Family and Tribe

My Jewish friend commented not too long ago, “I feel like I’m a 21st century person living with century people who look like me.”” We’d been discussing immigrants coming from dictatorships either communist or royal,  I’d just been reading about pockets and bubbles where these people who’d been here a while were self segregated by their dress.  

“I meet people who never heard of the Magna Carta, The French and American Revolution or the Fall of the Wall.  They have this other history and are pro authority. They’re  here to make more money. They are living in a different urban centre but their God is money and they don’t want to upset the status quo. It’s the new consumer materialism.”

The reformer is the enemy of the status quo.  I said.

I’m an individual,

I have always identified as a Canadian until Trudeau who denied not only the existence of Alberta but also the existence of Canada.  “I’m a transnational,” he said. I’d rather liked the word ‘trans’ till it slithered out of his forked tongue.

His cabinet minister asked what he would do if he lost the election said, “I’d go home to Somalia and return to politics there”.  He said

I’d already was beginning to realize I didn’t have a ‘home’ anymore. My father, mother, brother, aunt and uncles were dead and had only a next generation of children who had their own lives and values and couldn’t possibly understand as I never understood my WW II veteran RCAF father our his values.  Family was what motivated mom and he.

I have identified with many causes.  Raised in church, a Christian, I’ve loved God but studied Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Judaism.  I didn’t see their God as ‘different’ just the religions that man made around the spirituality of the close encounters.  I prayed and meditated and studied the varieties of religion and even studied the less scientific religion of aetheism, the latest man made explanation.  

I remember as a young man I was a hippy and peacenik, studying St. John of the Cross and Gandhi, learning the history of Christianity, the Mennonites and later Merton and Houston.  I enjoyed meeting Dalai Lama and Bishop Tutu. I meditated with Benedictine Monks and Yogis and watched the dancing dervishes.  I sang folk songs, hymns and played rock and roll.  John McCartney, Lennon, Lightfoot, Mitchell, Dylan and such were my gurus and prophets.

I had a sense of belonging in the ‘counter culture’, a insider outsider.  One day I was being billy clubbed by the authorities and next day the Mayor was marching beside me.  I was anti establishment then establishment. I was expelled from high school for reciting a poem I wrote with the word fuck in it and 40 years later I was told that I would be expelled from medicine and lose my license to practice medicine because a woman objected to my saying I used the word ‘fuck’ as in ‘fuck off’ and doctors should not be allowed to use vulgarity.  I am still trying not to say ‘fuck’ at a time when there is an all tine shortage of doctors.  The administration class has however reach a new high with laws against saying there are too many chiefs and no Indians as the middle class is destroyed infinitude of elite and all us front liners and those before the wire are shot in the back and discarded in new language.  Euthanasia and abortion have replaced life and Liberty .  Censorship abounds. It really is Black Friday.  The new hypocrisy .

Today I’m at that age where my rich friend with family and a sense of accomplishment and belong are retiring.  I’m still working and can’t think of anything better.  I’m physically accepting that much of my life was fueled by health.  I’m considered for the third year selling my escape pod, my world class off shore sail boat I sailed solo in winter through hurricane with. I’m working to pay the repair of my Camper which I’d got to do Steinbeck’s ‘Travel’s with Charley’. 

I don’t pass as transgender but act out a kind of Klinger , black like me. Once sex and love were like peace and other words but today escape doesn’t have the appeal. I have no hone to go to and the question is whether to surrender or accept my position has been over run. I look around at my cohort and so many are simply waiting to die, doing the same old same old.  We all share stories of aches and pains and worn body parts.  We’ll be meeting God any day.  It’s not like we’re in the lake, we’re in the river and some of us can hear the falls.  

The question is who we are playing too. Who is the audience?  Who are the critics?  Do I want to play Shakespeare or Monty Python., I an in the 21st venture. One step ahead of the crowd you’re a leader Two steps ahead of the crowd, you’re a martyr.

She told me she was really glad to not be in the Middle East anymore and that she’d moved to Canada.  “I didn’t like that they were killing homosexuals in my country.  It’s much better here in Canada. But do you think homosexuals shouldn’t be in jail.”