It’s about class and race and sex and…

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

Just a teaser there!  Now for the real post!

So, I’ve been writing a biweekly column for the local paper, The Comox Valley Record.  Not exactly the New York Times, the Globe or the Guardian.  It’s a paper published twice a week and emphasizes ads over editorial content, but it’s making an effort to provide some coverage of social issues.  The Record is read by substantial numbers of people locally so I get some people reading my work.  They tell me so occasionally.  It’s a challenge to write a regular column sometimes. Not that I’m at a loss for words.  I’ve been writing for some time now about homelessness and affordable housing and local government involvement in such things.  Problem is, I’m not at all convinced I’ve changed anybody’s mind on these topics.  I generally try to provide evidence for my position and appeal to reason, but I doubt I’m having much effect.  Of course, I may be surprised by what people are feeling about my work, but I have no idea what impact I’m actually having.

Generally I think that people are loathe to change their minds in any way.  They have a huge vested interest in their ideas and more often than not in my experience when I’ve spoken in public I sense that people are not so much listening to learn, they are listening only to respond on the basis of their own ideas.  That was how many of my students listened in class over the 36 years I taught at BC colleges.  Not all of them.  It’s hard to say just how many of my students had a change of mind after taking my courses.  I know that some of them did to the point of going on to take sociology as a university major.

Obviously we teach and write with the hope that people will listen and change their minds if the evidence is compelling enough for the arguments we make.  I’m not sure that happens all that frequently.  I’m thinking that people change their minds for lots of reasons, just not often by appeal to reason.  It strikes me and has struck me for some time that a person’s social status, class, ethnicity or nationality and sex have a profound impact on their worldview and what they allow ‘into’ that worldview.  Of course, age, intelligence and many other factors will also have an impact.  There have been a few studies about how people change their minds or don’t.  Not a lot.  A recent article in The New Yorker by Maria Konnikova (May 16, 2014) entitled I Don’t Want To Be Right addresses this issue.  She writes: “When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.”  So many of our attitudes, beliefs, values and ideas are habitual, entrenched and lovingly held, that we resist any attempt to change it. Some of our beliefs are held tentatively as in science, but for most of us most of the time, we don’t like evidence that contradicts what we believe or espouse.

Attitudes we hold towards other people in the class structure are generally quite entrenched.  We hold wealthy people in high esteem and we feel that poor folks are less than worthy of our consideration. That’s class at work.  We don’t want to support housing for the homeless because it’s their bed, they made it and now they must sleep in it, never mind all the evidence that suggests that the homeless are not always responsible for their life circumstances, especially homeless children.  Evidence in this case will be discounted time and again by whatever means possible including misrepresentation, misquotation, lies, deceit, ad hominem argumentation and any number of other strategies.  No, we don’t like our ideas to be challenged.  After all, they’re served us so well for our whole lives.  Why change now?  Indeed.

We do change our minds sometimes but it usually takes a profound change in our life circumstances to do so.  We change our ideas because our lives change and not the other way around.  We may fall ill, become disabled, or experience a business failure, a marriage breakdown, death in the family, death of the family.  So many life experiences have the power to change our minds and attitudes towards other people or other ideas.  Appeals to reason on the other hand fail to move us, especially if the new beliefs would require us to re-think our whole worldview.  The more highly we are committed to our worldviews and to our material interests, the less likely we are to change, no matter what the evidence to the contrary might be.  No better example of this is the Cheney/Bush insistence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.  Such bullshit so highly defended as truth.  I’m sure Cheney would still argue that the weapons are there somewhere.  He would be completely disingenuous in this, but he would at least be consistent.

So, why am I writing a column in the local paper that tries to convince people of the advantages, economic and moral, of providing housing for the homeless?  Beats me.  I’m still thinking about it.

Healthy Living Experts Forum – The House of Now

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Healthy Living Experts Forum – The House of Now.

For those of you in the Comox Valley area who are not averse to getting up on a Sunday morning, I’ll be speaking at this forum this Sunday.  The details are on the website.  I’ll be talking about morality and poverty among other things.  I have 20 minutes like the other presenters…but for those of you who know me, I could go on for hours!  Should be an informative morning…which you could then follow up with lunch somewhere like the Atlas Cafe or the Wandering Moose in Cumberland!

Spend a Day in a Wheelchair – Jeffrey Preston

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

Spend a Day in a Wheelchair – Jeffrey Preston.

Interesting take on the issue of widespread disrespect for people who we consider dis-abled. The author rejects the pity response to disability he says is encouraged by ‘spend a day in a wheelchair’ initiatives. He advocated for guided tours that point out structural blocks to accessibility in architecture and public works.

Sometimes I get very frustrated writing about this issue. It’s difficult to find adequate and respectful descriptors for the ‘disabled.’  I balk at using this word ‘disabled’ or words like it. Virtually every word that we’ve ever used to describe disabled people focus on their limited mobility, including the word ‘disability.’  I’m not too crazy about the term ‘differently-able’ either.  I understand the intent behind it, but I find it too much of a reaction to the word ‘disabled.’  We need descriptive terms to communicate and we generally focus on the normative (cow, for example) in creating descriptive terms that are not specific to place or location as in Wolf Beach. When it comes to people who have lost mobility in whichever way, I feel we haven’t gotten very far in coming up with adequate descriptive, non-judgmental terms.

Of course, we tend to judge people generally by their level of mobility.  If we are immobilized by poverty we do everything we can to hide that fact from others, to ‘fit in’ by whatever means we can.  Someone with a physical mobility issue cannot hide the fact so judgment by others is much more transparent.  Some people in wheelchairs, etc., have very ‘mobile’ minds but that’s not a visible part of what they are.  Our judgments tend to focus in first on what we see.  These judgments can change and often do once we get to know someone as an individual.

I guess what I’m advocating here is that we reject first impressions and reserve judgment to a time when we have enough information about a person to make a reasonable judgment.  This isn’t always easy but we can strive to reserve judgment and keep our minds open to learn about a person before leaping to conclusions about that person based on first sight impressions.  Can we do that?  Yes, we can.

 

How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps | Alternet

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps | Alternet.

Predicable.  The author Debra Leigh Scott doesn’t mention Thorstein Veblen’s essay The Higher Learning in America published some 100 years ago but he noted then how business was taking over higher education.

Pure science is under attack everywhere, a consequence of the decline of the importance of the national state and the rise of global corporate power.  It’s anarchy out there.  Corporations don’t want to spend a dime more than they need to in order to make megaprofits so they want ‘science’ that is strictly geared to their needs.  Countries (meaning you and I) are left with supporting pure science with the uncertain knowledge that it will benefit them in any practical way.  States still do support pure science in many forms, but the pressure is on the increased importance of ‘applied’ science…which is really engineering.

Utah Drug-Tested Almost 5,000 People On Welfare, And The Results Almost Made Me Throw Something

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

Utah Drug-Tested Almost 5,000 People On Welfare, And The Results Almost Made Me Throw Something.

I think that if the same test were run here we’d get the same results.  There are so many misconceptions out there about the poor…even amongst the poor.  There will always be exceptions to the rule, of course, but the evidence from this test is clear: the poor are like you and me, they just don’t have any money!  Of the almost 5,000 people tested in Utah, twelve, count them, 12, failed the drug test.  If you tested people randomly who walk out of some of the more expensive restaurants or bars in town, and you might just find much higher numbers of failed drug tests.

King Lear and the Walking Dead – From Earth in Transition

~ Roger JG Albert

Given what I’ve been writing here lately this is quite timely.  A good read.  Mountain is generally a very thoughtful writer and in this case, he nails it.  From King Lear to the Walking Dead, what drives us culturally and collectively is our fear of death.

King Lear and the Walking Dead

 

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion | IFLScience

~ Roger JG Albert

No, You’re Not Entitled To Your Opinion | IFLScience.

I quite like this piece. I used to tell my students at the start of every term that they did not have a right to their own opinions in my classes.  In fact I told them that I had no time for their opinions at all.  Now, why would I say such a nasty thing?  Because ‘ordinary’ opinion, not based on evidence, as in the case of taste and preference in colour, is not the same as scientific opinion, which is based on evidence and argument.  Until one has ‘done’ science, one has no right to an opinion in a science class.

Why are we afraid of people in wheelchairs?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

[This is a bit of an exploratory post.  I have ideas here that I want to develop further, but rather than trying to refine them now to a publishable state, I’m putting them out there in a somewhat disjointed and unrefined state so that I can think about them further and get your comments on them if you are so inclined].

 

A couple of days ago I posted a comment here about an injury I suffered last Thursday evening to my ribcage after a bad fall resulting in a hospital visit and a great deal of pain to an area of my body that had already been traumatized by cancer surgery.  Well, that personal story was just a way of leading into today’s post.  Of course, everything about the report I made a couple of days ago was true.  I’m still in a great deal of pain.  I haven’t driven our vehicle since my injury and I’m not sure when I will be able to again.  Maybe later this week sometime.  The good news is that I do feel some improvement in my pain levels already and some improved mobility.

That said, there are many people with immobility issues that cannot look forward to any improvement whatsoever in their conditions.  I feel temporarily humbled by my lack of mobility in a mobility driven world, but they must only feel permanently humbled and even humiliated.  Someone I am acquainted with has muscular dystrophy.  He’s my age, a little older actually.  He lived a ‘normal’ life for decades before being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, but his mobility has continuously declined since his diagnosis.  He is now confined to an electric wheelchair and a scooter that allows him a certain degree of mobility.  He can even visit me in Cumberland from Courtenay (8K) although not in my home because it is not wheelchair accessible. There’s actually very few locations in the Comox Valley accessible to wheelchair bound people, homes or businesses.  As an educated guess I would say that about 1% of Valley homes are wheelchair accessible.  The big box stores are all accessible, but not many of the businesses along 5th Street or anywhere downtown are. I know other wheelchair bound people in the Comox Valley with varying degrees of immobility, but all have very mobile and agile minds.  Of course, like the rest of us, not all wheelchair bound people have agile brains and some have difficulty communicating with ‘normal’ folks.  I’ll get back to that in a bit.

My point is that we treat people immobilized by various kinds of physical ‘disabilities’, ‘abnormalities’, or whatever other qualification we might use in describing them, with a curious dismissiveness.  We don’t take them seriously and don’t expect anything intelligent to come out of their mouthes.  Mainly, we don’t address them at all and if we must, we’d rather do it through an intermediary, like a caregiver or companion. I use ‘we’ here because this is a generalized social reaction with few people being self-aware enough to realize what they are feeling and why they are feeling that way.

What I am arguing here is not that individuals in our society are insensitive or uncaring about people who are ‘differently-abled’ as they sometimes describe themselves, but that we have a very deep-seated fear of immobility because of its association with death and we are culturally programmed to shun it.  If you think about it for a moment you’ll soon realize that we unconsciously equate mobility with freedom and wealth, immobility with death and confinement, either, for example, in a wheelchair or in prison.  We punish people in our society by removing their mobility.  We laud people who are mobile.  I can’t tell you how often I’ve been asked since I retired from college teaching where I’ve travelled to (nowhere, actually) or what travel plans I have.  Our obsession with mobility is virtually universal, goes a long way back and is deeply embedded in our cultural fabric.

Colin Turnbull in his 1960s ethnography of the BaMbuti tribe of the Ituri Forest in Central Africa described how the BMbuti had developed a system of describing how dead a person was.  If a person was unable to speak because of a stroke or such ailment, that person would be described as partially dead.  The greater the inability to keep up with the group, communicate and contribute to tribal life, the more dead a person was considered to be.  There was always a danger that a person might be considered dead even though they still had a pulse.  I can’t remember which anthropologist it was, writing at about the same time as Turnbull, who described in his notebooks a tribe in the New Guinea highlands that buried people alive because they had lost the ability to speak. For this tribe, he wrote, an inability to communicate verbally was a sure and certain sign that the person was dead. Burial would follow no matter how much movement was evident in the rest of the affected person’s body.

So, part of our common human cultural heritage seems to associate immobility and its various manifestations in individual human beings with death, the ultimate evil (in Ernest Becker’s words).  It doesn’t seem to matter what part of the world we are from, what language we speak or what tribe we belong to.  If we cannot speak, have various ailments that confine us to a wheelchair or we are somehow immobilized in body or mind, we are somehow lesser human beings no matter what other qualities we may have.  If we are on crutches because of an injury caused during a hockey game we will face a wait-and-see attitude.  If we are playing hockey again in a reasonable period of time all is forgiven but if we fail to get back to the game in a timely manner or are prone to injury and hence immobilized too frequently we will be considered a slacker and not really a good team player. Hero status goes to the player who plays on despite being injured, flaunting pain and immobility.  If we are in a wheelchair with obvious mobility limitations there in no wait-and-see-attitude, there is just ostracism and sometimes revulsion.

This all takes me back to wheelchair bound people, ‘mobile’ and agile brains.  My friend with muscular dystrophy has a very active mind, is from a professional background, is community-minded and involved in various social groups and activities. He is articulate and fully capable of expressing himself. His scooter is quite impressive and commands respect, but even he has commented to me that on more than one occasion when he was in his wheelchair accompanied by one of his caregivers that a clerk or other frontline worker would address the caregiver rather than him even though it was his business that was being discussed.  They often behaved as if he weren’t even present and, without asking him directly, would address his caretaker with:”…and would he like a drink with that?”    He reported on these occasions of feeling somewhat humiliated and disrespected, even if it was just for a moment.

We seem unwilling to tolerate immobility in any of its manifestations.  As noted above, we find physical immobility disconcerting and we feel uncomfortable around people in wheelchairs.  People who are ‘mentally’ immobile are particularly scary for us because they cannot move a conversation forward in a predictable manner.  We feel afraid or disdainful of people ‘talking to themselves’ while walking down the street. And while we are fine with immobility on vacations, lying around beaches reading novels, it must only be as a temporary interlude in a busy work schedule.  We heap scorn on ‘lazy’ people.  We find the immobility brought on by poverty particularly vexing and distasteful.   We describe children and retired people as ‘unproductive’ because they fail to contribute to the forward mobility (growth) of the entire community.  Combine any number of physical and mental immobilities and the disdain and fear we experience are compounded.

One mental struggle I’ve had for decades now is determining just how much of our fear of immobility is driven by our biological built in urge to avoid death like every other animal species and how much by culturally specific imperatives, including learning and education.  It’s hard to dispute the idea that over our history on this planet (and even now) individuals might at any moment have had to flee a predator or fight for survival.  The ‘fight or flight’ reaction would have been severely impaired by individual immobility.  Obviously, anyone who was immobile for whatever reason might put a whole family or tribe in danger.  The consequence of being immobilized by injury, hunger or any number of other conditions could be catastrophic.  How many times in the movies have you seen a war scenario where there was great gnashing of teeth over whether to flee and leave behind a wounded colleague or endanger the whole group by dragging him along and slowing everybody down.  Of course, if the wounded colleague was a hero he might just commit suicide, thereby releasing the group of its obligation to him and ensure the safety of the whole group.

There’s no denying that we are animals and have animal preoccupations around sex and survival.  However, that doesn’t mean that our behaviours are forever destined to be driven by our animal natures.  Ernest Becker argued that it’s our ingenuity and not our animal nature that has pushed us into perpetrating more evil on this planet than ever before.  Is it our destiny to always fear immobility and death?  Is it possible for us to ever develop cultural and moral principles and imperatives that strive to accept immobility and death rather than to fight them at every turn?  Will we ever be at peace with the fact that we are a weak, vulnerable, finite animal that has limitations or are we driven inexorably to apotheosis and hubris?  Will we ever treat each other with respect no matter what our level of mobility?  I’m afraid I’m not very optimistic about our chances of answering any of these questions in the affirmative, at least not in the short term.

A lesson in humility

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

I’m not usually big on humility.  I figure life gives us plenty of opportunities to feel humble without actually cultivating that quality of mind.  I’ve often been humbled in the past when confronted by situations out of my control, when all I could do was stand by helplessly and observe the unfolding of sometimes very unpleasant events.  For me, feelings of humility are more often than not brought on by situations where I am helpless, prevented from acting in one way or another or immobilized by a physical condition.  One great example in my past of being immobilized, and humbled by it, was when I had a disk removed in my lumbar region many years ago.  I had had an ‘accident’ in a lumber mill and was left close to immobilized with a severe injury to my back.  I was off work for a year because of it.  As an active, eager young man, being subjected to the immobility brought on by my back surgery and lots of time in bed was humbling to say the least.  My vulnerability as a person and as a man was plain to see.  I was definitely humbled by it.  Lying in my bed for days on end, I was in no position to exercise hubris of any kind.  It was hard not to feel diminished by the situation.  Over the years I’ve had other similar experiences.  

In 2002 I was diagnosed with kidney cell cancer and had my left kidney removed in a complex, delicate surgical procedure that left me with a 36 centimetre scar running around my left ribcage, front to back and chronic pain ever since.  We had just bought an acre of property which needed a great deal of work and here I was unable to do anything physical.  Carolyn was left to do all the work that needed to be done around the place and look after me too.  That was humbling and sometimes humiliating.  Of course I had no intention of getting cancer.  I have no idea how I got cancer.  It could have come from poor personal dietary decisions or who knows what.  So, I couldn’t be blamed for my immobility.  Still, being a conscious, sentient male of the species unable to move a great deal was humbling anyways.  Getting cancer and being immobilized by it highlighted in no uncertain terms my animal vulnerability.  

A few days ago, while working on a building project at home I had occasion again to feel my animal vulnerability, this time more acutely than in the past.  I’m 67 years old but in quite good physical condition.  Carolyn and I walk the dog on average 45 kilometres a week.  We average around 10 minutes per kilometre.  That’s a pretty good pace.  Along with that we regularly exercise in our little gym at home and with a trainer.  I’m pretty fit.  I’m able to do things.  I can lift heavy rocks for landscaping projects and work long hours in the shop or on various construction jobs.  That all came to an end last Thursday evening when I slipped on a loose board and crashed to the ground landing on another board in the process right on the exact location of my 2002 cancer surgery and the chronic pain its given me ever since.  Off to the emergency ward we went.  After a couple of hours of investigation, the hospital staff determined that I had not broken any ribs and that I should just go home and let it heal.  Well, that’s easier said than done.  I don’t have a lot of pain until I move, then the pain level shoots up to a 10 or higher.  I really can’t do much.  I can sit and type this as long as I keep my arms as still as possible but every once in a while without warning I get overwhelmed with a paroxysm of pain that threatens to leave me groaning and writhing uncontrollably on the floor.  Carolyn is required to do most of what I used to do for myself.  Thankfully, my family is here to help too.  My daughters and granddaughters have been great and my son-in-law is pitching in to move our deck building project along.  Still, I feel helpless and stupid for my carelessness.  It’s humbling to say the least to be immobilized and incapable of looking after myself and contributing to the many projects we have going to keep our home running smoothly.  I’ve always been careful around my shop tools and on the various construction projects we’ve undertaken around here…and, although I’ve injured myself now and again because of lack of care and attention, this last little bit of carelessness is costing me dearly.  It’s taken away my mobility, the very condition that we define as life.  I hope it doesn’t last too long.  Even though I’m of an ‘advanced’ age, I heal quite quickly so I have my fingers crossed that I’ll regain most of my mobility in the next few days.  Right now, I don’t particularly feel that way, but I must remain optimistic and maybe I’ll be able to get some decent painkillers when I see my family doctor next week.  I hate being humbled.  

 

How We Harvest Horseshoe Crab Blood to Save Human Lives | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

~ Roger JG Albert

How We Harvest Horseshoe Crab Blood to Save Human Lives | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building.

I’ve been pretty quiet lately on the blog front.  That’s partly because I’m building a new deck to replace our old rotten one and that’s taking time.  I’m also writing a guest column for a local paper called The Record.  I may post some of those columns here although they’re probably more suited to my other blog on homelessness in the Comox Valley.

I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about us as a species and how we treat other animal species. Well, it’s actually been an ongoing interest of mine, but every once in a while I read something that freshens up my interest.  Of course many animal species rip apart and eat other species in a carnival of violence every day on this planet, but I think that we take the cake.  As the article I’ve reposted here shows, we’ll do pretty much anything to another species (as well as to our own, of course) including draining their blood as involuntary blood donors.  I don’t know.  Sometimes I despair about my species.  At other times I marvel at our ingenuity and imagination.  So many contradictory feelings about all of this.