Here are the empty shelves at a local pharmacy, part of a country-wide chain of pharmacies. It's been like this for months, no Tylenol and other medication for children at a time when many children are getting the flu and other illnesses that require reducing fever. Who would have ever thought that Canada in 2023 can't even have basic medication for children? That's the result of seven years of Justin Trudeau's government.
Monday, January 16, 2023
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Change vs. staying the same
Whatever we change, we change at the loss of something else, and not every change is for the better. Some things we change, what we may have originally considered reforms, end up making life worse, or more complicated, or destroy institutions that have supported society for centuries. Not much thought is given to how change will affect us, what we are giving up, what we are replacing, or what we have lost. We are a society that believes in change for its own sake, that everything new is better than what is old, and people cheer for change as though all change is wonderful. What people are cheering for now may be what people will regret in the future.
The reason we adopted the metric system is that it was presumed it would make us more economically competitive with other nations, for instance the European Union. Of course, the young accept the metric system, it's all they have ever known for measuring and weighing things, and it is taught in schools. Others among us have never wholeheartedly accepted metrification; fruit and vegetables in grocery stores are weighed in both metric and the imperial system, in ounces and pounds, and measurement for building construction material is still in the imperial system, we buy a sheet of plywood that is eight feet by four feet, a two by four is measured in inches, and so on. Measure twice, cut once, is the carpenter's rule; and it is done in inches and feet.
Metrification
meant giving up an aspect of our both collective inheritance and the use of
words that pertain to measurement. But we didn't care, we accepted something that displaced centuries of
our history, our way of life, and our language. Metrification moved us further
from what is specific and historical, the Avoirdupois system, and into
what was conceived in conferences and has very little connection to the everyday
life of everyday people. My concern here is not which is the better system of weights and measurement, it the loss of language, history, and our way of life; of course, we can't go back, that will never happen.
The
Imperial system is derived from the Avoirdupois system which originated eight hundred years ago, certain words are from Old English, the Romans,
and earlier civilizations. An "inch" is 1/36th of a yard, from the
Old English "ince" or "ynce"', and it is 1/12th of a foot.
A "foot" is from the Old English, it is a linear measurement of a
man's foot measured as twelve inches. A "yard" is the length of a
man's belt but also calculated by King Henry I as the distance from his nose to
the thumb of his outstretched hand, it is 36 inches in length. While a
"furlong", a word still used in horse racing, is the length of the
average plowed furor, it is 660 feet long. A "mile" is from the
Romans and calculated as 5,280 feet; a "country mile" refers to travelling
over difficult terrain over a long distance since it is not a straight line.
Meanwhile,
the metric system dates back to around the time of the French
Revolution, to 1795 and 1799, replacing other systems of
measurement. The metre was determined by dimensions of the Earth; the kilogram
or unit of mass was based on the volume of the litre. It was not long before
France and then the rest of Europe had adopted the metric system. This system
of measurement is a child of conferences, both the Treaty of the Metre (1875) and the Conférence générale des poids et
mesures continued to invent and increase divisions of the
material world according to the metric system.
If our previous system of measurement is ancestral and originated in a pre-industrial rural society,
then the metric system is fairly recent, originating in cities, by
intellectuals and academics, and based in measurement for science, business, and urban
dwellers; it is not a system of measurement with a relationship with the
natural world, with the earth, or with anything to do with forests, rivers,
wild life, oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on.
Perhaps most urban dwellers don't care about forests, rivers, wild life,
oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. The metric
system does not spring from the earth that we walk on or from our ancestors or
a belief in the importance of place or where we live; its origin is an abstract invented system of measurement.
How do we define what it means to be a human being and does this definition include a soul? The soul does not resonate to the metric system, the soul demands specificity, place, tradition, and history; the soul includes forests, rivers, wild life, oceans, fish, coast lines, farming, small towns, hunting, and so on. The metric system was imposed on us as so much else has been imposed on us; what is being imposed on us moves us away from tradition, our ancestors, and the ground on which we walk. The metric system does not spring from place, or from our ancestral and historical place.
Of course, after the fact this refers to what one becomes familiar with, and you can become used to anything. Metric displaced pounds, ounces, and Fahrenheit, it displaced what our ancestors knew and lived with, and it displaced words that were used every day by average people going about their lives. We can't go back to the old system but we should remember that change is not always for the best, that what changes displaces what we already have, and in retrospect what we already have may not be all that bad. Today's society is beginning to look very different from what we had, and were happy with, even just five years ago. I am not saying that change is not needed in society, but change and the direction in which our society is now headed is not a place some of us want to go, it looks to be dominated by the State, by globalism, by the end of the family unit, and the end of our way of life. So, this is about a symptom, metrification, and no doubt it seem ridiculous, but it is a symptom of a future that is already happening.
Friday, February 11, 2022
Two poems by Kenneth Patchen
A Vision for the People of America
O the poets with death on their tongues
shall come to address you.
You will drown in your rot.
The poets with death on their tongues
shall come to address you.
The slimy hypocrisy will end.
You will go down in your filth.
O the poets with death on their tongues
shall come to address you.
Flow out over the land
Men have destroyed the roads of wonder,
And their cities squat like black toads
Nothing is clean, or real, or as a girl,
Naked to love, or to be a man with.
The arts of this American land
Stink in the air of mountains;
What has made these men sick rats
That they find out every cheap hole?
How can these squeak of greatness?
Push your drugstore-culture into the sewer
With the rest of your creation.
The bell wasn't meant to toll for you.
Keep your filthy little hands off it.
O fiery river
Spread over this American land.
Drown out the falsity, the smug contempt
For what does not pay . . .
What would you pay Christ to die again?
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Hi Bob, Yes, I am back out walking
Yes, I am back out walking, I aim for a daily walk, it is my favourite exercise. Here we are again at the corner of Cote St. Luc Road and Robert Burns Avenue, a property that continues to deteriorate. I suppose whoever owns this property is waiting for a buyer, or demolition and building permits, or architectural plans. In the meantime we have a building in which the electricity has been cut off and with the changing seasons the whole thing is in a state of decline and deterioration. Last week I saw a hawk sitting on one of the railings in the photograph below. Nature is returning to the Covid cities we inhabit. But nothing stands for long in the way of making money so these buildings must not only go, new buildings (condos, most likely) will be built here.
Sunday, September 5, 2021
The illusion of progress and Vincelli`s Garden Centre in late July 2021
If I remember correctly, in Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley writes that the main problem for the world is overpopulation. So many of the world's problems can be traced back to there being too many people; people are everywhere and they're destroying the planet with garbage, pollution, climate change, building houses on farm land, forest forests, destroying rivers, and causing the extinction of thousands of species of wild life. We are destroying the world with our own species. People are everywhere and it's not a pretty sight.
I suppose there will be a resolution of this problem of overpopulation as more women are educated, there is a relationship between women's education and the number of children they have; women with careers generally have fewer children. As people become more affluent they have fewer children. This seems the only solution to overpopulation. As well, although the world has almost eight billion people we haven't had an increase in the number of gifted people, we don't have dozens of Newtons or Einsteins, nor do we have a few hundred Leonardos or Michaelangelos, or fifty Shakespeares cranking out works of genius. We are destroying ourselves as we proliferate; what will be left of the natural world by 2100? Will it be like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World? That seems one possible scenario...
There have been some extreme visions of a post-apocalyptic world; after the apocalypse the population is reduced, mankind is almost extinct. Yesterday, when I walked by Vincelli's Garden Centre, I was reminded of an old television show about what happens to civilization without people; for instance, they might show New York City and then, through computerized special effects, they show New York City in ten years, twenty years, and further off into a future without people. The asphalt streets are cracked and overgrown with weeds, windows are broken, buildings are beginning to collapse, the city is abandoned and overgrown with vegetation. It doesn't take long for coyotes and wolves to be walking along Fifth Avenue and the Empire State Building to collapse. Look at Chernobyl where, in 1986, there was a nuclear disaster, today wild life has returned, the place is overgrown with lush vegetation, and animal life has returned despite high levels of radiation. Tourists are visiting Chernobyl to see how a city that was once full of people going to work, spending time with their families, and enjoying life, has become a ghost city. It took just thirty-five years for nature to reclaim the abandoned city of Chernobyl but it won't be safe for permanent human habitation for many years, possibly for centuries.
More of anything does not necessarily increase the value of that thing, it might even diminish its value. It has been said before that we are not as moved by the suffering of a million people as we are by the suffering of one person, for instance a child's dead body on a beach. More of a thing seems to diminish its value, and one recalls the photographs of Spenser Tunick in which he invites hundreds of people to pose naked, standing or lying down on a city street. I always found these photographs disturbing, the pink naked bodies remind me of the dead naked bodies of Nazi victims, bodies thrown into mass graves before being covered with dirt. It is all highly disturbing. I don't like Tunick's photographs but I can still recognize their message; his photographs remind us that too many human beings in one place has not made the human race more attractive, it has made it something less attractive, more vulnerable, more expendable. I would add that overpopulation is dangerous to the long-term survival of humanity.
These photographs of Vincelli's Garden Centre taken in late July 2021,
Vincelli's Garden Centre a month after closing for good. |
When I used to visit Vincelli's Garden Centre I never thought it would end up like this . . . |
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
The illusion of progress and Vincelli`s Garden Centre in late August 2021
Every time I drive passed the former Vincelli`s Garden Centre I expect to see the place leveled and construction of almost three hundred condos begun. When I was young I was always looking for some nature in the city, an empty lot, the lanes in our NDG neighbourhood, the Villa Maria orchards, or riding our bikes along Norman Street and the empty fields there and then continuing on to Dorval Shopping Centre. That is all finished, Norman Street is all construction-trucking-delivery firms, the highway to the shopping centre is now many lanes wide and people drive like devils on it, no place for some kid on his bicycle. This is change, it isn`t progress. Being in nature, even an empty lot in the city, is good for children; every empty lot having a new condo built on it isn`t progress, it`s become uncontrolled development. I think by now we have seen through the illusion of progress, except perhaps in medical science; most progress is change for its own sake. And usually there is the profit motive in this, not that there is anything wrong with people making money--improving their family`s fortune, owning a nice home, improving themselves--but there are always consequences to what people do, and making money for its own sake can become greed. An empty lot, some country-like environment, is good for children, they can escape the relentless presence of modern life which is getting relentlessly omnipresent, it is also bad for our children`s health, and diminishes any vision or spiritual inclination that children may have been born with. Seeing Canada geese flying overhead, Monarch butterflies in the garden, honey bees, earth worms, urban wild life, imagination and creativity, dreams and day dreams, solitude, playing with other children, this is a connection with nature and getting in touch with something greater than ourselves, even with the divine spark in each of us. But the current housing boom is upon us, houses that families could afford just five years ago are now double the price to buy them and are being bought up by banks, foreigners, and entrepreneurs out to renovate and flip the property for profit. So, some children are being deprived of both using their imagination and a decent and safe place in which to live. These condos that will be constructed on the old Vincelli`s Garden Centre site won`t be cheap and they won`t be four bedroom condos for families, they will be built to maximize profit, probably one or two bedrooms for old people who are downsizing from their family home. It is not a positive future ahead of us as we get deeper into this century, some of us see it as dystopian.
These photographs of Vincelli's Garden Centre taken in late August 2021,