Why Canada?

On September 24, 2005, on a day that thousands of patriotic Americans traveled to their nation's capital to protest an immoral war that was being waged in their names (link), I also boarded a plane; but bound for another country. I left the United States of America that Saturday, and my family and I now reside in Canada. I obtained a Canadian work permit at the port of entry (Toronto) and I started a new job with a large health insurance provider in the province of New Brunswick. I only told a few people, and in the very strictest confidence, that we were leaving the US for good.

Why did I choose to do this? There were several reasons, but it basically boils down to security for my family and our future, financial security and for our safety. We were the victims of persistent threats of violence against our lives and property in Alabama. We are very conservative, white, Protestant Christians; we were members of the 1st Baptist Church of Arab Alabama, the very last people you'd expect to be on the receiving end of prejudice in the Deep South Bible Belt of America. Why were we attacked?

Because, in January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote a letter to several local newspapers questioning the wisdom of invading a country that did nothing to our own, based on claims of a threat that were not bolstered by hard evidence. I opposed what later turned out to be a huge mistake.

Do you remember the venomous atmosphere of hatred that existed in the United States immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003? No voice of reason, sanity or true Christian love stood a chance of being heard above the din. Never, as long as you live, forget it.

Did we leave out of fear? Partly, yes, though I never expected to see the face of any of those who threatened me, cowards all, I'm sure ... but at that time, if you'll recall, people like that were growing in numbers and it is in groups where cowards become dangerous. I decided to leave the United States because I felt like I no longer lived in America. The people I felt I knew (to include family, friends, co-workers, neighbors) were gone ... they were replaced by a hate-filled people, desiring (above all other things) vengeance. And I wanted no part of that. I wanted to be somewhere else.

I was a first-hand witness to how Americans spoke about Canadians when the government of Jean Chrétien announced that it would not participate in an invasion of Iraq in March 2003.  Because Canada put the truth and a respect for the sovereignty of another nation ... a tiny, impoverished, broken, defenseless nation ... above the will of the great and wonderful United States of America. It was ugly, and it was totally unnecessary. There are many who would argue with me, now, I'm sure ... that, in 2003, I didn't see Americans as they really are; I saw them at a time of crisis, an emotional time; that their true characters weren't on display; I was seeing only the emotions of the moment; fear, uncertainty, and reactionary hatred.

I would argue, rather, that the true character of people is always revealed in a time of crisis.  I learned that, growing up in the conservative Deep South, in America's Bible Belt.  I was taught that a man has no more character than he can command in a time of crisis.

I saw the true character of those around me, revealed when they faced a crisis; and what I saw came as a complete shock to me.  I saw them as they really are; and I can't simply "unsee" that.

It was not what I consider American.  And I know for certain it is not Canadian. 

I do not consider myself primarily a refugee from terrorism any more than I consider my move primarily one of protest. I consider myself a person who did what he felt was right, despite the enormous sacrifice and hardship that resulted from that choice ... in the very best tradition of Americans. In a sense, I packed all my belongings in a covered wagon, yoked a pair of oxen, and headed for a better place ... except my direction was North, not West. We are very happy in our new life; and we recovered a sense of freedom from persecution and hatred that I feel all people are entitled to.

Why Canada? Because it reminded me of the America I knew "before" (or thought I did). I know that I don't want to live the rest of my life in a place where my neighbors would support people who threaten my life before they'd stand up for me and my family. We stood up for our beliefs (in the best tradition of brave patriotic Americans), instead of remaining silent out of fear. And we were vilified for it.

At one time, I might have considered anger the primary motivator; but not now. Most of the anger I've felt in the past has turned to deep disappointment. I'm terribly disappointed in the people I once respected and often admired back in the States. In the past few years, I've grown to see them as small-minded, parochial, shallow, consummately selfish, and lacking both courage and conviction ... and not people I choose to be identified with.

Nothing the U.S. government has done in the past decade disappointed me as much as the response of the American people to those actions. Even the horrendous attacks on the WTC towers in NYC didn't shock me as much as the response of my neighbors, co-workers, friends and (in some cases) my family.

These circumstances aside, you know what really changed my attitude toward life in the USA?

My wife had surgery to remove a colon cancer in 2000, followed by chemo-therapy treatments. It was then that I realized how much I was dependent on my employer for medical insurance; without it, I would have been rendered financially insolvent ... then I got laid off and that devastated my ego. I blamed myself for a very long time. And it made me realize just how fragile our affluence really was. I had no trouble getting contract work and eventually a full time job (with medical insurance as a benefit), but I never went back to my old way of thinking; that "people have not, because they strive not."

In the sense that most Americans are only a paycheck or two away from a crisis; very few are so immune from circumstances that they should tolerate the systematic elimination of safety nets that protect them all.

And Canada is still a country where you can find what you thought America would never lose.
___
Charles Aulds
Sainte Marie de Kent,
New Brunswick, Canada

UPDATE:

In a swearing-in ceremony held on February 15, 2012, along with 

45 other immigrants to Canada,my wife and daughter and I became citizens of Canada. It took us 6 years, 4 months, and 22 days to achieve that goal.

Dead-Eye Dick could not be trusted with firearms (or war)

This has certainly been one interesting decade.  Let's go back ten years ...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a campaign contributor during a weekend quail hunt on a friend's South Texas ranch, local authorities and the vice president's office said Sunday.

On Saturday, February 11, 2006, at approximately 5:30 pm, US Vice President Dick Cheney "accidentally" shot  78-year-old Harry Whittington during a quail hunting trip, at the 50,000 acre ranch in south Texas owned by a wealthy widow named Katharine Armstrong.

The wounded man was in intensive care at a Corpus Christi hospital after being hit by several pellets of birdshot Saturday afternoon, hospital spokesman Peter Banko told CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/12/cheney/

Let's see ... Vice-President Dick Cheney made four mistakes that day, it appears to me:
 

1.  He was hunting with another man and two women who were NOT their wives.
2.  He failed to identify (as a responsible hunter always does) his target; he didn't know what he was shooting at.
3.  The incident was kept secret for 24 hours, and the lame excuse was given that it was the "landowner's responsibility" to report the shooting incident.
4.  He was hunting quail without a bird stamp (we all know better than that).

Is this the kind of man we chose to take our young countrymen and countrywomen into war?  Certainly not!

I love the way the mainstream news media downplayed the seriousness of the accident, saying that Whittington was "peppered" with "pellets," as though a shotgun blast in the face was nothing.  The old man was shot in the face.  That's serious, no matter what the gauge or caliber of the ammunition.

Even FOX news (normally an apologist for the Bush Administration) didn't give Cheney a completely free ride.  In one report, FOX said that White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, was "peppered" with questions about the event.  That was one cute play on words.  And I loved it.  :-)
___

February 11, 2016

13 years ago (the letter that changed my life forever)

Before October 2002, I had never written a Senator or Member of Congress at either the federal or state level.

Before February 2003, I had never written a "letter to the editor" of a newspaper.

It was the impending invasion of Iraq, based on highly suspect claims that later turned out to be complete fabrications and the deliberate lies of the US government that changed my completely apathetic and apolitical life.

The letter which follows, believe it or not, provoked death threats against myself, my wife, my daughter, and even against my farm animals (we were breeding registered Polled Hereford cattle):

February 9, 2003
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Huntsville [Alabama] Times

I believe every Times reader with access to the Internet should perform a
search for "Shock and Awe CBSNEWS" and read the text of the January 24
Evening News article in which Pentagon officials are quoted in describing
the military plans for the invasion of Iraq.

In view of the disappointing failure of the government to apprehend the
known terrorist organization leaders that it identified as the top targets of
its war on terror, the attack described in the above broadcast is a terribly
disproportionate response to a far less serious threat from Iraq.

Worst of all, the plan will do nothing to eliminate the threat of terrorism
against Americans living abroad, or even in this country. It will only
intensify and, to a large extent, justify the growing hatred of Americans
in nearly every corner of the globe.

The Bush administration needs to keep its eye on the ball.
___
Charles Aulds

 

 

That's it.  That's all of it.

I've shown this letter to very few people.  Most express surprise that it generated the hateful response that it did.  While the letter was only mildly critical of the government, it was a time when any criticism at all of the government's plans to launch an all out invasion of Iraq were viewed by many good "patriots" as treasonous.

Remember?

I fully expected a strong reaction.  The reaction wasn't a surprise.  What surprises me, now, is that I sent the letter at all.  I was absolutely terrified to write that letter.  I had been shouted down at work (by people much younger than myself which was, itself, a surprise) for saying, "Wait, we've seen no proof those WMD yet."  I knew how strong the war fever ran; I knew that the letter would infuriate more than a few people.

I sent the letter because I felt it was the right thing to do.  To have felt that way, and to have done nothing, would've been morally wrong.  I wasn't hoping to change any minds, certainty not the course of a country that was dead-set on making war, it did not matter against whom or on what justification.  It wasn't important to me what others did; it was only important to me that I do what I knew was right.

I sent the letter, and immediately started wishing I hadn't. A lot of people who knew me would read it ... I wasn't sure I wanted that. And I couldn't be sure that my neighbors (in rural Marshall County Alabama) wouldn't burn a cross on my yard. I was terrified.  I lay awake at night in a cold sweat, wondering why I did something that I knew, without a doubt, couldn't turn out well.

The bottom line, though, was that I did it.  I was afraid to do it, but I did it anyway; and (like the Robert Frost poem says), it has made all the difference.
 

 
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536

 

Populism, electoral politics, and war always strengthen the oligarchy

I'm takin' my country back! 

That's the appeal of populism ... and I admit, I understand that appeal.  I spent a year of my own life campaigning for a populist candidate for the US Presidency.  I met that candidate, personally, on the campus of a university in Huntsville, Alabama.  I was introduced to him by the state campaign committee as "a man who has done a lot for this campaign in Alabama."  I shook his hand firmly, looked him straight in the eye – which is how I was taught to judge a man's character – and I looked for the lie in that man, and didn't find it.  To this day, I believe he is honest, sincere, and trustworthy.  And those traits, alone, are what made his election an impossibility.

His campaign was used, I believe, to mobilize young voters who would eventually support an establishment candidate; one selected (probably years before) by those who hold the real power.

That's what populist candidate are for ... and to convince the voting public that the choice is really theirs.  It isn't.  The winner of the current presidential election (in my opinion, and I offer this as just my opinion) was selected a very long time ago.  The populist candidates are playing their roles ... they are preparing the way for the true candidates, who (in most cases) will appear far more "electable" than the crazies that are making headlines now.

There are populist candidates in every US election.  It's part of the process.  And they are part of the electoral system, which I believe is tightly controlled and carefully manipulated toward a pre-determined outcome.

Unless I'm mistaken, no populist candidate has won the US Presidency in our lifetimes.  And none will this year, or ever again.

Populism is a placebo.  It gives the impression that societal change can be enacted through the election process.  It's a lie.

It's a lie that the greatest achievements of any social movement (the American labor movement, for example, or the movements for black civil rights or woman's rights) were won through elections.  They were not.  They were largely won through strikes and demonstrations.  Activism, not politics.  In fact, during the period in which American labor won the most concessions from the "robber barons" of 19th century capitalism no more than 10% were represented by labor unions, which were mostly "trade unions" that protected defined classes of workers. 

Concessions were won by the working class because people refused to be divided by politics – farmers, journalists, lawyers, merchants, shopkeepers, skilled tradesmen and unskilled factory workers – they were united in one goal.  And that goal wasn't winning elections.  

It was politics that ended the greatest populist movement Americans have ever seen.  The Populists were absorbed into the Democratic Party, their message "co-opted" by the Party, and electoral politics took the place of activism.

Howard Zinn wrote about the election of 1896:

Once the Populists became allied with the Democratic party in supporting William Jennings Bryan for President in 1896, the movement would drown in a sea of Democratic politics. The pressure for electoral victory led Populism to make deals with the major parties in city after city. If the Democrats won, it would be absorbed. If the Democrats lost, it would disintegrate. Electoral polities brought into the top leadership the political brokers instead of the agrarian radicals.

In the election of 1896, with the Populist movement enticed into the Democratic party, Bryan, the Democratic candidate, was defeated by William McKinley, for whom the corporations and the press mobilized, in the first massive use of money in an election campaign. Even the hint of Populism in the Democratic party, it seemed, could not be tolerated, and the big guns of the Establishment pulled out all their ammunition, to make sure.

And always, as a way of drowning class resentment in a flood of slogans for national unity, there was patriotism.

McKinley had said, in a rare rhetorical connection between money and flag:

This year is going to be a year of patriotism and devotion to country.
I am glad to know that the people in every part of the country mean
to be devoted to one flag, the glorious Stars and Stripes; that the
people of this country mean to maintain the financial honor of the
country as sacredly as they maintain the honor of the flag.

The supreme act of patriotism was war. Two years after McKinley became President, the United States declared war on Spain.
___
From: A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, 1980, revised 2010
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html

Elections (and appeals to nationalism) are a remarkably effective way to keep Americans divided against one another, and to keep their focus off of their real and common enemy.   Elections never fail to achieve that objective.  The next 9 months will bear witness to that. 

I've been duped in the past; but I can tell you this:  Electoral politics won't waste any more of my time, energy, and resources. 

Vote in one hand, crap in the other.

A richness that's worth fighting for

Many of the people waging the fiercest anti-extraction battles are, at least by traditional measures, poor. But they are still determined to defend a richness that our economy has not figured out how to count. “Our kitchens are filled with homemade jams and preserves, sacks of nuts, crates of honey and cheese, all produced by us,” Doina Dediu, a Romanian villager protesting fracking, told a reporter. “We are not even that poor. Maybe we don’t have money, but we have clean water and we are healthy and we just
want to be left alone."

– Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, 2014

Around the world, indigenous peoples are embracing the reality that money doesn't buy health and happiness.  Closer to home, the Northern Cheyenne of Montana mobilized themselves to successfully oppose one of the largest coal mining operations in the world, the proposed Otter Creek mine in the Power River Basin (the mining rights or land leases were given by the state to the Arch Coal and Peabody Energy corporations). 

Most people will probably be surprised to learn that 40% of all the coal that is mined in the US comes from Montana, which has the largest repositories of recoverable coal in the US, at least 120 billion tons, one-quarter of all known US reserves. [ source ]   But not one bit of that coal comes from Cheyenne reservations, and if the Cheyenne have anything to say about it; not one bit more will be mined without their approval.

The Cheyenne are, by our standards, desperately impoverished.  The unemployment rate for the tribe is 62%.  Substance abuse is a huge problem; most of the tribe lives in sub-standard housing.  Why would they opposed a mining project that would bring money (actually, lots of it) into their communities and reservations?  Why did they fight it so hard for so many years; when they were always totally outgunned by corporations which had far more political power, and almost endless financial resources?

 

Simple.  The Northern Cheyenne, like so many indigenous peoples around the world, decided that their culture was worth more than all the wealth that the coal mining could bring them. That's extremely hard – almost impossibly hard – for anglos to understand.  It's something we've never had to choose for ourselves, culture versus money; our culture is based on money.

What these native peoples are resisting and rejecting is "colonialism" ... not colonization.  They fought colonization generations ago, and lost that fight.

Colonization: displacing the rightful inhabitants of a territory
Colonialism: destroying the culture of those inhabitants

Colonialism, I believe, happens to immigrants too.  Destroy their culture.  Enforced conformity.
When the Canadian government passed Bill C-33 last Spring, the First Nation Education Act, it was rejected by the national Assembly of First Nations (AFN).  The funding for native schools was rejected because the strings attached to it, to control those schools, were unacceptable to natives who remember the history of Canada's residential schools.  The Assembly of First Nations rejected $1.9 billion in education funding from the Harper government.  That's huge.  To accept that money, they felt, would have meant giving control of the native schools back to the Canadian government. [more about that]

The history of the residential schools is the main reason why they would not accept that money.  Colonialism.  They would not accept the government's open apology as full recompense for past injustice.  They won't agree to "live in peace, as long as you live like us."  And I think their choice was admirable.

Remember "Climate-gate" ?

"Climate-gate" was an example of the logical fallacy of the "irrelevant conclusion," in other words, it was asserted that one or two emails, out of hundreds that were scrutinized (after they were made public on the Internet), proved that all of the evidence that our planet is warming from man-made causes is bogus.  Reviews were conducted, but no evidence was ever produced of a systematic suppression or manipulation of data used by climate change researchers.  It was a "tempest in a teapot" and was a strategically timed stunt intended to derail the 2009 Copenhagen summit by influencing public opinion.  Opinion.  It was a political stunt that was completely irrelevant to the scientific community.

Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for global change research at the U.S. Geological Survey, told The Associated Press that, even if the data and studies mentioned in the e-mail exchanges were ignored, the evidence "is still hugely overwhelming in terms of the rates of changes that can only be attributed to the warming of the atmosphere. That includes melting Arctic sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets, decline of spring snow season, coral reef bleaching and earlier onset of spring in plants and animals," she said, referring to changing patterns of blooming, hibernation, and migration. They may be talking three or four datasets in the e-mail scandal, we're looking at 28,000 data sets of physical and biological systems from around the world," she said.

The bulk of the evidence is clear; the consensus of the scientific community, firm.  Man-made.  And the scientific consensus that came out of the Copenhagen summit was no different than when the summit began, as expressed in the "Fourth Assessment Report" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in February 2007:

The Fourth Assessment Report finds that human actions are "very likely" the cause of global warming, meaning a 90% or greater probability. Global warming in this case is indicated by an increase of 0.75 degrees in average global temperatures over the last 100 years.

Global warming is absolutely no "hoax" as the global warming "deniers" would like to claim.

I'll say it again:  it was, plain and simple, a stupid move, and a bad blunder. Instead of saying "there is reasonable doubt about man-made global warming," they chose to say, "global warming is a liberal hoax."  Which it was not.  They chose to tell an untruth, to deceive, rather than to stand up for what they claimed to believe.  Why?  Because they never really believed what they were saying.  

That little "publicity stunt" did as much as anything to hurt the case of the deniers.

And, just for what it's worth, no, truth does not have a "liberal bias."  It only appears that way to those who are, themselves, biased.

I slept with the real enemy for years

I spent 15 years of my life working for the US Department of Defense, 8 years as a civilian employee of the US Army, and the final 7 for defense contractors.  I do not miss it.  Looking back, though, I sometimes ask myself "what was so bad about it?  It certainly paid well."

Then I remember incidents like the following.

In the late 1990's my company was preparing a bid (as the prime contractor) for a multi-year contract to provide the information technology support for a large military installation (Redstone Arsenal, Alabama).  It was a huge contract, and the competition was truly brutal.  Our company "teamed" with a major Defense Department information technology contractor, Harris Data of Melbourne, Florida, to prepare our contract proposal.  The preparation of the proposal, which took the better part of a year, was conducted in a "secret" facility that was well guarded against espionage.  Part of the secrecy surrounded the exact makeup of the proposal team, and what types of people were flown in by Harris Data to work on it (most were technical writers, as I recall).  At the facility where we worked on the bid proposal, they even posted a lookout who watched the parking lot from an upstairs window, and described anyone who approached the building.  It was very serious business.

Two of my co-workers were having lunch with friends of theirs who just happened to work for one of our company's competitors for the contract.  A senior management official from our company approached their table at the restaurant and said to them, "You are sleeping with the enemy" and then walked away.  Several days later, on the military post, federal marshals with military police escorts came to the offices of these workers and made them stand in the hallway while their computers were searched.  They were fired on the spot for having compromising material on their workstations.  What "compromising material"?  Who knows?  Who cares?  They weren't fired for anything they did wrong.  They were fired because they were considered a risk to our company's chances at that base support contract.  And they were fired in a manner which would make it impossible for them to go to work for the "enemy," indeed, to work for any company on Redstone Arsenal.  The intent was not must to relieve them of their jobs, but to destroy their careers.  And to deliver this message all of us who remained: "And let that be a lesson to the rest of you!"  They were fired to make the rest of us cower in fear. It was psychological. We were made to feel like our own jobs, our careers, hung in the balance.  We were made to know our place, and to keep silent and remain submissive.  And it worked.  At least for most of the people.

Even now, years later, I sometimes look back and wonder, What was so bad about that, really?  How did it really affect me, personally?   All I had to do was to go along, to remain silent, to be careful who I chose to be friends with, to express nothing but the right political opinions, to look the other way when I was aware of any wrong-doing.   Hey, I could've done it; I could've retired comfortably, early, in one of those big brick south Huntsville Alabama homes, with an in-ground swimming pool and big redwood deck.  And what was so wrong with that?

Most people I knew had absolutely no problem with doing any of that.  It simplified life.  It made things black and white.  Do what you are told and hold no controversial opinion of your own.  We saw, very well indeed in 2002, how that dominated the thinking of most Americans.

The only problem was, I couldn't do any of those things and hold my head high.  I couldn't admit to myself for a very long time that submission and fear were the real keys to my own success.  Not my ability or my knowledge or my intelligence.  To admit that fact, I'd have to admit to myself that I made a career out of being weak.  And I had to admit, I was also "sleeping with the enemy." Because, for most of those years, I worked with and for people I could not respect and many I honestly detested for their lack of courage, or true adherence to principle.  For the most part, they weren't "bad people" at all.  They were, like most people are, governed by their own personal interest and the advantages of the moment.

I'm not saying anything at all about the Department of Defense, or its culture, ok?  I'm saying something about people who thrive in that culture. In the world's eyes, many of them would I believe, be considered "successful."  Yet, I pity them.