....after a brief bit about how ghastly the local newspaper is.
If you really,
really care that the New Brunswick legislature will be offering a new
beer to visiting dignataries, that plastic surgery is popular in
N.B., or that the town of Sackvile has cancelled its big hat party in
celebration of the Queen, then section A news will be your cup of
tea.
The only time I've
come across such limp news was yesterday, listening to Moncton radio
station 94.5. The news consisted, as I remember, of two
items – somebody got sent to jail for something, and somebody
didn't go to jail. Private radio in general has become pretty awful
in the last ten or fifteen years. But 94.5 is so bad, I wondered
whether it might be an Irving station.
Canada&World has
only 8 pages, with four of them ads. Of the remaining four, two pages
are still about Moncton - with the exception of one story that's
about a girl in Alberta. (She takes marijuana to treat epilepsy. The
news YOU need to know.)
The three stories on
B3 tell us nothing whatever. The biggest one is about a rumour that
Canadian jet fighter-bombers killed some civilians in Iraq. But the
Irving press has no idea whether it's true.
Well, it's nice, at
least, that our news is at last mentioning we're at war in Iraq. As
for killing civilians, it would be amazing if they weren't killed. Every war
since at least 1914 gas killed masses of civilians. That's the nature
of modern war. With modern weapons, it can't be avoided. And, in any
case, it's routinely done on purpose by every modern military I've
ever heard of.
Another “must-know”
story is on B6. A poll in the U.S. shows that the millenial
generation ( the one that is currently the annoying one) gets angry
at spelling and grammar mistakes – the women more so than the men.
Beside it is the fast-breaking news that an 'elite' grad of an
'elite' school in New Hampshire is guilty of molesting an 'elite'
girl. (The “elite” school has yearly fees of over $50,000. New Hampshire is in the U.S. which, I'm informed, is the land of equal opportunity for
fall.)
So much for
Canada&World. No news editor could possibly be dumb enough to
think the news in this paper is any news at all. This is deliberate.
The purpose of news selections in the Irving press is to keep us
ignorant of what is happening. It's quite deliberate. It's obviously
deliberate.
In local stories,
there are two I would be very interested to see – but I know that I
never shall.
1. Why did Irving
Ltd. pay a huge settlement in the Lac Megantic disaster case, the one
in which almost 50 people were killed, and a town largely
destroyed? Nobody pays a big settlement like that unless there is a
strong possibility of a serious charge of responsibility for the
deaths and destruction.
If I were a drunk
driver, and killed people on the road, I'm quite sure I wouldn't get
the option of paying a settlement. Why does big business have that
option?
Irving oil trains go
through this province routinely. If it poses risks, shouldn't we know
what they are or how they happened?
This case smells.
And the biggest smell comes from the Irving press.
2. A young man
carrying combat-style rifles (semi-automatic with large magazines)
killed three police officers in Moncton.
Where did he get
those rifles?
Why are such rifles
allowed to be sold? They're inferior for target shooting. They're a
poor choice for hunting unless you have too kill a whole herd of a
hundred of moose, and have only ten minutes to do it
Why did Harper
destroy the gun registry, depriving the police of knowledge of who
owns such weapons?
In Moncton stores
today, such guns are very available. You can also, quite easily, buy
a Glock semi-automatic pistol in Moncton, a gun useful only for
killing people at short range. I'm astonished at the number of guns
for sale in this city that are essentially designed to kill people,
or that are designed to look military so they can attract those
gun-buyers who are 25 going on 10.
Why didn't the
Irving press do a full report on this? Why didn't the municipal and
provincial governments demand a full report? Why do the people and
the newspaper of Moncton put up signs saying they love their police,
and build monuments to them when they won't lift a finger to give
them the help that could have saved three lives?
Get ready for more
of this killing. Harper has really encouraged the gun market in
Canada. Given time, he'll catch us up to the U.S. A very serious
change is happening in Canada.
Moncton! Will you please wake up?
The editorial says
nothing.
Norbert Cunningham
has an interesting column on maritime union. It's an old issue –
but it really should be looked at again.
Brent Mazerolle has
his usual, pointless column, this time about how he likes some
animals and insects, but finds other yuckie-poo.
There's an excellent
column by the President of the New Brunswick Medical Society, and the
Minister of Health. It deals with the coming crisis of health care
for seniors. It's important; but few will realize that because the
column is much too long. Relatively few people will read a long
column unless it has long breaks and is trivial – like Anne
Landers. That's too bad, because this is important.
And Gwynne Dyer
drops a bombshell. It's about the Chinese recession, and the effect
it's going to have on all of us. I don't doubt that he's right.
Capitalism never produces a stable economy. It never has. The history
of capitalism is a history of prosperity, frequent recessions, and,
less often, depressions.
And that's in the
lucky countries like Canada and the U.S. In other countries, like
Guatemala and Congo, the history of capitalism is marked by eternal
brutality, hunger, lack of education or medical care, poverty, and
short lives. (–-though the capitalists, themselves, normally remain
prosperous even in the most severe
times.)
Dyer's column is blunt; it's important; and it's well-written.
Luckily, a recession won't affect Moncton because we'll have a new hockey
rink.
And now a kind word
for the Faith Page, C4. The sermonette is by Brett Annington,
Chaplain at UNB – and the only columnist on the Faith Page I have
ever found to be worth reading. His style is light, conversational,
journalistically effective, and intelligent.
This time, it's
about how much the world has changed since his childhood. And, oh, it
has. And Canada has changed. The government has used the RCMP as
domestic spies for at least a century. But Canadians, until now, have
never tolerated the breadth and depth of government spying that we
now see. Canadians, as well, have never been so propagandized into
quasi-racial hatreds and fears since World Wars One and Two. We've
never before seen such trivialization of news media. I've never
before seen a generation of teen-agers so lacking in interest in
anything intellecual, so accustomed to passive “hanging-out”.
And there's the huge
change in communications so that so many on earth can be in touch
instantly for email – or for nuclear bombs. Distance has almost
ceased to have meaning. Separate countries no long separate people.
What happens in China has a profound effect on our lives, and has it
immediately.
We really can no
longer be a world of separate countries.
Nor did we begin as
one. The first civilizations were developed in cities (though usually
much smaller than cities of today). Living so close to each other and
so dependent on each other, they had to form some sort of government.
And so developed the city-state like Athens or Sparta. With the
cities so powerful, they attacked smaller settlement and rural
regions, tying them together, often out of greed, but in the process
making all dependent on each other, and therefore needing a common
government. So developed the nation-state.
The nation -states
were ruled, usually, by dictators that we called kings who with their
aristocracies, wanted more wealth to be gained by conquering empires
which, necessarily, involved fighting others who were playing the
same game. World Wars One and Two had a lot more to do with empires
than with democracy and freedom. But the increasing destruction as
we learned how to get closer to each other by such things as
ocean-going ships, and aircraft, raised fears that wars were becoming
impossible. The two world wars became, in their way, the guide to the
next stage – the world-state.
That was noticed as
early as 1919 with the founding of the League of Nations, and again
in 1945 with the United Nations. But both have failed. And both were
intended to fail.
They failed because
the major powers had no intention of accepting a power greater than
theirs. The major reason they wouldn't was because the major powers
depended on their, individual, power in order to become more
powerful. They needed it because of their competitive economic
systems (capitalism and communism). And they continued to need power
after the fall of communism because all the major powers now became
based on oligarchies of the wealthy who needed the station-state to
exist under their control to serve the ambitions of the very wealthy.
That accounts for
the rise of American Exceptionalism, a title that really means rule
of the whole world by the United States. That's why Vietnam and Iraq
and Guatemala and Libya and Panama and Syria and Yemen have been
under attack. That's why some in the U.S. want a war with Russia.
That's why the U.S. maintains the largest fleet in history in the
Pacific off the China coast. That's why the U.S. satellite, Japan, is
being encouraged by the U.S. to rearm. That's why Canada is showing
its satellite status in Iraq today. That's why Canadian sent troops
to Afghanistan. It takes a huge military force to conquer the world.
Can it be done?
Almost certainly not. At best, it would lead to constant revolt and
warfare all over the world. More likely, it would mean a scale of
murder and destruction so great that no country could continue to
function even as a nation-state.
And, even if it did
work, the individual greed of the oligarchs (who prefer to be called
capitalists, even entrepreneurs) would create a wage gap (as they are
doing now) which destroy their own markets, and make capitalism (by
whatever name you call it) impossible.
Individualism can be
a very good quality. But the direction of the world for the last
several thousand years, at least, has been toward community.
Communication of goods and money has created the city-state, then the
nation-state, and now the world-state as a necessity
It's made even more
so by the world-wide ease of war and destruction demanded by
oligarchs. ( Okay, call them capitalists if you want, but their
brand of capitalism is very, very twisted.)
And this brings me
back to what started me – Brett Addington's sermonette.
The world has
changed. It has changed a great deal since we were kids. We're now at
the stage of the world-state. What we do, how people live, what
standards we have affect everybody. Nobody in the world can escape
our interdependence. And that interdependence needs a world
government. But the oligarchs of our nation states won't allow that.
Their only solution is imperialism and war. We have to decide.
However, I fear there's been another big change in our world, a loss
of something we needed.
There's been a wide
collapse of religion – except in extreme and unhelpful forms. In
fact, it has long become a partner of the oligarchs and a justifier
of the killing and exploitation.
If you read most of
the faith page, religion is all about pancake breakfasts or special
music or getting yourself into heaven (the hell with the rest.) But
that's not what religion is about.
It's about setting
moral standards of behaviour – setting them our survival and the
survival of our children. I'm by no means a Bible thumper. But read the
Christian gospels, the Jewish Talmud and the Torah. Read the teaching
of Muhammed or Confucius or almost any other religion.
Almost all are
practical guides to the way a society has to behave in order to live.
They aren't just about dying and going to heaven. They're about how we must live if we are to survive.
I don't know much about
the others. But the Christian world has certainly paid no attention
to that. It's gone over to babbling about miracles or walking on
golden streets, or giggling at the thought that those people you
don't like will burn in hell.
In short, to
survive, we need morality. We don't have a hell of a lot of that. We
have an economic system based on greed, and conquest and killing. The
only significant political party in Canada that has its origins in
morality is the NDP. It was begun by religious leaders who formed a
party based on moral standards like love thy neighbour. It was called
the CCF, and is now the NDP. And the NDP still retains many of the motives of its youth as the CCF. (Though I could wish for more.)
Admittedly, the
churches were getting pretty wobbly on morality even when I was a
kid. But it's become worse – except in emphasizing a few things
that will get you – personally – onto a good cloud in heaven where you can, for the rest of eternity, get a good view of God and clap hands for Jesus..
What the world
desperately needs in the move from city-state to nation-state to
world-state is a conciousness that we all have this life in common –
just as such a realization was necessary at the city and nation
stage.
But that needs a
sense of morality. We aren't getting it from our oligarchs. And we aren't getting it from most of our
religions.
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