What Life Was Like–For Some
The latest issue of Orion landed in my mailbox last week, the first paper issue I’ve seen in a couple of years, having switched to a digital subscription, and I was reminded of the pleasure of sitting down with a physical magazine, especially something as sumptuous as Orion, a visual feast as well as a wealth of content. First up for me was a piece by Derrick Jensen called Against Forgetting: It’s hard to fight for what you don’t know you’ve lost.
His premise is that there has been a steady erosion of nature and the commons over the last several decades, to the point where there those of us who have become accustomed to the new reality and where there is at one generation and possibly two or three, who have known a whole different picture of society and its relation to the biosphere that what was extant in the middle of the last century.
Jensen writes of…
“,,,declining baselines. The phrase describes the process of becoming accustomed to, and accepting as normal, worsening conditions. Along with normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this way.”
As well, he cites Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Much of Jensen’s discussion speaks to the disappearance of flora and fauna, to the loss of habitat and to the different nature of our interaction with the living world, though it could apply equally to the changed nature of relations within society. I would cite the state of health care as a prime example, on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, with health care having become a profit center in the United States, subject to management by large healthcare corporations who insert a huge burden of bureaucracy and profit, as well as largesse to the management class, and stifling premiums for citizens, often with major exclusions from coverage and what seem to be denials of procedure on a whim. A look at an afternoon’s programming on an American television station will say much about the for-profit system: what advertising isn’t for cars, beer or casinos is likely to be for some health care organization. The same is true for the pharmaceutical arm of the health care equation, with a portion of the advertising being aimed at justifying the often outrageous cost of many medications because, we are told, these are R&D pharmaceutical companies. It seems, though, that advertising budgets are substantially larger than the budgets for actual research and development. North of the 49th parallel, we fare only somewhat better with the vestiges of what was once a reasonably competent nationwide health care system that delivered a wide variety of procedures in a timely fashion with relatively low overhead. Once Paul Martin took on the deficit pretty much on the backs of working Canadians by cutting services and transfer payments, the provinces were forced to cut back on what was on offer for patients, and, in many cases, did so with relish and glee, as governments turned a blind eye to the establishment of private, for-profit clinics and dismantled structures like the Theraputics Initiative, aimed at independent evaluation of pharmaceutical products and costs. When our current Prime Minister promised us that we wouldn’t recognize Canada when he got through, he wasn’t exaggerating or engaging in an idle boast, and our destination looks very much like the unregulated quagmire of our American friends and neighbours.
It is hard for us to maintain perspective and to measure change without a firm grasp of what used to be, particularly when, as individuals, we have access only to our personal and anecdotal information, and perceptions of how well the system functioned can vary considerably from place to place and with the influence of different circumstances, both personal and systemic. Sadly, it is hard for us to rely on statistics, given that there has been a campaign by several levels of government to ensure that the information that gets out reflect well on the issuing government, and on any interested parties with whom the government has chosen to work. Statistics Canada used to have a worldwide reputation as a quality provider of data and analysis based on thorough and meaningful methodology. My sense is that this is no longer the case, so we have to rely on our intuitive and personal understanding of whatever changes we perceive.
Changes of the same nature have been wrought in many other domains, from education to the world of work, from protection of water resources to urban sprawl, from foreign policy to basic research. The world I now inhabit is a very different world than that in which I grew up, and there is much that has been done that, for the sake of broader humanity and all the life that shares space with us, it would be better were it undone.
Jensen’s conclusion is an exhortation to gather baseline data now, a baseline against which to measure further erosion, or perhaps, rebuilding of the natural and societal realms, and he cites what might be some indicators to include in the baseline:
“But here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you to lis ten to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing) fireflies. Even if you’re in a city—especially if you’re in a city—I want you to picture the land as it was be fore the land was built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.
If you do this, your baseline will stop declining, because you’ll have a record of what’s being lost.
Do not go numb in the face of this data. Do not turn away. I want you to feel the pain. Keep it like a coal inside your coat, a coal that burns and burns. I want all of us to do this, because we should all want the pain of injustice to stop. We should want this pain to stop not because we get used to it and it just doesn’t bother us anymore, but because we stop the injustices and destruction that are causing the pain in the first place. I want us to feel how awful the destruction is, and then act from this feeling.
And I promise you two things. One: feeling this pain won’t kill you. And two: not feeling this pain, continuing to go numb and avoid it, will. ”
All of this is too true, but not so self-evident that it has spurred legions of concerned citizens to action: the struggle of memory against forgetting can only be won when the dynamic tension between what is and what should gives rise to action.
However, there is another side to this.
- No More
Back in the early Sixties, we had one of these, though it was a convertible and a kind of a muddy gold colour. It was tricked out with an automatic transmission and power just about everything and was, in some circles, pretty typical of what was on the road at the time. The same with the house we haunted at the time, as seen in the header photo. It was easy to believe at the time that all was reasonably well with the World, and that whatever wasn’t right was going to be made right by our prodigious intelligence and will to make it right. It took decades to recover from the attitudinal fog that allowed us to continue unbridled consumption of goods and services as a way of life, but bits of it started to trickle through in the middle of the Sixties, and by the time Reagan was installed in the White House to begin his program of radical restructuring, there were glimmerings of awareness that we weren’t going to be able to carry on with “Fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy took the T-Bird away.” Somewhere it was written that living like there’s no tomorrow has turned from a lighthearted metaphor into a chilling impending reality, so the V-8 Ford is gone, in the sense that there are groups of people who have chosen to get off the bandwagon of He Who Dies With The Most Toys Wins, and to look for process to rebuild community, a rational economy and resilience, and to try to spread that message as a counterweight to the tsunami of consumerist messaging that permeates all levels of society. I would posit that we should also keep track of the seemingly meagre progress that we’ve made in eliminating the superfluous and harmful so that there is something to celebrate, but also as a way to measure what actions have been effective in preventing the further erosion of nature and society and contributing to reconstruction of a more just and sustainable model.