12 years old - the nail, syphilis and BDI

I was with my brother and his friend Tommy, Kirk’s older brother.  I was pestering the older boys in some way, beside the house in the garden.

Ron had pulled out a short two by four piece of wood out of the dirt and Tommy had taken it.

“This would make a good club,” he said to Ron. 

“Yea, it would, “ Ron said.

“Can I try it out on your brother?” Tommy asked.

“Sure, “ Ron said. 

Tommy whacked me with the piece of wood right in the head. It had a nail sticking out of it.  It hurt like hell. I bled.  The blood was the limit. Tommy laughed.  I believe my brother was simply surprised at the force  Tommy had used. I think he saw the blood first. I screamed. I screamed bloody loud.  I hurt. Blood was blood.

My dad came to the screen door and shouted. “Shut up Billy.  Stop all that racket.” He went back in the house.  I don’t know what Mom was doing at this time.

I ran into my dad and screamed, “Tommy hit me with a nail!” 

My Dad who was now back on his recliner  reading the Winnipeg Free Press, turned and said, “I don’t care what Tommy did. You can’t be screaming like murder in the neighbourhood.”  With that he went back to his newspaper, ignoring me, a trickle of blood dripping down my face.

I walked away, furious and mortified. I went down into my father’s workshop with a piece of paper and a pencil and I wrote furiously.

“Tommy hit me.  Ronny let him.  You blamed me. You are wrong.”

My mom found me there.  I remember her wiping the blood off my face and head with a wet face cloth she got from somewhere. Mom’s always were producing things like that by magic. 

“Let me have that, “ she said. I think she was amused by my writing that out. 

I heard my parents upstairs. 

My mother had given  my legal brief to my father. It hadn’t gone over well. I don’t know what she was thinking. I’m suspicious today that there was a back story that I was somehow a pawn in what is often seen as the passive aggressive drama.  We were all watching Perry Mason in those years. I’d study Freud and Jung many years later.  To Dad it was  more like the Magna Carta. Or there was another conversation going going. Either parent can use a child to hide behind or to make a point. Mom really was the go  between us kids and the Old Man. She was maintained the peace. She was loved each of us. Even the dog. At this time the dog had made himself very scarce.

I next heard Dad shout.

“I don’t care what happened, I’m not going to have my authority questioned in my own house. I’m leaving.”

Dad just packed a suitcase then and left.  

Now Ron and Mom were angry, very angry at me. Tommy had gone home.  

Mom was crying..

“You shouldn’t have screamed so loud, Billy. See how you’ve upset your father. He’s left us.”

“Tommy didn’t hit you that hard.”

“I was bleeding.” I said.

“We didn’t know there was a nail in the board. It was just a scratch anyway. You’re such a cry baby.” My brother added.

“Stop it you two. Billy go to your room. I don’t want to see your face again this day. You’ve upset your father and now he’s left us. We’re not going to have anything to eat. We’re going to lose the house and end up on the street and it’s all your fault.’  She was sitting there on the sofa , her face in her hands.  Ron sat down beside her.

“Yea, Billy, you upset Dad. You shouldn’t have upset Dad. Now Mom and Dad are upset and it’s all your fault.” He said

Mom just waved me away.

My brother was as I remember always quick to ascribe blame.  Meanwhile I was a jailhouse lawyer myself. What I couldn’t understand was how  I was the guy with the headache, I’d been stabbed with a nail, and somehow I was the bad guy.  

I’d went to my room.

This became the a cornerstone of my twisted inner life.  I’ve played this day over a thousand times, a thousand ways, over the years.  In my mind and my heart it sits there beside  the ships of the USSR and the ships of America meeting on the high seas in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Cuba let Russia install nuclear missiles secretly on it’s island, breaking the Monroe Doctrine, causing the  having the greatest show down of my life.

Looking back I know that Dad leaving was to do with something going on between him and mom.  This was the era of feminism, Hanoi Jane, and women burning their bras, Overnight everyone was having sex with everyone.  The birth control pill was discovered in 1952. It freed women to be as promiscuous as men.  They were no longer as likely to get caught with telltale pregnancies. The profitable abortion industry  was just ramping up.

In my home, Mom had used my legal dossier (Perry Mason) to challenge my Dad.  Dad was on his day off after a week of work ruling men and unions and trying to get a job done for his bosses way off in Eastern Canada. They sent out blue prints he said were conceived in LALA land and had no bearing on the reality of what he was faced with trying to put modern conveyor systems into a fixed building space with existing materials and tools.  Dad didn’t think highly of architects.  

Now the house was empty.  Mom was crying. My brother was scowling at me. I was stupefied.  

Dad returned that night.  

He stomped back into his house with his suitcase.  “I decided I’m not going to pay for a motel room when I’m already paying for my own bed here.”

That was Dad, the Scots Analyst.  The judge had spoken.

No one else did for weeks.  My mother was quiet as a mouse. My brother and I whispered.  Dad came and went to work.  The meals were served. Not a bird sang in the valley. No blossoms blossomed. The insects died.  My brother did stop being friends with Tommy.  

Dad worked out of town a lot.  Despite huge main projects in the city he’d be gone for a week or two in the north doing a smaller project in a store up there.  

Tommy had this mean streak He’d always insist he didn’t know there was a nail. It might have been true.  Whatever it was about Tommy it helped make him his later success.  He’d go on to be this great leader. I never turned my back on him after that.  This ‘unpredictableness’ became  linked in my mind from that time forward with power. Arbitrariness was linked to respect. There was a critical glance between predictability and unpredictability that a person needed. 

 My brother and Tommy were both respected but for different reasons.  The fact is, Tommy was a great guy, smart, kind, loving, caring but there was that one time. He hit me in the head with a piece of board iwith a nail in it.  He seemed not to my mind it.  Kirk didn’t defend Tommy too much. Indeed Kirk in his typical diplomatic way wouldn’t talk about this at all. I complained. I whined. I complan and whine really well. Kirk didn’t say anything. Kirk doesn’t saying anything really well.

One day weeks later Mom and Dad were hugging in the hallway.  My brother visibly relaxed.  Laughter returned to the valley.  Dad was normally lots of fun.  Mom was the one who’d be serious and slap us kids if we ‘talked back’.  She had the Irish temper.  Dad was the jolly one.  He was also the last resort.  I was never afraid of my Mom but I was afraid of my father.  

“It was all your fault. You made Dad leave home.” My brother would remind me.  

My mother would say it too. “Billy, you can’t upset your father. You have to stop that.”

That’s the way things were after that. I remember being the ‘baby’ in the family then I was the ‘black sheep’ .I’d also learn the term ‘scape goat’. Years later in family dynamics I’d recognize the term ‘identified patient’ in systems theory. To this day I don’t know what was going on in the back stories, in the back scenes, behind the curtain, in the bedroom, in the community, in the cosmos. What mattered was Dad and Mom got back together. Ron and the dog were inside an inner circle.  I was the outside. They were the family. I was the one who’d almost torn the temple down. 

I don’t think others saw it my way.

That was the beginning of adolescence.  Testosterone and it’s distinctive stink. Hormones  could probably explain everything. Ron and Tommy were already adolescent while Kirk and I were just seeing hair appear in funny places.

Kirk would seem to overnight have the hairiest legs. He was black haired so in summer it was really noticeable. I had armpit hair.  Both of us complained about not having chest hair. Chest hair was cool. Leg hair, not so and, armpit hair not cool at all.

Girls began to look different by the end of Gr. 6.  That summer they started wearing bikinis.  We noticed.  Classmates acting weird.  The girls began whispering and giggling a lot.  

Two girls fighting each other in front of the school Ripping dresses off. Scratching. Everyone else in a circle until a teacher came and stopped it before one or the other caused serious damage. Hair pulling and eye gouging.  Not nice.  

My voice was a problem.  I remember it began to be untrustworthy. I knew shame. I didn’t have to wear a fig leaf but I would suddenly squeak instead of talking normally. It was wholly disconcerting. Everything was sstrange. Kirk and my other friends weren’t doing any better.  The girls seemed happy about this. 

The school had a class where they showed us boys WWII STD films of endstage gonorrhea and syphilis cases.  All us boys came out of that session shell shock. If transsexualism had been prominent in those days we’d have enlisted for immediate sex changes. It would be decades before I found those pictures in old infectious disease books. One picture showed a black emancipated guy wheeling his huge ball sack around with a wheelbarrow.The black and white film had been developed in the 30’s or 40’s  to scare the troops going into Europe and Asia.

We were 12 year old boys. All of us were virgins.  Kirk had hair on his legs. I had hair on my armpits. None of us had hair on our face or genitals.  We knew because we still swam naked at the Y and changed together in the locker room. The first boy to have hair on his balls was teased relentlessly.  That was Ron Brawn. He’d have hair on his chest too. We’d tease him. He didn’t care. Nobody messed with Ron.  He was like a combination of Schwartzenager and Chuck Norris.

Meanwhile we were scared senseless about the danger of having a penis. It was somehow associated with girls.  There were no copulating scenes to make it more explicable. Just these clinical diagrams that were like a kind of comic strip. We knew about sex as intercourse but not really.  It was a foreign concept.  We’d even found  black and white ‘True Detective’ magazines and hid them in our fort by the river as boys. We looked at them only because they were adult and taboo. They showed pictures of old guys and old girls in their 20’s ,with the girls having shocked expressions on their faces. All in black and white.  Kirk’s brother Tommy had Playboys and Kirk would steal these coloured magazines. and He’d show Garth and I pictures of these older women with hair and big breasts. 

None of these pictures looked anything like our Mom’s or Kirk’s sisters or any of the girls in our school.

The lesson on STD’s was similiarly about old people. 

Meanwhile the girls would come out of their “special” class smiling and floating down the hall. They had pictures of flowers and pink birds. When we asked what their class was about. They said it was  about menstrual cycles and babies. We didn’t tell them we’d seen pictures of guys with their noses eaten away by syphillis or guy’s pushes their ballsacks about with wheelbarrows. 

All the girls were looking forward to maturing while the guys were looking for rusty knives to cut off our balls before syphillis invaded their faces and ate away our noses. No guy touched a toilet seat for decades after seeing that film.

As boys we didn’t look forward to getting any older.  Boyhood with friends was an idyllic time. We had the best times on hikes, Garth, Kirk and I , down by the River River. Very Mark Twain and Hucklebury Fin. We’d catch frogs to give to girls. We had lucky rabbit foots. We’d skip stones. We’d throw sticks for the dog. He’d fetch them then shake all the dirty water on us.  We’d swing on branches and climb trees. It’s was a really good life. All that other stuff with adults and girls wasn’t so good.  We had our bicycles and we’d ride everywhere. Wildwood park was a great place to ride around. We loved riding along South Drive too. Sometimes we’d ride all the way out to the University. Great wide paved roads with long stretches without traffic.  We’d ride and ride.

The best was when we went in the other direction to BDI. Bridge Drive In. There was a Bridge there which I think is probably gone now. Only foot traffic was allowed on it then because it was already  so old. But the ice cream and milkshake stand was the best in the world. Never knew one ever that was as good. And we’d have money as boys from our mom and we’d get triple layer ice cream cones, chocolate, vanilla and licorice and we’d just pig out on the river bank sitting with our bicycles eating ice cream. One time we ate so much ice cream we puked. And laughed. We laughed and laughed and laughed as kids.  

If I’d known what adulthood would bring I’d have laughed more. Adulthood according to too many adults was deadly serious business. There’d be long stretches without laughter in adulthood.  Like laughter was taboo.  Giants would walk through the world shouting ‘fee fie fo fun, I smell the blood of a child.”

As kids we were beginning to move out of the world of our parents into the world where we had to make it on our own. We’d never forget BDi. It’s was a taste of heaven on earth.  

Moderate Moslems

Of course there are moderate moslems. There are Moslems saints and wise men. There are beautiful Moslems and happy Moslems and Moslems who sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of humans who are not Moslems.
I feel badly that I have had to be critical of the misinformation and disinformation of our politicians and media.  Their cupidity about Islamaphobia and political correctness surrounding terrorism forces everyone to ask, “why are they lying?”  To know they are lying follows asking “Is Islam the religion of peace?"
Islam is no more the religion of peace than Christianity is the religion of love.  It has long been said that the founders of all religions would not going the religions named for them if they were alive today.  Further what people say and what people do is one thing.  What there followers do is quite another.  Mohammed was a warrior and a killer.  He did at times preach peace.  By contrast Jesus was a healer and a teacher who did not kill and did preach love.  Buddha was an elite prince who renounced the world and became a monk who encouraged non violence. Abraham and the other founders of Judaism including Moses and David were patriarchs, kings and warriors.  Some were prophets. And all religions have martyrs. Hinduism is a polytheistic mystical religion begun in the times of warriors but carried forward by ascetic monks and sages.   Confucianism which some say is not a religion but more a philosophy was begun by a eurocrat working for a warlord.
History is made for the winners of wars.  We don’t hear much about the Quakers, a particularly non violent group of Christians any more than we hear much about the Sufis a usually non violent group of Muslims.
The fact is violence is the work of men and women who want power.  Having power they want to retain it and use religions of all stripes to maintain it.  They justify their violence and greed with religion. In the case of the atheist communists they don’t say a prophet told them but instead say their guru Marx or prophet Lenin told them to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with them.  Robespierre an anti-Christian deist was behind the French Revolution killing tens of thousands of his enemies.
Triangulation is a psychological defence in which one individual abdicates from responsibility of their actions one to another by attributing their behaviour to a third party. Today if an individual told me he had attacked me because his voices told him to, I’d consider him insane.  However, many a world leader has attributed violence to ‘voices’, “laws’, ‘committees’, “Gods”, ‘the people’, and today maybe Aliens, all as a means to confuse and control.  No one is certain whether or not it’s worse if a world leader actually believes his own shit or is just using this for the benefit of power acquisition and justification for treating others poorly.  A common ‘defence’ is the ‘greater good’ and for the future. Today all manner of shit is being said on behalf of the ‘future’ and for ‘the planet’.
In terms of logic and fallacy it’s always an ‘appeal to authority’.  There are also laws on earth for the rich and the poor.  The judges who would disagree would themselves be killed.  The winners write history.  The losers, lacking tanks and jets, create the best propaganda and makes the best promises.  They usually have maternal sexy babes with lose morals. The appeal for young men is a sort of mixed of sex and authority thing.  This is not to say that the rulers don’t have their share of “honey pots’ but the women of the ruling classes are more likely to say something like “give them cake’ rather than listen ad infinitum to their rambling intellectualism.
To the best of my understanding, Moslem countries are generally conservative.  It is worth remembering that secularism broadly speaking, the separation of ‘state’ and “religion” is condemned by Muslim intellectuals, and further in most Muslim majority states even where there is secularism there is a parallel court system of ‘sharia law’.
(Canada is definitely moving in this direction with their aboriginal or pagan court system parallel to the mainstream secular court system.  There are also some ‘sharia court systems’ in Canada but no Catholic, Christian, or Buddhist court system showing the fundamental break down of equality and freedom in Canada as just one example of devolution of western secularism. In Europe sharia courts are proliferating just as ‘gang’ justice proliferated in former communist countries after the fall. )
The most liberal of the older Moslem countries appears to be Turkey, Tunesia, and  Egypt.  It is worthwhile to note that these states, though Muslim majority, are under attack to Jihadists indicating how costly it is to be a ‘moderate’ Muslim or indeed a secularist Muslim in the world today.  The Jihadists are equally if not more hysterically enraged by their brother Muslim’s who refuse to accept their dictatorship.
(This is not surprising given that the French revolution killed tens of thousands of their own people while the various communist revolutions killed millions of their own people who disagreed with them.  Indeed “either you’re for us or a gin us’ is neither religious or secular but equally revolutionary as the standard revolutionary argument,  ‘if you don’t agree with me, I’ll kill you’.   ‘Ad hominem’ rhetoric or attack on the person in debate  causes  ‘forfeiture’ of the logical argument  because a long long time ago men realized they couldn’t have a decent game of golf without agreeing that anyone who starts hacking the competition with swords or axes might well live but he will never be respected as a golfer.”
When we think of Conservative or Liberal we general think of freedoms that the citizens have.  Iceland is often touted as a very ‘free’ country but it has to be remembered that comparison of countries is difficult without consideration of the countries make up.  Iceland is a white tribe whereas both Turkey and the US are nations of many different racial and political groups.  Mexico its a conglomerate of Indian groups plus the later European immigrants.
So ‘freedom for the people’ in general really took off in the 1800’s  with the American (1776)  and French  Revolution. The British Magna Carta (1215) before it had nothing to do with the peasants but rather challenged the divinity and authority of the king versus the barons.  This is like democracy itself which was developed by the ‘lords’ and ‘landowners’ of ancient Greece.  The Christian Suffragette movement extended the ‘vote’ to women like the American Civil War extended the ‘vote’ to blacks.  A key questions is always ‘who are the people’ and further ‘who can be the leader’.  In aboriginal society it was common for there to be ’slaves’ and for non tribe members to be considered ‘other than human’.  This is going on today in Canada where an immigrant Sihk is the defence minister of Canada but a US presidential candidate born in Canada is being questioned as whether or not he is an American.  Most nations in the world are highly restrictive, incredibly nationalistic, tribalistic and racist in this regard.   Some say that the Desert Spring of the Middleeast was the civil war and political uprising of the common people that was occurring 200 years later.
Moderation has described the way countries deal with dissent.  Some countries behead dissenting individuals while others jail them.  Others have a wide variety of means for individuals to be critical of their own government.  I’d personally be jailed or beheaded, I believe, in any other country but Canada where Justin Trudeau is our Prime Minister.  I don’t doubt either that Mr. Justin Trudeau would wish as Mr. Harper his predecessor might wish that ‘beheading of dissidents’ was a Canadian ‘custom’ given the rude criticism our extraordinary leaders are subjected to.   Canada has freedom of speech like England and like American.  Few Muslem countries are moderate in this way.
But yes there are very moderate individual Muslims. I know some who are outrageously radical.  They are living in the west because they do not believe they would do well in the countries they have left.  They are ‘cultural’ escapees. They have come to Canada for the freedom they didn’t experience in the Moslem culture in their home.  They prefer the freedoms and moderation and liberties in Canadian culture and they surely do not want Sharia Law or for the culture they left to become dominant in Canada or the west.  They are in many ways like the Puritan Christians who left England because of religious persecution by the State Religion of those who questioned the authority of the church leadership and wanted a more democratic religious church.  The authoritarianism of the Catholic church with the Pope gave rise to the religious wars that begat Protestant Christianity with is nationalist churches as well as it’s presbyterian and congregationalist churches.  Today the fastest growing community Christian churches are in many ways the most democratic with ministers selected by the congregation and voted on rather than being appointed top down by the centralized church authority.    Most Muslims I know  came to get away from the authorities and restriction there and love their new home. Commonly immigrants cite ‘corruption’ in their former countries and a desire to make a ‘new start’ in the country they are going to.  This doesn’t mean that there is no corruption here but the corruption is different and consequently there is more ‘opportunity’ here.  Not uncommonly there is movement back and forth with regard to economic refugees and whole classes of individuals like the ‘gypsies’ who reject national boundaries all together to the great consternation of those most invested in national boundaries. Indeed the countless trade agreements these days is a direct consequence of the entrenching corruption associated directly with ‘boundaries’.
My Muslim friends here are more Canadian than I am in that regard to their appreciation of the freedoms we know in Canada. h.
I just regret that we all have had to look at the numbers and the risks that exist because our media so commonly is interested these days in selling war while some of our political leadership are most interested in selling to the lowest common denominator.
The result is lies.
There are a whole lot of radical muslems.  Wahhabism sect of the Sunni Muslem, preached as a central tenet of mainstream Saudi Arabia  are fundamentally anti freedom, anti western, anti secular, jihadist and commonly utterly disrespectful of other religions and cultures. The salafists are jihadist until proven otherwise.    The aim of these Muslems is world domination in the same way that Hitler and the Nazi’s were world domination or Stalin and the Communists.  To them Muslim is a religion of peace means quite simply when all the world is Muslim and "we are in charge” and “we have killed all who won’t convert”,  then we will have peace.
Most moderates believe in a balance of power.  Moderates respect respect  religious freedom. I love that I have Muslim neighbours, Buddhist neighbours, Hindu neighbours, Pagan neighbours, Jewish neightbours,  Christian neighbours and even atheist neighbours.  I like all the colours of the rainbow.  I love the diversity that we know in Canada.  I know there are those who want only to eat cereal for breakfast and insist everyone else eat cereal for breakfast like they do but I like choice.  I really am a big proponent of freedom and choice for individuals and communities.  I am a Canadian.  I like that I can joke with my moderate Muslim friends about ‘all roads leading to Rome’ but that Christians will have the better housing district and Muslims will have to live on the other side of the tracks.  They say they will have the virgins and I say I will have the music and maybe one virgin.  We don’t kill each other any more than I do with my female Buddhist friend who at the same time tells us men that she believes we will not get to heaven in the next life but rather will reincarnate as pigs.  To which my Hindu friend insists that he was a pig in a previous life and that’s where he learned his bad habits.  My Catholic friend loves bacon but doesn’t like this talk of pigs.  She rejects Jews and Moslems because she love her bacon.  And such a conversation among friends can occur in Canada among a group of deeply spiritual and religious individuals who are moderates.  I don’t know any fanatics.  I expect if I did I’d have to kill them before they killed me.  So as a Canadian I prefer peace because I can get on with science, loving, community and art rather than devoting myself to watching my back and killing the fanatics before they kill me.
I am a physician too.  Physicians commonly say ‘moderation in everything.’  So I like my moderate friends and am skeptical of my extremist friends.  I have no fanatic friends but I certainly have friends whose behaviours and thoughts are extreme by my personal rather conservative behaviour and thought. I am however most skeptical of those that lie especially politicians and the media. Lying people in power scare me.  Scaring people pushes them to  extremes.  I therefore wonder why some people in power who lie and deny legitimate concerns and threat are so anti moderation and in favour of war.  That concerns me. I’m less concerned about my moderate Muslim friends than I am about liars in general.   All my Muslim friends are equally concerned about radicals and extremists as I am.  None of my moderate Muslim academic doctor friends favour jihadists.  The moderate muslim psychiatrists I know think they’re psychopaths.  Why are our political leaders and their media not equally concerned?  That’s what concerns me? Indeed as my moderate muslim friends are against the fundamentalist and extremist muslims, those who don’t wish to integrate into Canadian society but rather wish to dominate and subjugate Canadian culture or isolate and plan jihad, then quite simply the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Hence the Jordan pilot,a muslim, and the Kurdish women brigade, muslims, are my friends.
My concern is whether my leadership or their propaganda media are my friends?  I thank them only so far as their own violence has helped me clarify who are really the enemies of peace and the enemies of Canada and western secularism.