It takes a lot more time for us to deal
with the fundamental questions than is at first apparent.
We have to take this long, circular,
difficult, dangerous, humbling, strenuous, extraordinarily complicated, route to
find out where we were at the beginning! It seems simple, and there
are glimpses and hints of the resolution along the way, but it takes most of a lifetime.
There is a wonderful little poem by
Robert Frost that always comes to my mind whenever I reflect on that
ridiculous state of affairs:
Bobby
Orr wrote this in his recent book, Orr: My Story, p.
127:
I
have won a few trophies over the years, and I never really liked
individual honors, because they seem to miss the point. No one guy
can accept the praise for the statistics he puts up, because it takes
all kinds of unacknowledged help to get there. All the coaches in
minor hockey and in Oshawa. All the friends and volunteers, teachers
and billets. The neighbors who lent a hand at some point, and the
teammates' parents who drove me to the rink. There is really no such
thing as individual accomplishment.
That
is actually quite astonishing - “There is really no such thing as
individual accomplishment” - especially coming from the highest
scoring defenseman ever, a very much individualized person if ever
there was one.
He
gets right to the heart of the current political knot with that,
dealing with the crazy idea that if you're not selfish, you're a
communist; the whole “you're on your own” fallacy. It also
happens to get to the fundamental problem of sociology: How is social
order possible?
He
wrote further on, p. 235, “I was never particularly fond of
school and couldn't imagine having to sit through four years to get a
university degree.”
I
just love it because Bobby Orr is, and always has been, known for
being a decent human being, the real thing, aside from his
professional prowess. It has been a long time battle for me against my
academic colleagues to recognize that being a decent human being is a
prerequisite to arriving at an accurate understanding of how society
works!
One
more thing: Orr and his book are exemplary of Canada. I have spent
several years in Canada, travelled widely in Canada, read everything
I can about it, and just plain old think about it a lot. There are
certain events in Canadian history that represent or exemplify Canada
which are useful to me whenever I try to articulate to anyone what is
special about Canada and why I love it so much. The battle of Vimy
Ridge and “the Henderson goal” are often cited in this respect.
If you are interested in Canadian identity and history you have to
listen to Foster Hewitt saying “Henderson has scored for Canada”
-
I
submit that Orr's book, and life, are similarly expressive of what it
means to be Canadian and of Canada's gift.
Finally,
here is a video containing some of his time on the ice and some
interviews with people who know him well. There are many clips on
YouTube of Orr on the ice that I have watched but I think this is one of the best.
There is a documentary film showing
today at a New York film festival called “Kids for Cash” which
will be generally available on February 5th next year. It is about
two judges and assorted collaborators in Luzerne County (which
includes Pittston, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton), Pennsylvania, who
profited by cruel and arbitrary sending of children to for-profit
prisons.
William Ecenbarger wrote a detailed,
readable, excellent book on the crime, entitled Kids for Cash:Two Judges, Thousands of Children and a $2.8 Million Kickback Scheme.
The book came in the mail at about 5:00 PM last night and I couldn't
put the damned thing down until I finished it at 5:00 AM this
morning. I didn't want to read the book but I felt I had to read it,
because this particular crime exemplified for me the whole Reagan era
turn to selfishness, opportunism, the belief that social order
derives ultimately from The Fist rather than love, that there is no
such thing as society, and that money is a good measure of success
and value.
Judge Mark A. Ciavarella
The Juvenile Court judge, Mark
Ciavarella, had a friend build a juvenile prison, “PA Child Care,”
in Pittston and another one in western PA, and then sent a steady
stream of kids to keep those prisons full and immensely profitable for six years.
The kids were arrested on ridiculous charges and given an average of
four minutes hearing, during which most kids, who did not have lawyer
representation, said only a couple words and often just cried,
then were handcuffed, shackled, and taken off to prison. We are
talking here about several thousand girls and boys under the age of
sixteen over a period of six years.
It would be just monstrous for me to choose some quote from Ecenbarger's book to try to convey what
it was like for, say, a ten-year-old to be taken away from his home
for three to twelve months or more on some transparently dishonest
charge and incarcerated in a harsh situation.
Rather, here is just one quote from the
book (p. 240) which gets at another aspect. Basil G. Russin, who had
been chief Public Defender for Luzerne County for twenty-six years,
said the following to a commission of inquiry in justification of his
own, and his staff's, silence, passivity, compliance and
irresponsibility (p.240):
“Because
everybody loved it. Everybody loved it. The schools absolutely loved
it. They got rid of every bad kid in their school. When I was in
school if you threw a spitball, maybe you went to the principal's
office and sat for a couple periods. Last couple years if you threw a
spitball, they got the police, and you ended up in juvenile court and
got sent away. Schools got rid of all their problems. Parents,
parents who had problems with the kid at home. They called the
police. Police said, you want us to take him away? Sure. I can't
control the kid anymore. Away the kid would go. Parents loved it.
Police loved it. They knew every arrest they made the kid would get
sent away. And despite what you heard this morning, the DA loved it
because they were getting convictions. They were never losing cases.”
One of the big memories I hold from the
years when I had my own big truck travelling all over the US and
Canada is the memory of the beef cattle feedlot farms in Texas,
Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Colorado especially, but in other places as
well.
The first thing you find out about them
is that God-awful stink. You can pick it up for a couple miles away.
I remember a place I used to go just west of Amarillo where you could
smell it from three miles away. You come up over this little rise and
there it is, a giant feedlot full of cattle as far as the eye can
see. It doesn't have a single blade of grass in it and the ground is
sheer black muck, a lot of it stuck to the sides and legs of the
cattle.
I've seen these even in Vermont and there
is one right in the middle of a beautiful little town in central
Ohio. You come out from St. Johnsbury heading south and there is this
big, stinking feedlot, backdropped by the majestic mountains. You
come into this little idyllic Ohio town I tell you about and you
wonder how the townspeople tolerate having this right in the center
of town.
These feedlots are sometimes called
“confined animal feeding operations” or “factory farms.” They
are fed, among other things, 60% of all the anti-biotics used in the
US and several hormones three of which are synthetic. These drugs get
into the local ecosystems as well as into the meat and from there
into our own bodies.
There's nothing new in my speaking of
this. Everybody knows. What makes the difference, what turns you off
from eating meat ever after is the actual, physical, seeing and
smelling of these feedlots. You can read about them, hear about them, think about them,
but actually to see and to smell them is another thing.
I am incapable of addressing the
“humanity issue” with regard to non-humans, and can only respect
my own personal feelings.
But I often slept in the parking lots
of truck stops where there were cattle- and pig-hauling trucks
overnight right beside my truck. You could hear the cattle stomping
around during the night, bellowing, stinking. I remember some pigs
being transferred from one trailer to another at one of these
truck stops. The pigs were actually screaming. They
sounded to me like humans screaming even though they weren't humans.
I remember getting up one morning from my bunk, looking out my window
at a stinking cattle trailer parked right next to me, and there was
this great, big, terrified eye of a steer looking out through an oval
opening on the side of the trailer. That did it for me. I have eaten
meat a couple times since that morning ten years ago, but never
enjoyed it again. It was the feeling of simple, very deep, personal
revulsion that did it rather than some intellectual consideration.
There are all kinds of intellectual
considerations, however, worth reading. The latest issue of Popular
Science, for example, has a fascinating article on dietary
substitutes for meat entitled “Can Artificial Meat Save the World?”Here's
a sample:
80 percent of
the world's farmland is used to support the meat and poultry
industries...a single pound of cooked beef...requires 298 square feet
of land, 27 pounds of feed, and 211 gallons of water...That same
pound of hamburger requires more than 4,000 BTU's of fossil fuel
energy to get to the dinner table...That process, along with the
methane the cows belch throughout their lives, contributes as much as
51 percent of all greenhouse gases produced in the world.
I'm
sure that it is possible to dispute such studies and statistics
because the reality is so complicated. What about the incalculable
medical costs of putting those anti-biotics and hormones into our own
bodies through meat or the costs to our own feelings of well-being?
It's so complicated that I think we are left with having to rely on
our feeling, our intuition, our inner sense. That's what I got from
the feedlots like the one near Amarillo: I felt “This can't be
right.”
The idea that truth can be symbolized
by a feather is exciting to me because it seems that, usually, a lot
more goes into human truth than what one sees at first glance.
The ancient Egyptians were onto this
symbolism, as you can see from the weighing of a feather against
one's soul in the scales at the time of death. The symbol of the
feather often appears in their hieroglyphics as Ma'at and as the head
of Thoth.
One of the reasons it appeals to me so
much is, I think, because I see now as an old person how very long it
takes to understand all that goes into a true statement about human
realities. Last night, for example, I happened to see a film version
of Frankenstein and saw so much more in it than I had ever seen
before. I am able to see so much more in the classics now than I
could fifty years ago.
A feather is like that. It is composed
of small, almost insubstantial elements. These elements accumulate in
large numbers and you get a feather, and enough feathers give you a
wing, and a couple wings enable you to soar.
The feather symbol thus is an apt
symbol for the accumulated acts, no matter how small, that are true
and built into consciousness.
The Native American Indians sometimes
would have
just a single feather on their heads and sometimes would
have a very large headdress full of them. The elaborate ostrich
feathers of the Cavaliers' hats indicates their traditional status.
You often see even today a small feather in the hat band of a fedora,
on the left hand side, indicating a certain worldly sophistication.
Feathered ear rings must have some
connection to thoughts. I notice, too, that devils and dragons
usually have wings that are not made of feathers, like bats' wings,
although that is not always the case. There is more to this than I
have understood.
