In the end this will all make sense, it’ll all come together, a nice bow, around a nicely wrapped package.  I’ll enlist G.I. Joe, Barbie, girls, grass, and 45 degree angles to sum up the way I’m seeing it all today.  But maybe in the end, my desire to tie it up all nicely is precisely the problem.

Problem #1: I’m an eternal optimist

The other week I had the pleasure to go up to Sault Saint Marie, Ontario, right on the border of Michigan State, where Lake Superior and Lake Huron meet up, where the temperatures soared to 36 degrees and set local records, where across the boarder the US is mining and shipping vast quantities of coal to burn for energy someplace, where on our side of the Lake we fill trucks and rail cars with freshly cut pine trees of all dimensions, and I wondered how close I was to the site where Toronto is shipping all our garbage to be buried someplace in “Northern” Michigan.  While there I started reading “The Bush Agenda” by Antonia Juhasz and since returning I bought “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore – so blame them if this goes someplace you don’t like.

So, I’m up in Sault Saint Marie, each night blowing black crud outta my nose which I can only assume is airborne coal dust or something, when I catch a ride with a friend, Marc St. Germain.  See, we’d just finished participating in a Métis golf tournament.  See, we were up there to be the media people for the Métis Nation of Ontario’s 13th Annual General Assembly, where Métis across Ontario gather to do some business, pass some mandates for the leadership of the Nation, and generally hang out and enjoy the rich Métis Cultural together.  How golfing got in there I’m not so sure, but we whacked at the ball all the same.  After the golf tournament Marc and I went for a drive back to the campsite where the topic invariable moved to girls and how it’s been a loosing battle living with them.

We were talking about the cycle of relationships.  Now that we’re older, in our thirties, I’m married and have been for 5 years, and he’s been dating and living with a woman for a few years, how we still think about the grass being greener in other places, maybe where we could start over and find a “better” match.  (I equate this early period of dating to looking for someone new to lie to: “Oh, I’m going to be this and that, and go here and there, I’m a totally up person that the world can’t stop” which cuts 5 years later to watching TV together, slumped on a sofa, watching the news and wondering how the world went so quickly to nothingness from its early promise.) Now we both knew we were just trying the words out together, what would it be like to be single again at this age, what would we do with all of this new found freedom, and why is it that when we’re with someone wonderful and that we love deeply we still find other girls attractive and from time to time float into this netherworld conversation of “what if”. 

Surprisingly, I found myself saying something that I have been thinking lately.  “You know, sure, I’ll see attractive woman around town, they’re everywhere.  But what’s changed is that now I look at them and the gerbil wheel of ‘what if’ spins towards ‘they have dirty under wear too.  You wont be able to find a balance with who cleans what in the house any easier with them.  You’ll drive them nuts too with your inability to listen by trying to solve their heartaches with reason when they want empathy but you’re unable to deal with real emotions other than with laughter which is what pisses them off about yourself.”  And we both laughed when I said it.  We both recognized that this is ultimately true, we’ll look over yonder and see infinite possibilities that are always better than what we have and where we are, when we don’t really truly imagine that if were to go over to the greener grass it’d be the same in the end as it is over here, give or take a few minor details, because we centrally are the same people unless we choose to really delve into ourselves.  But we’re all pretty busy as it is, so …

And then we got to wondering, where did this little seed of “the grass is always greener” start from?  We talked about how playing with G.I. Joe that he always succeeded.  We never played G.I. Joe in the grass where he goes to battle, his friends die, he gets injured, flies back home now confined to a wheel chair, has to go to therapy, gets a substance abuse habit, and has problems sleeping at night reliving what he can never forget, the horror and insanity of war and killing other living people and places.  And yeah, G.I. Joe was married to Barbie before he left and Barbie is now tired of only being a vessel for male fantasy, no longer interested in just being considered human based on her body image.  She’s sick of being caudled in life, told to marry a strong man like Joe, but in the end he’s as weak as anything she’s ever known, her own weakness, and now at 50 where being pretty doesn’t matter so much any more, menopause sets in, her “vessel hood” stripped, she sets out to uncover just who the hell is she.  She leaves Joe or Ken and she goes back to college and tries to learn about running a small business, and afterward she cashes in her small savings and opens that small business and cries herself to sleep at night because everything is so new, because everything is in flux, and she doesn’t know how this will end like she always thought she did.  Can she really say that ‘everything is going to be okay’?  Really?

Marc said, “I wonder who that kid is?  Imagine the clarity that the kid who plays that way with dolls is going to wind up maintaining.”  Are you more prepared for real life with that kind of playing?  G.I. Joe gets injured and Barbie feels shallow and has an eating disorder and gets a substance abuse problem.  Or that Ken and Barbie work in different rooms, kind of tired of each other, kind of wanting their own space now that they are “together”, now that having that settled they have the larger looming problems to deal with like what to do with it now that you got it.  Does imagination like that better bring about real change and action in the world as opposed to fantasy?

All I know is, whenever I played, the good guys always won.  That centrally, good will overcome evil, that we’ll rise to every challenge.

Problem # 2: There is no end to “better” or “more”

There’s this stupid ad in movie theatres here put up by Cineplex Odeon to attract businesses to have presentations in the theatre.  In the ad, a man is giving a power point projection onto a screen in which a simple graph is projected behind him that everyone is looking at, it has “Sales” written on it, and the future looks bright indeed – the sales soar into the netherworld.  The slogan comes up, something about rent the theatre for meetings, and then we cut to the balloons and confetti and everyone picking this guy up on their shoulders, applauding his graph, his presentation, the future sales.  I cringe every time I see it.

Just look at this simple graphic, it’s no different that the G.I. Joe or Barbie thing.

It only goes up.  This is what we have in our minds eye.  There is no decline.  There is no possible up and down, there is only up, up, up.  We want life to be this way.  We go to wars for life to be this way (for those who win the wars).

Look at this graphic this way, it could read all sorts of things:

Growth of company sales, growth of stuff we’ve accumulated in our homes, growth in the overall size of homes …

or how about this:

Growth of aids and west Nile virus, growth of pollution which is causing global warming, growth rate of species extension, the economic growth rate in the disparity between rich and poor …

Aside from the last sobering graph, the point is this, we only see up.  We are somehow pre-programmed to only see the graph going up.  It’s all we work for, working for the “progress” of humankind.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m programmed this way too, and hell, I love the Internet and all things technological.  But why don’t we see the graph this way:

That for every rise there can be a fall.  There’s an up and a down.  Maybe if we did see the graph of life’s promise this way we would be better able to tackle things like lulls in relationships, lulls in our health as we age, and movies that don’t always have a happy ending because we as humans make bad choices, we make gross mistakes, we are capable for as much rise as we are fall in the world around us.  Doesn’t the heartbeat graph look something like this anyway?

Problem #3: Our Definition of ‘a real man’ is insane

I want to make this point brief because it drives me fucking crazy.  The dominated world view or society is white male energy.  And how do we define this energy?  With cock replacements.  Forgive me, I’m sounding harsh, but explain this to me: it’s more male to own a big truck with a great big engine that roars, that burns more gas, that says ‘fuck you’ to the air and natural world around us?  It’s more male to be a Republican or a conservative and seek to end the worlds ills with violence and domination?  What did I read once about testosterone, that it basically boils down to fuck it and kill it?

So, from this basic media image, that woman swoon over strong men smoking cigars, driving Hummers, and investing in Haliburton, these are real men?  And men who drive hybrids, that recycle, that are able to see that there is a lot of grey, that there needs to be a lot of examination before action, that diplomacy is actually an answer to problems, that we are seen as weak liberals, weak males, weak humans.  Seemingly, Schwarzenegger is all male and the Dali Lama is a sissy under these cultural eyes.  Is it me, or is that crazy?

What does this observation have to do with what we’re talking about so far?  Well, that graph that goes on forever upward, that “we’re going to win in the end” attitude combined with the dominate male energy of ‘real men drive hummers’, like the size of your cab is an equal co-relation to privates size, I think is more than a destructive force.  What’s benevolent, kind, or peaceful about a Hummer, and why is this geared towards boys and men as the all-male vehicle from which to define ourselves?  Is it the size of the truck that ‘protects’ our family, that they are higher up, they have giant front grills, so in essence this enormity of the vehicle makes it safer for our family, and we as men seek to be the protectors physically of our family?  Shouldn’t all-male by this reasoning be the guy who’s on his roof installing solar panels for his energy needs?  I know, I’m crazy right?

Problem #4: We Can’t Have Less

As I started off saying two things from at the top: one, I’m an eternal optimist; and two, I’m reading “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore.  I was raised to see that the good guys win in the end - even though my Dad’s Métis and his entire people “lost” in 1886 in Batoche, Saskatchewan, but even still there within the people is the feeling that things are going to get better, ‘we’ll rise again’.  And reading Al Gore’s book, the graphs of global warming and its destructive force is only going up, up, up it’s tough to keep the chin up.  It’s harder to see the good guy winning in the end – the good guy being humans that are able to sacrifice, maybe even have less, for the sake of Mother Earth.  Hey, there’s one of those weak sissy liberal terms, “Mother Earth” – like you’re just from Cincinnati or Timmins, that’s it.

Does the next generation play with G.I. Joes under black skies where he does die in the end, or he can’t go to war and be a hero because his asthma is too bad, or all the soldiers are being deployed to dig New York City out of the rising oceans?

How do we allow ourselves to see the graph going this way:

How can we see that this is okay?  That the peak is how bad it got on Earth and how we turned it around, how we reduced the pollution and the global warming, and how polar bears came back from the brink, and the coral reefs came back, and the hurricanes lessened, and we were able to breath our last breaths handing the world over to the next generation better than we found it.  Can we see this graph as a reduction of our wasteful ways – by a reduction of our need for stuff?  Can we turn this around by allowing ourselves to see that a graph sometimes has to go this way?  Can corporations and shareholders make less profit to allow for better business practices?  What are we willing to sacrifice to make the Earth healthy again – I think she’s giving us signs that she needs the help or she might be soon done with us.

And you know, I haven’t finished Al Gore’s book but I can guess in the end it moves from bad news to good news, from how we can change the world to make it better place, how we all can jump on the challenge and solve it together.  I know it’s going to go there, maybe that’s why I’m reading 50 pages per day – like fast forwarding through the scary parts of a movie late at night.  Don’t you want to skip through the hard part and just be on the up part of the ebb – is this our generational shift from the Boomers and Hippies to the Generation X, we’re this group of holding the hope in one hand and the darkness in the other and we’re not exactly sure which one will win in the end, that it’s not a total foregone conclusion that good will once again triumph over our own evils?

It’s so hard to shake it, isn’t it?  Well, for me it is.  I cannot give up on the belief that we’ll get it right, we’ll get onto the good fight and we’ll come up in the end.  I play these thoughts in my mind, the whole dirty Bush-Oil-War-Profit thing and the dying of public service and the environment.  They spin in my mind like my little Darth Vader figure in one little hand and the Hans Solo figure in the other.  I can see them now playing on the grass, battling, making noises out loud as they battled under the summer sun.  My sister Christi and Jordan are sure that it has to get a lot worse before it gets better and they doubt that we’ll ever rise above the darkness, that humans are just too selfish to change course now, that we’re doomed.  So, Darth Vader makes a big move and Hans in lying on the grass weakened.  But my Mom and I cling to hope, we’re hopefully beyond measure, we just cannot allow ourselves to give up.  So, Hans springs from the grass, flies through the air and stands over Darth.

I guess it boils down to this:  I want my children (when I eventually have some) to play in the grass and believe that good will over come evil.  I want to hang out with my kids and laugh and play and mess about and learn and teach and love and live.  And I want that graph to explode not with profit but with life for Mother Earth.  This little glass ball in the middle of what?  Infinite space?  We don’t even know.  Shouldn’t one of these points of reference, micro (our hearts) macro (outer space) humble us into action?  I guess the question is, what are we going to do?  No ... what am I going to do?