Second Opinion on Life

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Hello Reader

Of course you are right, but—

Got second opinion? 

From the 1970’s come two TV characters from two shows, All in the Family and Happy Days—The bigoted father, Archie Bunker, and the cool “bad” motorcyclist with his white T-shirt and leather jacket, “the Fonze.” They had something in common: Both would get lockjaw trying to say, “I was w-w-w-wrong.” Same as my dear brother-in-law. Recently I’ve been looking in the mirror…

Even that epitome of cool, the Fonze, ( raising his thumbs to affirm, “Ehhhh!”) couldn’t be right all the time, no, not even in fanciful TV land. In my everyday world, it would be such a comfort to believe everyone has common sense, and that “of course everybody knows” common things—but no. There is a good reason why newspapers and traditional media, on a continuing Big Important Story, on each successive day, must retread the same old ground, and keep on repeating what has just happened. People don’t always know. Maybe “they should” but the plain truth is they don’t.

People are like some chunks in a box of cold cereal: After lots of shaking around by life, every chunk “should” be the same size, but there are always a few big pieces that seem to have slipped through the process. To me, every one of us are “big chunks:” We all seem to have “missed out” on different things, having gaps in our knowledge. Why? Easy: we live in a complex society. 

It’s so common to miss out on common things: I’m still chuckling over my friend, a university graduate, who didn’t know the “dirty thirties” were caused by the Wall Street stock market crash of late 1929. She innocently thought the Great Depression was caused by the mid-west “dust bowl.” 

(My principal told us how a farmer would plow a field all day, then, during the night, lose every last teaspoon of his topsoil, gone with the wind)

Respect for human nature, and for ordinary ethical journalism, is why my essays will have abbreviations spelled in full, explanations in brackets, and even the odd “as you know, comma.” I do this to be gentle on my readers. In school we took a short story about (from memory) The Man From Kalgoorlie who managed to go an entire year without knowing World War II had broken out. Yes, that’s only fiction, but stranger things have happened. 

(As you may know, the war started September 1, 1939, when the Germans, as part of the Axis powers, invaded Poland. Canada declared war on September third, and the First Canadian Division was in Britain later that year… The attack on Pearl Harbor, by some different fascists, was not until December 7, 1941. At least the major fascist countries learned a lesson. I can’t speak for smaller axis countries like, say, Italy or Romania, but I know that today Germany and Japan are peaceful to a fault)

Any remedy? Yes, a partial one: Listening, as humbly as I can, from knowing I surely have gaps. It’s not rocket science. The Chinese say, “When you go outdoors, look at the weather; when you come indoors, look at the faces.” While I am talking, I modestly check faces to see if I have abruptly sounded like an idiot. That is, unless we are imbibing and gesturing wildly in a pub—then we can all be idiots together.

In a social group, whether I’m flocking with delinquents on a street corner or hooting with a parliament of owls, it’s common sense: Don’t assume a motion or topic is worth discussing unless there is figuratively a seconder to the motion. And here’s another common sense metaphor: As a sailor, I don’t assume my “sea story” is worth telling to a crowd of sailors relaxing in the fo’c’s’le. Not unless I have first tested it on the ship’s cook, and then secretly lingered outside the hatch, to check to hear whether he tells it to the next fellow to enter the galley. (footnote)

The only thing you can’t test out is how to break bad news. A dozen mountain ranges away lived my dad. A few days after the death of dear old dad, my sweet sibling let me know. Some days later my friend Judy had a disturbed face: She just had to get back to me to ask why getting the news took a few days: “Is your family estranged?” 

“No, just slow.” 

(How slow? Dear Mom passed away later, in the summer of 2016, and today, Easter of 2019, with two of my slow siblings as co-executors, there is no sign yet of any estate money for us chickens. It’s no big deal—at least the taxes, submitted around Easter of 2018, have finally been done, I think)

As for estrangement, I once skimmed a link on the web. Turns out folks can be estranged, can be giving a relative the silent treatment for years and years, while at the same time the relative doesn’t know about the treatment, let alone know why. I can relate: Certainly I can hold a grudge for a long, long time without the other person having a clue. That may be OK for acquaintances, but for family? That would be too dumb. And too unworthy of me. Theoretically. 

And yet… I can remember telephoning my father across many mountain ranges to his time zone to ask, in effect, whether our family believes that just one thing can be “a deal killer,” as in being “not good enough to love.” I know, right? Shouldn’t have to ask, right? And yet I had felt so degraded, keeping shameful and silent about my family, as my bank manager remarked that even Jesse James, after robbing trains, was loved by his folks. 

There’s a good reason for the Good News story in the New Testament about a prodigal son. There’s another Gospel story, nearly two thousand years old now, of a man washing his hands and asking, “What is truth?”

The truth is that if I am especially ashamed and keeping silent about some notion I have, then I am especially needful to ask someone, anyone, for a “seconder to the notion.” Not asking my bar tender, who may solely listen, but asking someone who will answer my truth with his or her own truth. Perhaps by saying, “Yes, yes I do think you are wrong… being silly… and wrong.” How easy to be told I’m wrong about some exciting tavern trivia game, how very hard, something to be approached with fear and trembling, to be told I have been wrong about a close relative who has—which is “had” in the present tense—severely hurt my feelings. So often the “easy way out” is to feel offended, not hurt.

Something about offended anger is this: It’s always there, waiting, even if I change my mind about people. Like a hand-eye coordinated sports move, it remains to be called on, years later. Like how “everybody knows” that the same folks who have known peace since the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement would shoot and bomb and kill if tomorrow a customs “hard border” appeared across Ireland after Brexit. How queer: A baby born on Good Friday of that year would be 21 years old now… 

How tragic when nations who have strained and strived and finally achieved peace can just throw it all away, abruptly surrendering to an impulse for hatred. The capacity for anger remains. Today I desperately need my higher reasoning to know that life has moved on, that it’s silly, and that my old thinking, today, is something I was w-w-w-wrong about.

Today I’m avoiding my mirror… yet I just had to write, for me and you.

Sean Crawford

Trying not to subconsciously rebel about de-cluttering,

April

2019

Footnotes: 

~The sea story advice is from novelist Jan De Hartog in his nonfiction book, A Sailor’s Life. (You may download the book for free as a PDF, link)

~Some folks get their opinions from social media and false news. That’s a problem: The consensus is that social media is, too often, easily and wrongly forwarded by deniers of media ethics, just as as easily as folks will spread false gossip. For the journalism ethics practised by true ladies and gentlemen, see my three journalism essays archived in May and April of 2018. 

Note to my Irish-American cousins: You might snobbishly feel superior to the British Irish for their reverting to violence from seeing a “hard border,” (customs police in grim buildings) but hey, have you looked in the mirror? 

You and your pals wear flowers in your hair for a street protest, swearing up and down to each other that your march will be “a peaceful demonstration…” But then you riot… and the next morning? You tell news reporters it was the mere sight of hard armoured riot police that “made you riot.” Does that sound very adult of you, “they made me riot”? So don’t you go feeling superior to the Northern Irish.

~Funny: As for the hard border, my cousin Crazy Eddie thinks it should staffed exclusively by contractors from south of the border, Catholics, solely of the female gender, wearing mostly frilly pink civilian clothes from home, working in tents and pavilions gayly painted like gingerbread houses, with the real police, on call by walkie-talkie, sitting cozy, south of the border, in Irish pubs… Yup, there’s a reason why we call my cousin Crazy Eddie.     

Meeting the Locals

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Here comes the judge! 

seen on a button in the 1960’s.

Being the second half of a speech I gave at Toastmasters, with the first half, Part One, archived in July of 2017. (Yes, you can “judge” me as being “slow” in getting around to posting this, but hey, nobody said they wanted a part two, so there!)

Hello reader,

Like tourism?

Like meeting “the people?”

I’ve heard of tourists who say, “I get off the beaten path, and meet the people.”

In Part One I pointed out that if you want to “meet the locals” when you travel, and strike up a conversation with complete strangers, then it is good to first learn how to do so here at home, before you travel. Incidentally, this is a skill the new recruits for a certain secret service all have to learn, but I don’t think they are explicitly taught: I gather for them it’s “sink or swim.”

Today you’re in luck, no need to drown, because I had think through how to explain this at Toastmasters. Having dealt in Part One with faith (in people and yourself) and the first half of awareness, (of self and others) today we can do the other half of awareness, and then cover willingness.

I try to be aware of my eyes. As in Part One, I like Miranda’s findings that people will talk to you if your eyes are loose and roaming around. I would add that your eyes should ideally be soft and kind. Things are unlikely to work out for you if your eyes are remote or fixed, and you won’t ever strike up a conversation if people see your eyes as dry little coals—too scary!

I suppose there’s a Zen to it: If you are smiling inside and loose inside, then your face will be loose too, and easily prone to smiles, and surely people will respond. It is especially easy for strangers to talk to you if you have excited eyes, thinking: “Wow, I’m a tourist in Britain! Here from exotic Edmonton!” …The question then, for having conversations, is: Are you willing? 

Not if you’re in a hurry… or a snob, or an Ugly American. If American tourists seem crabby about how the “little natives” are not as good and sensible as Americans, well, I think I know the reason. Americans will tend to seem ugly, or at least “not safe and supportive,” when they have a very rigid view of the world. If people are know-it-alls, thinking, “My way or the highway,” then they tend to be threatened by anyone different. Like wearing a Here comes the judge button. Better for them to avoid strangers. They may seem crabby not just abroad, but even in their own hometown. Of course I am using “American” as a metaphor for you and me. As I said in Part One, I have my bad days, but on my good days I try to be willing to listen and talk as I come across new people.

Perhaps willingness is like art or literature. Someone told me the best way to read is to do so without judging, just accept it all as you are reading, then turn on the judgment and reflection after you put the page down: You are less likely to miss out that way. As an old grandmother said: “Live and let live.” A variation: “Accept others, and have self-acceptance.” In a way, strange adults are a bit like children and dogs: They know when you can’t accept them—you reveal yourself when you can’t listen well.

For my toastmasters speech it amused me to wear my Doctor Who T-shirt, and present this scenario: Suppose, on the Royal Mile, I am conversing with a stranger who says, “You Americans, on your TV, you have way too much crazy science fiction.” I could get defensive and say, “I’m Canadian.” I could, if I lacked boundaries, misinterpret that my ego was being attacked, and then counter-attack: “Oh ya? Well, see this T-shirt? Doctor Who is British!” Or maybe I could be accepting, point a friendly thumb at my T-shirt and laugh, “Ya, we keep showing a man who flies through space in a crazy blue box, no bigger than a phone booth…” … or, my final scenario, I could at least wait until I walk away, and only then switch on my judgment, bending forward to mumble with comical resentment. (Fun to act out on stage at Toastmasters) 

Are you willing to be interested in the world? Then the world will be interested in you. Are you bored? Then let’s face it, you are a bore. It never hurts to store up a few lively factoids to share. Earlier I mentioned faith. My belief? People want the same human contact I do. But maybe not factoids. To me, a good life-style choice is: Always leave strangers and acquaintances feeling better for having met me, never worse. And lastly, if I am momentarily feeling too afraid, one day, to act loving towards an innocent stranger, then I may take heart from the New Testament: Perfect love casts out all fear.

There you have it: You may strike up a conversation using your Faith, awareness, willingness, and spiritual faith too. 

Farewell: May the wind always be at your back, may the road go ever onwards, and maybe we’ll meet one day on the Royal Mile.

Sean Crawford

Winter

Alberta

2018

Footnotes:

~The Ugly American civilians, in South Vietnam, nearly all hung around with the urban elite in Saigon. Hence they were so useless at understanding how to converse with the vast majority of Vietnamese, ordinary rice farmers, to “win their hearts and minds” for teaching them to choose democracy over communism. In Iraq the Americans repeated their history by clumping together in the isolated Green Zone, which had the payoff for them: They didn’t have to understand or respect Iraqis. 

As I see it, for success meeting people overseas, before you travel, try to at least practise being less rigid and more respectful at home. As for the fiasco of Iraq: Because of inappropriate screening, which kept out democrats with years of experience nation building in Yugoslavia, many of the Americans working in Iraq were republican-party members who couldn’t even bring themselves to respect democrats, their own fellow Americans.

~Speaking of (Doctor Who T-shirt) boundaries, I’ll be glad when American Muslims go into social work and then teach other Muslims about “boundaries.” And teach them about “victim role” too. Every time I hear “Islam is under attack” I see a flashing neon sign: victim-victim-victim. A healthy democracy, of course, requires citizens to feel a sense of “agency.” 

When Muslims in, say, Pakistan bomb to, as they say, make their country “more unstable” what they mean is to make their fellow Pakistanis feel “less agency” …because then people are less likely to resist a new dictator. History shows us that every dictator, —Nazi, communist, militarist, Islamist—without exception, always turns his country towards having fewer human rights and more fundamentalism. As in, “more Islamist.”Yes, the ignorant Islamist suicide bombers do at least know this much. 

~Of course, sometimes immaturity, such as Sunnis hating Shiites, has a payoff, so we cling to it. At breakfast some of us were telling writer Lois McMaster Bujold how folks from the cities of Edmonton and Calgary, here in Alberta, in their broad inter-city competition, would rather the national Grey Cup was won by “a team from Mars!” than by their fellow Albertan city. Lois burst out, “It sounds like sibling rivalry to me!” 

“(Blushing) Yes, well (cough).”

People of Revolution

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got revolution?

I’ve been remembering my youth these last few weeks… this will be my last post on the topic.

YESTERDAY

A week ago I re-read a terrible story by Marina Nemat, a Canadian woman. Marina was tortured in Persia (Iran) for two years, ostensibly in the name of God, but actually by those who had used the revolution to seize power.

 I’ll get back to her, 

but first,

QUOTE:

Revolutions were a tricky thing, and this one would be no different. Hard-line clerics  fanned the flames of the populace’s rage…Young students and professionals who wanted to throw off the censorship and yoke of the shah’s secret police had no idea that they were making an alliance with a group that was no friend of free speech, feminism, and the enlightenment of Persian education. The youth of the country, however, were swept up in the storm of change like an angry uneducated mob. Very few stopped to think what things would be like after the shah was removed. Ashani knew, though. In the end, revolutions were almost always won by whatever group was most willing to slaughter any and all opposition. Nearly three decades, a marriage, and five daughters later it was clear to Ashani that many of those students regretted what they had done. 

UNQUOTE 

(Protect and Defend, a thriller, by Vince Flynn, 2007, page 11 hardcover)

I’m sorry for those students.

TODAY

As recently as last month, September, in the Camden Market in London, I saw that decades-old T-shirt of my youth. The one showing the clean-shaven face of a  handsome young man wearing a beret, with his eyes fixed on something ideal in the distance: the revolutionary Che Guevara. I wonder if everybody today who buys the T-shirt know who he is. A manager at work told me he asked a young man wearing the shirt, “Do you know who it is?” and the lad replied no, but he thought maybe it was a basketball star.

Back in the 1960’s many were thinking of revolution, with some folks wearing cool berets.  I am sorry to spoil anyone’s romantic view of the 1960’s and the various liberation struggles, but I must speak out: Because in an age where today the young male equivalents of Che Guevara are seeking revolution through religious violence, it is important to remember that idealism can serve evil as well as good. Today I refuse to give Muslim clerics and university professors of religious studies any sort of “diplomatic immunity” just because they are professing religion… along with their hatred.

This month, in mid-October, the Epoch Times ran a story on Che (page A9 for Oct. 13-19)

“Although many believe Che was a doctor in his homeland of Argentina, he never did graduate from medical school. In fact, he dropped out to join the fomenting Marxist revolution in Cuba funded by the Soviet Union.”

Che wrote:

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. … These are the procedures of the bourgeois detail. This a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the teaching of the Wall!” he wrote in “Motorcycle Diaries.” 

Che also wrote:

 “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls into my hands. My nostrils dilate while savouring the acrid odour of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”

No, I won’t buy his handsome T-shirt.

Early this month, in the library display rack, I saw Canadian Marina Nemat’s face on the front cover of her book, After Tehran, where she has post traumatic stress disorder in Canada. As with the Canadian armed forces and first responders, it can take years for problems to be admitted enough to work on them. She’s a lot better now. As for Guevara’s phrase “judicial proof is unnecessary” I am reminded of something: I’m sure there was never any proof before sending thousands, literally thousands, of teenagers to somehow crowd in to the infamous Evin torture prison in Iran.

Here in Canada, Nemat received medical help to deal with her torture, and support from her community. But not everyone was reasonable, supportive and nice. In her book she changed the name of the only person who was cruel. It was a female university professor Marina initially worked with by doing translations and transcriptions. Cruel from her leftist ideology. 

Perhaps for some readers of After Tehran, such as the ones who thought Che’s T-shirt logo was a basketball star, it might seem impossible that a 21st century professor can be so cruel. But not to me, not at all, because I knew such people during my youth. “But wait old man!” someone asks, “Aren’t today’s learned professors all open-minded, in gentle tweed, puffing on their pipes?” I regret to say: No. Some are like learned imams (clerics) in Muslim churches. 

History repeats, for sure, and this grim fact is partly because ordinary people won’t believe that such “ethically challenged” people exist. That’s why some folks thought Che loved the people, was no communist, but merely an “agrarian reformer.” Others believed that a socialist German loved the people, but merely wanted national socialism. Nazism for short.

Maybe it’s because of my harsh youth, but I just can’t get over how even today professors can still be so ignorant. So I am posting clips in TOMORROW from two of my essays, about the infamous “Regina 16,” 16 professors safe in their ivory tower, who will still be there tomorrow, which I posted in 2007. Let’s try to know our history.

TOMORROW

Back in 2007, as Canadians fell in Afghanistan, leaving young children back home, I was angry at the “Regina 16.” I thought professors should know better.

So here’s a footnote from 2007’s April essay Decent Democracy

~… recently (March 24) some Canadian professors in Regina—16 of them— were equally crazy. Obviously these eggheads think not only is our government "separate," like an occupying power, but that the soldiers are separate too. They signed a letter saying the children of soldiers killed in Afghanistan should not be allowed to have university scholarships (heroes program) because the war was "imperialism." 

Clearly they have forgotten the average soldier can't even define "imperialism," while the rest of us regular Canadians are also shaky on that word... Surely it is the responsibility of the professors, as a part of our community, and part of our body politic, to educate the rest of us. But no. Instead they feel separate, off in some alienated ivory tower. Wimps.

To further understand communists, here is an (revised) excerpt from my April 2007 essay about the Regina 16, Socialists reject Soldiers:

QUOTE 

Actually, not “some” but “most” socialists had a strident lack of fellowship for guys like me. I could spot their lack of caring by reading any of their publications supposedly intended for first time readers, for “folks who had just come in off the street.” All I had to do was take a red hi-light pen to every word I didn’t understand. Did the writers really think regular folks would know what a proletariat is? A bourgeoisie? A lackey? A running dog? By the time I’d finished making red marks the page had a very bad case of measles. 

I decided these leftists with their measles may not hate me for being so handsome or so rich, but based on their writing they surely wouldn’t care about me.

Now, in our new century, in which Berlin has always been one city,  the ivory towers remain the last islands of communism on this continent. One of the Regina 16 had a column published in the Calgary Herald. His piece doesn’t quite have the measles, but neither does it communicate. In the first two paragraphs I find: “…illegal imperialist war of invasion and occupation (He means by Canadians)…our troops… are invaders and occupiers…a U.S. puppet-regime…

What scenario is this professor coming from? In his column, in words too distasteful to repeat here, he trolls Canadian history and sees the army as “an arm of the state” employed against the workers during various strikes: “…workers faced machine gun nests and armoured cars.” In other words, to this leftist professor, the rosy cheeked army men are historically not “our boys” but instead belong to Darth Vader. 

UNQUOTE

Although I have a university degree, I still try my best to feel solidarity and empathy with working class boys in uniform. Somehow, those sixteen professors have suffered a failure of empathy. I pity them. When empathy fails, can cruelty be far behind?

Sean Crawford

October

2017

Calgary

Afterthought:

Given that the Argentinian Che Guevara met his end leading guerrillas in the forests of Bolivia—after encouraging the killing of many Bolivians—I want to quote the gentle Han Suyin, the lady I praised in a recent essay:

“Revolution should be neither exported nor imported.”

A cartoon: 

I dimly remember a Doonesbury cartoon. 

Picture two small boys, one black, one white, at the kitchen table with milk and cookies. The black boy would have surely worn a black beret, like the black panthers, and probably his white friend had a beret too. Lacking any revolutionary clenched fist scowls, the boys are clearly enjoying themselves. The caption:

“Even revolutionaries like chocolate chip cookies!”

  

Connecting Historical Dots

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader, 

Got a vaccination for preventing young terrorists?

Maybe Education?

Now, I myself DON’T say 

President Donald Trump is a “national oppressor,” 

but OK, now that I’ve got your attention: 

One thing national oppressors can always count on is support. 

Across the Muslim world, for people in the rural areas, it’s as if they can’t be educated. For urban dwellers, even the smart ones at university, it’s as if they won’t be educated. Such a pity: By ignoring history, they condemn themselves.

I recently heard on the CBC radio, from a woman almost young enough to be my daughter, how in Iran she and the other women were once free to show all their hair, and wear nice skirts and pretty dresses. If today that is not the case, and if today the Ayatollah dictates to the elected president, then all that is not by coincidence, and NOT from religion either. Too bad, how the average young person here in Canada doesn’t know that Muslim women used to have rights; so sad, how young male would-be terrorists, with their vested interest in testosterone, don’t connect the historical dots.

As for Iran, if the day ever comes around that somebody tells me women and men over there now have Human Rights, those worldwide rights the United Nations proclaimed after the war, then on that blessed day I won’t have any reason to ask whether the infamous Evin torture prison has at long last been levelled to the ground. 

Below are some historical dots to ignite a vaccination conversation. I have bold-faced some passages to make it easier to skim. The “long hair” referred to is not for women but for men.

As For Greece

Moderate and leftist politicians were arrested. Long hair was banned, along with the music of Mikis Theodorakis, of Zorba fame. King Constantine refused to support the military, and he was sent into exile. Civil liberties were suppressed. Censorship was instituted.

Papadopoulos won support from the pious rural poor, attracted by his opposition to atheism, his anti-Communism, dislike for 'hippies," his unpolished manner and simple way of speaking. Papadopoulos presented himself as a friend of common people and promoted economic development in rural areas neglected by previous governments. And some middle class urbanites welcomed what they saw as stable government.  

As For China

By 1982… Mao’s portrait was to look over Tiananmen Square, but elsewhere across China his portraits and his statues were being removed. And stockpiles of his writings were collecting dust.

The drab dress of Maoist times was gone. Chinese women were now dressing themselves in "bourgeois colors." The Chinese were now attending motion pictures, exhibitions of western art and attending plays from the West.…

Then on May 30, the demonstration in Tiananmen Square was revived by dissidents erecting a thirty-foot-high, plaster and styrofoam statue called "The Goddess of Democracy." … They claimed that the government would never speak to them unless they maintained the kind of pressure that they were applying.

Many in China's countryside – where eighty percent of the population still lived – viewed the demonstrations with dismay or disfavor.

As For Chile

Chile's military took no chances concerning opposition to its coup. It arrested tens of thousands of Allende supporters and others it labeled subversives, and for the sake of control it put thousands into concentration camps. Some leftist activists were hunted down, and some shot on sight. Many fled to Western Europe and elsewhere. The leader of the coup, General Augusto Pinochet announced that Chile, one of the first countries to have abolished slavery, had now "broken the chains of totalitarian Marxism, the great twentieth century slaver.”

Meanwhile a new constitution had been created that guaranteed eventual elections. In a plebiscite in 1988, 56 percent of the vote was opposed Pinochet continuing as president. Pinochet was furious. He had been in power fourteen years, but like many dictators he liked power and wanted to remain indefinitely. Pinochet summoned members of the military to his office to overturn the results. Air Force commander Fernando Matthel refused to go along, as did other generals, forcing Pinochet to accept the plebiscite results.

As For Sean Crawford

In the Arab world, I have read that many of the ruling class send their children to colleges overseas, to avoid student protests, to avoid having a critical mass of people ready to believe in Human Rights. (Which, according to an Arab taxi driver, can co-exist with religion) 

I envision Arab cities someday providing a critical mass for education; people could then be consciously reach out to the rural areas to reduce the oppressor’s base of support. 

The disposing of Mao’s “portraits and statues” reminds me of Nineteen Eighty-four. In that classic novel I remember a line suitable for anyone in any time and space—the fascist Pinochet, the communist Mao Tse Tung, and the Muslim Ayatollah:

“You do not seize power to make the revolution … you make the revolution to seize power.”

Sean Crawford

October

2017

Footnotes: 

~The source is the web, fsmitha.com,

Macro-history and world time-line

~I touch on someone’s life under communism, before and during the cultural revolution, in my essay Decent Democracy archived April 2010.

~Here is a link to a lengthy fictional account of some incidents of the cultural revolution, translated into English. 

It appears on the website for Tor publishing, as an excerpt of the Hugo award winning novel The Three Body Problem by Cixin  Liu. 

For anyone who reads to the end of the excerpt, let me say the three parts—cultural revolution, armed civil conflict and environmental devastation—are quite realistic, matching what I’ve read elsewhere, although the novel, of course, is fiction.

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.