Travel Photos

Maude and the Melancholy Monster

This is a story
about a girl named Maude
Who lived in a town
that was really quite odd

The sun never shined there
it was all grey and gloom
No plants grew in gardens
no flowers did bloom

One day Maude
was walking through town
When she heard what to her ears
Was the saddest of sounds

Whimpers
                 Whines
                              Mumbles
                                              and moans

The sounds of someone… or something
All sad and alone

The sounds came from behind
a big barred door
With signs that said
                                STAY BACK!
                                                       BEWARE!
                                                                          …and a bunch more

At the top of the door
was the tinniest of windows
Maude stacked up some boxes
and stood on her tip toes

Maude looked in
but it was too dark to see
the only hint anything was in there
were the whimpers of melancholy
Maude looked and found
no lock on the door
no one had tried
to open it before

With a CLANG!
                         and a BANG!
                                               a THUD!
                                                              and a creak

The door swung open… Maude took a peak
Inside the darkness
she saw two eyes
Peering out
as if surprised

With a GROAN!
                          and a MOAN!
                                                 a CRACK!
                                                                  and a pop

The monster within… crawled out of the slop

The people around
ran running in fear
Screaming "Oh my!"
                                 "Oh no!"
                                              "Oh gosh!"
                                                               and "Oh dear!"

But Maude just stared
at the sad looking beast
He did not scare
Her in the least

He was big and hairy
With a round nose and big belly
His hair was all matted
and he was all sorts of smelly

He looked at Maude
With curious eyes
She looked back
grinned and said "Hi"

He stared down at her
and gave a slight smile
He was happy to be out
It had been a while

Maude reached out her hand
grabbed hold of his thumb
she was pretty sure she knew
what needed to be done

She led him to her house
Grabbed soap and a broom
and some of that smelly stuff
Mom kept in her room

To the backyard they went
Maude grabbed the hose
She began to wash the monster
From his head to his toes

He looked like a fuzz-ball
Smelled like a rose
Maude painted his nails
Tied his hair in a bow

Maude held up a mirror
for the monster to see
He smiled a huge smile
and gave Maude a big squeeze
With a WOO-HOO!
                               YEE-HA!
                                              HAHA!
                                                         and HEHE!

Maude and the monster
danced around with glee

Maude and the monster
started to play
They played all sorts of games
for the rest of the day

With all the commotion
the townsfolk still hiding in fright
Peaked out of their windows
to see a wonderful sight

As Maude and the monster
Danced
             Laughed
                           and played
The sun peaked through the clouds
the grey faded away

The townsfolk astonished
Came out from their hiding places
And walked up to the monster
With big smiles on their faces

As the people scratched their heads
and said "isn't that funny"
Maude looked at the monster and said
"I'll call you Sunny"

The Symptom of Poverty

Ever since the last "economic crisis" hit there has been no shortage of articles and studies on poverty. I have read a fair number of the articles and listened to many different pundits express their opinions. While some were certainly well meaning and even informative, others simply espousing the same old toxic stew of rhetorical and logical fallacy. In the end much of what I have read, seen or heard about poverty has left me with a hollow feeling and more questions than answers.

Why is the fact evermore broken lives and dreams are being thrown on the human scrap heap all of a sudden headline news? What about the people who have long been on the bottom of that scrap heap? There has been a steady growing underclass of the destitute for generations that got very little mention from the MSM outside of the pretext of crime and drugs or the seminal stories of those who have risen above poverty to achieve great things.

Perhaps the addition of fresher faced formerly-middle-class workers to the mosaic of poverty has provided the mainstream media (MSM) with a more appealing demographic to showcase? The media calls them the "newly poor". In reality they have probably been poor for much longer but were sheltered from poverty's realities by a shroud of debt. Or they were the working poor living a meager pay cheque to pay cheque existence and rapidly descended into abject poverty once their salary could no longer keep up with the rising costs of living or was lost to unemployment.

The increase in poverty news from some sources is an attempt to confuse and even control any meaningful discussion about poverty. We like to think the MSM is there to inform us, after all they frequently profess to do so, but the reality is they are often the broadcasters of spin and obfuscation. They package poverty as a tangled mass of drugs, crime, laziness, evidence of a failing public education system (and used to support private education), a screed that "we" are not doing enough, proof the social security net is a black hole never to be filled and even as not being all that bad of a "job."

The MSM is often accused of bias. Bias of ideology and political party affiliation are the usual accusations. The real goal of the media is not to manipulate the discussion for the direct benefit of any particular ideology. They manipulate the discussion to create confusion. This is why the far-right reader can accuse the media of being "left" and the far-left reader can accuse them of being "neoconservative". They can't be both can they? Sure they can if all they do is confuse the hell out of everybody. And so it has become with poverty, despite all the recent media attention, we may be more confused about the subject than ever before.

What is Poverty?

If we are going to make any attempt to see through the confusion and find solutions to poverty one of the first question we need to ask is - What is poverty? The dictionary says the state of being poor is "not having enough money." Is that really true in a capitalist society?

If you have seen poverty in developing countries it is hard to say that poverty is merely a lack of cash. More money will not provide clean drinking water, secure housing and the ability to shop for healthy foods in a place where the infrastructure does not exist to supply those things to the people. I also have serious doubts just dumping money on the homeless or long-term victims of generational poverty in a capitalist society would do much good for many of them either.

The word poverty has become a loaded word with more than one practical meaning. The meager lifestyle afforded the unemployed but not yet homeless here, would be a standard working class lifestyle in many less fortunate countries. This leads some who have seen the disgraceful standards of living in other countries to have little sympathy for the North American poor. I contend they are not comparing apples to apples.

The poverty in the slums of Africa, Asia or South America is difficult to compare to what we see in North America. But the site of a young child drinking from a filthy stream as his family baths and washes clothes in the same stream is no less or more heart-wrenching than the site of an elderly lady dumpster diving for dinner. What we are seeing are two very different kinds of poverty. One is the poverty of nascent industrialization the other of post-industrialization. In simpler terms, the poor in developing countries suffer from not being lifted up, while the poor in our society suffer from being beaten down.

The poor in North America have been beaten down by the class system, by the media, by good intention, by their own representatives, their own people and by capitalism. The beating down involves removing opportunity, demoralizing, stigmatizing and cultivating the ignorance of the lowest wage earners. Many of the poor need more than just money in order to be able to get a stable foothold in our capitalist greed driven society. Providing money to people who are in despair, who may lack life skills and a support network and who have been the victims of the propaganda of ignorance for decades may appeal to some. However, doing so without the understanding that we are dealing with a larger problem than just money will not solve the problem and may even make it worse. Poverty is about more than just money. Poverty in North America is the fundamental breakdown of our society as a whole.

Honesty

Any meaningful discussion of poverty is impossible unless we are willing to be honest with ourselves. Poverty has many faces. The people living in poverty can be hard working families struggling in low wage work, single-parents, people looking after an elderly parent, laid-off workers, people suffering from a physical disability or mental illness, or screw-ups, no-good lazy welfare-bums, crack-addled street hustlers. The discussion must include the entire demographic. We need to talk about both the people feeling the economic effects of society's breakdown and those feeling the full burden. Both parts are too large to ignore at this point.

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."
- Voltaire

We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another.
But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism—an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the consequences for others.

In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmental good is immoral. The result is a diseased public culture that proclaims greed is a virtue and sharing is a sin. The symptom of this disease is poverty.

They Have Hunted and Slaughtered Our Lions

I use that expression quite a bit. It is inspired by a quote attributed to a few, and in different variations, but I'll give it to the classic megalomaniacal-imperialist Alexander the Great.
"I would not fear a pack of lions led by a sheep, but I would always fear a flock of sheep led by a lion."

I often use the expression whenever the topic of political discussions turns to "How do we change things?" That’s one of those questions more people are asking these days… or at least they should be. Forget about debating whether global warming is man -made or not, that's a damn red herring. Food and fuel prices going up, the erosion of the middle-class, the destruction of workers' rights, continual deterioration of our ecosystem, the loss of biodiversity, economic turmoil, all of those are stark realities. So whether you’re a poverty advocate, labour union member, PETA supporter or a good old fashioned tree hugger, you should be asking "How do we change things?"

The answer is right in front of all of us. It stands out in history books. Revolution… but do any of us really want to do it? The majority of people are still too comfortable or clueless here. If things are ever going to truly change and we're going to lift the poor out of poverty, halt the devastating effects of global capitalism on our ecosystem and tear down the plutocracy that controls our global society it will require us to make a drastic change in our way of living. What is viewed by many today as their entitled "standard of living " (e.g., cars, big house, stuff) will need to be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.

This struggle between what is good for rich corporate interests and the people has been going on for a very long time. The side that wants to move the system towards a sustainable system of and for the people has been losing for centuries and really getting pummeled for decades now. There will be no building or electing of any political party that isn't attached to G20 priorities and global capitalism of one form or another. There will be no truly effective voice to counter the corporate controlled media. Let's not forget, they're coming after the internet now.

In North America too many of us are smug, callous, greedy, stupid, scared or some combination. There is no mass will to protest let alone revolt. Our governments play us like fiddles. The US government is showing some serious cracks now that the Obama-sham is pretty obvious. But the plebs are so confused or otherwise occupied the system is in no trouble of collapsing through a unified nationwide mass movement. In Canada many of us still think somehow we aren't a part of all this. We're on the playing field and host some events but we're not part of the game. Our media feeds us our parliament through a Fawlty Towers lens and we eat it up. This leaves many Canadians believing our politicians are all merely incompetent, petty and wasteful. Those incompetents vote on hundreds of bills each year though and I doubt many Canadians could even tell you what most of them are.

We are too busy watching the orchestrated political theatre of our politicians to concentrate on the business of our politics. We are not losing jobs and being driven further into debt by mere wastefulness, our middle class and manufacturing base is not declining because our politicians are incompetent. We are on the same march towards a plutocracy and fascist police state as the US and it is intentional. We need to stop supplying our politicians with the excuse of incompetence and mismanagement, they are fully aware what they are doing.

But that brings us back to "How do we change things?" With so many of us still being sheep, lions are needed, but the global power base is on the lookout for any potential lions and are quick to respond and discredit (or worse) anyone who may have the potential to lead us in any sizeable measure. We have been divided and confused to the point where organizing all the disenfranchised into one cohesive movement is now a Herculean task. With the chances of any unifying figure emerging being remote we can no longer sit by and wait for one to rise from the masses. We must all become lions with nary a sheep in the crowd.

Consumption, Consumption, What's My Function?

Resource extraction to support consumption has been going on for thousands of years, from the slave labour salt mines of ancient Rome to the coal mines of Europe and the first gold mines of the Americas. Resource extraction has always consumed in order to extract resources. Salt mining in Rome consumed years off a slave's life, many parts of Europe were deforested in order to build coal mines, water cannon gold mining consumed our most vital resource (i.e., water) while decimating mountains, polluting rivers and destroying natural habitats.

http://www.conservation.ca.gov/dlrp/watershedportal/ReportsEvents/Documents/Miningstoxiclegacy.pdf

None of that has changed. Something has changed though and that is the amount of resources consumed to get our resources. It has become staggeringly high.

The days of mining with pick axe and wheelbarrow are long gone, even the days of water cannon mining pale in comparison to the 400 ton mechanical behemoths of modern mining. As global consumption has increased so have the size of the machines used to extract resources. As the machine size has increased so has the amount of resources required to build and maintain them. Natural rubber (http://www.bgci.org/resources/news/0569/) is required for tires (synthetic rubber doesn't have the necessary heat dissipating ability), high grade steel for structural components and barrels upon barrels of lubricants and fuel are required to keep them running. Just one machine will consume millions of liters of various lubricants and fuel in one year.

https://srsroccoreport.com/gold-mining-industry-fuel-costs-explode-in-a-decade/

Often the machines themselves are consumed within a decade and large mines will have several hundred of these machines. Not to mention service vehicles, diesel generators, locomotives, buses and planes all consuming resources. I wish I could say all these resources get recycled, because much of it can, but often that is not the reality.

It isn't just equipment that consumes resources either. Often small cities are built around these mines with roads, massive workshops, fire stations, hotels, airports, seaports, communication networks (e.g., phone, cable and internet) and the necessary water, power distribution and sewage systems. All mines have a life expectancy though and many of these mining towns, just like mining towns of yore, end up ghost towns when the resource is tapped out. Not only are mining towns left to rot, there are also entire towns consumed just to get to resources.

(http://www.xs4all.nl/~kazil/etzweiler.html).

As for reclamation of old mines, don't count on that either.

(http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14258)

Why do we do this? So we can collect ever increasing amounts of stuff? So we can breed like bunnies until we have over populated our planet and consumed ourselves to death? How many resources do we need to consume to continue consuming? How badly do you need that new iPad 2.0? Bad enough to support the Democratic Republic of Congo and risk the future of millions of people?

(http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-conflict-minerals-funded-a-war-that-killed-millions/)

Our consumption is out of control. Planned obsolescence and the cult of stuff benefit only corporations and the interests of corporations are diametrically opposed to the interests of people. Our rate and mode of consumption are designed to increase corporate profits and nothing more. A race to the bottom is not won by anyone, the first one there is simply the first to discover we are all screwed.

There is much talk today about the distribution of wealth and the need for a fairer system of wealth distribution but I fear that may be missing the point. The problem is wealth itself. The creation of wealth comes at great cost. It costs our environment it costs our societies and it costs people in remote parts of the world that most people shopping at Best Buy don't even consider. Unfortunately redistributing wealth is not the answer to the problem. Taking the wealth created by the rampant consumption of disposable goods and distributing it more equitably amongst the workers is only perpetuating the problem. It may seem great for the workers who see a bigger cut of the profits, but as long as wealth is being created someone, somewhere, is being exploited. That is the only way wealth can be created.

I'm not naïve, I understand enough about economics to know corporations need to sell stuff to employ people and people need jobs in our current society in order to live. But I fear unless things drastically change we are on the road to ruin. Perhaps technology can save us, we could recycle anything and everything, slow down but not eliminate consumption and prey our resources last until we can find some way to reverse the damage we've done or get off this rock before our ecosystem collapses. I'm not convinced any of that is going to happen though. We are prisoners trapped in a world created by ignorance and hubris and no matter how gilded the cage you're in, we are all in this thing together. No options available to us to truly change course from the inevitable are very appealing to the majority. The end of money, the end of wealth, the end of consumption: stuff, cars, gadgets, holidays in the sun. Most people don't want to hear about that. But if we don't wake up and do something soon about this runaway system we have found ourselves dependent on we may all end up there anyway and at that point there may be nothing left besides survival of the fittest. That is if our rampant consumption doesn't destroy our ecosystem first.

For All the Failed Bands (Side One)

The laughing heart (Tom Waits reads a Charles Bukowski poem)