"The Courage To Be Disliked", a book I just finished reading, is a bit of a mind bender, in a good way.
Like you, maybe, I'm holding my breath re the upcoming election. It still shocks me how much support there is for Conservative politicians in this country. I don't know how you could be paying any attention at all and want Pierre Poilievre to be Prime Minister.
A party born of guns, the Bible, and white nationalism.
Preston Manning is the Devil.
So "The Courage To Be Disliked". It's a dialogue between a philosopher and a youth. The youth is very negative, dislikes himself, thinks life is a competition, is at odds with his father, doesn't like his job, wants to be special.
Your typical young man, in other words.
The philosopher is a philosopher.
But the good life is about loving ourselves, developing horizontal interpersonal relationships, and contributing to the community in some way so we experience our innate value to it.
I had a United Church minister tell me the same thing years ago when we were living in Belleville, but it's something I have to re-learn. It's the contributing to the community part I think I've finally figured out to take less literally.
There are lots of ways to contribute to the community. It isn't all about making money. That's just one of our "myths of normal".
But the interpersonal relationship part is tricky too because they should be horizontal, not vertical. I think young people today are probably closest to living this way. A little trickier, maybe, the older we are.
No one person is more important than another.
I'm working on it.
I'm coming to terms with estrangement, heeding the advice of a friend.
"It isn't about you."
I play it on repeat in my head.
My older sister was estranged, decades ago now, although she was back in touch, off and on, later. With our mother dead, though, the relationship is in the past.
It's fine with everybody.
It mattered to me so much at the time but now I wonder if it was just everybody getting caught up in the drama of it all. She lashed out at my mother but then at the rest of us. I understood it with my mother, but there was no reason to lash out at the three of us, her siblings.
They didn't get along, my mother and older sister. Never had. No two queen bees in a hive.
Families can be a lot of work. Divorce can make it even trickier trying to keep everybody in the fold. I don't know what it would have been like had my father not died, but I imagine it would have been better.
It was a bit of a combat zone in my original family, I realize now. They were alike, my mother and older sister, but of different generations, with different values. There was a constant clash of wills. It didn't matter that my mother was very modern in her outlook. Growing up poor at a time when people, never mind female people, didn't have the rights we do now is such a far cry from how my siblings and I grew up.
My father didn't grow up poor but he was overseas in WWII fighting the Nazis for King and country.
The Greatest Generation was a study in trauma. The Depression, WWII, the Patriarchy.
No birth control. Women wanting careers being housewives. Men doing jobs they hated so they could provide for their families they didn't necessarily want.
We were all wanted. My kids were all wanted. That's the jackpot right there, isn't it, and yet still it's not enough.
"The war killed your father."
I thought for a long time my mother said that to my older sister who relayed it to me, but my mother might have said it to me, to calm my hypochondria. I might have been pestering her about cancer, which is what my father died from. I was obsessed with fears of cancer. That's where my eating disorder likely came from too. Cancer, cancer, cancer. Pesticides, pesticides, pesticides. Food, food, food.
Anyway, I've watched enough Dr. Gabor Maté's videos, and read his book, "The Myth of Normal", to know what my mother meant by, "The war killed your father".
It's tragic, to think of this tall, thin man, an academic who became a lawyer, fighting in a war.
I hope he at least met a woman, had some tender, loving care.
We're all being terrorized by Israel's slaughter of Palestinians and Russia's slaughter of Ukrainians. I have Facebook friends who no longer have relationships with each other because they believe one is more or less justified than the other.
They'd argue that's an over-simplification but it isn't.
Go argue theories of original sin to the war dead and its traumatized survivors.
Meanwhile, we're being trolled by Donald Trump and the Nazi architects of Project 2025, all of them owned by the Russian and/or Israeli Mobs, threatening us with invasion if we don't roll over, none of it making any sense, nobody important seeming to understand there's no arguing with trolls.
DNFtT. Do Not Feed the Trolls.
Nobody else has pointed it out, I don't think, so let me be the first. Stephen Harper constitutes foreign interference in our election. He's head of the IDU, an international laundromat for global fascism. He interfered in the American election, too, on behalf of Donald Trump.
Seize his bank account(s) someone who can, please, and apply the appropriate sanctions. Enough pretending he isn't a traitor, too, because he is.
Anyway, I don't have any answers for the state of the world these days, but I understand what my mother meant.
The war killed my father. It broke up my family. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be.
And around and around and around we go.
