Covid, Cabin Fever, Protests and Riots

The news is all about ‘protest’s’ in the US.  I was in the peace movement with long hair and sandals. I had love painted on my forehead with lipstick. I miss that time. A lot of weed ,Patch and incense, you could get high from the second hand smoke if someone wasn’t already passing you a joint.  I was with the sexiest funniest woman in the world at the time. The phenomes were thick too. All that youth.  We were young. Artists. Dancers. Athletic. World class cyclists.

 John Lennon’s « Give Peace a Chance’ and the Bed In  Love In really said it. That was a protest. Great performance art.  We were against all war.  I learned Buffy St. Martie’s Universal Soldier and sang it in coffeehouses, playing, guitar poorly.  People actually asked me to sing and play, Draft dodger’s Rag, a great song by Phil Ochs, I’d learned from Jon Cowtan.   Still a funny song.  I was an intellectual but I wasn’t serious.  We were at the Strawberry Mountain Peace and Love festival. In San Francisco we shut down the city, so many of us.  It was psychedelic.  The White Room by the Cream instantly takes me back there. More so than the Grateful Dead who were playing then. It’s a bit of blur with flashes of smiles, laughter, naked bits of beautiful bodies, the Golden Gate Bridge  and bits Gracie Slick blasting out across the city. across the city. 

No one was throwing rocks. No one was attacking police. No one was carrying guns or shooting weapons at the authorities.  It wasn’t a riot. It was a protest.  

Kids these days don’t know the difference between a protest and a riot.  None of us were getting paid. All of us were living off our parents or summer jobs, casual work that paid for the rent.  There wasn’t any coke or fentanyl.  People drank beer and wine.  Some of the old geysers in their 30’s were chugging back whiskey but they were just there for the young girls. Mostly everyone was too wasted to be smashing federal buildings.  All that lovemaking, smoking and hiking didn’t make for playing baby military types in black suits and throwing Molotov cocktails.  Paisley and bright flower Hawaiian shirts were more the motif. Lots of dancing. I remember a group of us dancing  one evening in candlelight like a Winter Palace Matisse painting. It was a time of encountering zen and learning about mystical Christians like St. Theresa of Avila.  Gandhi was our hero and Martin Luther King. Non violent resistance was a protest.  We were protesters.  

Years later , long after I’d been billy clubbed and hand cuffed for ‘giving lip’ to the authorities, long after I was expelled from high school for saying fuck, the mayor would march beside me along with some MP’s in the last of the peace marches I joined in.  That was way before the Pride Parade and way before I dressed in drag and made a pilgrimage to Stonewall in New York. I was respectable , a bit peculiar, but respectable.  Like protests.  Protests were respectable. 

My parents raised me that if you broke something you had to pay for it. My parents raised me to respect the work of another man. My parents raised me to know that a man and a woman in uniform were just doing their job and that I shouldn’t make it more difficult for them than necessary.  Dad had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during WWII and respected the men who served. He didn’t even hold a grudge against the Germans and Japanese soldiers who served against him. It was the politicians and leaders he had concerns about.  He didn’t feel they cared much for the middle classes and lower classes. I learned young that politics is about choosing the least bad alternative.  I learned also that democracy could be bad but it was never as bad as dictatorships, especially religious and communist dictatorships.  Like Phil Ochs said, « we hate Chow en Lai and I hope he dies , but there’s one things you’ve see, someone’s got to go over there but that someone sure ain’t me. ». We were humble kids compared to the narcissists today. I’m not saying we weren’t arrogant like them but we were just saying ‘Give Peace a Chance’.  There was no civil war.  Hanoi Jane was a traitor. We cared for the American POW’s up to their neck in farces tipped pogo sticks.  We didn’t like celebrities fucking the enemy.   We even knew communists lied.  They tried to continue the war in Europe after Berlin was taken.  They would always claim to be the victims ,but they built walls to keep their citizens in.  The Berlin airlift was a thing of beauty.  Non aggressive.  I grew up seeing that on tv documentaries.   Brilliant flying,   Not long after, we watched Armstrong stepping down on the moon. 

I remember it was another  miracle when the Berlin Wall came down.  All those people freed from communism.  All the folks Solzhenitzen wrote about  getting out of the Siberian Gulags. Now there’s  millions in the Communist Chinese Gulags today and  hundreds of thousands in religious Islamic Iranian prisons. 

Today I listen to the news and hear liars calling riots and looting,  protests.  I can’t wrap my head around it. A lot of people in the north go crazy with a thing we call ‘cabin fever’.  The lockdown really must have done a number on people, especially the media.  They sound so turned around they don’t know right from wrong like the Prime Minister of Canada. CSIS, the national security service, says the Communist Chinese party has infiltrated the Canadian education system, media and politics to the highest level.

I’m too old for this shit.  I like staying in.  I’m as afraid of ignorant people and the lawless as I am of Covid 19.  I don’t understand why paying more than half my income in taxes I can’t feel safe walking in the streets at night.  The elite then and now had walls around their own homes.  Now they have bodyguards and private armies and don’t want citizens to have rabbit guns.  Everyone had guns when I was growing up, before Trudeau’s father..  Then we left the doors unlocked.  I asked the police I know why the mobs keep destroying property, interrupting traffic and communications ,more and more, without anyone  suffering consequences.  What happened to law and order and peace.   They told me the  politicians won’t let them stop the riots.  

I’d like to defund the politicians.    

Resentment, Forgiveness, and Justin Trudeau

I haven't been personally so disturbed by someone since I was divorced. I remember I couldn't stand the way the ex wife spoke.  She was stoned and would try to appear normal. I knew her so well that I knew when she was being dishonest.
It's the same way with Trudeau.  I just think he's not present.  I want to drug test him every day. I remember Reagan saying, "you can drug test me any day".  Yet here's Trudeau whose admitted to criminal behaviour, breaking the law, with marijuana use, first as a teacher and then as an MP. 

But the issue is my reaction to it.  I'm clean and sober and I did the same as he did. I was every bit as arrogant and megalomaniacal as he. I remember thinking as I smoked a joint that I was 'special'. I was above the law. I was part of the 'insider' group. I was buying dope from physicians and smoking dope with doctors and lawyers. I was 'in'.  I was 'above the law'.  I had arrived.

That's the distinction between alcoholism and addiction.  The alcoholic isn't breaking the law. He may break the law once he's loaded but he's not breaking the law when he gets loaded.  The addict however 'intentionally' sets out to break the law.  Every time he lights up a joint or crack pipe or smokes heroin or shoots heroin he's thumbing his nose at authorities.

I understand it must have been very difficult to have a distant father like Pierre has been described, a rather cold fish with emotional difficulties. His wife and the mother of Justin was absent with her drug addiction so the poor guy grew up loaded with all the red flags that go with mental illness. Stalin's wife killed herself. Paul Johnson's classic book, "The Intellectuals" records the life histories of the highly intelligent men who were equally lacking in emotional intelligence. I get all that. I personally am normally empathic.

But I'm afraid. I'm taught when I have a resentment to question how this is personally affecting me.  First is the person having a negative  effect on my financial security. Well, yes. I think with Trudeau throwing around money like a drug addict does giving away the countries savings and buying votes left and right that I'm not going to have any old age security.  I'm old and fearing I'll never be able to take a break from working.

Unlike Trudeau I've worked since I was 16.  I've worked the equivalent of three jobs for thirty years and lived under the Liberal government for most of those seeing all the wealth of western Canada being stolen by Quebec. That's the legacy of Pierre Trudeau.  I remember liking his carnation and how naïve I was politically when I was caught up in Trudeaumania back before anyone knew how many hundreds of millions of people had been killed by the Communists.  The left wing made the right wing Nazis look like beginners when it came to extermination of it's citizens.  We didn't know this till the fall of the Wall.

Pierre Trudeau's communism was exotic in the 60's and 70's but when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the lies of the left became available for everyone.  It turned out the USSR economy was built on the slave labour of Gulags.  Today everyone hears about the American prisons but forgets that Communism everywhere depends on slave labour.  China's gangster society with hundred millions deaths and countless slave labour is the latest lesson in left wing politics.   Now we have another Trudeau and communists kill or imprison any one who disagrees with them. Further the fact is that Hitler was a reaction to Stalin.  Communists begat the Nazis.  Read history.

So I fear Trudeau, personally, because I fear and always have feared Police States.  Canada is daily now moving into a worse police state.  Our basic rights are evaporating and the only ones who can afford the courts are the rich.  The Poor and the Middle Class are daily more disenfranchised. Freedom is such a rare and vulnerable luxury which so few in the world have and yet its loss occurs so easily.  Hitler took over Germany within a couple of years. Trudeau wants to change the way we vote.  He threatens every freedom Canadians have won over many many years.  His father's dynasty is the destruction of western Canada and the English.  The only real winners are the courts and Quebec.  Now the Charbeaneau Commission tells us Quebec is ruled by mafia and bike gangs.

So I'm afraid.  I'm afraid of Trudeau and those who are beehind him. 20 years as a Liberal I became disillusioned by the corruption in the Liberal Party and in Quebec.  I left all political association.  

So yes I'm afraid. Fear is the precursor of resentment.

My second question is, after money, what about personal status. My own personal status and my sexual life as well are declining with age.   So yes here' this young punk flaunting his sexuality like a cheap whore showing off his tits and pects.  

I remember Kim Campbell just showed her shoulder .   The women were furious that the PM position would be won by flagrant sexual sales job. Yet now 50 Shades of Grey is the female rage and women are filling the treatment centres for addiction. Myra Cyress and the Kardashians are the new female superstars.  So everyone adulates the bimbo boy PM.

The standards for social behaviour are plummeting and I'm no prude.  But as I've paid the equivalent of a million forfeigt as a consequence of smoking dope, I've paid the equivalent of a million dollars for using the F word. I didn't lie like Pierre did .  Pierre Trudeau said he didn't say 'fuck' but that he said 'fuddle dock' instead. Asked if I said fuck, I was truthful as I've always been saying I said "fuck'.

Now I'm am supposed to forgive my enemies.  I'm supposed to think Trudeau isn't bad but just a sick man.  I'm supposed to pray for my enemies.  Each day I do this.  I'm praying for forgiveness and for Trudeau and for Canada.  I'm praying whenever I'm not working or doing something else.  All I'm doing is praying because it seems a day doesn't go by without him giving a way another billion or throwing another party.

He's taxing the air we breath.  If he taxed O2 even the scientifically illiterate Canadians would figure out that he's taxing the air.  But instead he and Obama with their Climate Change Cult tax 'Carbon'.  And no one without science training figures out that CARBON DIOXIDE is air.  So Canadians are now paying Trudeau to breathe.

And I have to pray for him. I have to forgive him.. I have to learn to focus on the light and not to be distracted by his sickness. I"m taught to 'detach with love'.  Well I'm trying and I'm not doing very well.

So please God help me pray for Trudeau and forgive him.  Help me have hope for the future. Help me to look for the positive.

Now I must look for my part in it.  So God please forgive me for voting for Pierre Trudeau. Forgive me God for not listening to my father and all those other wise older men and women who saw that he was a Marxist Leninist and knew what murderous sociopaths communists worry.  Please forgive me for not listening to my mother who had no respect for Margaret Trudeau.  Please forgive me for my youthful stupidity and superiority and for smoking and thinking I was so hip, slick and cool compared older people despite my ignorance and arrogance.  Forgive me for my inexperience then and I pray now that I am wrong.  Please God fill Trudeau with your light and love.  Help me overcome my resentment as I know that resentments are just taking poison and hoping the other guy will die.  Help me overcome my fear and have faith and trust in you as you have always loved and cared for me.  I am so blessed Lord.

I know in my work I see such poverty and waste and feel so empty with so many good people suffering. I see and hear old men coming back to work as doctors unable to retire because of the rising costs. Everyday I learn of another death.  Sickness surrounds me.  Help me see the humour and find the joy in life Lord.  Don't let me be pulled down by all the suffering in Canada.  So many people I see are homeless.  The elderly are without health care.  The elderly can't defend themselves from the thieves that are everywhere now. The courts have abandoned the old here in Canada.  Every where I turn another old person is being threatened.  Forgive me Lord for my fear and identification with all these good people who worked as I did and now are lost and forgotten.

Please Lord help me forgive.  Tonight I pray for Trudeau.  May they know truth. May they know you.  May I grow in courage and have more faith and know more love.

Burnaby Victoria Day journal

I'm here in my motorhome with Laura and Gilbert. We'd planned to go away hunting and fishing but because of a minor financial shortfall with taxes and high overhead I didn't feel up to spending money on travel. We'd planned to go to Clinton and frankly I didn't feel much like driving up the canyon towing the motorhome.  It's serious scarey business.  People die on roads.  Towing means all the concentration of driving my Harley without the sense of freedom. I feel like a water buffalo in the truck towing my RV whereas on the Harley I feel like a free spirited stallion.  I just have to concentrate a whole lot more.  The Mazda Miata is a gelding compared to the Harley but much more responsive to the touch and a joy to drive.  I don't have to worry about Gilbert beside me whereas when he's behind me on the Harley I always worry if he's okay.  Laura loves the Miata and the motorhome.
I love Burnaby.  Came here circa 1970 after the Strawberry Mountain Peace and Love Festival in the Colorado mountain.  True hippy ecological peace and love event where you had to back pack up the mountain and there was only acoustic guitars, gorgeous girls, tents and hugs. After that we hitchhiked to San Francisco wearing flowers in our hair, marching through the streets by the 10 thousands and dancing.
 Then we came to Vancouver for a European songfest. Thousands of voices singing of peace and unity.  Most had been written between the wars, after the War to end all Wars before Hitler then Stalin tore up the world with megalomaniacal dreams.  We were all afraid Vietnam was the beginning of WWIII and a nuclear holocaust.  Easy to think back now and see that things didn't turn out that way.  I like to think the peace movement had its influence on the industrial war complex.  Caused them to rethink war.  Okay to keep blowing up foreigners but had to figure out a way to kill less of one's own.  After Vietnam the world needed popular wars.
But Stalin had enslaved most of the world then and it wasn't even possible to think of the Berlin Wall just coming down.  Later that year we'd be in London with IRA bombings and all the talk would be about Carlos and terrorism. We never envisioned 9-11.  The terrorists just scared us and made us thankful for our own laws and order. Government by suicide bomber.  Later I'd learn all the ammunitions, studying physics and chemistry with an appreciation I'd not have had were I to stay in a suburb, go to a university and not ever encounter the Europe of the 70's when such skills seemed necessary as we all might have to fight terrorists with  their own tools.
I was raised by cowboys.  Long gone were the days of honor and men fighting one on one.  It was a dark world of shady deals and gangs on one.  No heros.  Just survival.
Burnaby at the time was the house of a family friend with all the loveliness of my mother's home. Quilting and embroidery and gardens and family and fine meals.  I loved the greenery outside the window. It rained the whole weekend that I recalled. But it was lovely rain.  Like the rain today.
There's something special about rain when all around there's grass and trees and bushes.  In Vancouver downtown the rain is an irritation because there's just concrete and parking lots. The city doesn't need bike lanes. It's needs boulevards and more sky trains.  I love Stanley Park but it's out of the way.  I don't get over there enough.  Maybe I should get an apartment off Denman so I can use the park. I did when my sailboart was moored near there in  Coal Harbour. Every day I'd walk around the lagoon. Stuart loved the walks in the park and I loved taking pictures of the ducks. The swans laid eggs that year.  The year before vandals had destroyed them. What kind of people destroy the eggs of swans.  It's always a reminder that port city hide trolls and psychopaths.  It's why Vancouver and New Westminister have so much drug traffic whereas Burnaby is relatively free of such sordid insaniety.
I've just come from swimming in the pool. Earlier today I walked Gilbert for an hour along the Brunette River.  Yesterday I spent hours researching medical legal topics, reviewing the literature regarding patients cases, trying to stay up to date this year, 2012, when only last month I read the report of a rich administrative doctor who'd not cracked a clinical text in 30 years or more by his recommendations, yet he was still practicing and telling others how to practice. It's all the rage to get MBA's instead of specialties.  Money is more important that learning yet I want my patients to get better and maybe there's something new I can learn. Always learning. Always driven to study and go to lectures, go to conferences, search the internet.  I miss working overseas when I could read for an afternoon and be available for the hospital at the same time. I was on so many physician discussion sites back then.
These days its hard to keep up again.  I feel behind and know it's at most only months.  There's no money in knowing the latest or doing the best.  All the riches go to the businessmen not the clinicians.  There's no bafflegab in the life and death questions.  And I realized that I haven't done what I set out to do when I entered medicine. I wanted to lazarus and be like Jesus, heal by touch and raise the dead.  Now I'm a cog in a wheel.  Anyone who actually questions the system is called a 'disruptive person'.  Anyone who wants to cure cancer really is called 'grandiose' and delusional. There's such negativity and heavy weight in the overly beaurocratized system of non believers and pay cheque seekers.
And I'm not much better. I'm older now.  I sometimes find myself working for weekends. After a year or two of being caught up with morons, psychopaths and criminals in the system I'm only happy seeing patients and trying to figure how to save just one.  What can I do for this person. Mostly it's just band aids now.  So little time, no resources and a deluge of sick and dying, the aging, like me.  Too many of the people I thought were heros too have retired and I don't know the young who are smarter into 9-5 and overtime.  I never was paid for over time.  Millions lost in service when she told me "it's just a job'.  The doctors call them clients today and even customers.  I gave my pound of flesh.
There's nothing in self righteousness or self pity.  Both are dirty urinals.  I have to raise my eyes.  Climb another mountain. My friend still does the Grouse Grind.  I wonder if my knee could do it. Its been several years since I could climb stairs without pain.  I always feel better in the desert. Loved being in Arizona and Texas.  The rain is beautiful today but it's hard on the joints.  Something about barometric pressure.  The joints love celebrex but the stomach doesn't
I'll go back to my book. It's about India and terrorists.  I just learned 70,000 Indians died in WWI and 9-13 was the Mumbai equivalent of 9-11.  Hundreds killed by terrorist bombers.  One character commented on the Pakistan Indian War.  Another talked about the War of Independence. They're trying to protect athletes in the games from terrorist bombs.  Canadians aren't described as good sports.  Helicopters and Chinese near Kashmir.   So many of my patients or their parents are immigrants. I read histories of the areas where they come from.  So many have been tortured or jailed, some from refugee camps, boys who sold themselves, a woman raped dozens of times by roaming gangs.  I see the soldiers who have nightmare about what they can't forget but would like to forget.
Just had some Murchies Golden Jubilee Tea - Queen E II 1952 to 2002.  Laura says her diamond jubilee is coming up.  Today is Victoria Day.  British empire and the queen who said, "we are not amused'.  I  listened to the CBC podcast Divine Blake and read some William Blake poetry after listening to Bob Smiley the hilarious Christian comedian.  We ate elk curry I made a couple of days ago and put away for a rainy day in the freezer. Laura's daughter just got some baby goats. We pray each day for the baby that is coming too.
God the rain is beautiful with all the green around. Thank you Lord for this day and for this life. Thank you for the challenge and prividge of medicine and healing.  Help me through another week and help me pay the taxes and not regret all the nights and days and weekends I worked for free.  Instead God make the monetary system a 'calling' and let them work for free for a change.  I'd rather that than think the materialists are all headed for hell and I'm going to be in heaven with saints and me a sinner knowing even Jesus supped with tax collectors while Paul was as much a beaurocrat as a tent maker.  Let me be less critical of groups and focus on the individuals who make Darwin's Awards so appealing to even Christians who otherwise have no use for such religion.
It's a short work week and I'm already worrying about all that needs to be done and how little time there is to do all that others say you must so they can be idle.  Lord let there be more Indians and fewer chiefs.
I talked to Dad today.  That was good too. Thank you Jesus for caring for him.  I read my brother's blog and enjoyed his pictures. Thank you for family Lord.   It was sunny there.  Dad was glad to hear of Gilbert and his always wanting to play ball.