Saturday, January 19, 2013 Woodcroft Public Library, Edmonton, Canada
I found a crowded pool changeroom at 7:30 this morning. I went to relax. I seemed to be a minority of one. The men of all ages and shapes in that change room busily changed into and out of swimsuits. "I got here at six," one told another. "You slept in!" was the reply, in a tone of good-humored chastisement.
Out on deck, I saw each lane, "Slow," "Medium," and "Fast," occupied by at least one swimmer. I limbered up, backswam four 50-metre lengths in a "Slow" lane, and went first to the steam room, second to a deck chair to read from my latest New Internationalist ( http://www.newint.org/), third to the whirlpool, fourth to read on deck again, and fifth to the change room.
In the change room, I overheard two young men lamenting "poor Vancouver," where one's friend had trouble finding a job before he relocated to a job in Kamloops. "It's only 130-140 hours per month. I want to work more," the man's friend said. I think of the words I heard years ago from a Catholic priest who later left the order for a woman and children: "At the end of the rat race, you're still just a rat."
Earlier this month, I met a Filipino woman who lives in a new housing development in southwest Edmonton. She complained that she did not know her neighbors. "We all just get up, go to work, and go home. That's not life," she said. She explained the community gatherings she remembered from Philippines, where neighbors knew one another. I suggested that she post a sign for a potluck dinner or other gathering.
A fall, 2012 Edmonton newspaper article said that speakers of Tagalog, a Filipino national language, number 495 000 in Canada. Tagalog is Canada's fastest-growing language. Arabic is second. Canada is a multinational country, a model for a combative world.
Someone told me that people in Edmonton's outlying neighborhoods "only stay about five years." Then they move toward the centre of Edmonton. Presumably life is livelier closer to the centre. Strathcona, her central neighborhood, seems to her too lively on weekends, "When Sherwood Park comes to town." Sherwood Park is an Edmonton suburb, much of it similar to the Filipino woman's southwest Edmonton neighborhood.
Before I met the Filipino woman, I met a man born and raised in downtown Edmonton. Now retired, he lives in Castledowns, in north Edmonton. He told me that his downtown childhood was in a community where people lived and worked, gathered for social activities, and knew and helped one another. His current community is less social, he said.
Many themes run through these situations, these lives, these laments. these memories.
First, the intense swimmers yearn to live healthier and therefore probably longer. Life is short and death is eternal, despite religious delusions. Multidimensional universe theories seem like sounder sects: somewhere you live and choose what you did not live and choose in this life. Perhaps compost is the surest immortality. We are made of organic molecules: immortality via decomposition, and absorption into other life forms.
So people swim furiously on Saturday mornings. Who would argue against longer, healthier life?
Second, one who works, eats, and sleeps, with minimal social activity travels an uncertain road to happiness. Canada has a higher rate of mental illness than Kerala, a poor state in southern India. Does a mundane, materialistic lifestyle with minimal social activity contribute to this? Is such life why "Sherwood Park comes to town" on weekends? Not everyone in inner neighborhoods lives a happy life, either. Perhaps they should socialize with Sherwood Parkers: exude civility, imbibe fun.
Indeed, inner city neighborhoods, stalked by police, burst with the many social and personal problems that such neighborhoods' poverty produces. As this city booms, and rents and prices outpace wages, material security diminishes, as do physical and mental security. Freedom declines, too.
The comfortable and the reactionary, groups that overlap some but not all, whine for safer neighborhoods. They belittle the social and economic forces that make neighborhoods unsafe, and people unhappy. They preach individualistic solutions to collective problems. They lock their doors and trust the police to hold back the poor. Police buttress the system which makes the poor, makes the crime, makes the unhappiness that creeps into nice neighborhoods, through locked doors.
When fascism comes to the United States, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible, US political eonomist Michael Parenti wrote. Canadians, now as in the 1930s, welcome fascism more than they admit. Alberta's 1936-1971 Social Credit government ruled well for the war industry and postwar oil boom. Socreds promoted Christian fundamentalism, whose socially-choking legacy endures. Alberta's 1971-present Progressive Conservative government continues to serve the oil industry, and rant propaganda against the rising worldwide call for ecological sense and against the tarsands. "NATO's gas tank," I call Alberta.
Third, leaving a dull neighborhood helps it remain dull. Instead, stay and enliven it. Similarly, people who lament inferior public schools should help improve them, rather than move their children to private schools, which everyone cannot afford. Bridges, not walls, enhance civic life. A Czech proverb says that good neighbors are better security than good fences. Such neighbors enhance each other's freedom, too.
Everyone cannot afford to live in inner, older, livelier Edmonton. Nor has everyone the time and money to swim to fitness in a pool. Anyone can offer kindness and comfort, not "the cold hand of charity" but real attention and care, to those struggling to be happy via, or despite, the pursuit of material security, of wealth. Talk to your neighbors. Make it a neighborhood. Walk together. Eat together. Be together. Together we are stronger. Together we can design better ways to live. Perhaps together we can save our species from killing itself by killing its environment, physical and human.
I think people should organize their lives around living, not around working to pay bills and buying what others tell them will make them happy. This lifestyle can lead them to expensive, unfulfilling thrills such as gambling, drinking, and shopping.
Perhaps you, like the 1700s English poet Alexander Pope, think I "should hold my piece nine years." That is, I should not write such things. Perhaps I add to the sea of ill-considered speech that floats online, like the garbage that floats on the oceans. If you have a piercing insight or two to offer, I welcome you to shine it through what garbage you find in my words. Perhaps we can join dialectically to enhance life, above and below sea level.
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