PM won't attend opening of AIDS forum in Toronto
World Leaders to join 20,000 researchers and activists at international gathering
Globe and Mail
OTTAWA[!-- /dateline --] — World leaders are expected to attend a major international conference on AIDS in Toronto this summer but Canada's Prime Minister will not be among them. "There was an invitation sent to the Prime Minister's Office to participate in the opening, to have the Prime Minister welcome the delegates and to open the conference," Gene Long, a spokesman for the 16th annual International AIDS conference, said yesterday.
"Recently we've received a letter that he would not be attending," he said.
This is the third time that Canada has played host to the prestigious conference that is held every two years and is expected to attract 20,000 scientists, journalists, community leaders, AIDS activists and people who are living with the disease.
There are rumours, which could not be confirmed yesterday, that former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will also be in attendance.
Both men have devoted time and money to the fight against AIDS through their respective foundations.
Former prime minister Brian Mulroney spoke eloquently about the effort to combat what was then an emerging threat when he addressed the 1989 meeting in Montreal.
The decision by former prime minister Jean Chrétien to skip the same conference in 1996 caused Nelson Mandela, South Africa's president at the time, to pull out. Mr. Chrétien's absence was termed a national embarrassment and a signal that Canada did not believe it was important for a head of government or a head of state to be at the opening.
Mr. Long said the track record of attendance by world leaders has been mixed in recent years.
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra did open the conference in Bangkok in 2004 -- and was heckled for his country's treatment of poor Thais living with the disease.
The president of Spain did not appear at the conference when it was held in Barcelona in 2004. But the president of South Africa was a participant at the 2000 conference in Durban.
Mr. Long said that there has been no announcement yet which visiting dignitaries, VIPs and special guests will be at the Toronto conference.
But there are some world leaders who will attend the conference, he said.
So Mr. Harper's absence poses something of a problem, he said.
"There is a protocol issue when there are visiting heads of state in an official function to be greeted by the Prime Minister."
Sandra Buckler, a spokeswoman for Mr. Harper, said yesterday that she was unaware that her boss had declined the invitation.
But "we never confirm the Prime Minister's schedule until we get closer to an event that we're going to do," she said.
Harpoonie must think that AIDS is only a gay issue. And we all know he freaks out with two dudes or girls kissing. What do you expect when you have Stockwell Day in your cabinet.
(Day doesn't believe in science, and believes the earth was created in 7/24 hr days when the actual hebrew translation in the bible for 'days' could mean anything from a day to a 1,000 years or infitity which means that evolution makes sense along with the big bang considering those take longer then a week to happen.)
A lot of ultra-conservative religions consider AIDS to be the work of the devil, so I'm not surprised he refuses to attend. Nevertheless, he is supposed to represent ALL the people, so his absense is unjustified. It's still very rude of him to snub other heads of state.
Shame on him!
Thank god my church has never thought that way. But then again the ELCA isn't exactly conservative but its the 5th biggest church group in the country with 5.5 million people. While the ones above it are all conservative goof balls.
The Man Who Walks with Dinosaurs
(//vny!://thetyee.ca/2004/12/01/daysm.jpg)[h1][span class="img_caption"]Will he evolve?[/span] [/h1][h3]The return of Stockwell Day, who now implies that people with AIDS deserve no sympathy.[/h3] [h6] [!-- start /util/contributor_list.mc --] [span class="authorname"] By [a class="contrib-link" title="Bio page for Murray Dobbin" href="vny!://thetyee.ca/Bios/Murray_Dobbin"]Murray Dobbin[/a] [/span]
[!-- end /util/contributor_list.mc --][!-- end contributors and pub date --] Published: December 1, 2004[/h6][h3]TheTyee.ca[/h3][!-- Start "Page" --] He's back. Stockwell Day, the man who once admitted that he believed humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, has once again revealed that he is not fit to hold public office. Then it was sort of funny (remember the "Doris" Day petition?) but this time it is just appalling. Press reports revealed recently that Mr. Day, who is the Conservative Party's foreign affairs critic, refused to send condolences to the Palestinian people on the death of President Yassir Arafat. Why? Because of Mr. Arafat's support for armed struggle against Israel? No. Because he might have died of AIDS.[/p]In a November 16 email to his Conservative colleagues Mr. Day stated: "Some of you have asked why I have not released a statement of condolence or sympathy. As you know, there are two sides to the Arafat story. You pick...." He then included in the email an article by David Frum, former speech writer for George W. Bush, indulging in unfounded speculation about the cause of Arafat's death. Frum suggested that Arafat's symptoms "sounded AIDS-like." [/p]Clearly, for both these men, anyone who dies of AIDS is to be shunned, not only while they are alive but even after they are dead. Shunned why? I guess we would have to ask Mr. Day though neither he nor anyone from the Conservative Party wanted to talk about it. We can safely assume however, that Mr. Day, a fundamentalist Christian, and his intellectual mentor David Frum, believe that Mr Arafat was gay and contracted AIDS through sexual contact. In other words, Mr Day believes that we should punish people for being gay. This antediluvian attitude persists in the Conservative Party despite the great progress made in this country in dispensing with homophobic bigotry.[/p]Foreign Minister Day?[/p]This proof is irrefutable: the man who Stephen Harper will name foreign affairs minister if the Conservatives form the next government, has no qualms about expressing this backward and mean-spirited attitude. Even worse, he is quite prepared to act on it. One of the areas in which the Official Opposition can act is in responding to such international events as the death of a leader – and Mr. Arafat was the elected leader of the Palestinians. The message sent by Canada's government-in-waiting to other countries is that Mr Day's homophobia will determine whether or not condolences are forthcoming. [/p]I wonder of Mr Day refuses to send condolences to families in his Penticton constituency whose loved ones die of AIDS? Or would they qualify only if they could prove the disease was not sexually transmitted? Just what are the rules for receiving sympathy from the man who holds one of the senior critic positions in the Conservative Party?[/p]Back when Mr Day was dismissing evolution he was also, lest we forget, trying to defend his more serious transgressions. He had expressed the view that we should place child abusers in the general prison population so that those prisoners could summarily execute the abuser. He was also proud of the fact that he made a point of being one of the first customers at holocaust denier Jim Keegstra's new garage after he was convicted of hate crimes. When he was an Alberta MLA, Mr. Day slandered Red Deer lawyer and school trustee Lorne Goddard, attacking him for defending a pedophile in a child pornography case. "Goddard must also believe it is fine for a teacher to possess child porn," said Day. He spent years badgering his cabinet colleagues to end abortion funding.[/p]How moderate? [/p]The disturbing pattern of those days is revealing itself again. If the law and constitution of the land conflict with Mr Day's perverse version of Christian values, then he feels no compunction in simply ignoring the law. The roots of this contempt for human rights go deep for Mr. Day, right to the very notion of democratic governance. Under his guidance the Bentley (Alberta) Christian Centre featured a social studies lesson which declared that democratic governments "represent the ultimate deification of man, which is the very essence of humanism and totally alien to God's word." One might have hoped that years of being in government might have moderated this extremist nonsense. But clearly Mr Day still gives preference to his interpretation of "God's word" on homosexuality and not on the word of Parliament.[/p]Stephen Harper refused to criticize Mr Day's offensive email, presumably because the extreme Christian right is still just as important to the party's future success as it was when it was called the Reform Party. While the party has now taken the name of the Conservative Party don't be fooled by the name and the moderate gloss Mr Harper hopes it will provide. [/p]If Mr. Harper was genuine in his claim to be moderating the "new" party's social conservatism he would have fired Stockwell Day. He didn't. Behind the moderate image lurks the same old bigotry.[/p][em]Author and journalist Murray Dobbin's 'State of the Nation' column appears twice monthly on [/em]The Tyee.[/p]
I can't understand why stupid clowns keep getting elected. Surely there can't be that many idiots in the voting populace. Then again, since he is in Parliament, there must be.
kitten wrote:
I can't understand why stupid clowns keep getting elected. Surely there can't be that many idiots in the voting populace.
I said the same thing when Reagan was elected (yes, I'm that old, though I was just a kid at the time). A few years later I spent a Summer in LA and met a lot of them.
That's why nothing surprises me any more.
Because they attach themselves to religion. Most people in this country that go to church vote. So if they say they are pro-life or whatever that means people will blindly vote for them even though the politicians themselves will never act on those 'pro-life' promises because its politicial sucide because then they loose a trump card to the other guys in elections. Thats why democrats have only been in office 8 years since the roe v. wade decision went down. Its like when the Liberals use scare tatics against the Torries in elections saying they are against women issues and such. (Which actually is technically true and knowing and watching Canadian conservatives they'll do anything and not think about the consquences just look at Mulroney did and it f-ed up his party for a decade.)
So if the abortion issue passes the republicans are basically screwed because there are millions of people who just vote on one issue in this country: abortion and if that goes away then that opens up a huge grey area.
Sportsdude wrote:
Because they attach themselves to religion. Most people in this country that go to church vote. So if they say they are pro-life or whatever that means people will blindly vote for them even though the politicians themselves will never act on those 'pro-life' promises because its politicial sucide because then they loose a trump card to the other guys in elections. Thats why democrats have only been in office 8 years since the roe v. wade decision went down. Its like when the Liberals use scare tatics against the Torries in elections saying they are against women issues and such. (Which actually is technically true and knowing and watching Canadian conservatives they'll do anything and not think about the consquences just look at Mulroney did and it f-ed up his party for a decade.)
So if the abortion issue passes the republicans are basically screwed because there are millions of people who just vote on one issue in this country: abortion and if that goes away then that opens up a huge grey area.
Do you really believe that the real majority of Americans feel that way? Reagan and Bush père got elected on economic issues more than anyone else (well, that and a racist view of violent crime–as the "Willie Horton" ads of 1988 will attest). That's what the "Reagan Democrats" were all about. The sad thing is that the Republicans drew the wool over "working class" males' eyes about what they would do for them. They found a good scapegoat in women and minorities.
There was a phenomenon in the 80s of the "Angry White Male": men between 20 and 45 who were finding their social and economic primacy eroded during that period—mostly by globalisation and the anti-labour politics of Republican administrations—but the Republicans were good at casting the enemy as not the corporate overlords but the "beneficiaries" of Affirmative Action and "the women's movement". For example, the main reason why women made wage gains against men in particular professions during the 80s and 90s wasn't because they started earning more: it was because men started earning less (the same case can be made for minorities as well). That's a lot of what's behind the Far Right even now.
After all, what was the rallying cry in the Clinton campaign HQ in 1992 but "It's the economy, stupid"? Clinton was able to capitalise on the economic downturn of the early 90s, just as Reagan was able to milk his "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" bullshit in 1980. Don't think that Thatcher and Mulroney were any different.
Yes, there will be a few very vocal nut jobs who will swear up and down that their real reason for voting Republican is based on social issues. But even these people will have some sort of economic imperative behind their opinion. I've yet to meet someone who would tell me that they stand to stand to see their income go down if their candidate is elected, but it's worth it to them to see said candidate enact some sort of social legislation. After all, the whole anti-choice position was sold to the greater populace on the basis of the "welfare queen" myth. True right-wingers (like certain members of my family) support abortion rights because, from their point of view, it keeps the poorer classes from breeding and burdening the wealthier ones.
btw, this is perhaps off the subject, but let me tell you something about the rights of women in Canada. Women were not allowed to vote [span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"]or even own property[/span] until 1947. The next time you go off about how historically more liberal Canada is as compared to the US, why don't you take that into account? When I found out that little piece of information, it sure explained a lot about some of the regressive attitudes I have encountered in this country.
Please try to look at the current situation in the context of history, not just in what you see now.
In 1972 I was not allowed to buy a car in my own name without my husband's written permission. Things have changed a lot since then.
Fine but what I see now is also what the mood of the country is in currently. Bush won '04 on the religious right vote. I throw papers and most houses I see that have political signs up say "Vote Pro-Life" blah blah blah. As I said earlier the people that go to church are the people most likely to vote and they usually vote Republican. *My family excluded.
My friends parents one is a catholic deacon. Are HUGE Social Conservatives. They vote with the pro-life issues first and every thing else is a minor second. Catholic schools are teaching there kids to vote social issues first and everything else second. Its a growing issue something you probly haven't seen because you live outside of the country or grew up on the west coast where this trend is not common place. Thats all these people care about. And yes Canada has been slow in areas but that was eons ago (maybe not from your perspective but from mine it certainly is). There has been a cultural shift to the hard right and if you can't see that well I'm sorry.
kitten wrote:
In 1972 I was not allowed to buy a car in my own name without my husband's written permission. Things have changed a lot since then.
Get this: in 1976 my mother, a medical professor who had just finished an auto repair course, took her new car back to the dealer for some warranty-covered repairs. The dealer said to her, "OK, honey, now you take this estimate home and show it to your husband, and if it's OK with him, he can call back and authorise the repairs."
My mother said, "Well, first of all, the person who owns the car, the person who has paid for the car, and also the person who knows how a car actually works is standing in front of you, whereas my husband neither knows how a car works nor how I spend my money keeping it in repair—and you, sir, ARE A COMPLETE SEXIST!"
Oh, how I wish I had been there.
Even better: my mother had a friend, a black female Army psychiatrist, who made great money as the medical chief of a VA hospital in an unnamed but almost completely white and very rednecked American town in the late 1960s. This woman decided to buy herself a motorboat to enjoy her time off on some of the local reservoirs. When she went into the dealership the salesman kept steering her towards the less expensive boats, even though she was interested larger ones that would allow her to invite more of her friends along. But she went along with him and settled on the boat the the salesman suggested. When it came time to settle the bill he started outlining various financing options. She just pulled out her chequebook and asked him how much it was, and promptly wrote out a cheque for the full amount! That stupid racist and sexist mofo must have realised pretty quickly that he had just missed out on a much bigger sale had he not made such stupid and short-sighted assumptions about what turned out to be one of the more well-heeled customers he had had all year!
I wonder if things are much better now, to be honest. Real estate people still "steer" single women and minority couples towards lower-income neighbourhoods, even when they can afford more. It happened to me when I moved to Vancouver. I ended up buying in a cheaper neighbourhood than I could have, and ultimately ended up spending more in renovations than the difference between a place here and one in an area where I wouldn't have had to put so much extra money and work into my property . . .
And schools were still segregated until the 80's down here. Jim Crow laws existed until the mid 60's. Racial profiling is prolific as ever (the worst is in Missouri). Inter racial marriage was illegal in most states until the 70's, in some states single people can't adopt. You want to keep going because I can. Canada has changed and so has America.
Here are some examples:
Goldwater's son calls for concentration camp for illegals. Actually this is not as extreme as you would think, a lot of conservatives I've talked to support this idea.
[A href="vny!://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FORCED_LABOR_CAMP?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME"]vny!://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FORCED_LABOR_CAMP?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME[/A]
And here's an abortion article.
[A href="vny!://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ANTI_ABORTION_CONVENTION?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME"]vny!://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ANTI_ABORTION_CONVENTION?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME[/A]
Here's Missouri's Racial profiling report: Its the worst in the nation by the way.
[A href="vny!://www.ago.mo.gov/racialprofiling/2005/racialprofiling2005.htm"]vny!://www.ago.mo.gov/racialprofiling/2005/racialprofiling2005.htm[/A]
Sportsdude wrote:
Its a growing issue something you probly haven't seen because you live outside of the country or grew up on the west coast where this trend is not common place.
The family members I was quoting live in the mid-Atlantic seaboard region and adjacent Midwestern states, and I last visited them in 2003. I am still in touch with some of them (though not the cousin who raised money for Rick Santorum's first campaign, but most of the others) and they feel the same way as they always have. I can say the same for people I know who still live in the Deep South and Southern California who vote Republican. It's an economic issue, period.
I also have known a lot of self-described "born-again Christians" who have their own personal ethics but personally disagree with a lot of their church "leaders" in that they don't believe that they have a right to inflict their beliefs upon others . . .
Canada has been slow in areas but that was eons ago (maybe not from your perspective but from mine it certainly is).
You try living here as somethings besides a white male and then you can talk to me about this issue.
There has been a cultural shift to the hard right and if you can't see that well I'm sorry.
Sweetheart, I hate to pull rank, but I'm probably old enough to be your mother. I've seen more, experienced more, and I lived in a lot of different places in the US (some not far from where you are now). I know something about where you live and I understand that it's miserable (the last time I travelled through your hometown I was shocked that the clerk in the gas station/convenience store I visited actually had a smoldering cigarette next to her, and that I had to inhale her fumes—this was only three years ago), but it doesn't necessarily represent the whole Midwest, the whole US East of the Rockies, or the whole US in general.
If there's anything I learned from the Reagan-Bush era of the 80s it's that it is the most vocal and fascistically well-organised (in modern terms, the sheep-like religious Right) that get their voices heard—but it is a true "silent majority" (to make ironic use of Nixon's reactionary terminology from the 60s) that populates the US and makes up the more moderate bulk of the population. Why do you think that the last two Presidential "elections" were expected to be so "close"? Is it perhaps because the huge number of swing voters not only can't make up their minds between two truly abhorrent candidates, but also because they don't fit into the kind of pigeonholes the media (and you) want to put them into? That's a far cry from the lockstep jackbooted Christian activists that you (and the media) are portraying to the rest of us.
I'm reminded of a recent German movie I saw about the WWII period—forgive me if I can't remember which one. A character who suffered under the Nazis was asked why he didn't leave. His answer: "I was waiting for the Germans to return." In other words, the ones who weren't total fanatics and the stupid sheep who just followed along with them. That's the way I look at the American people—and I believe that, despite all the bullshit that's happening now, the better part of us will prevail. Just as some college students I knew in the early 80s thought that the world had come to an end when Reagan was elected, and found later that all was not lost.
I'm just finishing up a biography of Germaine de Staël, the famous 18th- and early 19th-century saloniste whose career predated the French Revolution, and whose republican sentiments and writings caused her to be exiled by Napoleon. A passage I read the other day from this book particularly struck me:
"Compared to what the world has known since, Napoleon's régime seems mild and humane; but to one who remained faithful to the hopes of the eighteenth century, the world of 1810 was a nightmare of brute force. War was permanent: it had gone on for eighteen years. From Spain to Poland, from Amsterdam to Corfu, French soldiers were garrisoned, levying tribute and imposing the will of one man. With the Continental System and the blockade war had become total, with no end in sight, engulfing all human energy: the arts had to glorify the régime; philosophy and education must function as tools of conformity; science was enlisted to create synthetic substitutes. Resistance was punished by demotion, exile, imprisonment and, in the conquered countries, the firing squad. The year 1810 marked the beginning of a new phase in systematic oppression. Napoleon created state prisons, where inmates were held without trial, decreed drastic new censorship laws, and deprived the Church of its last vestige of independence. The Pope himself was arrested and hustled off to Savona. If his plans had succeeded, said Napoleon in 1816 [in other words, after his defeat—in case you didn't know], he 'would have become the master of the religious as well as of the political world.'"
That was just five years before his defeat. Since then worse despots have gone down as a course of history and general opinion against them. Bush and his machine will go down too.
Don't tell me I don't know what it is or where it comes from because I've seen it too. And it's here in Canada as well, as much as you'd like to believe otherwise.
But it will not prevail. Simple human decency dictates that. If you're really worried about that, then get off the computer and do something real in your own community—or go to one in which your efforts can bear fruit.
Just as the border insulates me from living with the Christian Right 24/7, so your geography isolates you from those as near as the Northern Midwest (and yes, I am in close contact with friends there, too) who believe as you do.
One last point: even my friends in the Midwestern US are shocked at the kind of sexism I've had to deal with here in Canada. As a white male, you are in no position to comment on the kind of oppression and regressive attitudes I've confronted here. I have made part of my living in a male-dominated field since long before I left the US, and I have never encountered the repression and shockingly outdated views of women that I have here in Canada—and if you put yourself in my shoes for 24 hours you might sing a different tune, you little pissant.
"One last point: even my friends in the Midwestern US are shocked at the kind of sexism I've had to deal with here in Canada. As a white male, you are in no position to comment on the kind of oppression and regressive attitudes I've confronted here. I have made part of my living in a male-dominated field since long before I left the US, and I have never encountered the repression and shockingly outdated views of women that I have here in Canada—and if you put yourself in my shoes for 24 hours you might sing a different tune, you little pissant."
Oh like being a white male somehow makes me immune. MY ASS! I've been called a 'n***er lover' because I went to an all black school. Was told "isn't getting rough up there" in response that I went to an all black school in a part of the county that has shifted from a white neighbourhood to a mostly black one and the white people have moved to a county over. I've been called a "Satan worshiper" by pro-lifers at a catholic school and a lutheran school because I was a democrat. I have constantly put up with my relatives calling muslims turbin heads, dirty mexicans and china men. I DARE not tell anyone around here that I've asked out girls who weren't white. Accidentally sad that to one of my friends and he gave me a weird look. I've been told that I was going to burn in hell, and was called filth of the earth. You maybe older but for my 20 YEARS of living so far I've have experinced so much crap that a normal human being my age can't even being to understand. I've seen constant racial profiling. I got pulled over once because I was driving through a neighbourhood with a friend of mine who happend to be black, we were searched. People see inter-racial relationships as the devil. I've seen public support for abortion clinc bombers "Doing God's will". The same friend that gave me the weird look about my attempt at inter-racial dating wanted to egg the Planned Parenthood. He calls anybody thats not pro-life PRO DEATH.
You know what I'm sick and tired of older people telling me I'm wrong. I've walked in your shoes Dissident I've been on both sides. I know what I'm talking about. I doubt you've ever seen real racial tensions. Well I have. I doubt you've seen fights that were all started because some white guy did something stupid and caused a riot. I've seen people bomb a local hindu temple thinking it was a muslim temple. People want to kill all the muslims here.
In high school I was on the football team. The team was all black except for 4 kids. I was one of the 4 kids that wasn't black. In reality I was the only real 'white' kid because the other 3 lived in the city. I was the only 'white kid from the burbs'. We were the best team in the state and to get pumped for a game we would play the race card. And 5 games the race card wasn't a ploy but a fact. The Quarter finals in the state tournament we were number 1 in the state but somehow had to travel to the boot heel of the state. We went past cotton fields. Everyone was quiet, they had never seen cotton fields before. We get off the bus play the game we win but there was this section called the 'dog pound' that constantly yelled racial slurs at anyone with opposing team colours. White or black race in america doesn't matter anymore. Now its a oh you live in the 'city'. We asked for the group to get arrested but the authorities laughed at us.
Used to tape Varsity girls games and against the sister lutheran school which was all white and in the suburbs I got on tape (showed it to the coach) parents on the other team yelling racial slurs at my schools players. This went on the entire game and it wasn't isolated it happend again and again.
I've been made fun of because I came from the rich part of town even though I lived in a smaller house then the people making fun of me.
On a Youth trip to Atlanta, a couple of people in my group acted gay, so they could get there black roomate who was from a differnt church to leave them alone so they could party. They did this every day. Even in the middle of the night. I've stood up for gay people before and have been called a fag for it. Can't even tell half the stuff that I've seen or been through fearing blacklash.
Sportsdude wrote:
Oh like being a white male somehow makes me immune. MY ASS!
Let me put it this way: you walk into a place by yourself where no one knows you, you are a white male.
I walk into a place where no one knows me: I am a woman.
I spent the better part of the day today dealing with building subcontractors. My ex-husband was one, and I speak their language. Even so, I had a much harder time than I should have—because what does a woman know about these things after all?
One of these guys, who had been fairly reasonable and fair-minded—and who was around my age—made some comment about running into someone he had known in high school nearby, was I from this part of town, had I gone to one of the schools in the area? I tried to put him off with vague denials until he finally forced me to admit that I had gone to school in the US. Shortly thereafter he handed me a bid that was several hundred dollars above the other ones I had received for the exact same job.
It's all appearances and assumptions. Just as I can never truly understand what it's like going through life as a non-white person, you can not understand what it is like to live as a woman—or to live as an American in Canada unless you do it yourself.
Sportsdude wrote:
I've walked in your shoes Dissident I've been on both sides. I know what I'm talking about. I doubt you've ever seen real racial tensions. Well I have.
Probably while you were still in diapers I lived in LA. Try walking into a hardware store and you are the only female and white person there. The hate was palpable. All I wanted to do was buy a few screws, fer Chrissake. This was in the mid-80s. Oh, and try going into a hardware store in two different Chinese neighbourhoods in San Francisco to get something you need for your job as an apartment manager. It's us "uppity white women" who "act like men" and are responsible for their women running off with white men, or so they used to tell me . . .
Don't talk to me about racism . . .
I was gay-bashed even before there was a word for it. Even though I'm straight, just because I played sports and was intelligent and outspoken in my teens I was beat up for being a dyke. Once again, this was in the mid-80s.
Just learn some perspective, that's all I'm trying to say. Just because it seems so bad to you now, if you talk to anyone who has really been there, it isn't as bad as you think.
Similarly, if I had taken the time to talk to someone who had really been here in Canada (aside from my very conformist and middle-class brother, whom I didn't believe, and now I rue the day that I ever discounted his opinions) I probably wouldn't have put myself through the last four years . . .
Its not just me. My mother grew up in a farming community she was the only woman in her class to graduate. She went off to Chicago, on her own, lived in the south side on her own, and took critism because she was a woman. Her grandfather was against her going to school because he said women don't belong in school. All her friends got preggo, been divorced a few times and wonder why she didn't have kids really early. Last time I checked I had an X chromosome and she was my mother.
My dad grew up in an immigrant family from Hungary. He heard constant racial slurs from his nieghbours. He was called a nazi everyday in school. He was looked down upon. Even though my grandmother was in a concentration camp after the war by the soviets and his aunt escaped at night under the wall before it was built and his dad diserted the german army somewhere in Austria. Last time I checked my dad was my father.
My sister was born deaf or didn't have the processing to hear or talk. She has severly learning disabilities and is the beyond shy. She struggles but she has come along way considering doctors said she would never talk and thought she was deaf. She's been treated horribly by people because she can't talk in public. I admire her courage but its a struggle to even talk to her relatives.
Also grandpa from hungary was born in a shack, lived on dirt floors and was so low in society they were almost gypsies in Hungary.
My other grandpa was born into poverty in southern illinois. Father was a drunk, him and his 6 siblings lived in a 2 room house. He was made fun of because of where he lived had hot boiling water dumped on his head by a bunch of deliquents.
What, you want to get into a "suffer-off"?
You want to know why I don't like Hungarians? I was engaged to a Hungarian Jew who, despite my use of birth control, knocked me up and was ready to marry me until his mother objected—because my father was Jewish and my mother wasn't and that doesn't count? What it was really about was the fact that my parents were academics and didn't make the big money they were hoping their son would marry into.
Big f*cking deal. And that's minor in the course of my life, for f*ck's sake.
What does that have to do with the political situation in the US and Canada, which is the subject of this thread?
Especially as it has to do with AIDS. Want to know how many people I've literally watched die of AIDS? Having been a performing artist in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis I can tell you a lot. But does that have anything to do with Harper's actions in the year 2006?
You have to look at the meta-issues, dude. Otherwise, it's a huge paradox, and you get lost in the details.
Europeans blame North Americans' Puritanistic view of sex as a major stumbling block to rational public policies as regards HIV (the Clinton years notwithstanding). Yet it was my totally Anglo-Saxon Puritan uncle with his three degrees from Harvard that he's so proud of who told me in the midst of the AIDS crisis that he was thankful for it "because it mostly hit the homosexuals and drug addicts, and it thinned them out". I almost ran my car off the Bay Bridge when he told me that. From his point of view, of course, it was perfectly sound fiscal public policy.
Follow the money. That's where it all goes.
sorry that we were yelling through words. Just once though could you say anything good about where you live. You sound like the female version of Swan Dive. (He was a DV'er who only complained about Vancouver and wanting to leave it).
I'll start with St. Louis. I like the mornings here. The trees, the deer, and the bikers. Its great while I'm driving around doing my work to see the world getting up. Its fascinating. And its not hot out. In my job you tend to become a morning person and realise how long the morning actually lasts considering most of the world gets up and starts moving at 8 when the sun has been out for 3 hours before that. Those 5-8 days are nice.
I like this one park I go to, its on a flood plain, its got a huge but shrinking lake, bike paths galore.
Just as in Seattle when the clouds part and you can see Mt Rainier, Vancouver is pretty when you can see the mountains. Keep your eyes in the clouds and every place is nice. In other words, this is a nice place to visit, but . . .
SD: go to Chicago, St Paul, even Milwaukee—someplace else where you'll be more comfortable.
Take my advise: get away from your family hoopdidoops and get a chance to live your own life. You'll be able to separate your experience from your surroundings and figure out what it is that isn't working. I'd suggest San Francisco, but you have to be a millionaire to live there any longer.
Or try Europe, or Australia. Very likely, if you're like me, with some distance you'll start to appreciate the good things about the US once you're away from all the bad stuff. Baseball. Jazz. Soul music. Even (gasp!) some aspects of Southern culture. One of the best afternoons I spent here in Vancouver was with a gay black male from New Orleans (post-Katrina) where we talked for hours about the hypocrisy of both the American and Canadian governments—that is, when we weren't arguing about who was the better jazz or gospel singer, from our respective points of view (or whether Roberto Clemente or Hank Aaron was the bettter ballplayer).
I listen to some good early Ray Charles and it all doesn't matter. Or some mid-career Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra. Pain is pain, Joy is joy. I made my life in the arts, which transcend everything. Hitler and people like him may have attempted to suppress some of the most profound artistic expressions known to us, but they endure and we see, hear and feel them. Walk away from a performance of Mahler or Bach and tell me you felt nothing.
These things go back from before our ancestors and their oppressors were born. At the same time, most the things we find the most moving are born of the same genre of struggle as people are facing now. My ex-husband was a "freedom-fighter" (though a certain governments allied with the US probably still classify him as a terrorist), and through him I learned the power that art, literature and music have to motivate people—especially when they don't dwell on the differences, but on the potential to unite people on devotion to higher causes.
My point in all these posts is that it is the stupid, tiny things that bring us all down into that place where we hurt one another. Obviously, as a communist, I'm going to blame the Capitalist machine, but essentially it all has to do with "what is mine and how do I keep others from encroaching on it"? On the West Coast the factions wear different masks and use different names than those on the East Coast, those in the South or those in the Midwest.
Yet we all get up in the morning, we all look out at the same sky (which is miserably grey here in Vancouver most of the time, hence our native pessmism) and we all make our decisions about how we feel about where we are and how we feel about our lives as we get out of bed and begin our days.
Even with the most conscious effort it is difficult at times to look beyond what is in your immediate vicinity, or what you see on some flat screen in front of you. Most of us are so busy keeping body and soul together to look much further beyond that, or to do our own research. We're tired.
The nice thing is that we can look beyond this to the rare occasion when we meet someone with whom we can communicate without a lot of explanation, or someone who has been through what we have. We can start to understand that, in spite of all the negativity that the media feeds us (and that we displace on other people in our surroundings) there are people who share similar hopes and aspirations for the populace in general; and when we raise our eyes above the stupid petty differences we see that we have much more in common than we had realised.
Some of the friends I lost in the AIDS holocaust in the 90s had been members of religious communities—both Catholic and Anglican—before they decided to realise themselves as gay members of society. Sadly enough, as soon as they had done so, both the religious communities that had formed their identities since puberty and their families had nothing further to do with them, even when they were dying. Yet there were religious and social communities in San Francisco that were ready to receive them, and they formed their own "families of choice" based on real emotional ties that were totally divorced from biological determinism.
btw, sadly enough, I see little evidence of the potential for that here in Vancouver, despite the liberal laws—and I've done some work for AIDS charities here (and I have friends who may be in a position eventually to make use of those services), so I've some idea of what the situation is here. Talk about stepping back 20 years or so. Even Mississippi probably makes better provisions for people with HIV than the GVRD, but I digress . . .
I'm suggesting that you look beyond national differences—certainly those that separate us in North America or in the West in general—and find a plane of commonality that will take you out of the slough of despond in which you feel you dwell now. You won't find it by crossing simple national boundaries, or possibly even ideological ones. Very likely you'll find yourself making personal and ideological compromises when you do so—however, when you do find those you can communicate and work with, best of luck to you.