Volume 3 Issue I

Written by JAZ
4/7/2020

 

HISTORY REPEATING, DON'T BE BORN IN THE LAST TWO DECADES OF THE CENTURY

My grandparents were born in the last two decades of the 19th century. I imagine their parents, my great-grandparents two of whom I never met as they lived their entire lives in Switzerland and two of whom I knew when still a small child and can only vaguely remember, looking forward with promise and wonder at what the coming 20th century would bring them. I can image this because this is what my partner and I were thinking as our two eldest were born in the later 1990's and the new millennium was on the horizon, I had just become proficient at working on computers and coding html embarking on my transition to life as an entrepreneur, working in the analog board game world and the coming digital-tech world.

My 5'0" grandmother was a wonderful woman, feisty, a great cook, always wanting to feed me -- dumplings, egg noodles she made herself, knoeophla, varenyky, and cheburek -- when I went to her place. Looking back now -- and I certainly didn't recognize it then, she always had both a twinkle and a sadness in her eyes. How could there not have been sadness?

Grandma, and my two grandfathers, and my other grandmother who died from cancer before I was born, lived through the second world war -- which claimed about 75 million lives including for my mom's mom (Grandma) a God-child in the air-force and for my dad's dad (Grandpa) a nephew, the Great Depression and Bennett buggies and Anderson carts, the first world war which claimed 20 million lives, and the Spanish flu which infected around 500 million people at a time when the world's population was a scant 1.8 billion and claimed between 17 million and 100 million according to various academic studies.

Grandma used to talk about the Spanish flu, about how she used to go milk the cows for neighbours who had came down with it, and about people she knew or knew of that had died from it. For me they were names from a darker, less knowledgeable past, for her they were friends, acquaintances and friends of friends.

My parents experienced the Great Depression, the Second World war, the polio epidemic which claimed 500 lives and left 11,0000 paralyzed in its wake, the post-war boom including the 60's, the medicare battles and medicare, the federal government's destruction of Saskatchewan family farms, and the US and to a lessor but still significant extent Canadian war-making in foreign lands. Now in their 80's and 90's they are experiencing the threat of death by Covid-19 pandemic. But even with all the sorrows and problems they have witnessed in their lives, their world must have seemed a lot more rational, peaceful, civilized, sane, better, than the world my great parents experienced.

I experienced the zoo that high schools were in the 1970's - the senseless violence and bullying and outright racist and awhole behavior, the amazing 80's, the wars and rumours of wars which were essentially our governments and military cheered on by the main stream media laying waste to much less powerful countries to change their governments and acquire their resources, the creation of the internet, rise of authoritarian feminism working in lock step with the power structure to put a break on our freedoms and liberties and criminalize and marginalize men "because they cause women to be afraid or might be violent to them." It was pure hysteria happily fed by the main stream media that was always propagandizing for war. And of course flat screen tv's, wifi, cable tv, the Raku, 911 and the rise of the security state and surveillance state.

My 90's children entered adulthood at a time where authoritarian feminism had run roughshod over University campuses and society writ large, working with the mainstream media to demonize, criminalize, marginalize and sideline and devoice and delegitimize working class and middle class men, where anything sexually suggestive directed at a woman could get a man fired, criminalized, expelled from university or reported about by the same mainstream media that was always, is always, propagandizing for war. They saw 911 and its aftermath, had dim awareness of the Iraq wars and Afghan war and the Libyan war, the evils of which were experienced only by our soldiers and the inhabitants of those far off lands, the hostile for men workplace that is the modern campus, cell phones and smart phones, and mass travel and globalization and Saskatchewan out-migration as many of their high school friends who did not go on to university departed for provinces where they could find employment and had prospects of careers.

Though millennial and zoomer men have had it a lot worse than their sisters -- 1 in 3 American men between 18 and 34 in the US are unemployed, underemployed, living below at or near the poverty level, or thanks to criminalization, unemployable -- they haven't had it that bad. Not until now anyway. Now it seems they will get to witness first hand the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global economic melt-down and economic destruction in its wake. Unemployment is sky rocketing and so is government debt, the economies of western capitalist industrial states may, without some very fancy foot work and misdirection, quantitative easing they call it, take generations to recover if they can recover at all .

Like my grandparents the children born in the 80's and 90's will likely come to know people who have died from pandemic first hand, grandparents and great aunts and uncles, friends and acquaintances, even children.

The women of this age will like my grandma, come to suffer as much as and perhaps more than the men have already suffered. The healthcare fields are primarily occupied by women and many of them could get infected, and a number of these infected will die.

While governments and the mainstream media in chorus pointed fingers at and demonized men and declared them threats to women's safety, the governments were:

  • failing to properly prepare for a pandemic that almost all of the world's epidemiologists were telling them humanity was due for -- it wasn't a question of if but when,
  • downsizing public health budgets and research expenditures,
  • not acquiring PPE even when the nastiness of the covid virus could be seen on television as it wreaked havoc on Hubei province and the city of Wuhan,
not realizing or not caring how this could be harmful to their citizens, their economy, the global economy, and dangerous for and putting at risk of death, the people, mostly women, who working in the health care sector would be destined to become the front lines in the efforts to keep people alive, slow and ultimately, eventually, hopefully, contain the contagion and bring the pandemic to an end.

Where was the main stream media when it should have been discovering this government malfeasance and negligence and penny-wise pound foolish management and publicizing it and ensuring its rectification so there wouldn't be a pandemic, or if there was, it would be of more mild character?   The main stream media was just too busy propagandizing for war, including the Trump-Russia fake news, and persecuting and demonizing and vilifying ordinary working class and middle class men and calling for more and more laws to criminalize them for engaging in normal male sexual behaviours. Looking at you here CBC, Toronto Star, National Post, Toronto Globe and Mail, and US hedge-fund owned "local" media like the Star Phoenix.

Lots of people have already died from the Covid-19 pandemic and the number of people who have already died will likely pale in comparison to the number of people who have died by the time the pandemic is finally stopped or burns itself out.

The surviving majority may well end up like my grandmother -- having friends, acquaintances or knowing of friends of friends who didn't.

I can only hope and pray the economic implosion taking place as a result of the pandemic doesn't produce recrimination, hate, desire for revenge and evening of scores and culminate in a third world war.

The takeaways:

  • don't trust the main stream media -- for anything. They are neither friends or allies of the working and middle class or the people in these classes.
  • don't have blind faith that those in government are managing things in the best way possible or even just competently, and
  • don't allow yourself to be born in the last two decades of a century. If you do, you are likely going to be in for a world of hurt.

ADDENDUM  Prior to the covid-19 1 in 3 American men between 18 and 34 in the US are unemployed, underemployed, living below at or near the poverty level, or thanks to criminalization, unemployable. Things are much worse now -- for both sexes -- with more than 6.5 million unemployment insurance applications being filed in the last week, people doing car horn protests in front of the mansion of the Mayor of Los Angeles and the now unemployed talking about general strikes and rent and credit card payment strikes.