No Humour Please, We’re Skittish

WARNING: No ethnic or racial group, be it human, primate, dolphin, or otherwise, was harmed in the making of this or any previous satirical document by the author. Warning: This essay contains words, none dangerous to your health, all carefully weighed, one at a time.

If my personal brand of humour somehow hurts the reader's feelings or even just ruffles your feathers, sorry, ... though quite honestly I remain bewildered as to why or just how, given that this is my blog which means I did not seek you out, you chose to drop in.
However, I am learning fast that blogging is often as not certainly not a literary debate.
It seems to be all about aggression, about the blogger daring to stick their head up and then seeing who lops it off, or at least sometimes, like when it's all about attacking another’s and/or defending one’s own written assumptions, holding to a position while trying to encounter every manner of verbal assault.
I guess this dates me but that is exactly the opposite of any seasoned, disciplined, respectful debate.

It is true that, due to the limits of the medium, the message in blogging may not be able to successfully convey anything very subtle. There's no voice tone, no body language, so loss of nuance is inevitable, no facial humour, verbal tone is absent so there is a loss of facetious intent, often misunderstood quietly sardonic humour, misread acerbic wit, never mind any attempt at outright subversiveness through humour.
Still, maybe blogs can still include needed insights.
Blogging may not even be suited to being about considering anything lighter or less than terminally self serious in the first place.
Who knows?
Am I perhaps supposed to understand that if one’s own humour fails to amuse everyone that this equals rudeness or is thought to be "overbearing"? If someone out there comes on line and does not happen to think my post is amusing or entertaining, where are the limits of my responsibility?
Somehow, touchiness in many a reader is not only often PC driven but it seems almost a bit like these days there is a quasi religious proscription against metaphorically farting in church. (How rude!).
Nevertheless, I stand by what I see as every person’s right to broach whatever topic they deem to be worthy, be it self reflection, humour, exposure to satire, or even, on occasion, the call for some small measure of what some deem rudeness.
There is a respectful way to get almost any point across.
And humour by definition is iconoclastic, anathema to some conservatives who lack the spontaneity to rise with the laughter.

While some might disagree with me, I still defend to the death their right to do so. I also support our mutual right to laugh out loud, even in blog church, - and especially if there seems to be the danger of any nasty bout of humourlessness lurking about, or if I sense in a comment submission any tendency toward ornery cussedness in need of a playfully unpredictable antidote.

Poet though I am I have tried to develop the requisite blog thickness of skin needed for fbeing on the receiving end of flaming, but I will not use that layer of gradually thickening hide as any facade.
Nor could I hope to or even desire to conform to any social standard which involved wearing the psychological equivalent of Mao’s “one size fits all” p.c. straight jacket of watered down, civil, boring discourse.

With all due respect afforded those in my life whom I continue to hopw will want to stick around as worthy debate opponent’s, I must by nature welcome healthy verbal jousting.
And lastly, while civility has its merits and I would moderate any comment that was off the wall, neither do I wish to view others who choose to comment on my blog as developmentally or emotionally challenged adults in need of debilitating kid glove molly coddling. It is an odd world out there filled with the alienated and the lonely and it can be a minefield trying to find similar minded souls or worthwhile debaters.

For example, here is just one issue: Even if I fully agree with others that remote communities maybe should find some way not to need tourists, I still think that a one liner like:
“Send your money over on the boat and stay home”
speaks succinctly to the reality of the ancient love/hate relationship which many a remote bur lovely island still sustains about “tourists versus their money”.

On the flip side, I have personally heard many an openly rude, hostile and gauche comment made by various island locals about visiting tourists and even about the lesser breed known as "part timers".
All in all some pretty nasty remarks have also been made while within earshot of some of those same “cash suppliers”.

Now isn't that avoidably rude? Is that even necessary?

Summer guests and visitors have been made keenly aware of this aspect of hostility to "outsiders" for far too long a time. The bad news (or is it?) is this: Islanders (from the specific island of which I speak now) have become notorious "off island" for their unhidden expressions of hostility and resentment and for presenting an often very unwelcoming face to the world at large.
It can be downright embarrassing at times to hear over and over again from guest visitors just how islanders are seen by those who come and go as guests of a small island.

No ambassador or diplomacy awards there.

However, for all I know, no one else sees this as a negative aspect of island life at all.

Of course, this resentment toward outsiders (which admittedly only some islanders give off) is no secret. One reason why this attitude is all too well known off island is precisely because, aside from style, many locals describe just how equally easy it is for tourists to spot who is who in the island zoo.

Some locals longing to belong may take extra long at the till to chat on a first name basis with whoever is working the till. Do they do this so that everyone will know they are the real insiders, the full timers who “belong” here?
I would just be guessing but it sure looks like it. How pitifully insecure.
Nevertheless, I have consistently fielded comments like “The locals don’t much like us being here, do they?” from dozens of paying guests, ever since the eighties.
Why do I suspect that this is a less than confident posture for any islander to project? Do such types really want so badly to be members of a private club at any price?
I agree it is not everyone who feels this way. I am aware that islanders are not one demographic nor one undifferentiated mass. It is just that it is so consistently the same the way islanders seem to be perceived by people from "the real world".

However, like it or not, this also reflects on the rest of us, and we wear it as best we can, whether or not we agree.

Reminds me of being in Paris, just once, way back in ‘64.

God, how the merchants and hoteliers and the cool, haughty, indifferent, angry, seemed to so deeply loath the tourists who kept that huge city’s economy afloat. I understood it but it still felt mean spirited. Unlike the cheery helpful people in the streets of London, in Paris virtually the only ones willing to speak to me and/or my mother during that brief visit, (and my Mum who was the kind of lady who could strike up a rapport with absolutely anyone, anytime, anywhere) were students from the Sorbonne who wanted to otry out their English. The cold shunning went on in the same vein for one entire week, even though we were both reasonably fluent in French.

Oh, the pathos of needing far too desperately to "belong", to be absorbed into some collective identity, sometimes at any price, no matter how high.

Then again, on the laughter front, we all need to share some kind of humour, precisely because it is subversive and therefore potentially healing, not to mention a lot better than the alternative.

Some exercise razor sharp wit, both barbed and acerbic, and profess to cynical realism without being taken to task for it, nor called alienated or bitter
Who knows why?

Sometimes the flip face of humour is a close relationship to loss or other tragedy. That, too, seems acceptable as a source.

Still, at times one almost weeps with the angels over the sheer paucity, the dearth, the sorry absence of playful wit, especially in certain remote settings.
It is a sad state when sobriety becomes elevated to a virtue by those who can not or will not laugh, often on principle.
I have a friend who once said that when she moved off island people missed her at the movies especially. Why? Because they no longer knew when to laugh without her to cue them.
Pathos? Dysfunction? Both?

While I fully realize that islands are never comprised of just one community but contain many smaller communities made up of different people, often linked to significant others by which wave of immigration they may have floated in on, nevertheless I hark back to this. There seem to be those who assume a certain posture of public tolerance for other islanders, and occasionally even for visitors, but only so long as either group does not impinge on certain people’s ever growing private need for ever deeper reclusive tendencies.

Sounds just like autonomy, seems like self containment, appears like a self sufficient virtue, sure, but sometimes such a state of mind is more of a debilitating virus, perhaps more easily bred in conditions of isolation.

As for healing community rifts, regular stand up comedy nights at the pub long ago were at one time a wonderful cross cultural coming together of our multi communities, including imported comedians from Yuk Yuks.

Of course, what one person, versus another, finds funny is also partly learned before the age of reason.

I happen to originate from back east, which for the purposes of this argument, might as well be another country, then and now, an east only once removed from the next Continent, a place which truly is another world.

There are so many other vast and sometimes wondrous places, millions of values apart from one another, places where DVDs about them do not always manage to reproduce the taste of sophisticated or urbane wit, or suburban irony, or ghetto sourced humorous self deprecation, all of which emerge from far flung clusters of various civilisations which remain vital locations where brilliant satire reigns supreme.

If you haven’t ever experienced what different places have to offer you are never going to notice when it may be missing, but to me this is just as much a real part of the very diversity which enriches all cultures, be it the ones of the Prairies, Interior, Yukon, the Maritimes, Quebec, Newfoundland, the Americas, Africa or the Continent.

Rick Mercer is a bone fide Newfie.

Isn’t Mercer’s classic rant humour seriously barbed?

You bet it is.

Many comedians, with good reason, are deeply suspicious of the mental status of those who are utterly humourless. Of course, comedians are often the most twisted and warped of all.

It is of note that John Cleese lost one of his best comedic friends to therapy.
Turns out that the cure for what ailed his buddy also killed the comedy goose that laid the golden egg.

Oh, his friend got what he wanted, all right. He became “well adjusted”. Instead, ever afterward, he was terminally boring.

Funny bones can be highly subjective joints.

Friends, on and off island, enjoyed the jokes I used to post. In an non urbane setting I took a risk. Maybe I am lucky to be rich in friends? Maybe satire seems funny just because some of us have grown old, wear purple, don’t give a damn about appearances any longer, and are ready to laugh about the craziness of it all?

Humour can be found or generated in the most unlikely places. Unintentional humour is one of my favourites. I happen to think that it is absolutely hilarious to hear the oxymoron “strident” used to describe Italian (or Jewish or Irish, or anything non WASP) older women, as if they were somehow culturally not up to snuff, as it were.

It begs the question, just who is setting the bar? Other examples abound of people of ethnicity being informed that they are not being culturally understated enough or sufficiently circumspect enough to pass muster.

Hey, remember, they don’t call it BRITISH Columbia for nothing! Life offers up pretty funny stuff all the time, if you are open to it.

While some “local ethnic minorities”" might have chosen to take offence at being labeled “strident”, or might have taken umbrage at being patronised, that never seemed to happen.

Good for them. It speaks volumes about self confidence to not get angry or go there. Some find everything an insult. others see beyond it to the release of laughter. And while name calling may sometimes spring from a certain anti ethnic bias, ageism, sexism, (or even all three), I, on the other hand, was taught, (at my mother’s knee, and other joints), that humour, including but not limited to the quintessentially female branch and often called “self deprecation”, can be the very best antidote to the far more serious risk of vanity, self absorption, fear, righteousness, or any other form of touchy egocentricity.

Seems it’s a great cure for incipient narcissism as well, and can double as a tiny vacuum which clears stray lint right out of one’s gazed into navel, too.

And yes, it isn’t all that hard to understand that certain cultural buzz words are intended to serve as a way to keep others in their “place”, even when the user pretends otherwise.

Every male whoever felt mixed feelings about a woman getting what they describe as the “upper hand” knows this one. Words used routinely on women can be even more potently derisive when used on men.
Works like a charm as an double whammy.

Women can seem like some unknowable mystery, at least to men, somehow necessary, often good at keeping things in order, occasionally seductive, more than a bit scary. And if women start to talk back, potentially they always teeter on the brink of being jusged as “strident”, at any moment.

So what? Put downs are like obscene phone calls. Just because someone makes the call doesn’t mean the recipient has to stay on the line, does it? Same with a blog. Difference is it is not obscene, at least this one isn’t, and more to the point, it does not dial you up or hunt you down.

On the contrary, you have to go looking for it. Hardly seems like grounds for justifiable complaint if you go on line and then do not find things there to be to your liking. Why not just hang up?

Take, for example, that singularly erudite sociolinguist/gender linguist (sounds rude, doesn’t it?) who is a Jewish - (oh boy) - New York - (oh, jeez) - woman - (oh no!) - writer - (yee gods)-, named Deborah Tanner.

She asserts - (oops, she must be a "womyn")- beyond a shadow of any doubt that key tools to gain control over others, be it via religion, governance, or any other hierarchical, patriarchal medium, are used to encourage subtle shunning of those who are often the most alive human beings.

These tools include condescension, dismissiveness, and dissuasiveness. Often as not, one sees an overemphasis on manners, propriety, since proper form is always part of the package. It can all seem just as if the whole purpose is about remembering to be good boys and girls or no juice and cookie.

Instead, shouldn’t it be about public discourse being protected as a venue for rousing, stimulating, discursive exchanges amongst parliamentarian adults with backbones and a respect for the tradition of opposing points of view? Isn’t this right at the core of all democratic discussion? And isn’t defending healthy disagreement central to protecting the differences we all call freedom?

Shame, on the other hand, is the ultimate Sunday schoolmarm weapon.
I, for one, am a born iconoclast. Hence, at a startlingly early age I was expelled from Sunday School, for laughing way too much and much too often. Thank God, “eh”?

As for those intent on controlling the majority of others, when it comes to the extremes of imbalance throughout history, achieved by conquerors and rulers, everyone deserves a chance to remind themselves just how we all help it along by colluding with those who misuse powers we grant them, be it a lover or a leader.

Need we go any farther back in history than by observing what happened after the British took over India, the same historical manoeuvre used throughout the Ruling Empire?

It went something like this: Short version:

“Let’s have YOU and HIM fight and then we (Brits) will step in to restore order”

After they went on to acquire India, Our Man In India conveniently inherited an entire serving class. And what did they do next? British rulers promptly showered the East Indians (and later the Anglo Indians) with displays of astounding condescension, disrespect, end cruelty, not least by dressing native servants up in formal British garb, reducing natural born, educated, proud East Indians to looking like trained monkeys in full British regalia, serving high tea to their “betters”.

Thank goddess for the perpetuation of the all pervasive class system so we will always be able to tell just who’s who in the zoo, right? In exactly this area, Tanner examines just how the cool tempered, non emotive cultures use these traits to get and keep the upper hand.

She carefully illustrates how “cool headed” cultures invade and then deploy specific expectations, ones which uphold as valuable and necessary their own traits of low facilitation and low involvement communication techniques. She explains how low involvement cultures put strong emphasis on repression, disapproval, and control, often through insistence on mandatory etiquette.
She illustrates how all of this is used to achieve dominance over others. To me, as someone not easily tamed, this is fascinating stuff.

Northern European standards where “one-person-speaks-at-a-time”, as if it were a solo performance, does not represent the majority of people on the planet. While such a style is a dominant characteristic, it is dominant not by being the majority in number but by the use of force.

Simultaneous speech, also called "duet", or "contrapuntal conversatio", is the norm in most warm temperament inclined countries.
Try that one on for size.
The groups are roughly sorted into two types, the high involvement, high connection, high participation rapport conversationalists
versus the stilted, inhibited, high considerateness, low connection, low participation conversationalists.

By the way, it is invariably the latter who always insist that they feel interrupted and who expect silent gaps and defined pauses in conversations.
Yet the cool headed cultures and genders actually dominate through the act of withholding, even while inaccurately accusing overlap speakers of dominating the low facilitators by means of the high facilitators penchant for facilitative overlapping of speech.

The way in which such cultures dominate other cultures, Tanner adds, is similar to the way in which (traditional) men tend to dominate their women. Women in love will often talk far less than women who simply love or who are independent. To such a man, once the real business of a relationship begins, that makes such women the equivalent of emotional high rent, or high maintenance.

Worse yet, in isolated settings, relationship asymmetry often escalates.
For traditional women, living in a remote setting can sometimes exacerbate these existing gender differences, while ironically, for traditional men, isolation often serves their inner need to match their own emotional austerity with their external remote surroundings and to get and keep the upper hand in relationships.

Tanner’s premise is that traditional men easily revert to emotional minimalism regarding intimate communications.
They do so by withholding, by being less motivated to connect, by feeling interrupted, by being pejorative about a woman’s need for involvement, by insisting that there is a practical need for paternal control, by limiting communication for the woman’s own “good”, by withdrawing, by aggressively setting up their own ground rules based on who seemingly needs whom more, by taking rather than by giving, by arranging to always be on the receiving end of what they perceive as the female need for inclusivity.

While it may not be news that women talk “rapport” talk while men talk to give a “report”, it is still worth remembering.

For centuries, Tanner maintains, certain cultures have used their own emotional detachment and cool civility to conquer vibrant cultures prone to high facilitation, high involvement, cultures with innately passionate or vital natures, and the low iinvolvement cultures have used this need of high involvement cultures, the need to please, to control and conquer the pleasers by condemning them for natural conversational overlap and excoriating them for having high social facilitation styles.

Some would call it missionary zeal. others might call it cultural genocide.

Hence, words become weapons, dozen of which can be used to keep the committed and the involved off balance.
And gender aside, how damnably "polite" many non third world Canadians seem to have become, not to mention watered down as well, more like a melting pot each day, less than ever a multicultural culture.

Do we want a culture where insisting on misplaced tolerance of absolutely anything dominant, combined with the controlled use of terminal politeness and humourlessness actually becomes a guaranteed recipe for social success?

But I digress. What could this sombre state of human affairs have to do with humour? Everything.

Then again, what one may think truly “belly jigglingly” funny, another may judge as bitter, alienated or rude. On the other hand, someone else might think of intolerance for any diversity of humour in all its manifestations as sounding more than a bit alienated or bitter or rude as well.

Many I call dear friends have been shaped by and steeped in multi cultural cities by distinctly eastern mores. Does that make us each different than those from somewhere else? I sure hope so.

It is one huge multicultural country we’ve got here in Canada, more like a bunch of countries, really, even when rolled out neatly into a patchwork blanket of provinces and territories. Each single region within each province has a different dialect. Most of them live with utterly different values and more than a few have another language than English.

To get through this life on a Canadian scale that large, I suspect we are going to need all the satirical encouragement we can muster, if only to encourage us to embrace one another and to laugh at our shared absurdities and differences.

I certainly hope that it is not only those who think they have no options left in their bag of survival tricks who seem to risk succumbing to laugh-less lives.
The absolute core essence of humour, written or spoken, begins with the ability to laugh at oneself and then at life itself, to throw off temptations such as vanity, pretensions to egoism or meaningless inhibitions.

Life is not about being expected to be “handled carefully” or having an overweening need to expect ego massages all the time, is it? I think in the long run the kid glove approach only weakens people.

And even if one has sustained damage, or life has dealt one a cruel blow,
if one feels that life is so unjust that it makes one fear going insane, who doesn’t, at times?

The secret is to widen that line between sanity and insanity and make it into your own personal sidewalk lined with wit and good will.

I admit that in writing, voice tone and nuance are lost.
By definition, weblogs have inherent weaknesses that way, since the voice nuances (35%) are turned off and the body language (60%) is missing.
I am also guessing that maybe age gap, cultural differences, and differing life experiences play a role in our at odds perceptions of what is or is not funny.
I have suffered as much as the next person, maybe more than many.
Should that make me into the gatekeeper on rules for what others should find funny?

Maybe it is just different taste in the literature that shapes us? For instance, Mark Twain(self proclaimed heathen), H.L. Mencken(European Jew), Robin Williams (American Protestant), John Cleese (British lapsed Anglican ), Bill Maher (lapsed Catholic), Jon Stewart (Jewish), Stephen Colbert (South Carolina Catholic), Nora Ephron (Jewish New Yorker), Rita Rudner, Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, the list goes on and on.

By the way, despite the fact that the UK list of The Comedian’s Comedians picked exactly five females or comediennes out of fifty, while forty five of them as the pick of the litter were male comedians, mostly white males, tells us that for most of the western world women have NOT come a long way, baby.

And there is no substitute for hearing exactly why this fact remains so telling, even today, 15 years after the making of the documentary “Wisecracks”.
Get the word straight from the female mind and mouth, so many wonderfully funny women speak out about this who were in that documentary. Rent it, duplicate it, buy it, it remains so fabulously relevant.

Women comedians controlled by the male dominated world ( inn this case, the one of comedy) spend the whole time “outing” male comedians for their anti female bigotry.

They do so largely through the most uplifting, gut splitting and yes, barbed, and stinging humour, brought to us courtesy of the inherent “nothing to lose” freedoms accorded to second class citizens, disclosed by the intentionally alienated, who transform male attempts at control and exclusivity into the subject of deadly accurate laughter.

All of these people capture cultural alienation by employing good old acerbic, ironic, satirical and often biting wit. They nevertheless subversively succeed at being incisive and accurate while mirroring human foibles. This rant got away from me as rants tend to do.

It was not just meant just as a “funny” piece, but it sure as heck is an article about the crying need for laughter.

The humour challenge can be a gauntlet thrown down.

So ......................Are YOU “Skittish”?

Postscript On Comments About Comments

Just my own opinion, but personally I think that misplaced or inappropriate "comments" posted to this kind of open ended blog can tend to get easily moderated into thin air, while thoughtful "commentary" essays or articles which make answer to posted essays or to others' short comments may be less likely to just go missing.

comment, noun, verb.
noun 1. a note or remark that explains, praises, or finds fault with a book or other literary work, a person, a concert, an article or a thing.
2. a remark; an observation.
Ex. "I cannot remember a single problem that has been solved by diplomacy" was his somewhat smug comment (London Times).

commentary, noun, pl. -taries.
1. a series of comments.
a series of notes explaining the hard parts of a book; explanation.

2. an explanatory essay or treatise.
Ex. Many volumes have been written by way of commentary on Dante and his book (Thomas Carlyle).
Regards.

Part One: Water War Warnings or THE NEW OIL

THE FUTURE OF POTABLE WATER:

WHY CANADIAN GULF ISLANDERS SHOULD HAVE IN PLACE A SPECIFIC VISIONARY BY-LAW TO PROVIDE FOR PREREQUISITE RAIN CATCHMENT SYSTEMS AND RAINWATER CISTERNS AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF CONSIDERATION OF NEW DEVELOPMENTS, BUILDINGS AND ANY AND ALL FUTURE ISLAND HOUSING.

Only a few years ago a water war broke out into full fledged finger pointing and nasty backlash behaviour in a less known Bay on a well known Canadian gulf island.
Did anyone elsewhere on island know about it?
Maybe a few.
Probably not most.
When this happened, all it took was for water to become scarce.
Many living there over at the Bay immediately took on that classic human stance, the first choice of so many otherwise seemingly mature people, namely, blaming others.
Each in turn claimed to be innocent themselves of any water sins of excess.
At the same time, people began to accuse everyone else living around them of taking showers too often, of flushing too many times, of having too many non paying additional guest visitors in summer.
It got ugly fast.

Bear in mind that this Bay has relatively few seasonal rentals compared to most densely populated other parts of the island.
It was already "well" known that saline intrusion had, years earlier, been detected in the Bay's own communal water cistern.
This was to be expected, even if ignored, especially given that any increasing demand for fresh water had already pulled the Pacific Ocean into fresh water wells in too many locations all over the rest of this Gulf Island.

The Bay is not unique when it comes to ignoring warning signs.
Undetectable saline was already known to be present in much of the road near the ferry landing area, for example, back in the late 80's, or even far earlier.
After the famous fire which burnt down parts of the local, it was seemingly well known, even if at that time ignored, that apparently a compromised septic system was not rebuilt when the buildings which use it were rebuilt.
Even eighteen year ago many already often witnessed the bar water routinely run out in mid summer, and the glass washing machines would have to be shut down.
Nothing has changed since then - except for the worse.
Ostriches breed and abound.

Saline, especially undetectable saline, meaning ocean water intrusion into fresh water wells, is deadly. It is a serious health risk for pregnant women and their children, for creating heart disease and high blood pressure, and really, for anyone, even for pets.
Imagine drinking water and getting more and more thirsty by doing so.
The number of wells which produce saline water after the driller is done and paid might astound most locals living in wilful ignorance or oblivious bliss on island.

However, the real question is this:

Why would the local situation be otherwise?
Any Gulf Island is, after all, a remarkably small land mass with distinct limits.
Rather like an oversized stationary cruise ship, our island is by turns buffeted by winter winds and then basks in the summer sun, a mother ship which has, for years, been facing overstrained limits on the island's collective water, with no port in site for a refill, ever.

Economic enhancement schemes aside, population reduction through people who choose to leave the island would appear to be a mixed blessing, at least from the point of view of the present limitations in our own overview of the upper limits of water and sewage.
And that seems to be exactly how one often find oneself arriving right back at the lifeboat logic again.
Instead, say, for example, we might pursue other options, beginning with developing a true willingness to face the following facts:
It is well past the time to consider a completely sustainable island future while we still can.
Perhaps we need to create new by-laws. Couldn't we consider a by law which demands combining rainwater collection and cultured wetlands septic all in one? How about putting this into a small footprint of densely constructed, collectively attached houses.
Is there some really good reason why this necessary conservation of precious water could not be be built into the future of any consideration of housing construction on that most vulnerable lifeboat itself, Hornby Island, a microcosm of the globe's dilemma?
Call me a voice in the wilderness.
Or is that a voice in the former rain forest which later became another desert? Or write it all off as a voice in the wilderness, doomed to see too far ahead.

Ironically, the aquifers which Gulf Island dwellers do share tend to be over demanded and then they show the first symptoms of running dry on many properties which are those doomsday foretelling small half acre lots, which means only that properties in subdivisions are the first ones to manifest the problems of the future of water which we all face, the problem of exceeding the carrying capacity of the island itself.
Imagine gigantic fresh water taps, in at least several of the average Gulf island's year round densely populated subdivisions, which are turned on and get left open to run non stop, year round.
Well, that seems to be pretty much what we are looking at with island subdivisions.
To add to that problem further, imagine a community which looks the other way, or cries poor or victim when people flush sewage directly into the ground with no septic tank, no septic field, and with absolutely no means to filter either their own wells or those of their downhill neighbours from the bacteria laden filth they dispose of without a second thought.
Welcome to reality. You think you are poor now? Try later when the bill for disease and social chaos arrives.

Interestingly, there also seems to be some kind of will to collectively ignore the following fact about our most densely populated areas:

On at least one Gulf island in particular, there are three criminally small subdivisions (approved decades ago by a gang of politicians in cahoots with a realty comapny for obscene profit) all properties in those subdivisions have in place, part time ONLY recreational residential use ONLY restrictive covenants, which are sitting right there in plain print on the land title document for every property there and elsewhere on island.

Okay, okay, don't shoot the messenger! Don't blame fact finding journalism for awakening Rip Van Winkle.
Why let the most limited thinkers be the ones to drag every else down?
Why not try to solve the problem instead, one ozone water filter at a time,- or by investigating whatever works?

Sure, the realty company and greedy developers had an incentive to subdivide too small lots when selling off properties on this and other Gulf Islands, so they ignored the very problem they knew existed in the first place. They did so by putting that very same restrictive covenant on every proposed subdivision application for the subdivision's approximately half acre properties on this Gulf Island. That is precisely how the rich developers got around the sticky legal problem of knowing that there would not be enough water in the future to supply so many households, once the subdivisions got built out.
That was way back when the realty vendors did the dirty deed for this island.
Now, of course, that gang of indifferent developers is long gone. But are we any different? By that I mean, what about our collective indifference to our own island limits, an attitude which is right here, right now, still alive and growing unwell?

However, lest we too easily dismiss the legal obligation of current property owners to uphold that RECREATIONAL USE ONLY covenant, it is a fact that at least one covenant holding member is also still alive and well.
And, along with every property owner, and every renter, that covenant holding man, too, is responsible for enforcing the legality of the "Recreational Use Only" restrictive covenants for all individual island properties in subdivisions
That means that each and every one of the covenants is still valid.
Did these ever make an iota of difference?
No.
Who is to blame?
Everyone.
Are the covenants ignored?
Of course.
Do those affected first, meaning those in the subdivisions, see it as someone else's obligation to clean up the problem they too created? Probably. How many see it as a situation to be solved individually, by owners? Not many.

The reality is this:
Those covenants mean that those who rent, those who own and or those who however temporarily occupy housing in these three subdivisions are actually in violation of the original intent of the "Recreational Seasonal Use Only" legal covenants on title for on each and every subdivision property on this Gulf Island.
And that situation describes a LOT of full time residents.

So much for the meaningful application of a covenant as an environmental or legal tool to prevent over demand or pollution or both.

Granted, on larger acreages this filtration problem does not present the same kind of problem, or at least not as quickly does it become evident and there is naturally more land available to absorb the error, at least in the summertime.
Does that solve the problem? Not really. It only speaks to the carrying capacity of larger properties exceeding the carrying capacity of tiny ones never intended for full time use. Still, when one then learns that several subdivisions were long ago privately nicknamed Hepatitis Hill, or that other name of notoriety is also referred to as the Gulch, it certainly puts a whole new coloration on the emerging problem and whose private responsibility it is or should be for solving this serious situation now, not later.
Of course, this also means that there is a far higher risk of sewage pollution spreading, in several ways.
One way would be through encouraging further year round development.
Another way would be through ignoring further year round demand on the island's carrying capacity, by larger numbers, be it by those who own property and have non paying visitors, by those who rent out existing houses, or by those who own resorts which encourage exceeding the carrying capacity.
It makes little difference to the water table whether the rentals are carried on seasonally or year round.
One larger year round family makes the same demand as weekly large groups do.
In fact, if the off islander ignores the rules they tend to run dry.
Impact for the island as a whole is strictly a feature of the carrying capacity of any individually owned land.
Carrying capacity means water in and sewer out.

Densely populated areas are the first ones to manifest how water is going to become polluted by those who, for whatever reason, do not pump their septic tanks or have none.
The fact is that the water table carries such pollution far and wide during the wettest winter months, not during the summer.
This is when the water table carries failing septic system contents everywhere else.
In summer the ground is parched dry and can then absorb more flushes per household, This does not, however, excuse any landowner permitting the land in question to exceed its own carrying capacity.
But neither is seasonal rental the only way to pollute.
As for summer demands, it would seem that most discover the limits of the water table we all share only when water simply runs dry or gets detectable salt, or both, - just as it did in the Bay.
By late fall sewage excesses have presumably been filtered, if the field has not failed, that is, and the flushed water then returns to the water table, theoretically renewed.
Or so one would hope, since anything we drink comes from the same place into which we flush our sewage.

An international water authority warned these islanders some years ago that they had long ago used up all fossil or old stored aquifer water.
We are, and have been for some time, one hundred percent dependent on rain water renewal.
With climate change, there may even be more rain than ever, but there is also far more water run off into the ocean than there has ever been before.

80% of rainwater runs off. If we are lucky 20% at most is retained.
Hornby is in a negative gain position regarding that most essential resource, fresh water.
None can live without it for more than three days.

Meanwhile, back in the Bay, one of three local "canary subdivisions in the water mine", otherwise "civil" people soon found that tempers flared.
Accusations flew in all directions.
Neighbours turned on formerly friendly fellow neighbours.
Anger mounted.
Then ....
Someone thought to simply raise the foot valve in the Bay Association's communal well.
Since the Bay's "temporary" over demand on the fresh water table had already caused the dangerous intruding salt water to rise even further, it seemed that the only "logical" answer was to raise the pump's foot so that it was once again resting in fresh water.
Salt water, by definition, is heavier than fresh water.
PROBLEM:
Scarce, salty water.
SOLUTION:
Raise the foot valve.
Okay, so maybe most also cut back somewhat, at least temporarily, on fresh water usage and also, since use goes unmonitored, most hoped that their neighbours did the same.
And then it all "went away".
End of the Bay's salt water intrusion problem, right?
Well, it would seem that the problem had been solved.
But in truth, had it?
Apparently, this neighbourhood thought so.
Sadly, such may well be an example of about how far ahead the average human thinks or plans, even in a very dry location.

Regards,

A Person Is Only As Valuable As She Can Be Of Help To Others

At one time, albeit this occurred at a resident's meeting many years ago, a certain Gulf Island's separation from Canada came under deadly serious consideration by a small, loosely organised but distinctly separatist, and quietly insistent group who then made a motion that this Gulf Island separate from Canada.
Some assumed this was a joke. Others who paid attention knew right away that it was not.
Maybe this is just one of those "you really had to be there" stories but still ....
Many around the circle that night clearly made a tremendous effort NOT to become reduced to a puddle of giggles.
Then, to make matters even more trying, a certain well known, very British accented, dry humoured, ironic style woman precipitously but politely intervened, just as this earnest separation discussion was well underway, at which point she gave the whole thing a clever, straight faced re-direct by making a second motion, namely ... that the resident's organisation consider instead the alternatie of establishing of a local monarchy, as an alternative to the island separating from the rest of Canada.
No one could meet anyone's eye, some but not all for fear of losing it completely.
She immediately added the coup de grace to her motion by volunteering to nominate herself on the spot for the new position this would create as a monarchy, the job of being the Queen.
No one, -and I mean no one-, dared to laugh out loud.
That was a classic evening, one which gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "the pain of suppression".

Transfer of Water From BC To Service Tar Sands?

This is an eye opening pdf about the B.C. Free Trade Deal recently struck by Gordo Campbell with Alberta, which, amongst many other travesties of justice, makes the transfer of water from B.C. to Alberta permissible.
Nary a peep about the risks or other implications in the papers, that I have seen.
Is this is not how those we elect allow precious, irreplaceable resources to be plundered - for oil?

http://www.gov.bc.ca/bcgov/content/docs/@2SKBp_0YQtuW/TILMA April 25 2006 final.pdf


possible under that trade act
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/01/24/TILMA/

Climate Change: Any Opinion's For Sale

Michael Moore said it best in Fahrenheit 9/11:
Corporate psychopaths would sell you the rope to hang them if they could make a dollar doing so.
It can be difficult sometimes not to despair when everyone and everything seems to have a price on it and everyone is for sale.
Why, one must ask once again, do the rest of us allow or even invite a monopoly by power mongers who then set about selling off the the entire planet, even as they already view it as a sinking boat?
This is way beyond simply soiling the nest.
This is sheer madness regardless of whether voted in, bought, or both, and these are the pirates left in charge of our fragile future, like a fox in the hen house.

Groundwater expert Allen conducted a study of Hornby's water table a few years back.

Allen was then hired by what later became, and still is considered by many to be, an extremely environmentally controversial massive development, namely Langford's Bear Mountain, located outside Victoria.
Touted as the "next Whistler", the sales pitch was not dissimilar to
"Missed out on Whistler? This time buy in while you still can!".
And everyone did just that.
They bought into the first rash (or is that trash?) of identical overpriced houses, at top dollar, listed from $800,000 to one million a piece.
Cheek by jowl high end tract housing looks out on completely fake gold turf which has altered every single natural contour for 500 acres beneath which sit two of only three major subsurface water sheds intended for the benefit of the entire CRD region.
No yards.
No privacy.
No pets.
No bike lanes.
No play areas.
No trees.
No landscape screening or sound barriers between houses.
These "dwellings" are so close together you could dry your undies on the shower rod next door.

Many of these high priced houses since then seem to have developed the "two cars plus one run down third car parked on the road" syndrome.
Presumably this is because those who bought in, in haste, must now rent out their hurriedly renovated illegal garage suites, perhaps to cover the massive mortgages they brought down on their own heads, authors of their own undoing.
At this stage, the whole thing is only a few years into the long term massively Big Plan and already Phase One appears to be becoming a shoddy, ghettoised has been.
Rather than an opportunity to implement a vision which might have set an environmental example, instead one drives through what for all the world looks like a treeless, high priced slipshod dump, a barren denatured place which now floods in winter, flushing tons of silt into nearby salmon bearing streams and which has been reduced to a loveless mud pile.
On top of this, the developers have since been at war with several native tribes, having completely destroyed a sacred underground native cave, which has, until now, survived for many tens of thousands of years. They have apparently also bulldozed native burial grounds. Several tribes were offered casinos as a buy off.
At least one is not being bought off, and since it must be a consensus-or-nothing deal, all seems to have ground to a stand still.
Irreconcilable differences.
Of course it may be possible that the dinosaurs themselves haven't a clue what they have really done. Certainly they have demonstrated nothing but open contempt for any and all protest by everyone opposed, and the number of people opposed is not small.

Sometime after assessing Hornby's ground water as part of a larger academic study, Allen chose to be willing to lend her hard earned good name to backing Bear Mountain's assurances that there was and would continue to be plenty of ground water available for a gargantuan 54 hole golf course.
These days, all over North America developers are ploughing under three golf courses to every one they build, because the golf courses have made the land too pricey not to develop the turf, so the owners of high priced and high status golf course houses will now end up looking out at other houses all around them.

Bear Mountain development is not even remotely completed as yet.
Yet all along several adjacent roads which share the very same wells which are also used to water Phase One of this gigantic golf course, at countless millions of gallons a day, residential owners on large adjoining acreages are already desperate because their own well water is going completely dry in early spring each year.
And only 18 of the projected 54 holes of a golf course which spans two different municipalities are up and running so far.
Bear Mountain appears to be using classic block busting tactics, and through expansionism they will likely buy these hapless rural folks out at bottom dollar, once they have no choice left but to sell valueless land to the developers.
To add to the disaster in the making, the original promise of limited residential golf course housing has gone from a total of a couple of thousand and has now escalated into zoning requests for many more thousands of homes, apparently by using a classic bait and switch sales pitch development manoeuvre to get councils on side.
As for the water expert at the centre of this controversy?
So much for the average uninformed community member being able to trust the experts and take them at their word, including the one who told Hornby that the status of our water was borderline.
What are we to believe now?
And why at all?
How can anyone trust those whose opinions are for sale, be it biologists, environmentalists, approving officers, forestry consultants, engineers, or top North American water experts when it seems that these days everyone can be bought and sold by lending their so called "good" name to faux scientific studies?


http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0%2C%2C329703480-117700%2C00.html

Building A Paranoid Shaped Future Fortress Called "Canamerica"?

"Applicants must submit a notarized document confirming their identity to the Orwellian-sounding Office of Reconsideration, which will turn the file over to an independent adviser from outside the public service for review."

For a great many years now we have no longer been a part of the so called British Commonwealth, which once meant wealth held in common and meant to include rather than exclude commoners.
But that was then, and Britain is no longer Britain, for that matter.
Was there anything inherently positive about "bringing home the Consitution"?
Canadian historians and legislative powers created a clean slate by way of a replacing a flag indicating our history with a simple maple leaf flag which contains no hint of any links to our British past. Passports no longer gave one the right to travel to other former Commonwealth countries.
Why?
Is there still any "common wealth"?
Water, for example, was once held in the commons as a right under exactly this very legislation.
Is it now? Maybe. But just try to uphold that right.

The video below shows us that under Britain's PM, Tony Blair, yet another Bush administration lackey, what was once Britain can no longer qualify as "Parliamentarian".
It is a corrupt nation in decline, hardly worthy of the term "democratic".
If such terms have been rendered specious, almost overnight, there, why not here?

If you have high speed service, please first check out this Google Video.
Then rethink the implications of a seemingly pragmatic NO FLY LIST being implemented here in Canada.
Is Harper our version of Blair in implementing the New World Order?
Must Canada become totalitarian?
Is it already too late?
If you think not, then please don't be passive about it. Write to your MLA and your MP.
But first, click on this:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4839556520925774502&q=suspect+nation

Before I comment on the new Canadian "No Fly List", first a few pithy, pertinent quotes from Canadian author Margaret Atwood:

'If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.'

'If a stranger taps you on the ass and says, "How's the little lady today!" you will probably cringe. But if he's an American, he's only being friendly.'

'Canada was built on dead beavers.'

'The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not "Am I really that oppressed?" but "Am I really that boring?"'

Many decades ago, Atwood said, (and I paraphrase loosely), that if North America was the story of Moby Dick, the U.S would be the hunter and Canada would be the whale.

Is this List the tip of the totalitarian iceberg which signals not only regime change but the beginning of cultural annihilation?
If so, given this NFL (the acronym for the "No Fly List", not for the the National Football League), we can expect more of the same from here on in, as we fast approach the North American Alliance Treaty (read an 'irreversible merger with the U.S'.). So how do the little people help it along? Through apathy, indifference and inaction, perhaps?

Did I somehow misread this first symptom of societal illness which I think that a NO FLY LIST indicates?
Would it be jumping to wrongful conclusions to extrapolate about quasi parliamentarian tampering with the most basic rights of our Canadian identity ?
Is this the thin edge of the fascist wedge?

The former Reform party cleverly morphed into the Alliance and then, like some redneck vampire under cover of darkness, next inhabited the former body of the "Conservatives", - which they resemble no more than any wolf in sheep's clothing.
While headed up by our rigidly unnatural, but righteously religious and dogmatically indirect in his arrogance, namely the current Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is it not this same fundamentalist minority government of Canada which seeks to collaborate with a certain declining empire to the south, which in turn is set to exploit and plunder Canada's bounty resources?
Are our representatives not operating against Canadians own best interests as our own government marches in lockstep with the schemes of the Bush Administration (who, surprise!, indirectly funded the Harper/Harpoon election campaign)?

Why is our own Canadian Parliament pushing through this kind of NO FLY LIST legislation, just as if Canada is now arbitrarily ruled by the House of Congress, as we rush to mimic the way Bush pushed through the Patriot Act without any legal Congressional approval?
Does anyone else think this NO FLY LIST could facilitate the impending Canada/U.S. mergers into one unthinkably frightening entity?
Is Canada poised on the brink of a political and corporate motivated but not all that hostile take over?
Is a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to our basic human rights to be not voted on by those very politicians whom we ourselves have elected?
If not, why not?
If endorsed, why endorsed?
Does anyone ask which funding supports which Members of Parliament who will be the ones to endorse such Draconian measures, versus which members might protest or demand to vote against this bill?

I gather that, at least in the vernacular, Harper has been nicknamed "Bush lite".
So what do we see here?
Are NO FLY LISTS the legislative equivalent of a drag net which randomly traps and immobilises the life of the sea quite indiscriminately, supposedly in the interests of catching a few tuna?
If not, then what is going on here?
Is this not intentional use of fear as a tactic to legitimise the escalation of the loss of our most treasured freedoms?

Imagine, for example, that you are an average Canadian who is on your way to take a flight to go to Granny's 90th birthday. Or suppose your son or daughter is off to see Cousin Martha for the last time right after learning that she has been suddenly stricken with a rapidly deteriorating terminal condition.
Through a typical computer error your name gets cross referenced to a suspected terrorist and you find you are banned from flying.
Now the onus is on YOU to prove you are innocent.
So how can NO FLY LISTS be considered to be legitimate, let alone legal, if all you forget to mention was your middle name when you registered, only to find you have been turned away from the flight desk, left with only one option, 30 days in which to appeal (win? or lose?). Congratulations. You have just been effectively prevented from going to see either your Granny or your Cousin Martha. At that is the benign version.

Incidentally, despite the proven fact that all of us have a far greater chance of being struck by lightening than of ever encountering any terrorist or terrorist incident whatsoever, this NO FLY LIST effectively undermines the long standing Canadian right to enjoy freedom of movement within Canada, something long ago entrenched in the Canadian Constitution.
- Or is it any longer?
Has anyone else checked out how our Constitution now reads?
Concerned,
(especially since it is a given that all who forget history are doomed to repeat it),