Against Change/2

 

Philips Square seen from The Bay on 17 October 2009

    

One of the most existentially bleak things I've seen are television commercials promoting online gambling. These commercials extol the great fun to be had by solitary gambling on one's IPhone. In the commercials the actors portraying happy gamblers are all laughing and having a great time by themselves; even when shown in a room full of people, each person is alone, isolated, gambling on their IPhones; whatever the gimmick is to get them to gamble it's working--advertising works--as soon as the gambling begins these people are transformed, suddenly they are all laughing and happy. This scenario is what the gambling companies want you to believe, this is the lie they are promoting. These gambling companies would promote solitary drinking if they could get away with it, maybe that’s the next big thing.

    There are moral values for a reason; life is good when there are moral values, life has a structure by which people can live. We can see the result of our Western society's abandonment of morality; the result of society’s liberalization of the last fifty years has made society, and our individual lives, worse; it's become a free-for-all of arguing and "do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else" attitude. We have fewer relationships, our families are scattered, we are isolated and alienated from other people, mental illness is rampant, sexuality is confused, and our children have been sacrificed for liberal reforms. Liberalization proceeds to a dystopian world of amorality and the inevitable loss of free speech. The children are not doing well in this new world that has abandoned morality. Liberalization, open mindedness, was ostensibly intended to make society more equitable, to remove injustices, to improve society, and to decriminalize non-victim crimes, but it didn't work out that way.

    What did abandoning moral values achieve? In the past we never had homeless people sleeping in the streets, we never had widespread drug use, and the same applies to access to pornography, gambling, prostitution, and so on. Go back fifty years. People had moral values, rules to live by, that supported society and emphasized people living a moral life; they were the underpinnings of a good, decent society. Today everyone has an opinion, there is a cacophony of disagreeing voices; people are arguing, opinions matter but facts don't matter, it's all subjective and up to personal opinion. It's better to say nothing or the progressives will attack you, and there is no going back. We laugh at morality, we barely remember that people once had moral values, and we smirk when morality is mentioned—grin and smirk, grin and smirk—. And if you express anything in public that is  critical of the new morality, the thought police will fine you, disagreeing is a hate crime; it's a crime to disagree with the currently fashionable opinions of others. When our moral values were denied, abolished by government to buy our vote, then almost immediately society began to collapse. 

    Today, good people are silenced by fear of being attacked, and society is increasingly looking like some dystopian facsimile of what we once had. We're told good and bad don’t exist, it’s all relative. The new morality does not include free speech; it is a morality of censorship. No one wants to return to oppressive values, to misogyny, to prejudice or racism, but what we have now is not working. What we change is at a cost; no one has gained anything by discarding the moral foundations of society in favour of the possibility of a better society, it didn't work; gambling is one of the most addictive activities and I suspect the IPhone makes it even more addictive, like doom scrolling, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pornhub, and the rest of "social" media hell.

Edited: 04, 05 March 2026

Think like an Immigrant

 

Newly arrived immigrants at Pier 21, Halifax, Canada, mid-1950s

                                        

             

The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialisation. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.

                     --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is something unsettling about seeing the happy, laughing, vacuous faces of the wealthy and their happy, vacuous children; privilege doesn't evoke empathy. For some, the parents or grandparents of the wealthy were born here, for others their parents or grandparents were immigrants to Canada. In either case, people had to work for what they had, they put in long hours of  work to make money and to build a legacy for their children, to make a good life for their families, they didn't want their children and grandchildren to go without as they had. And they succeeded; see the expensive cars in the driveway, the big houses, the mansions, the fine clothes, the Patek Philippe watches, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, and other brands indicating status. It's from rags and being poor to riches and wealth and back to rags and poverty in three or four generations. Material stuff doesn't last forever, eventually it ends up in the landfill, the dumpster, or dust.

So now I suggest that we think like immigrants. These are people who arrived here with nothing but a suitcase and five dollars; they were willing to live in small apartments, several generations living together and being frugal, working several jobs. I am not suggesting that we all live exactly this way but at least we could reduce our level of acquiring stuff we don't need, stuff that we just want, we could be frugal and careful with money. We could remember what it was like in the past. We could prepare for the hard times ahead of us.

It is with this in mind that I wrote a memoir of my grandmother, Edith Morrissey; it is a memoir of her Girouard Avenue flat. I wanted to remember her--she whom we all loved--and so I wrote Remembering Girouard Avenue. My grandmother had little money but she lived in a large flat and family members who needed a home were welcome to live there, her door was open; she always had family members living with her: her Aunt Lib, her father, one of her sisters, and then, later, another sister lived with her and also her daughter, my Auntie Mabel, who never left home; and in the early 1950s my parents, my brother and I, lived with my grandmother for several years. The irony of this is that when my grandmother's husband died in 1932 my father told her to move to a smaller place, that family would want to live with her, he knew her generosity and what do you know, almost twenty years later, we were also living with her.

In the past few people were homeless, now there are homeless people everywhere. Now homelessness is a possibility for all of us; indeed, many Canadians are one pay cheque from being homeless, one rent increase from being homeless, one visit to a food bank from being hungry and eventually homeless. Homeless people live on the street, in a tent, in a bus shelter, they have no home to return to, they have no home to return to, no bedroom with a comforter on the bed, a night table and a book to read, food to eat, the heat turned up in our cold northern climate. There were always a few homeless people, they were usually older men who were often alcoholics; and they were taken care of by mission halls or the Salvation Army that fed them and put them up for the night or as long as they needed; it was not an easy life but it was not as widespread as it is now. Now, the homeless are everywhere and they include young people. What family did in the past is being replaced by government services, and while there are well-meaning people in government we can't rely on government to provide for everything people need. 

I remember two elderly women in Vancouver, they lived a few blocks from where the billionaires now live in West Point Grey in their $45M homes, 15K square feet for two people, indoor swimming pools and a helicopter pad on the roof, a view of the water, and these two old women in no way lived like the wealthy live, they had a large house but it was getting old and looked a bit run down. It would eventually be sold for the land it sat on, that's how it works when a city lot costs $5M and higher, you don't live in the old house on the lot, you tear it down and build something new. These two old women drove identical cars parked in their driveway, cars maybe forty years old. Here's the point: prepare for an uncertain future, be anonymous, don't draw attention to yourself, don't forget where you come from. Think like an immigrant.