Gah, wrote this on Sunday but was not able to login to blogger. Momma mia... Yesterday, on a Saturday morning, my gracious body woke me up at 6:00am. I felt compelled to organize my life… just getting back into Toronto after a month away I had already managed to start biking to work and running again but I was missing something. I went downstairs and finally got around to reading through the list of upcoming social justice events from a mailing list I’m on and there was one for that afternoon, 1-6pm. SWEET. After a bit more anal retentiveness I hit the sack for a nap before heading out to this event.
Holy hot damn. It was exactly what I was looking for to temporarily quench my thirst for learning in Canada – the missing rhetoric. A crowd of sociologists, activists, writers, teachers, volunteers to discuss issues of human rights, sustainability, and most importantly, what is NOT being done in Canada. Yes! Critical thought.
Upon leaving my my bubble of Ann Arbor activists for Toronto, during my first year I was confused – why was it that everyone in Canada seemed to think that as long as Canada had better social and international policies than the US, that is was GOOD and FINE? That there was no racism, no poverty, no inequality, no injustice? There was this blindness between the link between our affluence and the world's poverty. I came to realize yesterday that this is not the case. Now I realize, duh, the business students at my university didn’t necessarily know about social injustice engendered in and by the US… and my crowd in Canada has by and large been business students and the business community, BUT NO HIPPIES! Eureka!
I think it’s a wide-ranging Canadianism to think in relative terms, rather than absolutes. If it is -10 degrees, it is NOT cold. Why? Because yesterday was colder, therefore today is NOT cold. Rock. This isn’t good or bad, it is just a trend I’ve noticed. I tend to think in more absolute numbers, but in the end, you need both. Like when reviewing performance results, you can’t just review the amount of growth because it could be from 1 to 9, you can’t just review the absolute numbers because 200 may be a lot but last year was 250. At any rate, the point is, in not keeping both of these frames of analysis in balance, the risk is assuming that because things are relatively rosy, that things really are rosy, which begets complacency/lack of growth, which will soon beget degeneration.
The day was wicked awesome. Keynote by Linda McQuaig, from whom I got a clearer picture of Canadian politics through some of her snyde comments. Panel discussion “Canadian Connections to Global Struggles” with speakers from Rights Action, Global Aware, and ZNet. Most striking was Leslie Jerymyn from Global Action, who took her time to “scold, encourage, and inspire" the audience, after making a case for the intimate relationship between sustainability and social justice. She warned against a syndrome some activists fall into of “suspended political animation”, leaving us with some simple questions
- What do you do for a living?...
- How and where do you live? E.g. do you use a car, active in neighborhood?
- How do you spend your free time? E.g. watching, engaging in community, making healthy dinner for family and friends?
- Are you pursuing an intentional life? E.g. where you do things you want to do, and understand the consequences of each decision you make.
More specific interesting themes/concepts I knew very little about and in which I was grateful to join the dialogue:
- Canada in Afganistan – why?
- Canada as an appendage of the in the US hegemony
- Canada acquiescing to the US in SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership)
- Canada’s unique position as one of the few militaries with no border to defend and historical consequences thereof
- Refugee and Immigration Policies (500,000 in Canada w/o status, and major exploitation)
- More specifically, the spread of things like Working Caregiver Programs
- Make Affluence History (as opposed to the quest to make poverty history)
- Don’t Ask Don’t Tell grassroots method of regularizing people with no status
Coming back from the holidays at home and an intense national conference, my body and mind are started to adjust and heal (this helped with the mind); now I am just waiting on the heart. Very stubborn – It usually takes the most time to adapt/adjust.
