Time to get Political on yo' ass

Yesterday I was angry. ANG-RY. Yesterday on Global news, it was reported that the Conservative "Government" made about 1 Billion dollars in cuts to federal programs, the nature of which made me ANGRY. At the time, they highlighted the following cuts:

$9 Million to Literacy programs
$5 Million to the Status of Women
$11.7 Million of unused, earmarked money for the Mountian Pine Beetle problem here in BC
$4 Million to the Medical Marijuana research program

How could I not be irate? With the exception of the Mountain Pine Beetle money, the Conservatives were clearly picking on the social sector, and that in my estimation makes them scoundrels. Well, I was close...

Today I am livid. LIV-ID. Because today on Global News, the cuts were further reported, and it was worse than I thought:

-$50 Million of unused funding for Northwest Territories Devolution

This makes me utterly upset, because basically what *WAS* left of the devolution process were programs such as those designed to transfer the powers to develop, conserve, manage and regulate of surface and subsurface natural resources in the NWT for mining and minerals (including oil and gas) administration, water management, land management and environmental management; powers to control and administer public land with the right to use, sell or otherwise dispose of such land; and powers to levy and collect resource royalties and other revenues from natural resources. I use the past tense because now it appears the money is gone for the process, and oh gee, now that the NWT is a hot bed of oil, diamond and mineral development, the Feds would hate to lose those Royalty rights. (http://nwt-tno.inac-ainc.gc.ca/dv_e.htm)

-$6.5 Million eliminated from funding for the Centre for Research and information on Canada

Gee, let's get that group for saying things that are true! Bastards!

-$4.6 Million eliminated from the RCMP drug-impaired-driving program's training budget

Good to know a future RCMP officer will have trouble visually identifying the effects of drugs on the impaired driver who kills me on the road.

-$5.6 Million eliminates the Court Challenges Program

This is a program that provides funding for test cases promoting the rights of official language minorities and equality-seeking groups in Canada (READ: the GLBT community, Aboriginal groups, Immigrants and just about everyone who doesn't vote Conservative), and the Conservatives are making it very clear a) what they think of these groups; and b) that they are trying to form some sort of oligarchy where only those with money can affect change in this country.

People. I'm actually passed Angry. I'm technically beyond being livid. I'm Junkyard Dog M-A-D. I'm 'buy a plane ticket to Ottawa with a dozen eggs' MAD. I'm 'Pour acid into the HarperTron 2000's circuits' MAD. White hot RAGE++ mad.

I'm so fucking mad that upon hearing the news earlier this evening, I had to take off my clothes because it was suddenly too fucking hot to bear in my apartment.

Who says Politics can't be interesting?

Five years, Part Two

I made it through the day with a minimum of essential tears. But the anger and heartache aren't so easily tamed.

I needed to watch something tonight. On CBC there was a documentary presentation on The Passionate Eye called 'The Falling Man.' It details the attempts by an author to identify a particular man who was photographed falling to his death from the 106th floor of the World Trade Centre, and how that photograph came to represent the sad humanity of the day.

Call it ghoulish if you want to, but at one point during the chaotic, frantic coverage of the events at Ground Zero that day five years ago, one of the news programs briefly showed footage of a person falling to their death, and then it was gone. I would see brief, unfocussed, scattered evidence of people who, either by choice or by the force of the blast, were sent to their deaths from such a dizzying height, but for the most part, these poor souls were ignored, and pictures of them were condemned as wrong, immoral even. I wanted to know that those people who made that desperate decision were being accorded due respect for their actions.

And I started to get angry.

For years we've been bombarded with the emblematic, heroic or heartwrenching photos from the World Trade Centre site, and absolutely all due respect to the men and women of the emergency services, but there are definitely more stories then just theirs, and I don't know whether it's a sad commentary about the depths of political society or my own deeply-rooted cynicism that I feel those Emergency Services workers' deaths have been exploited to a large extent by politicians on both sides in the US. But still, after 5 years, no one wanted to talk about those individuals who plunged to their death, and to me that's wrong, and it dishonours their memories, laying them aside as a discreet percentage of deaths that day we'd rather not talk about.

Faced with the choice, who's to say which of us would decide to jump or potentially succumb to the horrifying heat and flames. Faced with those equally terrifying choices, some people made the decision to exert one last moment of control over their lives and not one of us left standing in the aftermath has any right to pass judgement over them. For five years, I've lived with the image of a person freefalling through the air against the backdrop of a crisp, bright blue sky and a raging inferno of shattered building materials.

Tonight's documentary was a cathartic experience for me. I was able to watch, at times in complete anguish, and learn that I was not alone in stopping to ponder the actions of the few who died this way. To me, those images represent the very essence that is complicated Humanity just as much as any other image that day produced. And the anger I've felt for those people, ALL those people who made the choice one way or the other, has finally started to subside enough to make this day easier to bear. I will forever mourn and respect all those who died on September 11, 2001 in New York, Washington and Shanksville, and today, learning that I was not alone in wanting to respect "the falling man" and all those he represented, I feel vindicated that someone else out there recognizes that those deaths were just as dignified as the rest.

Normal, Five Years' Different?

Five Years ago, Monday, September 10th, 2001, was normal. I probably spent the day at home, watching TV and playing online, and continuing my erstwhile search for a job, since I was in night school, and had a cashflow issue approaching. Rod was in classes at the University.

Five years ago, the major headlines of the day, as peddled by the New York Times were such:

Despite Plan for Talks, Mideast Violence Explodes

On the eve of talks between Yasir Arafat and a top Israeli official, two Israeli soldiers were slain by snipers andIsraeli tanks began shelling Palestinian positions in theWest Bank.

Nuclear Booty: More Smugglers Use Asia Route

The appearance of a large quantity of uranium in Georgia indicates that nuclear trafficking has shifted from Europe to Central Asia.

Reports Disagree on Fate of Anti-Taliban Rebel Chief

The day after a suicide bombing aimed at the opposition leader to the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan, conflicting reports persisted over whether he had survived.

No kidding, these were the headlines that peeked out from News stands and Paper boxes on the morning of September 11. And it's probably quite sad that today's headlines are barely any different. Even the monstrous mess in Iraq relates to those headlines, as being a central Asian nation accused of dealing in nuclear trafficking, hence giving Bush his war. Israel and Palestine are still at war, demonstrating the absolute failure of the much vaunted "Roadmap to Peace" (Note to Bush Pundits, it was a stupid name, a stupid plan, and arrogantly touted as, forgive the expression, The Promised Land, in terms of peace). And the Taliban are still very much is factor of daily life in Afghanistan, as first the US-led Coalition, and now NATO both failed to wipe them out as Bush promised.

But it's a masterful illusion to say that the eerily similarity in headlines five years on means that life is the same. This is now a paranoid and war-weary world. We're terrified of hair gels and shoes on planes, we're seesawing between safety measures and personal freedoms, and we've developed a whole new sickening vernacular that includes questionable terms like "Insurgent" and the concept of Freedom for political hire. Patriotism had to equate to unequivocable support for the Political Leader, otherwise you were a friend to the Terrorists. This is not the world I lived in prior to 9/11/01. It's all so maddening, so complicated to the point of lunacy. I say fuck it. It's okay to be confused.

Continued Tomorrow.

Sorry, did I lose that?

Yeah, it's been a topsy-turvy kinda couple of days. Right after I signed off on the last entry, I made Rod take me all the way down to Point Grey Beach. Once there, in the darkness, with the lights from the ships/boats on the water, and the buildings in West Van, North Van and the West End poking into the night, I broke down.

I've become unnaturally obsessed with money and debt-servicing lately. my brain is constantly working and reworking the numbers to pay off one debt or another, while maintaining a day-to-day standard of living, and the fact is that I don't earn enough money to do this. So I've been thinking of taking a second job. Why have I gone to such lengths? Well, it was clear that the certainty of going back to school was slipping away from me with every penny being wasted on bad debt servicing, and I was desperate not to let that happen. Admittedly, at work, I do spend time playing with my finances, though not at the expense of my work, as work is not particularly strenuous most days.

On that dark beach, with sand in my mules and Rod by my side, I left my guard down and cried for the pathetic situation I was slowly finding myself being pulled into. I'm still committed to school, and I'm still 100% positive that moving when we did was the right thing to do. The fact of the matter is that the window for convincing Rod to take such drastic measures is always caught short, and I saw my chance and took it, otherwise I'd still be in Edmonton, with a fairer financial situation, but miserable and no closer to my dreams and ambitions.

So I wept for the dream of school slipping away. I wept for my employment crisis. I wept for all the valuable opportunities passing me by because we had not the financial resources to pursue them. It was a bitter low, and I needed it to happen.

So on Thursday at work, in between tasks and phone calls, I started to draft a letter to my band's student services division. I am sort of entitled to up to four years of funding to pursue post-secondary education, and to this point throughout my ridiculously complicated student career, I've only used technically 3 years of it. I had no idea if I'd get that fourth year, given that it's been more than 5 years since my last contact with them, but hell, what did I have to lose?

Plenty, as it turned out. I sent the letter to my parents to proof, and then the possible fit hit the shan. It turns out that when a student on funding drops to part time status or flunks out of school, they are required to pay the money back. I flunked out of school and a program, and each time I was on band funding, but I didn't know anything about paying the money back, and no one ever told me. Suddenly mum and dad were in a tizzy because there was the potential that if I even sent the letter, all kinds of debt doom and gloom would befall me. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place: Do I contact student services and accept whatever happens; or do I not and try to find other avenues of funding (realizing of course that I've exhausted student loan possibilities, and it's harder now to get an increase on my student line of credit because my parents are no longer home owners)?

I decided to take my chances with the band. Hell, what's another debt when I'm this far in anyways. Well, I did have some luck on my side after all. Since no one informed me about the paying-back clause, and no one ever pursued me for money, despite knowing where I was, AND I continued on and get my degree without the last year of funding, I was going to be okay. I suppose in the long run, it was money well spent for the band because it was used in the eventual pursuit of my degree. In both cases of my flunking out, I ended up using the credits I did earn towards my degree, so in a roundabout way, it was all legitimately spent. Of course, this is all news from my parents, so I still need to speak to the person in charge myself, but I'm optimistic, and I was thrilled to learn that the band now offers up to 72 months of funding to pursue a Graduate degree! Either way of course, I am researching scholarships and bursaries like a madman, determined one way or another to make school happen next year as planned.

So I needed to go a little bit crazy and lose my mind in order to regain my fight. Sometimes I get a little complacent about things not happening, often because I feel I don't deserve them to. This bizarre cycle of self-torment must reach an apogee for me to decide to fight back and realize that dammit, I do deserve something. I can't explain it all, it's all very scientific or whatever.

So for the first time in over a year now (see She Fell), I am feeling like the old Fancy. The one before the trip down the rabbit's hole. Welcome back Mind...now get to work.