Bite-Sized Subversions - challenging thoughts about everyday things

There are over 2 million people in prison. Each week, there’s another thousand.  We pay for their housing, food, medical care, education – about $30,000 per year per prisoner.

So I propose a new three-strike law: first crime, you get rehab (maybe it was truly an accident; maybe you’ll change your mind about stuff; maybe you’ll grow up); second crime, you get imprisoned (okay, this is punishment, pure and simple, because if that’s what it takes – ); third crime, you get exiled – you get kicked out.

Given your inability or unwillingness to follow the rules of this society, you should live in some other society, yeah?  If you have found another society willing to take you, great.  Bye.  If not, we will escort you to a remote designated area.  You’re on your own.

Really, it’s not as if the bar is set that high.  Basically, you just have to pay for the stuff you use (via taxes for the stuff in common, such as roads and parks, and at the check-out for everything else) and abide by a bunch of laws, most of which are pretty reasonable.  Sure, some of our taxes are unjustified and some price tags are too high, but we don’t have to say we agree, we don’t have to serve in the military, we don’t even have to engage in that bare minimum of participation, voting.  And a lot of price tags are too low, given the actual materials and labor.  So geez loueez if you want a free ride and you can’t abide by a few rules, then I say get the hell out.  We’re tired of carrying you.

I wonder if the overwhelming sense of entitlement, which is what, I think, justifies much lawbreaking in the eyes of the lawbreakers, comes from a life of getting what you don’t deserve and not getting what you do deserve (and, conversely, seeing others get what they don’t deserve).  For example, most ‘kids’ who live at home – do they still have to do daily chores to earn their allowance, not to mention their food and shelter?  Every time I hear that they expect their parents to just give them money – for everything – I think, wait a minute!  You want it?  You work for it!  Slave at a minimum wage job for a year and save up for it.

As for not getting what you deserve, yeah it’s hard knowing that people with ten times as much didn’t work ten times as long or ten times as hard.  They either had it given to them or they got it through grossly unfair salary differences (bonuses at work, golden parachutes, severance pay – I’ve been declared redundant, I’ve been fired, and I’ve quit, but I’ve never gotten more than a – well, actually I never got a farewell party either.  But that injustice doesn’t justify the other injustice.  And anyway, all this addresses just theft and property damage in all its manifestations – economic violations of the social contract, if you will.

Other violations of the social contract, such as personal damage in all its manifestations (assault, manslaughter, and so on) are harder to explain.  And, truthfully, I find these people easier to exile.  If you have so little control over yourself or so much disregard for me, for my life, I’d rather you be somewhere else.  Far away.

So, go!  Let us escort you to our border.  Cross over into this designated non-country, and you can do whatever you want.  If you’re not killed first by others like you.  Or by just trying to live without society, without the benefits of a couple thousand of years of others’ work.  Work that has given us dvd players and ipods, not to mention medical treatment, and shoes, and light bulbs, and flush toilets.  But hey, you gave all that the finger.  So make your own damn shoes.  And be careful not to step in your own shit.

(I dare say you’ll miss us a lot more than we’ll miss you.)

I was sort of attacked by a dog a while ago when I was out running.  It wasn’t really a severe attack: I was simply taken down, like a deer, in a well-executed stealth manoeuvre by a large German Shepherd; he did not, nor did his companion, come in for the kill, or even the maul – I was left with a single but deep and ragged bite requiring half a dozen stitches.

It wasn’t provoked – well, perhaps it was – in the way a red miniskirt provokes an assault:  I was running, which in itself is provocative to most canines for at least accompaniment, if not pursuit; and I was running past (but not on) his property, so I was, given the canine propensity to extend legal boundaries by a few miles, ‘in his face’.

Thing is, Read the rest of this entry »

When you ‘get married’ you are entering into a legal contract. You might be doing a few other things (promising your love to someone, making a deal with a god), but you are most certainly entering into a legally binding contract with another person. There are rights due to and responsibilities incumbent upon people who enter into a marriage contract. Some of these have to do with money, some have to do with children, some have to do with sexual services, and some have to do with other things.

What I find so extremely odd is that even though well over 90% of all people in the USA and Canada get married, almost none of them read the terms of the contract before they sign. (Most people find out about these terms only when they want to break the contract.) Probably because the contract isn’t presented when their signatures are required.

Although this begs the question ‘Is the contract, therefore, still binding?’, the more interesting question is ‘Why isn’t it presented?’

My guess is that it started well enough, as sensitivity: people realized that terms such as ‘crippled’ and ‘retarded’ had gathered too many negative connotations, had become insults; so they replaced them with new words such as ‘physically challenged’ and ‘mentally challenged’ – words that, because new, would be free of such slant.

This linguistic reform became called, I suggest, ‘political correctness’ – perhaps by people (men?) who couldn’t say (let alone be considered) ‘sensitive’.

From there, Read the rest of this entry »

Two poems of mine have been published in a journal dedicated to “the Black experience”. An audio piece of mine has been aired on Native radio programs. I am neither Black nor Native. Had this been known, I suspect some might have accused me of cultural appropriation.

It’s an interesting idea, but Read the rest of this entry »

We need to rise above natural selection. Otherwise, as a species, we will continue to become dumb and dumber.

Who has the family of five? Not the physicist or philosopher. She’s chosen not to have any kids. And not the biologist or sociologist. He stopped at two.

And who’s having the family of ten? The people in ‘developing’ countries who either don’t have access to contraception, let alone a grade twelve education, or who subscribe to some indefensible religio-cultural belief about family.

How do we rise above natural selection? That’s the question no one wants to ask. Because the answer is so clear. And so awful.

But not nearly as awful as a species of idiots.

I think philosophy is one of the most misunderstood subjects. That it took so long to become a high school course, I think, attests to this. Even within academia, however, there seems to be confusion. Two PhDs expressed surprise at the title of my masters’ thesis in Philosophy (“The Issue of Consent in Sex and Sexual Assault”); both seemed to think that philosophy was stuff like ‘If a tree falls and no one’s there, does it make a sound?’ or ‘Does the table really exist?’ Philosophy is that. But not, at all, only that. Read the rest of this entry »

So I was working in my local public library the other day – well, trying to work. I was distracted by the kid on the computer next to me who was playing a computer game. My first point. Is it appropriate for kids to be allowed to play computer games on the computers in public libraries? I suggest that libraries are repositories of knowledge that people either peruse to borrow or access on-site.[1] Given that, playing computer games should not occur in a public library. Libraries aren’t entertainment centers. Yes, perusing and accessing knowledge can be fun. But that doesn’t mean that that which is fun is necessarily perusing or accessing knowledge.

Furthermore, Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s say assisted suicide is illegal because it’s often a tragic, premature, perhaps even ill-informed, death. But so is unassisted suicide.

And there are alternatives to assisted suicide – better pain management, for example, or counselling. Same goes for unassisted suicide.

Assisted suicide violates our social values, our respect for life. Yeah, well. And yet unassisted suicide is legal because ‘It’s your life’. Read the rest of this entry »

This is not “a recreational paradise” or “a summer playground”. This is our neighbourhood.

Those labels are marketing ploys used by real estate agents and business owners eager to make money on sales. They do not speak for us. We live here; they do not.

Many of us have lived here for five, ten, twenty years. Half of us are retired; half of us still work. We live here because we want to live on a lake in a forest. We love to look out at the water and see the sun sparkle, the moonlight shimmer. We love to hear the birds and see the squirrels at our feeders; we stand in awe when we see the occasional moose or bobcat. We sit out in the evening and look up at the starry sky. We open our windows at night to hear the loons as we fall asleep. We love the peace and quiet; we bask in the solitude.

So when you ‘summer people’ come here on the weekends and do whatever the hell you want, of course we consider it an invasion. And of course we want our neighbourhood back.

When you come here, you’re not leaving the city and driving to a place where you can ‘let loose’ – you’re simply leaving your own neighbourhood and entering ours.

When we have asked, politely, that you not drive so fast in your pick-ups, we were told we don’t own the road. (And to prove it, you sped up as you passed us, spraying gravel in our faces.)

When we have asked, politely, that you not come so close to us on your seadoos, you have screamed at us “You don’t own the fucking lake!”

True enough. But this is not a public campground: it is not empty before you arrive, it does not exist solely for your pleasure, it is not empty when you leave. Did you really think no one lives here?

Right. Okay. Read the rest of this entry »