What I have decided that I do not like about this city are the old arguments and the insular thoughts of certain groups…the community at large, particularly the one with the power structure embedded that has a very hard time in taking seriously the sufferings and realities of those who come here from other places to build new lives. Generally, there is not a lot of effort made to make it a swift transition to find their footing, no matter their intelligence or their previous training, education, or experience. Yet they are brought here or allowed to come to pay for the lives of the established citizens who will soon need a supporting population –  a youth, a tax base, at bottom, needed to support the burgeoning population of the aged. People to fill those potholes.

Therefore, when people encounter these difficulties, what do they do? Often, not surprisingly, they decide to go elsewhere, to find lives elsewhere where they will not have as much racism to contend with, nor any language laws, and where without penalty their children may study in school in English like the remainder of the continent, where the taxes are not the highest on the continent, and where the infrastructure of the city is not visibly in a state of appalling disintegration — where they do not fear for their lives when driving or walking to work. Somewhere where the larger voting population (provincial) is not kept in a state of ignorance and uniligualism by those in firm control of political power. For of course, it is actually the French population of this province, particularly the more rural French population, that has suffered far more for the lack of English in their lives — the alienation from the remainder of the continent if not the world — and this virtual enslavement has been caused entirely by the greed of their own leaders, who cleverly manipulate this populace, many of them far removed from any chances to learn English in remote rural areas of Quebec. With the arrival now of the Internet, some 20 years ago, change is in the wind, but not nearly fast enough.

Much of the province has been kept in a state of unilingualism and that is precisely what the provincial government has wanted — they have wanted that anger and alienation to be nurtured to a fine heat to be used whenever it served their political purposes. This province could develop or might have developed in the better economic times much more swiftly without those old arguments and power structures defining the lives of the people who had the confines of only one life to find liberation from those enslaving old themes of hatred. And find prosperity themselves with two languages, rather than merely one. It is not rocket science to know that the likelihood of prosperity is much more likely when you share the common language spoken by everyone else on your continent.  Without English, this means there are 350 million people (a conservative estimate) with whom you cannot speak, share, trade ideas, grow relationships with, invent business ventures, share friendships with, laugh with. GROW. In every way possible.

Quebec could have promoted and inspired and SOUGHT bilingualism for this entire province, but her leaders have actively discouraged and repressed that growth for one reason only: to retain the power structure.  For there is no other reason. It is a lie and a myth that it is to SAVE the French language: it is merely about money and power for those who have wanted these things for themselves. It is, finally, about slavery. A sly, but extremely powerful, joke on their countrymen.

It is not Montreal itself that is to blame. I have grown to love Montreal and I know I always will love this city. Yet, in my belief there is a strong relationship between the crumbling of the infrastructure of this city and the dogmatism and greed – the power-mongering — of the leaders of this state, past and present.

Corruption is of course everywhere, found everywhere in the human world. But corruption flourishes best where there are fissures in trust, and particularly where fissures in trust are developed purposely.

In a province where the politics is built on destabilizing trust, and where actively destroying trust has become the private entry card to power, I blame a manipulation of fear by those in power for the corresponding hatreds which shape the politics. A politics of distrust and paranoia. Introducing change and new ideas and new initiatives takes courage and also requires vision and leadership. Who in this new world is showing great vision and leadership? Not as many as we need and will need.

But here in Quebec, this problem, at least for those of us who came here without any real choice in the matter (I am one of those), find ourselves having to make other choices, and enter other rooms, other worlds. Ultimately, we all have to choose our politics and our languages — and those which we actually have any hope of changing or affecting, influencing. I have lived in enough places to know that every regional community and every state and every country has its blinders — its complacency factor — an innate blindness to the very issues, often, which threaten it the most. I have always despised complacency, for this C word, while not as bad as the other C word, corruption, means boredom and stagnation.

What I have experienced here is a life in words and books and the creation of books in my own private sphere.  And although it is true that the complexity of trying to live here under the circumstances that “govern” one’s thinking does somehow also inspire creativity and ingenuity and makes living in English Canada, or English anywhere look like a cakewalk somehow, it is also true that this innate complexity takes up a lot of room in one’s head and thinking, and yet is not definable (not to me), it is ineffably murky, like a swamp that sucks one under, and there is a resistance in Anglos to talk about it, in depth, how it changes one’s thinking, affects the mind. But it hits home when one hears their artistic comrades articulating how tough things are getting under Harper and the economic downturn, and yet they actually ARE bilingual. This is not a new story but a worsening one. When it gets to that point, one knows the artistic community here – and the first language English community — suffers from a cyclical stagnation and an internal quandary because people keep leaving (as I now must) and this fractures the whole, and causes an anger, or some strange sense of betrayal or restrained anger from some quarters that I cannot quite get my mind around, caused perhaps by a perpetual cycle of doubt and fear, perhaps, fear of the same bloody cage? It is ineffable, unclear. And yet I am experiencing this anger emanating from both Francophone friends, and English ones.

For it is as if they believe I can control the circumstances in which I must operate and create and I cannot — I can grow a business and I have before, but I can do it much more swiftly and successfully in an environment where I do not have to fight upriver in the language realities found here.  I came here when it was already too late for mastery of French, but without true mastery, it did not interest me.  I love French, but I knew it was too late, and the state played its own role also in that — they made it much more difficult, not less, and only because I was English, rather than an immigrant from elsewhere. French deeply interests me for use in my writing, in meanings, in the cadence of sound, in the poetry.  But some battles one to has to recognize as already lost.  However, living here for fourteen years has deepened my love of language, which I already possessed  — all languages — and of diversity. Of sound, cadence, rhythm.  My own speaking cadence has been definitely affected by it.  If I move to Ottawa, at least I know there I also will find diversity, if not the artistic angst and awareness that exists here. Fourteen years has given Montreal to me, if not always her trust. I am her child.

I see myself as a world citizen, moreso than as merely Canadian, perhaps because of a decade spent living outside the country.  I wonder sometimes if the average Quebecer, English or French, thinks of themselves as being free in this environment or, rather, as trapped in a matrix of history, because of language laws. Certainly in my recent experience, I think regardless of how much a person has traveled or how many languages they may speak, an individual’s idea of freedom comes down to how they think in their own mind about relationships and human interaction and trust  — having a willingness or a desire to interact and share without desire for control or for greed, or for a misplaced desire for power, developing a natural curiosity and an open mind to see in another person the seeds and potential of what they often are in the act of becoming — and to encourage others within their own sphere, and particularly one’s friends, to free themselves from tyranny in whatever form it imposes itself. Losing trust in the human race because of tyranny, greed, or from a simple lack of curiosity, or perhaps a lack of human compassion– these are the fissures that grow unabated in a country — a province — where distrust is openly and actively encouraged. Nurtured. Accepted as a given. For one reason: the urge to control.

Perhaps what it teaches you is that this is the truth of politics everywhere.  The fastest way to control people is to convince them that someone(s) is wrong, or stupid, or incompetent, or even evil,  or to believe or to allow yourself to be convinced that you cannot trust certain persons or groups — especially if they challenge your thinking. Our willingness or ability to trust in anything shapes our world every day. My sense of trust has been challenged living in Quebec, I have to say, and this has not helped me to find balance here — and I arrived with any sense of balance thoroughly out-of-whack as I had been an academic nomad for 10 years.  In some ways, I feel raped by Quebec’s history and still ever-present rage — and my own identity forced underground by it while living here.

Now when I must leave, because it makes the most logical sense to leave, I find that it is as if I am attempting to qualify what shaped my life while I was here — during what I would call the defining years, moreso than any other timeframe, of my life. I think I was definitely robbed of much opportunity while living here.  This is a complicated question. What does that say about this province? How should I feel, given what I have experienced here? What other choices might I have made? What is true is that I found my own answers to the problems, but took curious detours which have in turn shaped me into someone perhaps not always easily understood, for I never have taken the common path. The road less traveled has always led me forward. Perhaps my identity forged of difficult circumstances will now become a unique strength as I shape a new future elsewhere.

We all have our inner tyrannies to conquer and only one lifetime in which to succeed at this.  It is a strange realization to discover that for 21 years I have allowed, to a far greater degree than was healthy for me, state laws and state political histories to frame my existence and to exert a stranglehold on my own freedoms, and even my own thoughts about freedom and what freedom might mean, although I never relinquished control of my imagination.  I vow I will never again let anyone, an individual nor a state govern my mind as it has for the past 21 years, while I lived under either visa restrictions or language laws. Whether that might be studying a language or any literature(s) of my own choice, or whether it is the ability to work in whatever capacity I so choose, or in composing the fictions that ultimately tell the stories of those who have walked this earth trying to make sense of what they encounter, and where their walks have taken them.

I did do many things right, even if sometimes that was by accident, or by circumstance, and not even by an outright choice, but moreso perhaps a result of intuition, internal wisdom. I have made some extremely tough choices in my lifetime. And I paid for them dearly, even if they did allow me to grow and to change.  I approach another choice.  Finally, I am free to choose and the irony is that it hurts, it deeply hurts, to leave. Montreal has claimed me as her own child, even if her politics and her destiny have punished me at certain times. She is filled with pain, and right now, so too am I, as I prepare to wish her adieu.

Curiosity and joy in human interaction is what inspires discovery. It is quite interesting but also dismaying to see how people tend to react to change when they witness it, and imagine it is always a completely chosen path rather than one experienced as a tapestry, yes, a wild and complicated tapestry of experiences and circumstances and life-framing events, that carries you forward and governs one’s decision-making and thought process. You flow toward where your words make sense, and where your person, your mind, and your SELF with your language, your very body, is understood and allowed to become, allowed its rightful place. Where curiosity and discovery can become an open and beautiful road, where with any luck, one can become, by the use of one’s imagination and ingenuity, a citizen of the world possessed of a free imagination rather than one entrapped within an old political world with an old idea of itself and its former hatreds, driven forward by tired and now meaningless battles played out again and again, relentlessly, idiotically, while our embattled planet appears to be dancing towards her own tragic end.

As a child of six, in first grade, I attended one of the old elementary brick schoolhouses, and walked from my home to the school with friends and family members, a good mile from the house along a highway. There was no bus in those days. In the afternoons, we first graders were dismissed a half hour early to make the trek home.  Presuming, I suppose, we would take longer at the end of the day to make the journey, and therefore it was supposed that we needed extra time. My friend Sylvia and I took our merry time on that walk home from school, and played as long as we wanted in the streams and roadside ditches, picking flowers, making up worlds of our own, generally having what is known as quality dream time. I remember those walks with great joy. But they came to a crashing halt when one day our teacher espied us in our play, and thoroughly aggravated that we should dare to enjoy ourselves, stopped her car, gave us a harsh tongue-lashing, and bore us promptly home in her vehicle, to tell our parents (in my case parent as my Dad was not alive) that we must not, in future, do this as it was too dangerous.

I suppose she was right, and who am I to know, perhaps there is some crazy out there who missed his chance to kill me (us) because of Mrs. Robertson and her firm view of the matter. After that, we were forced to walk home with family members: no lollygagging allowed.

The next walking I specifically remember was in the countryside around my home, where I would head out, whether summer or winter, on long hikes into the meadows and forests and wander at will, dreaming up all kinds of scenarios and worlds of my own. I remember on one walk making up the world of a family of mice living under the snow, and their purported occupations and calamities.  Those mice enjoyed intricate, and often heroic, lives and were not the devilish mice of Douglas Adams’ imagination.

Often my dog would accompany me, leading me where he would, which, as often as not, was in the pursuit of rabbits or whatever he cared to become excited about.  His escapades were usually meandering in nature.  Those times in the wild, with what I call free range walking, or hiking, were times of vivid imaginings and a correspondingly wild freedom of thought, and were matched by the reading that I did after returning home. Those walks often ended at the cemetary where my father was buried.  I would talk to him. Which seemed a necessary thing to do at the time.

The next walking time of importance that I recall was when I walked down the aisle to be married, and five years later, when I walked into my home with my (our) first child, a beautiful son, in my arms. Walks in those days were less painful, and yes, filled with the work of healing. Walking does heal a person…and feeds the mind. Exponentially. That is what I found, walking through time, with dreams in the mind. Eventually, I began walking through university classes, and many journeys into my own head and the heads of the writers of the ages. And I decided my brain needed more walking.

Eventually, the dreams created by voracious reading pushed aside thoughts of anything vaguely domestic, and I made a decision, a painful one.  I needed  to make another walk into the future and take a different fork in the road. I left for Montreal and McGill. And there I walked those halls, and the Montreal city streets. And I discovered new meandering paths to explore, opening my world further. The world of the interior. The world of literary history. The world of inquiry.

Later, I walked for a while in Toronto…although this was a brief interlude, which further added meaning, more meandering, to the tapestry of the mind — before making a crucial decision to walk into another marriage and yet another life, south of the 49th parallel, south of Richmond. And that decision to make that walk definitely represented a Different Fork in the Road, for there was no way of knowing where that road would eventually lead. This did not matter, I thought, because I was fulfilled with whom I was walking.  And the path I walked through that  forest was a very long, meandering,  and dense one, filled with many revelations, disappointments, joys, discoveries. At the end of it, we emerged from where we began: Montreal.

Here in Montreal, I have walked through much more than I would have imagined I was capable of walking through. I have walked through my brother’s death, my nephew’s death, my husband’s death, a dear friend’s death, and it may, at times, have been closer to a stagger than a walk. But it is, yet again, a meandering and yes, deeply meaningful, if at times extremely painful, road that I continue to walk.

These days, every day,  I walk in my fiction, and in my “real” world, but I also walk forward in my mind, to that next fork in the road. For I know there will be more forks in my road. So far, I don’t believe I have taken — ever — the wrong road, the wrong fork, but I definitely have taken the more meandering path, and the less direct.  Sometimes, as in the past, it is particularly helpful to KNOW that there is a fork there in the road, and to understand, when selecting your path, that it is a decision, and it is for a reason. By this point in a life, it is critical to see the forks and to intuit where they are leading.  Sometimes, organically, we grow to understand the best decision simply because it is where our “minds” are leading our feet. Or perhaps our hearts. Ideally, it is both. And stay well away from those evil mice.

Kate Orland Bere

I will be posting weekly in this blog on the “walking” mind of a fiction writer, as I continue work on a novel and a book of short stories.  -KOB January 29th, 2012

By Kate Orland Bere

Stepping into another dimension, arriving at that pinnacle of American politics, the inauguration of a new president, is not a challenge for a ghost horse–even with someone on my back. I, Lucky Strike, carry there a human who is also a time traveler–as a ghost is destined to be–Zithra is a filmmaker who visually captures images with the retinas of her eyes, only to have these randomly converted into films, films she dreams in her mind; the editing is done by thought alone, not by a machine. The visual may then be streamed into a computer for storage. We beam, as Scotty did Captain Kirk, into the center of the festivities in Washington, atop the dias on the West Front of the Capitol, hovering near where Barack Obama is to give his speech, immediately following him being sworn in as president by Chief Justice John G. Roberts. Zithra becomes occupied with her business, her legs tightening around my midriff as she has me turn this way and that, sweeping in footage. This is fine with me, as I can then see more of the activities of the human life surrounding us; I am not shooting a film, but I am communicating what I see and think of these proceedings.

The National Mall in Washington D.C. on this day is as packed as ever it has been in its history–a swarm of jubilant humanity eagerly awaiting the turning of history’s page. Although the many races and demographics of the 52 United States are here well-represented, there are, as one might expect, many, many African-Americans, most visibly ecstatic, and many who had traveled from every corner of the nation to witness Obama’s historic hour: the day that the first African-American man is to assume his post as the the 44th American president of the United States. Many people here say that they had never expected to witness this day during their lifetime. A number are teary-eyed already, and the formalities have not yet begun. For African-Americans, and for all Americans who truly care about the pain and suffering of an enslaved people, this is a momentous day indeed: it will be the event they will talk about for the remainder of their lives–the individual stories of this day, just getting here to attend this day, all forming an oral history that will become legendary–a massive fiction as it is recanted, orally and on the page, through the years, from one generation to the next. Martin Luther King Jr. Day falling just yesterday, on the 19th of January, has no doubt made this moment all the more emotional.

My mind drifts back to previous inaugurations, which I have made it a point to attend through the years, for an inauguration is always a deeply symbolic event, happening only every four years, ushering in the agenda of that particular administration for the next four years, for both America and the watching world. Not much of the world remains unaffected by the transfer (or renewal) of power in the White House. Of course, as a ghost, I do not hold citizenship, except to Hades perhaps–this is why my commentary may interest you as I have no other stake in the matter other than my intellectual curiosity–my own good horse sense. The Inaugural speech forms the catalyst for the coming days, weeks, months and years of what will be the President’s agenda for that time-arguably the Speech puts into motion (or does not) that agenda. It should, in my view, and I realize I am but a horse not a human, ideally mobilize those who agree with the president’s message and wish to take a supportive role. Ideally, it does not mobilize enemies of the president, but in some cases it does precisely this. The majority of persons hearing the speech probably could not give you more than a rudimentary description of it, even minutes after this crowd will disperse–but ideally they do take away the tone and tenor of the inaugural address–the key ideas–and promise themselves, solemnly even, to do better. This idealism will glow through the inaugural balls and will hopefully not become lost on the fuzzy, swollen tongues discovered the following morning. Hopefully the words of this new president will carry forth, casting the flyline of hope that Barack Obama seems to offer Americans–and those who watch with curiosity from around the globe–as he gracefully casts that slim, fragile flyline of hope into a deep river of doubt.

I am remembering Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech to Americans at his Inauguration on March 4rth of 1933. I am wondering if Barack Obama intends to attack directly the morals of the banking institutions, and the wealthy, as FDR did in his speech, or praise directly the Constitution which protects America and has upheld this republic, so far at least, throughout all of the obstacles that have been thrown in its path. FDR said:

“Our Constitution is so simple and so practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.”

FDR, like Obama, faced a nation in serious financial disarray and a people devastated by cruel monetary losses. The biggest difference now is that Obama has a much more enormous faltering economy with a far greater population facing the spectre of unemployment to address, and the crisis is far from over–it may just be the beginning of a deepening void brought on by, must I say it, decades of decadence and an abuse of power by banks, financiers, Wall street hucksters like Bernard Madoff, right on down through the ranks of citizenry. Simple vices can destroy a nation: greed, gluttony, selfishness, arrogance. The Boomers were the children that Richard Nixon in his Inaugural address (in 1969) called a generation of youth “better educated, more committed, more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history.” This assessment has not borne itself out when it comes to governance: over the past sixteen years, America has elected two boomer presidents who have in effect brought the American economy to ruin–Bill Clinton by indulging his sexual appetites while changing the laws that had for decades protected the American citizen from the greed of his banker and George Bush by war-mongering in a part of the world where a common horse thief could tell you you simply cannot win even if it were a virtuous war, which it is not. Iraq is a war over oil at bottom. Not one honest American citizen believes otherwise. Since Clinton you may credit with high intelligence, his move shows his conscience lies squarely in his wallet. Since Bush is of Texan oil stock, as is his past-president Daddy, his move was inevitably driven by his affiliations, with Slick Dick Cheney there to guard his moves, and propell forward, at any cost, the Iraq war. Has anyone seen Dick Cheney during this Bush presidency? If I am a ghost, he is yet a better one.

Now I see them wheeling Dick Cheney out in a wheelchair, and I have to give a horse chuckle at that–he probably is afraid to stand on his own two legs lest someone should attempt to shoot him. Ditto Bush, who is looking more than a little nervous as he walks out onto the dias of the Western front of the Capitol for the ceremonies. Things are heating up, although it is, even for me, mighty cold standing here, especially for Washington D.C. We can see now Barack Obama, with his wife, Michelle, and their two young girls, Malia and Sasha. Obama, born in 1961, and therefore of the Jones Generation, is,  at 47,  one of the youngest presidents to take office. Slender, and tall, with a youthful, genuine grin and wide set intelligent eyes, his visage has inspired confidence and trust–the guy can actually speak eloquently, unlike Bush, and does not ooze lies and sleaze, as did Bill Clinton. The people believe he is deeply committed in his love for his wife, Michelle, and she seems equally dynamic. Barack Obama has a fine reputation–one that has not collected any dirt–for surely if there were dirt, his enemies would by now have discovered it.  Grace in his walk, directness in his talk, sincerity in his eyes, intelligence in his words: what I ask in my mind is: can this man survive through this storm? I fervently hope so. He must be very, very intelligent. Mistakes will not easily be forgiven, especially major ones–for enemies do lurk and this pedestal he is being put upon has cracks in its foundation. Not even his own failures or weaknesses so much perhaps as the weaknesses of those who are placing him there, and a virulent national history.

Looking at this man, as he makes his vow before the people, I think with amazement of his upbringing and the unlikely path that brought him here to this pinnacle of power. For Obama was born of a Kansan mother and a Kenyan father in Hawaii, August 4th of 1961. Stanley Ann Dunham (her father had wanted a boy) was in Hawaii because her father was a talented and determined man and he had chosen the new state of Hawaii as a perfect environment in which to prosper; Barack Obama Sr. was there because the Kennedy’s in the U.S. had sponsored a group of young African students to be sent to the United States for their education. Barack Obama Sr. was chosen to go as a young intellectual son of the nation, to be ready for the Kenyan independence looming in 1964. Kenya would need, it was understood, educated leaders. The marriage between Ann and Barack was an unlikely one as Obama SR was the very first African man to attend the University in Hawaii. Inter-racial marriages, even among whites and Asians, were rare. Ann did the unthinkable [then] to marry Barack, after becoming pregnant with their child. Not long afterward Barack JR was born, Barack SR. left for the Harvard School of Economics, where he would finish a graduate degree before leaving the U.S. to return to his Kenya, to take part in building a new independent country. Ann filed for divorce in 1964, requesting no alimony, moving on with her own education.

Barack’s mother met Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro while finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii and accepted his proposal of marriage in 1967. Ann moved on to Jakarta, with her new husband, taking her young son Barack JR with her. There Ann gave birth to her second child, a daughter, Maya.  When Barack was 10 years old, in 1971, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to be schooled there, and to live with his maternal grandparents. It was around that time that Barack saw his father for the last time, when Barack Sr. visited Hawaii and spent time with his son. Obama Sr. died in 1980 in Kenya, at only 44 years of age, in a car accident, after a long decline into disillusioned poverty and alcoholism, his political and civic career destroyed by his strong opposition to the ideas and plans of the new President Kenyatta. Ann meanwhile, left her second husband in Jakarta in 1972 to return to Hawaii where she began graduate study.  She returned to Indonesia for field research, and took temporary positions in several foreign countries, before eventually completing by 1992 her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii. In 1995, at age 52, Ann died of uterine cancer.

I reflect that Barack Obama II has sprung, then, from parents who definitely held strong views, had fine intelligence, even brilliance, and had the courage to live their lives without compromise, notwithstanding their weaknesses. They both died relatively young. It seems no surprise they manage to create a unique individual who has sought to craft his life by making very conscious decisions. Barack Obama has not chased the dollar bill, nor his he made erratic decisions–he considers his every move, it would seem, very carefully. As a mixed-race political leader in a country where two brothers, one a president, and one a potential president were publicly shot in cold blood, Barack Obama will have to tread carefully. All the more reason why his speech prompts such intense curiosity–what will this man say at such a time of public crisis, where clearly there has been many to blame for this financial disaster–to rouse the people to action and awareness, and yet not inspire hatred in the souls of his enemies. For every president has enemies, no matter his color.

As President Barack Obama II begins to speak, I do hear echoes of the Inaugurals of the past–especially FDR, JFK, Nixon, and Reagan. Each of these presidents faced a crisis of varying proportions in their time–and what is striking is how they framed their speeches to meet the crisis of the moment. In Barack Obama’s words I hear the honesty of FDR–although not the direct challenge to the banking institutions, nor the blame–I hear the passion of JFK, albeit more distilled and not the heated threat–I hear the eloquence of Nixon, his attempt to reach “the people”, to empathize, and to appeal to the simple qualities that matter in life: “goodness, decency, love and kindness,” yet without the annoying smugness of Nixon–and I hear a similar integrity of tone as that of Ronald Reagan, without the emotional crocodile tears. The elements of Obama’s speech are: a direct forthrightness, a humble yet somehow bold presentation, an ambitious and hopeful, yet somber, realistic outlook, and perhaps most important, a promise for immediate action. He says, in essence, wake up America, from your slothful sleep, and take heed, for there is work to do, your service to apply. Our planet needs protecting; we must harness our resources more intelligently; we must rise and rise immediately to meet this crisis–this challenge. Why? If for nothing else, because of the faith and the vision and the forbearance and courage of our ancestors. For their sakes, and for your own, and for the coming generations, sacrifice and hard work will be required to get us out of this mess we are in and nothing else. Obama is saying, “it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things–some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long-rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

I am thinking of the generations past–for not so long ago, life for the human–and for that matter the horse–was much tougher physically. Humans have, as in that new animated film, Wall-E, automated themselves into a state of moral oblivion. Is it possible this crisis occurred because humans have automated their lives too much? Or that the way the world economy functions has become too complicated for even the most brilliant of humans to configure and control–to manage? Or to manage without the majority being robbed by certain powerful  individuals or groups? Where has all the money gone–to certain someones definitely. Yet in what he is saying, and how he is saying it, President Barack Obama II is inviting, in much the same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did so many years ago, all Americans to share in the burden of building, in this case, a sound economy and firm moral principles, in MLK’s case, a basic staple–freedom and equality as a foundation for life. These two things go hand in hand–for if you do not have one, you cannot have the other. Today Barack Obama has cashed that check Reverend King spoke of in his freedom speech. This horse only hopes that this check will not be returned as well, for it may well now be the bank that is insufficiently funded. For the rest of the people worldwide paying in blood and taxes, will they be able to ask–and be answered–who are the robbers and the murderers truly–the ones who cast Bush and Cheney as their puppets–where are these villains? What is their plan? What is their next move?

This same blog entry can be read at web address below:

www.walkingwordsmontreal.blogspot.com

A fire built upon ice, around its circumference people gathering, dancing to keep their spirits and their bodies warm. They sway gracefully within their bindings, their voices joyful, a girl shrieking gaily as a young man swoops her up, tossing her into the air, a shimmer of long auburn hair floating down. This was the way of the past, where everyone in a village knew one another, depended on one another for trade … built their lives upon a mutual exchange of goods and services, marital bonds securing the bonds of commerce. Depended on one another for entertainment and laughter and the bolstering of the spirit against the rigours of settlement life. We have come through time to a reality today where kings and queens are rare and do not represent anything sacred, merely a ritual of pomp and display–at least as it is commonly realized here in this country. Whether they are more even than venial symbols of greed, no person in this village in my era could probably say. What holds power now, in the mind? More likely Power Quebec … or Videotron … or Turner Oil & Heating … or Starbucks, here Marmelade Cafe. The Oscars. Ottawa. Frameworks. Networks of human interchange built up now over a mere four centuries of life. Life over the cup of java et Ie cabernet sauvignon supporting a surge of commerce … building friendships, liaisons, partnerships, time-honoured contracts. Wealth.

This village once burned to the ground–I see the women and children running from the flames through time … memories burning furiously in their wake. Cold cold cold night and the heat is intolerable. Who led the fight to build again? Who were the voices of reason in the chaos? Who drew the people back to build … overcame their despair, steeled their resolve? Perhaps the Mill, which, being built of stone, did not burn. Bread will still be baked … oh for the fresh baked bread from the brick ovens! Fresh churned butter … all meals made from their own harvest. The shared meals. Some overcome and rebuild, others move away. New life entered the village: new families, new buildings. New blood and new money and new skills. New foods. New babies.

I had sex with the blacksmith in his smithy because I had a bad aim and because he was persuasively insistent. Like Orlando Bloom in “Pirates of the Caribbean” he was not brawny or beefy but rather slender and sported a pretty ponytail and deep blue Irish eyes; he clearly was a genius at his trade. Tomas chased me around the smithy with his blade drawn, and I threw a horseshoe at him, for luck. Where is the justice in my aim? He caught the shoe on the end of his blade and forced the tip of the blade to my throat, smiling. Strip, he whispered. Who argues with steel? Fortunately, that was the worst of it. Genius at a few trades, good with his hands. These steely exchanges build networks too; I rode out of that smithy at a gallop on a bay mare called Lucky Strike.

These narrow streets were meant to be taken in from the back of a horse. Like a Gunsmoke town, probably Clyde’s once was attached to a stable where those who wanted to dine & down a few pints parked their steeds and buggies. Or maybe La Gourmand was once the stable for Clyde’s or vice versa, hard to tell. I need to find a guide … someone to tell me the history … someone to help me to wend my way through this town. It would be André of course, the only denizen of this village I personally know, André of Lebanese heritage, now a successful Canadian businessman. His shish taouks are to die for, his depanneur across from the post office a village cultural marker–to rival that of Wild Willy’s ice cream parlour, kitty corner off Cartier. Yes, from André I will learn of the people today. I whirl Lucky Strike about, and we canter east.