“Yes: I am a dreamer – For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde
In mythology, Cassandra was a tragic figure, blessed with the power of prophecy, but cursed to have no one believe her words. There are echoes of this syndrome in modern literature, where Cassandra’s name is frequently invoked when prophecies and warnings are not believed.
History is littered with cases of warnings ignored. The victims of Mount Vesuvius‘ eruption in August of AD 79 ignored all of the mountain’s tremors as the molten rock increased within, and only marveled as all of the animals, including rats, fled the town. The wells and streams suddenly dried up, but the Pompeian’s brushed off that warning as being due to hot weather.
To mix my metaphors, that sounds a lot like Nero fiddling while the continent burns … or like a politician, one of the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the US, blithely and inaccurately, showing and telling how a snowball in winter disproves climate change.
Similarly, the Indian Ocean‘s tsunami and earthquake of 2004 was predicted, not just by ‘dreamers,’ but by the Pacific Ocean Tsunami Warning System. Even as one government official had his calls to action ignored, he found himself termed “crazy,” and he was banned from certain parts of Thailand, as he was believed to be a threat to tourism. For seven years, the countries in the tsunami’s path were warned of the coming event. There was another clear warning of disaster when the sea in Indonesia receded several hundred meters after the earthquake, but few knew or believed a tsunami would follow.
More than 230,000 people were killed, 500,000 were injured, and 1.7 million were left homeless. But at least they got those tourist dollars.
And what of those whose ‘visions’ prompt such ridicule? If you’re not going to believe a Tsunami Warning System, you’re certainly not going to give credence to the Maoris, who believed that seeing a spirit canoe called waka wairua sailing over a lake near Mount Tarawera in New Zealand in 1886 was a sign of an impending disaster. Even several European tourists claimed to have seen the canoe, which legend said was used to transport the souls of the dead. There were physical signals as well, as the lake’s volume rose and fell rapidly, and the rocks released hot water.
But that’s just silly people believing in legends, right? 120 people died that June 10th, and several native Maori villages were completely destroyed.
While I am not advocating a belief in legend and mythology, I think it’s interesting to consider how humans deal with information they don’t like, or refuse to believe. There is a knee jerk denial, inevitably coupled with sarcastic laughter directed at those who are explaining what is about to happen. Public ridicule becomes the norm, with the object being to drive the truthsayer’s reputation into the ground, and to mute their words from society’s hearing.
That shortsightedness doesn’t prevent disasters from occurring … in fact, it’s more likely to hasten the disasters.
By June of 1941, Josef Stalin had received more than 100 warnings about Germany’s intention to attack. Germany, meanwhile, was assuring Russia that they were just massing troups at the Soviet border to ‘protect them against British bombing.” Oh, the lies we will believe in the name of keeping safe! The Soviet Intelligence communities had their warnings ignored., while the head of Soviet intelligence, who had also warned Stalin of Germany’s intention to invade, ended up shot.
775,000 German soldiers and at least 800,000 Soviet soldiers died in Operation Barbarossa.
Prior to the Gulf War, the CIA and US military intelligence had warned the US government about the impending invasion of Kuwait. Those warnings were not only ignored, but led to the granting of a $1.2 billion loan to Saddam, just two days before the invasion. Indeed, the US was so contemptuous of the warnings that it took four days for maps of Kuwait and Iraq to be loaded onto their computers, post invasion.
25,000 Iraqi soldiers died, as did 248 UN troops, and 100,000 Iraqi civilians. A million more Iraqi civilians died later, due to sanctions imposed against their country.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar? Perhaps you remember September 11th, 2001.
“… starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.
By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me.
…. And there was one more chilling warning to come. At the end of July, Tenet and his deputies gathered in the director’s conference room at CIA headquarters. “We were just thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how this attack might occur,” he recalls. “And I’ll never forget this until the day I die. Rich Blee looked at everybody and said, ‘They’re coming here.’ And the silence that followed was deafening. You could feel the oxygen come out of the room. ‘They’re coming here.’” ” (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors-documentary-911-bush-213353)
Insolence, a belief in one’s own superiority, and a lack of imagination always work against those who doubt naysayers and whistleblowers. Consider the case of Bob Ebeling, an engineer who worked for the company that produced the rocket boosters on the Challenger space shuttle.
Prior to the January 28, 1986 launch, Mr. Eberling had warned that the extremely cold weather would prevent the O-rings from sealing properly and would cause an explosion. But a delay was nixed by executives under pressure to get the shuttle into space, and he was told it was ‘not his burden to bear.’
And so millions of viewers, on the ground and on televisions around the world, watched as the shuttle exploded, 73 seconds after takeoff , killing seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, a teacher who had won her seat on a NASA educational program.
After World War I, the German economy was a mess. Inflation, massive unemployment, and a crushing debt imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, requiring them to pay the equivalent of 100,000 tons of gold as restitution, led the Nazi party into power. One of Hitler‘s main propaganda points was that Germany would refuse to pay anything ever again. It would be “Germany First.”
Economist John Maynard Keynes said that the Treaty was dead on arrival. Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, a French army commander, warned that the treaty was not the end of the war but rather a suspension of it, and that Germany would be much more formidable in a new war, invading France and staging attacks into England from there.
They were right, but ignored. And despite those tinfoil hatted lunatics who deny the Holocaust, by the end, almost 50 million people were dead.
The list of tragedies that could have been prevented by heeding the warnings, either of dreamers or Cassandras, or by the use of simple common sense, or by listening to those who could sense what was coming based on their own knowledge and experience, is very long, and filled with millions of casualties.
Americans were given ample warning of what would happen if they allowed themselves to elect a president whose sole intention was of ransacking the treasury for his own personal gain, a man who demanded total control of an entire country and delighted in a chance to remake it in his own image .. a place of carnage and destruction that he could survey from his gilded palaces.
Their own constitution offered all the information they needed to prevent his rise to power. Their vaunted ‘checks and balances’ produced nothing more than a last line of defence – the Electoral College – that folded like a cheap suit. Now that the fox is in the hen house, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to get him out, and will likely produce millions more victims to add to that very long list of innocents, murdered through the elected officials’ casual ignorance, or a stubborn belief in their own infallibility brought about by a controversial electoral win.
Like the victims of Pompeii, or the tourists that ran forward into the retreated waters of the Indian Ocean to catch stranded fish, we seem to be waiting, mindlessly, to see what will happen next, as the ante keeps getting raised. Like them, we will be buried under what we refused to see coming.
We were warned, by dreamers and Cassandras, but didn’t listen.
“A basic weapon of regime changers, as fascists realized nearly a century ago, is to destroy the concept of truth. Democracy requires the rule of law, the rule of law depends upon trust, and trust depends upon citizens’ acceptance of factuality. The president and his aides actively seek to destroy Americans’ sense of reality. Not only does the White House spread “alternative facts,” but Kellyanne Conway openly proclaims this as right and good. Post-factuality is pre-fascism.” (http://time.com/4690676/donald-trump-tyranny/)
I am normally a peaceable, happy person, but lately I’ve discovered just how much rage I have for the blandly evil, those who nonchalantly throw the lives of innocents into turmoil and pain for no more reason than a belief in their own superiority. How angry am I? The next person who shrugs off ANY thing to do with the Orange-Tufted Twitter Flitterer with a casual ‘fake news’ gets it right in the kisser.
The #SwoleLeft was started by 26 year old New Yorker, Poncho Martinez, who says: “Trump’s election made it clear that the Democrats are incompetent—that their power machinations are useless when confronted with a different fighting style, and that regular people need to get involved with politics on an individual level and on a daily basis.”
However, if The Trump of Doom is correct that fake news is the enemy of the people, then he has made himself Public Enemy Number One, through his dedication to the spreading of complete fabrications and outright lies, while offering no evidence to back up his take on what he’s seen on FOX or what he’s heard from some German golfer who knows a guy who knows a guy. We are, in the words of KellyAnne “WrongWay” Conway, to take his tirades and rants, not as mere prose, like ordinary people use, but as some sort of special messages he is delivering from his heart. You know, like that other guy, the North Korean Dear Leader, that is so misunderstood outside of his own country.
There is misinformation, and there is propaganda; there is a ‘sex sells’ slant, and ‘if it bleeds it leads.” And then there is the $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history, that was given to Mr. So-Called-President gratis during the last campaign, allowing him to outline his plans to Make America Great Again.
Dire Abbey has his own personal vision of America, which is apparently a place of carnage, a dumpster fire of cataclysmic proportions, where the citizens flee in terror of one another and certainly from anyone of any sort of colour that is not orange. Which is odd, because it would seem that he has seen very little of the country he represents, beyond the golden toilets of his suites in Mar A Lago or New York city, or as seen through the tinted windows of his private jet. Is this ‘dumpster fire’ visible from his unfriendly skies when he can tear his eyes away from Bill O’Reilly?
His dystopic vision was nurtured on the ramblings of alt-right ‘celebrities,’ and misspelled internet memes, which does, in some horrific way, make him representative of half of the American people. And it is the internet that must bear responsibility for the care and nurturing of trolls and hackers who gleefully terrorize social media like the bullies at a Nerd Prom.
You have been warned. Next time … POW!
Now, I’m not gonna go off on a rant here, about global warming, and whether or not it’s caused by human activity. For one thing, it’s too nice a day to argue. It was 11 degrees yesterday, and it’s nearly 10 degrees today already; seriously, not wasting my time on deniers. Mama wants to gambol where flowers will soon be.
where democracy is shoved aside as unfriendly to business, where opinion (literally) trumped logic, and the slaughter of millions of innocents barely raises an eyebrow.
Perhaps Huxley, in Brave New World, understood our impressionability more than Orwell did in 1984 … it’s not that we are being denied books or access to information, it’s that we prefer entertainment to knowledge.
“The world’s nuclear clock sits at one second to midnight .. but first, a word from our sponsor.” 
And, in what I consider truly tragic, we still have to somehow find a sense of trust in those we elect to lead us into this uncertain future, and I don’t know if we can suspend that much disbelief any more. There comes a point at which we simply can’t deny that each successive political ‘saviour’ is just a new mask on an old face of treachery, bought and paid for by market forces.
Despite no recent Prime Minister having been elected with a clear majority or mandate, sweeping changes that will affect Canadians for generations have been put into place over the last few decades, with barely a whimper. Or, if a whimper was murmured, it was simply ignored. At best, we changed lobsters and continued the dance.
From History Today, ” If I was forced to name the worst year, it would probably be 1914. In July of that year, a European order that had brought peace, prosperity and extraordinary artistic and scientific progress, began to unravel. The vast conflict that followed led directly to the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the Cold War and the mess that is the modern Middle East. Only in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, did we enter a relatively stable period – the ‘End of History’ – before it came crashing down on September 11th, 2001. ”
te to Mary. The normalization calmed their fears, and made people realize that they could relate to a drastic social change.
We want to pay as little as possible for any given thing. Corporations heard us; they outsourced manual labour to countries where they could pay lower salaries. And so those jobs, which we used to do here, no longer exist.
And what role will self-driving vehicles play in a future economy? Long haul truckers, cab drivers and couriers will find themselves out of work – not tomorrow, but within the next decade. And that’s a whole lot of drivers.
When Trump said, “For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries” while depleting our own. And,: “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world, ” he was outlining ” a world in which foreign relations are collapsed into a zero-sum game. They gain, we lose. ” (
The order was signed as many were on planes, en route to America.
Political parties that relied upon cutting taxes rather than shoring up their infrastructures and their citizens needs, just to get re-elected, are to be blamed. Every party, every country, big and small, passed that big buck along to their successors, enriching corporations and themselves in the process, while ignoring and angering their constituents, who had trusted them to explain what they needed to know and understand about their future.
And so, there were no television series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, that allowed citizens to normalize a changing present and a very different future. Instead, there was a rise in conspiratorial, dystopic, dramas, and a rush to fairytale land, that deified cartoon superheroes, and fantasy characters. Reality shows, that weren’t really reality, appealed to the minority and the niche groups. And an entire genre of television catered to the needs of ‘preppers,‘ those that would stand alone and defend what little they had when the inevitable (to them) collapse of society occurred.
And certainly, there were good times to be had in the 60’s and 70’s, and I have tons of fond fuzzy memories of elephant pants and go-go boots, Sassoon haircuts, and Mary Quant and Twiggy makeup tips.
One of my favorite memories of my own misspent youth is of the first and only time I saw Janis Joplin perform live. The Montreal Forum, November 4, 1969. It was every thing I had hoped for – and more. I was first struck dumb by her presence and energy, and when that had passed, I rushed, like the thousands of others in the audience, to the stage front, to try and capture just a hint of that glorious essence by being closer to her.
And in that time, we who were actually young when Janis was young, who first heard these songs on our radios or our portable record players or were in the audience when she toured, bottle firmly in hand, and wailed her way into our hearts, were able once more to revisit a time when everything seemed possible.
But the gift that Kudelka gave us, by channelling Joplin’s spirit and music, was a chance to go back to our adolescence in our minds, to forget momentarily that, while we may be wiser, we are also greyer, stiffer, and a lot less supple than we once were. This Janis, then, a Janis Joplin that survived, and was celebrating a 74th birthday by once again sharing her talent .. this Janis relit the candle that aging, politics, and a general societal malaise seeks to extinguish in our hearts.
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with friends in the Market, when Molly Johnson came bopping along. Molly may be a Canadian icon – a singer, songwriter, broadcaster and philanthropist – but that day she was a woman on a mission, distributing posters and postcards to the local shops, in aid of her latest project – the first annual Kensington Market Jazz Festival. It was the first I’d heard of it. When I asked how I could help, she asked if my friend Barbette and I would volunteer to handle door duties at some of the gigs.
Don Cullen was the Pied Piper of Possibilities, of that first break, when the world was wide open to the new. New music, new sounds … whatever could be dreamed up, this was a place where it could be showcased.
For boomers, aging is a bit like puberty; we don’t know what’s next, and we’re both eagerly anticipative and terrified of what’s to come. Often simultaneously.
So when the idea of retiring comes along, whether because we’re closing in on 60 or because other factors, like failing health, or a kick out the door from long time employment, play a part, it can be a bit of a shock. It doesn’t matter whether your retirement is because you want to, or have to .. it’s gonna be a ride.
Will I be happy and relaxed, comfortable, with plenty of time to pursue my hobbies, living the good life, traveling for pleasure, or to visit family and friends? Or will I be scrambling to make ends meet, worried I’ll outlive my money? Some will never feel secure, no matter how much money they have, while others struggle with very little in their pocketbooks, but are rich in friendship and emotional support.
As my friend Barbette Kensington says, “Aging is about how bright your light glows…. keep up the energy level; the more you do the more you can do. Watch your friends and environment; don’t let anybody or anything break your stride…“
Planning for a decent retirement from full time work goes way beyond financial, by the way. Even those retirees I know, that have salted away a good nest egg, have much more to deal with than just money. There may be downsizing involved, which in itself is horrifically conscious altering. There may be health issues, relationship issues, or, just to complicate matters, the health issues of those you’re in a relationship with.
Volunteering may never have been something you’d thought of as ‘work,’ but it is, and it can be a lot of fun, as well as a benefit to your community. Sharing your knowledge of what you’ve learned in your field can be another way to not only keep your mind ticking over, but of giving those just starting in your turf a leg up.
While I see others, who have ‘retired’ by retreating from life, and waiting for death, sinking deeper and deeper into the anaesthesia of pills and booze, ‘self-medicating’ the pain of their losses, kept housebound, fearful of their surroundings, and interested only in their own aches and pains, and needs and emotions. Addicted to quasi-medical shows that sensationalize the dangers of everyday life, and media that fattens its ratings by appealing to their fears of a world that feels increasingly more dangerous, they wrap themselves in cotton wool, unable to trust anyone, spiralling down into a paralyzing world hell bent on picking their corpses clean before they’ve even been buried.
What I’m talking about is reframing the experience of moving through time, so that as we do grow older we can step out of these age-based associations that can keep us in a cage. “
