When a Democracy Disintegrates, Justice Becomes a Circus Show

Robert Reich's article in the Guardian "Americans Acceptance of Trumps Behaviour Will be His Vilest Legacy" and good people will let it slip with phrases like - you can't change the world. But what they and we need to understand is people have changed the world before.

Suppose everyone believed this at the end of WWII? If Hitler had continued his killing across Europe until all that is diverse: love, struggle, despair, compassion, as it reveals itself in culture, was sent to the gas chambers? Would we realize then that the scapegoat is us?  Would we understand that the strongman's enemy is life itself? There would be no writers, no musicians, no scientists, no public intellectuals, no universities. 

Life here would be like that portrayed in Les Miserables—the struggle to survive an endless punishment. There would be no Handmaid's Tale because rape would be normalized for all women. There would be no Christmas Carol because Scrooge would be in charge.

The goal of fascism is to get rid of social conscience and you can do that by teaching people they are nothing but isolated egos competing for the most of what each of them want; that violence, competition, war, torture and greed are the natural order rather than the result of centuries of trauma and alienation.

The city would be a prison where everyone must look over their shoulders at every corner.

Yes corruption is creating a narrative with misinformation and cynicism, but imagine your world where cruelty and all its devices have no names because no-one is aware it could be different.

It still would take at least a century to kill off all living creatures and life would be unbearable for anyone who was not a narcissistic psychopath. 

I Can Do Love

 I Can Do Love

There are times when I move outward 

offer emotional band-aids to cover bruises 

and cuts, daily skirmishes where ants and worms

suffocate beneath streets paved with concrete

making every corner the exclusive domain

where economy is the ruling language, 

where racks of new clothes show exquisite colours

and showered shaved staff smile sweetly

your smooth transition—educated citizen 

to consumer where happy thoughts decorate the mall 

but the homeless and hungry are not allowed

where it is easy to look where you’re going

to find the thing you need for your ambitions 

and where it is bad manners to speak 

of anything outside business positivity

as if it’s a crime to care about those who suffer 

and where it is troublesome to express an opinion 

which does not have a solution neatly folded within

where it shatters the day to raise concerns that point 

to our social failure 

to celebrate how you have evolved 

from the cave—your ancestors 

striding through anxiety towards that distant field 

where the poet will meet you.

(from Sleep With Me: Lullaby for an Anxious Planet. Ekstasis 2020)

Losing My Mind

If I wake at four am and cannot get back to sleep

it’s because my mind insists on attention

it’s hungry for  words to record feelings

tangled in reason and memory

it screams

get me out of here!

It demands blood to break down the plaque

clinging to white cells curling around that time 

I walked home from school crying, unable to explain

just the heart pumping

“do something”

it’s broken.

I know in my organs how broken

now I must find out what IT is.

Now I must make a cogent argument in one 

or six stanzas on how and why my mind loses

the story every night when I sleep

because if I don’t do this, all the tensions

all the insights—will be eaten by maggots

in my grave and I will know then 

I am more popular than I have ever been.

It’s nature’s way of reclaiming

what was always hers

where belonging is in the universe.

Spreading the cheer of the season

 

It was a beautiful day today. First we Skyped with youngest daughter and her husband and two boys in South Africa. Their excitement on opening their new lego sets was catching and their running about so quickly is energetically inspiring.

Then we skyped with Tony's sister and brother in law in England. Learned a few things about how the UK is handling the pandemic. Pleased they look so healthy.

Then we got a call from daughter and her partner in Okanagan Falls, and put together the cubii present from them so I could exercise my legs a bit.

Later we called our son, daughter-in-law and their two kids and was energized by their happiness.

They are brimming with happiness being together.

There is no greater happiness than receiving that energy from the children you brought into world hoping they would thrive. They have all turned out to be good people and healthy.

Later we watched Scrooge for the umpteenth time while rain came down to water our garden.

Thank you to all the beings who bring joy without planning it. They beam and glow.

Granny Jackson's Story

Rachel Armand, daughter of Charles and Andries, married a Canadian Soldier in a French coastal town during the First World War. Their nine month old son was sleeping out in the courtyard of the farmhouse, when an allied bomb fell on his pram and killed him. Rachel's husband was killed too. No proof of their union remains, not even their names as the marriage and birth certificates were thrown out after Rachel died.

Rachel would prepare and deliver food to the English troops fighting on the beaches nearby. Here she met John Jackson and they married April 29th, 1919 in Marlow Parish Church, England. They came to England for a very short visit, so that Rachel could meet John's family, then return to France.

They ran a general store in St. Cecile, a village just a few miles from where they met. The front was a retail grocery that sold vegetables, sweets, and cheese made from the two goats' milk they kept to keep the grass down. At the back of the store was a big hall that served as a dance floor, and a bar where you could buy a drink. In the middle of the floor was a large stove and a trap door covering their well. Their four daughters Olive, Irene, Muriel and Dot were born in St. Cecile. Olive remembers being sent by the nurse to fetch hot water when Dot was born, and remembers her mother saying "what tiny feet she got".

One of the entertainments of that time were cock fights. Local villagers, wearing black berets and wooden clogs, smoking clay pipes, would gather in the courtyard outside the shop to lay bets on whose cock would win. To make the birds more aggressive they would give them alcoholic drinks and set them to tear their competitors apart.

The beach was a three minute walk from the house; the girls went shrimping every day and were often out to pick bunches of round grass that grew in the sand dunes on the beach. The grass would be dried and woven into chair seats.

Olive recalls one night when there was a terrible storm - thunder, lightning, rain, lashing against their windows. When they got up next morning they found many plaice stuck on the windows. It took some strength to pull them off, but when they did they enjoyed many meals.

People from surrounding village would visit the beaches on weekends to look for lead bullets. lead was valuable and could be sold for a fair price.  One busy weekend a mine was triggered.  Rachel ran to the beach tearing her petticoat into strips to make bandages.

The explosion created a huge crater and ladders were dropped to reach the injured. 

One day Olive walked along the beach, when a villager who worked at the garage offered her a sweet. He took her by the hand and encouraged her to walk with him, then carried her back to the garage. There he began to fondle her. She was about five years old at this time and terrified. She screamed, he threw her into a car, hoisted the car in the air and left swiftly. Olive kept screaming until someone rescued her. The abductor was later tried and imprisoned for six years. 

Rachel's parents had a farm three miles from St. Cecile. When you opened the front door there was a font where you dipped your hands in holy water (purchased from the Catholic Church) then made a sign of the cross before entering the house. 

Rachel's father and his brothers were fisherman. One of them lost his ability to speak after he had been badly frost-bitten during one fishing trip. 

Rachel's sister had seven sons, all of whom were killed in the 1914-18 war. 

Olive started school in Boulange, seven miles from St. Cecile, before Rachel and John decided to move back to England. When Charles Harmand found out he was very angry, and a furious row between Rachel and her father broke out in the back hall, which Olive witnessed. Charles could not persuade Rachel to stay so in a fit of rage he lifted the door to the well and tried to push her down. There she would drown and would not be able to leave France. Olive screamed, her father rushed in and managed to save Rachel before she was thrown down.

When the Jackson's came to England they lived in John's mother's little cottage in Bovingdon Green for about four months, then on Trinity Avenue in Marlow. Later they rented a house at 24 Glade Road.

When the girls started school in England they were called "frogs" because they came from France. One particularly cruel and persistent tormentor, put many live frogs down Olive's blouse. She remembers going to Church every Sunday and hearing people say "Here come the Frogs!" 

The local fishmonger slurred Rachel when she came to his shop to buy fish. She left and never returned and he lost a good customer, as this family coming from the coast, would have eaten a lot of fish.

French onion sellers would travel by ferry and bicycle to sell their onions in England. When they came to Marlow, Rachel would invite them in for food and a drink.

When John came home to find a row of bicycles parked outside the house, he was upset. To find his wife surrounded by frenchmen lost in conversation and laughter, he was annoyed, and told her to send them away. Rachel refused of course. These were friends who offered the few occasions she could chat in her native tongue. 

The Jackson's stayed at 24 Glade Road until the girls grew up, married and left home and John Jackson died. Rachel continued to live there until she became quite frail and was moved to a smaller home on Deansfield Close.

September 7, 1999

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year

 Home made tree by Lucas and Gabriel.

Thought for the day: Earlier Universe Existed Before Big Bang (Article written by Sarah Knapton)

Earlier Universe Existed Before Big Bang: Yahoo News

"An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics."

"Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six ‘warm’ points in the sky (dubbed ‘Hawking Points’) which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon."

"Sir Roger was awarded the honour alongside Professors Reinhard Gerzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and Andrea Ghez of the University of California, who proved there is a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, by studying its impact on the stars around it." 

Re: [pacifi-kana] We will miss her: Winona Baker (1924 - 2020) by Vicki McCullough

 

Winona Baker, beloved elder and exemplary haiku poet, died at home on October 23, 2020, at 96. Condolences go out to the Baker family, among them Winona’s daughter, haiku poet Helen Baker. 

 

A life-long crafter of words, Winona also loved the society of writers. Many of us in the haiku community were fortunate to spend time with her, most commonly at the former Gabriola Haiku Gathering, which took place a short ferry ride from her home in Nanaimo, BC. But Winona’s achievements in haiku also took her as far away as Toronto, Romania and Japan. In Yamagata, Japan, in 1989, she was awarded the Foreign Minister’s Prize in a contest marking the 300th anniversary of the journey Basho chronicled in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Her winning haiku:

 

moss-hung trees

a deer moves into

the hunter’s silence

 

Winona’s poetry, published worldwide, has appeared in more than 70 anthologies. Her publications include four books of haiku and senryu: Clouds Empty Themselves: Island Haiku (1991), Moss-Hung Trees: Haiku of the West Coast (1992), Even a Stone Breathes (2000), and Nature Here Is Half Japanese (2010). Winona’s writing life and accomplishments have been documented most recently in Moonflowers: Pioneering Women Haiku Poets in Canada (2020).

 

Here are a few more of Winona’s haiku . . .

 

old pond—

frog’s eggs float

in my reflection

 

fourteen photos hang

over bouquets of flowers

propped in drifted snow

[December 6 is the anniversary of the massacre, by a man, of 14 women engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989.]

 

prize sweet peas

where the outhouse was emptied

last spring

 

summer trail

a trashed car in the salal

rusting in peace

 

hike in falling leaves

the happiness

in the setter’s tail

 

he brings in the cold

a perfect snowflake melts

in his dark hair

 

Christmas card list—

so many names

crossed out

 

in the stubble

a ball of blue wool

unwinds in the wind

 

a dark path

in the graveyard

ends in a snowman

 

river

     carries light

                       to the sea

 

 

===========

Vicki McCullough

 

Moonlight Sonata

 

Moonlight Sonata 

When there is nothing left to do
the phrase of the morning has come and gone 

the rain is still coming down
a log on the fire still burning
and all the arguments that roll around
your head no longer care
what you think
it appears that voice, the sound of sadness
comforts the passion
you held onto for so long
now there is just the breath
inhaling and exhaling and nothing
left to say 

the moon will have its way
swimming across  sky
bleaching out stars
the astronomy of great speakers who, 

having studied long into their own night 

close their eyes and sleep 

their dreams like impatient goats hop 

and climb the mountain
roll down again
interrupt the rhythm of breathing 

mind doesn’t really care
about mechanics of your lungs 

or what should be done about your fingers 

so there 

(from my latest book of poems published by Ekstasis - Sleep With Me: Lullaby for an Anxious Planet)

Writing or reading poems

 

For Some Reason

Writing poems helps, maybe just me

but hopefully you too.

It calls to me … details that passed my attention

like  feathers held aloft in the breeze

and says in whispers, things don’t have to last forever

in order to be significant, and you don’t have to be

sergeant major to lead the band of your competing desires

Whatever you do, or don’t do, will go down

in the book of uncertainty for generations to come

without mentioning your name or date, 

it will sit in the library of your neural substrate

for as long as you live.

How can this be? You ask.

We are made of moments that inspire other moments

that’s all and the only thing you need to judge

is how this will inform your life.

(from Sleep With Me: Lullaby for an Anxious Planet, Janet Vickers. Ekstasis 2020)

On Mystery

 

Micah

I am not me

I am a teacher with one student

who I treat carefully

for I have been told

he is fragile and given to outbursts

might even lash out

so I let him teach me 

how to teach him.

He is young, perhaps 13

I sit by him while he teaches me

a subject I have never studied before

I dare not make a sound

not because of what he might do

but because I need to understand him.

A voice tells me his name is Micah.

Remembering 14 Women

"On Dec. 6, for the 31st year in a row, Canada will pause and remember one of the most horrifying tragedies in our modern history, when a misogynist killer took the lives of 14 young women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. He took their lives because they were women."

Elizabeth Renzetti, Globe and Mail. December 5, 2020.

All the Rage

There are two rooms

one with men writing charts

arguing over what is right and wrong

their voices rising over one another

coming through gaps in the window

where scribes wait patiently for the news

—it is their job to make sense of the noise

turn it into a narrative we can understand

and the other room where polished rocks

are inserted into charms for good luck

where no human voice can rise above  

conveyors fed by thin hungry women

hoping the floor manager does not

take a fancy to their buttocks and demand

they follow him into the closet

where the bully gets to thrust his hard

into the lives of his victims

confident the victim will be blamed

until we stop buying these little charms

for those we love.

(Sleep With Me: Lullaby for an Anxious Planet. Ekstasis 2020.)

The Failed Philosopher

 The Failed Philosopher

Some memories stick out like a photo falling out of an album

uninvited. The time a young German girl, an only child who lived

around the corner, on a council estate, in England, whose mother

gave me the first taste of yogurt, in the fifties where being German

was not popular. Aware that I was not popular like the girl

that other girls circled, and this girl was younger

by a couple of years and she sought my friendship, called across

the dell and I ignored her. She called again and I ignored her again.

Later her mother asked me why I did that and I was silent.

Then that time walking along the alley behind our house

with a girl who was older and admired, when we were attacked

by a gang who said I could go free – they wanted her not me.

Later I knocked on her door to see if she wanted to play

she answered with a bandage around her head and told me

they beat her up, dragged her by the hair, because they said

her father put their father in jail, and this girl asked why

I didn’t tell my parents, why I did nothing to help

and I was silent. In those days I had nothing to say

to myself or to them.

Was there, is there, something in me that is mean and withered?

There is no way to defend myself.

Now outrage stews in my skull for the missing and murdered women

and the evil stupid men who think they are winning when they kill

but worse than this

I don’t know what to do about it.

Like a force of nature that those who cannot know why they do or don’t do

go out and kill friendship or dragonflies. Those who need love most

but don’t deserve it are the tricksters who return me into the arms

of something else I cannot understand.

(from Infinite Power, Janet Vickers. Ekstasis 2016)

Eyes

 Yesterday I went to the eye specialist clinic for a post surgery check up. The efficiency during this pandemic time was spectacular. It was as though the staff had wings on their shoes.

The reason I was so impressed is that I suffer from a balance condition that seems to be incurable. So I cannot move fast or spin around without falling over. It's more like my limbs are folding up and giving way.

Normally such visits would be fine but lately I have found health care very stressful. Venturing out means I am dependent on my husband, to remember instructions (memory loss on top of balance issues), where to go, when to get there and when to pick me up afterward.

Watching staff move around so quickly and efficiently is very much appreciated but also it magnifies my clumsiness, my disability, my apologetic demeanour. I am, in those places — a sad little sausage.

I wonder what others see then. Do they think my condition is the result of drug addiction or alcohol consumption or poverty? Do visitors to my home think I'm a slovenly housekeeper?

That said, I am thankful to live in a place where health services are available, where doctors study for years to learn their practice, where technicians learn to read their devices, where offices are kept clean and safety protocols are established. 

It has taken centuries to get where we are today and the driving force for our current blessing is compassion. Generally we don't want to see people suffer.

Winning Prizes

 

When I enter a contest of any kind I take care not to hope that I will win. Even literary contests. Whether you place or win depends on the judges that scan the work before it even goes to the judges.

I would be delighted to win a prize for the status. But I know this is dependent on judges who have a set of values and opinions I know very little about.

A friend of mine has won many prizes and advises that I find out who the judge is and what kind of writing she likes, what is her writing like?

This is beyond me because the poets and writers I like and read, have a gift that I can't imitate. This is probably why they are famous and I am not.

I was born with the genes that produced dirty-blonde hair and grey eyes even though I wouldn't have chosen them if I had a choice.

I came into the world with certain abilities and tendencies and have spent my years attempting to overcome what I didn't like about myself. After 70 years I realize I have won the prize.

The prize is that I married a man who helped me overcome my lack of practical skills, and that we had three children who are lovable and capable, to have had friends whose help saved my life when I needed them, as well as friends I admire and wish to learn from when I grow up.

My prize has been settling into a life that accommodates my skills and weaknesses but is not perfect so that I am challenged to make some things better.

The Purpose of Life

The purpose of life is to create more life. More varied. More colourful. However the purpose of post paleolithic life is to survive.

Competing forces make survival a game of winning and losing. 

A pecking order is created by the pecking order with most of the privilege going to the top and most of the suffering going to the bottom.

The myth is to believe we are self-made and when we win or lose it's our fault, we have failed.

We are atomized and cooperation is forced or broken down.

There is a lot of pain and a lot of undocumented pain. 

I personally think it is valuable to be aware of the world and its parts as much as it helps to be aware of the systems of oppression.

In creating more life the earth must be protected and cherished. It's not so much creating more babies as creating the intricate social system that reveres life.

A Christmas Story Written By Naomi Wakan

(Because I love this story I republish third year in a row. Thank you Naomi for being my inspiration.)

 A few words first, in order to give a setting to my small Christmas story. I, a non-observing Jew and a retired Toronto therapist, bought, with my husband Eli, a country school-house in the small village of Stirling, Ontario. We were totally alien to country life and, indeed, since we purchased the schoolhouse in late winter, did not even know whether the schoolyard, under deep snow at the time of purchase, was asphalt, or grass. We just saw the swings, the roundabout, the see-saw, the large schoolroom with a blackboard running down one wall and we were immediately seduced into buying a building totally inadequately insulated for an Ontario winter, and totally unsuited to residential life.

We also were uncertain as to what we might be doing in order to pay the schoolhouse’s ridiculously high-rate mortgage, but what we did know was that somehow we wanted to experience life in a village, and, for that, we were soon to discover, we would have to go to church. As recent Buddhist drop-outs and keen non-observers, we were reluctant to take this step, but the lure of singing in the small church choir overcame our resistance, and soon, each Sunday, we were to be seen donning black gowns with odd gold-drapery collars and belting out “Nearer my God to thee,” “Eternal Father strong to save” and other such oldies and goldies.

We had taken up residence in the schoolhouse in the summer and that Fall our little choir was busy practicing carols for the Christmas services. I was an amazingly keen participant in all this, perhaps because, as a young girl, I had been excluded from Christian assembly every day for six years at the girls’ high school that I attended. As one of a handful of Jewish students, I was only allowed into assembly after the Christian prayers had been sung, so that I might hear the notices of the day. In the line-up of girls slinking in belatedly (besides the Jewish ones) were the girls who had been given a detention or had been caught fraternizing in the local GI camp. Now, in my little village, at last I was being allowed to be party to the Christian mysteries.

I can barely remember, but think “Hark the Herald Angels”, “In the Bleak Mid-winter” and “Silent Night” were certainly among the carols the choir practiced. 

Come the Sunday service before the holidays, a day selected for the choir to perform in all their black and gold glory, the snow descended as only the snow can descend in an Ontario winter. By the time Eli and I had donned, sweaters, trousers, boots, jackets, scarves and gloves, the snow was almost to our knees. The phone lines were down, of course, and our pump had ceased to function making us a little ashamed that we were going to church unwashed, but hoped we would be forgiven by he/she who forgives all.

The little church perched on the top of a hill from our schoolhouse, and it seemed to bob up and down as we dragged first one boot, then the other out of the deep snow. It was a good ten minutes of slogging that usually short climb, before we carefully pulled ourselves up the steps of the church.

It was surprisingly cozy inside. The farmer’s wife from the farm adjoining the church volunteered to come in and keep the place dusted, stoke the furnace, arrange seasonal flowers, play the organ and, in fact, do everything save give the sermon. She greeted us rather abruptly with the news that the service was cancelled as the minister couldn’t make it over from his lodgings in a nearby village, since the snow ploughs weren’t out yet. She doubted that any parishioners would turn up and seemed about to usher us out.

I, however, a new and devoted country woman, and almost as devoted choir member, was not about to be dismissed so abruptly. I had promised to perform and to perform I would, audience, or no audience. I should mention here that a few of my aunts had vague theatrical connections (one of them played piano to accompany silent movies) and my grandfather’s cousin had a gypsy orchestra so my showbiz roots weren’t too far away and “the show must go on” was somewhere engraved on my skeleton.

Persuasive as I can be when I want something to happen, I ushered her over to the organ to prepare, while Eli and I slipped into our gold and black horrors. She and I had a slightly heated un-Christian conversation about what we would sing to the non-existent congregation. For some reason, although the choir hadn’t chosen to include it in their program as it wasn’t Christmasy, I suddenly had a strong desire to sing “The Church in the Wildwood.” The farmer’s wife was taken aback and refused my earnest pleas, saying that it wasn’t in the United Church songbook. I turned aside, sulking a bit, and muttered the words to myself:

“Come to the church by the wildwood. Oh, come to the church in the vale. No spot is so dear to my childhood as the little brown church in the vale.”

I had no idea where this desire of mine to sing “Church in the Wildwood” had arisen from since I was brought up in the honky-tonk seaside town of Blackpool, nowhere near any vale, or dale come to that.

I halted my mumbling suddenly, remembering that this was supposed to be the season of goodwill, so I agreed with the farmer’s wife, and also with Eli (who had disloyally sided with her), in the decision that we would stay with “Hark the Herald Angels,” “In the Bleak Mid-winter”, and “Silent Night.” Eli and I proceeded to render them best as we could; although neither of us could get anywhere near the high note towards the end of “Silent Night.” The hollow church echoed our voices, bouncing them from stained-glass window to stained glass window.

As the word “peace” did its final echoing, I found myself moving towards the pulpit and, standing there, I started to give thanks. I thanked the empty pews for welcoming us to their village, and I thanked them again for allowing us to sing in their choir, and buy their farm milk and eggs, and shop for other basics at the little village store. And looking out over the ghostly empty church, I found myself thanking God for my sturdy body, imaginative brain and the good life I had been given. And I, a Jew, whose grandparents had never spoken English, at least not in a way that made any sense to me, and someone who had no idea what the word “God” meant, suddenly found the tears running down my cheeks at the joy of being able to share this moment with my dear husband and the farmer’s wife.

And looking over to my favourite stained-glass window, a window in which Jesus was carrying a new born lamb, it seemed to me as if he too nodded towards me in some kind of union.

Naomi Beth Wakan

She and her husband moved to Gabriola in 1996 and opened a studio, Drumbeg House Studio, where Elias makes wood sculpture and Naomi painted, wrote and did fabric art. During this period Naomi moved from writing books geared to children to books for an adult market. She did five books of poetry and essays for Wolsak and Wynn (Segues, Composition, Late Bloomer, Book Ends and A Roller-coaster Ride).

(first posted on this site December 27, 2018)