Priorities

by Jean Roberta

I sometimes wonder what I would pack if I had an hour to gather up my belongings before being rescued from a crisis situation.

In the early 1970s, my aunt and uncle and their three children were living in the Niger Delta area when a new country named Biafra seceded from Nigeria, and a civil war broke out. (My uncle was an American engineer working for Burlington Mills, and he was showing local employees how to use big industrial looms.)

The U.S. government sent planes to rescue American citizens stranded in Biafra. Among a few other items, my aunt gathered up her silverware, made of actual silver. When the family arrived home in South Carolina, they had no furniture for at least a week. They used orange crates as chairs and a table for dining on, but they used sterling silver knives, forks and spoons at every meal.

My aunt and her two brothers (one was my father) were the children of a jeweller and watchmaker. Items made of precious metal were not disposable for them.

A few years later, I experienced my own Nigerian crisis when the Nigerian man I had met in England and sponsored into Canada as my fiancé became unbearable to live with. When my closest friend offered to rescue me and my three-month-old baby while my husband was out of the house, I threw some stuff in a black plastic garbage bag, and away we went in friend's car to the local women's shelter.

Compared to the baby herself, everything else I owned looked non-essential, and it was all replaceable. Clothes and shoes? Well, yes, I had to have something to wear for the next few days, but none of them last a lifetime anyway. Grooming products? They’re easy to carry, and besides, they’re available at the drug store. Books? Hard to transport in bulk. Knicknacks? Meh. Plants? They don’t always survive in temporary, makeshift living arrangements. Luckily, we had no pets. If we had, I wouldn’t have left them with a raging alcoholic.

So many people around the world have had to cope with natural disasters over the last few weeks. My heart goes out to them, and I wish it were easier for hordes of refugees to come to the Canadian prairies. The worst thing we’ve faced lately is an unusually dry summer that has affected the wheat crop. (Watch for higher-priced bread in the next few months.)

I’m sure there’s nothing like an out-of-control fire or flood or winds that uproot trees and tear the roofs off houses to remind people of what is really valuable. Parents grab their kids first. Some pet-owners round up the furry children before leaving the premises.

It’s actually freeing to realize that inanimate belongings are not really essential to human life. Even books, as reluctant as I am to say this. I can literally live without books, and so can other avid readers.

I don’t need it is my mantra when I pack for a trip. Like Lisabet, though, I find it hard to travel light. (What if it’s very hot where I’m going? What if it’s very cold or very wet? What if there’s no sun-block or toothpaste or antiseptic cream there? What if there’s nothing to read except what I bring with me on a six-hour trip?)
I just need to put myself in crisis-survival mode the next time I plan to see the sights in some faraway place.
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Shaky Ground

by Jean Roberta

I believe that Truth is never a stable thing, much like the earth itself. We all pretend it’s solid and unchanging, but in earthquake country, cracks in the ground can appear at any time, and they cause all kinds of damage to the structures foolish humans have built on them.

In other regions (e.g. Florida), sinkholes can swallow cars and alligators. On the northern prairies where I live, the local “gumbo” (rich black earth) isn’t supported by bedrock, so buildings settle unevenly over time. Eventually, cracks form in the foundation that let in water, and gaps in the roof let in snow.

Solid earth is a myth, and climate change is escalating the processes that cause natural disasters. On an economic level, house prices have risen so fast in some cities that even relatively well-paid jobs can’t always accommodate the mortgage on a place within easy commuting distance. We literally don’t have a trustworthy place to live.

This isn’t all bad news. The slogan “This too will change” can be comforting for someone who can’t imagine how things could get worse.

Re “human nature,” I’m not sure there is such a thing. Canadian journalist Naomi Klein mentioned recently that the use of fossil fuels, a major cause of climate change, is blamed in the media on “human nature” (greed, a desire for fast transportation and physical comfort) even though not all humans are in a position to build pipelines and dig non-renewable resources out of the earth. The people who do all that are closer to 1% of the population.

Realistically, if our ancestors could survive without the use of oil or gas, so could we. And we wouldn’t have to regress to medieval technology.

Consider that when I was a teenager, I was warned that passing university courses might be impossible for me because I was a girl. After all, I had the plumbing to conceive and nurture a baby, and that was much more important than getting an education. In fact, as I was told, my ovaries somehow affected my brain, so that I was born to be terribly emotional and instinctive, and I couldn’t think logically. The formal education system, as distinct from the school of life, wasn’t designed for a mammal like me, even though I was a faculty brat.

Now that the student population in North American post-secondary schools is more than half female (and the sex ratio among the faculty is progressing to that rate), the general tune has changed. Now, educators are warned that schools at every level are failing males because classrooms are really designed by women for girls: students who can be expected to sit quietly for hours and pay attention. Apparently boys (and men?) need to move, to run, to play sports, to climb trees. Studying is not in their nature.

Never mind that all the great old universities of Europe and Britain were founded in the 1200s, exclusively for aristocratic male students who needed to be prepared to rule the known world. (And what passed for “knowledge” in those days was very interesting. Courses like “defense against the dark arts,” as taught at Hogwarts School, were on the curriculum at Oxford and the University of Paris before the scientific revolution of the 1600s.)

Yet the word “education” is slung about as though it meant the same thing in all times and places, and as though there were some universal consensus about what it’s supposed to accomplish, for whom.

Shall we talk about sex? Where should I start?

It wasn’t long ago that “normal” women weren’t supposed to have sexual feelings, and everyone was supposed to be strictly heterosexual “by nature.” (How females could feel sexual desire for males without wanting sex at all, with anyone, was a mystery.)

Any sexual experience—or fantasy—that wasn’t strictly vanilla and missionary-position was supposed to prompt a visit to a psychiatrist or at least a general practitioner (who was supposed to prescribe what?). The rising divorce rate was sometimes blamed on “perversion” in the general population. Or maybe it was caused by unreasonable expectations of happiness in a relationship that was supposed to last a lifetime.

Knowing what the past was like prevents me from wallowing in nostalgia.

What I believe is what keeps me going. I believe I still don’t know enough to form a really knowledgeable opinion and let it harden into dogma.
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