I Moved Among Less Honest People

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got dishonesty? 

Getting you down?

Back when I lived with a prostitute I had an adult best friend. Friends are good. 

As children, many of us had a best friend, remember? As adults, few of us have one. But there I was, with a self-described best friend, “Jodie.” In our relationship, because she had small children, I always visited her; she never visited me. The closest Jodie ever got to my door was when she had her limousine stop across the road to pick me up. Keep an eye on that limo, I’ll get back to it.

I knew Jodie during the years I happily lived with two sex trade workers. Call them “Kim and Casey.” They weren’t old or hard-bitten; no, they were young and sociable, just a little older than the fresh-faced students up and down our street: We three lived on “duplex row,” a street of students. Because Kim, Casey and I knew each other before we moved in together we got along fine. For me, the worst part was visitors making tiresome references to the TV show Three’s Company. Tiresome. 

The women would always forget I was older, they told me, except at odd times when I showed my age with a comment like, “Real men don’t wear pink.” Once I said, “I tell people we play rap music” and then they proceeded to tell me no, there were lots of types of music such as “hip hop” and so forth. “Oh. I just thought it was all rap.”

Honesty counts. Lately, I’ve been thinking of those days when I had four ladies in my life: my best friend, two roommates, and a girlfriend. I’ve been thinking back on how our characters made our destinies.

I was not yet ready to face a counsellor because I was too fearful, and also too unsure of any need for therapy, but at least I was attending a self-help group. At least I had a full-time job, but— I could have been doing better. 

I tried to be honest, while my being “insecure” (as my boss phrased it) meant I was not “getting my act together” as fast as I could have. My girlfriend was insecure too. I would stay the night at her place, but never she at my place, nor visit me except when the others weren’t around. She said I wasn’t supposed to tell Jodie about her. Too bad, because Jodie, besides surely giving me vital relationship advice, would have swiftly spotted my girl’s “manipulation,” while my girlfriends’s dishonesty, which dragged her down in her life, was something I didn’t truly discover until after the end of our relationship, after others told me. (An older friend told me she was glad for me, as I was feeling “post break-up,” that we had broken up)

It was at a self-help group which met at a downtown hospital that I met my best friend. She was wearing a cotton dress that day. (Usually she wore jeans) Jodie and I stood on the sidewalk after the meeting, talking excitedly and knowing we would become friends. I relished Jodie’s enthusiasm for life—and found she was a good hugger. Soon I was spending time at her place, while her two young kids decided to call me “Uncle Sean.” Jodie told me she liked it when I hugged her in front of her kids because then it sent a message to them that she was OK.

My friend was on Social Assistance, but was slow to use that assistance to advance her life. “Case workers,” she told me, “are like angry parents: You can only ask for one thing at a time.” I suspected her social worker was useless as a counsellor. 

Jodie’s still-developing character, I came to realize, was why her attendance at any self-help group was intermittent; she wouldn’t even attend noon meetings held in the daytime, straight down the road, one bus, while her kids were in school. (Also, she had a car) I suggested she see a free government counsellor, at the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Clinic. AADAC amazed me: their TV commercials, unlike most advertisements by government “do-gooders,” were terrific. I asked them why they had good commercials: Turns out they tested their ads beforehand on youth and parents. 

Jodie saw someone at AADAC for a while, but then she felt she had to quit. The reason? Her counsellor, she told me, after she asked him, had replied he could not guarantee confidentiality. Her big secret was not that she was gay, nor that she was in a relationship with an unemployed angry violent person.

Her big secret was this: Unbeknownst to Welfare, her lover had persuaded Jodie to secretly blow all her extra single mother welfare funds, funds that were intended for special assistance, on illegal drugs. Her lover then held that secret over her, like a raised battle-ax, if ever Jodie tried to escape the relationship. Poor Jodie: Character was destiny. Honesty counts.

Needless to say, it’s crazy to do drugs. As for craziness, I suppose the people I knew best back then, and me too, had been prone to moments of being crazy-like-a-teenager. Naïve teenagers can be so-o-o unbelievable, remember? Back then I believed, and I still do, that everyone is entitled to one or two naive unexplainable behaviours. Such as, say, standing me up. Nothing wrong with anomalous behaviour, once in a blue moon. But if a person shows a pattern of something, such as standing me up, then I have to pull the caboose-coupling pin, and steam on. I was sadly saying so on the phone when Jodie said, “I’m sure glad you told me!” and from then on she never stood me up again. 

(Today I mostly believe in giving people feedback for their strange behaviour)

We had a nice friendship. I was struck by how “character counts” every time Jodie broke her word or lied, to me, herself or others. I’d fume to myself, “Jeez! No wonder she’s on welfare!” My friend was like my poor “low functioning” mother, who was a housewife, in certain ways, and so by learning about Jodie I was learning about my mother too.

 A good part of my growing in confidence and learning about the big wide world was from living with other people. Naturally, by sharing a roof I was banking money, but I was also banking experience while warming my heart. I would never live with people who only wanted me for my rent money; no, it was nice to be liked. Speaking of rent, for a little while Casey helped me out: She had a heart of gold. 

As an exotic dancer, Casey was technically a sex trade worker, complete with stage name.(If we met in public, then she would be acting “in character,” and I would just call her “Kid.”) To me she was just Casey, working hard, with her little grey steel filing cabinet in the living room for her tax files, travel receipts, deductions and so forth. Such a cabinet was beyond me: In my insecurity, I truly dreaded taxes, scared of the angry taxman sending me to jail for my poor arithmetic. 

Maybe my life was imperfect, but I was a perfectly good listener, so at least I had that to offer. I liked how Casey found a boyfriend, “John.” He was a Sunday school teacher, besides being a streetwise guy from the States. (USA)

I remember when a tourist from Boston, on the bus, saw my daypack: She told me how down in the States people couldn’t wear their backpacks squarely, not on both shoulders, for fear of muggers pulling them down. I told John. His eyes lit up and he said, “I remember; we tried wearing our bags diagonally, so we could fight.” John could fight, and he was tough. Which was handy, as I’m sure when they went clubbing Casey, who was so pretty, would be “hit on” by strange men. John would be hit on when he was on the road—and cheat. I forget how Casey caught him. For a second time. Their relationship survived.

At home Casey would easily moan when I was massaging her—she was a vocal girl. She trusted me not to tell John if I heard her vocalizing in her bedroom with someone else. And hey, I trusted her not to laugh at me afterwards when I sang so loudly in the shower. Poor Casey and John each worried about the other cheating—with good reason. They were “relatively honest,” I guess, but not “rigorously” so. Too bad: For Casey and John, being a few degrees off true north, off true character, meant many degrees of stress on their relationship. Honesty counts.

At home we managed our daily stress through music and TV. Drugs? Doubtful. Not even cannabis. Or not much. At least, nothing I can remember. 

(This was in Canada, less than a decade after we witnessed our US cousins declaring war on drugs with a White House TV campaign, but of course my fellow Canadians hadn’t declared war. It was merely peacetime for us: no beating the drum, waving the flag, shaking pom poms and trying to “win the hearts and minds.” Like watching a bus sliding on ice, we observed without comment as our cousins began “wasting” lives, committing grotesque collateral damage such as zero tolerance and no sliding scale. Grotesque.) 

Certainly I would remember if we did any hard drugs at our home, a nice home that always felt half empty when Casey went on tour. Being a dancer was honest work. It was legal. Taxed. Not like being a prostitute. No little girl dreams of becoming a lady of the night. And so they don’t… not if they have good character. What I came to realize over time was the connection of prostitution to honesty—or the lack of it. 

Down the years, I’ve occasionally heard young men talking, men who fancy themselves as worldly liberals—remember them? Posers. They would speak with knowledgable sympathy, saying prostitutes are normal folks who ply their trade only for survival. Not so. Honest people will starve first, or subsist on welfare like Jodie. This I know from intuition, and from knowing my roommate Kim. 

At first Kim had a low wage job with a nonprofit. Casey said Kim could be a dancer too, if she lost a few pounds. But when Kim tried losing weight she only used the hunger method, which didn’t work. 

Kim lost her job. Then she didn’t seem to look for work very hard. In fact, I remember her going to a job interview without washing her hair. Something else: At the time no one in our home was admitting to putting fees on our telephone bill by dialling for directory assistance, instead of taking a few seconds to use the phone book. Talk about lazy. And then lying about it. That was Kim. 

At last Kim found a job babysitting evenings. I remember one night a mother called us when Kim was not home. The woman became very nasty, saying, “But we gave her a cell phone so she could stay in touch!” At the time I thought the angry mother was a spoiled brat, a yuppie dork. Then one day Casey and I were alerted by a matchbook. We clued in, did a little sleuthing: Kim had found work, all right—with an escort service.

Besides denying phone charges, Kim had also denied for a year knowing where a treasured belt of Casey’s was—we only found it in Kim’s room after she moved out. And I used to wonder if money was somehow disappearing from my jacket at times when I hung it on my chair at a donut shop—but no, that was Kim too, stealing, from when my jacket hung near our front door. In our own home. 

When we first knew Kim she was normal, she was fun. We knew she was raised in a family with a cultish religion, initials JW, but we knew that was survivable. We three all knew about surviving, as we all had a past. I know now: It was not Kim’s religion but her dishonesty that enabled her prostitution. 

Kim found a boyfriend in a bar. One day, while Casey was gone on a dance tour, Kim told me that somehow, she didn’t know how, she had gotten a black eye in her sleep. Looking back, I guess she didn’t want me asking, “Which door?” (did you walk into) And one day John and his friends piled into a car, as young men do, and they thought they’d drive past the big famous hooker stroll, as young men do, and there was Kim.

I learned how the boyfriend got Kim to turn her first trick. But only because Kim explained it, through tears, to Casey’s sister. Pimps have their ways. (Note: The sister was even more insecure than I, being as bizarrely untrusting as my girlfriend)

 We tried to keep Kim in our lives but soon she moved out of the house, claiming we didn’t like her boyfriend—but we had never said a single word against him! Not to Kim. No, not even after I came home to find pimps playing cards in the kitchen… Surely, in this sad world, those of us with a past need to encourage each other, with whatever optimism we can summon, just as Casey and I had tried to encourage Kim, just as Jodie and I encouraged each other. 

One day my best friend decided to get a trade. A diploma. Jodie asked me which, of two choices, would be the best for her: two year community college, or short beauty school. The specific college program Jodie was thinking of was the same difficult one where I had earned my diploma, so difficult that every year at college equals one at university, (instead of the usual two for one) a program where I had seen vulnerable students I liked crash and burn, so I thought she’d be better off learning hairstyling. And she did. 

I remember Jodie agonized very much over doing what little homework she had—like me sweating bullets over taxes—so I came over and sat nearby, silent all evening, so she would feel supported to “get to it.” Jodie coped. And one day she had her big graduation, and she proudly came to pick me up in a big black shiny limousine, a limo that represented something very hard for folks like us: being able to sustain worthy effort over time. 

Note: If Human Resources values a parchment then it’s merely because it shows a job applicant is stable enough for the semesters needed to graduate. (footnote) 

Not long after Kim left us, Casey and I both left too. I began paying rent on a tiny room, (and maybe, I forget, Kim helped me wrap dishes and spices for moving) but I didn’t finally move out until Casey did. She moved out east. I remember the day we hugged goodby. Casey had a tear track, and I went off and immediately muffled my my feelings, “medicated,” in a cafe that played 1950’s music: That was the day I realized I medicated in cafes; I honestly hadn’t known.

Honesty, I know now, is part of part of a good life, a functional life, and more: of living up to one’s potential. Since then I’ve matured enough do things other people take for granted, to graduate university and be a junior manager. And more: I’ve gained the skills to be published for money. A social worker I knew back in the army said, “You’re a success.” In my humble opinion: “Yes.” I will never again move among less honest people.

Jodie moved out east. The angry partner went with her… …and now Jodie’s living with a schoolteacher. I’m sure she “has upped her game” to be as functional as her new partner. Oh, how I love a happy ending.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

August

2019

Footnotes:

~Small world: Carmela Hutchison, the lady that Jodie had at first lived beneath, (I had been acquainted with Carmela’s husband in the army) has passed away this week. They were friends. In the tabloid daily newspaper, the Calgary Sun on Saturday August 24 Carmela merited a news article, all across the bottom of the page, for being helpful to causes. (I had seen a news photo years ago of Carmela pushing her walker beside a mentally ill prominent socialite) Maybe one of Carmela’s causes was Jodie. 

~ The concept that in modern society Human Resources people are using university degrees merely as a screening device (without regard for courses taken, course major or grade point average) comes from visionary Jane Jacobs in her last book Dark Ages Ahead. (Which quoted my city mayor) Her most famous book, condensed by Readers Digest, was Death and Life of Great American Cities.

~Since those days I’ve owned at least one pink T-shirt… but no pink slacks.

~A college girl once wrote a book about her life as an exotic dancer: It covered most of what I learned from Casey—No need to learn about that life by actual experience.

~I was able to tell concerned folks why Kim was transferred by her pimp three time zones to the east: to be disoriented and cut off from supports—There are writings by former prostitutes about that life.

~I’ve always assumed pimps learned how to control their stable by talking to each other, and I suppose they do, but hey, maybe there’s a book about that too.

Toast to Roads

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Recently, 

at my club one evening, 

I asked my fellows to stand and raise their glass in a a toast: 

“To roads!”

As I told my club, it’s queer: When we go to Washington State or British Columbia, (B.C.) we surely look at the nearby mountains and say to the locals, “Wow. Mountains so close by; I can’t believe you guys don’t go up.” Those folks surely come here and say, “Wow! Flat prairie and lots of roads!” And then be amazed that we don’t all take road trips. Well, I do. Sometimes. 

I especially like the quieter roads. Near my home I have twice seen a pair of big white trumpeter swans, and last month, on a quiet Victoria Day morning, a green headed mallard duck flapped alongside my car going precisely as fast as I was. At last he veered off.

So many roads to choose 

It was in 1926, when my mother was three years old, that the province of Alberta stopped referring to highways by colours and went in for numbering. I guess there weren’t many colours left by then. Today the numbering system is quite rational, for a quite extensive list of roads, too extensive to explain here. 

Of course names can be attached to the numbers, such as the Yellowhead Highway, #5, that emerges from B.C., goes along to Edmonton, and along through the border-straddling city of Loydminster… And the Crowsnest Pass highway, #3, that comes from B.C. through the mountain pass, and on through the city of Lethbridge… while the Icefields Parkway goes north and south along the Rocky Mountains to Jasper… And now the Boom Town Trail goes through some interesting east province tourist areas, including Camrose, the wee city I reported on in May 2019. This latter trail, actually, is not a highway, it’s more of a regional designation.

There’s one exception to the provincial numbering system: Calgary is at the crossroads of the QE II, or highway #2, and THE transCanada highway, or highway #1… and so the ring road, a freeway around the city named Stoney Trail, is… the #201.

It’s easy to find out whether a road is snowed over, or closed by a mudslide, as Alberta has a 511 website and telephone number. Recently I checked and found out the highway was closed north and south of Radium due to wildfires. 

We don’t say “forest fire” anymore, as a “wildfire” can roar through isolated houses or whole towns, such as the wildfire that took out Fort McMurray. (the 6th largest population centre in Alberta) After windows sag and pop, the fire pours right into the house. Incidentally, the government publishes guidelines for how much vegetation to clear to protect your home from fires raging branch to branch up to your door, and big embers flying from far away onto your roof. Alberta ranches have always had their long buildings, amidst vast plains of scrubby grass, separate from each other as a fire precaution. 

Breakdowns

When my car broke down on the Queen Elizabeth the Second highway I pulled across the white line onto the paved shoulder, only a kilometre from the posted turnout. Then others pulled up behind me; I guess they thought we were already at the turnout. In Alberta the turnouts—a short parallel strip— are supplied with garbage cans and very short merge lanes to get back on the highway. Anyway, I was glad people stopped because then I could ask a senior citizen if I could please use his cell phone. He was in a motorhome the size of a tour bus, or so it seemed; I laughed to see his summer home on wheels looming far larger than my own little year-round cabin.

Another time, stuck on a Crowsnest mountain road, I waved with two hands a big stiff white flag and got picked up by a young man and woman who drove me to the next town to phone for a tow truck. I politely ignored the smell of marajuana, what the government is now calling “cannabis,” now that such weed is legal to grow and sell, now that people at parties may show off their weed solariums.

Another time, same flag, I was picked up by a bachelor with a pickup truck and a big dog.

Another time, not from a breakdown, but being stuck within Edmonton city limits on the Yellowhead in a snow bank I could not shovel out of, (because my car bottom was resting on snow) it was a bachelor in a pickup who popped in some chains to the back of his truck to pull me two thirds of a meter forward (two feet)

To avoid such breakdowns, my last cars were bought brand-new. I am currently driving a Toyota Prius, a hybrid, with two motors under the hood—giving me good traction weight for for driving on ice using my front wheel drive. The storage battery, for my “tractor motor,” running under the passenger bench, is charged by my brakes. If you consult Consumer Report (CR) magazine, you will see how my Prius rates “excellent” in every category, earning the coveted CR “checkmark.” 

(Hey, maybe that’s why a “red tag days” letter from a Toyota dealer shows no Prius, and neither do any of the other dealership used-car ads in the newspaper: Maybe nobody wants to sell their Prius!)

My favorite category, of course, is for “ranked at top of the page” fuel efficiency: Because then I can look at the endless Alberta roads, beckoning to me across an entire time zone, and cry, “Road trip!”

Sean Crawford

Alberta

2019

Talk to Stangers Footnote:

As a road trip tourist, are there benefits to talking to strangers? 

(For me there is, as documented in my May essay To Camrose From Gotham) 

How about talking as a commuter, or in your own downtown? Scientists have researched the benefits, here’s (link) what they found

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48459940

Personal Footnote: 

Did I tell you I value my freedom, even to the point of graduating university without debt? And value buying my cars “all in one payment,” except for my last car? To paid off this Christmas? (And I paid off my wee mortgage on my mini-cabin before the first scheduled renewal) 

Well, thinking of road trips and cellular telephones: Years ago my client offered to buy me a cell phone, but at the time I didn’t want to be “tied down” to a plan. I forgot all about it until my boss was reminded by my old client. We were amused.

Free-Fall Funnies

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: Here in Canada, trade with Cuba is perfectly legal. We ship them steel locomotives, they ship us leafy cigars—much to the chagrin of Yankee imperialists. In fact, adding further chagrin,  the head communist, Fidel Castro, was a pall bearer at our prime minister’s funeral. (Pierre Trudeau) At least my good U.S. cousins can take consolation from being so patriotically anti-communist! … Because it’s a pity they can never know what a truly good cigar tastes like.

…Ya, but only the good die young. I bet delinquent capitalists secretly sneak behind the boardroom to puff on contraband communist cigars. You think?

Hello Reader,

Got right-brain humour?

From writing fast?

At the writer’s centre: As we mingled putting our coats on I overheard someone going into the next room and saying my name. “Sean had good humour today,” answered by “Yes, we could hear you guys laughing.” So, I can seize the excuse to be lazy! Today I won’t spend man-hours crafting my weekly essay. But first:

As you may know, I meet at Friday Free-Fall with other writers. We write with a timer going, then we STOP, (with a one minute warning) and then around the long table we read aloud what we just wrote. 

We gather to use our creative side, to write without editing for once, and to crawl out of our lonely garrets to come and mingle. By free-fall I mean someone calls out a “prompt.” Then: Get writing! No pausing, no stopping and no looking back to make corrections. 

Of course, when you are “falling” so swiftly, it’s easier to be melodramatic than dramatic, easier to miss the funny-bone completely than to be slightly amusing. Writing in mid air makes any humour twice as funny, “if you could be there,” than if it were carefully crafted at a remote desk.

Well. I’m not saying my pieces will bring you a smile: Someone else did. Here goes:

prompt- 

why wait

Every day I would see Mrs. Pringle walking down the alley in her sensible shoes. Plock plock plock. She would pass east; and passing west was the flower girl, still energetic this early in the day, walking skipp, skipp, skipp, The sun would shine, and the air would blow nice smells from the bakery as I sat at a cutesy iron table, with a decent wooden chair.

Every day I would sip my coffee and think elevated noble thoughts—coffee does that, you know. And I would watch those people go by. I would think how formidable Mrs. Pringle was, in her prim outfit. I wouldn’t dare talk to her. At least, not in the here and now. Someday. 

And I would watch that sprightly flower girl. I wouldn’t dare talk to her, not when I am a dull flowerless middle aged man. She probably drank lemonade or organic tea. I would talk to these ladies one day, maybe, perhaps. Then one Wednesday morning, when the sun was particularly bright, I thought: Why wait?

Oh, course I had lots of sensible reasons to wait, or never talk at all… but… if I felt permission to talk some day, then now was the day. So I shouted, “Hello Mrs. Pringle!” And she stopped, stopped dead, turned her body to look at me, and I could tell her face was not used to smiling. A beat went by. Then, in a reserved voice, “Hello” she said.

At this point the flower girl was coming by. She saw Mrs. Pringle stopped still, and so she slowed, glanced at me. “We’re practising our hellos!” I said wildly.

Prompt-

look up

I love being a tourist at the seaside. Fresh air, the sound of seagulls going “scree, scree”—you never hear them inland where I live. The sight of sparkly waves, and all the real locals—and one of them was doing Tai Chi. Wow. Everybody knows that you travel to “meet the locals.” Although, maybe some of them were travellers like me. That Tai Chi lady looked like all her clothing was brand new, not like a tired local.

When I say tired, I mean that none of them looked up. Not at the exciting freighters passing in the distance, not at the mountains looming so close. Not at nature’s creatures of the air, wheeling and soaring on the air with their God-given wings. No, they all seemed to look down, or at least straight across. “How curious,” I thought.

Many, both young and old, had yellow sun hats. This being a school day, there were no big children, only the littler ones. A line of perambulators were lined up on the sidewalk. That’s what the locals call a stroller. Pram for short. I just took it all in, casting glances back at the prams, and forward at the mothers on their beach towels, bent over their little devices. Lord knows what they were texting and gawking at. This while the little ones were delighting only God and me. The mothers were missing out. But hey, what do I know? I was a tourist. 

A helicopter breezed by and I looked up. It was a Royal Marine helicopter—that was all the time I had to squint at it, because then I was really squinting. Some poor seagull, seeing that metal monster, had the—how can I put this politely?—had his innards scared out of him. And since gravity pulls innards down, and I was looking up… now I know why the locals never look up.

See? Actually, at that point I couldn’t see very well— but, see? Being a traveler can be educational! You learn things. I’m going back, as soon as I buy a sun hat.

For variety, sometimes we “write a list.”

List 

(prompt-) of how to get along with in-laws

Tell jokes

Laugh at in-law’s jokes.

If your in-laws have stone faces and never joke, then be God-fearing and charitable.

Remember that some people can only smile a bit, and some laugh inside.

If your mother-in-law has a yappy dog, don’t kick it.

At least, not where she can see you do it.

But if you can terrify the dog, then she’ll be amazed at how well it behaves around you.

Don’t waste your good Cuban cigars on Father-in-law.

In fact, don’t light up unless he does.

Then bring out your drugstore cigar, and that’ll shut him up.

But stop before you get sick, because that will give you away.

Prompt- 

life is wonderful

Life is wonderful if you are a tourist. You can pick up stories of seagulls, pick up a bored sister of a tired mother, You say, “OK, you watch over your darling as she takes her nap, while we’ll just go outside so we can shout at each other.” Is that rude? No, mothers need their rest too, and their friends deserve a chance to be restless.

As for the friend, I can’t tell you about her. I mean, I can, but then the rest of my story would be anti-climax. For I travel to meet the people, and her I got to know very well.  A little rushed, but well. So I better tell you about something else, like goldfish.

I went into an office building, and there was a canal right on the bottom floor. How bizarre. It had wonderful waves, and bubbles, and it disappeared into a tunnel at both ends. So people could still walk across the floor. The most wonderful thing was that my Australian drinking buddy didn’t abandon me when I commented to the security guard, “Ah, those luscious fish. I just want to pick one up and take a big bite!” 

The guard said, “You need to kill your appetite. Try this.” And he gave me a free cigar and stepped out side with us to smoke. But it was a fire door, and he closed it on us, locking us out. 

So I shared my cigar with my drinking buddy. But it was a drugstore cigar, so all he said was “Ar-r-r-rg!  Time for a drink!”

Sean Crawford

January 31

(Princess) Alexandra Writers Centre Society

at the new C-space

the renovated sandstone King Edward school

2018

Footnotes:

~This truly was written last Friday (Jan 25). I’m joking about being lazy. Someday, shall I do another free fall post? 

~I’ve never tried to free fall at home on my own, but you, dear reader, may find FF at home rewarding, if only as a confidence booster showing you too can write, and that you can do so without needing a big block of time. …Most of us at Friday FF don’t use a keyboard like a working stiff, but rather, a pen and pretty notebook like a writer having fun.

Feminism and Terrorism

Hello Reader,

Got children with ideology and religion?

Those people who weren’t politically involved, as I was, may forget that back when people wore peace signs, even peace belt buckles, society endured constant bomb threats, while the The Anarchist Cookbook (for bomb making, 1971) was rolling off the presses. Sean Crawford 

I was wondering

To a young idealist

At university

Epilogue: A feminist regards Muslim Uzbekistan

I was wondering what I would say to my imagined college aged Muslim half-radical niece or nephew. Could I help them to exchange an iron ideology, one where cold parts fit too tightly to let any light shine through, for a loose, breezy uncertainty? The kids might claim I had “sold out.”

Maybe I could honestly tell them that I myself had been an involved teenage idealist, one who left home after my eleventh grade, wearing my non-capitalist home-dyed T-shirt, to go burrow into the edge of old Chinatown. (Of course I would spare them any stories until they were much older)

“Every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse.” If my grandparents, parents and my own peers believed in “salvation by society” as in, for example, a revolutionary form of government, an Arabic democracy, or communes of love… then, as Peter Drucker noted back in the 20th century, our children, giving up on such dreams, now believe in “salvation by religion.” 

Fundamentalism then, Muslim or otherwise, is just like terrorism in being NOT from “poverty and despair” as our bleeding heart leaders claimed after 9/11, but instead, surely, fundamentalism is from hope for a better world—in fact, I dare say there are now more fundamentalists in the affluent U.S.A. than in the less affluent parts of Europe. As a Londoner put it, “God lives in the American midwest.”

(Note: When I was phoning the British Museum long distance, to ask if I could wear my backpack, I caused a stir of laughter when I innocently said, “Praise the Lord.” The answer by the way was: Yes, you may bring your rucksack, but this year we have a line up for checking bags for guns and bombs)

As for London, as I noted here in my September essay I Met a Muslim in London, there were lots of folks in burkas walking around. Meanwhile, crossing my local university, I passed a young lady in black with only a visor slit for her eyes. I did not see that visor as being from [religion + peer pressure] No, I saw her as a typical student showing her [religion + youthful rebellion] .  A few years ago, while the pendulum swings, I read in the newspaper that Muslim kids in town are saying their parents are not Muslim enough. No doubt, to them, their parents praying only once or twice a day, instead of the Islamic five, is wrong. The kids cry: “You just don’t understand!” 

In my day, here in North America, Chinese parents might tell their child, as the kid packed alone to go to China, that China was not a “workers paradise,” that the cultural revolution was not a shining jewel to excite the world. But no, the kids had their own ideas: “You just don’t understand!” There is a Quebec movie (probably The Barbarian Invasions) where a man now old remembers, with a humiliating flashback, praising the cultural revolution. at great length, to a Chinese lady who has suffered unspeakable knowledge, as she just looks at him, steadily and silently.

To a young idealist packing up to go to the middle east, maybe torture prisons are OK, are only for the bad guys, only for the greater good of society, only temporary, to bring about a shining new age. Such iron logic. It was a communist sympathizer and “fellow traveler,” Han Suyin the Asian fiction writer, who helped me understand how to avoid being brainwashed—something I could share with my sister’s kids. As it happens, I was an intellectual, even back in my teens, and idealistic too. Allah knows we intellectuals can be very extreme in following our philosophies right to their fearsome, pitiless conclusions. One day I went to hear Han Suyin, (“Han” as in “China”) Such a gracious, gentle lady. She said you must look at concrete examples, not solely at your abstract religion-ideology. Do this, the lady said, in order to avoid the horrors of extremism. Based on her three-part political autobiography, I knew Ms Suyin was a survivor, gentle and effective, but never a useless bleeding heart: I respected her judgement.

I  would talk with my niece and say to her, yes, I can understand people saying society must be protected from sinners who would kiss each other, and so forth, outside of marriage but, if I may bring things down to a concrete level: Is beheading your cousin Fatima the appropriate response? And, to keep things “fair and square,” must cousin Mohammed, in turn, be stoned to death for kissing too? Another concrete example for my Puritan niece: Would you telephone the police if that handsome, nice looking Justin Trudeau was a guest at your house, and then he started smoking marijuana? And if you did, would you visit your former guest while he was in jail? Or would you be too ashamed of phoning? How unsurprising, then, that in Canada such drugs will become legal after mid-2018. 

(Note: In Canada, of course, drugs have remained illegal, but we have never waved the flag and beat the drum to have our society at war: No U.S.-style collateral damage, with President Obama impelled to pardon hundreds of people)

To the kids, I would reminisce about being a welcome member (“Just don’t vote”) of the Women’s Collective and Resource Centre at the university. “Liberation, sister!” And if my nephew’s eyes began to glaze over I’d tell a white lie, “How exciting for me, that they had burned their bras.” I have read that today feminist theory is so obscure only professors can discern it and then teach it, but— In my day, let me tell you, ordinary women without degrees could meet in people’s houses and share their concrete stories and experience. By doing so they encouraged each other to lower their mental defences and raise their consciousness. “The truth will set you free—but first it will make you miserable.” From their lived examples they formed theories, miserable ones maybe, but good ones. Heady stuff. Empowering. As for that new fangled assertiveness training, theory could be a friendly foundation, but assertiveness training only worked by using concrete examples. 

At university, if my niece and nephew were smart enough to attend, and if I visited, then I would tell them that technical courses require students to grind out equations every evening, right until up bed time—they are in school to learn the answers. It’s no coincidence terrorists never major in the liberal arts. In a general studies education, “free time” is part of the workload, for they are there to learn the questions.  Students may stay up, a boy and girl across coffee mugs from each other, not for equations but for discussing the meaning of life. (We just don’t do that in the working world) 

Term papers will be assigned well in advance of deadline, for students to have ample time to sit under an apple tree and get hit on the head by an idea. Too bad half of them will spin out their term paper the weekend before, but as for the other half—Wow. As a student, you discover there are no nice, tidy, ideological answers. You compare and contrast, document and footnote, and at the end of the term… the scholar still retains an open mind, the same as any scientist. 

The only fitting True Answer, however vague, is: Let us work for the common good. 

Let’s not have civilization go backwards. Because, as our liberal education unfolds,  we come to realize: it’s been such a terribly long, slow slog to get this far.

Sean Crawford

October

Alberta

2017

Epilogue: A feminist regards Muslim Uzbekistan

Missing… because it was posted here last week. (archived October 2017)

Footnotes 

~To document that terrorists don’t take general studies, see the opening of my essay Backfire, a book review, archived September 2010.

~for “today feminist theory is so obscure” see (link) 

~I wonder: In the British Guardian newspaper this week, did a non-feminist scientist’s unexamined belief in “society as we know it” misinterpret a viking grave? (link to) How the female viking warrior was written out of history.