I cast my vote today, as I always do, and we wait here in Ontario this evening to find out who our Premier will be. Toronto is my first home, and the effects on it from lack of leadership both here and in Queens Park are something all Torontonians should be concerned about. Watching the political landscape increasingly reduces my hope that small and responsible government can ever be a reality here again.
She was born in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Her parents had lived through the Great War and the Revolution, and her father, a Russian Orthodox priest, had refused to renounce his God. So she attended a new school at least twice each year, never knowing when KGB attention would sharpen its focus on her little family and cause them to run in search of another place to live. In the end, the running was for naught, and by the time she was 12 her father was taken away for the last and final time. They were left with only a rumor, never formally confirmed, that her father had finally been executed. By the time war broke out again, she was fully indoctrinated, well trained in fear and suspicion and primal self-preservation.
After the war, she and her mother arrived as refugees in Canada. They worked as indentured servants for one year to pay for their passage, and they were incredibly fortunate. Their fortune was to be taken in together, instead of being separated, by a prominent gentleman and his wife. The gentleman was semi-retired, with duties only as a board member of a large and venerable publicly owned institution, and he mentored his younger ward, giving her the run of his personal library, and arranging for her employment at his firm’s head office in Montreal when her passage had been fully served.
“I remember this moment,” she tells me, “when everything changed. All my life I had lived with my heart clenched tight in total fear and paranoia, like a heavy rock in my chest. One day, as I stood on rue Sainte-Catherine waiting for the light to change, I became aware of everything around me in a different way. It was a perfect day, with blue skies and sunshine and a light breeze. Everyone on the street stood or moved so freely, so lightly. No one was afraid, or tense, or self-conscious. I stopped and stared, and the heavy clenching fear in my heart eased open and fell away.”
60 years later, she looks at me hopelessly and tells me, “It’s back.”, and then she tells me why.
In recent years, she, and her friends and family as well, have had cause to interact with our medical system, and related social services as well, repeatedly. There have been too many incidents where doctors and others engaged in providing medical care cited rules and procedures as their only communication to the patient. They filled out paperwork and routinely turned away anyone whose needs could not be clearly addressed by approved procedures. They offered narcotics and tests and specialist referrals that took months to materialize, were performed, and produced results that were ignored and not followed up on. She has further discovered that she no longer has access to effective representation by elected officials that can do anything to intervene on a citizen’s behalf.
For over 40 adult years, she worked hard, paid her taxes, always voted, and never hesitated to contact her political representatives when government services were delayed or inefficient. This process, she says, has stopped working. It seems to her now, that everyone she can expect to encounter through her old age works for the government, and acts more and more like the citizens of the communist country she grew up in, like chattel. This is why, she says, the fear is back. It is the fear of soulless automatons who thoughtlessly follow their master’s rules and do not see another human being when they look at her.
How much of this, I ask myself, is an echo of her past, and how much based on the current reality? Is there really much difference between advanced socialism and communism? There are some people who’ve received satisfactory medical care here in recent years. I’ve spoken to them. They were all highly successful, well known, and they were all men. I have not heard a happy patient story from an average citizen, or from a woman, in many years. The truly wealthy all leave the country for medical care.
How much does it take, I wonder, for those of us who haven’t been terrorized, to learn to be afraid?
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Trackback: Free Does Not Mean Avaliable.
…and on a Weekly Wrap Up (links).
My American friend alternately tells me that everything in the US is about politics and that everything is about money. My response is that everything is about freedom. What do you think?
Being fascinated by all things cultural, from fine arts to psychology to free speech, I continually view political and economic landscapes from multiple viewpoints. The United States of America is truly the most dynamic and multifaceted nation on our planet for this kind of observation. It also offers, by virtue of the freedom its citizens enjoy, as wide a range of belief systems as any one society has ever simultaneously produced and allowed to flourish.
Every ideology has some positive values at its core. We can trivialize them, we can view them with cynicism, especially when they are misinterpreted or perverted or taken out of context, yet no matter how much we do this we can’t make them go away. We can’t dismiss a core value out of existence by sneering at it, and if we try to invalidate it by ignoring it our whole becomes unbalanced, or, to put it another way, the code won’t validate and the program will keep slowing and stalling. Unfortunately, our natural tendency is to concentrate on the values and processes we personally like, and when we get stuck we try to blame it on the things we don’t like.
What does all this have to do with money?
Monetary valuation is a lot like a piece of the underlying structure of a computer program. It performs functions based on values. It is also a universal method we have developed for understanding and allocating meaning to much of our day to day existence, to our actions and interactions with one another.
How we live our lives, what we do and how we behave in relation to others is what really makes the ‘world go round’. Our most natural functions, though, in conscious learning and living, involve valuation and judgment. Money is, at its essence, symbolic. Removing money as a symbol does not change what is being symbolized.
Communal ideologies, in practice, tend to crash on the basis of valuation, and this is because people are all unique and different. we have different abilities and needs, even when we have a common purpose. Altruism, charity, the concept of mitzvah, social responsibility, etc. are not things that can truly exist without personal belief and motivation. Individual achievements and actions that benefit several or many can be entirely satisfying without formal valuation, but an idealistic state where every one of us devotes all our efforts only to benefiting others is contrary to our basic nature. Each of us has many primary levels of need, beginning with those associated with physical survival, and increasing in complexity through levels of self realization, emotional balance, etc. Disassociating these personal needs from the money symbol is a good thing, but denying them as unique and personal isn’t. Trying to do so not only denies our identities it also threatens our very existence by devaluing them.
Money is an integral component of the methods we’ve developed for valuation of our actions and accomplishments, and it is only that. Primitive societies used other things symbolically for the same purpose. The issues related to ‘love and peace’ vs ‘aggression and war’ are important to most of us, but valuing then on an economic or monetary basis makes no sense. Both peaceful and warlike societies have died out, passively or violently. Power has been acquired and used by benevolent leaders and by tyrants alike, but neither benevolence nor tyranny are based on wealth. Money is one of our important things. It isn’t us.
Our personal motivations and actions can be moral or immoral, but blaming immorality on money is pure misdirection. Even more dangerous is associating immorality with the accumulation of money. Money doesn’t breed immorality …immorality breeds immorality. The more we hang on to this dangerous fallacy the more it ‘proves’ itself for us. In interpersonal transactions, whether we trade our work product peer to peer, create products or services for many, or are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, we choose constantly either to focus on creating and offering value or on trying to get away with something and this is the root of morality. This is the level at which we define, or misdefine it, and making this a conscious action is one of the best definitions of freedom I know.
Democracy is, perhaps, the best ideal we’ve created so far, and the statement that ‘all men are created equal’ one of the best expressions of it. This is, in my opinion, perverted by viewpoints which effectively deny our unique individual makeup, abilities, and autonomy, and thereby our freedom. The very concept of freedom is one of the most highly personal things there is, not a political system. It is also, and for the same reason, at the heart of every great human achievement. None of these have been motivated by money per se, yet, if money is viewed as a measure of prosperity and an instrument of freedom in society, then most of them were.
We in North America live in what was once called the New World, a place where opportunity to create a good life for ourselves, our families, and our communities was boundless. It was also a rough and dangerous place, involving risks and responsibilities that are hard for most of us to imagine today. Both peace loving settlers and daring adventurers survived and prospered, in part, by being prepared to kill or die at any time. Is modern society here safer?
An essential part of the romantic allure that permeates the history of this continent rests in the dream of almost limitless personal freedom. The history proved some very profound truths. More recent history illustrates the same truths, but they are becoming obscured by our increasing lack of understanding of personal freedom in the context of societal interaction and interdependence.
Every one of us has, deliberately or accidentally, said something politically incorrect. Recently, I pointed out to an aggressive bill collector following old records that he was looking for someone male with an Arabic name and that I was female with a Slavic name. His response was instant anger and his retort, (approximately) that “we’re all trying to become alike!”, struck me as sublime. This particular mantra isn’t about any real ideal of equality. We are, every one of us, completely unique in a myriad of truly wonderful ways, yet share an equally remarkable spectrum of needs, desires, and goals in common. Where individualism and equality meet, where they recognize and respect one another, is where freedom resides.
I don’t keep a record of them all, although I remember the dates most important to me.
Jeff’s post on 911 resonated most with me today.
For me 911 invokes, not only the threat to our society which it carried out, but also every brutal slaughter and execution lodged in my memory. I think of most of my family members dying under the Soviet regime, and this, just like 911, re-enforces to me the value of our freedom, and the extent to which I passionately believe in fighting to protect it.
Focusing on freedom today strikes me as a fitting tribute.
I’m reading more today on banned books, including sassymonkey’s third in a series on Banning Books In Schools on BlogHer.
If you want to join in reading about freedom today, here’s another place to start …the ALA Intellectual Freedom Issues page.
Non profit American news co-operative Associated Press is a monopolistic news re-distribution conglomerate in the United States. Their content is created for them by contributing media (newspapers, radio, and television) in the US. Last year, threatened by the freedom of the internet, AP began charging for any right to use or reprint its content electronically.
On Sep 6, 12:22 PM EDT, Wired published an AP article on Net Neutrality titled Feds OK fee for Priority Web Traffic, which I can’t link to without paying. I can link to the Agonist Forum’s Ten Things That Finally Killed Net Neutrality, or to Peter Kaplan’s Justice Dept wary of “net neutrality” proposals on Yahoo News via Reuters.
There has been plenty of conversation online about Net Neutrality, but precious little in the mainstream media. Much of the online conversation focuses on Republicans and big bad capitalists in general as the perpetrators of the death of net neutrality. Little of it talks about what Net Neutrality is in plain English, or what it means to all of us. It is freedom of speech and freedom of access, which includes freedom to make a living. It affects every single one of us.
It’s worth an hour or two of everyone’s time to learn about this.
Start with Tim Berners-Lee, and sign up at Save The Internet.
Save The Internet is a very unfortunate name. This isn’t like Save the Whales, and it’s a lot more than an appeal to conscience. I’d name it Claim Our Freedom.
The opposition to Net Neutrality has been led mostly by delivery system giants such as AT&T with opposition coming from companies dependent on a customer base that is free to leave, including eBay and Google (although Google has been getting progressively quieter on the subject lately). When you do read mainstream press on the subject, pay some attention to the way the issue is presented (including what is left out). This will usually tells you everything you need to know about the presenter’s agenda.
The average non-tech person has never heard of Net Neutrality, or if they have they don’t understand it at all. When it is explained in terms of their telephone company wanting the right to both ‘capture’ a fee from the consumer and control access to what we currently create for one another for free, then everyone gets it. Take it one step further and explain that your access to others is going to be controlled by big media and telephony, which translates into censorship, and more people might start to value what we have here and protest against losing it.
Who is communicating this effectively outside of the core online tech communities? There is over 80% computer saturation in North America and there are over a billion people online worldwide, so why don’t most of them know anything about this? This is a serious issue that threatens free speech and personal freedom. Is Net Neutrality dead and is it just because we didn’t take the time to tell everyone about it?
Shame on the US press.
I can only conclude that mainstream media is all for censorship. We’ve been listening to their crying over lost readership growing in volume as it is directly impacted by more and more individual voices online.
Many professional journalists are horrified by what is called citizen media with its lack of professional standards. Despite many strong voices advocating the joining of traditional press to online citizen publishing, however, I don’t see anyone actually doing it.
AT&T and Google are corporations, not people. They have a clear legal obligation to their shareholders to make as much money as possible. Period.
The onus for communicating the threat here falls squarely on the shoulders of a free press. Anyone who knowingly ducks is either a coward or a political hack, but cannot rightfully claim the designation of free. Free press means us, just as it did in earlier times of our countries (US and Canada). You and me. We’re the free press today, not the Times or the Post or CNN or Fox.
Why isn’t everyone saying this plainly while we still have the freedom to do so?
