A Grave Subject

A friend has informed me of a Facebook question she posed and the Facebook response she received. The question was why do cemeteries seem to all face the graves east west with the head of the deceased facing east? The answer came from an evangelical Christian.

Now I shall weigh in as a pagan.

It is true that Christian cemeteries (and now by tradition) have faced the graves east-west with the headstone facing east. And so for those believers in the Christian faith, they faced the direction of the assumed arrival of Jesus. And it has been a very delayed arrival indeed.

Jewish cemeteries, I understand, tend to face the graves either in the direction of Jerusalem (which was generally easterly) or the gate of the cemetery. The latter, it seems, is because on the resurrection, which Jews believe in, they would leave the cemetery by the gate!!! However, it seems that one of these two directions is not always the case.

Muslim graves tend to face Mecca, which traditionally lay the graves in a north-eastly direction because Mecca was generally south-eastly.

But much of this tradition comes from pre-Christian times in which the sun was the focal point of beliefs. The sun rises in the east. The dead would witness the sunrise. The sun has been a symbol that other religions have adopted but transformed, often in order to make conversion of “pagans” less of a transition for those people.

So, as graveyards become more secular, it is a tradition that has simply been carried over.

Would a Christian in China have to face west? I know, you will tell me that the world is round; but it would be a much shorter distance to face west.

I believe there are some religions that don’t worry about these directional requirements. Regardless, it is much easier to burn the body; then one doesn't have to worry about whether one is facing east, west, Jerusalem, Mecca or Timbuctoo.

Here endeth the lesson.

A Bad Rap

Snakes have been unfairly characterized since time immemorial. Of course there are those that can be harmful. But where we are, these types of snakes do not currently reside. However, a cottage neighbour of ours has a phobia of these much maligned creatures. She will not go in swimming if one has been spotted in recent weeks.

In the thirty-four years we have been spending summers here, I could probably count the number of times I have sighted a water snake on the fingers of my two hands. I admit that some snakes are particularly nasty looking. But to others there is a certain beauty in their shape, colours and hue. And they serve a very useful ecological purpose: eating mice!

I was saddened, even sickened, recently to hear that this neighbour had without regret killed a large snake that was sunning peacefully on a rock by her cottage shore. What had that snake done to deserve summary execution? Nothing. Her fear is irrational and even she knows this.

Why do so many of us human beings think we can so casually commit such atrocities? We have no more right to life on this planet than these creatures. Certainly, if one is threatened with harm in a real sense, one has a right to take action to preserve one’s health and safety. But wanton destruction of another creature’s life is despicable.

And it seems that this disrespect of nature is rampant. It is human arrogance at its worst. Our sense of entitlement at times disgusts me.

A cottage should be a place where one observes and enjoys nature to the fullest. Once I believe it was. However, sadly, it seems this is no longer the case. It has become a place of excess consumerism. Instead of quietly paddling a kayak or canoe around the water’s edge, one does circles on jetskies or screams in a rubber sleigh in the large wake behind a too powerful boat. Instead of quietly observing the rock formations, the trees on the shoreline with their magnificent roots sculpted by nature, and the variety of creatures that shelter there, people of all ages are racing around in loud and oversized motor boats, oblivious to, or worse uncaring of, the wonders they are disturbing and the harm the are doing.

These days cottagers rarely swim in the lake, have no knowledge of handling a canoe or do not engage in physical activities that actually take skill. Rarely are they found sitting on a dock observing what lies before them. Do they ever see or notice the lovely painted turtles that sun on the fallen and submerged tree trunk, the deer peacefully grazing in the marshy areas, or the frogs peeking out from between the lily pads? Their large boats, noisy and travelling at ridiculous speeds with their destructive wakes drive these wonders away unseen, unobserved.

How sad that they miss the ducklings hiding in the reeds, or the heron standing sentinel by the shore. How sad too that they do not take time to notice and drink in the shadow shapes on the distant shore or the ever-changing sky-scapes. Tragic is their ignorance of the morning mist and the brilliant sky in the dark of night.

If only they would sit quietly and listen to the hooting owl, the howling wolf or the plaintive call of the loon at night, maybe then they would begin to understand that we do not own this planet earth.  At best we are caretakers of it. We are only a small part of a greater eco-sphere. We must learn to respect the whole.

Systemic Discrimination

I was once asked by the Ontario Human Rights Commission staff interviewing me for a job, what “systemic discrimination” was. That was thirty-five years ago. I did not get the job.

There is a lot of talk about systemic discrimination these days. It is largely in the context of racism. Many say we have it here in Canada. Some disagree. It has become a cry of political jousting. But I do not believe people are talking from the same standpoint.  

If one means our society is systemically discriminatory because our laws were, and indeed our very Constitution was fashioned by rich white men, then yes, there may be hidden biases embedded. But tell me how to fix it. Do we toss out Parliament because it is a Caucasian and European invention? What do we replace it with: tribal councils? I have seen nothing that works any better and much that functions far worse.

A wise woman has once stated that hindsight is a poor judge of history. I concur. Taking down statues or changing the names of streets, schools or towns is not the answer. One should not whitewash the past anymore than one should glorify its wrongs.

We know dreadful things have happened throughout time. The witch hunts of the New England colonies and elsewhere, the inquisition, the criminalization of homosexuality, the Jewish pogroms, the enslavement of blacks – and the socially forced servitude of others, the extermination of indigenous people, religious massacres, the expulsion of people from Acadia, Ireland, Scotland and other places. And of course, there has been conquest and colonization since time immemorial: by France of England, by Rome, by Greece, by Islamic countries of Europe, by European countries of the world, and more recently by the United States, and by China. Dreadful things are still happening worldwide and at home. And of course there has been mass migration, which has caused great upheaval, since homo sapiens first arose in the belly of Africa.

In Canada, I agree, there is systemic racism against indigenous people written into our Constitution of 1867. It was somewhat tempered by the embedding of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into it over one hundred years later; but not perfectly so. We still have a form of apartheid. 

We are conflicted. Did Europeans conquer Canada, or did they settle here under non-European terms? What do these so-called treaties with various tribes mean? I have not seen any conclusive or convincing answer. Sometimes one must accept reality and practicality. One cannot go back in time anymore than the Anglo-Saxons could undo the Norman conquest of 1066, or the ancient Picts could undue the Scots' invasion many centuries earlier. One must go forward. Sometimes “good” does arise from the ashes of “bad”.

One says that our police forces are home to “systemic discrimination”. If one means that the laws and policies around policing are in a system-wide manner filled with discrimination, then I think this is not correct. The problem is not the system. It is, I believe, the people. People are racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist, xenophobic. What we lack is education. People learn these discriminatory stances at home. They learn them in their churches, and sometimes in their exclusive clubs and schools. We have come a long way to change the laws and the policies. We have failed, however, in the education of the people. We have failed in the recruitment and screening of people in positions of authority: be they law enforcement officers, politicians, preachers, bureaucrats or educators.

From some of these dreadful events, we have learned. And from others we are still learning. But does anyone have a solution or are they just advocating change without knowing what that looks like. The latter is dangerous. There is no consensus, even among the different interest groups.

Another wise old woman, my maternal grandmother, used to say: “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater”. When someone, - politician, activist or whoever - can offer a practical solution, I will listen. Until then, from my perspective, we need to work on education. We need to weed out the remaining laws and policies, or perhaps it's only their application, which have an impact on people in a discriminatory fashion. This is not just about racism.

Oh Canada

Some people are saying that our government was too slow to react to the Covid-19 virus. Canadians should not have been leaving the country, as they still were, for spring break in March. We, who had been in Cuba since very early in January, noticed many pale people who had obviously just arrived in mid-March and we found this curious. Perhaps if there had been an earlier reaction to Covid-19, things would not have had to be so restrictive as they are now. But hindsight is always a poor judge of past events.

However, one stranded tourist has written that he now understands why it is important to register with the Canadian government when travelling abroad. We have done so in our recent travels over the last five or six years. Fortunately, we had never had the occasion to rely on this. This year we did. And it was very unsatisfactory, if not downright disgraceful.

By early March, we had started to pay as much attention as we could to the news of the Covid-19 virus with our limited access to the internet. But we were lulled into a sense of security. On March 15, we received an offer by Westjet to upgrade our seating on our "upcoming flight" (March 24). Then on March 17 we received a concerned email from a friend on Cape Breton alerting us to the fact that Westjet’s last international flight out of Cuba would be by midnight on the 22nd. Our flight home had been cancelled. We did not receive this news from either the airline or the Canadian government.

We logged onto Westjet’s site and were informed we could change our flight on-line. We tried. The message we received was that our flight could not be changed on-line. We would have to call an agent. There are no Westjet agents in Cuba. There was a toll free number to call. It did not work from Cuba.

We started to panic. We had received no notifications from the Canadian government so far. So we called the Canadian Embassy in Havana. A recorded message said the Embassy was closed (during business hours and in a crisis!); but that if we needed consular services we could leave a message with contact information. We did. We never received a response.

Fortunately, I was able to get hold of my niece back home and give her as much of our information as I could, so that she could try to change our flight. Within an hour she emailed (March 17) us with confirmation of our flight change. We would be leaving on the 21^st at 6:05 p.m. Although things seemed quite calm in Cuba at the time, we wanted to cry with relief. We had been ready to come home anyway and three days early was just fine with us.

It was only late in the day on the 19^th that we had received our first email notification from the Canadian government. Too little too late! It advised us of cancellations of flights by three airlines, none of which was ours, and said we should try to change our flights. Kindly, it advised us this might be difficult and that we would likely be on standby!

So being registered with the Canadian government was not at all helpful to us at least. And our country’s consular services were laughable. But we are home and we are happy.

A Peck of Dirt

One thing this Covid-19 pandemic with which we are currently confronted should teach us is to be vigilant: not with respect to viruses but with respect to the loss of freedom. Hard won

rights are too easily lost. Sometimes this may be necessary in the short term. But it is not always so.

Human beings are social animals. The loss of the freedom to socialize will have, I fear, a greater impact than the virus itself. I wonder if we are not over-reacting. Yes, the virus will kill some – perhaps many. But so will isolation, fear, and despair. We can, perhaps, tolerate having social norms taken away for a short while; but the longer that while drags on, the more crazed people will become.

After a few weeks, we are already seeing the “holier-than-thous” smugly “outing” those who struggle with this new way of being. And the rules change quickly and the restrictions grow daily. Unless one is glued to the media one cannot possibly keep up. What was permitted yesterday, may not be permitted tomorrow.

As I write this, there are just over one million one hundred thousand cases, with not quite sixty-two thousand deaths worldwide. That’s about 5% of cases. There will be more cases and more deaths I know. But last year there were four point two million people who died from pollution related illnesses and no doubt many more who are ill because of it. And it is estimated that there are three to five million serious flu cases worldwide annually with two hundred and fifty to five hundred thousand deaths annually.

So I ask myself, are the governments' broad restrictions wise. There are always those who are more susceptible to viruses. Perhaps our over-use of antibiotics and pharmaceutical medication generally is to blame. With our wipes, and our masks, and our physical distancing are we just adding to the problem of diminished immune systems. My grandmother used to say a healthy person must eat a peck of dirt when they are young. And I believe that. The world has become too sanitized for our own good.