Some Miniscule Minds at Work

I am sometimes stupefied when I encounter the ignorance and plain idiocy that comes out of many people’s mouths. For example: did you know that “global warming” is a hoax? Yep, we have proof. Two winters ago it snowed in Houston. If that’s not enough for you, try this: a couple of years ago emails were intercepted in which climate scientists were discussing “manipulating data.” The smoking gun! Sarah Palin added that the trouble with scientists is that they don’t look at the “big” picture; she, on the other hand, has gone back 20-30 years and discovered that all this “warming” stuff is part of a natural cycle.

What can you say to people who hold such beliefs? Go back to kindergarten, start over, and this time pay attention?

It’s really odd that scientists who can describe the earth’s weather as it was four million years ago missed Sarah Palin’s 20-30 year cycle. More so, “manipulating data” means one thing to Fox commentators and quite another thing to scientists. According to the Fox interpretation “manipulating data” can mean only that scientists are actually making up data and throwing out stuff that doesn’t conform to their theories. When scientists talk about “manipulating data” they are talking about applying different formulas, algorithms, or equations to help them understand the data.

If it has never snowed in Houston before, but it did two winters ago, then this is one more tiny indication that the earth’s weather patterns are changing. This weekend it snowed in places in the North-Eastern USA for the first time on this date since weather records were kept. What does that “prove?” As the polar ice caps melt it is bound to have an effect on weather world-wide. I am so glad that it is all a hoax. I’m sure that the polar bears who can’t find any ice floes to rest on must feel the same way.

Now here’s another thing that galls me.

Did you know that evolution is another scientific hoax and that there are better, more common-sense, explanations for dinosaur skeletons and fossils of sea creatures on mountain tops? One is that a big guy with a beard snapped his fingers and all this appeared. Poof! And the fossils are his way of testing our faith in him(???) Another is that: yes, life forms have changed on our planet over the years, but the process has been guided by another big guy (not specified whether this guy is bearded or not).

In doing a bit of research for this essay, I stumbled across a web site: http://conservapedia.com/Evolution. It is a fascinating—and frightening—read. Here’s a quote: In addition to the evolutionary position lacking evidential support and being counterevidential, the great intellectuals in history such as Archimedes, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Lord Kelvin did not propose an evolutionary process for a species to transform into a more complex version. Now if those guys didn’t come up with the theory of evolution it must be fraudulent, right? I mean, who are you to argue with Aristotle?

Further, this web-page quotes many, many “experts” who question the validity of evolution. Aren’t quotations in themselves enough proof?  But the main problem with evolution is that its adherents are atheists and a court of law in the USA once held that “atheism” is a religion. A “religion” cannot be taught in public schools and, as the core belief of atheists includes “materialistic theories of origin,” evolution cannot be taught in public schools either. The coup de grace: Evolutionary theory played a prominent role in regards to atheistic communism. (I have never understood why right-wing writers use the phrase “in regards to” so frequently.) So, not only is evolution a religious tenet, but it’s un-American to boot.

Frankly, I don’t understand why anti-evolutionists don’t look through their church windows and take a hard look at the world outside. One of the most noticeable and dominant features of “nature” is change. Everything changes. Ever see a landslide or a flood? How about a volcano? That’s evolution. Ever hear of dog-cat-cattle-horse, etc., etc. breeders? That is evolution. Ever hear of a disease becoming antibiotic resistant? That’s evolution. Ever notice that most people have stopped relying on horses for transportation? That’s evolution. The idea that living organisms adapt to their surroundings and pass their survival techniques onto their descendants…I mean, isn’t that something that we all do every day? I can only guess that they have never driven through the country-side and seen rock-cuts through which the highway winds. All those apparent different layers, some at odd angles to the others. You really think that the guy who created everything (like some 200 billion galaxies with about 200 billion stars each) had time to worry about rock stratification?  I suppose that they have an explanation for the Grand Canyon popping out of nowhere.

The world and the universe is one wonderful miracle. The fact that it was created by and is governed by simple laws that even older children ought to be able to understand makes it even more wonderful. Why on earth would anyone want to take away from that splendor by inventing fairy tales about it? It is all so much bigger and grander and more stupefying than the wildest imaginations of those with eyes closed tight.

Elementary Cosmology

The universe, when I was a small child, was very simple. There was the place where we were, and a place above it called “sky.” I gained an insight when I was about 5-years-old while lying on my back studying the sky. I reasoned that the sun was higher than the clouds and that the sky was higher than the sun. This I deduced based on the observation that the clouds sometimes blocked our view of the sun, but the sun never blocked our view of the clouds. Both the sun and the clouds blocked our view of the sky, but it never blocked our view of them. I thought that was a pretty nifty observation.

But then my parents sent me to Sunday school and the picture got very much more complicated.  Unfortunately, they chose a fundamentalist church where my head was stuffed with nonsense by well-meaning adults. I got the idea that heaven was above the sky and below our feet was a place called hell. Okay so far. Bad people went to hell and good to heaven. The trouble is: we were all bad. They kept repeating over and over that we were all unworthy sinners.  In fact, every time you committed a sin, even telling a “white” lie, you got a black spot on your heart. I figured that when you died they must cut you open to see how black your heart is to determine where they should ship the body. It seemed to me that there was no escaping this hell place. I had dreams in which angels with swords swooped out of the sky to slay all the sinners—that is, everyone.

However, I thought of a way out of this trap that we were apparently in. Based on my reasoning of the relative positions of clouds, sun, and sky and that all three of these objects blocked our view of heaven, what I called the sky was really the underside of heaven. All I had to do was climb high enough and I would escape the vengeful angels and torture of hell. So, I began to pile objects on each other, like my tricycle on top of my wagon. An adult asked what I was doing and I told him I was trying to get to heaven which was above the sun and clouds. He laughed and warned me that I would have to make my way through heaven’s sewers.

I had no idea what “sewers” were, but I knew “sewer pipes.”  They were concrete tubes about 10 feet long with a flared end. I didn’t know what they were for but I would sometimes see them stacked up around town. I pictured that the underside of heaven was filled with these sewer pipes making it very difficult to make my way through them.

Well, you probably figured out by now that I could not make a pile of stuff high enough to get anywhere—not even to the relatively low level of the clouds. Many years later, somewhat ironically, I discovered my childish vision of our place in the universe was pretty close to what the Gnostics believed: that we were trapped on earth by evil forces and we had to be very careful about how we tricked evil into letting our souls (“sparks of heaven”) bypass them on the way to heaven. I also learned that when Christianity was in its formative years, its main rival was the Gnostics. In fact, the Acts of the Apostles specifically mentions Simon the Magician, one of the Gnostic leaders, in a very negative light. Just to make sure, I guess, that we didn’t get taken in by the rival company.

(The word “Gnostic,” in case you are wondering, is from the Greek word for “knowledge.” In other words, its antonym, “agnostic” literally means “Beats me. I don’t have a clue.”)

Now what is this little essay all about?

This: that the universe exists inside our heads.

Our brains are pretty good at picking out patterns and seeing causal relationships even when the patterns and relationships are illusions. Our brains demand answers and, if none are apparent, it will make them up out of fragments of observations. The idea that the earth is the centre of the universe and everything revolves around it is a very reasonable one when looked at from the point of view of a human brain. That is what the sense organs that feed it (mainly sight in this case) are experiencing.  The trouble is, as the scientific parts of our brains have been figuring out, that this is an illusion based on a very limited observation platform. Get us off the planet (whether in imagination or reality) and we see something very different. “Hey brain, you got it wrong!”

Now many people’s brains will not accept being contradicted. It was clearly impossible that men have walked on the surface of the moon because our senses tell us that the moon is usually about the size of a twenty-five cent piece and that it is located somewhere between the clouds and the sky. The entire enterprise had to have been created in a television studio. And, what happened to heaven if men can walk on our satellite? We know for sure that heaven exists because it says so in the bible and the bible, having been dictated to us by the guy who made everything, can’t be wrong. If we have doubts, every now and then a weekly “journal,” devoted to reporting the bizarre and sensational, will post a photograph of a distant galaxy under a headline something like, “Scientists photograph heaven.” I know I have seen at least a half dozen of these front pages at various times during my 65 years.

Something scary: when I was in my 20’s I took a female friend to a campground in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. In the late afternoon the moon was visible, as it sometimes is. “Look!” she exclaimed. “The moon rises during the day here.” She was closer to twenty-five years old than she was to five years old.

Now, picturing the universe the way that science has discovered it to be over the past few years, is a very difficult thing to do. I mean, it is big! And old! Not only that, from our vantage point in this minuscule section of our universe, we have been able to describe its structure in considerable detail. What do you mean that matter and dark matter exist on long string-like structures twisting through a void? Space movies have told us for years that we can reach any planet anywhere in the universe that we chose within the time between commercial breaks, and that all intelligent aliens look just like us except for a few additional bumps and appendages and oddly-coloured skin. Even though we can’t do so with any creature on our planet—even those sharing 98% of respective genomes— we can breed with aliens.  It is very handy that they all speak English as well. Any alien that does not look humanoid is probably a psychopathic killer that eats humans even though it has never encountered any before.

And time? What do you mean that it is a fourth dimension and that there are possibly more time dimensions?  Holy crap! And now you say that everything is made up of eleven-dimensional strings that both exist and don’t exist at the same time? I mean, this science stuff is too weird. Besides it hurts our brains trying to grasp concepts like there is no such thing as “before time began,” and that there are other universes, some only a millimetre or so away.  It is just so much easier to picture the universe as it is here on earth according to our sensory inputs; that there is a place above here called heaven; a place below here called hell; and that it is all ruled over by angry angels with swords.

Stereotypes and Same-Sex Marriage

I think I must have led a very sheltered childhood. I know that any mention of anything sexual was strictly taboo. Even fart jokes were enough for a stern talking-to from an adult. I was ten years old when I noticed that a woman who had gotten married during the past year was very pregnant and it occurred to me to ask a friend:  “Is getting pregnant something that happens when you get married?” I was genuinely puzzled by the seeming connection. (To give you a better idea of the flavour of the 1950’s, Roman Catholics went to their own school and we never associated with them. They were strangers in the midst of our small village. Of course, there were only Catholics and Protestants, so we didn’t have to integrate other religions into the taboo system.)

The point being: I really didn’t know very much about the world. By the time I was fifteen and just starting to date I knew that the word “homosexual” meant someone who was a sex-crazed lunatic attracted to males. (There was no such thing as a “female homosexual.”) Once, when angry with a girl-friend who said she wanted to be free to date other boys, I called her a “heterosexual.” It was the only word I could come up with that meant a sex-crazed lunatic attracted to members of the opposite sex, in the sense that it was an apparent antonym of homosexual. Apparently she told her mother who thought it was hilariously funny.

When 17 I shared a house with two pairs of males. I knew that they were sexual active with each other, but, it never occurred to me that they were “homosexuals” as that word carried so many negative connotations to me that had nothing to do with my house-mates. They were funny, friendly, generous, and were enthusiastic about my interest in girls: lending me clothes and giving me friendly and helpful advice. We never talked about their sexual orientation; it was something that was irrelevant to our relationship.

And then I met John. He was a female impersonator. He would “do” Bette Davis, Ethyl Merman, Mae West, and other female stars for what seemed hours of continuous hilarity. There was no question of his sexual orientation. In fact, the student social workers I was sharing a house with at the time, asked him to find out if I was homosexual.  He breathed heavily and slobbered on my belly for a while, which left me completely cold and uninterested. He concluded from that experiment that I was straight as an arrow.

By the time I was in university I had know many openly gay men. I found their sexual interest somewhat odd in that it simply didn’t interest me and I couldn’t imagine the attraction, but that really had nothing to do with them as people and my relationship with them. Chacun à son goût, as it were. I suppose, looking back, that the reason I met so many gay men was that I was interested in art and theatre. Please don’t leap to any conclusions here: though many men in the artistic areas of life are gay, not all are, and not all gay men are artistic. That should go without saying, but when dealing with stereotypes I feel I have to be careful how I word what might be construed as generalizations.

In any case, I recall that in my second or third year of university I wrote an article for the student newspaper on some of the problems that gay men experience. Besides the blatant discrimination, I tried to focus on the less obvious areas: such as the struggle many faced with their negative self-image fed to them by the society around them. When children start to suspect that they might be “different” they sense it as something “wrong” with them. The struggles to suppress, avoid, and finally to accept can come with enormous psychological cost. Well-meaning friends and family often make the suffering worse by their own ignorance and naivety.

I once said to someone who had difficulty accepting gay men as deserving of respect as straight men that the only time someone’s sexual orientation should mean anything is when you’re in bed with them. I know that’s a fairly wild statement, but the point I wanted to make with that statement was that, frankly, it is none of my business who someone has relations with unless I somehow become involved in the physical side of things. That pretty much sums up my attitude.

When one of my children boycotted a homophobic teacher’s class until a full retraction and apology for some stupid and hateful remarks the teacher had made, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that a child of mine should take that attitude and be willing to put it on the line to defend a group of fellow citizens who were being treated less than fairly.

Personally, everything came to a head when the church I was an active member of began to debate the question of the “blessing” of same-sex marriage. I assumed, naively, that all Christians, at least of my brand, accepted everyone as equal before God and that it is not our place to judge one another. At least, that what I was taught and what I read all the literature to mean. When our congregation got together with members of another congregation to discuss the issue, I broke the awkward silence by saying, “If I were gay, I would not accept the ‘blessing;’ I would want full-blown marriage.” That got things going, but everyone, expect for a few gay members of the congregations, missed my point and continued to discuss “blessing,” priding themselves on their conclusion that blessing same-sex marriages was okay in their view. The entire question of actual marriage was not even discussed.

To make matters worse, in my view, the national church could not even agree to bless such unions and some congregations felt so strongly in the negative that they withdrew from the national body and set up independent churches. I couldn’t believe it. I wrote a letter to the national newsletter, which was published, saying I had no problem accepting my gay brothers and sisters as full equals, but my problem was in accepting those who opposed the full-inclusion of all church members. When I realized that the church was not going to even attempt to get past the “blessing” hurtle in order to face the real issue, I stopped attending church. I felt that the church had abandoned me. I find it odd that no one from the church community has asked me, though it has now been more than five years since I went from being a warden and assisting with communion to non-attendance, why.

When recently in the hospital after a heart attack, a nurse asked if I wanted to see a member of the clergy. I thought long on it and, in the end, refused. My reason was that I felt it would just end up as a pointless argument with me venting my frustration and anger on this bystander who I had no prior relationship with. It just didn’t seem right to blind-side this unsuspecting man or woman.

Female Drivers and Growing Up

Children first learn about the larger world through their parents and those around them. They take everything in at face value, as they have nothing to compare it to. Whatever they face, they feel is “natural”—that’s just the way the world is. So, the Tooth Fairy visits and Santa is jolly, and that’s that.

And, when I was a child in the 1950’s women could not drive cars. It was a simple given fact. “Female drivers” were a menace on the road. Whenever a woman was involved in a traffic accident, it was clearly because she was a “female driver.” The accidents that men were involved in were “the other guy’s fault,” “lousy weather,” “lousy goddamn road,” or some mechanical failure, such as “the goddamn wheel fell off.” (Everything was a “goddamn” when I was young, including the “goddamn basement door” which always stuck.)

I recall once seeing a woman who had hit a dog with her car which then veered into a stop sign, somehow managing to impale her car on it. I remembered the look of helpless embarrassment on her face. I saw that same look later in life on the faces of women who were married to bullies. The shame, and hope that, if she kept quiet, somehow no one would notice.

During my teens and twenties personal transportation was mainly by subway or streetcars (Toronto), Metro (Montreal), and buses (both). I rarely encountered any drivers, male, female, or otherwise. Automobiles were just something I had to dodge when I crossed Young Street or Ste Catherine. Somehow, by my late twenties, female drivers were common and when they did give me a lift I appreciated it and was not at all worried for my safety. In the intervening years I had forgotten all about “female drivers” and the dangers associated with them.

There were many things that were simple facts when I was young that somehow, over the years, evaporated, to be replaced by my experience and learning. For example, if one made a clever remark then one was “too big for your britches.”  Cleverness became a desirable asset later in my life and if you were too big for your pants it meant it was time to lose some weight. If you stood up for your rights, you were told “don’t give me any of your goddamn talk-back.” Later, “standing-up-for-one’s-rights,” became a rather heroic stance.

Teachers were always right about everything. It didn’t matter if they spouted nonsense; you had to “respect” them. Later in life I attempted to get idiots removed from classrooms and quietly stood behind my son when he stood up to a homophobic teacher by boycotting his classes. When another son was being tormented by a bully who failed him three years in a row, I demanded that the principal intervene and get my son someone who could actually teach.

Let’s see: policemen were always right. If someone was arrested that meant that he was automatically guilty. It made sense; after all, why would the police arrest someone if he was innocent? It didn’t take me long to learn the fallacy of that belief. I encountered more than my share of bullies in uniform when I was a young adult. It took me even longer to learn that most police officers are not crude bullies, but can be helpful and sometimes heroic human beings.

My view of the military was complicated. When young I admired soldiers and their equipment. And then, in my early teens, I overheard my father telling neighbours that after high school I was going to join the army for two years “to become a man” and then go to business college. No one had consulted me on the subject. All I knew after overhearing that comment was that I was never going to have anything to do with the military or business. And then, with the war in Vietnam and the spread of nuclear weapons, my aversion became focused. There was no doubt in my mind that soldiers were insane murderers. I had a bit of trouble reconciling that with the actual former military people I knew who, for the most part, were normal people. But, when you are young everything is black and white and moral certitude is always on your side.

It took me a few years but eventually I started to see things from the soldier’s point of view and started buying poppies for Remembrance Day, solemnly observing the silence to mark the sacrifices of those who had gone to war. I still had no sympathy for the politicians who sent them there, but, I realized that the front-line soldier was not a monster. Most of them were ordinary men and women trying to do an extraordinary job.

In the mid 1990’s I attended a church conference at the Petawawa military base. We stayed in the barracks and in the early morning I watched a troop of soldiers with full packs jogging in the mist. As I was walking across grounds I fell into step with the Brigadier-General of the camp and we remarked on how beautiful the location was, perched high in the hills overlooking the Ottawa River and the hills of Quebec on the other side.

“You know,” I ventured. “I never imagined I would ever be in a military base. When I was young we sat outside the gates blocking the entrances.”

“I know,” the commander of the camp said. “We generals knew you guys were right. The people at the top knew what those weapons could do and what they represented. It was insanity.”

After that conversation I felt much better about a lot of things.

Where have all the children gone?

We live in a very small village—much smaller than the ones I grew up in. One thing I find odd: I know there are fewer children here, but, why do I never see them? Well occasionally I’ll see a dozen or so get off a school bus, but, then they disappear. Sometimes I’ll see a ten or twelve year old pedaling his bike along the highway, but he has the appearance that he is doing it to get from one place to another, not to just ride.

I know there are too many stories in the press about children being assaulted or abused but in most cases the perpetrators are their own families, relatives, and friends of the family. I don’t think there are any more boogie-men hiding behind bushes waiting for an unwary child to fall into their clutches than there were when I was young. We kids knew all about the strange adults in town and stayed well-clear of them. In fact, I think that everyone knew that Charlie’s uncle was a bit off.

My point is that when I was a child in the 1950’s the outdoors belonged to the children. That was our place in the world. We were not even allowed to be in the house except during severe weather. And, I am certain that the outdoors had always belonged to children. It has only been an incremental and almost imperceptible change over the past five or so decades that have lead to this world where the fields and streams that once used to team with children are now silent.

Now when I say that the outdoors belonged to the children, I mean that in an almost literal sense. We had our appointed meeting places: tree forts, porches, street corners, whatever. We had no government so places used to simply evolve depending on the season. And, with the seasons, our activities changed. Summers meant elaborate games of “Cowboys and Indians;” one group of children would go off and hide in the forest and then the rest of us would hunt them. When found we’d point our fingers at each other and shout, “Bang! Bang! You’re dead!” “Am not! I got you first!” “No you didn’t.” Sometimes I didn't  find or was found by anyone. I’d simply roam the forest just outside of town, all afternoon, until I heard a distant voice call my name to let me know it was dinner-time.

Summer evenings were special. While the adults gathered on someone’s front porch to chat and drink beer, we would play “Hide ‘n’ Seek.” It could be played in the daylight, but, it was a far superior game when played in the dark. Adults would cheer us on and call out advice as we crept closer and closer to home base before making the final dash and shouting “Olly-olly, home free!” as we touched the home base tree. I learned that I could become invisible simply by lying in a slight hollow in the ground.

Elora, where I lived between the ages of 8 and 10, is situated on both sides of the Grand River at a point where it cuts a deep canyon especially where it meets the Irving River. Of course we were always told to stay away from the river, but, how else were we to fish? Adults never chastised us for engaging in fishing. Also the cliffs along the southern side were ripe with berry bushes in early summer. It was natural that we would search them out. And, at the base of the cliffs were caves that demanded to be explored. Today, if I look down from the bridge that crosses the Irving just before it meets the Grand, I can’t imagine how we managed to get down there at the water’s edge, about 100 feet below. But, we had our ways. I recall being indignant when fences were put up along the cliff’s edges for, as we disdainfully said, “the tourists.”

When did the outdoors stop being a place for children? Even as a teenager in downtown Toronto we spent the greater part of the day outdoors, hanging around street corners, in school yards, walking along the railway tracks. We talked ceaselessly about girls, rock ‘n’ roll, and school. After I moved to Montreal in 1967 I still used to see gangs of kids from time to time wandering the city. They were simply a part of the landscape. Even in the early 1980’s when our children were small, they spent a fair bit of time outdoors riding their bikes around the condo court and getting together with other kids in the court. Then, they stopped just going “out.” Instead it seemed like it was all prearranged meetings involving parents driving them to friends’ houses. Then, worse, we moved to a rural location thinking, mistakenly as it turned out, that it would be a great adventure for them.

Where, when I was a child, I would have been outside every sunny day exploring the forest we lived in, building tree forts, and creating secret hiding places, they stayed inside. When urged to go out they would complain about “bugs,” (I admit, the black flies were pretty rough for a few weeks each spring.) The older ones liked baseball well enough, but, it was always to play in organized events, never a pick up game with whomever happened by.  Frankly, they all admitted at one time or another that they hated living there. There was “nothing to do.”

However, having boys who could find nothing to do in the vast outdoors, does not explain why there are not more children out there today. I did know of some parents who were extremely over-protective; their children had to be slathered in sunscreen, hats on head, sunglasses, no bit of skin exposed except, perhaps, a hand or two. And, the child would always have a watchful adult attached.  But those were the extremist minority—at least, so I hoped. We seemed to have lost the concept of simple free unstructured and unsupervised time where children learn at their own pace whatever it is they need to learn. We seem to have replaced it with fear of the sun that has warmed and nourished our planet for billions of years, of the soil that supports us, of the plants and animals that have always lived around us.

And, most tragically, have replaced it with fear and suspicion of our fellow humans.

On being misunderstood

I've pretty much run out of stories about my career in high tech in the federal government, so I've created a more generalized blog where I can comment on any aspect of life viewed from what I have experienced and learned.

The first thing I want to talk about is how difficult it is, at times, to communicate clearly and how easily we can be misunderstood. One of my earliest memories is of a time when I could not have been older than three. I know we are not supposed to be able to remember events from that young, but I have memories that I am sure must be even older. As far back as being fed while in a diaper sitting in a high chair. Be that as it may, I lived with my parents at that time in a one-room shack just outside of Fergus, Ontario. We moved to a "war-time" house in the village proper in 1948 and this memory is from before that time. My mother and I had attended a Christmas party at the Beatty factory where my father worked at the time. I don't remember the party except that Santa must have been there and had handed out presents. I had a small bag of gifts, most of which I was not interested in. But one thing had caught my fancy: a dump truck. I was looking forward to playing with it in the dirt around our home. It seemed a magical thing, as though this was something I had been waiting for all my life. We were walking with another woman and her son. Apparently she and my mother knew each other. The other woman complained that her son had not received a gift and was disappointed. Without saying a word my mother snatched the truck from my hand and handed it to the other boy. I howled in protest. I would not have minded sharing some of my other presents, but, the truck was special. I didn't know how to tell her that the boy could have all my other presents: I just wanted the truck. I did the only thing I could: screamed bloody murder. My mother assumed that I was being selfish and smacked me hard across the bottom, chastising me for being so greedy. I am sure that the blow must have shut me up.

In kindergarten, which I began at the age of four, I had some trouble always understanding what the teacher expected us to do. I was given to day-dreaming and not paying very close attention. For example, we were supposed to show up at the school on a Saturday to rehearse a play we were putting on. I went to the school at the appointed time and tried to get in the door we usually used to enter the kindergarten. It was locked. So, I went home. Turned out that the teacher had told us to go to the "janitor's door" to gain entrance on that day. I am certain that the teacher must have spoken to my mother about it because I have a vague memory of my teacher and mother talking very earnestly. I recall one day the teacher had pictures of different fruits pasted up and we were asked to copy them. When it came to an orange I decided that I really didn't like that colour, preferring, instead, the vividness of red. So, I coloured my orange fruit red. My mother took me to the doctor to find out if I was colour-blind. I wasn't. I could have told them the reason why I used the colour red instead of orange had anyone asked. But, they never did.

Another time I was to meet my mother at the doctor's office after school. She had an appointment for my younger sister. While I waited the doctor casually asked my mother if I had had the small-pox vaccine yet. No, she said, and they agreed that they might as well get it over with, seeing as I was already there. The doctor prepared the syringe while I cowered, not quite believing what was happening. I tried protesting. Yes, I was afraid of the needle, but, even more so, I felt that I had been tricked; this was not at all what I had expected. So when the doctor squirted the vaccine into the air then approached I was doubly anxious. I don't know which weighed more: my fear, or my sense that I had been betrayed. I howled and tried to get away, but my mother held me firm, calling me a big baby. The doctor scratched my arm with the needle and it was over with. But, how could I, at the age of 4 or 5 explained to them what was really behind my anxiety? I had no way to express concepts like "betrayed" and "conned." So, I guess the doctor and my mother went on with their lives believing that I was a coward when it came to getting needles.

My parents separated then divorced when I was eight and my brother, sister, and I were under our father's custody. We boarded with a family in Elora, just a mile or so away from Fergus. Ethyl and Brian Moynahan were the couple who looked after my little brother and me while my sister stayed with Grandma Moynahan across the road. One day at school the teacher told us that children needed 10 hours sleep at night. I quickly calculated that, seeing as we got up for school at 8:00 am, then our 8:00 pm bedtime was unreasonable. I tried explaining this to Ethyl. She would not listen and insisted that it was ten hours from 8:00 pm to 8:00 am, end of discussion. I recall trying to get her to count the numbers around the clock, but she just got angry with me. That is a scary memory because it marked the first time that I recall an adult being wrong about something factual that was obvious to me.

It is not just as children when we are misunderstood. More recently I was working in a tax preparation office. Though usually polite and friendly, there were times when I had to get tough with clients. For example, a young woman might be insisting to me that she made no tips while working in a local restaurant where tipping was the rule. I could not call her a liar. But, I could tell her firmly that if she lived in Quebec the government would calculate her tips for her and that they would range between 100% of her earned income and 400%.

Another examples: every summer the tax department asks to see certain documents to back up claims made on returns. A common request was to see rent receipts, as there was a tax credit for rent in Ontario. Many times I was told that the landlord lived thousands of miles away and couldn’t be contacted, or the landlord simply refused to hand out receipts, and other such excuses. In such cases I would tell them they could come to our office to pick up a form to fill out the required information and have their landlord sign it. Sometimes they would balk at doing even that much. In those cases I’d put on my sternest most authoritarian tone and tell them that if they didn’t comply that their tax returns would be reassessed, disallowing the claim for rent, and the result would be that that would have to pay part or all of their refund back to the government.

People didn’t like to hear that, even though it was a concise description of what would really happen. So, sometimes, my boss would subsequently get a phone call from such a person complaining that I had been rude and threatening. I never considered tell people in a firm voice what would happen if they did not assume responsibility for their claims as something rude; I saw it in much the same light as a lawyer telling a client what would happen if they robbed a bank. It’s reality; deal with it.

We see each other through prisms that distort images and behaviours, making them unfocused, blurry, with enough ambiguity that they can be transformed into whatever assumptions or demons live inside us. We need to know that before assuming that we know what the intent is behind another’s actions. As I have been misunderstood, I am certain that I have misunderstood others.