Seventy

Dear Blogosphere; wish me an extra happy birthday.

I have just turned seventy. I have suffered life long disabilities, but my body is holding up alright. I feel I can go on for a while yet before I need a cane, inhaler, or whatever.

If you read the short autobiography in my “about” page, you know that I have had some problems in life. I am surprised I have got to this age and still functioning so well. The key has been getting out of Alberta and getting better medical care.

My first big regret in life is not dragging myself to the border as soon as I reached eighteen, and never looking back. Some people have been telling me lately they do not believe the Alberta health system is all that bad, or that the Ontario system is that much better. They do not understand that I am talking about how things were thirty years ago, and in actual practice, not on paper.

I can do a blog on the present problems with health care and social services in Ontario later. I can say that, while I am worried about developments in Ontario, I am doing fine. The key is being in good Rent Geared to Income Housing, and on the federal pension system.

I had a fight to get my life arranged as I needed it, with all needs met, when I came to Toronto. But here, you can fight, and you can find help with your fight. All in all, Toronto the good has been good for me.

It is not like Alberta, where you have an entrenched cryptoNazi establishment. There is a perception that they hate public healthcare. What they really hate is the idea of keeping ‘useless’ people alive, like me.

My second big regret is wasting so much time on hopeless efforts at political activism. I could write a blog post on that topic. Or about a dozen.

Or write just the little bit more about it, further down in this essay. Basically, during the time I was trying to to fix the world, there was no one to work with. There were very few serious people with the right intentions.

So, I did all this simply because no one was doing it. I knew I could not be really effective due to my health limitations. I hoped I could inspire some more people to see what should be getting done.

So now I am living in a nice building, in a nice neighbourhood. It is rated as one of the best in the city, which is still a pretty nice city. It is in crisis, but everywhere is in crisis these days.

I am doing things I like doing. I can buy nice food to eat. I have enough money to not have to worry about money.

I can reflect on my life, and the challenges I have overcome, and feel that I did about as well as I could have given what was handed to me. Thus I do not feel like a failure in life, but I can look back with some satisfaction. I am even worried I am turning into a smug Canadian in my old age.

It is ironic. Back in the seventies, when I was in my twenties, most people were doing well. Some people thought everybody had it too easy, back then. Yet I was having a hard time making it.

Now I have things pretty easy when most younger people are having it very hard. So are a lot of older people. In fact, many people my age are having a very hard time of it.

I have recently learned about many of the people I went to high school with, as a result of a fiftieth anniversary class reunion and information posted about it. A lot of them have not done so well in later years. This includes some who I recall as brashly confident, and who treated me with contempt.

In Canada since the eighties, you can fly pretty high if you make the right connections and get into the right job. You can crash very hard if your health fails or you run into some bad luck. I believe people my age who are enjoying old age are usually people who took nothing for granted, did not expect the super seventies to go on forever.

And they did not go on forever. The world is now a very different place. Canada is, as I said, a much less forgiving society than fifty years ago.

Had I left home in the 2020s instead of the 1970s, I definitely would not have been able to cope, even marginally. However, I do not think I would have been so foolhardy as to try. I might have known enough to, as I said, get out of Nazi Alberta and demanded that my medical and other issues be addressed before anyone expects me to enter the workforce.

If I had realized many things back then, I would have been much further ahead, much sooner. I think a lot of older people feel the same way. But back then the whole of society was much more credulous.

Canada is like a completely different country, with different people, than fifty years ago. I am not just seeing the culture shift of going from Alberta to Toronto. I do not think it is mainly about the way technological change effects people.

Many people say that once you get to this age, the world starts to be like science fiction. To many, it has come to feel like a dystopian movie. Yes, we had those in the seventies.

We had few of the Gothically dystopian people who are everywhere now. However, not everybody back then thought that everything was automatically going to keep getting better. Unfortunately too many people did buy into that idea.

Some had the idea it was going to progress by brainwaves or some kind of ‘communicative action’. This is, of course, the ‘boomer’ generation thing. I am the most atypical of boomers.

But things really started to go rotten in the nineties, as the ‘upholder’ generation began to fade and the boomers moved into influential positions. Now generation X is coming on; the greedy, selfish cohort, according to some demographers.

If you listen to these demographers, it seems like each generation is getting worse. But my view of younger people is more nuanced and my experience with generation Z people is more limited. I had withdrawn from most activism by the time these people started showing up.

But my impression is that, over time, the population is becoming less standardized. I say that the best are getting better and the worst are getting worse. There are fewer ‘get along, go along’ people.

The best of the younger generation are, in many ways, quite admirable. The worst should just go back up their ‘Gen X’ parent’s cunts. Something is producing many more narcissists and ‘Dunning Kruger’ types.

The best of these generations are like people who could eventually lead the kind of revolution needed, to sweep away the old neoliberal crap and restart things on a sounder basis. The trouble is, right now they cannot do much. They are having a very hard time getting established in life.

Another problem is that they are bombarded with so much disinformation from all sides. They do not seem to have been taught thinking skills any better than when I was in school. It will take them some time and life experience to grow beyond the nonsense.

This tendency to narcissism has been growing for awhile. I recall in the eighties an acquaintance of mine complaining about the kids then being hired out of high school. They acted like pigs and expected to be treated like royalty, and were always playing head games with other people.

I do not recall that kind of thing when I was in high school, or while trying to get by in the seventies. Such behavior would not have been tolerated. Contempt for others was normally responded to with a fist in the face, with general support.

This idea that it is unacceptable to defend yourself, verbally or physically, seemed to come in with the neoliberal age. This, of course, is what allows narcissists to operate. It seems the youngest generation is becoming once again willing to defend themselves and each other, and to not let the narcissist’s targets be isolated.

This will make life harder for narcissists. These are necessary mental attributes if there will be be effective organization to create the revolution against capitalism. People have to learn to deal with rule or wreck tactics, and ‘make crazy’ behaviors.

The general lack of this capacity greatly vexed me when I was trying to be an ‘activist’. Of course, seeing this as something unnatural, refusing to be manipulated like a donkey, marked me out as the first to be eliminated. And of course, my health problems and lack of money made me more vulnerable to attack and harassment.

Yet it was not all bad. Being politically active gave me some very useful connections. Without them I would likely have not got many things I needed.

This is another thing about Toronto the good. If I had some bastards going after me, I could always get some people on my side. It was not like Alberta where I was usually left swinging because everyone was so intimidated by the cryptofascists.

To summarize this stream of thought, it seems to me that the society which I have lived within was at a high point during the time I was coming of age. It started to face problems it was unwilling or unable to face and deal with, and so went into a gradual decline. It seems now to be bottoming out.

Now people under thirty seem to be starting to understand what has to be done if we are going to get out of this trough. So there is hope. I might see the beginning of a new golden age before I kick off.

Now, to talk about the weather. They say everybody talks about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it. And of course weather over a period of time is called climate.

I have been experiencing weather long enough to have something to say about climate, based on experience. And people keep trying to do something about climate. There is not actually anything which needs to be done about climate, and trying solve a nonexistent problem is creating real ones.

We had weird weather fifty or sixty years ago. Back then it was just weird weather. There was not a massive propaganda machine driving it into people’s heads that every snow storm or flood meant the apocalypse was imminent.

We had forest fires back then. When I was a kid in Calgary, smoke was an annual event as the forest service did its controlled burns in Kananaskis. People started to object to that and the burns stopped.

Now they get these really big fires which cause a lot more smoke. Of course, all these catastrophic forest fires are the result of austerity; cutbacks in forest management. As well, people build houses and power lines where they should not.

It is the same thing with floods and storms. What would have been an inconvenience fifty years ago is a disaster due to elimination of emergency services. Again, greed and bad government leads people to build where they should not.

We had hot summers and cold winters back then, too. Whether I lived on the wet west coast, the dry cold prairies, or so-so south Ontario, weather was weather. I have never had a sense that climate was drastically changing.

It has seemed to me that weather has become tamer. There are fewer heat waves or cold waves, though average temperatures are about the same. There are some studies now, by real scientists, not perception managers, confirming this.

I have not experienced lately these really sweltering summers I found when I first moved to Toronto. I have definitely left behind the cryogenic cold spells I experienced as a kid on the Prairies. But I also remember a year there where winter really did not happen and trees cast leaves in February.

I do remember when the climate was supposed to be getting colder. All the smoke and dust being pumped into the air were triggering a new ice age. If us bad people did not stop all this productivity, we would wake up under a mile of ice someday soon.

No one took this crap seriously back then. The globalist’s perception management machine was not as developed then. We learned in grade school science classes that climate variations over time were caused by the solar cycles and moderated by the evaporation cycle.

It has been widely remarked that the change happened right about 1978. The anti-industrialization propaganda abruptly flipped around. Suddenly, carbon dioxide was the problem, and the world was warming up, not cooling down.

The climate data stored at Oxford university which had showed the world to be cooling now suddenly showed the opposite. There was no explanation for this, we were just supposed to forget what they said the year before. The warming was supposed to be bad, somehow.

I have noted one very disturbing thing about all the climate nonsense. Nobody took it very seriously until about twenty years ago. People kept demonstrating that there was no scientific basis for these ideas.

The climate fanatics changed their tack. They started this “argument is over” routine and started threatening anyone contradicting them, calling them “deniers”. So, most people now go along with this just because they do not want to be attacked and ostracized.

This is, of course, the basic fascist propaganda method, from back before there were even fascists as such. Never try to argue something which really has no factual basis. Just indoctrinate a core of true believers, and use them to intimidate everyone else.

The predominance of this type of behavior in public “discourse”, on most subjects now, is a big reason why I have retreated from public activism. I do not need this shit. I merely leave people with my axiom on the topic; ‘left’ fascists talk about climate, real people talk about environment.

However, the climate fascists do frighten me, more than anything except environmental destruction and the potential for nuclear war. If these ying-yangs get their way, it will mean industrial collapse. This will inevitably be followed by social collapse and a generation of “nasty, brutish, and short”.

Let me say something about all the damage to the natural environment. The war on pollinating insects especially concerns me. Bring back the butterflies, please.

Some people may remember the advertising campaign of the environmentalists, awhile ago. It showed small children standing in clouds of butterflies. The caption was; “when we were young, they were everywhere.”

They were everywhere when I was a child living on the west coast. They gradually went away. I noticed this and, at times, involved myself in environmental activism.

About ten years ago I was walking in downtown Toronto and I saw a butterfly fluttering around the concrete canyon. I do not know how long it survived, but that really moved me. I realized I had not seen one in years.

It motivated me to get to work with a few other old timers in my neighborhood, who remembered butterflies. Those of us who could still bend over a bit, and whose brains had not totally turned to butterflies, got to work on the various strips of derilect land nearby. We have had some success in creating a birds, bees, butterflies friendly environment.

That is about all we can do, for now. Even at this, we get resistance. We have cretins letting their dogs shit on our patches, and weirdos satisfying destructive impulses by pulling our stuff up.

That is what I can do while I wait for the world to start to heal. And write this blog.

So, I have lived my life on the down slope of a historic arc. I grew to adulthood when times were very good. I do not think I would have survived if I were born in present times.

I had the disadvantage of being born into a family of very backward people in a very backward part of the country. These people resented those times, only saw it as people becoming lazy and degenerate. I must have been a real throwback.

I made the most of everything, overcame my disadvantages as much as possible, and eventually built a life for myself. I could not fully erase the harm done to me; some physical and emotional damage is permanent. Chronic illness makes maintaining close relationships difficult.

One of the harder things to come to accept was that a marriage and a family were not practical for me. I have repeated seen in my own rather large extended family, the consequences of people having children they are not mentally or financially able to raise in a proper way.

But there is an enlightened faction in my family. They are mostly based in Edmonton. I have flown there a few times to visit them. Covid has interrupted that and I worry I may never see the old ones again.

But if there is one thing my family is noted for besides craziness, it is longevity. They all live to be ninety eight. So I have the ambition, despite all my ailments, of living into my nineties.

So, as I said at the start, I expect to see the bottoming out of this long arc and a new beginning. I believe we can already see the outlines of this new age.

I will tell you more about this in twenty years, when I get to have a ninetieth birthday. Until then, keep reading.