Commentary

Living in interesting times: Stephen Harper’s betrayal of Canadian Sovereignty.

~ Roger JG Albert

It’s interesting to me that a Conservative prime minister like Stephen Harper could be so anti-nationalist while constantly protesting his love of Canada.  He had good teachers, however, in Brian Mulroney and the Liberals Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien, who, each in their own way, undermined Canadian sovereignty.   It seems odd, doesn’t it, that the ‘leader’ of a developed country like Canada would be so intent on seeing it marginalized in the name of capital.  I’ve written about this in previous blogs. Of course, there’s always been tension between the interests of the nation-state and that of capital.  Now it seems we are living in the end times of the much-beloved institutions we call countries and the Harper government is leading the charge over the cliff, carving off bits and pieces of the resources of this country and making them available at rock bottom prices to global finance capital while we, the citizens of Canada, must sit by and watch our country being slowly dismantled.

Not that I’m a huge nationalist myself.  I’m not any kind of ‘ist’ in this discourse.  I understand the dynamics of history, particularly the political economy of capital accumulation, the impoverishment of greater and greater segments of the global population and the destruction of the environment along with the disappearance of countless species of animals.  Studying all of this has been my life’s work.

Historically, we’re on a course, a course that will not be reversed and at best can be slightly mitigated in its negative effects on all of the global inhabitants, especially humans.  Things will eventually get better for everyone, but not before they get a lot worse.  The Harper government is the handmaiden of your disenfranchisement and  the leading thrust in the destruction of the democratic process.  We’re inevitably on our way to a world government with the global population having no voice in governance.  Oh, there may be elections in the future, but they will be token nods to the concepts of real democracy, just as in Canada today.  Our education system is designed largely by people who have drunk the Kool-Aid of national sovereignty, trade between countries and parliamentary political representation. Our youth know nothing about global capital accumulation and the inevitable intensive concentration of capital.  If anyone learns anything these days about how the world really works, it’s in spite of the education system not because of it.

Private capital accumulation created countries during the bourgeois revolutions in Europe starting in the 11th century or thereabouts, but that evolutionary process was not without variation.  Some European countries got a leg up with the early concentration of political power in fewer and fewer hands in larger and larger political units.  Countries as we know them slowly evolved out of the amalgamation of small, independent political units.  France was, for hundreds of years, made up of clans, the Breton, the Normand, the Alsaciens, the Savoyards, etc… Britain was, as we know, an amalgamation of many, sometimes warring factions, such as the Normans, the Saxons, the Angles, the Danes, the Welsh, Scottish, etc… In the 19th Century, these same countries imposed the same kind of political organization on much of the rest of the world with virtually all of Africa split up between European colonial powers between 1873 and 1896.  Same thing happened all over the rest of the world.  Now the process is being rationalized with the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund among many other organizations encouraging the global release of restrictions on global capital accumulation.  The indebtedness of many countries is contrived and used as a means of disenfranchising national sovereignty, and that process proceeds apace.   As I noted above, private capital accumulation created countries, and it will lead to their destruction.

Look forward to a more concerted assault on national sovereignty by national governments and, in response, the need for greater and greater vigilance and social action.  What we’ve come to know as the Arab Spring will look like a picnic compared to what we will can expect in the future.  Syria is a case study in how national leadership can make war on its own people.  Expect more of that, much more.

The Tyee – Meet some of Surrey’s formerly homeless

~ Roger JG Albert

The Tyee – Meet some of Surrey’s formerly homeless.

Interesting approach to dealing with homelessness in Surrey, British Columbia. To have a look, click on the link above to The Tyee, one of my favourite sources for news.

This approach seems to be working, at least for some people.  I’d like to see a proper evaluation of it, but then I’d like to see a proper evaluation of all programs organizations advance in the cause of ending homelessness.  Evaluation is the key to determining whether a program is successful or not.  Of course, once a program, any program, gets off the ground and survives its first 2 or 3 years of operation it gets a life of its own and that’s hard to give up, even in the light of ‘thin’ success on the ground.  But programs can change rather than die and become more relevant and successful with a new approach to evaluation called developmental evaluation that includes the evaluator in a dialogue with the program to get its practice in line with its goals and objectives.

 

Bullying

~ Roger JG Albert

Bullying.

This post is in response to a query from one of my former students asking me for my sociological opinion about bullying.

So, what about bullying?  Well, I suspect it’s not just one process, and people will experience it differently depending on many social and individual circumstances, and I mean bullies as well as those bullied.  We used to call bullying, being ‘picked on.’  It always includes picking out, singling out a person for rejection by the group.  Rejection is sometimes expressed verbally but also in many other ways.  Bullying tactics include taunts, name-calling, exclusion for regular group activities, and even physical assault.  The goal of the bully is to render the person singled out to be bullied helpless and vulnerable.  But none of this is new to the world.

 

Bullying is a social institution, a way that people attempt to self-aggrandize while diminishing others.  And because there is a lot of diversity in the population, some people are virtually immune from bullying or being intimidated by others while others are highly vulnerable.  Some people fight back when bullied, others shrink back into themselves.

 

Bullying, in effect, is the individualized equivalent of scapegoating.  Bullies are more or less adept at gathering support for their ‘cause,’ which is the shunning of a person, or sometimes of a group of people, because of certain characteristics they target as socially unacceptable.  Sometimes these characteristics are real, sometimes contrived.  The effect is the same, either way.  It’s the old solidarity thing again. Durkheim wrote about it ad infinitum and others like Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, Norbert Elias among many others, carried on the tradition.  In fact, that’s what sociology is all about.  Durkheim correctly argued that sociology is the science of morality.  Solidarity is achieved in many ways and at many levels.  It’s not too difficult to get people to think of themselves as being an important part of a group.  Group life is necessary for human survival.  Our very lives depend on the power of our groups.  One way we do that is to try to diminish the ‘other.’  Governments do it all the time (as in the ‘evil empire’ crap) but so do many other organizations, even high school cliques.

 

I remember distinctly a time when I was a student at a private Catholic boarding school in Edmonton, Alberta (50 years ago now, sheesh), one of 40 kids from British Columbia in a school of 350.  We had a real we/they thing going with the kids from Alberta and Saskatchewan, most of whom we considered hicks.  I doubt if they spent a lot of time thinking of ‘us’ as a group.  In any case, we shared a sense of being in this together.  I’m not saying it was rational, but that’s the way it was.  Strangely  though, in one period of a couple of months, I found myself leading a group of kids taunting this poor kid from rural Alberta who had some personal hygiene issues, but who otherwise was like the rest of us.  (We slept in a dormitory of 125 beds.  Lots of boys had personal hygiene issues.  The odor in that room was sometimes choking and even the huge wall fan at the back of the room couldn’t deal with the stink).  He eventually left the school because of it and I remember us feeling triumphant about it.

 

At another time, I was singled out for special bullying attention.  That lasted a couple of months before I finally broke and got physically violent with one of the other boys.  The priests who were in charge of the place had a practice of dealing with inter-boy aggression by putting both boys in the boxing ring and letting them go at it in an officially sanctioned way.  Interestingly, that often worked to diffuse bullying because the boys, like me and ‘my bully,’ could go maybe 3 rounds before falling together in an exhausted heap, finally breaking out in laughter and hugs. (Boxing is really hard work!)  These bullying incidents were situational.  One day a bully could easily become the bullied.  The feeling I got, though, when I was bullied was complete helplessness and I remember writing my mother and asking her to get me out of there.  She urged me to stick it out and that’s when I struck back.  When I was the bully, the sense of power that gave me and my co-bullies was pretty significant.  We smirked and laughed and felt strong, even playing hockey more aggressively (and better, some would say).

 

We can all be aggressive: men, women and children.  But there’s a lot of variation in the population so that some individuals are more resistant to bullying than others.  But that’s on an individual level.  On the social level, bullying will happen as an inevitable playing out of power struggles as each of us tries to find our place in the world, much like chickens in a coop find their pecking order.  We can never do away with bullying as long as we are individuals living in societies where each one of us dances between expressing our individuality and living within the group’s moral wall.  Big problems would ensue for a society if no one were safe from aggression or bullying, if morality broke down to such an extent that we were all individuals on our own.  That, of course, is not possible for our species, so we try to put mechanisms in place to mitigate the damage caused by too much aggression or bullying.  We pass laws, we use guilt and shame.

 

Sometimes, things get out of hand.  A particularly vulnerable person like Amanda Todd, needing like we all do to be a meaningful part of a group, is shunned by more and more people (smelling blood) making for an increasingly constricting scope of activity, for extreme isolation.  Todd was not even safe in her own room at home where she was vulnerable to bullying online.  Bullying, like scapegoating, can happen just as easily at a distance as it can face-to-face.  Todd ended up committing suicide, in Durkheim’s terms, egoistic suicide because of the isolation she experienced and her perception that she had no one to ‘be’ with.

 

Bullying is a consequence of the dance we all experience between self-aggrandizement (ensuring that we take up valuable space in the world) and self-effacement (respect for the fact that we owe everything to our group and that we’d better not step out of line).  For some of us, sometimes, the dance turns deadly.  Most of the time, nobody pays attention to suicide, but every so often one incident gets a lot of publicity.  If the suicide is ‘caused’ by bullying, then, with the right set of circumstances, the social reaction can be severe.  People are calling for the arrest of the bullies in the Amanda Todd case.  Politicians are threatening to enact anti-bullying legislation. That’s a sign that we’re all feeling vulnerable and helpless these days.  We want our society to protect us.  And that’s fine, until we are ‘protected’ so effectively that we no longer have any room to move, to express our individuality.

Substance Use: Pathways to homelessness? Or a way of adapting to street life? | Here to Help, A BC Information Resource for Individuals and Families Managing Mental Health or Substance Use Problems

~ Roger JG Albert

Click on the link below for an interesting follow-up to my last blog.

Substance Use: Pathways to homelessness? Or a way of adapting to street life? | Here to Help, A BC Information Resource for Individuals and Families Managing Mental Health or Substance Use Problems.

Homeless People, Mental Illness and Brain Injuries

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I’m not a front line worker when it comes to homelessness.  I have spoken with many homeless people, heard their stories and, yes, given them money, often in the face of disapproving glances from passersby, as if it were any of their business.  Homeless people are often thought of as threatening, loud, dirty, uneducated, lazy and drunk or drugged out.  There is some truth to these thoughts.  However, homeless people don’t have a monopoly on them.  

Homelessness forces people into the street where their every gesture, their actions, their conversations and their very beings are constantly visible.  If they are street bound, that is, if they have no temporary accommodations, no shelters to sleep in or no tent in the bushes, they are visible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Being observed all the time, without privacy has to be very emotionally taxing, to say the least.  If the homeless person has mental health issues, a brain injury or an addiction (most of them) , the vulnerability of constant exposure must be enormously distressing, compounding any problems they might already have ‘behaving’ themselves and relating to other people.  Constant surveillance by the police and other agencies cannot but add to the stress of living homeless.  

Most of us, if we have too many drinks, get a little raucous, loud, or a little unruly, can catch a cab home and crawl into bed, secure in our isolation and out of the public eye.  Our homes are our refuge, a place where we can do things we wouldn’t dream of doing on the street or anywhere in public. In fact, if you can afford to rent or own a home, many behaviours and activities not for public consumption become viable.  Drinking to excess, getting stoned, walking around nude, all these things are possible if you live in a home.  Those are the things that make it so liberating when we move out of our parental homes into our own pads.  Privacy is precious and it’s obvious that the more wealth we have the more privacy we can buy.  

Privacy is not something homeless people can afford.  The public life that homeless people lead makes them incredibly vulnerable to being targeted, scapegoated and unfairly characterized as morally unacceptable and less than worthy in the eyes of many.  Mental issues, brain injuries, addictions and other problems are spread throughout the population, but the wealthy can buy themselves into expensive treatment programs and privacy.  Street people don’t have the same advantage.  Our attention is drawn to the homeless because of their visibility.  If we were subject to the same surveillance intensity they are we may not be so quick to judge and reject.  

The Perfect Susan B. Anthony Quote That The Religious Right Would Really, Really Hate | MoveOn.Org

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

The Perfect Susan B. Anthony Quote That The Religious Right Would Really, Really Hate | MoveOn.Org.

If you were to read some of my blogs over the past few months you would find this quote perfectly understandable.  ‘God’ in whatever guise you might find is always a personification of what people think is ‘good’ about their society.  All other values or means not sanctioned as good by social leaders are considered satanic, demonic, evil.*  Ernest Becker, in Escape From Evil elucidates clearly the reason why we bifurcate society in this way, a process that started millenia ago.  We are so dependent on our societies for our lives, our sustenance, our culture that we naturally deify them.  Those who might threaten our societies from within or without are evil and must be destroyed or at least ignored, ostracized or shunned.  The closer one gets to the core of social values, the closer one feels to ‘God.’  It’s all just illusion, of course.  A big lie.  But comforting.

In a society characterized by the accumulation of monetary value, those who have been most successful in this venture are the high priests (think Goldman Sachs) and are virtually untouchable, even when caught doing immense damage to the ‘rest of us.’ It’s not about the ‘rest of us.’  It’s about their interests and how they coincide with the perpetuation of capital accumulation.  That’s the message of this quote.

* This can be as simple as a married woman who looks the way of a handsome man as they pass on the street thus offending the husband’s notion of how a good married woman should behave (look straight ahead, acknowledge no one) and as complicated as a whole society’s condemnation of homosexuality or of the poor who are considered no better than the walking dead.  It refers to a violation of expectations of ‘proper’ conduct.

Congratulations on your retirement…wtf!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

So, I’m on vacation waiting for my retirement at the end of this month.  I’ve worked long and hard and most people wouldn’t begrudge me some rest.  Still, I’m not sure why people congratulate me on my retirement.  What is there to be congratulated about?  Managing to stay employed for so long?  Staying alive until 65?  Getting irretrievably older?  Not having to go to work anymore?  Being able to ‘do what I want?’  I’ve asked some people why they just congratulated me on my retirement and they sometimes pick one of the above reasons or they just shrug their shoulders.  It’s just something people do.  I’m sorry, but I find it annoying, but also very instructive.

Since the ‘industrial revolution’ there’s been a strong desire among our handlers, the ruling class, to get us to work without complaining, and even, maybe, to like it and, of course, to shit all over anyone who doesn’t share this ‘work ethic.’  Protestantism was essentially created as an ideological support for the idea that working hard and without complaining at our ‘calling’ was next to godliness.  Of course, a lot of people don’t work at their ‘calling,’ nor are they especially happy about their work unless they’re heavily sedated or medicated.  Work is pretty much a drag and we all know it.  Oh, some people get to do what they want in life, but they’re pretty scarce.  If you ask people if they would do what they do for a living without getting paid for it, a precious few would say yes.  After all, we work to live and not the other way around.  I always made a point of asking my students where they live.  None gave me their work address.  We don’t ‘live’ at work, we ‘live’ at home.  We work at work and don’t think of it as part of our lives.  Now, I’m writing here about life in the ‘industrialized’ countries.  What goes on in a rice field in Thailand is anyone’s guess.  A lot depends on who owns it and whether or not it actually sustains life in any meaningful way, I presume.

But to get back to the issue, work is a four-letter word.  A clue to how we really feel about our work ‘life’ is to congratulate people when they exit it.  “Geez, how does it feel to get off the ol’ treadmill, eh?”   The answer is supposed to be: “Aw, yeah, feels great.”  [Silently: “if I only had enough money now to enjoy it.”]  But, of course, I’m generalizing here.  Some people are quite happy and wealthy in their retirements.  But I’m not referring here only to retirement, which is a permanent retreat from work.  I’m also writing here about vacations.  If work is so great, why do we constantly need a vacation from it?  How often do you hear people saying “Boy, do I need a vacation.”  All the time.  Everywhere.

But there’s more.  Not only do we congratulate people who retire and long for vacations when we work, we are really ignorant about it. We call people lazy who lay about watching TV, we deride people who go on state-sponsored ski vacations, we treat the unemployed like crap…yet we yearn to be just like them.  We crave the idle life.  We long for leisure.  Work is this must thing we do, like taking bad tasting medicine for a cold.  Not surprisingly, either, because for most of us we have no control over our work, who we work with, the equipment we use, or the products or services we produce. [Again, this isn’t true for everyone, but it is for the vast majority of us.]  The only real interest most of us have in our jobs is our paycheque (and benefits, if we’re lucky enough to have them).  Take that away and there isn’t much left.  Still, all is not lost, as Karl Marx argued, in ancient Rome where slavery was the vehicle for the accumulation of wealth, slaves were 100% owned and controlled by ‘the ruling class.’  In the Middle Ages, when peasants were indentured to their masters, they had about 20% of their time to themselves and for themselves.  During the more recent ‘capitalist, industrial’ era, we spend roughly a third of the 168 hours a week we have at our disposal at work (as well as getting to and from work).  I’m talking averages here.  In the following era when people will all (for all intents and purposes) be unemployed (replaced by automated tools, factories, etc.) we’ll be 100% without masters. [Don’t laugh, it’s not that far down the road]  Strange as it may seem.  When the capitalist mode of production succeeds in eliminating employment as we know it, life will be a lot different.  We’ll still ‘work,’ but not for a wage.  Now we think of this idea as absolutely outrageous and dumb, but then it will seem quite normal, just as normal as it would have been to be a slave in ancient Rome.

So, in the end, we’ll get what we want: a job free world.  Retirement starting at birth!  Permanent vacation!  Yeah!  Because efficiency to business means the elimination of workers.  The ultimate efficiency is a factory that employs no one, not even maintenance personnel (that can be handled remotely, by robots, etc).  Problem is, who will they sell the products they make to?  It’s the ultimate business conundrum…and most business people don’t even know it exits.

This man ran an Indian residential school in Alberta.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

Fr. Martin Michaud OMI

Martin Michaud OMI
Martin Michaud OMI

 

Father Michaud OMI was born on January 31, 1922 at Fort Kent, Alberta, Canada.

He passed away on August 28, 2007.

 

When I was a boy, maybe 11 years old, my mother and father packed up the ’57 Dodge with about 8 or 9 of us kids and piles of supplies [I have no idea to this day how they did it] and took us on a road trip.  My memory is a little sketchy as to the exact itinerary, but I distinctly remember that we left Maillardville, near Vancouver, BC, and headed north up highway 1 to 97 to Prince George where we spent some time with some  family who lived there.  I remember that we went as far north as Dawson Creek then headed east into Alberta to Edmonton, then south again to a place  that stunned me and that I have never forgotten. As far as I can remember, the place was close to Trochu, Alberta, but I can’t guarantee that.  It was an ‘Indian’ residential school and my ‘uncle’ Martin Michaud was the man in charge. It was summertime so all the ‘residents’ were away at the time with their families.  Us kids [maybe all of us] slept in the dorm.  I had no clue about the political significance of the place and others like it.  I was struck particularly by the names of some of the kids that lived here during most of the year.  I remember specifically two names: Johnny Born With A Tooth and Johnny Born With A Gun.  I’m quite sure about these names because they were so distinctive.  I found them so unusual, so foreign to me.  How could anyone be called something like that?

But back to Martin Michaud.  I didn’t really know him.  I knew his brother, Father Guy Michaud, OMI, much better because I went to a private residential school in Edmonton, College St-Jean, a kind of prep school for the French Canadian boys (mostly) west of the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.  He worked there as director for a short period of time when I was there.  My parents sent me there hoping that I would become a priest, but as it turns out, I became a sociologist instead.  They tell me that I begged them to send me there because all of my friends were going.  That may be, I really don’t remember.  The point is, my experience at College St-Jean, where I got a superior, classical, education, was much different from Johnny Born With A Tooth’s experience at his residential school.   As I said, I didn’t know Martin Michaud.  But given what I know about Indian residential schools, at least as reported in Shingwauk’s Vision by J.R. Miller and What is the Indian ‘Problem.’ by Noel Dyck, among many other reports, and given the stories of pain and grief experienced by residents of the many residential schools in Canada, I wonder about what kind of a man Martin Michaud was.  Noel Dyck points out that in many cases the people who worked in residential schools or as Indian Agents were people with the best of intentions.  The religious personnel of these schools would have believed that the only way to salvation for the poor little Indian children in their care would have been to rescue them from their savage parents and cultures.  This may have entailed using physical punishment to ‘beat the indian out of the child.’  I don’t know what kind of director Martin Michaud was.  I’d like to know.  Obviously, it’s been many years since the residential school I visited was shut down.  I’m hoping there are survivors who can help me determine want kind of a man my ‘uncle’ was.  If you have any information about Martin Michaud or the residential school he directed, please, I’d like to know.  So far, my research hasn’t gotten me too far.  I’m hoping you can help.