pay taxes, help in the fight against climate change, etc etc etc.

CBC reported last week that car manufacturers, the same ones who make their cars so easy to steal our publicly funded police spend all our money trying to track them down, are making cars so big they have too many blind spots, and so we need regulations now due to too many blind spots in over-sized cars.

Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth and promises of more "red tape" reduction from the Russian propaganda amplifiers calling themselves Conservatives because they don't give a shit how many kids are killed by adults who can't see them while driving to the grocery store.

We've had a friend's car until he sells it, which he'd best do before our legs stop working, because yesterday, instead of riding our bikes to the bakery for bread, we drove.

Anybody who owns a house or condo is sitting pretty and don't you think for a second they aren't. Ours has doubled in value since we bought it 14 years ago. I don't really want it anymore, but it's cheaper than renting and I'm nervous about the party representing the interests of the Freedom Convoy neo-Nazis, the Conservative Party, raiding our Canada Pension Plan when Canadians elect them to a majority in 2025 because we are, apparently, the stupidest nation on Earth.

When Premier Loon of Alberta mused about taking Tarsands Inc's share of the CPP, the Lying Lie-face, the execrable Pierre Poilievre, shut down any conversation of him doing the same once in power, so now we know that's exactly the plan.

An older Facebook friend posted a cartoon of Singh saying "here's where I get out" while he opens the door of a car with Liberal written on its side going over a cliff. Haha, get it? A national childcare program, dentalcare, pharmacare, investments in clean(er) energy to help prevent the destruction of all life on Earth = driving The Economy! The Economy! off a cliff. Meanwhile, military personnel and veterans complain nonstop about our government not spending enough on them while they vote for the traitors in league with the white supremacists we fought against in WWII, aka the Conservative Party.

The Freedom Convoy was a three week white power rally thumbs upped by every Russian asset from our Official Opposition to Trump's insurrectionist Republican Party.

FFS the Conservatives entertained both domestic and foreign neo-Nazis in our Parliament. Where I come from, the heavily subsidized Sault, you've got one neo-Nazi in the party, you're all neo-Nazis.

Pierre Poilievre is a neo-Nazi or he wouldn't hang out with Diagolon Accelerationists. Period. End of.

But speaking of the Sault, and neo-Nazi party supporters, Bob the Steelworker, a Teamster, is so, so, so angry at Justin the Prime Minister. Why? He has a good job with benefits at the government subsidized Algoma Steel plant, but he doesn't like that his female neighbour will get dentalcare because, according to him, she's lazy and doesn't deserve it. Now, I'm not saying Justin should've just clocked the entitled little asshole, aka privileged little shit, but I am saying maybe Justin should travel with The Old Monster, aka former PM Jean Chretien, to give Millennial Bob's head a shake.

The Sault, like every other city, is in a healthcare crisis because healthcare is the responsibility of the corrupt thug and illiterate moron, Doug Ford, and Doug Ford works for the Muskoka Mafia, not you and certainly not me.

More of us don't have a doctor than do and nobody who has one is going to move or do anything to jeopardize their good fortune in this lottery of a healthcare system Canadians have paid into for generations, only to find it AWOL in our older age when we need it most.

Who are you idiot oldsters voting for this garbage?!

And why the hell aren't young women voting? I would be too scared to have a baby now. I really would. My heart goes out to all the young women willing to brave it, but Geez Louise, vote, dammit.

Want Doug Ford to give a shit about you? Be rich and own a cottage in Muskoka or be a crooked cop. Crooked cops LOVE Conservatives. It's the loot bags at all those weddings. Good luck to the investigators of the Greenbelt criminality dodging Doug Ford's crooked cop friends in the mix.

In the early days of the pandemic first responders, mostly cops and their unions, showed whose side they're on and it's not the good guys' side. Sunshine listers, angry about... ? Where I live I see the struggle. A skinny woman, a couple of decades younger than me, taking a couple of buses, carrying a green garbage bag as big as she is full of empty beer cans, the hardest working person I saw on the bus the other day, a woman Bob the Steelworker, Conservative Party supporter, would call lazy, undeserving of dentalcare.

Well bonus, Bob, she had no teeth.

He's been radicalized, you know, and it's women he's been radicalized against. He wants us pushed around, pushed back, and he wants it done by the state, that's why he's so angry at Justin, Feminist-at-large. Bob believes we're the why of the problems he's been brainwashed into believing he has, this Teamster with a good job and benefits - again, at a heavily subsidized workplace courtesy the rest of us - grousing about paying taxes and having a government that uses them as they're meant to be used, spreading the wealth to citizens of fewer resources.

And now we have New Democrats, yammering away about "working people", like Bob the Steelworker, who has long since been voting for Putin's Conservative Party, because all he cares about is himself. He doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody but himself. And by the way, those New Democrats include the much ballyhooed Wab Kinew of Manitoba, lined up in lockstep with a party born of guns, the Bible, and white nationalism, because that's what's going on with the Conservative Party just as it is in the United States with Donald Trump and his Republican treason weasels.

Everybody and his racist grampa will vote to bring down the Liberals over a program every economist worth their salt would say is sound and every environmentalist worth theirs would say isn't nearly enough even to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change.

We are paying for it in the billions and electing the Conservatives to the government of Canada will only make our lives that much more expensive but also so so so cheap in every way that matters.

The fact is, we haven't been paying what it costs to live here in decades, and all we'll be doing by electing yet more Conservatives to public office is making our lives worse, and making a mockery of the only true measure of a society's worth, which is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.

Sometimes I wonder if we're at a point in this individual vs the community race to the bottom we're in that we just don't want the world to go on for others after we ourselves are gone from it.

Bob the Steelworker and other tales

I'm from the Sault, home of Algoma Steel and a lot of railway tracks, none of which are for transporting people from one place to another. There used to be Greyhound but it's gone now too. Other than drive yourself or take a flight I don't think there's any other way to come and go from the Sault.

My mother has gone to her great reward, as she used to say, so although my first friends are still there... well... maybe next year I'll make the trip. It's a long haul and I've done it a thousand times from Toronto and a thousands times more from Ottawa.

The Sault has seen better days.

Back when I was growing up, pogey was the name of the game. Get enough shifts in at the plant, get laid off, collect pogey. Rinse. Repeat. Not girls, though. Girls were only allowed to do office work. That is until Sandy challenged Algoma Steel's discriminatory practices and got hired to work in the plant.

I think, like Devonshire House at the University of Toronto, it used no girls washrooms as the excuse as to why no girls allowed.

My cousin was the first female employee, I believe, to work on the "cat walk" guiding molten steel through the plant. My brother worked in Coke Oven #7 one summer. His skin had turned grey by the end of August.

My mother used to say to the other high school teachers who complained about how much more money they could make working at the plant, "So go work at the plant."

We lived across the street from the president of Algoma Steel, although there was a field between our middle-class 'hood and his gated enclave. He kept guard dogs and I once ended up caught between a screen door and the inside door, the dogs ready to rip me apart. If his wife hadn't been home I'd likely be dead. Later I heard my mother tear a strip off him for having guard dogs at all.

She was fearless, my mother.

He was a miserable man who left his unhappy wife in later years.

I believe in the 80s there were accusations of Algoma having been making bad steel and so losing contracts as a result but I have no idea if it's true. It has certainly downsized over the years, as has the Sault, now dealing with the same crisis of poverty and addiction as every other city in Canada, the US, and around the world.

Something I noticed in the 90s when I was visiting every year with my kids was a lot of "Jesus Saves" stuff, not a thing when I was living there in the 60s and 70s, not that there's necessarily a connection between evangelicalism and the crisis of poverty and addiction, but social conservatism doesn't seem to do much for our collective standard of living.

Too much voting for the afterlife, not enough voting for the life right here and now.

By the way, if not for government bailouts of one kind or another for Algoma Steel, the Sault would be a ghost town.

So I watched with some annoyance the video of Bob the Steelworker, by way of a bunch of made-up self-serving neighbour-slandering bullshit, flip off Justin the Prime Minister, in the Sault to promote the latest government investment in Algoma Steel, replacing coal with electric power to reduce emissions.

I mean, not only was Bob the Steelworker, well paid and with excellent benefits, thanks to years of government largesse to both Algoma Steel AND Sault Ste. Marie (ffs, Lotto HQ is there), flipping off Justin the Prime Minister, he was flipping off everybody who has not only invested in his very privileged existence in Sault Ste. Marie, but flipping off every generation to follow in his workboots.

But there it is, right? The difference between Bob the Steelworker, well paid, excellent benefits, a young middle-aged beneficiary in 2024 of decades of taxpayer funded bailouts, er, investments in Algoma Steel AND the Sault, but for whom the government must do even more while he pays less, and those of us who aren't Conservative and understand the only true measure of a society is how well it treats its most vulnerable members.

Anyway, of course Justin the earnest Prime Minister stuck to the script with Bob the full-of-shit Steelworker, but wouldn't it have been fun if he'd called him out instead?

Maybe even put him in a headlock first and administered a few noogies?

A Sault girl can dream.

Nitty Gritty Conspiraditty

Just the facts, ma'am.

We only ever had Stephen Harper's word for it that he talked tough to Putin.

After losing the election to Justin Trudeau in 2015, his party created in 2003 having failed to cheat hard enough to win it, Stephen Harper was installed as Chair of the IDU. From there he helped elect Putin Puppet, Donald Trump, President of the United States.

The "F*ck Trudeau" Freedom Convoy that attacked us, civilians living and working in downtown Ottawa, in 2022, while simultaneously blockading our international borders, costing Canadians billions of dollars, was given the thumbs up by Donald Trump, leader of the January 6th 2021 insurrection in the US, Fox News, Russia Today, and leaders past and present of the Conservative Party of Canada, at least one of whom is also an American citizen who likely voted for Donald Trump, not that a Canadian reporter has ever asked.

In spite of rumoured moderates in the Conservative Party, all its MPs voted in lockstep against invoking the Emergency Act to end the Freedom Convoy's three week attack on children, their pets, new mothers, their babies, palliative care patients, their caregivers, etc etc etc. The attack also featured gallows, cranes with nooses, unattended gasoline, fireworks, Hells Angels, drunk/high men marauding about harassing people wearing masks, hijabs, shopping for groceries, and lots and lots of flags, not one of them Ukrainian, many of them American, Confederate, a swastika or two, and "F*ck Trudeau". 

Meanwhile, mid-attack/insurrection attempt, Pierre Poilievre, thumb shaking with excitement at the violence unfolding in Centretown, an ONDP/LPC riding, declared his run for "PM". His blatantly corrupt leadership campaign (because haha democracy's a joke - get it?) was officially endorsed by Stephen Harper from his post at the IDU, the official laundromat for global fascism. Later Pierre Poilievre would march in solidarity with insurrectionist James Topp, his handler? Trump's man, Paul Alexander, since caught out by the FBI as part of a Russian disinformation campaign, over his shoulder.

Oh, I almost forgot. Right after the Emergency Act was invoked, sending our attackers back to Alberta, home of the Freedom Convoy's neo-Nazi organizers, Russia attacked Ukraine.

I guess if you didn't experience the Freedom Convoy attack, or if you fell for the lie that it was about truckers and vaccine mandates, it's hard to understand the effect it had on those of us who did. But there was a public inquiry into the invocation of the Emergency Act, and plenty of us have told our story. For me it was the knowing so many of our publicly funded police and politicians were complicit with it that I'm pretty sure led to the panic attacks I would experience over the next couple of years.

I know people who've been sucked into believing Russia's propaganda with regard to Ukraine, who believe there's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, the Conservatives and the Liberals, who don't like Trudeau for this reason or that excuse. Lord knows he can score on his own net like no other politician I can think of, but I also know it may as well be my name on all those fascist hate flags as his.

So yeah, go sit on a pine cone and rotate if you're helping elect a Russian Op - because that's what the Conservative Party of today is - to my Parliament.