As a Canadian I am demonized today because:
1) I believe in God and Jesus Christ and am demonized for these beliefs. I am ridiculed and condemned yet I am supposed to accept that those who are so judgemental of theists and Christians are themselves enlightened and tolerant. I am persecuted for my beliefs attacked as ignorant and insane for my faith.
2) I am pro life. Our Justin Trudeau is pro abortion and dictated that no one can be in his government who disagrees with abortion. I am by this one ultimatum of the petite Napoleon, persona non grata. I am ‘excluded’ by this government who claims to be diverse and inclusive. I have been screamed at and condemned and threatened for simply expressing and holding this belief.
3) I am a scientist and consider the central hypothesis of Climate Change, that the world is heating up principally due to man’s production of hot air purely a political construct with little scientific basis. I believe in Carbon Dioxide, the breath of life for plants and believe the taxation of carbon is a grand scheme of disinformation for political purpose. I have watched ever promise of the Climate Change Cult be proved wrong from Silent Spring’s death by ‘acid rain’ , to the boiling away of the planet by the destruction of the ozone layer, to Al Gore the greatest scientific fool of the century promising the ice caps would be gone by 2015. All the fish continue to live in the post Silent Spring world, and Mount St. Helena spewed more ozone into the climate than man in man’s life time with no damage to the ozone layer whose hole mysteriously appears to lessening. Now the Ice Caps are alive and well and never before has plant life been so radiant and yet I am demonized for saying that Canada has reached an all time embarrassing low by creating a Department of Climate Change. For a scientist this is like living in a world where the government has created a Department of Scientific Alchemy. That’s the sleight of hand of Climate Change and because I am opposed to this ridiculous deceit and the even more preposterous claims that the ‘world is going to end’ if you don’t give me more billions of dollars, then I am even threatened as a scientist with incarceration. Scientists simply don’t say other scientists who disagree with them should be put in jail or asylums but totalitarians do.
4) I am a libertarian mostly and against Communism specifically. I am demonized as a person who faced with the question of the ‘state against the individual’ puts more faith in the individual than the state. The state has killed more people than the individual and people in groups commonly act poorly compared to an individual. While I respect institutions I’m not naive to the history of the mass killing of innocents by the eurocrats of Communist Russia, Communist China and Fascist Germany. Yet I am attacked and demonized for not agreeing with the belief in Big Government, Centralization of Authority, Bigger Government and loss rights of regions and individuals.
5) I hunt and fish and kill, clean and prepare my own meat but suddenly those who are fed on mass by the urban butchers and industries of commercial endeavour hold me as somehow evil and primitive and a killer. The effete even approach food as a fashion statement and condemn outright all humans that preceded their experiment in taste. I and the billions upon billions before us are the enemy overnight and these sentimentalists defend the chicken and lamb but not the snake and alligator or even the fish. It’s bizarre how the cuddly are championed but I am those like me who hunt are demonized and suddenly the ‘trophy hunter’ is akin to the gas chamber bureaucrats who gassed children in the wars. The level of ignorance of the media and the urbanites is frightening because they all don’t seem to know that no food goes to waste in the wild and a ‘trophy’ hunt is about killing the oldest and most likely to die from old age that winter. More case for protecting veal in the restaurant than from killing the 8 point buck. Most unusual and outrageously ignorant behaviour in this mass hysteria fueled by urban elitism against all those who living in the country consider eating home grown vegetables and home shot meat as normal as the horrid city person might be considered for going to the 5 star restaurant. Yet here I am, son of a hunter, grandson of a rancher, raised on wild game and home grown vegetables all my life maligned by the masses as somehow un Canadian. I am demonized and excluded by those very effete who claim to be non judgemental and inclusive.
6) I am wholly against political correctness which I believe is the language of totalitarianism and goes against all the freedoms which the poor and marginalized have fought for since the origins of the magna carta. The Politically Correct have always been the ‘courtly’ the fawners, and the psychopaths and sociopaths who chameleon but lack substance and character. I believe in truth by contrast not relative truth but truth, the objective, agreed truth of consensus arrived at by hidden ballot if not by common sense.
7) I believe in democracy and the right of dissent.
I feel increasingly that Canada, once a tolerant nation is intolerant of the familiar, it’s own and it’s forbears and suddenly embraces strangers while condemning me and those like me. I am afraid in Canada today because of the violence of those who powerfully maintain that they are peaceful and loving but are not this to me.
Showing posts with label pro life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pro life. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Journal, Sept. 1, 2015
I would like to wake up like my dog. Gilbert is always bright eyed and bushy tailed. He wakes happy and excited. Licks my face. Walks all over my chest, squirms and cuddles me. Then eventually brings me a yellow tennis ball because he knows that will be the first thing I want to do when I wake up. Sometimes he just drops it into my face in case I want to chew on it before I throw it for him to fetch.
I wake up more grudgingly. I had great dreams last night. There's a world I often find myself in, in my dreams, this alternate reality. I return to it often. It's not the toilet where there's shit everywhere and no where to shit or stand. That's a bad dream. I didn't have that dream. No this other place is water, boats, people, dogs. I'm often rounding a peninsula in a sailboat, anchoring in a sheltered cove. It's sunny and blue sky and the sea is calm. I'm walking with a dog near the shore. Lots of meetings with friends and family. Sometimes there's old people and coffee tables. It's what I imagine heaven as. I didn't really want to leave those dreams this morning.
If I showed up in someone else's office and described my feelings, they'd say I was 'dysthymic'. Probably a little seasonal affective disorder, the technical explanation. End of summer, beginning of fall. I find my mood fluctuated with the sunshine. Then there's that Canadian thing of fall and winter where the summer is leaving and it's like losing a loved friend you don't see enough of. This summer seemed to rush by. I feel like I've hardly had a summer. So much work and stress and anxiety and burdens. They're not even mine but I've carried them.
Just yesterday, on the last day of August I said to a colleague, 'Freud took his holidays in August. August used to be the slowest month. Everyone cancelled. Peoples problems were less. There seemed to be more optimism. What happened?" He agreed. This August was different. Troubling. Less carefree. The pace was steady at his office too. No change in the density and traffic and flow. None of the lulls. That's what it was for me. The emotional sound of nails scraping on a chalk board or frozen pane of glass just seemed continuous all year round. My patients circumstances, often financially burdened, didn't change. Even as they learned new ways of coping the stresses they were under increased.
We're aging too. Not only are the celebrities of our youth and adult hood dying but friends and mentors. Grieving is a reason for feeling blue.
Taxes were a trial this year. The office move was costly and unsettling. An expanding company growing wealthy with increasing staff and marketting success displaces the lawyers and doctors working in their little office. The big guy has more clout. Our leases come up. They're not renewed. One can't blame a big corporation wanting to collect from just one tenant rather than a dozen. But moves are unsettling. I'm aging and fear I'm seeing change as loss more than as opportunity.
Aging is all about loss and handling loss gracefully.
I didn't ride my motorcycle or take out my boat as much as other years. The challenge and work of it all seemed unattractive. I chose to run on weekends instead, thankful for the repair of injuries and the returning athletic capability. It's hard though. Everything hurts. I hurt when I walk to the washroom each morning. All the traumatic arthritis of distant crashes and near death remind me with the first stiff and painful steps of the morning.
When I talk with friends I feel more and more like I'm reviewing the conversations I loathed when my father and mother shared. I tell her I've got back pain tying my shoes. She says her vagina itches.
Only older people 'share' such intimacies freely. Harry tells me about his hemorrhoids. We discuss infirmities. All the medical words I learned as a young doctor my friends are now using to describe their own symptons. I try to remain in denial. Denial is my first and favourite go to place.
Aging and the thought of dying are contemporary discussions. I am morally against physician assisted suicide but I know that suicide is never far from my mind. Homicide isn't that far away either. Thankfully the Darwin Awards allow me to laugh about all the stupid people. The older I get the more people seem stupid. And truthfully they are. Their inexperience and ignorance coupled with their arrogance is flagrantly thrust in your face. The worst are those with some power.
Daily someone tells me about grandstanding clerk or low level government worker cutting off the heads of others to make themselves look taller.
I find myself back biting, back stabbing. I speak negatively about individuals and institutions and immediately regret it. My long deceased aunt who was the executive assistant to the Canadian ambassador in Washington during WWII never said a negative thing against others. At her funeral it was what we all talked about. No one could remember this lovely Christian woman saying anything negative about anyone. She used to say "if you don't have anything good to say about someone it's best you say nothing." She was silent at times. We remember that. But I love that she was so positive and refined. I would be like her.
I have resentments. I have fears. I find myself often with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, resenting something in the past or worrying about something in the future, shitting and pissing on my day because I can't get my head in the same room as my ass is. I'm constantly bringing my mind back to the present. The present is all I truly have and it's called a present because that's where God is. Yet I'm a sinner. To sin means 'to miss the mark'. It comes from the days of archery when the intention of the archer was to hit the bullseye but for a variety of reasons including his attitude he missed. I'm trying to focus on God and the present and practice the presence of God but all too often I'm distracted by news I listen to with the misinformation and disinformation of the media.
I find myself wanting to enlighten everyone to the lies that I hear. The talk of the economy is put at a propaganda level of communication. There's 'techniques' of misinformation and disinformation that Hitler and later Stalin first ingeniously developped. Then the marketting companies advanced them so that every add campaign now incorporates these fallacies and cognitive distortions. I listen to the source and hear the 'hustle' or the 'ad campaign' then later in the day hear otherwise intelligent folk parrotting the fashion of the month. I'm momentarily crazed. I feel like the human in the alien attack 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
But what does it matter? Stupidity is being nurtured. Collectively we're being herded. Someone is pulling the strings. Or is it just as it is.
I struggle to avoid thinking or discussing matters that are 'above my pay grade'. It would be so easy to be paranoid, knowing one is right, relishing the warm cuddly feeling of victimship and being paranoid. Even Freud said 'sometimes the paranoids are write'.
But I'm a psychiatrist. I'm trained to 'tolerate the tension of opposites'. Like the chess player I am I play either side with equal skill. I see the Glass Bead Game for what it is. Just light and shade. I remember Leonard Cohen's song, There's a war between the rich and the poor, a war between the man and a woman.....there's a war between the odd and the even."
It's the dualism. It's Martin Buber's I and Thou. My questions and concerns are always a dialogue with God. We're forever playing hide and seek. I'm facing death and life is just another state of discussion with death. Everything is relationship. I'm just trying to find the laughter and the love. The "L" words. Sex is a metaphor for our relationship with life. Everythign is bipolar, waves and particles, everything in motion. Finitude is an illusion but infinity and finite are just faces of a coin.
Unfortunately the more intelligent one is the more risk there is for depression. As a great older Christian psychiatrist told me , bitter people are a dime a dozen. "You don't want to be a bitter old man. That's common.'
My friend talks about the obese ladies, first gaining weight then wearing runners and expandable pants. "They've let themselves go," she says.
Addictions are a way of living with one central fear of death and invalidity. The existential questions are now poignant for me. I read Kierkegaard, Camus, and Doystoyevski as a kid, appreciating the art and enjoying the story. Today I wonder if the hundred babies I delivered were good. Or were half terrorists. My friends children are drug addicts and drug dealers. I look back on a life of healing but wonder how many of those I healed went on to be criminals and murderers. I took comfort in my indiscriminate love yet today I question the daily work of rescue and seeing every single person as a child of god and treating them as if they were a family member. I prided myself in believing I was being a good person treating the devil and the saint equally. I took an oath 'do no harm' and now with 'physician assisted suicide' being promoted by the Supreme Court of Canada, I'm looking back wondering if all those suicidal people I spent hours, days, weeks and years convincing that life was worth holding on to, well maybe I was wrong. I could have worked less, made more money, had an easier life, just killing people. I know the abortionists have a hell of a good life killing babies. I still have nightmares about the dead baby I delivered. I still have nightmares about the boy who suicided on my watch. If I was a killer at worst I'd have to think about the ones who lived.
The abortionists haven't always got away with their killing. I heard the deformed courageous woman who didn't die when she was aborted. She lived and told her story. "J'acuse" comes back to mind. The great French story of justice.
But my friend says there's no 'justice in the courts'. The courts are there solely to protect the rich and maintain the status quo. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo. So the whole the beaurocratic system and all the outward appearances of the government system especially the courts are there to maintain the position of the rich and powerful. They now have a term 'social justice' and it's even more disengenuous. Deconstructionism and constructionism. Right is wrong. Black is white. I read between the lines and educated beyond my intelligence see what's really being said. The government and courts are as 'fixed' as soccer and Vegas.
But of course it's all above my paygrade.
If I knew what I know today, would I do what I've done with my life. Well, I wouldn't have married. I told my wife that her idea that marriage was for a couple and that marriage didn't need kids meant that marriages might as well be gay. I'd married for the sake of family and the women overnight said 'my body my own.' My baby was killed aborted. I married and raised some women who were only little girls and we played at love and kept each other close covering each others back for a decade at a time. But the children were killed and I couldn't even save the life of my own child. The Supreme Court killed my baby as much as anyone. The Prime Minister and Queen killed my baby. And now as I age I'm growing more and more alone. Like millions of other men who daily must struggle to avoid being bitter.
Another man says his son stole all his money and left him to die. Her daughter is using the grand children to maintain her drug habit. Her children get her the money from social services she uses to maintain her addiction. Obviously if one wants to be bitter, one can chose having children or not having children as the excuse for having a bad mood.
My bad mood is explained as much by anything but I wonder if life wouldn't have been better if I had devoted myself to learning killing instead of healing, Hundreds of my patients begged me let them die. I struggled through depression after depression. I helped women get through morning sickness and waddling days, and aches and pains then labour and delivery only to find that the courts and the beaurocrats are going to judge me in my senility on my 'popularity'. I took over from a doctor who the patients still sing the praises of down here in the Down Town Eastside. He's famous today and I see that he maximized the methadone and opiates he could give, maximized the benzodiazepines he gave and didn't ever really address their addictions, didn't recommend abstinence but just gave them more and more drugs until they died or he left and said he was sorry he couldn't give them more illusion and pain relief.
I expect families will thank me for killing their relatives. So many of my patients over the years have suffered caregiver burden. I have defended my patients over and over again from relatives who were wanting them dead or committed. I have fought to protect my patients assets and over and over again begged and cajoled to get them housing and treatment and hospitalization. I now think if I'd just become a lawyer I could have written a law and told the physicians to kill the patients. I'm still struggling with a judge who condemned me for advocating for my patient and the doctors who supported him. It doesn't matter that years latter my lawyers 'won' and the doctor's role as 'advocate' was upheld. I know this judge as a lawyer had a conflict of interest. All over the lawyers are looking to be in every aspect of our affairs insisting only they can represent everyone. So now we each of us daily need a lawyer who is a beurocratic body guard. My rich colleagues have them on retainers and some go into the hospitals with their lawyer at their side.
I think of physician assisted suicide as I consider these profound changes in society and the devolution of Canada as I know it. I've read the horror stories of Holland's experience with legalized marijuana, their banning BC Bud, their 180 degree turn around after 20 years of that failed experiment. I've also read how their 'physician assisted suicide' started out kindly then became a variation on Hitler's gas chambers with widespread killing of the aging mentally ill because killing is always cheaper. The addicts are given places to shoot up because their doctors don't believe in them as humans. They've given up hope. It's palliative care because we'd rather spend money on court rooms and elections and massive government waste and corruption than on authentic health care.
But what do I know. My opinion about what is right and wrong is just one man's views. The whole of the democratic process suggests that each individual's opinion is equal to another. So today more and more individuals on the planes I fly on think their opinion is as good as the pilots. M ore and more people comes into my office after a cursery look at internet and tell me what I'm supposed to do as a doctor. Everyone is an overnight expert with a google and it doesn't matter that the research says that all the computer health care programs have a 50 to 80% error range. It's sexy.
A few of us old doctors at the back of the lecture hall listened to a couple of cute your female academic doctors give a presentation on 'Physician burn out". They called their talk 'compassion fatigue'. We joked, "when was the first time you diagnosed yourself as burnt out."
My first year after residency. When I left the university and was on my own in real medical practice.", one answer.
"I stopped counting after my 19th nervous breakdown", the other grey haired world reknowned clinician said.
I said, I've not had a drink or drug in 16 years so I don't know if I'm just being a 'dry drunk - "rest irritable and discontent' or I'm experiencing "burn out".
"Remember that survey a few years back where every doctor said they'd have more compassion if they got the annual $50,000 in back pay they thought they deserved but had been diverted to excessive administration whose role seemed sorely to interfere with medical and nursing care."
Yes I do.
I don't see anyone lining up to work with ex criminals, drug dealers, addicts and the dangerously insane but you notice how people who've never got their hands dirty are the quickest to be critics.
We began talking when the lecture was on, pulled our selves to gether and listened to the pollyanna stuff about getting exercise and getting enough sleep taking more time to keep up with the literature and all this 'sweet recommendations' we usually hear from the College, the day before or after they come up with some recommendation that multiplies every physicians workloads a hundred fold or the government refuses to pay for the increasing aging patient practice. It's so easy to tell others to do the work.
"I've been hoping for war, " I said after that lecture ended and the three of us continued to talk. "I ask God for forgiveness but it seems it's the only way that the 'dead weight' is winnowed out of the fat cat systems. Germany has a better health care system and 1/20 the administration. "
The things breaks down into a poor me and shared expressions of self pity.
"I can 't afford to pay for me kids university and the alimony his mother demands."
And three old doctors all obviously suffering burn out have an ad hock group therapy session and go off laughing in the end.
The rich and poor, the doers and the takers, the lovers and the haters have always been around. 12 step programs broke down the source of fear and resentment to 'financial insecurity, concerns about ambition, concerns about status, concerns about face and friends, and family." Mental health is defined as the ability to love, work and play,.
There's infinite amount of work for doctors and never enough time in the day. Our love lives collectively suck and increasingly no one has the time or resources for play. Doctors can't afford to buy a house in Vancouver on their income. But then no one can, except those who inheritted or the criminals.
Bitch bitch bitch.
We have gratitude lists to change our attitudes. I have to give my head a shake minute by minute. I thank God for the light and darkness, the happiness and sadness, sickness and health, the good and the bad. It's only in the contrast can I appreciate the good. I am thankful for this life. It's had it's ups and downs. I know there are drugs to make everything bland. The addicts I see are bubble boys and bubble girls. They are living their lives in illusions wrapped in the candy floss of their drug of choice, missing out on 99% of the spectrum of living. I remember when I drank wine, smoked a joint or smoked a cigarette. Even these are their own valium type experiences. Living life on life's terms is walking a high wire. It's 'raw". It's the same with being intelligent. It would be so much easier to be stupid and believe in the 'group think' 1984 reality.
It's like the desire to take the other pills colour in the movie Matrix. Just live in the Solyent Green world.
Time to get on with reality. Ironically until they insist I kill people, they have made it law that I pimp for the abortionist, it's not enough that I say I don't do abortions, I required by law to make their killer richer. I expect the same will happen shortly when I say I'm too old to start killing patients for profit and they're say it's not enough for me to say I don't do it but that I must phone the killers and make appointments for my patients. I wonder if I should go back through my lists of people I convinced not to kill themselves over the last three decades, speak to each of the hundred individually and encourage them to reconsider our decision. I really think the lawyers in the supreme court should have taken lessons in boundaries and profession and stuck to 'lawyer assisted suicide' rather than telling physicians to kill their patients. At least in Saudi Arabia they have a public executioner. Given the way they've been botching up their killing in the court and jail side of the ugly business they probably want 'physician' assisted suicide because they know only physicians seem to know how to get things done. Which is why every restriction is place on us and the system hates and is terrified of us and other scientists.
I have to get back to making gratitude lists. This is always a me and God, I and it or I and thou thing. The complexity reduces to me and the other. I'm obviously not in a loving carefree mood. If I surrendered and accepted God is in charge and all loving then I'd feel better.
It's all above my pay grade. As my friend says we're all 'slaves'. Best to be grateful to be an 'inhouse nigger'. He laughs at me calling me a 'wage slaves'. He bought parking lots and made a lot of money. The parking lot prices outside the hospitals and clinics are always the best source of revenue.
I lack some gene that makes him think like that. Still I love his humor. God has a real sense of humor. When you can get your head around that then finally you stop taking yourself so seriously. I have to remember that.
I wake up more grudgingly. I had great dreams last night. There's a world I often find myself in, in my dreams, this alternate reality. I return to it often. It's not the toilet where there's shit everywhere and no where to shit or stand. That's a bad dream. I didn't have that dream. No this other place is water, boats, people, dogs. I'm often rounding a peninsula in a sailboat, anchoring in a sheltered cove. It's sunny and blue sky and the sea is calm. I'm walking with a dog near the shore. Lots of meetings with friends and family. Sometimes there's old people and coffee tables. It's what I imagine heaven as. I didn't really want to leave those dreams this morning.
If I showed up in someone else's office and described my feelings, they'd say I was 'dysthymic'. Probably a little seasonal affective disorder, the technical explanation. End of summer, beginning of fall. I find my mood fluctuated with the sunshine. Then there's that Canadian thing of fall and winter where the summer is leaving and it's like losing a loved friend you don't see enough of. This summer seemed to rush by. I feel like I've hardly had a summer. So much work and stress and anxiety and burdens. They're not even mine but I've carried them.
Just yesterday, on the last day of August I said to a colleague, 'Freud took his holidays in August. August used to be the slowest month. Everyone cancelled. Peoples problems were less. There seemed to be more optimism. What happened?" He agreed. This August was different. Troubling. Less carefree. The pace was steady at his office too. No change in the density and traffic and flow. None of the lulls. That's what it was for me. The emotional sound of nails scraping on a chalk board or frozen pane of glass just seemed continuous all year round. My patients circumstances, often financially burdened, didn't change. Even as they learned new ways of coping the stresses they were under increased.
We're aging too. Not only are the celebrities of our youth and adult hood dying but friends and mentors. Grieving is a reason for feeling blue.
Taxes were a trial this year. The office move was costly and unsettling. An expanding company growing wealthy with increasing staff and marketting success displaces the lawyers and doctors working in their little office. The big guy has more clout. Our leases come up. They're not renewed. One can't blame a big corporation wanting to collect from just one tenant rather than a dozen. But moves are unsettling. I'm aging and fear I'm seeing change as loss more than as opportunity.
Aging is all about loss and handling loss gracefully.
I didn't ride my motorcycle or take out my boat as much as other years. The challenge and work of it all seemed unattractive. I chose to run on weekends instead, thankful for the repair of injuries and the returning athletic capability. It's hard though. Everything hurts. I hurt when I walk to the washroom each morning. All the traumatic arthritis of distant crashes and near death remind me with the first stiff and painful steps of the morning.
When I talk with friends I feel more and more like I'm reviewing the conversations I loathed when my father and mother shared. I tell her I've got back pain tying my shoes. She says her vagina itches.
Only older people 'share' such intimacies freely. Harry tells me about his hemorrhoids. We discuss infirmities. All the medical words I learned as a young doctor my friends are now using to describe their own symptons. I try to remain in denial. Denial is my first and favourite go to place.
Aging and the thought of dying are contemporary discussions. I am morally against physician assisted suicide but I know that suicide is never far from my mind. Homicide isn't that far away either. Thankfully the Darwin Awards allow me to laugh about all the stupid people. The older I get the more people seem stupid. And truthfully they are. Their inexperience and ignorance coupled with their arrogance is flagrantly thrust in your face. The worst are those with some power.
Daily someone tells me about grandstanding clerk or low level government worker cutting off the heads of others to make themselves look taller.
I find myself back biting, back stabbing. I speak negatively about individuals and institutions and immediately regret it. My long deceased aunt who was the executive assistant to the Canadian ambassador in Washington during WWII never said a negative thing against others. At her funeral it was what we all talked about. No one could remember this lovely Christian woman saying anything negative about anyone. She used to say "if you don't have anything good to say about someone it's best you say nothing." She was silent at times. We remember that. But I love that she was so positive and refined. I would be like her.
I have resentments. I have fears. I find myself often with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, resenting something in the past or worrying about something in the future, shitting and pissing on my day because I can't get my head in the same room as my ass is. I'm constantly bringing my mind back to the present. The present is all I truly have and it's called a present because that's where God is. Yet I'm a sinner. To sin means 'to miss the mark'. It comes from the days of archery when the intention of the archer was to hit the bullseye but for a variety of reasons including his attitude he missed. I'm trying to focus on God and the present and practice the presence of God but all too often I'm distracted by news I listen to with the misinformation and disinformation of the media.
I find myself wanting to enlighten everyone to the lies that I hear. The talk of the economy is put at a propaganda level of communication. There's 'techniques' of misinformation and disinformation that Hitler and later Stalin first ingeniously developped. Then the marketting companies advanced them so that every add campaign now incorporates these fallacies and cognitive distortions. I listen to the source and hear the 'hustle' or the 'ad campaign' then later in the day hear otherwise intelligent folk parrotting the fashion of the month. I'm momentarily crazed. I feel like the human in the alien attack 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
But what does it matter? Stupidity is being nurtured. Collectively we're being herded. Someone is pulling the strings. Or is it just as it is.
I struggle to avoid thinking or discussing matters that are 'above my pay grade'. It would be so easy to be paranoid, knowing one is right, relishing the warm cuddly feeling of victimship and being paranoid. Even Freud said 'sometimes the paranoids are write'.
But I'm a psychiatrist. I'm trained to 'tolerate the tension of opposites'. Like the chess player I am I play either side with equal skill. I see the Glass Bead Game for what it is. Just light and shade. I remember Leonard Cohen's song, There's a war between the rich and the poor, a war between the man and a woman.....there's a war between the odd and the even."
It's the dualism. It's Martin Buber's I and Thou. My questions and concerns are always a dialogue with God. We're forever playing hide and seek. I'm facing death and life is just another state of discussion with death. Everything is relationship. I'm just trying to find the laughter and the love. The "L" words. Sex is a metaphor for our relationship with life. Everythign is bipolar, waves and particles, everything in motion. Finitude is an illusion but infinity and finite are just faces of a coin.
Unfortunately the more intelligent one is the more risk there is for depression. As a great older Christian psychiatrist told me , bitter people are a dime a dozen. "You don't want to be a bitter old man. That's common.'
My friend talks about the obese ladies, first gaining weight then wearing runners and expandable pants. "They've let themselves go," she says.
Addictions are a way of living with one central fear of death and invalidity. The existential questions are now poignant for me. I read Kierkegaard, Camus, and Doystoyevski as a kid, appreciating the art and enjoying the story. Today I wonder if the hundred babies I delivered were good. Or were half terrorists. My friends children are drug addicts and drug dealers. I look back on a life of healing but wonder how many of those I healed went on to be criminals and murderers. I took comfort in my indiscriminate love yet today I question the daily work of rescue and seeing every single person as a child of god and treating them as if they were a family member. I prided myself in believing I was being a good person treating the devil and the saint equally. I took an oath 'do no harm' and now with 'physician assisted suicide' being promoted by the Supreme Court of Canada, I'm looking back wondering if all those suicidal people I spent hours, days, weeks and years convincing that life was worth holding on to, well maybe I was wrong. I could have worked less, made more money, had an easier life, just killing people. I know the abortionists have a hell of a good life killing babies. I still have nightmares about the dead baby I delivered. I still have nightmares about the boy who suicided on my watch. If I was a killer at worst I'd have to think about the ones who lived.
The abortionists haven't always got away with their killing. I heard the deformed courageous woman who didn't die when she was aborted. She lived and told her story. "J'acuse" comes back to mind. The great French story of justice.
But my friend says there's no 'justice in the courts'. The courts are there solely to protect the rich and maintain the status quo. The reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo. So the whole the beaurocratic system and all the outward appearances of the government system especially the courts are there to maintain the position of the rich and powerful. They now have a term 'social justice' and it's even more disengenuous. Deconstructionism and constructionism. Right is wrong. Black is white. I read between the lines and educated beyond my intelligence see what's really being said. The government and courts are as 'fixed' as soccer and Vegas.
But of course it's all above my paygrade.
If I knew what I know today, would I do what I've done with my life. Well, I wouldn't have married. I told my wife that her idea that marriage was for a couple and that marriage didn't need kids meant that marriages might as well be gay. I'd married for the sake of family and the women overnight said 'my body my own.' My baby was killed aborted. I married and raised some women who were only little girls and we played at love and kept each other close covering each others back for a decade at a time. But the children were killed and I couldn't even save the life of my own child. The Supreme Court killed my baby as much as anyone. The Prime Minister and Queen killed my baby. And now as I age I'm growing more and more alone. Like millions of other men who daily must struggle to avoid being bitter.
Another man says his son stole all his money and left him to die. Her daughter is using the grand children to maintain her drug habit. Her children get her the money from social services she uses to maintain her addiction. Obviously if one wants to be bitter, one can chose having children or not having children as the excuse for having a bad mood.
My bad mood is explained as much by anything but I wonder if life wouldn't have been better if I had devoted myself to learning killing instead of healing, Hundreds of my patients begged me let them die. I struggled through depression after depression. I helped women get through morning sickness and waddling days, and aches and pains then labour and delivery only to find that the courts and the beaurocrats are going to judge me in my senility on my 'popularity'. I took over from a doctor who the patients still sing the praises of down here in the Down Town Eastside. He's famous today and I see that he maximized the methadone and opiates he could give, maximized the benzodiazepines he gave and didn't ever really address their addictions, didn't recommend abstinence but just gave them more and more drugs until they died or he left and said he was sorry he couldn't give them more illusion and pain relief.
I expect families will thank me for killing their relatives. So many of my patients over the years have suffered caregiver burden. I have defended my patients over and over again from relatives who were wanting them dead or committed. I have fought to protect my patients assets and over and over again begged and cajoled to get them housing and treatment and hospitalization. I now think if I'd just become a lawyer I could have written a law and told the physicians to kill the patients. I'm still struggling with a judge who condemned me for advocating for my patient and the doctors who supported him. It doesn't matter that years latter my lawyers 'won' and the doctor's role as 'advocate' was upheld. I know this judge as a lawyer had a conflict of interest. All over the lawyers are looking to be in every aspect of our affairs insisting only they can represent everyone. So now we each of us daily need a lawyer who is a beurocratic body guard. My rich colleagues have them on retainers and some go into the hospitals with their lawyer at their side.
I think of physician assisted suicide as I consider these profound changes in society and the devolution of Canada as I know it. I've read the horror stories of Holland's experience with legalized marijuana, their banning BC Bud, their 180 degree turn around after 20 years of that failed experiment. I've also read how their 'physician assisted suicide' started out kindly then became a variation on Hitler's gas chambers with widespread killing of the aging mentally ill because killing is always cheaper. The addicts are given places to shoot up because their doctors don't believe in them as humans. They've given up hope. It's palliative care because we'd rather spend money on court rooms and elections and massive government waste and corruption than on authentic health care.
But what do I know. My opinion about what is right and wrong is just one man's views. The whole of the democratic process suggests that each individual's opinion is equal to another. So today more and more individuals on the planes I fly on think their opinion is as good as the pilots. M ore and more people comes into my office after a cursery look at internet and tell me what I'm supposed to do as a doctor. Everyone is an overnight expert with a google and it doesn't matter that the research says that all the computer health care programs have a 50 to 80% error range. It's sexy.
A few of us old doctors at the back of the lecture hall listened to a couple of cute your female academic doctors give a presentation on 'Physician burn out". They called their talk 'compassion fatigue'. We joked, "when was the first time you diagnosed yourself as burnt out."
My first year after residency. When I left the university and was on my own in real medical practice.", one answer.
"I stopped counting after my 19th nervous breakdown", the other grey haired world reknowned clinician said.
I said, I've not had a drink or drug in 16 years so I don't know if I'm just being a 'dry drunk - "rest irritable and discontent' or I'm experiencing "burn out".
"Remember that survey a few years back where every doctor said they'd have more compassion if they got the annual $50,000 in back pay they thought they deserved but had been diverted to excessive administration whose role seemed sorely to interfere with medical and nursing care."
Yes I do.
I don't see anyone lining up to work with ex criminals, drug dealers, addicts and the dangerously insane but you notice how people who've never got their hands dirty are the quickest to be critics.
We began talking when the lecture was on, pulled our selves to gether and listened to the pollyanna stuff about getting exercise and getting enough sleep taking more time to keep up with the literature and all this 'sweet recommendations' we usually hear from the College, the day before or after they come up with some recommendation that multiplies every physicians workloads a hundred fold or the government refuses to pay for the increasing aging patient practice. It's so easy to tell others to do the work.
"I've been hoping for war, " I said after that lecture ended and the three of us continued to talk. "I ask God for forgiveness but it seems it's the only way that the 'dead weight' is winnowed out of the fat cat systems. Germany has a better health care system and 1/20 the administration. "
The things breaks down into a poor me and shared expressions of self pity.
"I can 't afford to pay for me kids university and the alimony his mother demands."
And three old doctors all obviously suffering burn out have an ad hock group therapy session and go off laughing in the end.
The rich and poor, the doers and the takers, the lovers and the haters have always been around. 12 step programs broke down the source of fear and resentment to 'financial insecurity, concerns about ambition, concerns about status, concerns about face and friends, and family." Mental health is defined as the ability to love, work and play,.
There's infinite amount of work for doctors and never enough time in the day. Our love lives collectively suck and increasingly no one has the time or resources for play. Doctors can't afford to buy a house in Vancouver on their income. But then no one can, except those who inheritted or the criminals.
Bitch bitch bitch.
We have gratitude lists to change our attitudes. I have to give my head a shake minute by minute. I thank God for the light and darkness, the happiness and sadness, sickness and health, the good and the bad. It's only in the contrast can I appreciate the good. I am thankful for this life. It's had it's ups and downs. I know there are drugs to make everything bland. The addicts I see are bubble boys and bubble girls. They are living their lives in illusions wrapped in the candy floss of their drug of choice, missing out on 99% of the spectrum of living. I remember when I drank wine, smoked a joint or smoked a cigarette. Even these are their own valium type experiences. Living life on life's terms is walking a high wire. It's 'raw". It's the same with being intelligent. It would be so much easier to be stupid and believe in the 'group think' 1984 reality.
It's like the desire to take the other pills colour in the movie Matrix. Just live in the Solyent Green world.
Time to get on with reality. Ironically until they insist I kill people, they have made it law that I pimp for the abortionist, it's not enough that I say I don't do abortions, I required by law to make their killer richer. I expect the same will happen shortly when I say I'm too old to start killing patients for profit and they're say it's not enough for me to say I don't do it but that I must phone the killers and make appointments for my patients. I wonder if I should go back through my lists of people I convinced not to kill themselves over the last three decades, speak to each of the hundred individually and encourage them to reconsider our decision. I really think the lawyers in the supreme court should have taken lessons in boundaries and profession and stuck to 'lawyer assisted suicide' rather than telling physicians to kill their patients. At least in Saudi Arabia they have a public executioner. Given the way they've been botching up their killing in the court and jail side of the ugly business they probably want 'physician' assisted suicide because they know only physicians seem to know how to get things done. Which is why every restriction is place on us and the system hates and is terrified of us and other scientists.
I have to get back to making gratitude lists. This is always a me and God, I and it or I and thou thing. The complexity reduces to me and the other. I'm obviously not in a loving carefree mood. If I surrendered and accepted God is in charge and all loving then I'd feel better.
It's all above my pay grade. As my friend says we're all 'slaves'. Best to be grateful to be an 'inhouse nigger'. He laughs at me calling me a 'wage slaves'. He bought parking lots and made a lot of money. The parking lot prices outside the hospitals and clinics are always the best source of revenue.
I lack some gene that makes him think like that. Still I love his humor. God has a real sense of humor. When you can get your head around that then finally you stop taking yourself so seriously. I have to remember that.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Morning Pages
Julia Cameron in Artist’s Way encouraged people to write, without censorship, ‘morning pages’. This was her exercise to help people get their ‘creativity’ ‘flowing’. She felt ‘creativity’, especially as a writer, was a spontaneous childlike process that had been stymied by years of criticism and restriction. So she said, ‘write each morning, whatever comes to mind’.
In Recovery, it seems that often the twin vultures of fear and resentment are sitting on the bedside ready to begin their days attack on our peace of mind. Hence, for me, morning pages, when I practiced this process seemed a kind of way of ‘squeezing the shit out of my mind’. I wrote down whatever was troubling me first. Today that’s change of staff and a contractor making a mistake that will not only cost me thousands more dollars but lose me thousands and require me to conjure up a half day of my time out a week already squeezed full by the 8 or 9 days expected out of 5 work working days available.
I’d really like to wallow in self pity. I’d like to whine and blame someone else for my troubles but frankly no one cares.
That raises it’s whole other sort of issues. I’m in the last third of my life and feel like I’ve let everyone else through the door, actually helped them, and now chivalry is dead and I’m left standing at the rear in a culture of agism and misogyny. So there’s a whole new source of self pity.
I”m normal. I liked to suck on the tit of self pity. I want to cry to my long dead mother. I want someone else to shoulder my burdens. I want Jesus to get down off the cross and make me breakfast. I mean, really!
I was happy to hear these last few days that when a man 100 years old was asked how he felt, he answered 20. I don’t feel my age. Like my still gorgeous friend who told me in her 40’s she was leering at a young man who wasn’t paying any attention when she had the insight that she was looking out at this young hulk from the inside of a corpse. She had this realization halfway through life with a body and beauty many would die for. I’m there now. I describe myself more and more as the ‘fat old white guy’. This is in a hip slick world of self help talk gurus who says things like ‘it’s a privilege to be getting old’.
Sure, but it doesn’t seem to help getting laid.
I’m a master of the quick retort when anyone wants me to get off the nipple of self pity or better still the other nipple of fear and resentment. Notice how the metaphors of vultures and breasts intertwine.
It came up when a patient told me that the Conservatives had passed a bill outlawing men seeking to pay women for sex while making it legal for women to sell sex. Meanwhile I answered that I thought it remiss that last year there was no laws against prostitution in Canada and somehow I’d missed that memo. It all brought to mind the famous comedian joke which went, when I was a young man I was disgusted at the idea of paying for sex, but now that I’m in my 50’s and begging is no longer working so well, I don’t think the idea is such a bad one.
Meanwhile the proponents suddenly began talking about teenagers (young women) being ‘exploited’ and evil male ‘pimps’ abusing ‘women’. And I found myself involuntarily retching like I do when I hear the Quebec separatists get on their soapbox. This is when women are in fact the ones who are confronting this ‘bill’ because they say it will ‘interfere’ with their ‘business’. But these ‘older women’ who are indeed the ‘madames’ must be stopped because they’re ‘obviously exploited’ by some as yet undiscovered ‘men’. I used to ask radical feminists how can they actually believe their rant about women having nothing when Queen Elizabeth was our monarch. I just listened to an Australian woman going on and on and on, the way they do, when I asked her if she happened to know that the richest most powerful 'person' in Australia was a woman. These people seem truly gender blind to Hillary Clinton while they ignore the 20 year old male hookers offering blow jobs at half the price of their female co workers in a tough street market.
I guess, sitting at the Red Square last week in a MacDonalds enjoying a Mc Cafe and egg Mc Muffin I kind of hoped that “social communism’ might eventually fall like the Berline wall. All this “I”m the poor proletariat and you’re the bad bourgeoisie” rant should somehow end. I hoped that seeing a shopping mall in the Red Square might shut up all the 'rhetoric' of that old dead 'regime'. I'd seen the phoenix rising in the church revival in St. Basils. I'd seen the new life infused in the very heart of the death culture of the old communist world. Yet I came home to Canada to hear this old debate still couched in the old language of the 'victim' and 'victimizer'. Meanwhile it's just 'me and them". I'd just listened to the song 'ding dong the witches dead' and watched the children running about the village playing again and the bells ringing only to return to the Conservative Government of Canada spouting communist rant about 'exploited women' while wanting us to buy their 'market approach to the world' . This is insane!!!
One day, in the 90’s, it was recognized that those who were always ‘helping the exploited’ were, well, like Hitler who went to the ‘rescue’ of the poor Austrians, or Stalin who invaded his neighbours to ‘help’ them. The 'exploited' never get better with the activists and the hand outs but rather they get better with community and helping each other. I don't even want to talk about this anymore because the world is 'caregivers and victims' and the 'caregivers' will kill me if I even question their corruption. I just watched the millions of dollars of government corruption called the 'Portland Hotel Society' and the major benefactors who stole the milk right out of the babies mouths got off with a handshake. MP Jenny Kwan actually blamed her 'man' .
So, forgive me, but I see the people ‘protecting adult women’ from ‘evil men’ as essentially ‘exploiting’ the prostitutes. The legislators want a cut of the action. They're the 'dirty men'. I remember too well when the women prostitutes of Paris marched through the streets and shut down the city because they didn’t want these pompous ‘daddies and mommies’ to interfere in their ‘business’.
In the ‘metaphor’ of ‘capitalism’ , “my body is my own’, means I can be a mercenary or a prostitute. Historically men risked their bodies in work or war whereas women risked their bodies in sex or childbirth but today men and women die in war and men and women work the sex trade. Men and women ‘sell their bodies’ but all the language of the 'bill' about prostitution was disgusting gender biased so there was little talk of 'men' and no mention whatsoever about the most outcast in todays society, the 'transexuals'.
There's always been a 'trade' in 'blood'. I sold my blood to pay for my tuition to medical school. Right now everyone is up in arms about ‘sale of body parts’. Meanwhile just like health care, the 'local's' are denied services whereas the elite 'shop for health care globally'. The 'elite' go overseas for postitution and buy babies they bring back to Canada where women are told "your body is your own' but the fact is the 'state' and the 'courts' especially ,own your body. There is supposed to be ‘suppy and demand’ but the ‘law makers’ and ‘judges’ in this business world are introducing sanctimonious stupidity into an area where all acknowledge the need for ‘regulation’ not ‘censure’ ,because ‘censure’ simply doesn’t work. It drives the industry into the black market and removes it from taxation and medical attention.
The next three people I spoke to about the Conservative government’s prostitution bill immediately mentioned ‘young girls’. Girls and boys are not considered men and women in Canada until they are 19 and maybe even 21 or 25 because they can look older but until they’re about 25 or 30, men can go to jail for having sex with them because our child protection laws are the most stringent in the world. So the prostitution bill has nothing to do with ‘girls or boys’ but says instead we will put adult women out of work who are in the sex trade by arresting their johns because ’women’s bodies in Canada are not their own’ but rather a woman’s body is the ‘property of the state’. Meanwhile a national woman's magazines carries an article by a new executive woman complaining about the lack of gigalows available for her sexual needs at the end of a work day when she is travelling. And a major Vancouver newspaper carries the several page story of the 50 years prostitute who finds that the 'money' makes the 'work attractive' because she can 'set her own hours' and only bemoans that fact that the younger' competition' can get 10x the rate of pay. The story sounds as much like any aging sports athlete that I thought it would do well to be in the sports pages where the 'body worker's' get paid and complain about the 'young talent' put them out of work middle aged. Meanwhile brain workers like me complain about different shit but try to sound more intelligent about it than they do on the sports pages. Meanwhile pole dancing, a wholly different matter, is showing up as the latest medical solution to an increasingly gluttonous and slothful generation all the while old men and old women in parliament are devoting their attention to lust in what was once considered a place where the state had no business, i.e. 'the bed rooms of the nation'. Now the State , which reads your every email, wants to shake down the man who leaves some money under the pillow while claiming that they're really not interested in shaking down the woman that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid the gay man or lesbian that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid even more a 'transexual' that leaves money under the pillow. The language of the bill is so 'sexist' it should cause an adult to retch. No wonder we have "Wrecking Ball" songs.
So the whole feminist ‘my body, my own’ argument goes out the window. Right? Really?
Which may be okay because that was the pillar that ‘abortion’ was built on. So if the state doesn’t allow women to ‘control their vagina’ and it certainly is already against women being ’surrogate mothers’ for hire in Canada there is no longer any ‘basis’ any longer for "personal' abortion.
Hence from the perspective of ‘pro life’ todays ‘prostitution law’ is truly revolutionary.
Seen otherwise, it would just be more post communist ‘rant’ in an age that is so far beyond bourgeoisie and proletariat. While these old tenured London School of Economics red ’sillies’ were squabbling in another centuries debate, usually smoking dope and wearing paisley bellbottom flower power earmuffs, the world moved back to the medieval days with the ’super elite’ new world order. We're no longer in the Beougeoisie and Proletariat wrong ideology but rather we're in the Emperor, Senate, Citizens and Slaves reality. There’s no proletariat and beougeosie. We’ve devolved politically to a pre Marx reality, all the while the irrelevant ’separatists’ and their other 'ist' die hards, are being used by those who always benefit from ‘divide and conquer’ for their own ends and the stupidity of scaredy cat tenured fat cat academics with their Marxist rhetoric.
Personally, I’m certainly not the emperor and I’m not even a senator. Further my pay cheque excludes me from being a ‘citizen’ because today’s ‘citizenship’ isn’t defined by ‘landowner’ or ‘vote’ but rather a more ‘elaborate’ ’status’ indicator. It’s obviously about ‘money’. To be a citizen I think one needs first to be a millionaire or multi millionaire but at least a ’net’ millionaire. I think if you even have to ’think’ about the cost of any purchase you wish to make short of lear jets and rocket ships, you’re not a citizen. Further, a real 'citizen' can't 'work' in a Marxist sense. They're rather more likely the 'Wolves of Wall Street'. A citizen should 'gamble' for money, perhaps or buy and sell slaves or something but not actually 'make' anything.
I’m a wage slave, myself. In Russia a ‘worker’ was a person to be admired. Work was admired and skills and talents were admired. Slaves, like monkeys, are ‘cute’ when they do things but the Chinese emperor had long fingernails because long fingernails are the outward manifestation and symbol of not needing to work. The elite don't 'work'. They don't 'sweat'. They 'play'. In the movie Elysium they were so far above us they lived on space stations.
Corporate leaders today are not ’national’ but ’transnational’ which is why the word ’nation’ has become an adjective. Corporations can be good or bad but the best make the most money for their stockholders so as Robert Hare says they are judged little differently than we judge snakes and other reptiles. Corporations aren’t ‘warm blooded’. Nations once were or at least aspired to be. Nations were 'tied' to land and history. Corporations are unearthly and make history. There is no ‘idealism’ surrounding the ‘brand’ whereas the very word ‘culture’ in its highest form derived from the very best a nation state had to offer. There is no need for 'locality' to corporations. Indeed right now all the wealth of the world is to some extent 'offshore' or 'off world' but specifically 'off the grid'. There is no privacy in the bedroom but there continues to be no end to the privacy of banks and the elite whoever they may be.
One world order is empiric. Intrinsically it’s digital and paranoid. It’s us and them.
Unfortunately for me, I always feel like a ‘them’. Indeed even when I’m an “us’ I feel for the ‘outsider’ and working as a physician give myself and my services to everyone irregardless of whether they are ‘us or them’. Indeed I've been told over and over again by various authorities especially in government that I should treat 'them' in such a way as keep my distance and 'select' the most 'profitable' relationships as opposed to working in the 'old fashioned way'.
The Syrian government and other governments are now arresting doctors who don’t agree with the master race paranoia. Neitze is in and St. Paul is out. The new fascism says not only Jews require extermination but we all need ‘euthanasia’ because we’re doing the ‘jews’ a favour. Would you want to be a jew, or an ‘outsider’? Aren’t we being kind to kill them. Like aborting babies, isn’t this ‘good’. Aren’t we doing the child ‘good’ by protecting it from entering this ‘cruel’ world. Don’t we have to ‘protect’ the ‘planet’ like we would ‘protect the fuhrer’. The language has shifted but it's still the same old same old. Today the Jew is still the Jew but the Jew is also the gypsey and anyone else who disagrees with, well, you know, disagrees. Is disagreeable. Doesn't pop a pill to 'feel' good about the 'group think'.
In the end I guess I should be thankful that with the economic crisis continuing my government, in it's wisdom, with these new prostitution laws has perhaps, in it's generosity, offered me the right to prostitute my ass, legally. Perhaps looking on the bright side, I can hope that they're done with my ass. They won't even prosecute me for trying to sell my ass, at my age, but if some poor John or, god forbid, a Jane, offers me money for my ass, they're protect me from being 'exploited' by those bastards.
So the trinity of fear, resentment and self pity disturb my peace. I write them down and then hopefully my humpty dumpty ego will feel I ‘listened’ and I heard’ all the fine intellectual arguments that the ‘sky really is falling’ and this ‘really is a steep wall’to fall from.
But gratitude in contrast is all. God is great. So thank you lord for this day. Thank you for my breathing. Thank you for my fingers. Thank you for my dog. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my work. Thank you for my refrigerator with food for breakfast there. Thank you for my shelter this day and my rent being paid this day and all the taxes paid this day in all the hidden and convoluted ways that I am taxed. And thank you for my enemies and thank you for my friends. Thank you for my enemies so that I might better appreciate my friends. Thank you for the rain because the sunshine is so much better. Thank you for the art and industry and technology and all the solutions to all the apparent problems that exist in this ever loving always growing expanding metaphysical spiritual space of coexistence and temporary adventure. Thank you for the sunshine. Thank you for my stomach. Thank you for the coffee I’m about to make.
Thank you for morning pages. Thank you for all your blessings. Thank you Lord. Thank you especially today for my ass and my government. I am so thankful that my government is protecting it from future potential exploitation by scaring away whatever customers I might possibly have ,at my age. I hereby let all and sundry know that I am a prostitute and that if you interact with me, especially younger nubile women, I will expect token financial payment, for which you will be duly rewarded but unfortunately you will be considered a 'john' and subject to prosecution, even if your name is Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie or Ellen Degeneres.
Now I'll get back to prayer and meditation. Thank you Julia Cameron for 'morning pages.' I can focus on God and Jesus and Creativity and Love and work and gratitude. Thank you.
In Recovery, it seems that often the twin vultures of fear and resentment are sitting on the bedside ready to begin their days attack on our peace of mind. Hence, for me, morning pages, when I practiced this process seemed a kind of way of ‘squeezing the shit out of my mind’. I wrote down whatever was troubling me first. Today that’s change of staff and a contractor making a mistake that will not only cost me thousands more dollars but lose me thousands and require me to conjure up a half day of my time out a week already squeezed full by the 8 or 9 days expected out of 5 work working days available.
I’d really like to wallow in self pity. I’d like to whine and blame someone else for my troubles but frankly no one cares.
That raises it’s whole other sort of issues. I’m in the last third of my life and feel like I’ve let everyone else through the door, actually helped them, and now chivalry is dead and I’m left standing at the rear in a culture of agism and misogyny. So there’s a whole new source of self pity.
I”m normal. I liked to suck on the tit of self pity. I want to cry to my long dead mother. I want someone else to shoulder my burdens. I want Jesus to get down off the cross and make me breakfast. I mean, really!
I was happy to hear these last few days that when a man 100 years old was asked how he felt, he answered 20. I don’t feel my age. Like my still gorgeous friend who told me in her 40’s she was leering at a young man who wasn’t paying any attention when she had the insight that she was looking out at this young hulk from the inside of a corpse. She had this realization halfway through life with a body and beauty many would die for. I’m there now. I describe myself more and more as the ‘fat old white guy’. This is in a hip slick world of self help talk gurus who says things like ‘it’s a privilege to be getting old’.
Sure, but it doesn’t seem to help getting laid.
I’m a master of the quick retort when anyone wants me to get off the nipple of self pity or better still the other nipple of fear and resentment. Notice how the metaphors of vultures and breasts intertwine.
It came up when a patient told me that the Conservatives had passed a bill outlawing men seeking to pay women for sex while making it legal for women to sell sex. Meanwhile I answered that I thought it remiss that last year there was no laws against prostitution in Canada and somehow I’d missed that memo. It all brought to mind the famous comedian joke which went, when I was a young man I was disgusted at the idea of paying for sex, but now that I’m in my 50’s and begging is no longer working so well, I don’t think the idea is such a bad one.
Meanwhile the proponents suddenly began talking about teenagers (young women) being ‘exploited’ and evil male ‘pimps’ abusing ‘women’. And I found myself involuntarily retching like I do when I hear the Quebec separatists get on their soapbox. This is when women are in fact the ones who are confronting this ‘bill’ because they say it will ‘interfere’ with their ‘business’. But these ‘older women’ who are indeed the ‘madames’ must be stopped because they’re ‘obviously exploited’ by some as yet undiscovered ‘men’. I used to ask radical feminists how can they actually believe their rant about women having nothing when Queen Elizabeth was our monarch. I just listened to an Australian woman going on and on and on, the way they do, when I asked her if she happened to know that the richest most powerful 'person' in Australia was a woman. These people seem truly gender blind to Hillary Clinton while they ignore the 20 year old male hookers offering blow jobs at half the price of their female co workers in a tough street market.
I guess, sitting at the Red Square last week in a MacDonalds enjoying a Mc Cafe and egg Mc Muffin I kind of hoped that “social communism’ might eventually fall like the Berline wall. All this “I”m the poor proletariat and you’re the bad bourgeoisie” rant should somehow end. I hoped that seeing a shopping mall in the Red Square might shut up all the 'rhetoric' of that old dead 'regime'. I'd seen the phoenix rising in the church revival in St. Basils. I'd seen the new life infused in the very heart of the death culture of the old communist world. Yet I came home to Canada to hear this old debate still couched in the old language of the 'victim' and 'victimizer'. Meanwhile it's just 'me and them". I'd just listened to the song 'ding dong the witches dead' and watched the children running about the village playing again and the bells ringing only to return to the Conservative Government of Canada spouting communist rant about 'exploited women' while wanting us to buy their 'market approach to the world' . This is insane!!!
One day, in the 90’s, it was recognized that those who were always ‘helping the exploited’ were, well, like Hitler who went to the ‘rescue’ of the poor Austrians, or Stalin who invaded his neighbours to ‘help’ them. The 'exploited' never get better with the activists and the hand outs but rather they get better with community and helping each other. I don't even want to talk about this anymore because the world is 'caregivers and victims' and the 'caregivers' will kill me if I even question their corruption. I just watched the millions of dollars of government corruption called the 'Portland Hotel Society' and the major benefactors who stole the milk right out of the babies mouths got off with a handshake. MP Jenny Kwan actually blamed her 'man' .
So, forgive me, but I see the people ‘protecting adult women’ from ‘evil men’ as essentially ‘exploiting’ the prostitutes. The legislators want a cut of the action. They're the 'dirty men'. I remember too well when the women prostitutes of Paris marched through the streets and shut down the city because they didn’t want these pompous ‘daddies and mommies’ to interfere in their ‘business’.
In the ‘metaphor’ of ‘capitalism’ , “my body is my own’, means I can be a mercenary or a prostitute. Historically men risked their bodies in work or war whereas women risked their bodies in sex or childbirth but today men and women die in war and men and women work the sex trade. Men and women ‘sell their bodies’ but all the language of the 'bill' about prostitution was disgusting gender biased so there was little talk of 'men' and no mention whatsoever about the most outcast in todays society, the 'transexuals'.
There's always been a 'trade' in 'blood'. I sold my blood to pay for my tuition to medical school. Right now everyone is up in arms about ‘sale of body parts’. Meanwhile just like health care, the 'local's' are denied services whereas the elite 'shop for health care globally'. The 'elite' go overseas for postitution and buy babies they bring back to Canada where women are told "your body is your own' but the fact is the 'state' and the 'courts' especially ,own your body. There is supposed to be ‘suppy and demand’ but the ‘law makers’ and ‘judges’ in this business world are introducing sanctimonious stupidity into an area where all acknowledge the need for ‘regulation’ not ‘censure’ ,because ‘censure’ simply doesn’t work. It drives the industry into the black market and removes it from taxation and medical attention.
The next three people I spoke to about the Conservative government’s prostitution bill immediately mentioned ‘young girls’. Girls and boys are not considered men and women in Canada until they are 19 and maybe even 21 or 25 because they can look older but until they’re about 25 or 30, men can go to jail for having sex with them because our child protection laws are the most stringent in the world. So the prostitution bill has nothing to do with ‘girls or boys’ but says instead we will put adult women out of work who are in the sex trade by arresting their johns because ’women’s bodies in Canada are not their own’ but rather a woman’s body is the ‘property of the state’. Meanwhile a national woman's magazines carries an article by a new executive woman complaining about the lack of gigalows available for her sexual needs at the end of a work day when she is travelling. And a major Vancouver newspaper carries the several page story of the 50 years prostitute who finds that the 'money' makes the 'work attractive' because she can 'set her own hours' and only bemoans that fact that the younger' competition' can get 10x the rate of pay. The story sounds as much like any aging sports athlete that I thought it would do well to be in the sports pages where the 'body worker's' get paid and complain about the 'young talent' put them out of work middle aged. Meanwhile brain workers like me complain about different shit but try to sound more intelligent about it than they do on the sports pages. Meanwhile pole dancing, a wholly different matter, is showing up as the latest medical solution to an increasingly gluttonous and slothful generation all the while old men and old women in parliament are devoting their attention to lust in what was once considered a place where the state had no business, i.e. 'the bed rooms of the nation'. Now the State , which reads your every email, wants to shake down the man who leaves some money under the pillow while claiming that they're really not interested in shaking down the woman that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid the gay man or lesbian that leaves money under the pillow or god forbid even more a 'transexual' that leaves money under the pillow. The language of the bill is so 'sexist' it should cause an adult to retch. No wonder we have "Wrecking Ball" songs.
So the whole feminist ‘my body, my own’ argument goes out the window. Right? Really?
Which may be okay because that was the pillar that ‘abortion’ was built on. So if the state doesn’t allow women to ‘control their vagina’ and it certainly is already against women being ’surrogate mothers’ for hire in Canada there is no longer any ‘basis’ any longer for "personal' abortion.
Hence from the perspective of ‘pro life’ todays ‘prostitution law’ is truly revolutionary.
Seen otherwise, it would just be more post communist ‘rant’ in an age that is so far beyond bourgeoisie and proletariat. While these old tenured London School of Economics red ’sillies’ were squabbling in another centuries debate, usually smoking dope and wearing paisley bellbottom flower power earmuffs, the world moved back to the medieval days with the ’super elite’ new world order. We're no longer in the Beougeoisie and Proletariat wrong ideology but rather we're in the Emperor, Senate, Citizens and Slaves reality. There’s no proletariat and beougeosie. We’ve devolved politically to a pre Marx reality, all the while the irrelevant ’separatists’ and their other 'ist' die hards, are being used by those who always benefit from ‘divide and conquer’ for their own ends and the stupidity of scaredy cat tenured fat cat academics with their Marxist rhetoric.
Personally, I’m certainly not the emperor and I’m not even a senator. Further my pay cheque excludes me from being a ‘citizen’ because today’s ‘citizenship’ isn’t defined by ‘landowner’ or ‘vote’ but rather a more ‘elaborate’ ’status’ indicator. It’s obviously about ‘money’. To be a citizen I think one needs first to be a millionaire or multi millionaire but at least a ’net’ millionaire. I think if you even have to ’think’ about the cost of any purchase you wish to make short of lear jets and rocket ships, you’re not a citizen. Further, a real 'citizen' can't 'work' in a Marxist sense. They're rather more likely the 'Wolves of Wall Street'. A citizen should 'gamble' for money, perhaps or buy and sell slaves or something but not actually 'make' anything.
I’m a wage slave, myself. In Russia a ‘worker’ was a person to be admired. Work was admired and skills and talents were admired. Slaves, like monkeys, are ‘cute’ when they do things but the Chinese emperor had long fingernails because long fingernails are the outward manifestation and symbol of not needing to work. The elite don't 'work'. They don't 'sweat'. They 'play'. In the movie Elysium they were so far above us they lived on space stations.
Corporate leaders today are not ’national’ but ’transnational’ which is why the word ’nation’ has become an adjective. Corporations can be good or bad but the best make the most money for their stockholders so as Robert Hare says they are judged little differently than we judge snakes and other reptiles. Corporations aren’t ‘warm blooded’. Nations once were or at least aspired to be. Nations were 'tied' to land and history. Corporations are unearthly and make history. There is no ‘idealism’ surrounding the ‘brand’ whereas the very word ‘culture’ in its highest form derived from the very best a nation state had to offer. There is no need for 'locality' to corporations. Indeed right now all the wealth of the world is to some extent 'offshore' or 'off world' but specifically 'off the grid'. There is no privacy in the bedroom but there continues to be no end to the privacy of banks and the elite whoever they may be.
One world order is empiric. Intrinsically it’s digital and paranoid. It’s us and them.
Unfortunately for me, I always feel like a ‘them’. Indeed even when I’m an “us’ I feel for the ‘outsider’ and working as a physician give myself and my services to everyone irregardless of whether they are ‘us or them’. Indeed I've been told over and over again by various authorities especially in government that I should treat 'them' in such a way as keep my distance and 'select' the most 'profitable' relationships as opposed to working in the 'old fashioned way'.
The Syrian government and other governments are now arresting doctors who don’t agree with the master race paranoia. Neitze is in and St. Paul is out. The new fascism says not only Jews require extermination but we all need ‘euthanasia’ because we’re doing the ‘jews’ a favour. Would you want to be a jew, or an ‘outsider’? Aren’t we being kind to kill them. Like aborting babies, isn’t this ‘good’. Aren’t we doing the child ‘good’ by protecting it from entering this ‘cruel’ world. Don’t we have to ‘protect’ the ‘planet’ like we would ‘protect the fuhrer’. The language has shifted but it's still the same old same old. Today the Jew is still the Jew but the Jew is also the gypsey and anyone else who disagrees with, well, you know, disagrees. Is disagreeable. Doesn't pop a pill to 'feel' good about the 'group think'.
In the end I guess I should be thankful that with the economic crisis continuing my government, in it's wisdom, with these new prostitution laws has perhaps, in it's generosity, offered me the right to prostitute my ass, legally. Perhaps looking on the bright side, I can hope that they're done with my ass. They won't even prosecute me for trying to sell my ass, at my age, but if some poor John or, god forbid, a Jane, offers me money for my ass, they're protect me from being 'exploited' by those bastards.
So the trinity of fear, resentment and self pity disturb my peace. I write them down and then hopefully my humpty dumpty ego will feel I ‘listened’ and I heard’ all the fine intellectual arguments that the ‘sky really is falling’ and this ‘really is a steep wall’to fall from.
But gratitude in contrast is all. God is great. So thank you lord for this day. Thank you for my breathing. Thank you for my fingers. Thank you for my dog. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my work. Thank you for my refrigerator with food for breakfast there. Thank you for my shelter this day and my rent being paid this day and all the taxes paid this day in all the hidden and convoluted ways that I am taxed. And thank you for my enemies and thank you for my friends. Thank you for my enemies so that I might better appreciate my friends. Thank you for the rain because the sunshine is so much better. Thank you for the art and industry and technology and all the solutions to all the apparent problems that exist in this ever loving always growing expanding metaphysical spiritual space of coexistence and temporary adventure. Thank you for the sunshine. Thank you for my stomach. Thank you for the coffee I’m about to make.
Thank you for morning pages. Thank you for all your blessings. Thank you Lord. Thank you especially today for my ass and my government. I am so thankful that my government is protecting it from future potential exploitation by scaring away whatever customers I might possibly have ,at my age. I hereby let all and sundry know that I am a prostitute and that if you interact with me, especially younger nubile women, I will expect token financial payment, for which you will be duly rewarded but unfortunately you will be considered a 'john' and subject to prosecution, even if your name is Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie or Ellen Degeneres.
Now I'll get back to prayer and meditation. Thank you Julia Cameron for 'morning pages.' I can focus on God and Jesus and Creativity and Love and work and gratitude. Thank you.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Pro Choice -Abortion Lobby - Latest Set Back
When I first worked in an abortion clinic a quarter century ago the conventional wisdom was that a 'fetus' was not 'human' and that "life' did not occur until 3 to 6 months later. The idea was that in removing a 'fetus' one was really simply taking out a 'growth' or a 'tumor'. At that time I was screening pregnant women and making the referrals for abortion even before I later did abortions.
At that time I was probably considered 'pro choice' and there was clearly some sad but few cases in terms of maternal care and unavailability of contraception. That was a quarter century ago.
Since then ultrasound and other advanced technologies have indicated that life is present at a much earlier stage. Morning after abortion pills and contraceptive advances have been astounding, providing all manner of scientific information. There is even a resurgence of abstinence as a contraceptive approach, something as strange as yoga or vegetarianism was when I was a young doctor. As important sexual behaviour has been influenced by a whole range of sexually transmitted diseases previously unheard of. Along side this is a pornography industry geared to both men and women with some of the greatest stake holders being todays business women.
Politics commonly lags far behind scientific advances and businesses are simpy entrenched in what is most lucrative. I was doing 'street medicine' and volunteering my services in those old days whereas today abortion is truly Big Business and highly lucrative. Canadians who went across the US border were routinely 'scalped' by the 'curettage cowboys' keen on making a fast buck. Here abortions are scheduled and run like a factory compared to all the messiness of obstetrical practices.
Then abortion clinics advised patients to avoid obtaining ultrasound. This was because once people had ultrasound which amounted to truly 'informed consent' the benchmark of standard medical practice and truly transparent clinical delivery, the business clinics found that many who had ultrasounds decided against 'abortion'. Patients still go on to have abortions fully informed and as increasingly evidence showed that those who had abortions had subsequent psychiatric problems with increased depression risks, this transparency may well change that. In surgical practices, being informed for loss was found to improve post operative results. Hence no surgeon today would consider an amputation without fully advising the patient of the procedure and likely pros and cons of outcome using the latest media to assist in this informational session..
So here was where abortion shifted from science to politics and business. The book "Aborting America' certainly raised all manner of concerns. The scientific work of Dr. Philip Ney and colleagues further raised concerns about the ultimate 'costs' of abortion societies.
Now in British Columbia doctors are advised not to tell parents of the gender of the child for fear that women will abort the female fetuses. China is accused of using abortion to indeed build one of the largest male armies in the world. The anti feminist campaign there is said to start in the womb.
In Canada it turned out for radical feminists that when boy babies were aborted it was okay but when parents were preferentially aborting female babies that was not part of the grand plan. Subsequently all parents are denied the information that could help them make and 'informed choice." In this case 'pro choice' becomes decided 'anti choice' and 'discriminatory'.
Why all parents should be penalized and not allowed to know the gender of their child because a minority of individuals are using abortion for what radical feminists call 'frivolous' reasons is uncertain. Apparently pro life folk long ago contended that many of the 'reasons' supported by pro choice folk for 'abortion' were often 'frivolous' and 'uninformed'.
At this same time as Rush Limbaugh is roundly condemned for questioning why he should pay for others contraception when a girl wants her contraception paid for by the health care program at a religious school. Obama even steps into this providing a shoulder for the poor girl, a law student, to cry on. We have long come to expect drama from Russ Limbaugh but this bit with Obama harkens back to the medieval religio political plays done for the masses of the day. The jokesters meanwhile have a hayday making fun of the need for Post Clinton Democrats to support the broadest appeal for abortion and contraception. In the end it seems that abortion is something that non abortion folk will be encouraged, if not forced, to collectively pay for so long as only boy babies are aborted perhaps.
Politically there is a desire with the advances in scientific knowledge, the evidence of 25 years of practice, the pros and cons of that process, the ready available, even publicly funded contraception choices and now abortion to review this whole subject again. Politicians, judges and lawyers all either tremble or salivate at the thought whereas science plods on. By the time the politicians catch up science may well be working on immaculate conception much to the terror of religious groups. Only last year a transexual man had a child and extra uterine conception and delivery isn't the thing of science fiction. Bio ethicists are meanwhile doing push ups mentally with the idea that life may be as close as thought even as scientists have developped the first trans-matter delivery systems physically confirming.
It reminds me of the great joke where scientists inform God that they are now ready to make a human, and just as they pick up some dirt to complete their experiment, God says , get your own dirt.
The critical factor of public funding in these economically challenged times is not whether funding something is good, it's always good to spend somebody else's money on any good cause. The trouble is that if we fund one thing another doesn't get funded.
Radical feminists argued 'my body my own' and that might have been true but the courts held that men who believed women were using contraception but lied were still accountable for child support. As a male, I am biased. I simply don't agree that I am excluded from all discussions relevant to the future generations of society especially when radical feminists want only boy babies to be aborted.
Finally when did a 'tumor' or a 'mass of tissue' become a 'gender' Gender is implication of life and humanity so denying parents the right to know the 'gender' of their children is a somewhat draconian measure of a group claiming 'pro -choice' while denying just that. Knowing the gender of children, for those who are having children, can help them in planning the future of their children, those that live of course.
Pro Life has to date been more scientific and indeed increasing supportive of all 'rights' in the community, not just those of a privileged few.
That said, there is a real need for ongoing support of children whose parents are not traditionally motivated towards parenting. The courts have had an abysmally costly and punitive record regarding children suggesting that if we collectively took the billions of dollars that have historically funded 'court fights' and put that 'war chest' money into the 'peaceful' raising of children supporting primary care givers especially in formative years the whole issue of 'abortion' might well itself be viewed differently.
In the area today there are many questions of bio ethics, and much of today's debate simply couldn't have occurred 25 years ago because the knowledge wasn't there. Despite the abortion lobby being happy with the present lucrative business deal it seems reasonable for society at large to consider that review may well be indicated.
At that time I was probably considered 'pro choice' and there was clearly some sad but few cases in terms of maternal care and unavailability of contraception. That was a quarter century ago.
Since then ultrasound and other advanced technologies have indicated that life is present at a much earlier stage. Morning after abortion pills and contraceptive advances have been astounding, providing all manner of scientific information. There is even a resurgence of abstinence as a contraceptive approach, something as strange as yoga or vegetarianism was when I was a young doctor. As important sexual behaviour has been influenced by a whole range of sexually transmitted diseases previously unheard of. Along side this is a pornography industry geared to both men and women with some of the greatest stake holders being todays business women.
Politics commonly lags far behind scientific advances and businesses are simpy entrenched in what is most lucrative. I was doing 'street medicine' and volunteering my services in those old days whereas today abortion is truly Big Business and highly lucrative. Canadians who went across the US border were routinely 'scalped' by the 'curettage cowboys' keen on making a fast buck. Here abortions are scheduled and run like a factory compared to all the messiness of obstetrical practices.
Then abortion clinics advised patients to avoid obtaining ultrasound. This was because once people had ultrasound which amounted to truly 'informed consent' the benchmark of standard medical practice and truly transparent clinical delivery, the business clinics found that many who had ultrasounds decided against 'abortion'. Patients still go on to have abortions fully informed and as increasingly evidence showed that those who had abortions had subsequent psychiatric problems with increased depression risks, this transparency may well change that. In surgical practices, being informed for loss was found to improve post operative results. Hence no surgeon today would consider an amputation without fully advising the patient of the procedure and likely pros and cons of outcome using the latest media to assist in this informational session..
So here was where abortion shifted from science to politics and business. The book "Aborting America' certainly raised all manner of concerns. The scientific work of Dr. Philip Ney and colleagues further raised concerns about the ultimate 'costs' of abortion societies.
Now in British Columbia doctors are advised not to tell parents of the gender of the child for fear that women will abort the female fetuses. China is accused of using abortion to indeed build one of the largest male armies in the world. The anti feminist campaign there is said to start in the womb.
In Canada it turned out for radical feminists that when boy babies were aborted it was okay but when parents were preferentially aborting female babies that was not part of the grand plan. Subsequently all parents are denied the information that could help them make and 'informed choice." In this case 'pro choice' becomes decided 'anti choice' and 'discriminatory'.
Why all parents should be penalized and not allowed to know the gender of their child because a minority of individuals are using abortion for what radical feminists call 'frivolous' reasons is uncertain. Apparently pro life folk long ago contended that many of the 'reasons' supported by pro choice folk for 'abortion' were often 'frivolous' and 'uninformed'.
At this same time as Rush Limbaugh is roundly condemned for questioning why he should pay for others contraception when a girl wants her contraception paid for by the health care program at a religious school. Obama even steps into this providing a shoulder for the poor girl, a law student, to cry on. We have long come to expect drama from Russ Limbaugh but this bit with Obama harkens back to the medieval religio political plays done for the masses of the day. The jokesters meanwhile have a hayday making fun of the need for Post Clinton Democrats to support the broadest appeal for abortion and contraception. In the end it seems that abortion is something that non abortion folk will be encouraged, if not forced, to collectively pay for so long as only boy babies are aborted perhaps.
Politically there is a desire with the advances in scientific knowledge, the evidence of 25 years of practice, the pros and cons of that process, the ready available, even publicly funded contraception choices and now abortion to review this whole subject again. Politicians, judges and lawyers all either tremble or salivate at the thought whereas science plods on. By the time the politicians catch up science may well be working on immaculate conception much to the terror of religious groups. Only last year a transexual man had a child and extra uterine conception and delivery isn't the thing of science fiction. Bio ethicists are meanwhile doing push ups mentally with the idea that life may be as close as thought even as scientists have developped the first trans-matter delivery systems physically confirming.
It reminds me of the great joke where scientists inform God that they are now ready to make a human, and just as they pick up some dirt to complete their experiment, God says , get your own dirt.
The critical factor of public funding in these economically challenged times is not whether funding something is good, it's always good to spend somebody else's money on any good cause. The trouble is that if we fund one thing another doesn't get funded.
Radical feminists argued 'my body my own' and that might have been true but the courts held that men who believed women were using contraception but lied were still accountable for child support. As a male, I am biased. I simply don't agree that I am excluded from all discussions relevant to the future generations of society especially when radical feminists want only boy babies to be aborted.
Finally when did a 'tumor' or a 'mass of tissue' become a 'gender' Gender is implication of life and humanity so denying parents the right to know the 'gender' of their children is a somewhat draconian measure of a group claiming 'pro -choice' while denying just that. Knowing the gender of children, for those who are having children, can help them in planning the future of their children, those that live of course.
Pro Life has to date been more scientific and indeed increasing supportive of all 'rights' in the community, not just those of a privileged few.
That said, there is a real need for ongoing support of children whose parents are not traditionally motivated towards parenting. The courts have had an abysmally costly and punitive record regarding children suggesting that if we collectively took the billions of dollars that have historically funded 'court fights' and put that 'war chest' money into the 'peaceful' raising of children supporting primary care givers especially in formative years the whole issue of 'abortion' might well itself be viewed differently.
In the area today there are many questions of bio ethics, and much of today's debate simply couldn't have occurred 25 years ago because the knowledge wasn't there. Despite the abortion lobby being happy with the present lucrative business deal it seems reasonable for society at large to consider that review may well be indicated.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Pro Abortion Canadian Style
Mighty Judgement, How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life, by Phillip Slayton, reviews the 1988 Morgentaller Pro Abortion decision by the Supreme Court that shot down elected Parliaments 'pro life" decision of the day. At the time women were able to have abortions in hospital but the decision was made by committee. In addition women had abortions by seeking D&C procedures or suction D&C procedures for 'abdominal problems'. I did two such therapeutic abortions myself with the attending obgyn knowing full well we were doing abortions.
Back alley abortions occur today. They occur among the mentally ill. They were not 'necessary' in 1980 when I did abortions and they are not 'necessary' now. Indeed today people have access to free birth control of a wide variety of forms, morning after pills and abortion at any stage of pregnancy. As a wry Moslem Iman recently remarked, "Everything goes in Canada, except having babies."
Fetal personhood is denied today by the Supreme Court of Canada which indeed denied women 'personhood' as late as 1928. It's interesting that the female judge on the Supreme Court took the radical feminist position saying that 'no woman should be forced to carry a fetus to term' using classic radical feminist hyperbole suggesting women all over the country were being held down forcibly for 9 months and required to give birth to monsters. No doubt she saw crosses being burned in Prince George as such politically minded women rarely consider reality when they have access to their own seductive ideas.
When I did abortions any woman who was raped could have an abortion, any woman who wanted an abortion and said it would affect her mental health could have an abortion and any woman who wanted could go across the border and an abortion would be done by any of the countless American abortionists that thronged the American Canadian border competing financially for the lucrative Canadian abortion trade.. Morgentaller, a keen and rich business man, can be admired for moving an offshore business home.
The decision in Canada was made by 4 men and 1 woman against 2 judges with the 2 other Catholic Judges whose voices and discussion went unheard in the subsequent debate being absent due to sickness and politics. We can be assured that were the female judge sick, this debate would have been delayed. .Given the claim to freedom of religion in Canada it has been well demonstrated repeatedly that this halcyon cry of the secular religionists has said it's okay to have a religion as long as it's not Catholic.Christians are commonly equally damned by the secular religion of Canada.
Pro Abortion Chief Justice Dickson prevailed.
Supreme Court Judges "William MacIntyre and Gerard La Forest, distressed by what they saw as an unwise attempt by the court to take power that rightly belonged to Parliament, dissented.
William McIntyre said,"The solution to this question in this country must be left to Parliament. It is for Parliament to pronounce on and to direct social policy. This is not because Parliament can claim all wisdom and knowledge but simply because Parliament is elected for this purpose in a free democracy and , in addition, has the facilities - exposure to public opinion and information - as well as the political power to make effective it's decisions".
"As the years went by, Bill Mcintyre's pessimissm about the effect of the Charter on Canada's constitution increased. The court, he thought, used it's power "to substitute its own social policy for that of the legislative branches throughout the country".
Abortion in Canada would kill not just babies but Canada as a free and democratic country. Thanks to the messianic vision of Chief Justice Dickson and the Morgentaller decison Canada would become a 'secular legal theocracy'.
L'chaim! All my relations! .
Back alley abortions occur today. They occur among the mentally ill. They were not 'necessary' in 1980 when I did abortions and they are not 'necessary' now. Indeed today people have access to free birth control of a wide variety of forms, morning after pills and abortion at any stage of pregnancy. As a wry Moslem Iman recently remarked, "Everything goes in Canada, except having babies."
Fetal personhood is denied today by the Supreme Court of Canada which indeed denied women 'personhood' as late as 1928. It's interesting that the female judge on the Supreme Court took the radical feminist position saying that 'no woman should be forced to carry a fetus to term' using classic radical feminist hyperbole suggesting women all over the country were being held down forcibly for 9 months and required to give birth to monsters. No doubt she saw crosses being burned in Prince George as such politically minded women rarely consider reality when they have access to their own seductive ideas.
When I did abortions any woman who was raped could have an abortion, any woman who wanted an abortion and said it would affect her mental health could have an abortion and any woman who wanted could go across the border and an abortion would be done by any of the countless American abortionists that thronged the American Canadian border competing financially for the lucrative Canadian abortion trade.. Morgentaller, a keen and rich business man, can be admired for moving an offshore business home.
The decision in Canada was made by 4 men and 1 woman against 2 judges with the 2 other Catholic Judges whose voices and discussion went unheard in the subsequent debate being absent due to sickness and politics. We can be assured that were the female judge sick, this debate would have been delayed. .Given the claim to freedom of religion in Canada it has been well demonstrated repeatedly that this halcyon cry of the secular religionists has said it's okay to have a religion as long as it's not Catholic.Christians are commonly equally damned by the secular religion of Canada.
Pro Abortion Chief Justice Dickson prevailed.
Supreme Court Judges "William MacIntyre and Gerard La Forest, distressed by what they saw as an unwise attempt by the court to take power that rightly belonged to Parliament, dissented.
William McIntyre said,"The solution to this question in this country must be left to Parliament. It is for Parliament to pronounce on and to direct social policy. This is not because Parliament can claim all wisdom and knowledge but simply because Parliament is elected for this purpose in a free democracy and , in addition, has the facilities - exposure to public opinion and information - as well as the political power to make effective it's decisions".
"As the years went by, Bill Mcintyre's pessimissm about the effect of the Charter on Canada's constitution increased. The court, he thought, used it's power "to substitute its own social policy for that of the legislative branches throughout the country".
Abortion in Canada would kill not just babies but Canada as a free and democratic country. Thanks to the messianic vision of Chief Justice Dickson and the Morgentaller decison Canada would become a 'secular legal theocracy'.
L'chaim! All my relations! .
Individualism, Collectivism, Abortion and Pro life.
Individualism, to give a starting point, is defined in wikipedia as:
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of theindividual".[1] Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance[2] while opposing most external interference upon one's own interests, whether by society, family or any other group or institution.[2]
Individualism makes the individual its focus[1] and so starts "with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation." Classical liberalism (including libertarianism), existentialism andanarchism (especially individualist anarchism) are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis.[3]
Collectivism is defined in wikipedia as follows:
Collectivism is any philosophic, political, religious, economic, or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human being. Collectivism is a basic cultural element that exists as the reverse of individualism in human nature (in the same way high context culture exists as the reverse of low context culture), and stresses the priority of group goals over individual goals and the importance of cohesion within social groups (such as an "in-group", in what specific context it is defined). Collectivists usually focus on community, society, or nation. Collectivism originated in socialist theory[1], although it is used and has been used as an element in many different and diverse types of government and political, economic and educational philosophies throughout history, ranging from communalism, democracy, monarchy, and socialism to totalitarian nationalism and exists in some organized religions. Collectivism is sometimes confused with socialism, but while socialism, as a political and economic theory, draws more from collectivism than it does from individualism, it is directly concerned with perceived economic justice or injustice such as the elimination of private property. Collectivism regards group action as more important than individual action somewhat independently of cultural context, and does not propose a system of government and civil life, as socialism does and has been used in such ideologically opposite systems as monarchy. Most societies contain elements of both collectivism and individualism.
Corporatism refers to a form of collectivism that views the whole as being greater than the sum of its individual parts, and gives priority to group rights over individual rights.[2][3]
In Canada parlaiiament is a democratic organization that is limitted by the appointed Supreme Court of Canada. In the Morentaller Abortion decision the Supreme Court over turned the Parliamentary democratic 'pro life' decision of the day. This decision spoke to the essence of individualism and collectivism. Ironically, Canada's Supreme Court took the anti life decision that marks the Chinese communist pro abortion position. In contrast parliament, Canadians collectively, women and men, felt that birth was not merely an 'individual' expression but that men were indeed part of the equation, as were parents and community. The Mortgentaller decision was not so much pro female as anti male, anti family, anti community. It was communistic and anarchist in it's roots and genocidal. 4 male lawyers and 1 female lawyer over turned democracy on this decision in Canada.
Now, not surprisingly lawyers say that the fetus needs a lawyer. Certainly this would represent a 'make work' project of the first order but does speak to the 'interdependence' of our society today. (My dog Gilbert perked up and insists that as I'm not throwing the ball for him this minute, he too needs a lawyer)
The halcyon cry of the day was 'my body, my own' yet all men in Canada had by law to respond to conscription should the cry arise and now all women will too. Sloganeering so communistic in it's flavour doesn't get around the 'interdependence' of all of us. As we grow individually and as a nation in spirituality we know what First Nations people have always taught in their statement 'all my relations'.
Post modern society is a far cry different from the atomistic modernism of Mortgentaller that gave rise to two world wars and the shameful Holocaust that caused at least one Freudian to say that Morgentaller's history has caused him to 'indentify with the aggressor'. To a fetal person Morgentallerism is Naziism indeed.
Further, the Mortgentaller decision has condemned doctors who do not want to be forced to do abortions as appointed government doctors have consistently been pro death as opposed to pro life on the fetal question. Indeed having a 'pro life' position as a doctor can be the very grounds for being passed over for promotion. Pro life doctors indeed are the most condemned in CAnada today because there is an erroneous notion that abortion is somehow a 'female position'. Yet when radical feminists are advised that a 'woman's council' could well decide such decisions excluding even men, these adolescent girls want their 'own way', ie their cake and eat it, much as all children do in any society. The reality is that everyone is affected by abortion as they are affected by children.
The issue isn't male or female but rather collectivism versus individualism. The Supreme Court of Canada as late as 1928 denied women 'personhood'. It's now 2012 and they are denying children 'personhood'. This is not the dark ages either when no one knew the scientific make up of a child was DNA, both male and female. A man and a woman in society also have parents and brothers and sisters. They are by nature 'interconnected'. There are often other children.
When I worked in a street clinic I offered women the options of abortion, having the baby and giving the baby up for adoption, or keeping the baby. The latter two decisions were financially supported then and there was no fast tracked mainlining of death as in today's abortion clinic world where the lucrative nature of the practice and the industry of abortion speaks louder than any morality. Ironically, at the very time the abortion proponents argue that women 'own' their womb they are the very ones that deny women the right to 'sell' the product of their wombs. Canadian women en mass go to liberated pro women countries where women can arrange with another woman to have their child for them. The abortionists call this 'selling babies' but they are more keenly interested in keeping their brand and closing out the competition.
Further, radical feminist doctors in BC demanded they receive gratis the products of abortion for lucrative 'stem tissue' research and sale becoming royally incensed when a another doctor argued that the downtown east side women whose abortus products these were should 'own' the products of the abortus and be financially be imbursed.
Collectivism and individualism. There is no need for back alley abortions and no one is suggesting this at all. The fact is that Pro Life is Pro Choice because the abortionsists today deny women autonomy and integrity and treat women individually as 'numbers' separate and apart rather than as persons interpersonally connected. To believe the abortionists all pregnant women are divinely impregnated, fathers, mothers , grandparents, siblings and all of community unnecessary to the act of insemination. As a doctor I am ashamed of Canadian history regarding Morgentaller and think it horrendous that this man should have received an Order of Canada for his destruction of family, community and country.
Interestingly in law, the corporation is a 'legal individual' so Morgentaller and I are considered 'equal' without any consideration of the clear cut David and Goliath image this creates. I am alone and easily crippled and silenced by the abortion industry. There is and never has been any money that causes me to hold one position against another but as a physician I long ago learned to follow the money trails. Morgentaller 's brand is a money machine. A baby is not. Indeed a baby has no resources but a mother and a mother needs a community and a baby needs a village. The Canadian Supreme Court would deny our interconnectedness in this regard, give all power to the 'abortion brand' , deny women true personhood and pro choice, attack pro life advocates in shockingly deceitful ways and reduce ethics and morality to factionalism. Either you are for me or agin me, adolescents say.
The decision clearly needs review and Canadians have to ask themselves if they are wanting a democracy lead by parliament or what in this decision is 'dictatorship of the proletariat' communism where abortion and aetheism go hand in hand with a nihilism of depression. Hope is the alternative and support of women, true support of women, all women in society, is freedom.
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