Until A White Man Has A Problem

The tendency armed white people (like the police) have shown recently towards killing unarmed black people in America has put me in mind of Canada's native people. The problems, troubles, crises, injustices and apathy the First Nations are subjected to regularly turn up on mainstream (read: white) news, and yet are never actually addressed by government. For generations.

The reason is obvious. A problem isn't a problem until a white man has it. Aboriginal Canadians are not a significant financial or voting base, so until the problems of the native community matter to non-native voters or backers, no politician has to campaign on them. Should non-native (mostly white) voters ever say to politicians vying for power, "look, this shit has got to stop. You better fix it because poverty, suicide, disease, and injustice are just not fucking acceptable in this country," things might change. Until aboriginal issues start to matter to non-aboriginals, nothing is likely to change.

In South Africa's apartheid age, sanctions worked because they meant whites pressured the government - a government that was elected by them and dependant on them - for change, because they couldn't do business. It was costing white South Africans, establishment South Africans, money and inconvenience - in other words, the problems of nonwhites (powerless and poor) in S.A. became a problem for whites (privileged and not poor) in S.A. That's my theory, at least.

How does a mistreated group: black, female, native, French speaking, Spanish speaking, immigrant, poor, make progress on a grievance? Perhaps when their problems become problems for the empowered groups. Through violence? Maybe selectively, but embrace mass violence and it becomes easy for them. The answer to violence is violence, and you know who wins that.

Social action leads to politics, but politics is where the bottleneck is. How many policies that large majorities in the country support and want have no chance of ever happening? Many, very many.

George Bernard Shaw said that as long as we have prison cells it matters little which one of us sits in them. The question is how do you get people who don't experience poverty to see poverty as a problem. Or people who don't experience racism, or may benefit from racism, to see racism as real. Change requires a critical mass of people - but not necessarily a majority. If the persecuted and the poor where not so powerless they would not be so persecuted and poor, and if the were not so persecuted and poor they would not be so powerless.

The system is self-perpetuating, and that is also it's weakness, because entropy applies to everything and there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Every civilization eventually winds down and our civilization will inevitably be replaced by something we cannot now imagine. What we do now, be it clean energy, peacemaking, environmentalism, equal rights, or justice in the system, we hope influences that change. Let us hope for a soft landing, a positive change - from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, not from Rome to the Dark Ages. But you never know.

Too Good At Democracy?

It's been said before that perhaps wanting to be a political leader should disqualify you from ever actually being one. That's because your wanting power over me makes me that much more suspicious of you in the first place. Who does power attract, and what does power do to them when they get it? The cliche that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely assumes that those who attain power weren't already corrupt. That being corrupt, morally, intellectually, or financially, isn't how you get power in the first place.

The problem is that the worse you would be at governing, the better you can be at getting elected.

What do we do when the people who do politics for a living get so good at it that it renders the democracy non-functional? Political professionals know our psychology, they know how our brains work, they know marketing, hell, they know what colour tie to wear to make us trust them more than the other guy. They know how to poll to get the result they want, how to work within laws to slant courts, influence voter turn out, and gerrymander districts. They target so specific a demographic that they know what word to repeat to get the emotional reaction they want.

Face it, the game is so well played by the players, that we, the voters, are at the disadvantage. The point of manipulation is that if it is working on you, you don't know it.

In professional hockey the goaltenders are now so good at stopping the puck, are so hard to beat, that the league may make the nets bigger to give the shooters more of a chance. The players are so good at what they do you have to change the rules to make to make it a meaningful contest. Something worth cheering for rather than tuning out.

Sports leagues seem able to find neutral referees and umpires to call their games - you don't get to umpire a Yankees' game if you work for the Yankees, even if they are paying you through a third party fake Society for the Betterment of the Red Sox charity front. Fans can stop watching, but voters need to vote, because somebody is going to form government. It's just that it will either be with or without your voice.

I can't out spend the a billionaire on campaign ads, but for all his or her money he or she only gets one vote. The rest of us out number them and can out vote them, but only if we don't let them buy our votes. Only if we don't respond just to ads, stop being emotional voters, vote with our head as much as our gut, support independent media, participate not just in protests, but in the process, think critically about our own culture about what we're told, pause and count to ten before casting that vote, and God's sake, don't base it on what colour a candidate's tie is.

Sex, Gender, and Jenner

I am not a doctor but I do play one in my imagination and in my imagination people are just people, rather than being assigned a gender at birth. People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual. You may choose to tell me who you're dating now, but why tell me what type of person you are committed to dating the rest of your life? It's not that your orientation will or should change, but who you may sleep with ten years from now is not relevant ("Will you go out with me?" Yes because I'm a man or no because I'm not tall enough?).

I'm not advocating bisexuality. You can still like who you like - only woman, only men - but don't need to identify with that as a campaign, a cause, a flag to fight under. I am a man married to a woman, but that is a description of my current life, it needn't be turned into an ism.

Being circumcised (male or female) to fit into your cultural box is bad enough, but having yourself surgically and chemically altered to fit into the cultural box of 'womanhood' or 'manhood' is a lot to go through. Why can't a person have a penis and just be a person with a penis - not 'male' or 'female'? Why require surgery to be one thing or another, when we can let anyone dress, date, or be treated as they wish, out of the respect accorded all humans. Perhaps rather than changing a body to fit our social conception, we could change society's categorizing of male and female into just people, with their own selves and interests and ways of living. Maybe a penis is a differently shaped clitoris.

I know that evolution, which undergirds everything, requires we be split into groups of with-penises and with-vaginas and that that ends the discussion, but there will always be reproduction - that's not going away. What, though, if I had to get to know some people before I could tell if they had a vagina or not? Would I find myself liking someone who turned out to have a penis? Would I be waylaid into gay sex?

How would society function if we couldn't automatically tell who had a penis and who didn't? It couldn't, so this is not a serious suggestion. For all I know someone who identifies as a woman (itself a social construct) while living in a 'male' body very much wants a clitoris. But if we could take the socially constructed elements out of people's identities - gender, sexuality, race - could we ever just see a person as a person who has a body, is dating a person, who dresses a way.

What if we just had people, without short-hand categories of gender or sexuality or marketing, and let people sort everything else out one on one? I know - it'd be inefficient, and nothing is worse than inefficiency, not even suffering - but a man can have sex with only women without identifying as heterosexual, but just sexual. No matter what you may think, and no matter who you are sleeping with now, you don't know who you'll be attracted to ten years from now, if the situation and the options are different (prison?).

If you're in a good relationship now, be glad that you are, and if you are not, be hopeful that you will be soon. If you have in mind the kind of person you want to be with, that's fine. But do we need to categorize gender more emphatically than we may someone having a job, or height, or age limits, or the kind of accent you find sexy? All of which are also preferences. Is someone in Toronto who is only interested in someone who lives in the same city, a Toronto-sexual? Why then with gender? Why must you must be a gender not just have sex. You must be a man in a man's body or a woman in a man's body - those are your options. Yes or no. Up or down. In or out. On or off. No continuum. No recognition that your state is 'at the moment' - you just choose a forever side and go though massive reconstruction and trauma should you choose to switch.

Think of Caitlyn Jenner. If a 65 year old man thinks she'd be happier as a 35 year old woman, who am I to disagree? But the point is she switched sides. You still have to be one or the other - the idea of the surgery is to be all one or all the other. Race, nationality, gender, sexuality or caste - it's never enough to be a person, we need to know what type of person you are.