Category: Editorials

A headline in this week’s demonstrates how the worst possible things can have their origins in the best of intentions: Huge anti-abortion rally hails Canada’s new foreign-aid stand. Pro-Lifers gathered on Parliament Hill to show their appreciation for Harper’s decision to withhold foreign-aid support for abortions. And who wouldn’t be appreciative for someone taking steps to preserve the life of an unborn child? Really, when you think about it this way, it seems like the right thing to do.

Until of course, you find yourself destitute and pregnant. Caught in the light of such a predicament, all symbolism and sentiment withers away rather quickly.

But it is the mindset of the religious Pro-Lifer not to think that far ahead. I should know. I used to be one.

In my mid-teens, a member of an Evangelical youth group, and definitively NOT sexually active, my mantra on the issue of abortion was “you play, you pay”. In other words, if you commit the sin of sex, you have to deal with the possible consequences of a baby, whether you want it or not. This sentiment was directed at my very patient and sexually active friends, who would only shake their heads, and say, “when you get in a relationship, you’ll know.”

Of course I never considered what they were talking about because it wasn’t my position to consider anything. The dispute for me began and ended with the tenet “you play, you pay”. Period. End of story. There was no arguing against my good, moral, Christian position. Anything less than completely illegalizing abortion would result in the continual murder of babies, steady de-population, and the proliferation of foetus farms. As for the unlucky girl: just suck it up. Have the baby and give it up for adoption, how hard could it be? Of course your family would help and of course your boyfriend would stick around, right? And someone’s bound to adopt the little tike. Me? Are you kidding? I’m too young to have kids. Besides, compromising my position would make me less of a Christian, therefore lessening my chances at going up in the Rapture and getting front row seats to watch you sinful suckers fry.(Thinking about it, I am beginning to doubt that I was celibate by choice. I mean come on, what girl wouldn’t want to fuck a guy who does the equivalent of pointing at her body and saying: that isn’t yours. Form an orderly queue, ladies)

You may laugh, but much of my motivation behind the such a hard-line position was about being a good Christian. And that’s what I recognize in the faces of the Pro-Life demonstrators, a lot of people doing their best to follow their faith. (Looking at them I keep thinking of a possible new reality show, So You Think You’re a Christian) Awash in blessed sentiment, these rosary-adorned crowds don’t realize (or refuse to think) that they aren’t the only people who are thanking Harper for cutting abortion funding to countries where war-rape is common. Male soldiers love the idea. What’s the point of war-rape if you can’t saddle your enemies with unwanted babies? Also, his decision will no doubt be a boon to the proprietors of back alley abortion clinics, and to the orphanages who will receive a sharp spike in enrollment in the children of mothers who’ll make the fatal decision to patronize the substandard clinics.

But again, it’s not the role of the faithful to think about such unintended consequences, but simply to follow. When confronted, simply shout something about killing babies, and perhaps wave the results of recently published and swiftly refuted scientific studies about abortions causing breast cancer, or abortions being detrimental to maternal health (the whole Ireland thing – turns out, Irish women still have abortions, but “take the boat to England” to do so)

Please do not take my tone as diminutive towards the faithful. The religious Right in Canada are as politically organized and motivated as they are passionate. We could at least afford a chortle or two if we had some MP’s vocally taking a stand for women’s reproductive rights. But from I can glean from the news, there has been nothing but cowed silence. This has emboldened the Pro-Lifers enough that Pro-Life MP Paul Szabo publically stated, “we’re taking incremental steps, small steps. It’s just a question of knowing when it’s the right time.” This, on the idea of making changes to the abortion laws in Canada in a way that better suits good, moral, Christian values. In other words, if we let them have their way, we’ll soon have our own Canadian surge in the number of wealthy back-alley abortionists.

Given the silence from Pro-Choice MP’s, it looks as though we’ll have to make our own noise.
Joyce Arthur, of Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, has a list of ideas on her website on how to take a stand on the issue. Among them are contacting your local MP (harangue them if they are Pro-Life), volunteering at local events, and sending letters to your regional newspaper. If you want a template for a letter to your MP, you are welcome to use mine. There was a time when we could laugh-off the religious Right as an American phenomenon. Times have changed. They’re here and they have their own vision of Canada which they want realized, whether we like it or not.

As an aside, check out the article, The Only Moral Abortion is MY Abortion.

A man butts ahead of me in line at the LCBO (the liquor store, to my non-Canadian friends). Well, he doesn’t exactly butt, he is a little more subtle than that. He first pretends to be looking for a particular half-Mickey that they sell at the front counter. He then leaves the line and disappears for a few moments, only to return and repeat the same butting-like procedure as before. However, this time he stays in line ahead of me and begins fishing for his wallet. I see that he has a bottle in his hand and the Your-Getting-Screwed centre of my brain – the same centre that goes off when one of my friends takes more than his share of pizza – starts going off. My heart rate gains speed, my gut gets that sinking feeling, and the line-transgressor appears to notice.

“Sorry dude,” he says, “I was already in line with her.” He points at the girl in front of us in line.

“Isn’t that right?” He asks her, smiling.

She smiles back. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says.

They exchange a few more pleasantries, which I don’t hear because my head is a raging sea of indignation. Part of me wants to make a scene, something cool, collected but ultimately violent; something that Stephan Segal would do. But to my horror I discover a part of me – a rather large part – wants very much to believe this guy, who is now bantering with the cashier.

I can already hear your thoughts. Some of you, like my wife, are thinking “why are you making such a big deal about this?” While others are thinking, “Dude, I would have already burned down the guy’s house by now.” Which leaves me somewhere in between, in a place reserved for those who often find their indignation bridled by anxiety. I can’t help but think this is the realm of the beta male.

Funny thing is, I never thought myself as one. I’ve had my fair share of fights and confrontations. To be honest, I never thought myself as an alpha male either, because there has been many a-times in playgrounds and cafeterias and street corners where I’ve skulked away with my tale between my legs.

I’ve always considered myself someone who just does his own thing. I’ve never needed to defer to the rooster with the biggest frock and I’ve never needed a bunch of little buddies to faun over me either.

Lone wolf? Yeah, right.

Perhaps lone husky, or one of those mid-sized dogs with the red bandanna named ‘Bandit.’

But never, never in my life, would I think of myself as an anxious little Chihuahua standing in line at an LCBO.

By this time, the girl is paying for her six-pack. He is still talking to her, and I lean forward and say “well played” as if I’m giving him my blessing on his trespass; as if to say: I know you did it, but I’m going to let it go. He responds in kind by saying that he’s going to have the girl pay for his small bottle of liquor.

In the end they pay for their own liquor and leave separately. I want to shrug off the whole incident as just one of those things that one can’t make a scene over.

However, the thought lingers for the rest of the night. Lisa tells me to stop obsessing, but nevertheless, I think of recent times on the subway where my foot has been stepped on, and I think of a friend of mine who enjoys staring down other men (including police) from his car while idling at traffic lights.

Have I been listening to too much Ron Sexsmith? Have I been reading when I should have been out driving six-inch nails into two-by-fours with a framing hammer, just for the sake of it? Have I misplaced that mannish (and often childish) willingness to disturb the peace, to risk injury, for a perceived transgression?

We are told that we live in a civilized world, where we have institutions to mete out justice and provide security. But we are also told that civilization is always one generation deep. If civilization collapses I can help but worry whether I would be an Eloi, or an Eloi-eating Morlock? The fact that I know the difference between the two possibly demonstrates that I am spending a little two much time reading and not enough time outside knocking holes in things.

Eeshh. I think I either need to quit obsessing, or join a local militia.

That’s right. It’s only a matter of time before I’m swatting at youngsters with a shillelagh, yelling at cops when they pull me over for doing 40 in a 100 zone, and testing the limits of Depends Undergarments with great relish.

This realization hit home on a recent trip to New York City. I should have half expected it in the wake of what happened between me and Montreal this past summer (we had a falling out), that and the fact that I couldn’t drive three hours without getting sleepy (and I loooovve long road trips).

But it wasn’t until I caught myself saying “It’s a nice place, but…” that I fully realized how set in my ways I’ve become. That expression, in my mind, has always been reserved for crotchety people who never stray far from the resort shuffleboard tables. I never thought I’d be using it, especially about NYC.

It’s a dynamic city, plain and simple. Be you in Park Slope or Chelsea, the place is alive and bustling with activity. I could go on with a multitude of clichés about the Big Apple, but let’s just say that I’ve always harboured a not-so-secret desire to live and work there.

Until last month that is. There was a point – I think it was when I was almost knocked of my feet – a second time – by someone sprinting to make a light, or when I paid 20 bucks for an art exhibit at MoMa that consisted of a bunch of naked, screaming people (something that was often provided me gratis by the patrons of the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy at the Gladstone Hotel – the ungentrified Gladstone, mind you) that I realized that I’m not 20 anymore – heck, I’m not even 30 anymore –and I no longer have the determination, resilience or romantic ambition to live in a place simply to live there.

Also, I think there’s the fact that I am an agoraphobic urbanite. I love your presence, but leave me and my cappuccino alone. I hate it when someone walks behind me for more than two blocks. When that happens I start to give twitchy glances over my shoulder, like when someone is kicking the back of my seat in a movie theatre. Now, imagine me in lower Manhattan with five people shuffling behind me, all chatting on their cells. It would be a matter of months before I’d be having meaningful conversations with myself in bus shelters.

As well, there’s the roommate situation: I can’t go back there.

I am a creature of habit and routine. Running out of 3-Minute Quaker Oats in the morning puts me off for the entire day. I hate surprise and change in equal measure. In Toronto, I was lucky enough to have spent most of my renting years with a solid roommate, but his mere mention of the possibility of moving elsewhere caused no shortage of anxiety for me.

Such is not a good quality for one who wants to live in NYC.

The city’s rent levels demand that if you don’t want to live in a cardboard box, you have to have at least 10 roommates, all with varying levels of hygiene, mental stability and musical taste. I’m at the point in my life where I spend a lot of time peering through my blinds and muttering about what the neighbour is doing next door. I have a habit of sitting on my front porch with a bottle of wine and grumbling about the youths and the lack of decency in their clothing style ( I stand by that still – tights aren’t pants, ladies!). Having to wonder who’s been using my bar of soap, or having to hunt down roommates for arrears on bill money due to the fact that they’ve spent it on Sonic Youth tickets, simply aren’t my kettle of fish. The situation would most likely end in tears, gunfire and bloodshed.

There was a time – a small window – when I could have moved to NYC.

I had enough energy, freedom, and hostility towards social norms that I could have dug in and carved out a niche there. But as fate would have it, I wound up in Vancouver, reading Adbusters, hitch-hiking about, attending raves, anti-logging protests and poetry readings. In the end though, I found my way back to TO.

Who knows, maybe I’m just finding away to justify my lack of adventure. Then again, financially, and not including time spent on my tenants, I can get by on 25 hours of work a week in Toronto, giving me plenty of hours to write, travel about, and work on my dandelion garden. Can working double or triple that amount of hours just to pay rent be considered an adventure?

I’m old now. Which, as it turns out, isn’t such a bad thing. I’m looking forward to causing no shortage of trouble for my kids and grand kids. And in the meantime, NYC will always be a nice place to visit. Who knows, maybe if they ever get a Dark Horse Espresso Bar, I’d reconsider.

Well, it doesn’t exist. But this has never stopped grown adults from believing that they can talk to the dead or that magnetic fields can boost their immune system, or that we only use ten percent of our brains, leaving the remainder open to unfathomable, hidden potential.

To be honest, like many other tots, I ate up the idea of a jolly fat man who brings me presents once a year. And I mean, why not? At fifteen, I mean, five years old, who wouldn’t want to believe that? I wasn’t paying for groceries or the mortgage, so what did it matter? It didn’t cost me anything and as it turned out, he always brought me something at Christmas time, even if I was a rotten kid on Victoria Day weekend.

I confess that I did lose quite a bit of sleep throughout my youth, out of the fear of Satan and his minions, who for some reason had decided to come all the way from Hades to spend a night in a closet in Thornhill, Ontario. But eventually, after an embarrassingly long period of time, I came to understand that Satan was just another part of my imagination, and to paraphrase Paul of Tarsus, I put away the kids’ stuff.

Bear in mind that the bravado of this claim tends to fizzle after a watching a good horror movie when my wife is away for the weekend. But I think that’s part of the point. It’s still fun to wonder things like, “what if I could see dead people?” or “what if my mind had the power to bend spoons?” But what’s not OK is if, as an adult, I cling to such fantasies and allow them to influence my life and world view.

Take for instance Antonia Baker who sees Christ in her kitchen tiles, or Diane Duyser who found the Virgin Mary in her grilled cheese sandwich. There’s the worldwide Hindu Milk Miracle where believers claimed, to the delight of dairy producers everywhere, that Hindu religious statues around the globe were suddenly imbued with the ability to imbibe milk. And though it is often claimed that there is no room for miracles in Buddhism, in the late 1990’s, this didn’t stop thousands of Burmese pilgrims who flocked to a Buddhist monastery to witness light beams blazing from the building (waiting source confirmation). As for those of Islamic faith, the internet is awash in photographs of Allah’s name written into clouds, rock formations and even in cuts of meat.

It’s not so much the people who profess these miracles that startle me, but the amount of grown adults, with jobs and children and savings accounts – who are so eager to believe in these sideshow exhibits. In interviews, the mannerism and cadence of this grown people become almost childlike when they describe the witnessed miracle, as if some kind of mental regression is occurring within them.

It’s quite possible that we, as adults, have never gotten over the dissatisfaction of learning that the fairy tales of our childhood were in fact made-up stories. Or was it at that point – in our infancy – that we first gazed into the void, the idea that there might be nothing around us but what we can filter through our five boring senses? No, that can’t be true! This would explain the crowds of eager adults flocking to weeping statues, the people who plan their lives around Horoscopes and Numerology, and possibly the 50 million of so who spend much of their free time as magic-wielding wizards in online games. By extension, this might also explain the insidiousness of conspiracy theories; that there are unseen and powerful machinations at work in our day to day lives. Though a morbid comfort, it is still a comfort to know that one’s life is in powerful hands, be them that of the spirits and fates or those of the Bilderbergers.

But why the disappointment with plain old physical world? Even from secular adults, I’ve heard the claim that things wouldn’t be as beautiful or wondrous without a little magic in the world. Really? So, knowing that the sun is a ball of burning hydrogen takes the splendour out of a sunset? Or knowing that a rainbow is just light working its way through prisms of water makes it any less fascinating?

Perhaps this all comes back to the universal fear of death. If we remove life’s little miracles, if we expose Allah’s signature in the sky as coincidence or the tears of weeping statues as canola oil, then we nullify the signs from heaven; and when we do that, we eliminate any possibility of us continuing on after we shed this mortal coil, a possibility that even some of the most secular cling to.

But for how long must we consider such preoccupations as acceptable adult behaviour? It seems to me modern science hasn’t hindered such beliefs, but exacerbated them. Modern medicine and technology has, in a way, allowed many to maintain a prolonged and sheltered childhood. Young men can spend all their waking hours battling orcs or Photoshopping Allah’s name in the comforts of their homes; or retired couples can spend the day worshiping the latest saint-of-the-month before stopping off a Mcdonalds.

I am at least comforted to know that those who have learned of that the ills of nature never rest. Take for instance the astronomical agencies who scan the sky for rogue asteroids, and biomedical organizations who work to unlock the secrets of our genes and provide our bodies with life-sustaining devices. It is this minority, who have taken to heart the rather ominous archaeological discoveries of Earth’s former inhabitants. For instance, the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs was only one of at least five extinctions in the Earth’s history. That such people have taken the adult role is a double-edged sword. While they help increase the chances of our long-term existence, they also allow us the childhood luxury of doddling from one magical distraction to the next.