Quiver

In previous entries (see the archives) I talked about Sigmund Freud’s theory that all humans have a death instinct, which he called Thanatos (the Greek word for death.) He also thought that we possess an opposing life force, which he called Eros that often took the form of sexual impulses. I took his ideas and developed a theory about the psychology of global warming where I speculated that humanities’ destruction of the environment was this death instinct manifesting in a species-wide suicide attempt.

Now I take it one step further and look at how both Eros and Thanatos combine in war to illustrate how the two work together in a tremendous force of human ruin. All it takes is a simple Wikipedia search to reveal that historically, the male penis has been the greatest weapon of mass destruction known to humanity. It has been used throughout the ages as both an instrument of torture and the ultimate male weapon of war.

World War two has the dubious distinction of being labeled the greatest mass rape in the history of the world. Estimates of the number of rapes reach into the millions with men, women and children from ages eight to 80 being raped. Many of the rapes were repeated over and over, sometimes as many as 70 or 80 times. The number of women thought to have died as a result climbed into the hundreds of thousands. In terms of the American military, the only ones likely to ever be punished were black soldiers.

The international aid organization Save the Children recently issued a report stating that the majority of rape victims in current war torn Africa are children under the age of 18. These include both boys and girls who are not only repeatedly raped, but sexually tortured.

The Journal of the American Association Medicine states that rapes “commonly include not only enemy civilians and troops, but also allied and national civilians and even comrades in arms.” Gender is irrelevant in these acts of violence with men in some parts of the world reporting that 70 percent of male political prisoners and 80 percent of men in concentration camps being raped or sexually battered.

Some reports indicate that Japanese officials tried to reduce the number of random rapes by introducing a system of “comfort women,” essentially women forced into sexual slavery to serve men associated with the military. These women were either abducted or recruited under false pretenses into a brothel system where they may have been raped by a hundred or more men a day. A full three quarters of these women died, either from direct trauma or disease.

Some argued the system of comfort women did not reduce the number of rapes, but rather increased it. Others said they were offered to lessen the chances of revolt by unhappy servicemen who did not want to continue to fight in the military. Regardless, the truth of what happened was kept secret for many years after the war as the political leadership fought to keep their shame from the public and avoid responsibility.

The question of why this happens and how it relates to a theory of Thanatos and climate change may not be immediately obvious. But the link is clear nonetheless. It is about a total perversion of healthy Eros into a culture of Thanatos and death values.

What we see is the masculinization of death, cruelty and sexual sadism and the feminizing of victimization. Historian Susan Browmiller called it the expression of male contempt for women in the ultimate male only club of the military. It is thought that male soldiers used rape both as a weapon as well as a tool to prove their own masculinity in the context of a supremely aggressive and violent atmosphere where the strong survive and the weak quickly perish.

Not only is sexual violence seen as a means of proving one’s self, but it is used as a reward for men attempting to conquer a weaker enemy. “To the victor goes the spoils,” is the saying, with the weak being the sexual spoils of those with the power of brute force.

Rape is also conceived as a tool to lesson the morale of the enemy and to increase the morale of one’s own military serviceman. In one recent war in Africa, the conquering general issued an order to rape every man, woman and child encountered along the way as a means of crushing the rebellious spirit of the defeated peoples.

The resulting injuries to the victim are not only physical, psychological and emotional, but also spiritual, political and cultural. In some countries, a rape victim is thought to bring shame upon a family and is either cast out or killed. This lessons family and cultural bonds adding to the psychic defeat of a culture and people.

Rape has been used in various ways as long as warfare itself has existed. Historian Harold Washington says in ancient time war itself was imagined as rape and that cities attacked are its victims. He further argued that it happened in the context of stereotypes of men and women and what is considered masculine and feminine.

The traditional prohibitions against homosexuality and pedophilia are cast aside in the context of war and seen not as an act of sexual pleasure, but rather an act of aggression and an expression of power. It is not done for fun, but rather as a means of punishing the weak.

It is also a classic expression of Thanatos because it seeks to destroy all life-affirming values by crushing the spirit of the victims and initiating a cycle of self-destruction in the violated. It is literally sowing the seeds of Thanatos in the next generation by destroying the will to live in the most vulnerable of all the conquered peoples, the children.

Soldiers and the military institutions they belong to are committing, at least in practice if not theory, to the death values of Thanatos and the distortion and perversion of the life-affirming nature of Eros. It is a culture of death, murder, torture, sexual sadism, destruction and cruelty. It results in the unrestrained expression of Thanatos and a full rerouting or Eros into its negative counterpart, sexual cruelty and perversion.

The Iraq war is an excellent example of how this all relates to my theory of species-wide suicide. The Iraq war was ostensibly about preventing Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Those who tried to argue differently were widely mocked at the time. By now, in light of everything that is known about the situation, leaders who were part of the invasion discussions in the White House admit that securing a stable source of cheap oil for America was definitely part of the rationale for the war.

It is interesting that a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, lead to untold billions in destruction, numerous torture scandals and war rape stories, was the result of a desire to control the very means by which humanity plans to extinguish itself- fossil fuels. The Allied forces killed everything and everyone that stood in the way of them possessing the means necessary for them to kill themselves, which is a classic murder-suicide in the Thanatos sense.

I was standing at the bus stop last night as I often do. This young man who looked like he might have a slight developmental handicap approached one of the other people waiting. He told the man he was a dollar short for the bus and asked if he could he spare some change.

The man was irritated and told him no. The young fellow then proceeded to ask all of the other people one by one. I heard him and each time he asked for a dollar to get on the bus. Mostly people were annoyed with his somewhat aggressive style and everyone told him no.

Then it was my turn. I saw him look me over and size me up as he got to me. I had already decided I was going to give him the change in my pocket and had it in my hand. But then he did it.

He checked me out carefully once more and then asked me for two dollars. This immediately made me mad and I challenged him instantly. “You needed one dollar with the last guy. Do I look like an easy mark to you?”

He got smart. “Okay, then. If you want me to ask for a dollar I’ll ask for a dollar. Do you have a buck?” I was really peeved and told him I didn’t like being scammed and I wasn’t giving him anything. He said he was sorry if I thought that and headed to the next person.

A minute later I saw him stopping cars that were trying to drive through the parking lot behind us. He was quite bold and seemingly very desperate.

It reminded me of the time last winter when a man came up to me. He said he had a bus transfer that was good for an hour and he held it up to show me. He then asked if I would give him my cash bus fare, that way he could use the money for food and I could still get on the bus. It appeared to be a win-win situation.

But what he didn’t count on was the fact that I looked closely at the transfer he was holding. He was trying to cover up the date on it with his finger, but he missed it by a bit. It was an old transfer from a previous day. It was expired and useless. Worse, if I had tried to use it to get on the bus there would have been an embarrassing scene and I would have been left on the side of the road.

When I told the man no he got very angry and yelled at me. “I hope you never need help in your life,” he shouted. It seemed pretty rich to me. Here the guy was trying to screw me and now he was laying a guilt trip on me for not falling for it.

This latest incident comes on the heels of an exchange I had with a man a couple of weeks ago. We were also waiting for the bus and he had just crossed the street from the beer store and he approached me, clearly in a very agitated state.

“What do you think, man?” he asked. He then proceeded to tell me of the confrontation he just had with a stranger. He had gone up to the man on the street saying he was short a dime for the bus. The man gave him a quarter.

Unfortunately for him, the man was heading in the same direction as him. The guy ended up behind him in line at the beer store where they were both getting beer. “So you needed bus fare?” the one guy said.

The other man was so furious at being challenged on his dishonestly, especially in front of all those people, that he lost his temper and began to argue with the guy. “I felt like throwing the quarter in the guy’s face. I mean, Christ, it’s a fucking quarter,” buddy said to me.

I asked him about the principle at issue, he had lied to get the money. He wasn’t very impressed with me at that moment but said he had no choice but to lie, people won’t help you if you tell the truth. The only way to get the money is to lie. He then asked me what I would do.

I told him if he asked me for a dime for beer, I’d give it to him if I had it and probably laugh about it. But if I thought he was scamming me for some reason, I wouldn’t give him a cent. He fell silent for a moment and said nothing else to me as he got on the bus as it arrived right then.

The bottom line for me is that I don’t consider myself to be a miserly or ungenerous person, I will help you out if I think you need it and I can. But I don’t like being taken advantage of. I don’t like it one bit.

I’m sorry that situations like these make me not want to help people generally, but that’s exactly what they do- and that is a real shame.

I remember a particularly obese woman who got on the bus one day. It was incredible, no doubt, how someone could get that large. Everyone was staring at her, half in disbelief and half in self-satisfied amusement.

I had a similar reaction to a man I saw at the gym one day. He had to be over 500 pounds, missing several teeth with purple legs and feet, likely caused by the diabetes he suffered from as a result of his obesity.

I was in the pool when he walked onto the deck in his bathing suit, putting it all on display. I was shocked and yet fascinated in the same way that I tend to stare at car accidents and road kill.

I admit I wasn’t too thrilled when he got into the hot tub with me later. But then I spoke with him at length and got to know him a bit. It didn’t take me long to learn that every ounce of the weight on his body represented a pound of pain for a deeply wounded human being.

We talked a long time and eventually he told me his “life story.” He was raised by adoptive parents after his 16-year-old mother gave him up at birth. She had been at a party and ended up being raped by another drunken teenager and found herself pregnant as a result. Unable to care for the child on her own, she gave up the boy immediately after birth.

Apparently, her friends and family felt she should not have had the child. Then the man spoke the saddest words I have ever heard anyone say, “ I was the baby everyone agreed should have been an abortion.”

It was with those few words that I came to understand him. His soul had been mortally wounded by the truth of his birth and his sorrow had molded itself into the mountain of pain I saw before me.

I’ve been doing a lot of talking to people lately and I’ve realized something important. We are all the walking wounded. There aren’t any of us who have escaped the cruelty of this world and not been injured by its aggression.

One man I talked to was a most disagreeable sort. He argued and fought with people constantly. He was a miserable man who spread his unhappiness around like a cold germ. Then he revealed the source of his pain. His father had sexually abused him as a small child and he thought about it and the betrayal it represented every single day. He is now a senior citizen and only just beginning the healing process.

The fact of the matter is we all have been injured in one way or another to some extent. The nature of our wounds varies from person to person, but we are all hurting- every one of us without exception. No one is truly happy. I don’t think that true and lasting happiness is even possible in this realm of existence.

The unfortunate reality is that we pass our misery on from one generation to the next just as surely as we pass our very genetic code on to our offspring. Most of us never get the help we need or gain the insight necessary to recover from the suffering inflicted on us. The result is that we are unable to transcend our victimization and we transfer the only existence we know off onto everyone around us, especially our most vulnerable- the children.

In some ways human beings are remarkably resilient creatures able to carry on in the face of overwhelming odds. Yet at the same time we are as delicate as tissue paper easily torn to shreds by a harsh world.

Human beings continue to perpetrate the most unspeakable crimes against each other, animals and the environment. But it does not happen in a vacuum and without its causes. We are seriously damaged by the world we live in and yet we have next to no insight into our own inner workings. It is because of this that the problem persists.

One great philosopher once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I would add that it is the unexamined life that perpetuates this terrible cycle of abuse forever. Until we look deep within and come to understand the source of our personal pain, we will forever be destined to inflict the same suffering on everything and everyone around us.

I read in the paper about this woman who lost her wedding ring. She was walking by a homeless man on the street and decided to help him out. She dumped her change purse into his cup and walked away.

The next day she realized that her ring was missing. She had totally forgotten that she had taken the ring off and put it in her change purse. She ran back to the man.

She told him she might have accidently given him something of great personal value. “Was it your wedding ring?” the homeless man asked. Then he handed it back to her and wished her well.

The woman’s husband was so overjoyed by the man’s honesty that he wanted to do something to reward him. He started a website to collect donations for the guy. Before all was said and done, they had collected more than $150, 000 to give to the man.

Later the same day after reading this story, I went for a coffee at the donut shop around the corner. As I sat down I noticed a young couple surrounded by bags and bags of stuff. I quickly deduced they were homeless and the bags were full of their belongings.

They looked very upset, like something bad had just happened. At that moment two men walked in the door and saw they were distressed. “By any chance did you lose your wallet?” the man asked the homeless guy. The young woman burst into tears and they both were over joyed. They said that was all the money they had in the world and they also couldn’t replace the contents of the wallet if they had to.

The young couple thanked the men over and over again. The man who returned the wallet was obviously happy that he had helped the guy out and it was a moment of happiness for everyone.

Stories like these are outnumbered a thousand to one on most days. But they are more important than all the stories of murder and mayhem put together.

That’s because everyone knows what is wrong with the world. What we forget is what is right with it. If it weren’t for all the good people quietly going about their lives doing good deeds, the world would have fallen apart long ago. It is people like these who keep the world turning.

Imagine if there were no good left in the world. What kind of place would it be? No one would ever enjoy a happy and safe day again.

While it is true the world can often seem like a dark place, the reality is that there is more light than we realize. We just have to take off our blinders, let it in and see it for what it is.

It was a bloody hell of a blizzard, actually. It also had to be minus 15 or more. It was pretty, but it was also damn messy and frigging cold.

I was literally just walking up to the bus stop when I saw the clerk from the variety store come out of the back door into the alley way. He was half carrying and half dragging an old man.

Then without warning, he just let the old man drop to the ground and said, “Just have a little rest, buddy.” Then he walked away and went back into the store, just leaving the old man lying on the ground. He wasn’t moving and his coat was half way up leaving his stomach and back exposed to the weather.

There was a rather good looking young man talking on his cellphone and we just looked at each other incredulously. “Did you see that,” I said. “The guy just dumped him there.” He looked at the man and replied, “We can’t really just leave him there, it’s freezing out here.”

I said we should call an ambulance. The man ended his call and phoned 911. The dispatcher asked some questions and said they would be right there. I told the young man if he had to go I would stay until they got there.

There had to be a half dozen other people waiting at the bus stop. They would all steal the occasional glimpse of what was going on, but were going to great lengths to pretend not to notice anything was wrong. Passersby would stare. Sometimes you could see they were debating whether or not to get involved, but they mostly decided not to and just kept going.

The one bus driver stopped his bus and got off to use the washroom in the store. He walked right past us, looked down at the man and then kept on walking. I could read the look on his face. He was debating whether or not to ask what was wrong, but he was clearly in a hurry and decided in the end not to trouble himself.

One guy came up and asked us what was going on. We told him we didn’t know but the clerk just dumped the guy on the street. He shook his head and said that was terrible, but good for us for helping the man. We told him we had it under control and he left shaking his head at the crowd of people carefully minding their own business.

Then we heard the sirens coming. The next thing we knew they drove right past us and were suddenly headed in the wrong direction. My young friend ran to chase them and brought them back.

When the ambulance drivers got out they asked me what the problem was. I said I didn’t know what was wrong with the man, he had just been left here. Then he got a look at the guy.

“Ah, jeez,” the paramedic said. I asked him what was up. “This is the third time tonight we’ve picked this guy up and brought him to the hospital.”

I asked him what they were going to do with him now. “Pick him up and take him back again,” the man said to me. He then thanked us and said we could leave and they would deal with things.

I had missed my bus by this point so I went into the store to sit and have a coffee. I couldn’t help but think about what had happened.

I guess if there is a moral to the story it is that we should be grateful. We should be grateful that we aren’t homeless and totally unwanted, tossed out on the street in the middle of winter. Grateful we are not seen as a human waste of skin that no one wants or cares about and that no one will take care of.

It was just a sad thing to witness. But I’m sure not all that unusual in the scheme of things, which makes it all the more tragic.

This time it is animal rights under attack. Humans are awful when it comes to our subjugation of everything on the planet to satisfy our whims. It’s bad enough what we’ve done to the environment, but the suffering we have inflicted on lesser creatures is truly a horror beyond imagination.

Animal rights activists have worked tirelessly with great determination with only minimal results to show for their efforts. People have been steadfast in their refusal to elevate animals to the level of living souls with basic rights. We inflict all manner of cruelty upon them in the name of cheap cheeseburgers.

One of the greatest gains made by activists has been to change the perception of fur from high fashion to generally unfashionable. There has always remained a residual trade for the most intransigent, but for the most part the wearing of fur had come to be seen as a bloody crime. Not anymore.

It was slow at first, one or two here and there. But then the full extent of the problem became clear to me. I saw a couple of kids from my university wearing fur trim on their coats. Then I noticed it wasn’t just a few. It was positively everywhere. The “in” thing this winter is fur.

A fur trim is the most common fashion statement. But people are also wearing fur hats, gloves, scarves, and even full fur coats. Fur is all the rage. What a sad testament to just how easily we can lose all the gains decent men and women have worked so hard for.

A few fashion designers decide they want to bring back the barbaric practice of the fur trade, and nearly overnight we are back to square one. Let’s not forget what this means.

Many of these animals are farmed in unimaginable conditions, housed in cramped cages in their own waste, unable to move around and never allowed to see the light of day. When they are ready for “harvest” in terms of their fur, they are killed, often by having a probe inserted into their anus and being electrocuted-or else they are drowned to so as not to damage the product.

Those are the ones that are farmed. The ones caught in the wild face an equally horrid end. They are usually snared in leg clamps that render them unable to escape, but that do not generally kill them. They are left to linger, bleed and suffer for days or more until someone comes along to club them to death. It is not uncommon for these animals to attempt to chew their own legs off to try to free themselves.

A few weeks ago a couple of modelesque female activists from PETA descended on one of my local downtown intersections. They were clad only in skimpy bikinis and angel wings. They were trying to attract attention to themselves so they could highlight the plight of animals trapped in the fur trade.

They did get some media coverage, and the attention of a few passersby who stopped to talk, but mostly it was a Playboy moment of female objectification. Men passing by in cars honked, hooted and shouted “nice ass” to the women. They took it all in stride, saying their suffering in the freezing cold temperatures and the chilly reception of cold hearts was a small price to pay to lesson the suffering of the animals.

Yet here we are witnessing the near total reversal of all the work that has taken place over decades and decades. It happened in the blink of an eye with hardly a moment’s hesitation in the face of blind and unscrupulous consumerism.

I want to add a word of caution to this sad story. Don’t think these reversals can’t just as easily happen on other fronts. You would be naive to think the return or fascism, the decline of civil liberties and end of progressive human rights can’t happen just as fast and without warning.

I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who once remarked that, “The tree of liberty has to be watered periodically with blood.”

The line up was originally fairly short, no more than 6 or 7 people ahead of me. But they piled up at the back of the line pretty fast. Soon there must have been almost 20 people in the queue.

After only a minute or two, an elderly woman using a walker came in. The staff person told her she could sit on the chair that was beside me and wait her turn. I noticed when she slowly made her way past me that she was probably wearing adult diapers and they needed to be changed.

I caught the woman’s eye and when she said hello I told her she could go ahead of me in line if that made it easier for her. She smiled real big and thanked me profusely. I was completely unprepared for what happened next.

The two women behind me practically had a meltdown. The one young woman in her early 20’s especially had a fit. “I’m glad you speak for all of us,” she snapped at me. Then the slightly older woman she was with spoke up, “Yes, I’m glad you asked our permission before you did that,” she said.

I could hardly believe it. I tried to keep my voice low and asked them what their problem was. “It’s nice you think you run the place and make the decisions around here,” she said to me.

The old woman heard the kerfuffle and said she didn’t want to upset the apple cart and she would wait her turn. I looked at her and said I was sorry; that I guess a little common courtesy for a senior was too much to ask. This raised hackles with the two women.

They were starting to make me mad. I turned to all the people in line, knowing full well each and every one of them heard everything and had stayed out of it, and in a really loud voice asked what was wrong with them. “She is an elderly woman with a handicap, is it too much for you to let her go ahead?”

Not one person made eye contact. They just looked up, down and everywhere but at me. The woman in front of me chimed in: “Really, it’s not a big deal,” she said to everyone.

Then the one young woman behind me nearly lost it. “My uncle is dying in the hospital, I don’t have time for this.” I just looked at her and said it was obviously so urgent that she be by his side that she stopped to renew her driver’s license in the middle of a busy afternoon at a government office. She just about blew her stack.

Her companion quickly tried to calm her and when she couldn’t she insisted the lady go and wait in the car. As she left she started screaming at the clerk behind the counter and pointing at me. When she realized the clerk wasn’t going to get involved, she stormed out.

Then the one woman suddenly became all apologetic and said her friend was under a lot of stress because of her sick uncle and of course the old woman could go first. The old woman was clearly embarrassed and no longer wanted to trouble anyone, but she went ahead anyway and no one said anything.

After I left, I asked a few people if I was really so wrong to do what I did. They said not wrong exactly, but not right, either. They told me I should have either asked the other people or given her my spot and went to the back of the line.

That bothered me. They insisted I either had to have permission to do what I thought was obviously the right thing, or I alone should have been the one to do it and pay the price.

I still think I was right and I’m not sorry. But I can also tell you I will certainly be reluctant to do it again. Pity the next old woman who comes along, and pity me for being afraid to do the right thing in the future.

I have always that he was a decent man and it struck me what a good dad he was caring for his daughter the way he does. But then we got into a conversation about organic foods and he expressed his doubt that he was doing the right thing after all.

You see, while my friend may be a nice guy, he is no fool. He knows that Canada, like a lot of countries, has an organic regulation scheme in place that seems designed to promote increased profits rather than healthy, ethically produced foods.

I have to admit that he is more right than wrong about this. When the Canadian prime minister introduced the new organic standards in 2009 he was quoted in the papers saying, “There is a lot of money to be made here.” Such a comment did not inspire confidence in me that the government had the right motives in mind when laying down the new rules.

When my young vegan friend was over one day he noticed my free-range eggs in the fridge. He laughed at me and asked, “So, how much did you pay for those?” The fact is they are more than twice the amount of regular eggs, but I told him it was worth it to me not to cause the hens to suffer.

He looked at me like I was a handicapped six-year-old and explained that free-range just meant they were let out of their cages for an hour a day and had a window in the barn. He said that if they were labeled “free run” they actually were able to roam freely. He said you had to be educated if you were going to bother being responsible.

I thought it was grossly unfair that I would be misled in this way. Here I was trying to do the right thing and someone just wanted to profit off my good intentions. But now I know that’s how the game is played and that is what they do.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the rules for organic food in Canada on the Internet. It took about one minute of digging to begin to see these regulations had holes you could drive a truck through.

First of all, to be certified organic food the ingredients need only be 95% organic. I immediately thought to myself, “What the hell is that? “ Five percent poison is quite sufficient to wreck the whole deal as far as I was concerned.

The next thing they said was that to be certified organic in this country the food must not be treated with certain pesticides, herbicides or rat poisons. But they noted that the food did not necessarily have to be free from these substances because the government recognizes that the soil and water the food grows in will likely be contaminated.

The fact is there is no clean earth and water anymore and they realize that is beyond the control of individual farmers and exempt them from the toxins regulations for this reason. So as long as they did not add the poison themselves, the fact that it is there does not prevent them from calling it an organic product.

So there you have it. You can spend two or three times as much money on organic food for your kid, but the only thing you can guarantee by doing so is a big fat profit for somebody. It didn’t take these guys long to take an industry ostensibly built on changing the way things are done, and turning it into a corrupt money making enterprise.

Some days you’ve just got to ask yourself what the point in trying is. But that is the wrong attitude to take. We always have to try, even if the bastards seem to continually stay one step ahead of us.

I had a lot of questions for my friend. I started with my assertion that Christianity was basically a death cult where the best things in life come after you die. I suggested to my friend that this fact would cause people to see this life as somewhat irrelevant and not be concerned with the consequences of their actions in the here and now.

He said this was a flawed assertion. The fact is that most people are indeed very concerned with the here and now because of one simple fact- they doubt the truth of their own beliefs. Faith is by definition a belief that exists in the absence of proof. Thus many Christians struggle to find certainty in what they believe.

They look around the world and see many contradictions in what they are told. My friend said that once Christianity became inseparable from both capitalism and the power structure of governments, they became irreparably corrupted and twisted to suit the goals of the capitalist state. Therefore many sincere Christians look around today and see how religion is used to further the aims of the power structure and they cannot reconcile what they see with what they are told Christianity stands for.

He said many faithful wonder to themselves if what they are being told is really the truth; it all seems too good to be true- eternal bliss in heaven after a short stint here in hell, and all you have to do is believe. Only problem is, many don’t. There are just too many things that don’t add up.

The result, according to my friend, is a kind of bifurcated strategy of life and religion where people hedge their bets. They’re not really sure about all this after life stuff, so they decide to get what they can while they are here and simultaneously profess their love of Christ just in case that whole angle turns out to be true.

The result is what bothered me from the beginning, the hypocritical, two-faced Christian who said one thing and did another. After my buddy explained to me how he thought their whole logic worked, it made a little bit more sense to me. It wasn’t so much that they were hypocritical in their beliefs so much as they lacked a real sense of conviction about what they thought was really true. Thus enters the old saying, “those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.”

People who are unsure of what to really believe in will adapt their beliefs to suit their needs in the moment and can easily rationalize the contradictions all away. My friend kept going on about how Christianity has been watered down and perverted to the point where it is barely recognizable as Christianity at all. I rather thought this was a cop out.

It seems to me very convenient to simply say that anything you don’t like about Christianity is merely a distortion and not actually an inherent flaw with the entire belief structure. I have no idea what Christianity is supposed to look like in its pure form. But, really, who the hell does? But it makes for easy preaching if you can simply dismiss what you don’t like.

I don’t know that in the end my friend succeeded in convincing me about the “true nature” of Christianity, but he did make some good points and left me with much to think about. What are your thoughts on the subject?

History is full of examples where major shifts in societal thinking and regulation take place because of a handful of very noisy troublemakers. Today I was reading how a complete revolution in the Canadian judicial system happened at the beginning of the 20th century, largely due to the work of two activists.

Many years later, their work was mostly undone by a small group of pesky counter-activists who wanted to see things done differently. Thus the pendulum swung in one direction because of a couple of unhappy people and then swung back because the efforts of a handful of equally unhappy conservative types.

Canada is currently witnessing something remarkable with the birth of the Idle No More movement. It started in October with small protests by members of the native population angry about the treatment of aboriginal peoples and the rolling back of environmental protections in violation of First Nations treaties.

They began slow and quickly built momentum. Their protests grew bigger and more disruptive. They blocked transport routes and modes of mass transportation, shut down border crossings and brought havoc to city streets during their marches. They were generally a serious pain in the ass.

The major difference I see between these guys and the Occupy movement is one of intent. The Idle No More people are dead serious and they’re willing to do what it takes to get the job done. If that means shutting down areas of the Canadian economy, breaking the law and risking arrest, they won’t hesitate.

The Occupy Movement on the other hand was preoccupied with being nice. They were determined to follow the rules and instructions of the very people they were protesting and few of them either wanted to break the law or risk arrest.

They seemed to completely forget that the very definition of civil disobedience requires that they disobey authority, not quietly do as they are told. It seems completely counter productive to rise up and demonstrate just how passive you are.

Laws are made by powerful people primarily to protect the interests of powerful people and they generally reflect the values and mores of those very elites. Just because the law is the law doesn’t make it fair and doesn’t make it just. It was once legal to beat your slaves and illegal for women to vote.

Rosa Parks broke the law of the day by refusing to give up her seat on the bus. She was considered a criminal in her time and sent to prison. Now those laws are nearly universally seen as unjust and she is viewed as a heroine for disobeying them.

The Idle No More movement has managed in a very short period of time to bring the Conservative government to its knees. They forced the prime minister himself to the table to hear their demands. And make no mistake about it, those were demands.

One of the chiefs pointed out that they had both the warriors and the momentum to bring this country’s economy to a halt and they were not coming to the table “to make requests.” Despite the fact that they likely do not enjoy favor with the majority of Canadians, they don’t care. They are getting what they want, not by politely asking for it, but by taking it. They are determined to get back what was taken from them the same way they were deprived of it- by force if necessary.

I’m sick of hearing people say nothing can be done about the environment, poverty, health care etc. The only reason nothing can be done is because nothing is what people are doing.

The time has come. This is our last chance. If you believe in something, stand up and fight for it.