Sunday October 10, 2021
A rising tide of people in this country apparently believe – body, mind, and spirit – that they are called overthrow the established powers-that-be. By any means. Including physical insurrection.
A friend’s daughter got a pedicure. The pedicurist told her that she's part of a designated group that will, in due course, take over the country. That they're a quasi-military group. That a number of notable figures are dead and have clones standing in for them -- the Queen, Hilary Clinton. and Joe Biden. (This is the 4th clone standing in for him).
But Princess Diana is not dead. Nor are John Kennedy Jr. and his wife.
And that she has been authorized to serve papers to people who are giving vaccinations. The other day she marched into a Shoppers Drug Mart and ordered the pharmacist to cease and desist giving further vaccinations.
Her parting words were, "You have been put on notice."
Increasingly unavoidable
Until recently, I thought of these delusions as what Zaphod Beeblebrox, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, called “an S.E.P.” – Someone Else’s Problem.
It hit home the last time I got a haircut,. While I was trapped in the barber’s chair, my barber launched a tirade against vaccines, masks, politicians, cops, immigrants, and mainline media. I chose not to argue – I feel vulnerable when anyone wields a sharp razor near my neck. But I won’t go back to that barbershop.
In the federal election just finished, 820,000 people voted for the Peoples’ Party of Canada (PPC). That’s about 5% of the total votes cast – a significant protest group.
I’m not suggesting that the PPC endorses insurrection. That has never been part of its official platform, and Bernier himself has never advocated violence. Nor, as far as I know, has the party officially supported racism or hatred.
But a lot of his followers do. It was a PPC member who threw gravel at the prime minister, during the election campaign.
Several of those demonstrating in front of hospitals and harassing healthcare workers have been identified as PPC supporters. Some travelled across the country to participate.
Conspiracy theories
They seem to buy into some kind of conspiracy which they – and they alone – know about.
I have a deep suspicion of all conspiracy theories. I find it far simpler to blame basic human emotions –greed, anger, ignorance, even stupidity – than to imagine vast numbers of people somehow collaborating in a mass movement to take over the world.
So I do not believe that Maxime Bernier, or Donald Trump for that matter, is heading a worldwide conspiracy to overthrow democracy.
But that works the other way, too. I do not believe that the mainstream media – television, radio, newspapers, and magazines – conspire to censor negative information about masks and vaccines.
A conspiracy has to be a small group, working in secret. It cannot be a conspiracy if 2.8 billion Facebook users all know about it.
Manipulated by corporate media
But perhaps that’s the common element in this aberrant behaviour.
Last week, a Facebook whistleblower did a bombshell interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes program. And followed up two days later with testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on communications
The root of the problem, Frances Haugen told 60 Minutes, is the algorithm Facebook uses to select the choices presented for you, when you click. Of the millions of options available, the algorithm is designed to choose the ones most like what you have clicked on previously.
The more you click, the less likely you are to receive any alternative information.
Thus the algorithm goes round and round, reinforcing your prejudices and preconceptions.
“What they have learned,” Haugen told 60 Minutes, “is that it’s easier to inspire anger” – or hate, or disgust -- than more charitable emotions.
Anger provokes you to click and keep clicking, building an audience for Facebook advertisers.
A Facebook manager until May of this year, Haugen summed up her evidence in her opening statement to the Senators: "The company knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people."
It’s not just Facebook, of course. Google has a similar algorithm, to give you what you’re looking for. So does every other search engine. It feeds you back your own prejudices.
I almost feel sorry for the protesters and dissidents, waving their anti-everything placards and shouting slogans at each other.
They don’t realize they’re victims of a computer algorithm. They’re being used to bolster corporate profits.
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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
Last week, I used my old friend David Bryson’s birthday as the launching pad for some memories. I’ll give first place among the responses to David himself.
“I am an avid reader of Jim's columns,” David wrote, “but not much of a communicator. What a lovely birthday treat for me to be commemorated in his column. My first and oldest best friend. And what a testament to Jim's incredible memory!
“We both left India in 1946. We had no further contact. Unbelievably, 50 years later, in 1996, we bumped into each other at a hiking camp in the Canadian Rockies. At age 60, Jim was instantly recognizable. His daughter, Sharon, in her twenties, was also at the camp. Incredibly, she had with her a 50-page essay Jim had written, especially for her, about the four years he spent at Woodstock School. It made frequent references to me. ‘Uncle David’, Sharon exclaimed, when Jim introduced her to me.
“Yes, starting at age seven, I was shipped by train each year, to the high Himalaya mountains, 2000 miles from my home in India, for nine straight months of boarding school.
I loved every day at Woodstock. We had so much fun. I loved my three-months vacation back home. Life was idyllic.
“Now, 25 years later, thank you once again, Jim, for remembering my birthday each year.”
Two other Woodstock schoolmates chimed in.
Helen Arnott: “It is interesting to read your memories of our childhood home as seen through the mists of time, memories so similar yet somehow different from my own.
“For me it was a wonderful childhood, full of lifelong friendships which I have today ~ an interest in the beetles races and scorpions, peacocks and vultures and dead cows, those same leeches and the salt packages we carried to school to sprinkle on them, causing them to shrivel up and fall off, watching the blood trickle down my leg ~ inspiring an interest in biology and chemistry which led me into nursing as a lifelong career. When I close my eyes I can still almost taste the juice of the fresh sugar cane, the juice of the ripe mangos, dribbling down my chin. Adivasi (Bhil) children were my playmates during the holidays, as well as the children of the lines in back of our bungalow where they lived with their parents, our servants. My Woodstock classmates were (and are) my most inner circle, my family, my defenders when I needed defence, my playmates with whom I experienced life’s many adventures, from whom I learned to make my way in an adult world, to forgive and be forgiven.”
The other Woodstock schoolmate, Jane Downs Wallbrown, writes long letters. Here’s an excerpt: “I do remember all the things you both mentioned with a smile, wondering how I could possibly have taken so much for granted. I suppose, now, I'm thinking particularly of the leeches. I do remember all the beetles and beetle races. I remember boys trying to put beetles down the backs of our dresses. In recent years I heard one of the newer principals at some USA Woodstock gathering suggesting that what held our generation of Woodstockites together were all the hardships we experienced. We all just sort of looked at him. It never occurred to me that I was experiencing a ‘hardship.’ It was simply our life.”
And Brian Bradshaw offered a small correction: “I won’t be the first Brit to tell you, I’m sure, that stinging nettles and ‘dock leaves’ grew together in England too: the pain and the cure, nice of Mother Nature.”
Yawar Baig sent his own memories of boarding school in India. Too long to reproduce here, unfortunately, but if you’d like to sample them, https://yawarbaig.com/hyderabad-public-school-and-other-matters/
“Thanks for this glimpse into your youth and experience of a boarding school,” Isabel Gibson wrote. “I've just been reading C.S. Lewis's account of his own, mostly detested, school years in English boarding schools and, of course, you mention our own residential schools. It's good to remember there are other models.
“I think it's delightful that you can't remember which of you two collected 23 leeches -- and that you know you can't! I'm perhaps too inclined to trust my own version of events.”
Bob Rollwagen reflected on children’s games: “I never had a winning chestnut; usually came home with fewer marbles or having lost one of my favourite hockey cards. I have one really good friend from grades one to eight. He was an only child and his parents went on fabulous camping trips. I was always invited and saw North America from coast to coast. Many stories about two kids exploring and hiking.”
Laurna Tallman: “Your description of your childhood reminds me of the freedoms we took for granted when I was a child. We played out-of-doors, roaming the neighbouring streets where playmates lived and, in one subdivision, a stretch of the Don Valley and the meadows behind the houses on the hill. Only when notorious bank robbers were thought to be hiding there was that woodland forbidden for a while. When visiting cousins in other cities, the same sorts of freedoms to explore new territory applied. We gained confidence in our ability to navigate natural territory as well as the streets of the city. Summer vacations in Muskoka taught further survival skills, from swimming and canoeing and hiking by map and compass to building fires outdoors or in a woodstove and preparing meals on them.
“We were, at least, learning to bridge some of the differences with Aboriginals and expanding our understanding of our hardy settler ancestors.
“I believe many, if not most, boarding schools were more like yours than like the dreadful institutions in Canada. When my sister moved into the near-North to teach school, a motif among her neighbours was, “What are you trying to escape from?” A friend who flew to northern communities to nurse made similar observations. I wonder if the residential schools attracted people who could not find a happy fit in towns and cities further south?”
“You blew the dust off of my dormant memories of school and growing up in a town built by the coal barons,” wrote Jim Henderschedt.
Clare Neufeld also thanked me for “childhood reminiscence -- and the joy of a serendipitously renewed & refreshed relationship with your friend, David, five decades post Woodstock.
“A journey well worth the effort to remember, record, and to test against recollections of others. The fear of mistaken and massaged memories is palpable, also for me, a ‘non-writer’ -- especially now that older grandkids are asking for stories about the various experiences of my life . . .”
Mary-Margaret Boone: “My brother-in-law was a Hindu from India, raised in a family where going to boarding school was a matter of course. When his oldest child went through a period of acting out, Raj wanted to send him to boarding school. But my sister-in-law Maureen resisted. Not the way to deal with issues in Indian Head, Sask.
“I found his stories interesting but so outside of my own experience in public schools, and the separation from home and parents quite bizarre. I can say that his experiences opened up a world for me that was culturally different, a small glimpse into the complexity of Indian society.”
For Janis Thompson, it was the bible verses: “I laughed at the 'Jesus wept.' Years ago, my next eldest brother, John, helped operate a 'church camp' outside of 100 Mile House. Just a tad evangelical and fundamentalist. So, each evening before supper, each cabin was to memorize and spout a bible verse. Anything, they were told. Sure. When my son’s cabin came up with 'Jesus wept', my brother castigated the wee ones, saying how unfair it was to use that verse. They were sent back to learn another verse before they could have supper.”
Lucille Ellard: “My husband and I are in our 80s and think often of how fortunate we were to grow up when we did. We were incredibly poor but lived a much better experience than what is going on today. The earlier settlers in Canada who grew up in Great Britain probably all had been at boarding schools and probably never envisioned that the residential schools would not be a similar experience.”
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.