My Freckled White Privilege and Freckled White Racism

I would like to state today that I have ‘white priviledge’.  Social justice warriors feel entitled to spit on me and condemn all that all white people have done.

I personally have never peed on my tent. St. Paul, a Jew, made tents and tents probably were first developed by blacks or yellow people. White people have liked tents and utensils and others basic developments without condemning them or their contributors.

Arabs gave us mathematical zero at a time when Arabs had Arab priviledge and were raping and murdering and enslaving everyone else.  The yellow people gave us gun powder at a time when they had yellow priviledge and were raping and killing and murdering everyone else.  It’s pretty clear that the world has been a series of wars beginning with families, then tribes and finally nations.  Colour hasn’t been so much a part of it in recent years.

The East Indians were part of the White English Empire just as the White Serbians were part of the Ottoman Arab empire and the Russian empire liked their yellow people. 

Before white people came to America north and South America was mostly ‘red’.  The chiefs were killing and raping and murdering and pillaging against each other but then made unholy alliances with white people and later black people to increase their killing and raping and murdering of red people.

There are aboriginal millionaires and billionaires.  They had ‘red priviledge’ and ‘still do’. The richest people in South and Central America are ‘mixed blood’.  Mixed blood privilege.

Priviledge is a funny communist word. A weaponized word.  Communism’s and cultural Marxism is paranoid. It maintains the idea of ‘us and them’.  To Marx, a truly priviledged little offensive obnoxious kept Jewish European shit who bit the hand that fed, there was ‘me and them’ and ‘they oppressed Marx’.  Marx was a fairly classic intellectual who wanted other people to kill people for his benefit. So he proposed ‘eternal war’.  Marx said we must fight until we are all losers and then we will have peace.  Today Marx would be a middle aged man who committed incest and lived in his mother’s basement with a computer and internet. 

Muslim radicals say the same. « We are the religion of peace’. We as Muslims must fight till everyone is muslim and then we will have peace.  

I love the irony. Kill to get peace.

The American missile was called the ‘Peaccmaker’.  

I was a hippy and peace nik.  I was billy clubbed by the authorities.  I marched at first as a ‘bad’ person then years later the Mayor wanted to walk beside me. I was a member of the Physicians against Nuclear War and our group got the Nobel peace prize. Considering who else has got the Nobel Peace Prize it’s kind of like being on the cover of Time, a bit of dubious priviledge.

I have always thought there were rich and poor. I just haven’t thought all the rich oppressed the poor. Certainly some do. I have also thought there were the ‘elite’ and the rest of us.  I don’t know that the ‘elite’ oppress the rest of us but they are to my mind an ugly segment of the rich and powerful.

I have had the privilège of meeting the truly rich and powerful.  

I have met and known one of the richest most powerful Jewish men in Canada and he really was a mensch.  Really.  Didn’t oppress anyone. Smarter than I could ever hope to be and his family were all whips like him. Banking industry. I met  same of boring  bloke who was white and Scottish.  They love working with numbers and money.  The Scottish guy owned some banks and I knew him and the family. Finest man I’ve ever met. White.  Liked bag pipe music. We shared that in common. I »ve met the richest most famous and powerful aboriginal people too. I don’t know if they were millionaires and don’t think they were billionaires but they were wonderful. Loved them. Enjoyed their company.  Saw them and their family and friends and they were salt of the earth.  Priviledge with strength and brains and kindness for sure.  Didn’t see them oppressing anyone. 

I’ve not known any blacks who were wealthy and powerful but my doctor as a child was a black man and he was incredible.  I also learned so much from a yellow doctor and he and his family saved my soul at a low point in my life when the whites, browns, yellows and reds were not around.  A yellow man chose to invite me into his home and share his family and food and give me hope when I was feeling pretty hopeless. 

He loved Jesus and showed me the painting of Jesus he’d done as a boy.  He didn’t paint a yellow Jesus or a black Jesus but it wasn’t a European thin nosed Jesus either. Kind of a peasant Jesus he said he’d seen in a childish vision.

Lots of priviledged people out there. Every colour.  

Personally I got up this morning. I was in my trailer. I’ve a Harley Davidson at the door. I’ve a blind cockapoo. I’m really priviledged to have a dog.  I’m really priviledged to have clothing. I ‘m wearing a Harley Davidson T-shirt I slept in which I bought a dozen years ago in the US. My underwear’s which I slept in are black and a couple of years old. I wash my clothes each week. That’s a real priviledge.

See I get the feeling that people who talk colour and priviledge have done this thing which government do all the time. It’s called ‘terms of reference’.  It’s ‘selective’.  It’s okay to talk about Jews and Palestinians today but not Chinese and Tibetans.  The Somalians invaded Ethiopia and lost so that’s not something we talk about. If the poor Somalians had won, it would be a different thing.

The winner writes history. Not much talk about Culloden.  Not much talk about my group being bad to my group.  Lots of « selective bias ».  Lots of rhetoric. Not much substance. Lots of propaganda telling us who the ‘groupthink’ is the bad guy or girl.

The bottom line is I want what you have and you want what I have. It just takes a little history to understand this. Great movies like Canada’s Duddy Kravitz show some of the answers.  

Why did St. Francis throw away his wealth for a life of poverty?  Marx was a kafetch and groveller. He said the God of the Jews was Money but instead it was his God. He wanted money and power. When people want money and power they make themselves look better by saying they’re ‘acting on behalf of this ‘idea’, ‘god’, ‘vision’, whatever.  It’s really still remains,  I want what you have but I’m making myself look good by calling you down saying you have it because of ‘colour’ , ‘priviledge’, ‘history’  or something other’.  

Buddha said ‘Desire is the cause of all suffering’.

Kierkegaard said « Life is suffering until death. »

I’m white. It’s not going to change. Well, in fact I’m freckled which makes me a kind of  multicoloured and spoofed  and an outsider.   I’m mixed with a bit of brown, yellow, red, black and white all together. Mostly I’m grey and all of my problems today are racism against the grey people. It’s the young people who don’t worship us and give us all the money, time and talent like used to happen in the good ole tribal days when despite any colour the young did as they were told by their elders and betters. I personally need some teen agers to polish my motorcycle every day. 

Being Celtic Scottish/Irish we also didn’t share the misogyny of the Mediterranean’s and English. We had women leaders when other countries were still enslaving theirs. We’re pretty incredible but I’ve never met a black, red, yellow, or brown person that seems to know who even the Celts were or are.  

That is sad. 

All the Diversity Warriors are the great homogenizers. They don’t respect culture or ethnicity or acknowledge that Germans are the great road builders that the Italians once were.  Canadians make shitty roads but they’re better than the Indians make.   

The Diversity Warriers are the Great Homogenizers.  They deny cultural differences. True there was that one Jamaican bobsled team and maybe there will be more but I’ve never met a kid from Alabama that liked hockey like I did. 

Viva la Différence.

Now I’m having coffee. I roast my own and grind my own and pour my own.  I think of priviledge as feather beds and satin sheets and several young boys and girls in the bed when you wake up. I think of servants bringing me Ethiopian coffee and pouring the bath and giving me a massage in the morning.  I think of secretaries and people who are all about me taking my commands.  I think of photographers and media personnel saving me from the onerous work of taking my own selfies. 

I don’t have that. The elite do. Mugabe was one of the worst elite and he was black and he even had a huge plane that was everything a pimpmobile strives to be. He was the event of red and brown drug dealers. White Hitler was an elite. His partner Eva Brawn must have been the greatest of bad ads drug and sex partners to have survived living with such a royal asshole.  We have lots of Elites today. Yellow elites like the murdering psychopath  Xi Ling.  White elites like nasty  Putin.  Really bad elites like Hussan Rouhani who probably has Jew blood in his coffee each morning..  

Generally speaking if you can be a pedophile and get away with it you might be an elite. Also if you can today have a private jet fly you and your friends to a party in Dubai you may be an elite.  

Laura is a grandmother. Gilbert the cockapoo was on top of her licking her face this morning. Normally he’s licking my face. So I had the priviledge of Laura being in bed and my escaping to the toilet without the usual face licking and body squirming.

I don’t have a royal ass wiper.  I was thankful for toilet paper.  I’ve known days when I’ve not had toilet paper.  Shitty days.  The elite probably have some kind of safety net that preserves them from the sudden awareness that there is no toilet paper. I wiped my own ass this morning despite my white priviledge.

I know I have a motorcycle and it’s a Harley and there are those people who only have a Honda. I once only had a Honda.  When I focus on what I don’t have and look at those around me I see I’m not priviledged and if they’re black like my black friend with all his friends, everyone likes the guy, I thinks it’s race.  People don’t like me because I’m white. I can’t change that so fuck them. It’s not because I’m an asshole.e My aboriginal friends had free university where as I worked 3 jobs day days evenings and weekends  and gave blood to get my education.  I don’t feel very elite about that.  I liked Einstein saying genius was 99% persperation and 1% inspiration. But he was a Jewish elite, a stupid guy who got his awards because he was Jewish. Everyone knows that? 

I’ve got this trailer and this motorcycle and a whole bunch of memories. I could have had a mansion but I wanted to travel so had a sailboat instead. I could have had security but I loved adventure. I can ‘explain’ my life as one of oppression and suffering or I can have gratitude for what I did have. I had a lot. Mostly I’m thankful for a mother and father who loved me and that’s been the greatest priviledge I’ve had.  I’ve known some elite who didn’t get that. They look rich but they are the poorest people I’ve known. Others not so.

Now I’m going to get on with my day looking to be offended and for someone else to blame. 

31 yo Northern Medical Stories -

Jack Hildes said, “You’ll have to wait till everyone dies to tell some of these stories. Otherwise they’ll get rid of you.”  He was laughing.  I’d go over cases with him each week and explain what I’d found.

Story #1

His favourite was the native lady who told me,

“I want to see my lover again but I don’t want any more surgery.”

This seemed a strange thing to say so I asked more questions. I tended to do that and often wondered  why others didn’t. I suspect a lot of people don’t want to hear what will follow.

“He likes to drink. I like to drink.  My old man here doesn’t know. We’ve been getting together for years at least once maybe twice a year. .  I just tell the doctors my stomach hurts and they send me down to Winnipeg.  There they do surgery and take out something else with their knives .Then I can spend three months drinking and being sweet with him before I have to come back north.  I miss him so bad but I don’t want any more surgery.”

“What surgery have you had?  

“My appendix was the first time. Then my gall bladder. They did a hysterectomy. Then they took out some scars and some other stuff.  They even took some of my stomach. Last time they operated on my lung. My sweetie said there’s nothing more they can take out. But my man here would beat me if he knew. There’s no other way I can go. Can you help me doctor.”

I reviewed the file. Sure enough 10 years of surgery. Every scan known to man. Every blood test.  All she did was say “my stomach hurts’.  No further history recorded.  Eventually some surgery and then she’d be let go to the community. She’d drink for three months and stay with her “auntie“.

I discussed it with Jack who laughed at all the unnecessary investigation and surgery. 

“I don’t know how many people here are doing just this. They don’t seem to care at the university.  You’ll have to send her out but I’d just express some concern about further surgery and possibility of surgical scarring. That might save her from the knife. I’d love you to publish that story after the doctors who did this were gone. Maybe a new set of doctors could learn. ‘

Story #2

I was interested in the children with ear infections and hearing loss and the elegant papers written about the different Eustachian tubes in natives and the particular resistance to antibiotics related to the native genetics.

Really, whole journals and thousands of academic papers. Not a word on compliance at the time. We’d have internists and infectious disease specialists fly in to hold a clinic. The mothers would bring the children.  They’d get the latest and greatest antibiotics. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Eventually the children would  get sent off the reserve and get tubes in their ears.  This was a problem because the kids were not supposed to swim with tubes but swimming was the principle summer recreation on the Rez. More infections, more antibiotics, more tubes.

I’d sit down and talk to the mothers.  They didn’t like talking to white men.  I had the local native healer with me and together we got the story. They’d  just answer ‘yes’ to what the white man doctor said.

“They get angry when you disagree with them.” She told me. 

Angry?

“Not mad angry, but silent angry.  They’re not happy.”

“So you answer ‘yes’.  I said.

“Yes makes them happy.”

They’re very sensitive to the mood of the interviewer.  The content of the questions aren’t as important.  They’re very agreeable and want to please because they don’t want to get hit. All the women on the ‘wet reserves’ had been hit and the white man hadn’t helped. He sold the booze to their men. The chiefs had a huge drinking problem. So bad they wouldn’t talk to me about it. 

So when the ENT doctors came and they saw their kids they answered what they thought the doctors wanted them to say..

Now the children don’t like the ear drops.  Most of the infections, the externa media cultured pseudomonas eventually. If they were treated early with amoxil the acute otitis cleared. The chronic was a different matter.  The kids didn’t like drops and they spit out their pills. The native mother’s didn’t believe in ‘forcing’ kids to take medicine.  They also were afraid of putting things in the kids ears when they were squirming.

I must have been the only doctor in years who did home visits. I’d get a boat to take me from the island nursing station to the shore. Then I’d walk from house to house with a nurse and ask if I could come in. The natives were happy. I got served great bannock. I’d ask to use the washroom and find years of the most expensive and latest medications for ear infections all piled neatly unused in the cabinets. 

The kids simply weren’t getting any of the pills. They were all there in bottles stored in cabinets.  All the drops and all the pills.  In all the homes I visitted there was a stock pile of medications that could have treated a village.

“He won’t take the pills. They taste awful.”

“He spits them out?” I asked.

“Yes, I’ve tasted them. They’re bitter. If they want children to take the pills they must make them taste better. It’s not his fault. I tried hiding them in honey and he still spit them out.”  

I’ve got a dog. It’s not rocket science. Kids are at least as smart as dogs.  My dog spits out his pills. Sometimes he won’t even take fresh roast because he tastes the pills.  Kids aren’t stupid.  

“He won’t let me hold his head. He runs away into the woods.  Sometimes half the village is looking for children after the white men doctors come and leave their stupid medicine ear drops.”  

My interest in ‘non compliance with medical regimen’ and ‘non adherence to medical regimen’ and ‘resistance’ as it’s called in psychiatry and later ‘motivation to change’ research we used in addiction medicine was triggered in general practice then strengthened in Community Medicine.  Placebo response in chronic diseases is as much as 30% so treatment should be better than placebo but with non compliance running at 50% in some populations what ever benefit the Cadillac latest medicine offered was a mute point in my clinical work. In the psychiatric population ‘non complaince’ rises to 80%.  

It is the elephant in the living room.

Story # 3

Nutritionists came to the reserve to do a survey. They proceeded to invite dozens of the mothers to the nursing station or saw them after I ran a clinic.  They were a trapped pupulation waiting for a boat ride back to their houses.  I looked at the questionnaire. I knew the native ladies were going to just be answering ‘yes’.  I asked them about this.  There was no provision for that. They noted the natives seemed agreeable.

I pointed to one question asking them the ‘colour and consistency of the stool’.  Really this is the ‘norm’ for so much of what we see in reality. The university is full of psychotic people. Even this young nutritionist hadn’t figured out what was wrong with the question.  

“Have you ever used an outhouse?” I asked her.  Very Miss Chatelaine as K.D. Laing so aptly observed.

“No,why?”

“The reserves have outhouses. No one can see anything in the outhouse.  No one can sort out the colour and consistency of their own poop in the pool beneath them.” I said.

“Martha,”  I said to one of the native ladies I’d just seen. “ Is your poop purple with candy strip rainbow colours?”

“Yes, doctor.” She replied. 

The medical research was bad enough but the allied professional research was based on thoroughly outdated models. Real 1950’s stuff.  Meanwhile I’m interested in ‘truth’. The nutritionist got really angry at me. 

“You’ve ruined all my research. How could you!”

Now that’s the normal response I get. “Kill the messenger”. It’s standard. Today I don’t even bother. Idiots reproduce.  There’s a whole lot of money in pseudoscience and lies. The truth is never popular.

Back then I’d like to find out the truth because it always amused Jack. When I’d tell he’d shake his head .

Jack had been the doctor who gained fame in the polio epidemic in Winnipeg. He mortgaged his own house to get another respirator.  He had teams of volunteers bagging people and then switching them on and off the respirators to open their lungs more.  

“If we’d waited for the politicians to get around to doing anything we would have had thousands more dead. Governments are good but they’re too slow.”

He’d established the Circumpolar Health alliance and develop the the Northern Medical Unit. I’d fly back and forth with him to the north. We’d meet with Elijah Harper. His “coup” with me was I was the first “trilateral contract. He insisted the government to include the natives in the contract with the University. 

Story #3

I wrote a letter to the head of medicine, “She murdered my patient.” I said. 

The College of Physicians and Surgeons advised me that I was going to lose my license for condemning a nurse. It was unprofessional to do this. I’d studied professionalism and knew they liked to make up their own meanings to old words to suit their ends. I respect language. I’ve had an Oxford Dictionary since teen years. Governments don’t respect words or ideas. The more left leaning the more they say even truth is subjective. Language is relative to government interested in power, control and money. 

Dr Johnson paraphrased by Bob Dylan, Nobel Lauriate, said “steal a little and they put you in jail, steal lot and they make you king”.

It’s important to know that no whistle blower has gone without punishment in Canada. I’ve been a good ‘in house’ critic and avoided ‘out house’ criticism , taking the matter directly to the public or some outside agency.  I’ve just wanted the problem solved so my patients don’t suffer.

The patient was a lovely young man who’d been drinking the night before and come in with epigastric pain. I did all the examination I could that day before the plane came to take me back to Winnipeg. It was a Friday. He’d been drinking on the Thursday night. I made the diagnosis of ‘gastritis.’  I did a complete physical, and drew a picture of the abdomen. Recorded all the history and then recorded the provisional diagnosis and the differential. 

I concluded 

1. Patient must not have any pain killers 

2. If pain persists he must be medi evacuated for abdominal X-ray and surgical consult.

It was boldly charted and remained as evidence. 

The nurse on the reserve was a brilliant native woman who loving her people had left, gone to university, got her nursing degree and come back. She was abused royally.  It was so hard to get native people to come to the reserve and when it’s your own, there’s even more ammunition to apply. We loved her because she was so bright and so knowledbeable about the community. She should have been head nurse but the ministry sent in a new ‘black ‘ nurse with no skills or experience.  It was the beginning of cultural communism and the trend to let racism override competence and training.

My friend said, “she hates Indians. You’d think being black she’d understand but instead she hates us worse than any white man’.

My friend quit the reserve because of her. Came to the city. Dr. Hildes was so disappointed. He wanted local people to return to their communities. I was involved helping him with the native doctor training program. 

The black nurse ignored what I’d written.  She didn’t everything wrong. 

I was on call 24 hours/ 7 days a week. She could have called me.  She didn’t. My English colleague was 20 minutes away at Island Lake.  She could have called him. She didn’t. She wouldn’t listen to the pleas of the native nurse.  Ignoring  what I’d written, on her her own she gave the guy with an acute abdomen and no clear diagnosis morphine, and kept giving this guy morphine. That’s cause for malpractice without my notes blatantly ignored. 

His family brought him back, that night despite the morphine. The pain was that bad. 

“Dr. Hay said he should be medivac’d if the pain persisted.” The native nurse and her family insisted. She ignored them. The native nurse tried to intervene. She got shouted down.  

“She called me racist for questioning her!” She’d later tell me in the city where she’d got a nursing job and begun dating my colleague. 

“I don’t take orders from a honky white doctor. The patients faking it. “ she told my friend who vouched for the character of the youth health worker with family.  I’d hear my nurse friends frustration later when she told me the horrid tale. 

The next day the morphine was increased. The chief came because the family went to him. She shouted down the chief calling him ‘racist’ for questioning her.

Then I got a call on Sunday from my English doctor friend.

“Do you know anything about this ‘acute abdomen. He was sent by medivac to here but there’s no records and I didn’t hear about it. The pilot was afraid he was going to die in the plane . Nothing was arranged. He’s in a bad way. Completely dehydrated and in horrible pain.  Delirious. Febrile. I’ve called the jet. It should have been called to meet the bush plane. It’s going to take another couple of hours. This guys needs emergency. I’ve got lines in and am rehydrating him but his bellies rigid. .  I should have been called.”

I filled him in, furious that I’d not been called. 

The young man was operated on immediately on arrival. He died. Ruptured gallbladder.  

“We probably could have saved him if he only got here hours earlier”, the surgeon told me.

I said, “she murdered my patient.”  I wrote out all of what had transpired.

“You will lose your license unless you change your letter now to ‘there was a preventable death’.  Apparently only a judge can say ‘murder’. But more importantly criticism of a colleague in an allied field is more offensive than actually  killing patients according to the government doctor. .

She’d go on to kill a dozen more natives , most of them babies and children.  There was a provincial enquiry. The chief and council had physically thrown her off one reserve and shed’ been sent to another where her killing spree continued. She was literally evicted from that reserve and the Chief was going to shoot her if she ever stepped foot on the reserve. I heard that it was simply unheard of to have a reserve take such strong measures but in this case two separate reserves had been inflicted with her malice or incompetence and both had retaliated. 

The head of psychiatry took me aside and told me. 

“They’d never tell you. I’ve just been all day in the hearing. Your name came up. You identified her with her first kill. I saw how they crucified you. If they weren’t so full of themselves they would have listened to you and a dozen natives, infants and children would be alive today.” He said. 

‘What’s going to happen to her.?” 

“She’s not going to be able to practice again in Manitoba. It’s easy to stop a doctor practicing but nurses have a much more powerful union. I heard that she was going to Northern Saskatchewan. Couldn’t believe it myself. But that’s what I heard. I just wanted you to know you made the right call. You’re a good doctor Bill. Don’t forget it. And don’t let the turkeys get you down.” He was one of my best mentors., a friend of Dr. Hildes.

In the back room I heard the black nurse was the lesbian lover of the most senior person in this government health care. I’ve have always said, “follow the money and when it’s not the money , find the  sex.”   Humans are rarely more complicated. 

Maureen was crying in her sleep one night when I woke her. She told me she’d seen a nurse kill a baby.

“I can’t say anything. I want my job. I saw what happened to you.  I can’t go through that. You don’t get ahead at the university doing stuff like that. Look what happened to you. They almost took your license. You’re persona non grata. I can’t go through all that condemnation and have people vilifying me. I just want to do my job.’ She said sobbing. 

“But she killed the patient. There’s probably more. I don’t know. I cwertainly couldn’t recommend anyone go through what I did and my nurse might well have been a serial murderer and they just buried it and tried to ruin me.” 

“ I just saw her kill one baby.  Maybe  I’m mistaken. I can’t be sure. But I’m not going to take the risk. Even if I’m right they’d punish me like they punished you. I might be wrong.” She knew she wasn’t, didn’t want to live with the guilt but didn’t want to be hurt so bad on one cas she’d not be able to help all the others.. she was a great doctor and would go on to be a great pediatrician with a great career helping countless children and families. 

I held her.  I’ve talked to dozens of doctors now who’ve told me how frightened they are of the College of Physicians and Surgeons.  

The nurse Maureen saw would eventually be caught.  She became a famous case in Canada. She killed dozens of babies. It wasn’t long after I held Maureen that some one blew the whistle. It got to the media. It became public.  Eventually the nurse was prosecuted.  

I miss Dr. Jack Hildes. I’d come to him and we’d laugh. Nothing fazed him. He was truly a mensch.  

I 

Ethiopia - Addis Ababa - out and about and musings

I fell asleep at 7 and am now wide awake at midnight. I did a day of a three day city tour with Lesan Gold Hailu, tour operator ,whose now friends on Facebook. He shared pictures of us.  It’s always a surprise seeing oneself in a picture. I loved most Holy Trinity Cathedral but then I’d really loved seeing the bones of Lucy and all the art and learning in the National Ethiopian Museum.

I loved the donkey’s but I’ve been a burrofan forever, since seeing the burro races while living in Mexico.  They’re such characters, real personality, tough attitude, but timid about little strange things.  Their personality reminded me of my Scotty Terrier, Stuart.  The mules are character too. Floppy mutt ears.  Quite the competition for the road with mules, donkeys, women carrying great burdens on their heads and shoulders, regular pedestrians,  and all manner and age of cars as well as motorcycles.  The infrastructure for traffic is congested the same as Italy and Greece.  What sidewalks existed have become parking spaces.  Unlike Vancouver they don’t have politicians with bicycle lane fetishes. The road constructions going on are for vehicles and pedestrians without political favouritism. 

Most of the motorcycles I’ve seen here so far were being used for pizza delivery.  The guys have hot boxes they carry on the back.   Pizza delivery is as popular and evidence of modern era as anything.   There are so many restaurants here and all I’ve read speaks of  the exciting night life and vibrant music scene. Naomi, from Langley Canada presently spear heading a campaign to stop smoking (cigarettes and legal weed) in condos, texted me to say her friends who live here were performing a gig several nights a week.  What a small world.  I’m flying onto Gondar in the next day or two though would have loved to meet one of Naomi’s ball room dance friends.

I had a delicious chicken noodle soup and a couple of cafe au lait at the Best Western outdoor cafe.  I asked for injera, on the side. It was delicious.  It’s made from a local plant, a kind of rice tasting bread like creation.  The Best Western Hotel I’m staying in has this outdoor cafe off from the street so unbothered by passing beggars. They’re here but not nearly as intrusive as elsewhere. 

I ate, drank coffee and wrote on my iPad Pro “air dropping” pictures I’d taken from my iPhone. It’s really one of my joys in life.  When I was in Gr 3 or 4, Mrs. Glover gave our class the assignment in  geography of reading about a place, imagining we were travelling there, then  writing letters home to our family telling them what we were seeing and doing.  I got so into the assignment that Mrs. Glover told my mother she’d had no other student so enthusiastic. I wrote reams.  

Ruth Kozak, our resident  travel writer in Vancouver, author of Shadow of the Lion, who I met at a Canadian Authors Association dinner, is still going strong at 85.  She loves Greece and wrote a travel guide of Athens at one time.  By comparison I’m a ‘travel blogger’.  I love photography.  My father helped me set up a dark room when I was a teen. We used his plywood ice fishing shack, tar papering out the light and covering over the hole in the floor..  He loved photography too. My older brother  got awards for his pictures of birds, his predator photos in a museum in Italy. . Now my nephew Graeme following in the family tradition is a cinematographer with a engineers approach to the whole subject. I admire his stills and films. I recently told him about visiting Scotland in my youth and meeting my uncle then who was a professional  Seagull photographer.  

I like that a “picture says a thousand words” and enjoy the combination of writing with photography. It’s what I like myself and am not alone as the multimedia production is a going concern with the technical advances in the medium. .  Apple has done a fine job of interfacing their tools and formats.  I can’t say I enjoy the technical aspects as much as my nephews but I do enjoy finding solutions. “Air drop” and “blue tooth” are great tools. I’m also using a Panasonic Lumix, a sweet little pocket smart camera with Leica lens I picked up in New York a few years back when I dropped the little Nikon pocket camper and needed a replacement on that trip. Mostly I’m satisfied with the iPhone camera, my brother telling me us ‘iPhone camera folk had their own society and competitions.”   Right now I’m transferring Lumix pictures with a little chip card, not nearly as much fun as “blue tooth and air drop.”

Lesan took me to the University of Addis Ababa.  They have a beautiful Kennedy Library from when JFK visited and left an endowment.  If I’d had time I would have loved to have  met  Abraham Tejera, MD PHD. He’s with the Department of Psychiatry at the Addis Ababa University. I first read about his incredible research when I came across of a paper of his on Khat addiction in the Horn of Africa. Reading Verghese’s , another great doctor’s, novel of Ethiopia, Cutting the Stone I noted that one of the characters, a doctor,  regularly used Khat, a mild stimulant.  I’ve had a couple of patients now in my addiction practice who have told me about using Khat so it’s making it’s way to Canada.  One day I’d love to hear Dr. Tejera present at the International Society of Addiction Medicine conferences as his work is both clinical and academic. He’s obviously a world authority and known by my former mentor Dr. Nady El Guebaly who recently got the Order of Canada for his work in addictions.  Dr. Tejera has had broad reaching interests and does really impressive scientific research. His most recent project is Neuropsychiatric Genetics of African Populations - Psychosis.  Ethiopia  produces great scientific researchers.

On my own, I took a walk from my Best Western Hotel and found I’m located on a major hotel ,restaurant and night club strip. Also all around are these vertical malls I first encountered in Hong Kong. They have a main entrance where there’s a guard who checks each person for weapons.  Maybe it’s not every person but me, because in my Tilly kkaki coloured jacket and poor imitation of  Steven Segall, one of my all time favourite martial arts movie stars, I get checked. One poor guard was shocked to feel my hard leather camera pouch, thinking I was packing. .  After that quick frisk part is over the Malls open into these  central atrium with the shops all around the 5 to 6 floors above.  In Hong Kong the buildings tended to focus on electronics or fashion but here the shops are everything, jeweller, next to high end fashion, next to computer store, then restaurant, and next a tattoo shop and a stationary store beside a liquor store. The organization is disturbing to Hudson Bay ordered Canadian mind.   

My brother, Ron,  who’d lived in Hong Kong and loved the Chinese culture and I, would talk about the different thinking that would put a bathroom supplies beside toys.  He’d noticed the same but loved the adventure of the search for things which made him think an afternoon at second hand stores or garage sale was fun.   I like a different types of mental organization.  I  see  this ‘messy’ treasure hunt experience as common too in Saipan.  

There really is such a variety in the stores here and the fashion reaches right to high end.   I had an Americano coffee  in one of these vertical malls watching the shoppers as well as the people below entering from the street.  Evening was coming on and the girls really were beginning to sparkle. It’s such a youth culture with so many in their 20’s. Lesan, my very bright guide, had studied hospitality and had his guide license and developed a tour business. I was surprised to learn he was only 22.  

There’s such an entrepreneurial atmosphere here with the evidence in the markets, business and trade everywhere. Reading the history of Ethiopia, it’s always been an agricultural power house.  The emperor saw Addis Ababa as a major trade centre. The Emperors in the past moved their residence around the country rather than having everyone come to a central location.  Lesan told me agriculture is still central to the economy of Ethiopia. Landowning and farming are so important. Ethiopian Coffee, sought after the world over, and one of my all time favourites, is a major export from Eastern Ethiopia. 

Ethiopia is also resource rich in minerals but  is vastly under developed if only because of the wars, Muslim Invasion and two Italian Invasions , Somalia invasions and the 20 year horror and disaster of the Communist take over by the DERG , followed by the civil war Liberation to ouste the  “Red Terror”. Aethest communist socialist have always  killed millions whenever they gain power. Now with a little space of peace these Christian Ethiopians are back to being a powerhouse of production. St. Paul was a tent maker and sales man and the Jews have always been admired for their business sense.  Ethiopia has always been on the trade route for Eastern spices and western guns. It once was along the Arab slave trade until Christians the world over began the move to outlaw slaves.  Ethiopians and the Coptic Church were early against it but the slave trade continued for sometime flowing north to the Arab nations out of sight. 

People talk of St. Paul 2000 years ago writing about slaves minding their places but everyone had slaves of all colours and races the world over especially aboriginals and pagans back then.  The great works of modern civilizations were often built with the aid of slave labour.   The movement against slavery began in 1823 with the first Anti Slavery Society in England followed by Royal Assent for the Abolition Act 10 years later. King Louis X of France had abolitioned slavery in France first in the 14th century.  America fought a Civil War over slavery, it’s abolitionist movement being inspired by enlightened Christians. Amazing Grace, that wondrous song was written by a former slave trader who converted . The American marines fought the slave trading Muslim pirates of North Africa to put a stop to their attacking American ships and selling off all the mostly whitecrews and passengers to slavery. .By contrast the Muslims and Arabs were a centre of slavery until very recently. It was only in 1948 that slavery was declared illegal under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania in Northwest Africa was the last country to abolish slavery in 1981.  Ironically the Democrats in the US forget their party was for slavery while the Republicans were the principal abolitionists through history. Today’s it’s ironically portrayed to often as a ‘racist’ when slavery was never solely racial but always economic.  The white European Christians were the first to outlaw it and the Arabs Muslims last. Mostly it had more to do with economics and politics.   Despite the outlawing of ‘chattel slavery’ much slavery persists today in African countries and countries around the world. The aetheist communist countries have been particularly central in the sex slavery industry.  

Being here I don’t think of myself as ‘white’ because I’m mostly among Christians.  I suspect others see me as such since when I pass a window I see my minority status but I think as Christians we  consider higher considerations of relationship. I think the Ethiopians think more of themselves as their land and geographical location like my aboriginal priest colleague Rev. Vivian Seegers who began the Urban Aboriginal Ministry in Canada.

I asked a Catholic Colleague how his mother had responded when he married his lovely but “different” wife.  He put me on the spot for a minute funning me as only the Irish would asking me seriously straight faced ‘what do you mean by different.” Fearing I’d made a major faux pas I was stammering for a while  before  saying “I mean your marriage is  ‘inter racial’, nothing wrong with it, just less common.” 

  “My mother didn’t see it as such,” he responded,”She’s catholic. That’s all that matters.’  

Reading Traditional Society by the famed anthropologist Diamond it’s important to see how any difference was a threat to people.  The stranger is as likely to be an enemy as a friend so caution has always been considered ‘healthy’.  Marx  divided the multi variate world into us and them fearing any differences.  Islam still a religion state not having experienced the Magna Carta of England or the Jeffersonian Principle of separation of religion and state promised a ‘religion of peace’ only when that had conquered or assimilated everyone to Islam.  The Ethiopian Coptic Christian Church by contrast has this interest inclusive nature of the New Testament of Jesus coupled with the Israeli exclusive old temperament nature.  

Ethiopians, reading their history don’t seem to care about colour or race having fought off blacks and white, muslims and aetheists.  Some of that has to do with their highland identity which after the fall of the Axum empire had them separate and apart in the highlands and often without a seaport to join them more forcefully with the rest of the world.  This has contributed to their distinct identity which they obviously hold highly.  Also they have a strong sense of morality.. 

Seeing the beautiful young Ethiopian women dressed up to kill heading out to the night clubs I was confident for the future of the country. All day long I’d seen pretty and sometimes stunningly beautiful women  in the attractive blue and grey cammo uniforms casually holding Ak 103, the favoured assault rifles of the Ethiopian defence forces.  Older even more beautiful and stylish women walked with their husbands and well dressed and well behaved children as proud family units.  Such strength,  resilience and obvious love of men, women , children and family. 

 Knowing I’m trying to look like Steven Segal to ward off pick pockets and con artists I’m still surprised to see looks of female appreciation of my being a man as catch a glance in a crowd.  By contrast I’m not even shocked  by the ladies strutting their stuff in the latest fashion, short skirts and high heels,  wearing war paint,  obviously intent on taking no prisoners.The young men, like young men the world over seem ready and willing to sacrifice and take a fall for their country. Marriage with family and all the ritual is a tremendous orthodox affair here.    

I feel  I’m relaxing again after the experince of Canada where so many are  “offended”  by sex and family.  The war on men is such that Hoff Summers, wrote the  seminal  book called War on Boys white a whole political party in the US, the Democrats,  celebrate the murder of unborn babies in their last trimester. Here Ethiopian and the Church celebrate life whereas in the US while the President speaks out against third trimester abortion a Democrat politician already  promoting euthanasia for Children.  The Trudeau family have always been pro abortion and euthanasia except of course for themselves, as the  privileged elite so often are. As always the dead don’t get a vote.

I love the Chinese respect and so often loving care of the elderly. On the plane I watched the hilarious comedy, Crazy Rich Asians emphasing family and relationships.  Here I’ve seen the young caring for the elderly and couldn’t help noticing how Lesan the guide was pacing himself and caring about me as  we climbed a little hill.  As only a man can have I had mixed feelings about his solicitiousness, regarding my age.  He offered  to carry my pack as we climbed stairs in the museums, I believe that’s the care for young and old is connected and leads to a multidimensional respect so different from the narcissists. Narcissists focus solely on power and believe like paranoids that others think like and feel like they do but are disguising it to gain advantage.  I’m thankful for the choice that has allowed me to travel whereas my friend prefers their house though it’s left them like farmers whose properties are worth so much, land rich,  money poor,  It also ties them to  their work. I’m more of a sailor.  

Travelling  we really see ourselves as much as that which is foreign.  Transference and Countertransference become more apparent at the group levels.  Lesan showed me a peculiar board game favoured through history by the herders and traders. “Once you start playing it it takes hours to finish” It was perfect for people watching their herds or waiting for deals. Having nothing to do for long periods they played it to pass the time.   

Enough musings. I’m actually feeling like a nap before breakfast and church. This hotel has 24 hour room service but I think I can wait for the great spread again I encountered this morning which comes with the room. 

Board game of herders that takes hours to place one round and bong.

Best Western Addis Ababa outdoor cafe with view of the street

Injerah , Ethiopian Rice like bread, and delicious chicken soup

Great leather stores




Atrium of Vertical Malls

Nearby Coptic Church I walked to the had a coffee on the second floor 

outdoor cafe of the vertical mall

I am wearing long sleeves for mosquitos (I saw one fly all day, no other bugs,

 and definitely no mosquitoes)..I’m also wearing a jacket for pockets. 

Asked about weather I saw it as warm but see here the locals in short sleeves

 and the children in shorts.  Warm.

I think this is the only motorcyclist I saw wearing a helmet.

Nun

Gratitude, Resentment, Grief and Aging

I am thankful for my fingers, Lord.  The knife cut I did to my index finger did not severe a nerve.  The joint capsule may have been penetrated but there is no more infection.  Daily iodine  with hydrogen peroxides and bandaid changes has saved the finger.  How come I was not so careful initially when I was washing the knives.  But thank you Lord if there was any lesson I was to learn from my injured  ‘pointing finger’.  I have not had to at least have it removed. I’m grateful for that.  Help me always to see more my own faults than the faults of others, or the faults of the world.
Thank you Lord for the health of my dog.  I was so devastated when he was paralyzed that day. I was in fear all day as we drove back early from the north. Thank you for X-rays and Oak Animal Hospital and the lovely Indo Canadian veterinarian who did a thorough examination of him and found his nerves had not been injured, that he would walk again with medication. Thank you for his slow recovery. Thank you for science and medication.
Thank you for the end of elections. Help me to recover from all the hatred and shame I experienced again for standing up for what I believe in.  For years I have taught people ‘love the person’, don’t accept the behaviour.  I have taught that guilt was what we felt when we did something wrong but shame was what we felt when we felt we were wrong fundamentally as a person.  I have experienced so much shaming.  Throughout the election and even now I am told by so many that I am not a Canadian because I do not believe as the victors do.   Always shaming. Always ‘ad hominem’. I have never been ‘good enough’.  I have always been ridiculed and condemned.  Meanwhile I serve like an untouchable, treating unclean bodies and unclean minds.  Men and women get rich off the sales of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, poor lifestyle, unsafe practices, yet I am there serving, healing and helping and I am told I am not worthy to live here.  I am unwanted.
I treat many old men like me.  Some old ladies too.  There is sadness in aging. There is sadness in a whole variety of poverties yet some poverty takes precedence.  The single mothers go to the front of the line while us men whose children were aborted are shunned.  We stand in lonely groups sometimes touched by the men and women whose children were killed in crime.  I huddle next to them.  Their sons and daughters murdered or killed in war or by accident Somehow we face dying together in the greatest of loneliness. I have no tie to this world, no illusion of immortality.
And so much I gave in taxes, taken from me, voluntarily though, I had no choice, to pay for education and children and I supported the children of others knowing my own were killed.  I am a laughing stock.  Worse than a cuckold.  The women jeer at us men whose lovers killed our being and say ‘you deserved it’. Man. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
I am shamed for being a man. And I’m not even a very good one.  The heterosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a man and the homosexuals hate me because I’ve had sex with a woman. I’m divorced and divorced men are the scourge of the earth.  Divorced women were obviously done wrong by men but divorced men get what they deserve.  They’re contemptible.  I was punished and condemned in the courts, laughed at by the judge whose eyes did not look at me but instead focused on the loosely covered breasts of the one who had once said she loved me.  As I once said I loved her.  In the end I paid her all I had financially. She was smug in profit.  The courts made their money too. The judge looked like he wanted to have a tryst with her.  He ogled her. She looked coy.   I was thrust aside. Loser. Fool.  Shame and humiliation.
50 shades of grey.  The billionaires are worshiped.  The women read with lust what girls are willing to do for the monetary winner. Eva Braun ruled all of Germany.  Only her man is condemned.


My mother is dead.  She didn’t do drugs or drink.  She insisted we go to school. She loved education.  She insisted we go to Sunday school and church. She loved the Lord.  She insisted we play hockey. She and my father loved hockey.  So I fished with Dad and hunted and fixed cars with my brother and my father. I learned cooking from mom and mixing cement from Dad and I helped him build buildings and boats.  My parents had lost so many friends in WWII.  Dad had served in the RCAF. A spitfire mechanic and a bombardier.  My parents met in the war.  Dad and Mom weren’t racists. I didn’t know racists till the government began dividing and conquering the people by calling everyone racists.  My black doctor didn’t even know he was black in those days like I didn’t know I was white.
Dad didn’t know that being a man and being white was wrong.  He didn’t think of himself as coloured.  My mother and her sister had black friends.  They were Baptist.  She didn’t have Catholic friends.  Dad had Catholic friends and Jewish friends and Buddhist friends and Hindu friends and secular friends.  Our family were as coloured as everyone. Mom joked about us having freckles.  My brother and her had red hair.  
Dad liked smart people, people who did things, ‘made something of themselves’.  Always growing up I heard my parents say, “It doesn’t matter where a person has been it’s where they’re going and are they building things up.”  Mom and dad most admired people who were working and taking care of their children.  They didn’t like people who were ‘living off of the government because they were too good to do a honest day’s labour’.  They didn’t like people who weren’t willing to ‘get their hands dirty’.  They especially didn’t like people who stole and criminals.
 “I didn’t fight for this country so I had to put a lock on my own doors,” my father told me.  The judge who lived a couple of houses over was a rip roaring falling down drunk and my parents didn’t have any time for drunks. They especially didn’t like drugs.  “Wasting their lives.  Caring for their own pleasures when they should be caring for others.  Not caring how much their behaviour hurt others. That’s their problem."
They both said, “You always were too smart for your britches.”  “I don’t care if the teacher is wrong, you’ve got to learn to not tell them that because they’re hurt you for it. The more wrong they are the more they hurt people who are right.” My aunt was Indian. My Baptist aunt was the executive assistant (we called her his ’secretary’ back then) to Canada’s ambassador in Washington DC during WWII. My grandfather arrived as a poor immigrant from Scotland and homesteaded northern Canada to become a great rancher and lumber man.  My other grandfather arrived from Ireland. Both poor, the “made something of themselves.’  They “didn’t take handouts’.
My aunts and mother told me the history of things.  The teachers told me lies. I was strapped by the principal for correcting them. The same occurred in chemistry when the teacher had the equations wrong.  But he didn’t have me strapped. He corrected his equation and thanked me.  That’s probably why I liked science.   We were caned in gym class, our buttocks bared.  I got my first ruler in kindergarten.  The female teacher undressed me in front of the class and held me across her knees smacking me hard over and over again on my naked bottom.
Much later I was punished for stopping men and women killing people. The people whose job it was to ensure the safety of the children hated and shamed me for stopping the killing. The provincial enquiry years later vindicated me but a half dozen babies more were killed before that occurred.  I never received an apology. I was never returned the money and time I lost for doing the right thing. I was suspect then. I didn’t keep quiet and mind my own business when I saw people being killed and raped.  I wasn’t a ‘team player’ they said in the government.  There is no “truth and reconciliation” for ‘whistleblowers’.
I’m surprised I don’t like S and M.  So many boys have come out of school spanked so many times like me that they at least got some pleasure sexually later from their twisted education.  I just got this twisted idea I’d stop people being abused. I try mostly to stop people from ‘turning anger inward’.  They continue to hurt themselves after being hurt so much by others.
Now the government tells me I can’t touch people.  Standing helpless in my office men and women cling to me and their tears run down my suit.  I cannot hug them.  All over the province men and women physicians are being publicly threatened fines and loss of license if they touch a patient, especially if they hug a patient.   I eventually push them away and tell them the government says that doctors can’t touch their patients even when they are grieving. There are so many laws today.  I am afraid of everyone and everything.

Thank you Lord for these moments of peace. Thank you Lord for bringing me safety this far. Thank you for the light. Thank you for the coffee and the cream and the porridge. Thank you for this computer. Thank you for letters and language. Thank you for the opportunity to learn. Thank you for the chances I’ve been given to make something of myself.  I am still walking upright. I’m still able to help others.  I am so thankful that my finger still works. I am always in pain, Lord.  I am just so thankful that it’s not as bad as it has been. I am so thankful that I can get out of bed and get to work and have some work.  I look back and remember the abject poverty of those years of being a student, giving blood for books, not having food because I paid the rent, eating at family and friends because I had no money. We were in love then. We lived so simply.  Years and years of hand me down clothing, hand me down furniture.  We pooled our resources for a party. I studied from 6 am to 12 pm and saw formulas in my sleep.  I lived in hospitals.  I went for years without sleep.  Plane crash. Polar bear chasing me.  Deadly diseases.  Old people dying in my arms alone in the night giving me their last words as gifts.  I thought I’d never get clean. The lice, the bacteria, the virus, the sickness. I was sick for so many many years.  Tuberculosis. I was treated for a year.  She condemned me for going where no one else would go. “You’re not a Christian, you’re a fool.” she told me when I wanted her nakedness and she was angry that I flew away to serve the aboriginals because, “no one else would’.  Now no one cares.  The government regulator sneered at me and said, “It’s just a job.”  I’ve never got my back pay. There never was a bonus.  Everyone said I had status but ever shopkeeper raised the price and stole from me.  All the while the government took in taxes and paid themselves fat salaries and froze my income.  Among ourselves we laugh if we make minimum wage.  7 days a week for how many years is it I worked and was on call. No overtime. No on call. No danger pay.  I fell asleep in an operation.  I wet myself too.  An adult man peeing dribbling unable to hold it. all night with an unforgettable bowel after a shot gun wound.  I wake with nightmares screaming lost in guts that are perforated seeing faces of suicides. It’s a good week when I don’t remember, when I get a full nights sleep.  This morning I woke at 5 am.  Now I know it’s just the rain.  It’s the darkness and the rain. It’s that season. I remember the rains coming and the palm trees flying over my car, my windows knocked out.  The rains and the darkness. I’ll get used to it again.

Thank you Lord for the memories. When I smoked pot and drank wine I forgot.  I don’t remember my holidays. Those brief weeks when we’d get away from the ‘front’ and escape to beaches.  I drank wine and smoked weed and now don’t much remember those days while the horrors of guns in offices and knives and the angry faces fresh from jail in withdrawal demanding valium and more valium or narcotics and more narcotics threatening shouting.
She said I ’sexually harassed her’ when I asked her to leave because she was stealing and smoking crack. She ‘d been raging and shouting at the Indo canadians in wheelchairs.  She hated Indo Canadians.  I didn’t know when I hired her. I didn’t even know she was a drug addict. I didn’t know she prostituted. I took others words. She lied. I didn’t know her johns had been her references. I didn’t know that her minister was her bisexual lover. I’ve never known anything when the shit hits the fan. I’ve been so focussed on saving a life that I didn’t know that I was being stolen from. Only when the bank balance didn’t match did I know something was wrong.  Only when I saw the receipts from the store did I realize that she was a thief.    Everything she said and wrote didn’t match. Lawyers showed that.  A hundred lies but it was never about truth.  I told the truth and was condemned for it.  Government’s don’t want the truth.
The government woman said, “Women don’t lie about sex.”
I learned there was no ‘justice’ and went to work pro bono with my friend who was killed when he said that only the rich could afford justice in Canada.  I still think it was a hit.
Thank you Lord for the lifting me up. These moments come and go. The set backs. Reflecting on people saying I’m not a Canadian.  People telling me to leave Canada and that I’m not wanted here.  It took me back to the time when I was getting death threats, when my windows were shot out by 22’s, when my cars was keyed over and over.  I had been diagnosing alcoholism and addiction and saying that people were unfit for work. The management thanked me for halving the accidents on the job. Men and women thanked me for making their workplaces safe but the cost was high. Drug addiction changes a person.  The pot heads were just as violent as the alcoholics and cokeheads when it came to wanting revenge.  Here there were having this good thing, the doctor before me saying they were depressed and giving them a week or two in hospital to dry out before they went back to work to wreck havoc on management and their fellow workers.  He was the loved doctor.
"The other psychiatrist  never asked about alcohol and drugs but this knew little shit doctor did and he fucked me up. The fuck cost me my job writing down what I told him I smoked and drank. It was supposed to be confidential. When the insurance company saw it they said that I had to go to treatment. I didn’t want to quit.  I just wanted the other psychiatrist to keep writing a note saying I was sick because of my bipolar disorder.  I didn’t want this fucking asshole to fuck me up.  I talked to everyone about him.  I didn’t think it was relevant to tell anyone how much weed I was smoking when I was working.  It’s medicine. It’s a herb.  It’s not like the pharmaceutical’s that little shit puts people on.  The boss is just like him. A fuckking shit. Keeps telling me I’m forgetting and not concentrating on the work.  Claimed I caused their multi million dollar machine to break down.  All the stress he was giving me made me do coke. I needed it to concentrate at work after I started the day with a few shots and a doozie or two.  Then I go to the hospital for my normal break, like we all did with the old doctor and this shit blows the whistle.  Of course I hate him.  Fucking boy scout.  Little do goober.  Of course my friends and I made his life miserable. After what he did to us he’s lucky he didn’t have an accident."

Now I’m just sad, now , alone.  Thinking how many lives I must have ruined drug testing.  If I’d just backed off, turned a blind eye like my colleague, these guys might have gone on to be Prime Minister or at very least headed the company. Instead they probably left regular work and went into growing dope full time and becoming part of the multi billion dollar BC industry that now has essentially been pardoned as well as getting to take the money and run.
I’ve never been “pardoned" in my work.  I’m just scrutinized, regulated, criticized,  shamed and threatened. They call the punishment different names like ‘re-education.’  It’s still punishment.  The hitters get paid and the victims get framed.  When I was doing so much pro bono work, about 20% of that years income, because the parents didn’t pay their premium they and their  kids couldn’t see private doctor and they were told to go to government clinics where they didn’t want to go because everyone their judged them and put them down, I saw them.  I didn’t get paid.  May e $20,000 loss of income a year. I thought like any business I should be able to declare it as a loss so I did.  Revenue Canada sent out three people to audit me. It wasn’t an audit. It was harassment. They went through all my books.  At the end of a week, this thug said, “No doctor sees patients for free. We haven’t caught you yet, but we’re watching you and we will.”  Every private doctor I know works for free but we’re not allowed to declare our ‘losses’.  Even today people miss appointments and I  don’t pay but I can’t declare my losses against my earnings like all other businesses can.  The reason is that psychopaths think others think like they do.  Lizards think other think like lizards.  So our government doesn’t do anything for free.  And they can’t understand a physician any more than an insect can understand a bird.
It’s not good to stew. It’s better to help someone. I am so thankful. When my mind wasn’t working I used my body to carry folk. When I couldn’t lead I followed. Today I know the people I’ll see are hurting more.  I have so many people with cancer and surgeries and all I do is provide relief.  The heroin addicts are far gone but here and there one awakes and wants to live.  I’m happy to provide solace. I love to see people cured. But now we’re all getting older and the only cure for life is death.
I think of that too much these days.  Kierkegaard, “Life is suffering unto death’. I think a lot about my buddhist days.  I’m praying and meditating.  I miss rejoicing.  I miss dancing.  I have to have a shower and get to work. Everyone is always angry that I’m late. Some days I’m afraid to leave my office. A day of my life has not gone by that someone hasn’t been angry with me. A year in my life has not gone by that some official hasn’t hated me and tried with all their power to destroy me.
 For so many years the friends of the man I stopped killing people haunted my life. They were in so many high places and their loyalty to their drunken dangerous friend was admirable.  They were more afraid than me.  I saw that but now a couple of them have died and the others are retired.  They’re rich and have young wives and their children visit them.  They tell war stories like we all do.  They’re victors.
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a victor. Maybe if I’d set my eyes higher. As long as I can remember I've just wanted to survive and help others survive.  .  Thank you God for letting me survive. Thank you for the easing up of my back pain and the healing of my finger and my dog. Thank you that I can type.  Please banish my anger, my self pity, my negativity, my comparison, my jealousy and envy and my resentments. Help me rid myself of these character flaws so I can better celebrate this new day and be grateful for all that you have given me.

A Week of Worry in the Cloud of Unknowing

If one has to whine, worry and kafetch one should be a master of it. To demonstrate professional capacity in this regard I have chosen to review the week for those who are mere amateurs at complaining and moaning and doom saying.
1) We are all going to die.  This temporal physical slow energy moving mass life is terminal.  No matter what vegetarian gluten free probiotic diet you ascribe to you will still die.  It will be like falling asleep and if you believe you will most likely wake up in a new life. If you don’t believe then this may be all you get.  If you are guilty then the laws of karma may well apply to those believers in after life who by their thoughts and actions want a personal hell.  I don’t think anyone can tell you what you’re going to get.  There’s no religion that has certain vision of the future.  I loved the book, “Cloud of Unknowing’.  It’s a mystery.  But I believe.  I also believe that it will be good, this afterlife journey.  I know it’s easy to see the negatives and that all children know when things are crap and cry and whine and whimper and sometimes take the fetal position. While this is happening the adults in the immediate vicinity are addressing the crap and trying to make the best of a bad lot.  This has been going on for 80,000 plus years from when our worst fear were large cats and thugs to today when it’s still environmental dangers including occasional large cats escaped from zoos and thugs.  That said most cats are small and most people are fairly good.  Otherwise we wouldn’t have survived on this planet en mass and risen to be the prime protagonist.
2) Aliens have landed. They may be controlling the minds of our politicians.  They may be the ultra rich people no one sees. They may be Saudi, Chinese or American.  They no doubt have stealth technology to conceal their vampire like features or their second heads. They may be nanodes in our intestinal tracks.  They may be cats.  Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson were likely aliens.  Miley Cyrus is definitely an alien and Justin Beiber is a wannabe alien.  They may or may not be friendly. They may indeed be computer keyboards that take their energy from our fingertips.  They are not going to do what Hollywood says.  Hollywood is a disinformation centre.
3) Vaccines cured the world of smallpox.  Small pox killed a half million annually going back to 10,000 BC.  Probably killed more people than all the wars put together.  Medical science has reduced suffering and extended life.  Science has contributed to allowing 8 billion people to live on a planet that was thought to be over crowded when Columbus left Europe in 1692.  I am a scientist. I’m also an artist. I’m also a minister of divinity.  You can believe in God and Science and Art and that’s okay because it just makes you trinitarian.
4) Feminists are sexist.
5)  Racism is an attack on white people. White people are dominant. When Blacks are dominant we get to call them racist.  You can only call other people racists. Racists never admit to being racists.  Except me, I’m freckled. I’m racist against white, and brown and black and yellow and red. Spotted people united. Throw off your chains.  Fight for your fellow spotted folk!!  Our first instinct is survival and our next is to form a group of ‘us’.  This is family then it’s a trash euro american biker gang in the west or an eastern militarist junta gang in the east.  Guns and sex and drugs are the principal money makers in the world.  Food and commodity transfers are basic and rather boring in general compared to the sexiness and excitement in the sale of guns, sex slave and mood altering drugs.  There is white collar crime and blue collar crime.  There are white collar gangs and blue collar gangs.  Much of the confusion in the world is comparing apples to oranges.
6) Last week the Chinese market crashed.  I believe that it didn’t founder as much as the Western world’s did a few years back because the bankers are learning how to manage the mass amounts of money that have surpassed any previous time in history. As an analogy when the world had TNT it was initially surprised but could handle it in time but then the Atom Bomb came and there was a stiff learning curve to management of nuclear weapons. We’re learning how to handle biological weapons of mass destruction, gene manipulation, and all manner of skyrocketing hyper accelerated learning. The bankers were never the brightest in the group. Most people who go into money management are pedestrian. Salesman, like those on commodity floors, they’re the nutbars. I’ve seen salesman selling family members overseas. They’re sell anything. Salesman and gamblers are two sides of the same coin. They’re the rabbits.  They're pushing the edge everywhere.  By contrast bankers and accountants are the tortoises.  I think it’s simply possible that the whole bank thing got a head of them like nuclear weapons got ahead of the equal slow witted generals.
Now it’s also possible that diabolical demon infested bankers, people with the mentality of the media ascribed to Bush and Clinton equally , the way the media describes these otherwise mediocre entertainers in the political circuit, that these kind of folks, learned how to steal obscene amounts of money from the world collectively with truly ugly evil devices for which God and Murphy will castrate the sons of bitches and all their putrid insectoid spawn because they think they got away with it. Evil loses, goodness wins.  In the long run.  That’s why psychopaths like to deny the afterlife.  Sprinters always want to win the race in the short run.  The life expectancy of assholes is decades less than the life expectancy of the mediocre.   The assholes in the east are the Fanny Mae and Goldman Sachs groups.  Better still, the unnamed folk jealous.  Sjealoo having done this and almost got away with it but got sort of caught by excessive gouging, they made the the imitative Chinese Totalitarian dictators jealous. Known for their collective stupidity and lack of innovation as communists the world over are, however having great chameleon lizards skills ,and the brain of a thieving squirrel they stole the ideas from the west.  Their slut girlfriends wanted more cocaine and jewelry. And paranoid they want bigger guns and better security systems.  So they are trying to steal mass amounts of money by manipulating their stock exchange  for personal benefit without getting caught.
It’s really matter of perception.
7) I’m from Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.  The Vancouver Stock Exchange lost it’s license because the Vancouver businessmen were worse than Goldman Sacks and the Chinese military put together. . Their low level of scummyness is unprecedented in the world. I just mention that because I wouldn’t want to point fingers without admitting that my city and province and country are the greatest of all scoundrels when it comes to white collar crime.
8) The Chinese market stabilized but again we were collectively threatened by the government controlled mainstream media with economic poverty.  This threat is pre election here in Canada and Greece remains our object lesson. The ’System” requires there to be a lot of really ugly losers and a very few very beautiful winners.  The losers can’t afford augmentation mammoplasty, penile reconstruction and liposuction and face lifts.  That’s all that makes the rich look good.  Lots of expensive medicine. And Betty Ford clinics.  By contrast the poor are given places to shoot up heroin, drug pubs, that don’t interfere in the profit of the blue collar gangs, like the Hells Angels.

9) Anyone can be cynical.  Nihilism is simply weak thinking.  It takes genius and adulthood to remain happy in face of dying daily.
10) We are on a planet spinning around a sun in the armpit of a distant galaxy and don’t even know where we are except by some kind of relative consideration. There are no absolutes. Except maybe God.  But most peoples God is too small. So it’s a mini me God and not the absolute God.
11) My job is to maximize my pleasure and joy in life without directly harming others.  I’m not concerned about all the urban activists getting on about big things like Climate Change  and Montsanto or oil spills or highways or television.  These are adolescent considerations. Adolescents know as well as mainstream media how to solve all the world’s problems but they have hemorrhoids and because of their hemorrhoids makes the world around them seem shitty.  They can’t wipe their butts clean.  Consequently they have a skewed outlook on the world and are always looking for someone else to blame.  Preferably a corporation or another country or an ideology.  They carry a stinky smell about them.
12) I don’t like abortions.  I don’t like radical feminists because most of those I’ve known have been monsters of the likes of Eva Brawn. I believe radical feminists hate men and lack a sense of humour and are the cause of so much of the world’s political problems these last decades. By contrast I love women and I have even admired Hilliary Clinton at times despite her man aping ways. Warren by contrast is one smart lady. But then I loved my mother and my mother and father together were an economic unit.  Individualism is a ‘construct’ that allows ‘corporations’ before the horrendously incestuous pedophilic laws to maintain me and a multi million company are equal except I can’t afford a lawyer.  And as the judges are only there to ensure that the people in power remain in power I at most can hope for crumbs.  The rich are above sexism and racism and only interested in money and power. These ‘divisiions’ of “political correctness’ better called ‘social communism’ have ensured that the courts can at any time arrest someone if they are at any time a real threat to the status quo.  All the activists who whine and complain are the ‘paid government critics’.  If a person is telling the truth in our society they will have been in jail or a psychiatric asylum or bankrupt unless they are Warren Buffet or Soros and they can ‘make whatever truth they want’ because the media is the spoke engine for the powerful.
Ultimately I have to ask my self the question am I really talking about this plane of existence or arguing with God.  Is God , the all powerful, to be loved  or feared.  Is religion the opiate of the masses or is politics the true opiate and spirituality the salvation that stupid wrong Marx simply couldn’t see because he hated Isaiah and Moses so much.  Identification with the Aggressor has always been a real bitch for the Jews. Thanks to Freud we know about identification with the aggressor and I may well worship God because She’s been such a bitch putting me in this ‘life of suffering’.
Anxiety is a measure of my distance from God. And if I see God as evil then I will see the biggest government and biggest corporation and the wealthiest as evil.  But I’m not at the bottom of the food chain. There are those below me and as I see those above me so those below me will likely see me because "as above so below".  So the paranoid fears those above and below.  The activist believes naively that they are representing the proletariat as they fight the czar or warlords or modern corporations. The rebels have been worse than those they deposed.  I’m just trying to get through this day.  No bombs have fallen on my head but I’ve heard about bombs falling on peoples heads all my life. I have been bullied and extorted by the media with news that is chosen to create the maximum fear and subservience in me and those around me.
Meanwhile I’m living in the world at one of the greatest times of innovation and progress with people living, the billions more on the planet in relative wealth and for decades longer than their forebears, with really neat love stories and incredible science fiction type toys. We’ve motorized wheel chairs which no one had for 99% of the life of man on this planet. Last week they developed a bionic eye for those who suffer from macular degeneration.  We’re living in  a sacred and amazing world.   But I must take my head out of my ass to celebrate the wonder of my fellow man and creation. I am so thankful for this moment being here, witness to this all.
Now that is how a professional whines, moans and kafetches after a week of worry.    

Disgrace

John Malkovich's performance is sheer genius in this post modern South African allegory based on the novel by Nobel prize winning author J. M. Coetzee. The new apartheid is contrasted with the colourless world of mother and child. Terror and humiliation beyond an eye for an eye dominates the primitive tribal rule. Malkovich with utter realism plays Professor Lurie who seduces a college student, played by Natalie Becker. Later, he cannot protect his own daughter Lucy, played by Jessica Haines. Jessica Haines brings new insight, depth and toughness to the white woman in a Africa role, earning her place alongside Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep. It is a must see.