Memories appear to be short in this world. People seem not to remember
anything anymore. Memories are important. Long memories allow animals to know
where good things can be found and where bad things can be found; it tells us
how to survive. Humans are perhaps unique on this planet for several reasons
having to do with memory.
Humans, but also whales it has been recently found, tell stories. This is a way to pass information on to future generations about what happened to people, often people from countless generation before and from lands far away. Sperm whales may pass on stories on navigation information through stories, but that has yet to be substantiated. Humans are unique, though, be recording their stories for future generations. Cave paintings may have been the first instance of this practice, or perhaps the only one to survive to this day. We invented books to store information for future people to learn from. Before books one person was required to pass all their knowledge on verbally and for some people that meant a lot of time spent doing so. The invention of books allowed science to flourish; it allowed accomplishments and failures alike to be kept for posterity. This meant wrong turns would not be explored again and our body of knowledge could greatly expand.
Books meant that we could record other important things like history, a word that means story. Having a record of what we have done lets people become aware of the good and the bad that people have done in the past, so we don't do it again.
That brings me back to memories, one of the other unique things about humans, is that we can use our memories to project into the future. Sadly, though, I have begun to doubt this fact recently. People have stopped projecting their minds into the future. Perhaps that is untrue; perhaps people are just not projecting far enough into the future.
I have a memory, a long memory, compared to some people, a very long memory. I remember standing on a chair and taking out a glass in our Mississauga home, small little acrylic glass and smashing it on the floor and seeing all the pieces everywhere and I remember the spanking less. I remember peeing in the bedroom floor while my parents were getting ready for work early in the morning, I remember doing it the second time I should say. I don't remember the spanking. I remember going outside and being happy because it snowed and the days before had no snow because winter was over, but this morning there was snow again, but the next time I went out, it had melted. I remember months later playing on the street, still in Mississauga, and playing on the road in the hot afternoon; the sun had heated the road so that the tar had bubbled up and we, the neighbourhood kids had decided to pop those bubbles with our hands. I do remember how painful the hand and face watching was that night though.
My point is I remember the weather from back in 1976. Honestly though, I did not get a true baseline until much later on what weather was like. Our family moved to Boonieland in 1977 and I got to grow up in the relative countryside. My parents mistakenly believed that the city was the wrong place for children to grow up. We did grow up wandering with friends through the neighbourhood, through creeks, up Canadian Shield cliffs, ponds and beaches. What I did not know I was doing was gathering weather data. I remember that the days were hot, I wore short sleeved shirts all summer long, but it rained frequently and some days were cool and cloudy. Our acre large front lawn was always green except on the worst droughts. The creeks never went dry and the pond dried up only rarely, once or twice in eight years.
My years not paying attention to the climate, but living in it, provided me a baseline of experience. My in attention change when we moved in 1985 to a new town, a new climate and a new life, far from all my friends. It was also the first time that I saw digital temperature readout. Keep in mind that in 1985, I was only 13 years old, but I started noticing things. That temperature readout stated that the temperature was 40°C, the hottest that I had ever experienced at that time.
We moved back to Boonieland within nine months, this time to a property resting on one of the Great Lakes. So, since 1986, I have been paying attention to the weather, the temperature and the lake levels that have been dropping since that year. The point is that I remember the past, and by using just that in significant past, I can project into the future about the weather and the climate. And that is just one aspect of my attention. I have been paying attention to politics too.
I have noticed that in the past thirty years that politics has been slipping to the right. Pierre Trudeau (Liberals) was considered a little left of center in the early eighties, because he borrowed heavily from the CCF and later the NDP. The Progressive Conservatives were just right of center. As the years slipped by the Liberals slipped right until they were right of where the Progressive Conservatives were and the PCs dropped the P altogether and are now very right wing. The NDP adopted more conservative practices to appeal more people, the Green party was never anything less that center, but primarily interested in the environment.
Because the change has been gradual, altering their outlook over the decades year by year and you would have to have a long memory to know how they have changed and you would have to know history to know where they are going. My father stood outside the public debates, during the last election. He had written on postal-board and carried them as signs and was there waiting for all the people to file past him. The signs stated that voting Conservative would be a vote for the New Third Reich. The allusion was to Nazi German in the nineteen twenties. You see my father knows history better than I do and he has a long memory too. Being older than me, he recognized the changes in society and predicted where they were heading. He thought that the conservative policies were restricting information, limiting democracy and muzzling free speech subtly. He recognized that their constant pre election negative ads and election ads were undermining free thought. Just like the Nazis did in the interwar period.
In my time, my Canadian Nazi party is riding its agenda not on hating Jews and the Outcasts, nor on the myth of the super race, but on the Economy. The Economy IS important, but it is not something that the federal government is in control of directly. The government can just pass laws that influence development, they can improve the infrastructure, and they can attract employers by making setting up in the area look like a great idea. Or you can reduce the effectiveness of dissenters and set aside environmental rules using political short cuts. Passing hundreds of little laws in one omnibus law is an example. Some of these laws stop environmental reviews of industry proposals, except for a small minority of locations in high profile places, little laws that prevent government employees from talking about their work, but are used to prevent Government Scientists from talking about their findings. Laws that reduce the bureaucracy by putting many different projects in larger departments and then cutting the programs to reduce those shuffled programs.
You see, there was another conservative government years before, in Ontario. This government was harsh and hated and in many ways corrupt. They built a toll highway that cost billions of dollars, but when it starting earning money, they sold it for millions of dollars. This government had a health minister, Tony Clement, who ripped the heart out of the provinces healthcare system. Let me tell you how he closed a dozen hospitals.
First they talked about waste in the health care system. Whenever right wing people start talking about waste, they have an agenda that they want to push. The scrutinized healthcare they said. They said that all the hospitals had too many beds, beds not being used. They closed off parts of the hospitals, saying they were reducing the costs and these beds were not being used anyways. That was phase one. Phase two, a couple of years later, they told everyone that all the hospitals had wasted space in them and an it was costing healthcare a lot of money. So they consolidated the empty beds into whole hospitals, so that there were empty hospitals and a bunch of hospitals at full capacity. Phase three; they said, look at all these empty hospitals, they are costing us money! They demolished the empty hospitals and sold the land, they made sure that hospitals in their own back yards were safe. They made sure that the secular hospital where all the gay people who were sick went to die was demolished. The gay people were forced to go to the religious hospital that would not let gay partners visit loved ones, because they were not family.
Phase inevitable came next, SARS. It could have been anything, a horrific chain reaction car accident, a plane crash into a neighbourhood; things that happen, but not often. The point was the province had no excess capacity no where to put an extra 600 long-term patients. The closing of hospitals meant that doctors and nurses and other staff moved away and now there is a shortage across the province.
Tony Clement, ex Ontario Health Minister, is the right hand man of the current Leader of Canada, along with a few other Ontario ministers from that time. I realize that I sound like a nutter, but I see Canada heading down the path that few in the world want to go.
The newest piece of news is that the government is muzzling Librarians and Archivists employed by the government. They are not to engage in high risk behaviours, like teaching or talking at conferences about libraries and archiving. They have to have a Loyalty Test, they say. A Loyalty test? Loyalty to whom? Librarians? Librarians love books, they respect the books. Archivists, they to love their work, they take the events of today and hold them for the future; they do not falsify data, they have no agenda. When people start doing stuff like this I think Orwell and I think Ministry of Truth; I think of Fascism and Stalinist Communism.
Some governments go too far.
Humans, but also whales it has been recently found, tell stories. This is a way to pass information on to future generations about what happened to people, often people from countless generation before and from lands far away. Sperm whales may pass on stories on navigation information through stories, but that has yet to be substantiated. Humans are unique, though, be recording their stories for future generations. Cave paintings may have been the first instance of this practice, or perhaps the only one to survive to this day. We invented books to store information for future people to learn from. Before books one person was required to pass all their knowledge on verbally and for some people that meant a lot of time spent doing so. The invention of books allowed science to flourish; it allowed accomplishments and failures alike to be kept for posterity. This meant wrong turns would not be explored again and our body of knowledge could greatly expand.
Books meant that we could record other important things like history, a word that means story. Having a record of what we have done lets people become aware of the good and the bad that people have done in the past, so we don't do it again.
That brings me back to memories, one of the other unique things about humans, is that we can use our memories to project into the future. Sadly, though, I have begun to doubt this fact recently. People have stopped projecting their minds into the future. Perhaps that is untrue; perhaps people are just not projecting far enough into the future.
I have a memory, a long memory, compared to some people, a very long memory. I remember standing on a chair and taking out a glass in our Mississauga home, small little acrylic glass and smashing it on the floor and seeing all the pieces everywhere and I remember the spanking less. I remember peeing in the bedroom floor while my parents were getting ready for work early in the morning, I remember doing it the second time I should say. I don't remember the spanking. I remember going outside and being happy because it snowed and the days before had no snow because winter was over, but this morning there was snow again, but the next time I went out, it had melted. I remember months later playing on the street, still in Mississauga, and playing on the road in the hot afternoon; the sun had heated the road so that the tar had bubbled up and we, the neighbourhood kids had decided to pop those bubbles with our hands. I do remember how painful the hand and face watching was that night though.
My point is I remember the weather from back in 1976. Honestly though, I did not get a true baseline until much later on what weather was like. Our family moved to Boonieland in 1977 and I got to grow up in the relative countryside. My parents mistakenly believed that the city was the wrong place for children to grow up. We did grow up wandering with friends through the neighbourhood, through creeks, up Canadian Shield cliffs, ponds and beaches. What I did not know I was doing was gathering weather data. I remember that the days were hot, I wore short sleeved shirts all summer long, but it rained frequently and some days were cool and cloudy. Our acre large front lawn was always green except on the worst droughts. The creeks never went dry and the pond dried up only rarely, once or twice in eight years.
My years not paying attention to the climate, but living in it, provided me a baseline of experience. My in attention change when we moved in 1985 to a new town, a new climate and a new life, far from all my friends. It was also the first time that I saw digital temperature readout. Keep in mind that in 1985, I was only 13 years old, but I started noticing things. That temperature readout stated that the temperature was 40°C, the hottest that I had ever experienced at that time.
We moved back to Boonieland within nine months, this time to a property resting on one of the Great Lakes. So, since 1986, I have been paying attention to the weather, the temperature and the lake levels that have been dropping since that year. The point is that I remember the past, and by using just that in significant past, I can project into the future about the weather and the climate. And that is just one aspect of my attention. I have been paying attention to politics too.
I have noticed that in the past thirty years that politics has been slipping to the right. Pierre Trudeau (Liberals) was considered a little left of center in the early eighties, because he borrowed heavily from the CCF and later the NDP. The Progressive Conservatives were just right of center. As the years slipped by the Liberals slipped right until they were right of where the Progressive Conservatives were and the PCs dropped the P altogether and are now very right wing. The NDP adopted more conservative practices to appeal more people, the Green party was never anything less that center, but primarily interested in the environment.
Because the change has been gradual, altering their outlook over the decades year by year and you would have to have a long memory to know how they have changed and you would have to know history to know where they are going. My father stood outside the public debates, during the last election. He had written on postal-board and carried them as signs and was there waiting for all the people to file past him. The signs stated that voting Conservative would be a vote for the New Third Reich. The allusion was to Nazi German in the nineteen twenties. You see my father knows history better than I do and he has a long memory too. Being older than me, he recognized the changes in society and predicted where they were heading. He thought that the conservative policies were restricting information, limiting democracy and muzzling free speech subtly. He recognized that their constant pre election negative ads and election ads were undermining free thought. Just like the Nazis did in the interwar period.
In my time, my Canadian Nazi party is riding its agenda not on hating Jews and the Outcasts, nor on the myth of the super race, but on the Economy. The Economy IS important, but it is not something that the federal government is in control of directly. The government can just pass laws that influence development, they can improve the infrastructure, and they can attract employers by making setting up in the area look like a great idea. Or you can reduce the effectiveness of dissenters and set aside environmental rules using political short cuts. Passing hundreds of little laws in one omnibus law is an example. Some of these laws stop environmental reviews of industry proposals, except for a small minority of locations in high profile places, little laws that prevent government employees from talking about their work, but are used to prevent Government Scientists from talking about their findings. Laws that reduce the bureaucracy by putting many different projects in larger departments and then cutting the programs to reduce those shuffled programs.
You see, there was another conservative government years before, in Ontario. This government was harsh and hated and in many ways corrupt. They built a toll highway that cost billions of dollars, but when it starting earning money, they sold it for millions of dollars. This government had a health minister, Tony Clement, who ripped the heart out of the provinces healthcare system. Let me tell you how he closed a dozen hospitals.
First they talked about waste in the health care system. Whenever right wing people start talking about waste, they have an agenda that they want to push. The scrutinized healthcare they said. They said that all the hospitals had too many beds, beds not being used. They closed off parts of the hospitals, saying they were reducing the costs and these beds were not being used anyways. That was phase one. Phase two, a couple of years later, they told everyone that all the hospitals had wasted space in them and an it was costing healthcare a lot of money. So they consolidated the empty beds into whole hospitals, so that there were empty hospitals and a bunch of hospitals at full capacity. Phase three; they said, look at all these empty hospitals, they are costing us money! They demolished the empty hospitals and sold the land, they made sure that hospitals in their own back yards were safe. They made sure that the secular hospital where all the gay people who were sick went to die was demolished. The gay people were forced to go to the religious hospital that would not let gay partners visit loved ones, because they were not family.
Phase inevitable came next, SARS. It could have been anything, a horrific chain reaction car accident, a plane crash into a neighbourhood; things that happen, but not often. The point was the province had no excess capacity no where to put an extra 600 long-term patients. The closing of hospitals meant that doctors and nurses and other staff moved away and now there is a shortage across the province.
Tony Clement, ex Ontario Health Minister, is the right hand man of the current Leader of Canada, along with a few other Ontario ministers from that time. I realize that I sound like a nutter, but I see Canada heading down the path that few in the world want to go.
The newest piece of news is that the government is muzzling Librarians and Archivists employed by the government. They are not to engage in high risk behaviours, like teaching or talking at conferences about libraries and archiving. They have to have a Loyalty Test, they say. A Loyalty test? Loyalty to whom? Librarians? Librarians love books, they respect the books. Archivists, they to love their work, they take the events of today and hold them for the future; they do not falsify data, they have no agenda. When people start doing stuff like this I think Orwell and I think Ministry of Truth; I think of Fascism and Stalinist Communism.
Some governments go too far.
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