Indignities of Youth and Age

As the old man reaches further into his dotage, he experiences many indignities. Unless individuals are unusually healthy, active and outgoing “People Persons” they usually do. Unless we are called upon to contribute in some useful way, the old man and his life partner of some 64 years from the beginning of that relationship have been happier communicating one on one or two on two, than in group settings.

In spite of or perhaps because of being a bit of a loner, I am still surprised at how thoughtful and helpful most total strangers can be when I suffer some aging indignity. One such incident happened to me several weeks ago. Having managed to work my way into some minor mobility improvement for a week or two, I drove to my neighbourhood pharmacy, managed to cane my way to the high prescription counter to hand the young lady two small notes of the request but dropped one on the floor below. Thoughtlessly I bent to pick it up but when I pushed my cane to get up my knees refused and I fell back instead, injuring tailbone and banging the back of head on the cement floor. Pharmacist, staff member and another customer rushed around the counter to help, instructing me to stay down, wanting to get me medical attention and so on. I did not pass out so refused but after a brief stay on my back levered my way to a sitting position for a while, then asked for a cushion to put under my knees and a chair for my arms to lever myself into the chair. They watched me for a while, prepared my order, offered a painkiller, made me stay seated for a while, helped guide me through the door, held my car door, handed me my package of insulin supplies after I was seated and watched me head home. They even phoned my home an hour later to see if I was OK. I cancelled my intended further shopping trip and spent much of the next ten days or so recovering and sleeping a lot. I am still in recovery mode.

During that period my frequent half-awake mental activity dwelt on such kindness towards my aging indignities and soon found myself back in the days of 1940, when no such help and kindness was in evidence.  That year I experienced many similar injuries to my cervical spine, causing neck and head pain I could not then admit. My nemesis for most of these youthful indignities that year was a pint-sized classmate from the city area called Frank Christian. To me he was neither frank nor a Christian, but a malevolent marauder, often egged on by other city classmates, who considered me fair game for his brutal pranks.

After all, I was one of the first pupils to reap the benefits of the new school district system providing local elementary classes to grade 6, but centrally located Junior High from grades 7 to 9, with Senior High classes from grades 7 to 12 plus Senior Matriculation classes for university entrance students in the city centre. The system required a fleet of school buses to carry pupils from outlying population centres to the central classrooms in time for classes starting at 9:00 AM with a one hour break for lunch and more classes until 4:00 PM for another long ride home. Each pupil had to go prepared for the needs of the day, including notebooks, texts, lunch and perhaps items of clothing. The image above shows a long distance blurred view snapped by my sister one misty early morning in 1939 as she met one of her friends heading for the bus stop, carrying what was then considered by us at least to be the appropriate school suitcase and I had one like it. 

The difference for me, of course, was that I was part of the contingent from the Village Theocracy of my Youth that I have mentioned some time ago in this series in a review called Vigilance and Vigilantes. World War 2 began in September of 1939. I started grade 7 at age 12 in the new centralized bussing program at the same time. The village had developed from the late 20s as a closed society of non-violent Russian born Mennonites recently arrived as refugees from the post-revolutionary problems there, still intent on maintaining there local independence and German language ways of the old country granted in early Tsarist days. The result was that our busload of villagers was generally labelled as German sympathizers, derided as square heads or conchies, their belongings labelled with swastikas and worse. On the lighter side, in my first year in 1939, while waiting for the bus to pick us up for the 10 miles of poorly graded gravel road to home, one of the “English” boys (to the villagers then, everyone in the surrounding community was English, be their name Zacharias, Ludchak, or Waslynchuk), a tough logger’s son from Sardis, swaggered up to one of my village bus mates, saying, “Wanna fight, squarehead?”. True to his non-violent creed, my friend answered, “Not today, thank you.” 

Today’s age induced pain re-kindled memories of those early days. In my case the aforesaid school suitcase turned out to be the major cause of the similar pain and indignities I suffered in that grade 8 room full of male rowdies and observant but usually quiet girls. At age 13/14 I was among the taller kids so my desk was the last in a row with a number of empties behind me. That was about the only place I found to keep my suitcase full of supplies handy. In the absence of our pretty young home-room teacher, Miss Nancy Raine, likely during the lunch hour, my half-pint nemesis described above, would sneak surreptitiously around the room, pick up my loaded suitcase and throw it directly into the back of my neck and it happened more than once. 

My immediate reaction to the pain was to rise as quickly as I could and chase him around the room. His larger friends immediately accused me of bullying the kid and told me to “pick on someone my own size”.  Of course I had no other recourse. Any complaints would only have worsened my position for the rest of the school year. Poor Miss Raine suffered a good deal of pain herself from those unruly grade 8’s and once or twice I caught her crying with frustration in the hall at her inability to maintain discipline. I had health problems because of the cervical spine injury caused by that prank until I quit school after grade 9 at age 15 to go farming.

In an epilogue I can say that the enforced bussing program in our community worked well on that small scale, to begin a sort of integration between my villagers and the “others” by the time I returned to the classroom in the fall of 1943, and the preacher’s control of his theocracy was more or less doomed soon after the war. It had turned out that some of the first army recruits in our area included youngsters from my village including one of my neighbours and in general, those earlier settlers found our villagers to be much like they were. As for my nemesis, Frank Christian, I never saw him again. Perhaps he had volunteered by then, provided he had grown some. I ran into Miss Raine again in the fall of 1945 on a crowded campus at UBC where I had enrolled for first year Arts, strolling hand in hand with a Mr. Jamieson, who had been one of my teachers at the village elementary school many years earlier.

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Frustrations of Change

The old man has just passed another milestone and is now is the fourth day of his 87th year. Having been fully occupied in keeping up some sort of mobility, blogging suffered in the priority race. In spite of that he decided to keep on trying to exercise his little grey cells by anticipating Microsoft's threat to stop servicing his beloved Windows XP computer. So I decided to scrap my wife's seldom used XP laptop for a new desktop with new bells and whistles powered by Windows 8. The result has been long hours, days and nights of stresses and strains just trying to think of how we could make this thing work gradually so the transition to the newer system would be easier for our slower learning curve. 

The store's technical squad finally delivered the beast yesterday and tied it in with my XP desktop to some extent the way I wanted it to go. After many frustrations and the exhaustion of watching the geek get it set up and operating I finally retired through a mostly sleepless and uncomfortable night with visions of large icons and sugar plum fairies floating randomly across the lit up screen in front of me.

Still, in an hour or so this morning I am sort of getting the hang of things. So this is by way of a test issue of the Post, the first from Windows 8. The technical expert did get emails running on both computers last night. Now I must see if it still does this morning. The old man will try to be more forthcoming next time.

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The Old Man's Christmases

The old man goes on beyond his earned years

though heart misses beats and legs grow weak

and memory fades for recent events,

wondering why he’s still here

regretting harsh words of a long time ago,

and his selfish actions in having his say.

Yet he is still around at the top of each day

to count each blessing on his way,

with his friend for life of sixty-four years,

who brushed off her tears after all his misses

and backed up his play in spite of her fears,

since they met in the snow that long ago Christmas.

The old man remembers even longer ago

when the world, as now, was ill.

He was only six with no why’s or how’s,

in another new place with strange inside toilets,

with tonsils, scarlet fever and poverty,

depths of Depression and urban rebellion.

Even then the old man was grateful each day

for the grace and goodness of a lovely teacher,

the seasonal gathering of all the clan

and the sudden thump on the rented porch;

a huge turkey hamper in that strange urban isthmus

that gave the old man a new idea of Christmas.

In his last years the old man sees changing ways

of living for ME and fun and games,

of anthills of trillions of zeros and ones

all alone though in constant abbreviated contact

with Facebook friends and theTwitter tweet,

never knowing who they will “friend” or meet.

But then the old man thanks his artistic niece,

Linda the Activist, for using real English in reality style

Praising goodness and love in music she sends

created by boys and girls of Paraguay’s Landfill Harmonic Orchestra

and the Welsh Only Boys Aloud male chorus causing tears to amass

behind the old man’s admiring eyes this Christmas.

But last of all the old man sees a world of greed

of strife and hate, of wars and separation,

of incarnate evil, of madness and guns

and twenty grade ones and six young teachers

butchered in minutes by one spurt of madness

in the midst of seasonal joy at Newtown.

Yet the old man sees love and courage,

forgiveness and hope rise out of the grief,

a coming together of friends in their pain

and worldwide admission that we must change.

May all you abbreviated zeros and ones join a new class

to change the world to the old man’s true Christmas!

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Escape: Dust Bowl to Rain Forest

“Uncle Sam, let me in!” According to my mother’s oft repeated story through childhood and youth, I coined that phrase in the U.S. Immigration Office at the Sumas, Washington border crossing in April of 1929. My parents had just been refused re-entry into their original promised land after trying to persuade officials to relent because my slightly older sister and I had been born there. I tried to console them with the threat that when I grew up I would return to that place to insist on my rights as an American born citizen.

So, insult added to injury, on the family’s return to our temporary home and reporting to Canadian Customs on the Huntingdon side of the border when questioned on the reason for their crossing to Sumas, they were informed that if their 1924 Studebaker was to stay in Canada, a duty on the value of the vehicle had to be paid. If they couldn’t raise the cash it had to be returned to Huntingdon for impoundment.

The old man’s memories of that event some 84 years ago returned after his recent viewing of the new Ken Burns photo story called The Dust Bowl. The many photos and stories going back to the twenties and thirties forcefully reminded me of my own family’s experiences, told as part of my parents’ story, A Family Diaspora, a book I self-published in 1997. In the chapter I called Footloose and Rootless in America I recounted the then personal memories, writings, family photos and other records which I thought then were exhaustive, provided by my siblings and myself. Some of my conclusions were in error as I discovered later.

In this issue I won’t go into the family travels from Russia to Germany, thence to the American arrival at New York’s Ellis Island and the arrival at Halstead, Kansas in December 1922. Their sponsors and bank loan guarantors were Mom’s American Schmidt cousins. That respite lasted four years during which Mom was the centre of attention in that community and thought she had achieved the American Dream. Dad worked in the flour mill, paid off the travel indebtedness, acquired a Model T touring car and seemed to be thriving.

In 1926, for reasons still unclear to me, the family packed up an old Model T truck piloted by Dad and the car driven by my then 13 year-old brother with the rest of the family, including me as a foetus, along gravel roads, camping and working our way through Idaho for a parcel of land in Coeur d’Alene County, Washington, where I was born. That lasted but briefly, and with money and cars gone, we answered an ad for farm help by an Ohio Pennsylvania Dutchman who advanced rail fare for the family. He turned out to be a boorish bachelor type with very unpleasant household habits and aggressive goats that considered the house part of their territory, so that ended in favour of taking over a share-cropping arrangement in the Archbold, Ohio area.

They must have had a kindly landlord, because they did well enough to preserve most of their chattels. Incredible to me, that included tools and belongings dragged along through all the trials and tribulations from Russia as well as a Phoenix treadle sewing machine Mom purchased in Germany for fifty cents American sent by the American cousins in 1922.

In Archbold, Ohio, my brother, aged 14 in June 1927 had been used by the non-driving landlord as the driver of a new Buick the man bought that year. Somehow, likely with the Buick owner’s backing my brother engineered the purchase of a used 1924 Studebaker sedan within the next year. He loved that car and the sound of its authoritative aah-ooh-aah horn, often lording it over the pip-squeak beeps of the Model T’s he passed.

As they had done for centuries, the Russian Mennonites kept in touch by letter throughout their communal wanderings. During this Ohio period, Mom heard from her much older sister and her husband. They had somehow made it to Canada during what was by then the Stalinist crackdown, and eventually made their way to a new Mennonite community in Canada’s Fraser Valley. They extolled its rain-forest virtues and the possibilities for a new Russian style religious village community just begun in 1928. With summer harvest done, without thought about citizenship status or border crossings, the family packed all chattels and family in and on the 1924 Studebaker and started out Okie-style (a term not yet invented then) to freeload, camp and work their way to the new village promise but still looking along the way for alternative places where the family might settle in a genial community all grown up family members could agree on.

Remember 1928 was still part of the Roaring Twenties. Americans were getting rich on the stock market and Herbert Hoover campaigned to succeed Calvin Coolidge that year with the slogan, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. That must have seemed a very empty promise to my family as we rough travelled through the country looking for work and a home.

One of our stops along that way was a grassland farm at Montezuma, Kansas. One of Dad’s former World War 1 Siberian internment fellows by the name of Miller had settled there perhaps a year earlier. The location is not that far from the Oklahoma Panhandle in Western Kansas, considered in the Ken Burns photo story to be the centre and worst part of the Dust Bowl. According to that story, the grassland farmers had bumper crops in both 1928 and 1929, and I suspect my family stopped as Miller guests for a time and perhaps considered settling there. My oldest sister left snapshots of the youngest children, including me eating an apple, and the one of the Studebaker, inserted here appearing generally unloaded and with mud on the tires. The people around the car show a young gallant in double breasted suit, likely a Miller son, eyeing my twelve year-old sister behind the car, my brother Henry at fifteen left of the driver’s door, Miller with foot on running board and Dad leaning against the back of the car.

From Southern Kansas the search went west through even more arid States to California and north to British Columbia. Our well laden, well travelled 1924 Studebaker caravan eventually reached the Canadian Border at Huntingdon, BC on December 7, 1928, almost six years to the day after my parents and their three surviving Russian born children were admitted as immigrants to the States at Ellis Island in 1922.

My family’s arrival at this new “promised land” in the Fraser Valley did not improve our lot. Relationships between my parents, between parents and my older siblings, and between all family members and the church community worsened. Reasons and speculations on the causes of this downward spiral are covered in my Diaspora volume, but the arrival here could not have been well blessed, as the following highlights may indicate:

• The family must have applied to return to America within 3 months after their arrival because the family documents included a letter from the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration dated April 6, 1929 at Sumas, Washington stating in the first paragraph: “With reference to examination of yourself and family at this office on April 2, 1929, and especially with reference to your appeal from the decision of the Board of Special Inquiry, denying you and your family admission to the United States, as the charge that yourself and family were likely to become public charges was made subject to reopening and as it is desired to clear up all doubtful points before the case is submitted to Washington, DC for final determination, you are requested to submit to this office, at your earliest convenience, proof of such money or other resources as you claim to own.” There were further requirements as well but of course proof of resources was not forthcoming.
• Our beloved 1924 Studebaker was impounded by Canadian Customs pending payment of 27.5% Duty on the value and a 5% Excise Tax on value and duty added together, for a total bill of $124.43. The family scrimped and saved and got it released on payment of that amount on October 18, 1930. It was in use sparingly for a year or two after that but sat on blocks in our barn/garage shed through the rest of the Depression, much beyond our means to operate. I spent many an hour sitting behind the wheel in the closed shed in useless fantasy.
• In their six years in the States, no matter how strict the family discipline and religious observance may have been, my three Russian born siblings, in early or mid-teen years could not be under constant supervision. In all their scrambles around the country they were the main communicators for my parents who had learned but little English during those years. The kids spoke American English by then without the tell-tale Mennonite accent, which I recognize to this day in Canada even in some public figures of perhaps third generation Russian Mennonite families. From stories my older siblings have told, especially my brother, I am certain that my parents were totally unaware of the many shenanigans they got up to, constant work demands notwithstanding.
• Through the Depression, my village theocracy grew. Many of the refugees from Stalinist atrocities by way of church guaranteed travel expenses had settled on the Canadian prairies, generally on grasslands granted to the CPR as part of the trans-continental railway construction deal. They soon suffered the same kind of drought, crop failures, and grasshopper plagues as the Burns Dust Bowl film describes. They left for greener pastures in Yarrow, my village theocracy, arriving from Mennonite area towns like Herbert, Beechy, Rosthern and Coaldale. We called them prairie chickens and soon the back road parcels of Yarrow were dotted with new shacks. Yarrow became a thriving German speaking community and soon filled the original Mennonite Brethren Church to overflowing. Under the strict leadership of the Rev. Johannes Harder the place indeed became a tightly knit village theocracy.
• The Harder story is told in a biography by Saskatchewan Professor Dr. Regehr titled A Generation of Vigilance. I reviewed the book from a personal memoir point of view in an April 2010 issue of The Old Man’s Post. It was obvious, though, that the Nickel family, with its earlier American arrival history and the freedom our teen children experienced there, did not quite fit in. The differences can be exemplified by one experience. One warm summer day my two older sisters walked along the central road in the village wearing short sleeved dresses. They were stopped and accosted by one of the church elders, publicly accused of indecency by appearing on the street as ladies of the night and advised to change their sinful ways and make their confessions to the congregation.

In spite of all our differences in the community and the trauma they entailed for an inhibited kid, I am forever thankful that we could not return to Kansas to partake of the American Dream. We survived through Depression and the unpleasantness of World War 2 animus against our German speaking village on a productive four acre patch of poorly drained land right next to the Vedder Dyke. Though we lived long on credit for essentials like flour and feed, I never went hungry, I always had work of some sort to do, I had time to wander behind the dyke and along the river and to dream of better times, to misbehave and learn bad habits and generally to develop some sort of humanity. What more can the old man expect?

You can note that by the time I had to make a citizenship choice, I had become a proud Canadian, the yen for the American Dream long dispelled. Though it is but a five minute drive from my present home, I have never returned to the Sumas border crossing from Canada to demand, “Uncle Sam, let me in!” And since my Canadian Passport expired and having no plans for foreign travel I refuse to acquire a cheaper border crossing identification card even to buy the cheaper pharmaceutical prescriptions, gasoline or groceries offered there. I have always preferred to buy in Canada where I have earned a living and where my heart is.

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conservative conservation?

As signs of the biblical end of days scenario appear to increase in the form of earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, droughts and melting ice-caps there are also signs of a public awakening to planetary change. The old man has also recently heard a few decibels more from the voices of those who could be converted to Small is Beautiful economics.  Media attention to the global warming problem and the extent of human responsibility has been particularly acute since the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey in the States.

Within that period I have noticed a number of national television broadcasts, mostly on PBS, dealing with the phenomena. Further:

·       A Republican mayor of New York City publicly supported Democrat Barack Obama for the presidency because he recognized the dangers of global warming;

·       Opinion polls indicated a much larger percentage of the general public now believed that global warming was real, though most still denied human causation and carbon emissions for its recent rapid increase;

·       More frequent news reports on environmental protests such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and anti-capitalist and oil company greed and corruption antagonism included numerous book reviews and films on near midnight end of world events, such as a technology filled remake of the 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still and long discussions about the human causes of prairie erosion and the showing of the eight hour long Ken Burns film about the prairie dust bowl of the thirties.

Among such reviews I was particularly impressed with an hour long Bill Moyers and Company program broadcast on the Seattle PBS channel November 18 last, titled Hurricanes, Capitalism and Democracy. In that program he talked at length with attractive young Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein. She sounded most rational and amazingly articulate but she was obviously married to one anti-big capital and global conspiracies line of attack to stem global warming and the striking economic imbalance between the rich and the poor. She did respond to some of her critics by saying she was not against capitalism but favoured a type of decentralized capitalism. I found that suggestion congenial with my own early thoughts against “bigness”, against the constant need for more, against the need for instant gratification and communications and my later interest in Small is Beautiful economics. You may view the entire PBS program by clicking on the Hurricanes, Capitalism and Democracy program of November 18, 2012 on billmoyers.com .

Though I spent most of my life on the fringes of big business and have personally benefited from the growth syndrome through periodic inflation if nothing else, I have been opposed to the notion that “bigger is better” and have attempted to give effect to that idea in my own undertakings. That may stem from my roots and traditions in a rather closed religious community. I did not find its separateness or its religious strictures congenial, but although its members generally assisted individuals in extreme exigencies of need, individuals competed with each other and were responsible for their own welfare and the sustainability of their holdings and their debts. The world was not that much with us in the twenties and thirties when I was a child. The enticements of affluence that constantly assail everyone now in an orgy of consumerism through radio, television and the Internet to distract us and make us dissatisfied with our lot, did not affect us then.

You may have noticed that my title for this issue of the Post is a small “c” conservative conservation? The term stems from a job I accepted in my last year in law school to avoid further delays in earning a living and starting a family. One of my older classmates said, “If you go to work for Imperial Oil you’ll have to eat, drink, live and breathe the company.” He was right and the company expected total and exclusive loyalty and constantly advertised to the public and expected its employees to believe and preach its creed that it was a gracious corporate citizen. In turn it nurtured its employees like a mother nurtures its young and from May 1952 I experienced the joys of “bigness” and suckled at the breast of Mother Esso for seven years before I was weaned.

Through the rest of the fifties I drank of the milk of plenty to develop the muscle of ambition and competition, prod my lethargy, develop right thinking (I plumped for Diefenbaker in the “follow John” federal election of the fifties) and learned the power of the cheque book, the sanctity of contract and the prospect of unlimited resources.

Resources, I learned, rewarded as a matter of right and justice individuals and companies willing to risk all to exploit them. Conservation in those years had very little to do with leaving resources to the environment. Conservation, to exploiters and government regulators (including those of socialist Saskatchewan) alike meant the task of complete recovery and utilization of resources. The environmental movement had not yet made a splash and the word ecology was unknown to me. I resigned on March 23, 1959, stating my reason in part as “I have come to the conclusion that in a small law practice I can contribute more to the community, my family and to myself, than I can as Division Landman or an even better position for Imperial.” I had to clean out my desk and leave the premises within the hour.

Back in the Fraser Valley, I joined a firm started in the early twenties. It had changed but little when I joined but the changing sixties moved in with me. A populist western conservative political group brought the growth syndrome to British Columbia in the fifties. The province became a hive of interference with nature when highway construction, river damming and international power grid development as well as oil and gas pipeline construction became the order of the day. Power of both capital and labour became centralized in the capital so that local community independence and self-sufficiency were hard to maintain.  On boards and councils I kept arguing for community consolidation and to halt the one size fits all trends but eventually the same expansion-growth trend found its way into my small partnership. Having developed debilitating diabetes and strained relationships I left the firm to its expansion and abandoned my partner of 14 years to start a solo firm a few miles away, intent on proving that remaining small was still possible.  Through this period I contributed to my service club by editing the twice monthly newsletter. My editorial comment in a fall 1974 issue illustrates my contrarian thoughts about both today’s all-engulfing technological consumerism as well as the environment:

Our luncheon speaker last week was erudite and enlightening on the wonders of cash-less banking and other technological marvels. I did consider his subject matter and the reaction of Rotarians to the scientific wonders he revealed worthy of comment and perhaps a little disturbing. It seems that Rotarians can hardly wait for the twin goblins of coaxial cable and computer to shower their many benefits upon us. Take heed then of the words of John Ruskin written in the youth of the Industrial Revolution:

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the crags. YOU cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash; you thought you could get it by what the Times calls “Railroad Enterprise”. You enterprised a railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone and the gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you fools everywhere.

All these many years later the definition of my titled conservative conservation adopted by governments of all stripes and the capital developers has not changed since the old man’s Mother Esso days described above. I suggest that whether right, centre or left, and whatever the talk of environmental protection and carbon limits, the results are still the same, especially in Canada and the States.

The record of the Harper government in Canada, appears particularly disappointing and contradictory in its northern policy. It sends armed forces and scientific vessels into the Arctic to claim national jurisdiction over large areas of the continental shelf. One would hope that information would be used for protection of the area and its flora and fauna. Yet the concentration seems to be in exploiting the resources made accessible by the receding ice in competition with the Asian, European, and Alaskan adjacent areas. At the same time in attempts to promote economic advantage from fossil fuel production, our government considers selling large interests to a Chinese government owned corporation to increase foreign control of “our” resources.

The Alberta and Canada policy on tar sands production seems a special insanity to the old man. By using all the latest technology the oil conglomerates are now mining and producing a sort of petroleum sludge that will travel through pipelines. They despoil and deplete already limited fresh water in the process, which uses nearly as much energy to produce as it creates in sludge form. In order to make a deal with China for the energy it would provide to them, a trans-mountain pipeline to the west coast near Kitimat is in the offing. All governments believe it essential and our BC premier simply objects because she wants BC to have a piece of Alberta’s revenue from the sludge that flows through the province. In spite of all the advertised (paid for by the taxpayer) double piping and tanker hulls, I believe it is an inevitable environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions in the making.

In the States, in spite of Obama’s fine rhetoric on developing renewable energy sources, he is still backing all sorts of fossil fuel development as well. He too is a captive of the lobbying of the likes of supporters of the tar sands pipeline to Texas, of drilling on federal lands for heavy oil, of coal mining companies, of expanded off-shore drilling and of the T. Boone Pickens shale gas drilling empire. In his first post-election press conference he admitted that no short term political action to limit carbon emissions in any meaningful way was possible. Drill, baby, drill!. There simply are too many people who still claim that carbon is favourable for the environment. After all, trees need it to live. Personally, I don’t blame global warming entirely on human destructiveness of our planet as we may be entering a new inter-glacial period due to some shifting effects in our solar system, but I also believe that all species have contributed to the changes that occurred over millions of years by destroying habitat wherever species multiplied.

The image of the Arctic ice shown at the top of this issue was copied from Dr. Jeff Masters wunderblog, where it is credited to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. Readers may be interested in reading some of the information in that blog, available at www:wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters .

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The Few and the Many

Beware of one of the Few for he has seen heaven and become as a god. So often history tells us he becomes so resilient, so truly human, he knows he is created in the divine image. Having achieved this self-image of absolute knowledge he must then disperse his Truth to those of the Many who are worthy of him so that they too may follow his path to resilience, even if they die in that effort, as many of those so driven do. So says the old man from his dotage in a faint whisper of response to the wisdom of the good Reverend Dr. Symeon Rodger in his website article, The Many and the Few on August 14, 2012, which you may read at http://globalresiliencesolutions.com/the-many-and-the-few. 

The old man is incapable of such single-minded passion. He never has, could have or desired to achieve the dedication to become a RESILIENT person, who is defined in the Reverend’s article as “someone who is on the way to becoming a true human being, to exploring and living out the full potential of a being created in the divine image. [sic]… a warrior with great courage.”

The Few absolutely know the Truth and are so persuasive as Leaders, so strong as Teachers, the passion about the possibilities they see so inflames their souls that “you can’t talk to one of these people about their passion without coming away with some of that flame yourself… if, of course, they think you’re worthy to hear about it.” At least so says the Reverend Dr. Symeon Rodger in his article. To help us recognize the Few (and they are many indeed throughout history) Dr. Rodger describes them as beyond self-interest, principled, demanding brutal honesty and truth and described by the cowards (the many) who surround them as disruptive, “loose cannons”, dangerous and inconvenient. He includes in this number Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela “and many others”. One could add to the “good” side of that ledger such people as the Bhudda, Socrates, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism and even ancient Confucius, though he is one of my favourites because  he, like the old man, and perhaps even a little like Mahatma Gandhi, was unsure about the nature of the “divine image”. There could be many more among the Few on the debit side of that ledger who were equally persuaded of their Truth and determined to die for it, including Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Osama bin Laden perhaps, though I doubt any of them would be chosen for Dr. Rodger’s list because they are not “beyond self interest” though they would have denied that.

A closer look at Mahatma Gandhi, the only example Dr. Rodger gives a few extra lines in his article, indicates that Gandhi certainly did not begin as the saint he was considered by most Indians and much of the world after his story became known. He was very slight in stature, very dependant on his parents and wealthy older brother and a devout follower of the Hindu holy books. In his twenties he tried to follow the teachings but could do so only by considering them allegory rather than history and rationally substituting non-violence to suit his belief for the right to kill the Gita taught. When he studied law at the Inner Temple and London University from the age of 18 to age 21 to become an attorney at law he tried very hard to become an English gentleman of fashion on the funding his brother provided for him in London while also looking after Gandhi’s child bride and his children financially in India. Gandhi’s father had been a state prime minister so the claim of no “social standing” in the article cannot be correct because Gandhi seems to have had an open sesame at all social levels in India, England and South Africa. That was so both before and after his voluntary assumption of personal poverty, so the force of his personality is evident, whatever his beginning. Apparently it was while on a case in South Africa at about age 24 that Gandhi had a sort of re-birth when he was thrown off a first class train coach for which he had a valid ticket and refused to move to third class, then sat up all night feeling resentful and sorry for himself. Apparently he spent the next 20 years in Africa fighting legally and politically for the rights of Indians in South Africa to be considered something other than coloured labourers. Those are just a few snippets from the 1950 biography by Louis Fischer, which includes on the back cover Gandhi’s own late in life statement, “People describe me as a saint trying to be a politician but the truth is the other way around.”

In retrospect how well did Gandhi do in his return to the simple life activism of non-violence in his fight for Indian independence? He was shot dead by an assassin on January 30, 1948, a wasted figure of 79, while fasting and conducting his daily public prayer meeting for peace among the warring factions in the divided India his efforts had wrought. He was surrounded by crowds of those who worshiped him as the father of their country. The Mahatma’s followers of the Congress Party, by virtue of his saintliness, effectively became the ruling party of the country and his successor family, cohorts and hangers-on became more political than saintly.

The sub-continent’s divisions persist, have worsened and become ever more violent. Machinery, or technology, which Gandhi decried as tools of the powerful few to ride on the backs of the millions, has become the principle reason for being of India’s millions and their diaspora. The Mahatma’s dreams of non-violence and village simplicity as a country’s way of life have been dashed to disaster in western notions of “Progress” in the so-called global village.

So it has been with nearly all our “good” examples of the Few. Even during their respective lifetimes, including beggarly rabbis like Jesus, the Buddha and Confucius, the Few suffered converts and rivals who tried to replace them or kill them, or varied their simple creeds into complex and rigid belief systems dividing into ever more sects and hierarchies. Thus the work of the Few has proceeded through the millennia to often violently pursue their separate and exclusive destiny in the Land of Infinity.

Christianity is a prime example. The original Jewish group of disciples was totally pre-empted by the Saul of Tarsus who had previously persecuted them after an allegorical conversion on the road to Damascus. As Paul the Apostle he effectively converted the simple message of Jesus, the itinerant rabbi, to a tool of Empire. There has been little peace ever since.

So the old man, with no genetic or self-taught leadership qualities, chooses to remain one of the Many, to seek his own truth in each day, to repent when in error and to defend and publish his choice when called upon in as kind and inoffensive a way as possible without being too much of a coward.

- 30 -

Another book?

As usual the old man has been struggling for an excuse to keep at least some part of his anatomy moving at a time when age and health issues have placed him and his partner both into a state of nearly total enforced physical inactivity. Current events and television being largely unrewarding, he often reverts to nostalgia.

This spring I determined to try putting together a collection of personal versifying as well as many of the greeting card verses I saved from cards sent to a few friends and relations. The latter didn’t happen till computer technology made the combination of pictures and words on cards for special occasions so easy. The result is now bound into a booklet under the cover shown at left above of which I now have a limited number of good copies professionally printed and bound.

I intend to offer copies to a number of family members and one or two others I feel might be curious and a few I will reserve for those I intend will get one whether they want it or not. To everyone else, I beg you not to try doing me a favour by requesting a copy and just ignore this issue of the Post. If you seriously would like a copy for your library, please send a request to me at 83rdplus@telus.net . If you can pay a short visit to pick up your copy please do that. If not, please include your proper snail mailing address and postal code and I will send it to you by ordinary post. My preface in the volume is printed below and explains the contents in a bit more detail.

Preface to Silhouettes,

a Collection of Verse

Five years ago I completed my last printed and bound book project in the form of the second edition of A Minority of One, my personal memoirs. I vowed to myself and others that it would definitely be the last time I would bore my few readers in that way. I lied.

Of course, I did not expect to be here five years later. Certainly not in any kind of condition to do the dog work involved in choosing and compiling a selection of the countless words that have strewn my conscious and subconscious reality during a long life.

In a way readers can blame my niece, Linda Ewart, to whom I have dedicated this volume. She is a lover of words. Like her artist father, Peter Ewart, did for me many years ago, Linda has a way of feeding my egoistic tendencies. Also, at this old man’s advanced years when more passive undertakings are restful for many, I find the challenges necessary to keep my grey cells exercised.

As for the collection itself, except for most of Part One and a few of the Part Two selections, Part Three and the rest are generally in random order related to greeting card photo designs. Readers will have to imagine the picture design from the imagery used in the verses.

Poetry is by its nature, an intensely personal form of expression, going back to the Homeric epics of ancient Greece. In reviewing my personal collection, especially in Part One, some of it can be considered much too self-conscious and navel-gazing in nature. Much of the work is the result of thoughts developed during a half asleep dreamlike state through the many nights without any restful deep sleep. In that state the words and rhythms seem to come together perfectly, much of it then missing when I get around to writing it down. The final product can then be worked out, often with the help of a private hour or two surrounded by nature.

Except for about four intended gifts and one to keep I propose to offer one of the limited number of properly bound volumes of these random verses as a gift to any who receive notice and may request one, especially the relations and friends to whom the personal greeting cards were sent on special occasions in the first place, as long as they last..

Bill Nickel,

Abbotsford, BC

April 2012