I turned 40 in 2011 and my goal was to rededicate myself to balance.  I’m a size 12 and I decided that I wanted to be strong, really strong.  Ironically, I was inspired by watching bad American television and seeing so many buff male bodies. Why I was inspired by the muscular physique of men, I have no idea. Freud might know, but I don’t actually care. Over the past nine and a half months, I have built quite a bit of muscle. I haven’t changed my eating and I haven’t lost any weight. I just wanted to be strong. My trainer says I can lift more weight on a romanian dead lift than most men – even perhaps him and he’s buff like my American actor friends.  Part of  it is my flexibility.  It’s not an easy exercise for the inflexible. But, whatever the reason my progress is great and I’m not focused on external results. I feel strong. I can run 10Km. And, I’m only going forward.

And, this is precisely why I’m so fired up by the response to the recent photo shoot instigated by Plus Model Magazine and featuring Katya Zharkova.

The plus sized modelling industry is relatively new – 1990s. Why there has to be a separate industry for models wearing clothing sizes above 10, I don’t know. Is it new because it’s driven by capitalism and designers are greedy for more clients? Is it new because women are lazy, getting fat and want to assert their completely unhealthy bodies? Or, is it new because the average clothing size and model is 23% smaller than she was 20 years ago, when she was only 8% smaller and not all women are actually this small?  Have we forgotten that one of the iconic beauties in West was a size 12? Nobody said that Marilyn was plus sized.

According to Wikipedia plus size modeling has received criticism. Some commentators believe that plus-size models may be setting a bad example to women on how they should look. They believe that promoting large models may lead to women believing that having an unhealthy lifestyle is acceptable. I’m wondering why the general public is jumping to the conclusion that someone who is ‘overweight’ is unhealthy when the wide-spread image of women is represented by models who may very well have the BMI of an Anorexic person.  It is possible to have two women side by side, one a size 12 and once a size 0 and both are healthy.

It’s 2012.  Let’s start judging health on something other than body shape, size and weight.

And now, I’ll stop my rant because it’s time for my Sunday 10K. 

Further Reading:

‘Most runway models meet the BMI criteria for anorexia’, claims plus-size magazine in powerful comment on body image in the fashion industry.  Mail Online

To see all the photos from this shoot, visit Plus Model Magazine

Photo Credits:

Plus Model Magazine

Fear of Fat is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Ah, there’s nothing so promising as the New Year’s resolution — a better body, a better bank account, a better world. And nothing so daunting – working out, working harder, working for the common good. It’s a time for decision making and commitment to a future self and a future that is in some way better than the present one. Trouble is, as humans we aren’t known for reliably making decisions in our own long term best interest. Neither are we known for reliably keeping pledges to ourselves and to others.

As this New Year approached, I got thinking about resolutions and more generally about decision making and why we choose to do certain things and not others. I wondered why decisions are so often against our own best interests and why they’re so difficult to stick to, even when we know we’ll suffer if we don’t.

The first problem is New Year’s itself. The month of January is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus – he’s the god of doors and beginnings – so this month has for the last couple of millennia been a time of looking back and looking ahead. The double purpose of the month means it’s an ideal time to make decisions because looking back means we can take into account lessons learned from mistakes and successes while planning the future.

That’s all fine and good. We’ve decided that the first day of this set of days named after a Roman god will be the one we designate as decision making time, but it is after all totally arbitrary. The New Year in China, for Hindus and for Muslims among others has nothing to do with this particularly western tradition.

So, if we’re going to make decisions — whether they’re about something as self-centered and trivial as our personal appearance (I’ll lose twenty pounds in 2012 or take up body building as a hobby) or to something as fundamental as our state and future as a species (I’ll convert my car to burn vegetable oil or refuse to fly anywhere ever again) — the decision-making process shouldn’t be tied to something as arbitrary as the arrival of a particular date in our Gregorian calendar. Decisions should be made more rationally and more nobly. We should make decisions, say, about our health only after receiving the results of a medical checkup; we should make financial decisions before we sign up for a mortgage; we should make decisions about the future of our environment based on the latest science and out of concern for the planet and our own fate.

But we just don’t always make our decisions out of nobility or via a rational thought process. Too often, we make decisions in other ways for other reasons. A study by a friend of mine, Chloe Tudor, proves it. A fourth year student at the University of Toronto, Chloe was motivated by Robert Kenner’s hard-hitting 2008 film Food, Inc. exposing the worst of factory farming to study how people make ethical decisions about what they eat.

Chloe designed an elegant little study in which she showed ten participants a ten-minute film about slaughterhouse practices. Afterwards, she asked each if watching the footage was enough to make them change their eating habits. While all were disturbed by what they saw, only half were motivated to find ways to eat more humanely. Following up several weeks later, Chloe discovered that only one participant had stuck to the initial decision to avoid factory farmed meats.

Disillusion is there to read in Chloe’s report. “Animal rights activists argue if slaughterhouses had glass walls,” she writes, “everyone would be vegetarian. However, even my small experiment tells me that this isn’t the case.”

Chloe sensed there was some force at work strong enough to keep people from their commitments and even from making them in the first place. She challenged the participants by identifying at least seven shops where they could easily buy meat produced by more ethical means. They responded with what Chloe categorized as excuses. She discovered that both sets of participants felt too inconvenienced by the changes they’d have to make in their shopping practices. Meat is an essential part of a healthy diet. It’s easier to ignore the issue of ethical treatment of animals altogether. Chloe countered each excuse with a rational answer that explained how easy it was for the participants to act on their impulse to avoid factory meat. The result? No change in behaviour.

So what is it that kept the participants from making or living up to their deeply felt decisions? That most intractable of human traits, laziness. It’s just plain easier to keep doing what we do. It seems to me that Chloe’s study makes a strong argument for the New Year’s resolution. Who are we kidding? We need a kick in the pants like a day named for regeneration and set aside as the one day of the year dedicated to making decisions. Otherwise, we’d procrastinate ourselves into heart attacks and climate change. We might do so regardless, but the New Year’s resolution at least gives us a chance. Flawed as it is as a means to a better future self and a healthy future world, we’ve settled on January 1 as decision day and we’d better stick to it.

Okay, so resolutions are made. Now what? How do we stick to our commitments? In the conclusion of this two-part series on the New Year’s resolution, I’ll take a look at commitment devices, a new development in the science of decision making.

Photo Credits

Fireworks @ Flickr

Food Inc Poster @ Wikipedia

The New Year’s Resolution, Part 1 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

JC Scott takes an impactful snap shot of a girl chasing bubbles, leading him to question the actions we take now which will leave an indelible mark on the planet to be inherited by a younger generation. 

I lead a pleasant life. For example I took this photo at a winery dinner this summer, attended only by invited guests. We all arrived by speedboat downriver from Kingston followed by a short SUV ride to the winery, just onshore and inland a few miles from the St. Lawrence River, near Rockport, Ontario. All the people at the party were invited because they own a certain type of very nice boat or were guests on the boats like me. The event was hosted by a vineyard, and it was there that I captured this Andrew Wyeth type image of a young girl, running freely and blowing soap bubbles in a field, just before sunset.

Who will protect this hope for a future where young girls can run in fields, this delightful innocence, this pastoral calm? Who will occupy this space? The parents of this girl, who are upper middle class yacht owners, are dependent on a structure that is being eroded and corrupted by that now infamous 1% and although they themselves may aspire to that lofty 1% niche in society, I know from my personal experience, how far upper middle class is from that 1% niche. As someone who attended my country’s most exclusive boarding school on an academic bursary, I learned that 50 feet is nowhere close to a 500 foot yacht and with boats that’s how boats, and wealth, and real influence are measured.

There is a space occupied in normal times by the upper middle class, where meretricious social values form the backbone and define the ideals for the enhancement of society. These ideals are crumbling, being eaten away by the dominance and social reward of sheer greed and the untrammelled criminal behaviour of Wall Street within our North American political system. Today the architects of shadow economies and debt derivatives are now the deans of Harvard and Columbia business schools and the perpetrators of deceit are now the current draftspeople of White House and thereby Canadian fiscal policies.

Passing along to this girl, a dept as great as any society has ever passed to the next generation is simply not fair. The space we all need to occupy is the space wherein humanity, ecology and liberty define that absolutely no one, no matter what politician they may own, is ever allowed again to steal this beautiful girl’s future, steal her hopes, threaten her health or diminish her ability to generate her own wealth. That is the space I wish to occupy, a green field, on a healthy planet with no financial or carbon debt passed from one generation to another. Occupy this space with me and with the 99% if you have the will.

Photo Credit

©JC Scott

Occupy This Space is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

How is America planning for retirement?  A challenge for both elderly and young people, author Martha Sherwood discusses some of the pit falls of raising the minimum age for collecting Social Security benefits in the United States.

Proposals to raise the minimum age for collecting both minimum and full Social Security benefits in are gaining increasing traction across the political spectrum. This looks like a comparatively painless way to address an intractable underlying problem: a large birth cohort entering retirement in the middle of a recession, which pushed forward by many years the date at which benefits exceeded payroll taxes. The Federal Government raised payroll taxes and supposedly stockpiled a surplus during the 1990s in anticipation of just such a crunch, but unfortunately they loaned the surplus to themselves, spent it on other programs, and are now faced with empty coffers and the prospect of having to borrow money to cover their debt to today’s retirees.

Life expectancy at age 65 increased, by a little less than five years, in America between 1940 and 2007, but the main reason so many people are now collecting Social Security, or shortly will be, is the large birth cohort now entering retirement. That birth cohort cannot be ignored. If the Social Security and Medicare systems cannot provide benefits sufficient to cover an adequate standard of living and the level of medical care people have come to expect, for that proportion of retirees who are dependent on it, then something has to give. There don’t seem to be accurate figures anywhere on what proportion of older Americans cannot realistically expect to continue working and have no significant resources other than Social Security and Medicare to fall back on, but if you add the roughly 20% who have significant health issues, people whose incomes have fallen below subsistence level before retirement and are counting on Social Security and Medicare to substitute for other social safety net programs, and discouraged workers, it’s a large and growing number of people.

Charging the maintenance of these people, who contributed faithfully to the retirement program which is now broke, to Social Security Disability, or extended unemployment, or entitlement programs such as section 8 housing, or heavily subsidized private insurance under “Obamacare” does not save the public any money and multiplies the bureaucratic headaches. The alternative is to tolerate high levels of poverty and unmet healthcare needs among the elderly. This would, indeed, have the effect of reducing life expectancy and therefore balancing the Social Security budget. One would hope that our country had a robust enough social conscience to reject such a solution.

Overlooked by most commentators, but surely a factor in the current Social Security deficit, is the shorter working life of the average worker due to escalating education requirements, and, in the current recession, the large number of young people who have been unable to enter the work force at all. Unless the work force is actually growing, older people who postpone retirement are occupying their children’s jobs, forcing the children to postpone having families of their own and depressing the consumer economy.

People who argue for raising the retirement age will claim that people in their sixties are, for the most part, better able to work than their parents were, because the percentage of them reporting poor health has declined from 33 to 22%, the share of physically demanding jobs has fallen from 57% to 46%, and the percentage of adults 55 to 64 who are college graduates rose from 16 to 32%. There is the assumption that anyone who can’t work will be able to collect Social Security disability benefits and that anyone who can work will be able to find a job at a living wage.

The recession has already produced a spike in applications for disability benefits among people with a variety of disabilities, none an absolute barrier to employment, who have been laid off and have no hope of competing against a horde of younger job applicants. Employers, including public employers, are trimming older workers. For persons 62 and older, Social Security is the main safety net in the face of being downsized. Without this fallback, lower income workers who have no retirement savings would end up in actual poverty. It is all very well to say that people should be saving more for retirement, but at present median family income allows for very little slack in a family budget. Those people of the Baby Boomer generation who did save for retirement have seen home equity and investments gutted by forces beyond their control or ability to anticipate, and many have also been forced to draw on the remainder early because of unemployment or a health crisis.

The very rapid rate of technological change in the workplace creates difficulties for older workers, especially when employers invest little in training existing employees, preferring to hire new blood which has paid for its training out of pocket. Most desk jobs now require a large array of computer skills that are second nature to a twenty-something but difficult for an older person to acquire. Jobs may not be as physically demanding as they once were but the demand to constantly learn new ways of doing things has escalated, and few sixty year old workers have a learning curve as steep as a person half their age.

The people advocating raising the retirement age are making many assumptions, including projecting an economic recovery which so far has failed to materialize. One way or another, the system is going to have to produce a way of distributing intergenerational benefits and obligations in a way that is sustainable and affordable, across the entire spectrum of the American population. Raising the Social Security retirement age and throwing a large number of older people onto social safety net programs that are even more stressed is not the answer.

Further Reading:

The Heritage Foundation

Urban Institute:  Fact Sheet on Retirement Policy

Photo Credit:

Microsoft Images

Raising the Retirement Age in America is Robbing Peter to Pay Paul is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

We’ve posted thing by Rick Mercer before. Things that make us laugh. This, on the other hand, is no laughing matter. 

Rick starts by saying that “every year in this country, 300 kids take their own lives” and he ends with “300 kids is 300 too many“.

What he says in between is what we need to act on. “We have to make it better … now!”

Watch this video, and then watch it again. The message is crucial! What actions can we take?

What actions WILL we take?

How do we make it better … now?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Big thanks to Heather Hess for pointing this out to me.

Rick Mercer’s Rant On Teen Suicide is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The notice in my inbox reminds me that my kids and I now have a credit of $31.62 to re-lend. We are a bank. A small one called “Northerners.” We are a small bank with a social conscience, and we make small, interest-free loans to people around the world. As the borrowers repay their loans, our credit adds up to the point where we can lend again to a different borrower. 

In the email, Kiva – a microlending organization we belong to – highlights a few possible loan recipients among the thousands registered with them. I click on one and read the story of Hector Hernandez of Nicaragua. He’s approached one of Kiva’s 141 partner organizations for a small loan to finance a food stall he’s set up. I learn that his request is already 40% financed. Small loan requests from Kiva’s borrowers can often be financed in a matter of hours, though many take weeks. I call up our Kiva account and apply $25 of our credit towards his loan.

Microlending isn’t new, but Kiva’s approach to it is – the non-profit organization’s on-line presence amounts to banking through crowd sourcing. My kids and I are one of over 600,000 lenders that have supplied about a quarter billion in loans in 60 countries. Kiva relies on a global network of micro lending institutions, 450 volunteers and almost 50 employees at the head office in San Francisco.

Jerilyn Camarines Fish Monger, Phillippines

Initially, I set up our family account with Kiva as a learning tool for my kids. I’d hoped they might learn about how people in other parts of the world live and work. I hoped they’d learn about lending people a hand, about the principle of sharing wealth, about the sources of human dignity, so I made them a deal. I’d start us off with $100. Every time one of our loans was repaid, I’d add that amount to our little bank and when they left home years in the future, they could either apply all the money in the account toward their education or keep re-lending or a combination.

When we started, the kids showed a lot of interest. They took the time to look carefully through the site at the various requests for loans from around the world – a cooperative store in India, a car repair shop in Mexico, a housing improvement loan in Mozambique. They selected the loans they wanted to make. As the loans were repaid, I showed them the reports and asked them to fund new loan requests. Although they eventually lost interest, I continued on with Kiva, reading the updates and making new loans. But we still talk about Kiva and the loans I’m making, so I hope that before they leave home after graduation, they’ll again get involved in the decision making. Because they were involved in the first place and we continue to talk about it, I believe the experience has given them many things to think about, in particular social justice.

Kiva’s goal is to help alleviate poverty around the world. Their website states, “We envision a world where all people – even in the most remote areas of the globe – hold the power to create opportunity for themselves and others.” While the idea and practice of microlending is not without valid criticism – some say that such loans have little impact, that perpetuate a cycle of dependency and an us-and-them mentality, and that they’re really about the lenders feeling good about themselves – I believe Kiva might just be the best we can do, as far as microlending goes.

Rosalinda Matea Rosales Rosales, Loom Operator, Guatemala

For one thing, Kiva is breaking the mould when it comes to microlending. Kiva doesn’t operate only in what’s typically referred to as the developing world. Recently former US president Bill Clinton announced for Kiva the launch of a community coalition in Detroit to offer over half a million dollars in microloans. Partners include Michigan Corps, the Knight Foundation and ACCION USA. The development is the first in a series called “Kiva City,” a way for the organization to grow more quickly in the US. Kiva City creates alliances between Kiva, local civic leaders, local community organizations and financial institutions. One Detroit borrower started a newspaper made for and sold by the homeless and at risk, while another is employing high school students to build bike trailers for those who use bicycles to get around the city.

Here’s another Kiva innovation that relies on the power of the internet to connect people. Within the Kiva community, lenders are creating communities. They might be people from a particular country or people who share a particular political or religious approach to social justice. Within one team called “Friends of Bob Harris,” 661 members have loaned over a million dollars. Bob is writing a book about Kiva with the working title, The 1st International Bank of Bob. “I hope the book will get more people to feel attracted to Kiva, excited about microlending, and more connected to the rest of the world,” says Bob. As a travel writer, Bob says, “I saw so much poverty that I decided to turn all of those paycheques into Kiva loans.”

Truphena Anyango, Pharmacy Owner, Kenya

A few days after I make my mini-loan to Mr. Hernandez, an email notice arrives informing me that his food stall is now 100% financed. I’m not worried about the loan defaulting. The repayment rate for Kiva loans is 98.87%, higher than ordinary banks could ever dream of, and the amount is so little to me that default can’t hurt me. I’m not even concerned that, as with so many non-profits these days, a high percentage of my contribution might be going to administration fees. Every penny I lend goes directly to funding loans. Admin costs are covered through optional donations from lenders. In other words, it’s up to me whether or not I want to contribute to Kiva’s operating costs. Otherwise, Kiva relies on grants, foundation support and corporate sponsors for operating funds.

In the coming months, I’ll get notices that tell me what percentage of the loan Mr. Hernandez has repaid and the corresponding percentage of my $25 has been returned to my account. When my account exceeds $25, I’ll lend it again. A million others will do the same, and together we can provide funding for thousands of small improvements to people’s lives around the world.

All Photos are the property of Kiva. 

Big Idea #1: I Am a Bank is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Guest Author Autumn Barlow writes about history, culture, geography, the evolution of the English language and how our need to communicate effectively remains the same.

Hello, America! I’m waving at you from across that big wide pond. You’re so big and strange to me, yet uncannily familiar from films – sorry, movies –and television. You’re like a distant cousin. Younger and full of life, but with different threads of history and ancestry feeding into your known-unknown face.

I defend you. I defend you a lot. More than you’d be comfortable knowing about, I suspect. I’ve taught English in UK schools and prisons, and one of the things I am passionate about is the history of the English language. It reflects the mixed and mongrel history of the English peoples themselves, which is something the more right-wing members of our society need to remember. We have a wannabe-politician here who speaks of the “indigenous English,” which is a laughable concept. Anytime I hear someone say that, I am compelled to draw large and colourful – whoops, colourful – maps on walls which show the movement of Celts, Picts, Romans – who were from everywhere including North Africa–  Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norse, Flemish, Franks, French and German.  Oh sorry, had you dropped off? But this is important stuff and it’s something that closed minds like to pretend isn’t true. And history doesn’t stop. That’s the other thing. I don’t speak like a 1940’s BBC announcer and I certainly don’t talk like Shakespeare. Gadzooks! My language – my accent, my intonation, my vocabulary – it’s different to my parents’ and a world away from the generations before. It’s evolving as it always has done. English has spiralled its sticky tendrils out across the world in wonderful ways.

You say tomato, I say tomato

And yet, time after time, I have to take students to task. Students who in one breath tell me it’s perfectly fine to hand in an essay written in txt, but that “Americans can’t spell” and “it’s our language.”  Sorry, spiky little student. English is not your language, nor my language, nor – I’m afraid – the Americans’ language. It’s everyone’s and no-one’s. It’s moulded and adapted by the mouths of anyone who chooses to use it. It runs alongside other languages. It merges in a patois, a sexy dance of vowels and words. It often, I am sad to say, stamps all over a smaller language and bullies them out of the house. It takes the words it wants, like dinner money, and leaves the beaten remnants in a scholar’s research paper.  It changes, it will continue to change, and that is a glorious thing. It doesn’t matter to me that your sidewalk is my pavement, my lift is your elevator. I understand you. I hope you understand me – though the relationship is a little one-sided. We get more of your influence than you get of us. Another harsh truth my students don’t like to hear, fed as we are on faded colonialism. The UK is a lot smaller than we’re happy admitting.

Communication is far more important than quibbles about spelling. Communication, dialogue, give and take and speech and listening – that should lead to understanding. I do believe that the words we choose to use reflect our inner state, and our relationships within society. And the words society uses can surreptitiously influence the people of that society. So let’s grab this flexible, evolving, changing language and make sure we put the right words into our own mouths. The words your children hear will be used by them, but with their own spin and emphasis. Give them a solid foundation of love and acceptance but don’t force them into the language of yesterday. Let the next generation build on words of peace and make a changed new future.

Photo Credit

“Statue of Liberty” – Creative Commons – Wikipedia

 ”You say tomato, I say tomato.”  All rights reserved by jeffspot

 ”So shall my word be.”  All rights reserved by GangaSunshine

Guest Author Bio

Autumn Barlow
Autumn Barlow is a writer and blogger in North West England. She cycles up hills, teaches English to speakers of other languages, and writes between cups of tea.

Blog / Website: http://autumnbarlow.wordpress.com

The Past and Future of Language is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

What we let fear do to us. The list is endless, isn’t it? Fellow Zen blogger Petteri has an excellent post on the topic, of which I’d like to take up the following:

I read a bit of news reporting a few months ago where they had interviewed three people, one born in the 1950′s, one in the 1970′s, and one in the 1990′s, in a certain part of Helsinki. They’d asked them to map out the physical territory they roamed as children below the age of 12. The 1950′s kid was all over the place, shooting rats at the harbor with a BB gun, climbing the rocky vacant lots in Kallio, getting into scraps with the kids from the neighboring neighborhood, taking long walks to Seurasaari, and so on. The 1970′s kid’s map covered the general quarter of the town pretty well, but had none of the 1950′s kid’s expeditions. The 1990′s kid went to school, some friends houses nearby, and was driven by his parents to do sports and other hobbies. His map had a few disconnected spots on it.

It’s really similar here in the States. And there are many reasons behind this shift. A heavy emphasis on the privatized, nuclear family model as the “best” way to raise children. A huge increase in reporting about child abductions and like situations, to the point where people think there’s a bad guy lurking behind every tree, waiting to take their kids. Another factor is the increased reliance on cars and other motor vehicles, to the point where our towns and cities are constructed to compliment motor vehicles, and often at the expense of safe places to play, bike, and recreate.

Petteri goes on to say that while Helsinki is a safer city now than it was in the 1950s, people live as if the opposite were true. Which is something I’ve seen here as well.

And like Petteri, I also feel that there are various fears underlying these attitudes; some maybe legitimate, but also some are completely concocted and reinforced socially.

However, I can’t help but think about, for example, the ways in which how we choose to structure communities impacts our heart/minds. Or how we choose to group ourselves, such as our family structures, and how that also impacts our heart/minds.

Actually, when I read Petteri’s post, the first thing that came to mind is something I have thought about off and on for years.

How do we mindfully build communities? How can we shift both physical and social structures in order to live together in a more awakened way?

Because having more and more people living in securitized, suburban-styled places where the only safe way to move in and out is by car is a recipe for disaster. And while there are signs of different models of community development gaining traction, it’s amazing how much fuss putting a single bike lane on a city street causes, or how much resistance there is to efforts to create a park out of a stretch of a shoddy freeway access road (both things I’ve seen here in St. Paul, Minnesota). Because so many people have structured their lives around driving quickly between various points, that still seems to trump nearly everything else, even in this age of higher gas prices and assumptions that the oil age is slowly (or even quickly) on its way out.

Over the years, I have watched the planning processes unfold for a series of inner city bike trails, for a light-rail train network, and for creating more “green space” within our two cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul). And while some great strides have been made, I have noticed that even the planners are at odds with themselves. On the one hand, sharing the visions they have for what probably would be a healthier, more integrated community, and on the other hand, saying and doing anything and everything to appeased the pissed off people who show up complaining about reduced speed limits, reduced car parking, and any general loss of ease in getting around quickly.

And yet, as someone who has never been a car driver, I look at wonder when people claim to “know their community.” How can you truly know your community when you spend the majority of your time whizzing through it in a plastic and metal bubble? When you don’t even know your neighbor’s name?

Again, I know this doesn’t describe everyone. I can even think of counter-examples in my community here, like the highly connected block where my mother lives. I also think of all the community gardens that have sprung up in the past decade, sometimes bringing together large parts of entire neighborhoods. However, these examples haven’t really translated for the most part into how we collectively handle the larger communities we live in. Big business, the whims of building contractors, and car-centric design still rule most of the day, even in fairly progressive places. It’s like there are little enclaves tucked away here and there within a sea of people living in the same space, but sharing little if anything else.

Which just leads me back to the question: how do we mindfully build communities?

Photo Credit

Thich Nhat Hanh © Parallax Press

Mindful Community Building is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Julia Mclean challenges Britain’s immigration laws and suggests that there are some serious economic consequences for immigration laws that do not protect the citizens of Britain.

A recent case in the British newspapers has aroused anti-immigrant feelings which is not hard to do in a small country where the green and pleasant land is being gobbled up to make housing for the multitudes arriving on this pearl set in the silver sea.

The case in question is that of a 54-year-old Indian woman who is importing her husband into England to work in a factory. He is 58 and speaks no English. England’s Prime Minister David Cameron, in response to all those Brits who feel that the least our immigrants can do is make a stab at the language (instead of at us or our shopkeepers) had just proposed altering our immigration laws to make them point dependant as in Canada or Australia.

In the Canadian system, people are allowed in if the country needs their skills, plus they speak the lingo, plus they have a sponsor plus a heap of other rules to deter the lazy and those on the make. We have vast swathes of Britain occupied by people who not only do not speak our language but never even attempt to. This woman is taking Britain to court for breaching her human rights by insisting the husband learn some English before he arrives. He is too old to learn according to her. In two years time he will be old enough to qualify for a pension and because he hasn’t earned enough, he will have an income supplement to provide for his family.

Old people’s residential care is a disgrace, medical care is worse; we are threatening to remove Caesareans from a hospitals’ routine practice and certain new drugs are being withheld from patients as the system cannot afford them. I quote at length Rod Liddle’s recent comment in The Times.  ”One of the pleasures of reading our tabloids is the regular appearance on about page five of an unemployed, newly arrived Somali family photographed beaming with pride outside the £2m house just given them by some witless borough council.”  According to Liddle, the Somalis are beaming in the photograph because they think, in their naivety, that the newspaper ”wished to exult with them in their good fortune, rather than portray them as feckless, scrounging jackanapes who shouldn’t be here at all.“

He goes on to say that “a new study suggests that we will need an extra 415,000 homes to house immigrants over the next 25 years; meanwhile the old canard that we need immigrant labour to pay for our pensions was comprehensively demolished even before the latest unemployment figures showed that one in five 16- to 24- year-olds was out of a job.  There is decent moral argument in favour of immigration, but not an economic argument and we should stop pretending that there is.”  The British Government spends a fortune on translating its documents into the multitudinous languages that our immigrants speak and have, only now, started to insist that a minor grasp of our language should be a requirement.

My husband and I are off to Tunisia in October, where I shall be ordering my coffee with just enough sugar and tea with milk in Arabic. I have learnt enough to be able to introduce my husband by saying what sounds like ‘Haada jowsie’ and he has to learn to say ‘Haadi marti’(this is my wife). If I can do this in my 3 score years and 10, I am sure some semblance of English can be learnt by a canny fifty eight year old who does, at least, know on what side his bread is buttered.

Further Rod Liddle Reading:

Liberal Conspiracy

The Times

The Spectator

The Spectator

Photo Credit

Courtesy of Julia McLean

Speaking in Tongues: Learning a New Language is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Lorne Daniel discovers that a small, unspoken gesture can brighten your street.

One of the things I love about my new neighbourhood of Fairfield, in Victoria (British Columbia, Canada) is the variety of “faces” presented by homes in the community. Each house, condo or apartment has a different look (no cookie-cutter concepts here) but most importantly every yard reflects an individual personality.

Some yards are manicured like English gardens. Others are a charming tangle of wildflowers. Some walkways are concrete, others stone or brick. There are little picket fences and tall hedges.

The broad strokes of urban planning set the stage but individual initiative can really set the tone and ambiance of a neighbourhood.

An offering of flowers.

Walking home the other day from an amble down to the waterfront, I passed this home. It offers even more to the neighbourhood than most — it offers flowers and trust.

The front yard sports an impressive array of carefully pruned flowers. I’ll never know my flowers by name — but I’m no less impressed by the wafts of scents and the spray of colours.

These flowers are so impressive that one might be tempted to snatch one. Perhaps this is how things got started. I don’t know.

$5 a bunch — on the honour system.

But at the fence is this quaint little shelf with bowls of freshly cut flowers in water. Passersby are invited to take them — for a price.

In tiny lettering, it says, “Coin Slot— $5 a bunch.” And “Thank you.” I’ve never seen the owners but I’ve passed here before and know it’s been in operation for at least a couple years. I presume this honour system works.

The owners of this little yard honour their neighbourhood and the neighbourhood gives back.

Delightful.

I had no money in my pocket this day. But I will return.

Photo Credits

All photos © Lorne Daniel, 2011. ll Rights Reserved.

Flowers and Trust is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN