I always knew I wouldn’t work at the mill. It had been the foundation of Bathurst for nearly a century. My dad told me never to go there. The place stressed him out. His father warned him too, but he didn’t listen.

My parents saved for my university so that I wouldn’t work beside the heavy machinery. After putting up with it for more than two decades, just as their first child was about to start the education they didn’t receive, the Smurfit-Stone mill closed without warning. That was in the summer of 2005—the people of Bathurst are still trying to get over it.

It started coming down piece by piece in 2010. The piles of scrap metal keep growing beside the pale green building frames covered in wires and what’s left of the walls. You can see through them to where the Nepisiguit River meets the Bay de Chaleur.

For Graham Wiseman, the worst part of driving passed the mill these days is seeing the old guys watching it disappear before their eyes.

“It’s like seeing your house being torn down,” he said. “That’s your home, you spend 30 to 40 years in a work place, that’s your home, that’s your family.”

After decades of complaining about the place, the community is coming to terms with living without it. All that will remain is contaminated soil and an unknown future.

***

 Everyone I talked to told me to get in touch with Graham Wiseman.  He was president of the Operating Engineers Union and he’s a city councillor.

I walked right passed him when we met at City Hall. He stood in the front doors with a Maple Leafs baseball hat, a dark puffy jacket, and faded jeans. He’s 58 and has a white beard. I expected him to be bigger for some reason.

“You look like a Hodnett,” he said when he met me upstairs.

He likes to cite specific dates and numbers, and he often raises his voice right at the end of his sentences.

“If memory serves, the 12 of October 1972 was a Thursday,” he said. That was the day he started working at the mill.

As with so many in the area, the mill was a family business for Wiseman. Graham was the fourth generation to work there.

“My mother’s grandfather worked in the woodlands with a horse and buggy, he was hauling the wood out of the woods – that was Grampy George.”

At the end of July 2005, Graham was working even though the mill wasn’t making paper. He was told that it was all to be shut off and that there was a meeting at 10 the next morning.  It seemed odd but he didn’t think much of it.

He was sitting in McDonalds around 7:00am when he saw 15 to 20 vehicles leave the Budget Rent-a-Car across the parking lot. He went to the meeting.

“The staff was coming out, and we were getting ready to go in, they must of been there for 10 o’clock,” he said.

Some were crying.

“What the hell is going on?” Graham recalls asking.

“The mill is being closed.”

“What do you mean being closed?”

“It’s closed, it’s finished; we’re all going home.”

Smurfit-Stone employees from the United States made the announcement to his group.

“Well heaven forbid, I mean, all these things are going through your mind now, holy god now, what about retirement, I mean what am I going to do, what’s the future going to hold, well, how’s the community going to survive, I mean it goes on and on and on,” Graham said.

They were told that the international representatives of the unions would fill them in and that there was nothing more they could do.

Danny Gallagher was also at the meeting and said, “the door in the board room opened and it looked like the WWF, I swear on my grandmother’s grave it looked like the WWF, they said ‘these gentlemen here will escort you to your cars’ … they had a hard time to fit through that door.”

Graham said, “even Tony wanted to say something, and he told Tony to keep quiet, and that was the Mill manager. So I believe in all fairness, I don’t believe anyone on staff knew this prior to that announcement being made at 10 o’clock that morning”

From then on everyone was locked out. They had to wait for permission to pick up their personal belongings.

Collective disbelief gripped the town; there wasn’t a single person unaffected.

People got together and set up “camp hope.” They set up tents and barbeques in the parking lot facing the office building with the Smurfit-Stone banner. The community donated food and many people slowly came to grips with being unemployed for the first time since high school.

“You could wake up in the middle of the night, jump in your car and go over to the mill—there was always someone there—and just sit around and shoot the breeze. Just a way to offload, but again, our employer never did nothing, it was us helping ourselves,” Graham said.

Nothing more could be done, Smurfit-Stone owned the property and they didn’t do anything with it until January 2010 when Green Investment Group Inc. bought it. People were hopeful for new jobs, but American Iron and Metal Inc. was contracted to demolish everything on the site except for the office.

***

 Trucks loaded with scrap metal, covered with mud from the humid onset of spring, head for Montreal. This is where American Iron and Metal Inc. operates a 40-foot-tall shredder—one of the biggest in the world. Once shredded, the metal circulates on conveyor belts where magnets detect the ferrous metals. The rest is separated with precise equipment and put into 20 different categories and sizes. The environmental director, Mathieu Germain, explained this in an email.

The raw materials are used in everything from cell phones and wires to vehicles and appliances.

The company plans to start building a shredder in Saint John in this month. They’ve obtained the permits and will be investing $30-million.

Once they’re done in Bathurst, all that will be left is an office building and riverside land that no one can live on.

Danny Stymiest of the Department of Environment confirmed that the site will be cleaned up to commercial standards. It’s a stricter standard than industrial—which is what it is zoned for now—but more work, and a lot more money, would be needed before houses could be built.

According to a document approved by the Department of Environment, Benzene and some metals contaminate sections of the soil and groundwater. After all, the mill dates from the days when spilled oil was only considered dangerous if you slipped on it.

***

 Not everyone feels like Smurfit-Stone is off the hook yet.

Danny Gallagher was 52 when the mill closed—the retirement age is 55. He got over the initial shock and took a job out west right away. He believes he should have received a pension.

I met Danny at a Tim Hortons three blocks from the mill. We sat in the same seats he was in the morning the mill closed. He has a wide face, thin dark hair, and pale blue-green eyes.

“I don’t want to go out west anymore. I live in a room 8 by 10; I work 20 and 8. You probably have friends working out there, there’s no quality of life,” he told me.

He’s been doing that for the last six years.

He was sitting in a cafeteria in Alberta and talking with former employees of a paper mill in Terrance Bay Ontario. When that mill closed the employees were able to use a recall rights clause to get their pensions if they were a few years short.

Former employees from the Dalhousie mill have done the same. They’ve gone to court and won. The case is expected to end up in the Supreme Court of Canada.

Recalls rights exist to prevent people from being laid off and replaced by a company trying to avoid giving out extended employment benefits. If you worked for 15 years, you had three years of priority to new union jobs, if you were qualified – the standard in the Canadian pulp and paper industry. In Dalhousie and Terrace Bay, 15 years employment also adds three years to your age and can bridge you to retirement. Danny, 52, and Graham, 53, would both be eligible for their pensions. But that’s not the way it went down in Bathurst.

Smurfit-Stone contacted the unions around Christmas time. There was money missing from the pension plan. They were going to pay the majority, but there was an additional $1.3-million that they weren’t obligated to pay. If the unions signed an agreement to drop all grievances, arbitration cases, and all court actions against the company and its successors in the future, then they would put in the extra money. It worked out to be over $10,000 a person. Smurfit Stone wanted an answer by the first week of January.

“They’re spending their first Christmas without a job, they’re on unemployment insurance that’s going to run out in about eight months time if they haven’t found a job. So how are people’s emotions going on at that time? What’s their thinking? What’s their mindset?” Graham asks.

Graham and the 20 guys in his union walked away. The other four unions took it. They would receive the money they accumulated in their pension plans, but only those over 55 would receive monthly pensions payments for the rest of their life.

“Everyone had one thing in mind: ‘I want the money in my pension, I don’t want to lose that, I want my money.’ So no one was prepared to investigate a possibility of challenging [Smurfit-Stone]. They were looking at themselves, and their future, and they weren’t concerned about you or me or anyone else. And I can understand—fear of the unknown.”

Five months later, the same deal was still on the table. The guys gathered, took a vote, and decided to sign and take the extra money.

“I’m not a lawyer. The company has all these high-priced lawyers on their payroll. Did the employer know when they made that offer that they had an obligation to say, ‘listen, you guys have recall rights here and when you turn 55 we’re going to pay you your pension,’ did they know that? And if they did, then they took advantage of a situation,” Graham said.

Danny feels the unions let him down. Bernard Richard, the Ombudsman with the provincial government, is going to see if he can investigate whether the government was negligent when they approved the deal from Smurfit-Stone.

Win or lose, they will always feel cheated.

“Is that how you treat a person, such as myself, with 33 years service?” Graham asks.  “Is that all I am, just an individual, and there’s the door, have a nice day, you no longer have a job?”

***

There’s a floating platform up the river from the mill. There was once a shuttle boat that would take you there from downtown. Kids could jump in the water during the summer days.

The Nepisiguit River has always been important to the area. Whether traveling in birch bark canoes, floating logs to a sawmill, or lying on the flat rocks after playing in the currents.

The mouth of the river would be a beautiful place to live—if only we could.

The reality that the riverfront will mostly be an empty lot, with no clear idea of what could go there, sinks in slowly.

The memory of a thriving community where you can quit the same job three times—like Danny Gallagher did—will only be found in the corner of the local museum.

“It’s hard to talk to someone who hasn’t had the experience,” says Graham Wiseman. “You lived the good times, you lived the enjoyable times, but you lived the sad times. Other people maybe don’t want to talk about it. It’s a memory: ‘it’s something that I did, now a memory and I don’t want to go back to it, I’ve moved on.’ And myself—I’ve moved on. I don’t dwell on it; it doesn’t bother me. Like someone said, I sleep like a baby every night—I wake up every hour crying.”

The red metal doors at Molly’s are odd for a coffeehouse—I see them at auditoriums, or as the side-doors at hockey rinks.

Inside, the wooden frame of a veranda leads you from the door to the counter, and then to the dimly lit sitting area. Lamps and wooden tables cover the carpet. The room is eclectic, decorated with everything from small white doll masks, to a one-horse open sleight.

“People sometimes don’t get passed the door,” Molly said. “They come in and they go—“ she opened her eyes wide and dropped her jaw—“and they look under the thing, and you see these little people looking at you going, ‘uh.’ And you feel like a fool, and they look like a fool. Half the time I don’t know what to say to them.”

The place is definitely different. It smells like homemade bread, and she doesn’t accept debit cards.

Molly is also known to speak her mind—maybe too freely sometimes.  Regardless, this month marks her 19^th year in business. And it hasn’t always been easy.

“You’ve got to roll with the punches, and be prepared to give things up,” she said.

Molly’s a tall, strong-looking woman. She has a long white ponytail, and glasses that cover almost a third of her face. Her and her husband Daryl run the place themselves, seven days a week. I’m not sure how old they are.

“None of your business,” she told me. “And that’s on record.”

She does things her way, says what she thinks, and doesn’t tolerate disrespectful customers.

“There are people who think that people in customer service are—’customer is always right.’ Well no, if the customer is right—I don’t have any problem with that. If the customer is not right—then I’ve got a problem,” she said.

“People like McDonald’s and those places don’t want people being insulted by a 16-year-old. Well to an extent I can understand that, but a 16-year-old who gets treated [poorly] is not going to turn into a good consumer. They’re going to turn into a very nasty consumer, which is just going to make the whole world a little more miserable. And that’s not right.”

Molly has seen enough nasty consumers. She does an impersonation of an alpha-male who takes offense easily for a couple of her stories.

One guy gave her such a hard time that she called the cops. When they showed up, he went outside, stuck his head in their window, and continued complaining. She thought it was funny. But, this stuff use to bother her.

She’s been doing it long enough now to know what to expect.

“People are weird—oh we know they’re weird. They’re all individuals and they have different stressors, different methods of growing up, different attitudes,” she said.

She makes herself impersonal to protect herself. She doesn’t usually look at people when she takes orders, and she’s reserved around people she doesn’t know.

“You do have to kind of guard against people taking advantage of you—I guess that’s basically what I consider it.”

And she does it seven days a week.

It’s a step up in lifestyle.

“I actually get more time off now than when I was running the farm,” she said.

Before the coffeehouse, she had a farm and a table at the market.

“Christmas day you’re getting out of bed to feed the birds. You can’t let them go Christmas day—you’d be feeling a little guilty.”

She raised chickens and show-birds.

She would pay someone to kill the birds when they were ready. She can’t stand killing things. She never raised larger animals because of it.

And then one day she saw how they handled her birds.

“I decided I had to do it myself; I had to take the responsibility. That’s the way I feel about it anyway, I was just being a coward before that,” she said.

She could do it without stressing them out. They didn’t have to be transported anywhere. It was quick and painless. “If you’re going to eat meat—somebody has to do it … It’s better that I should do it.”

But by late 1994 it had become too much, so she gave up the market.

“And by 99’ I had to give up the farm, I just couldn’t do it.” She put on a frail southern accent, “I was getting older, it was more difficult.”

She devoted herself full-time to the café…

“Ah—coffee shop,” I said.

“Grr, no—not a coffee shop either!”

“Coffee house.”

“Coffee house, right—house,” she told me. “Yeah, we actually gave up on trying to call it a coffee house because nobody gets it.”

Coffee houses serve alcohol, food, and coffee. They were popular again in the 60’s and 70’s.

“The coffee house license is the oldest one in Canada. The first one in North America was where that new convention centre is.”

But, she accepts her place being licensed as a restaurant. It seems reasonable—the food is her passion.

She’s picky about her ingredients.

“It’s just planning. I planned for a year before I put the organic stuff on the menu,” she said.

She makes it all from scratch.

“Well, there’s a few things that I cheat a little on, but they’re not on the menu. They’re specials, if I want to do something a little different, and quick, I might buy something that is not what I would consider really up to par for the menu.”

And she doesn’t serve anything she doesn’t like. People like her cream of mushroom soup, but she hates it.

“I can’t serve something I hate.”

The recipes are her own.

“When I go to do a recipe like nachos, I do a lot of research to find out what exactly is the intention of nachos,” she said.

“Nachos are a method of using up leftovers—that’s what they’re used for… when I discovered what it was that nachos were—and that was the key—then I could go ahead and make my own now, it’s that understanding of a food that allows you to imitate a food.”

“I was told by somebody that they had nachos like mine in some little town in Mexico.” In a southern accent she said, “maybe I got some vibes from down there.’

So, what’s in her lentil soup?

“Are you out of your cotton-picking tree?” she said. “After four batches having to be thrown out, I don’t think so. I couldn’t tell you how many people have been after that lentil soup recipe—I’ve lost count. People will come in four and five times, and order it and bring other people in.” She pretended to hunch over food and eat with both hands while looking around with shifting eyes. “It’s just hilarious. Go make your own—don’t be looking at mine. And they always get it wrong. That’s what really mesmerizes me.”

Just about every three years you can expect something different, either on the menu, or in the coffeehouse. She thinks you have to change things around every three years to stay fresh.

They started at a different location. They use to sell magazines and books. They’ve renovated, they’ve had a rooftop patio, and they’ve gone through a bunch of recipes. No matter what they do though—it’s always unmistakably Molly’s.

“Some people hate the place, and some people love it,” she said. “I guess I only want the people who love it to come back.”

On Reddit.com—a social news aggregator—it was suggested that I listen to “lo-fi, satanic, weed-drenched pop.” Definitely not a genre I’ve ever seen in record stores.

While hiding from the cold beneath four layers of blankets in Fredericton, I was introduced to the homemade music of a Californian-based musician within hours of the link being posted. I streamed the music, requested a way to download it, and then paid $5 to have the 23-track album on my iPod. It’s been my walking music ever since.

“With that Reddit exposure last week I’ve probably made a couple hundred bucks,” Will Marquis told me over the phone.

Marquis wrote, self-produced, and distributed his album online without any resources traditionally supplied by music labels. Apparently you can challenge multi-million dollar companies with a $90 recorder and a free account from Reddit.com.

Marquis calls himself the Meanest Boys and produced his self-titled album with a few instruments and a tape recorder he bought a decade ago.

“The equipment I have I know very well because I’ve been using it for so long,” he said. “So it’s really comfortable when I sit down to write a song.”

The album draws on five years of material, and even though it sounds rough at points, your heels still tap, the melodies get stuck in your head, and the songs stay interesting after listening to them for days—what more do you want from music?

It used to be impossible for people like Marquis to share his music without the backing of an established music label. But now every musician can access just about everything they need.

Services like Bandcamp.com will host your songs and allow you to sell them for whatever price you want. Distribution is no longer expensive or exclusive. You don’t even need the Apple store.

“There was a shakeup in the industry when all this technology started becoming available to everybody,” said Kevin Herring, the grey-haired head of the audio engineering department at the Centre for Arts and Technology here in Fredericton.

“The popular myth is that the recording industry is in trouble—though it’s not, the record labels are in trouble,” Herring said. “Music is still being bought, recording engineers are still recording the stuff, and musicians are still writing it and playing it … the difference is that the record labels don’t own that product anymore, they don’t own the distribution streams anymore, they don’t own that digital file—unless the artist signs for that. The independent movement is damaging the record labels, but not the recording industry.”

You don’t need a huge studio, a pressing plant, a warehouse, transport trucks, or anything else that goes in to creating and selling a physical product.

Of course, some people still want something they can hold, so Marquis is putting out two albums on vinyl with small, independent labels that have seen his Myspace page.

But the demand is shrinking for CDs and records, and that makes it hard to keep large operations afloat. When someone only wants the music, they just get it online, and they expect the price to reflect the simplified process—which usually isn’t as simple as Marquis makes it.

***

Truthfully, the Meanest Boys could sound better—and then he could charge more than $5 for 23 songs—but I like to think the sound quality is a part of his style. I enjoy it, but it’s not perfect.

When you want something to sound professional, you need professionals.

“You need a producer, and an engineer, and your songwriters and so on. Those roles are there because it’s the most efficient way to get a good sound,” Herring said.

You can stock a great home studio for a fraction of what it use to cost, but you need qualified people to run it.

When the resources are available, we don’t need to pay the people who are holding the tools hostage; we pay the people who know how to use them. It doesn’t matter how great your instruments are—if you can’t write music, you can’t make a good song. That’s why Marquis can make something worthwhile without good equipment. It’s talent that matters.

The same goes for every industry. Just because everyone can get the tools to make professional grade products, it doesn’t mean they know how, or that they’ll take the time to learn.

As Herring put it, “if I have the money I can go out and buy a Ferrari, but that does not make me Michael Schumacher. I’m not going to go to Monte Carlo and blow him off the track.”

“I find it the most difficult thing to do to send a young person to jail,” said Judge Richards. “But I can’t say society is safe with you out there.”

Brown had been released on probation Dec 17. He and Andrea Barber had been dating for two weeks. She called the police at 2:29am April 1.

Her right eye was swollen shut and there were marks on her neck.

Brown and Barber began fighting at the bar. They went to Barbers apartment and continued yelling and calling each other names. Brown pushed her to the ground, jumped on her, and she was knocked unconscious. She woke up and tried to phone for help. Brown threw the phone on the ground and smashed her head off the headboards of her bed.

“Do you know what I can do to you?” Brown allegedly said, in a statement from Barber, read by the Crown.

Barber ran upstairs to her landlord’s apartment and yelled for help.

She was taken to the hospital for x-rays and CAT scans.

“If you kick someone in the head, you don’t know if they’ll ever wake up again,” said Judge Richards.

Brown sat with a straight face and an aqua blue t-shirt.

“He has trouble controlling his anger when he consumes alcohol,” said Billy Corbey, the Crown Prosecutor.

He had already been ordered to attend alcohol and anger management. He went to the assessment, but he skipped his first appointment.

Brown pleaded guilty.

“I don’t know how many more ways you can be told that you shouldn’t drink,” said Richards.

“I feel terribly sorry for my actions,” Brown said. “Not only because I was in the wrong, but because I need to better myself. I feel I would benefit more from anger and alcohol services at home under house arrest then back at jail.”

“You don’t have a long history, it has only started recently, for some reason,” said Richards. “Society has to have faith that the courts will deal with these matters.”

She sentenced him to five months in jail.

“If you had been older it would have been longer, I had to look at your youthfulness,” said Richards. “You should never drink again.”

I feel guilty not following the crisis in Japan. I can’t imagine what those people are going through. Anything I picture seems like the most horrifying experience possible.

But, somehow earthquakes and tsunamis are beginning to feel common. Japan use to build houses out of paper because it’s an earthquake-prone island, and we have hundreds of nuclear power plants around the world, and a poor record handling fuels.

One of my problems with media is hearing too much negativity (I think it’s lazy reporting). I sometimes feel like I go a little crazy hearing about all the bad things in the world. I’ve decided that staying hopeful is more important than dwelling on things I can’t change. Does that make me self absorbed?

***

A few years ago, I was living in Halifax when police blocked off some streets. Smoke rose from a house just out of sight. A friend and I cut through the Dalhousie campus, we ducked under some police tape, and found our way to a two-story home with flames shooting out the windows. The onlooking family cried as everything they owned burned. I felt like a dick.

I went through all that trouble to give someone an audience during a traumatic time. I could just to go back home to my comfortable bed and never have to think about it again.

Since then, I always hope that people who slowly drive passed accidents end up seeing something they’ll never forget. It’s a bit of a journalistic conflict for me.

***

I feel sadistic seeking out footage of people at their worst. Especially when there’s nothing I can do. I understand that we need to know what’s happening, but how much?

When I was younger and pissed off at the “capitalists,” a friend of mine told me that if I keep letting them get me down, then they win just as much as if I submit. It’s just opposite sides of the same coin.

Feeling bad for someone’s loss doesn’t make it any easier on them, but it can have a heavy toll on you. It seems selfish to think about tragedy like this. But what good is a depressed and cynical audience when nothing can be done anyway? I often wonder if I’m sympathizing, or easing my conscience.

Do you know what I mean by western guilt? I’m not sure if it’s a “real” term, but I refer to it as something similar to survivors guilt. I consider a lot of the hardships in the world to be the result of western lifestyle, stemming from British colonialism, and therefore I feel guilty for being born into privilege.

When I hear of tragedies, I feel terrible for my easy life.

Self-loathing and whining doesn’t do any good, so I work hard to avoid these traps. There’s a balance–be aware, but not consumed.

***

Just as it’s always easy to point out problems and near-impossible to come up with solutions, it’s easy to find the tragedies and hard to find hope. This makes me think about the purpose of journalism.

I have very little interest in spreading despair. I don’t see the point. An emotionally hard-hitting story arch is great, but I like to think every sad story is secretly about redemption.

This is getting complicated. I certainly value journalism as a tool for change. Spreading awareness is one of the greatest things we can do. Exposing facts and forcing accountability is essential. But, as with everything, I believe there’s a balance. Pretending the world is a happy-go-lucky place is deceitful and kind of dumb. But thinking it’s all pain and misery is equally stupid.

In Japan, I know a lot of people have died. And around the world, a lot more will today, and tomorrow, and the next day. And we won’t talk about the vast majority of it. And I know I’m probably more apocalyptic and cynical than is actually sane, but this stuff isn’t news to me. I only hope that people don’t suffer too much, just as I hope I don’t when my time comes.

This is a reason why I love the internet. For the sake of my sanity, I can manage what I see. Kind of like how I stopped watching CNN when I started believing everyone was out to kill me and steal my baby sister.

The hard news from Japan was enough for me. I checked a few re-tweeted videos. But that sinking, hopeless feeling of awe and guilt is poison. I didn’t click anymore links or read anymore articles. Twitter unfolded the facts, and that was enough.

I eventually went looking for tsunami footage. This is probably one of the craziest videos I have ever seen in my life. It’s important to know that this can happen, but I can’t relate. I feel like it’s an evolutionary defense mechanism–I can’t understand a lot in the world so that I don’t become paralyzed with fear.

I know it’s the job of the journalist to bear witness. Reminding people of what actually happens in the world to build healthy perspectives. But, (as someone who hasn’t even started his career), I think we can deliver the grit without crushing the hope. But the hope is a lot harder to find.

***

I am very encouraged by all the debate around nuclear power. Articles like Propublica’s, While Nuclear Waste Piles Up in U.S., Billions in Fund To Handle It Sit Unused.

I haven’t heard of a good way to manage radioactive waste, so I’ve never agreed with nuclear power. I’m completely shocked by how accepted it’s been. I’m happy to see people looking at it.

One of my “hobby horses” is the loss of practical knowledge to our modern conveniences. I find we are willingly putting ourselves in vulnerable situations. We’re advancing too fast to allow natural trial and error to regulate us. And we’re including future generations.

We’re not justified in creating problems that could last thousands of years. Sure, I guess it is possible that we will be the only civilization that never falls, but we still can’t control everything. The earth physically shakes and moves, meteors fall, tornadoes happen, volcanoes erupt, places flood, people bomb each other, we make honest mistakes, we overlook things–you just never know. I think we should only gamble with our own money. Go ahead and create a society that has no idea how to produce its own food, but our mistakes shouldn’t be left to our grandchildren.

Democracy Now just did a story called, Japan Releases Radioactive Water Several Millions Times the Legal Limit into Ocean.There will be repercussions. We live with one big ocean. But am I crazy to think we’re getting off lightly?

It seems like the world has been in denial. How did no one realize that building nuclear reactors on fault lines was ridiculous? The Japanese traditionally planned for earthquakes. You figure those things out after living there for centuries. (I am very curious to know who planned those power plants.)

Hopefully we’re figuring some things out now right now, before it’s too late. As terrible as the events in Japan have been, I hope it wasn’t all in vain. It might of been the shake needed to wake up the world.

*****

Somewhat related. I just found this series on vbs.tv and thought this take on Detroit was a good example of finding hope when everyone reports negativity. A little inappropriate in relation to Japan, but suitable for a class on new journalism. http://www.vbs.tv/en-ca/watch/uneven-terrain/palladium-detroit-full-new-credits–3

My fear is that as journalists become the jack-of-all-trades of online media, teams will get smaller and writers will start handling their own advertising/funding.

I may be cynical, but I don’t trust someone to properly investigate or criticize an organization that funds them. “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you” is a cliche for a reason.
I’ll give you an example:

Maclean’s recently published their opinion on usage based billing. They mentioned that they’re owned by Rogers–so at least they were upfront about it. But, in my opinion, the argument was simplistic. It was rational and correct, but it didn’t take in to account the bigger questions. As a result, it was exactly the kind of argument Rogers would want people to read.

Again, I may be too cynical. But at the very least, I think this was just in bad taste.

Most news sources I know that address the ethics of advertising usually just shun it all together. NB Media Co-op, Democracy Now!, This American Life–they all rely mostly on donations. But, I think this is “throwing the baby out with the bath water” (to load up on even more cliches).

I really think advertisement can be win-win-win. Content creators can get funding, a good company can get exposure, and informed viewers can find a way to spend their money in a way that might curb a bit of that western guilt.

I picture small clothing shops devoted to ethical materials, ethical food producers (see Spearville), or any other business that respects social implications over the bottom line. I would love to help these people get known, especially since online shipping and shopping has made things so convenient that even Wal-Mart shouldn’t be able to compete.

***

If I were running an online news room, I would make advertisement a thing of pride. I would keep this appropriate by devoting one writer/sales person to it.

It would be challenging, and maybe too ambitious, but that person would be responsible for a weekly editorial, personalized audio/video/print endorsements of products and services, and customer relations with new and existing “sponsors.”

There would be an overarching mission statement for the whole company, one which would emphasize social responsibility and progressive ambitions, while primarily dedicated to the truthful and accurate story telling and reporting. This employee would obviously have to agree with our philosophies and ethics, but in the end, the advertising side of things would be completely under his/her control.

He/she would responsible for:

- Meeting with potential sponsors and keeping up relationships with existing ones
- Doing research in to these companies to ensure we approve of their practices
- Write a statement every week as to why the chosen sponsors are acceptable
- Interact with a Reddit.com-style message board and a Twitter account.
- Come up with a convincing ads for our audio, visual, and print content that would be embedded into a break in stories after they’re ready to be published/broadcasted.

This personalized/embedded ad would be similar to Leo Laporte’s style from TWIT. I’ve always enjoyed his approach. It’s a lot like how I feel I should donate when Ira Glass or Amy Goodman interrupts the show to explain why. When Leo raves about Audibles.com, I feel like I’m missing out.

I want to hear a real person telling me how something is actually useful and how supporting the company advances their cause. I would have to understand that cause, why buying from them helps, how I buy similar products anyway, and why I should feel good about funneling my money to these people instead of giants like Wal-Mart. It would be tricky. And keeping the ads short, effective, and as unobtrusive as possible would take time. But I think it’s possible.

Done right, I think everyone would win. Our writers would write and not have to be freelance/artist-types pitching and funding one project at a time. Our audience could trust our content and possibly appreciate the companies we try to connect them with. Hopefully our opinion would become respected. And after a few success stories, I would hope that our approval would become valuable enough that online ads would start selling at a rate that makes sense, and would truly usher in the “Attention Economy” that I’d like to see the future built on. 

****

I actually really like this idea. If you guys have any thoughts, or notice any flaws, please let me know. You can comment here, but as I’ve already pushed for–I think Reddit.com facilitates the best conversation on the net. CLICK HERE to use the reddit post I made so we can use their system, but anything is good. Thanks.

(The story of TWIT)

I remember loving how they compared Twitter to our brain. They related the way twitter moves out one person at a time but sets off chain reactions with retweets, to how our neurons only communicate to the ones right next to it, but obviously accomplishes complex things.

I was new to twitter, and this resonated with the way my internet use was feeling centralized and kind of controlled. I felt like I could follow an issue for the first time online with little effort. I actually loved deleting people and seeing how my feed changed. I remember getting rid of @thatkevinsmith pretty quick.

So, what has it done for me lately?

Twitter was my main source of information during the G20 protests this summer and it is still keeping me up to date

@g20mobilize, and many others, were my windows to the world during the G20 protests. The live streams I watched, the many many photos and videos that flooded in, and all the real time updates came exclusively from the networks that people like this connected me to. And they are still keeping me up to date with information that never comes up anywhere else.

I don't know this guy, but this is why retweets are awesome.

I’m not following this guy. But Lawrence Lessig (@Lessig) is, and with the click of a button I’m connected to the information he finds important. I looked into this tweet and found this article. Apparently Amazon is going to challenge Netflix. More anti-UBB corporate support?

Is this too trivial?

I don’t know. I love these guys. I think I check out photos from @NatGeoSociety just about everyday. Nothing makes me want to be a photographer more. Here’s the link–I very much recommend looking around.

I'm not able to catch every episode, so I rely on twitter to let me know which episodes I should stream later

I love the Q, but streaming CBC radio anytime between 10 am at 2pm (or the night show) isn’t always easy for me. @jianghomeshi is usually pretty active on twitter, so I see this as that “coming up tonight” sort of commercial that I never see without cable. I then just get the episodes I want off iTunes or stream it online.

I swear, I really wanted the original BoingBoing tweet but this was weeks ago and they're almost constantly tweeting

Somehow it’s embarrassing to post my own tweet, but I won’t link to myself, is that still self-promotional?

BUT, this has been the influence from Twitter for me recently. @boingboing posted this link to a contribution from Corey Doctorow (@doctorow). It’s weird. It really had me thinking about new online presentations. I tweeted this next:

“I got sucked in to 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein http://xrl.in/77e4 Here’s the blog http://xrl.in/77e5 and net.art http://xrl.in/77e6″

Also, Boingboing.net is great. It’s the only website I know of where I don’t actually like their homepage, but I love their tweets. They’re basically an aggregator. They link to things on the net and provide a headline, or a couple intro paragraphs. I find they’ve got good taste.

***

In case the link up top about Leo Laporte and TWIT didn’t entice you, I’m going to try again. This show really makes me feel good about trying to be a content creator.

***

-

“Move back!” the cops yelled.

“We have a right to be here,” Tim said. Then he sat down.

A line of riot cops had moved across the grass in Queens Park. They walked with their clear shields touching side by side.

“My nose was smushed against the shield at some points,” Tim said later.

The crowd tried to hold their ground, but the cops kept advancing. They shoved back and forth for twenty minutes.

Guns fired and the crowd started to panic and leave. Tear gas drifted in the air and burned in everyone’s lungs.

The police stepped over Tim, pulled him up, and zip tied his hands behind his back.

Over 1,000 people were arrested at G20 summit in Toronto this summer. Tim was held for three days before he could get bail, and then the charges were just dropped.

It was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The Ontario government used the “Public Works Protection Act” to do this. It’s from 1939, and it was meant to protect infrastructure during the war. In all fairness, it’s not the first time a wartime act was used out of context. Pierre Trudeau used the “War Measures Act” when the FLQ was bombings and kidnapping people.

Tim’s a tall guy with dark blond hair that is usually kept back with a bandana. He had been living in Montreal, he had an internship at an independent newspaper and he had a room in a housing co-op. He decided to bike to Toronto for the G20 protests with his roommate Amy-a shorter girl with curly blond hair.

They averaged 80 kilometers a day and moved with the sun. They made it in nine days, in time for the “People’s Summit.”

June 18^th to the 20^th was the “People’s Summit,” and the 21^st to the 24^th was the “Themed Days Of Resistance.” Migrant, gender, environmental, and indigenous issues were the themes.

There was a street medic day course and a lot of opportunities to learn about your rights. While people were volunteering their time to educate each other, the Ontario government changed their laws.

A day before the summit, on June 25^th, The Star reported that Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government had designated “Public Works” areas. It was believed that the police had the authority to arrest anyone within five meters of these areas if they didn’t present identification. This wasn’t true.

The Star recently reported that a press release was drafted later in the day on the 25^th to clarify that the police did not have the authority to arbitrarily search people outside these zones, but they decided not to release it.

The police acted as though they had these rights. Bill Blair told the Canadian Press later that the law didn’t exist but that he was “trying to keep criminals out.”

At the first march during the People’s Summit the cops “doubled, if not tripled” the people there, Tim said.

“To be surrounded by them and out numbered so hard put a lot of people on edge,” he said.

The events kept getting bigger as the days went on. The largest one was the labor march on Saturday, the day of the G20 meetings.

Tim and Amy had got up late and were behind the crowd. They passed the smashed windows and the burnt cop car, and found people at the fence.

The police hadn’t stopped the rioters, but they were ready to enforce the five-meter law around the designated “Public Works” areas.

A giant fence separated the rest of town from the G20 meetings. Tim saw the angry protesters and lines of riot cops. The group he was with had agreed to leave together if anyone felt uncomfortable, so they left.

They went to Queens Park and were thinking about going to a friend’s apartment when they “heard an army marching.” Amy didn’t want to face the cops, but Tim and some of his other friends stayed up front. This is when Tim was arrested.

They tied him up once they had him behind their line.  The cops kept grabbing people from the crowds and pulling them behind the shields as they cleared everyone out of the park. He was thrown in the back of a crowded paddy wagon, and then loaded on to an SMT-like bus.

A Human Rights Monitor from The Canadian Civil Liberties Association reported that, “I was very confused as the protest seemed entirely peaceful at the time and Queen’s Park was the designated demonstration zone?”

The inside of the bus was separated in to different sized cages. Tim’s had seven rows of seats. There was a guy in one of the back cages who had his face smashed up.

“It was like blood tears,” Tim said.

He swayed and nodded with the lazy stare of a bad concussion. The bus went crazy. They demanded medical attention for the guy. A guard eventually came back and took him to the front.

They drove through the empty streets to the “Toronto Film Studio,” which was now the “East Avenue Detention Center.”

The walls inside the warehouse were lined with cages. Each one had a bench and a door-less orange outhouse. Their hands were kept tied, the air conditioning was on, and the neon lights never went out in 24 hours.

They had to fight for every cup of water, and Tim was only offered a hamburger bun with a piece of processed cheese. He was too shaken up to eat.

Tim didn’t want to give his parents information, so he couldn’t get bail. He was taken to the provincial jail.  He was at an event in front of it two days earlier, and now he was going inside.

“I was kind of hoping Amy would save me,” Tim said.

After waiting and then being processed, he was led to a real jail cell where he finally slept.  He went back to the courthouse the next day and met Mana—the crown lawyer appointed to his defense.

The court has to provide you with a lawyer, which costs money and time. Professor Roland Chrisjohn from the St. Thomas Native Studies department wrote to me,

“Why not fight each case on a person-by-person basis, where the courts are forced to educate each person in the requirements to mount a creditable defense?  And then appeal the result (if a guilty verdict is reached)?  And demand a jury trial?  And otherwise clog the legal system? This would be another, and very effective, form of protest (and might even obliterate mass arrests as a strategy to break protests).”

Tim finally decided to get in touch with his father, but they weren’t able to get bail money by the end of the day, so Tim spent one more night in jail.

Amy actually found the money that got him out the next day.

He was led out the back door to a waiting room crowded with people. They all cheered and handed him sandwiches and fruits. He was happy but felt guilty about getting out while others were still in the mess.

“It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it now … I hadn’t thought about it in awhile,” Tim said later.

“So do you think protests are effective,” I asked.

“I don’t really know,” Tim said. “I don’t think the people inside the G20 had any idea what was happening.”

Tim’s aware of a lot of issues that need our attention, but he knows what’s at stake now. He’s seen what we allow the police to do.

He knows the G20 leaders were effectively isolated from the events on the streets, and he fears the issues didn’t even reach an audience because the media was drowned in talk about the vandalism.

Dr. Chrisjohn seemed annoyed with the strategies of the protesters when he spoke at a G20 panel discussion at St. Thomas University earlier this semester.

“I wish that we would just be a little more honest about the circumstances. Might makes right in this country … I don’t think these people thought through their objectives very well. I mean, it’s silly to think […] that we have to reinvent the wheel over and over again,” he said.

The other panelist, Political Science professor, Thom Workman, said that he “wasn’t surprised” by what happened in Toronto this summer.

This certainly isn’t a time where a Prime Minister, like Trudeau, welcomes protesters on his lawn to help keep him accountable. But can we really expect our government to act violently and illegally if they disagree with us? How do you address issues if a large amount of citizens gathering peacefully only incites violence and the suspension of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

Dr. Chrisjohn said, “They have water canons, they’ve got sound canons, they have stupid robotic mentality, they have everything else necessary to steam roll you, and on top of that, they’re going to get away with everything! The place to fight them, the place to confront them is not on the street, the place to fight them and win with all of this is the intellectual arena.”

-

You wake up in a concrete room strapped to a chair. Stacks of electronics are piled around you, and a face appears on a monitor.

Lines of red and blue shoot across your vision as the sound of high-powered electricity sizzles in your ear. You didn’t answer the question, now you’re being tortured. They want to know about your role in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, your time spent in a Soviet work camp, and the assassination mission personally assigned to you by John F. Kennedy.

This is how Call of Duty: Black Ops begins. People lined up around the country for its midnight release—the biggest 3D gaming release ever. Street parties were organized by Best Buy Canada in Vancouver and Toronto on Monday, November 8^th.

EB Games also opened at midnight here in Fredericton. There was a 100-foot line up in the Regent Mall by 10pm, and most of those people already had the game on reserve.

It’s no surprise. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 set the record for the best selling game of all time, achieving this only ten months after its release. Black Ops actually broke the opening day record by selling 5.6 million copies in the U.S and the UK.

Corporal Jonathan Thompson has his copy.

Jon joined the military four years ago. Within that year he bought his first Xbox, his first gaming system since the Regular Nintendo in middle school. He loves Call of Duty. It’s the rush that gets him.

“It sounds like an addiction when I talk about it like this,” he says.

He plays the game more aggressively than most. When the radio says go, he goes, no matter what. He is also quick to sacrifice himself for the mission, which the game rewards with cinematic scenes that make the whole experience like an extremely engaging movie.

Call of Duty has also promoted competition since the beginning. There are scoreboards that rank players around the world according to stats that are adjusted every time you play.

“A lot of people are really protective of their sores, kill-death rations and such,” says Jon.

The online Xbox community is extremely active. Everyone knows everyone else’s stats, achievements, and which games they’ve been playing.

“It’s what makes me play Xbox,” says Jon.

They’re all known by their nicknames and avatars, which they can customize by buying clothes and props. Jon is JKAT.

“JKAT is a hippy … JKAT wears grey pants, he has a blue almost komodo-like shirt, lots of colors, he wears purple-pink tinge round glasses, has his hair slicked to one side, and I believe he wears moccasins, and it’s not long hair, it’s short hair. Oh, and I have a jar of fireflies—I bought him a jar of fireflies,” says Jon.

The freedom of an alternate reality has a major allure.

Another popular game amongst Jon’s coworkers is Dungeons and Dragons—a game where the players construct all the characters, scenes, and story lines in their heads. The only limit is literally your imagination.

“Very strict, hardened people—like, that’s their personality—it interests them. Its almost like an escape from reality, I think that’s what it all is, I think people just enjoy that in general,” says Jon.

It may seem ridiculous to picture the drunk army guys at the bar recovering the next day with a round table Dungeons and Dragons party, but it kind of makes sense. Adventurous tasks, new scenarios to test your reflexes, and heroic aspirations seem to fit the military life as well as the make belief life of games.

Dr. Marc Milner is the director of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at University of New Brunswick. His wide arching mustache distinguishes itself from the rest of his evenly trimmed beard. He believes the sense of adventure has always been one of the biggest recruiting tools for the military.

It’s important to remember that the Canadian and the American militaries are very different.  For one, the Canadians have more recruits than they can train.

“The Canadian Armed Forces are a little more sophisticated, a little more mindful of the enormous responsibility that they have,” Marc says.

A couple years ago the Canadian Military ran its “Fight Chaos” campaign with dark scenes that resembled the atmospheres found in some games.

“They were successful not because they looked like some war game that somebody was playing, but because a combination of two things, there was a sense of adventure, you’re going to do some really neat stuff … and get the opportunity to go places and serve a good cause,” says Marc.

Whatever the reason, playing video games is very popular with Jon’s military buddies, but it’s extremely unlikely that the Canadian military is actively trying to recruit that demographic. Playing video games and joining the army just both seem like good options to someone who finds the typical day-to-day boring. And the creators of Call of Duty are making a lot of money because of this.

-

Murder undermines the values that rebellion is based on—so they cannot logically coexist. In The Rebel Albert Camus describes how the inability to justify murder and injustice is what gives the world value in the face of meaninglessness.

The environmental writer, Derrick Jensen, takes up the spirit of rebellion and the struggle for meaning and legitimate action in today’s context. For him, the revolt against injustice leads to questions about pacifism and the differences between genuine morality and the power serving principles disguised as morality.

We’re at a point in history where we now have to create our own meaning for life. If there isn’t a prescribed set of values, murder would become acceptable through submission to selfish desires. This would destroy us and the earth in a constant battle for power. We can justify this if we assume there is a given lack of value—but that isn’t realistic. We don’t want to suffer and we don’t want to die, so in order to be consistent we have to accept that the people around us don’t want to die either. Rebellion is born when conditions are so intolerable that you would risk your life to see a change. It is because you consider life worth living that you even have a concept of injustice.

Camus’ rebel rejects death, which creates the values that forbid murder. This has been forgotten in the past, and it is in danger of being forgotten within the environmentally based rebellions today.

For centuries western culture found meaning in the idea of God. You had to follow a set of rules if you wanted to get in to heaven. These rules banned murder and suicide, so we didn’t really have to question them. Most of these rules required sacrifice and denial right now in exchange for rewards in the after life. These beliefs culminated in an apocalypse when God would judge and then punish or reward everyone accordingly. This is traditional Christian eschatology.

Eschatology in general is defined as the belief that “events that will occur at the end of chronological time, will give history its meaning.” When the divinely appointed King was killed in the French Revolution it symbolized the death of God in western society, but it didn’t kill the hope of the eschaton. The French immediately decided that Reason would bring a just world, so they tried to base everything on it. The problems at that time would still be solved later, they just decided that “reason,” instead of “god,” was the way to a better tomorrow. The Reign of Terror followed. We tried to use reason to fill the eschatological void but it didn’t work. When Hegel created his Dialectic he gave the eschaton solid grounds in western thought without resulting in immediate bloodshed.

Hegel’s Dialectic is described as the idea that “history is a series of moments evolving successively out of the conflicts inherent in the previous one.” According to Hegel, history is attempting to realize the absolute spirit—a force working itself out through collective human awareness. By making the unknown known it will eventually realize everything, including itself. All the steps throughout history become justified because they are leading up to a great transformation later. This is what makes Hegel the “founding father of the two totalitarian doctrines: fascism and communism.”

Marx created Dialectical Materialism by applying Hegel’s ideas to economics. He said that all the different forms of society are justified because they are on the way to an ideal classless society at some unknown time. With that at the top of the priority list human suffering can be acceptable. But Marx didn’t believe in that application. Camus quotes him to remind us that “an ends that requires unjust means in not a just ends.”

A belief that sacrifices everything for its own benefit is nihilistic. Nihilism is “the situation where everything is permitted; since there are no absolutes, presumed necessary truths are not necessary, and there are no goals or values that have intrinsic worth.” A person, or system, that believes only in itself believes only in selfish desires. This is subjective and essentially nothing. There would be no reason why the strong shouldn’t take everything at everyone else’s expense. Corporate and political powers are allowed to act like this right now, but it is clearly wrong. The belief that there is no value outside of yourself is not rooted in reality.

No matter what you believe in, you do want to live—otherwise you wouldn’t keep going. For Camus, “the love of life was always more important than the meaning of life.” When facing severe injustice we revolt. We are reminded that there is something to lose and we are willing to fight for it. This may seem individualistic but it is actually the grounds for solidarity.

The rebellion is a revolt against injustice. It starts for yourself, but the recognition of suffering extends the revolt to all mankind. To reject this is to betray the rebellion and to destroy the logical grounds for your own actions—which would give way to nihilism. “The worst blunder is still to make people suffer,” writes Camus in Between Yes and No. This is becoming clearly true, but then how do you deal with people who disagree?

Power is rarely given up willingly and any serious rebellion would find itself in a situation where “if they retreat they must accept death [and] if they advance they must accept murder.” Capital punishment never made sense. “You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others,” as the Marquis de Sade put it. But it would also never be suggested that we should stand idly by to keep our hands clean. Both options are unacceptable, so you must choose both, or neither.

The tension of staying in between two unacceptable options is central to rebellion. Moderation and self-control keeps it alive. We have to “[reject] the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it.” (Camus also suggests that this is the source of artistic creation.) We have to harness our desires and constantly moderate and create ourselves in order to be true to our core principles. “Intelligence […] is the faculty of not pursuing our ideas to extremes,” as Leon Roth put it. We must hold our beliefs within a reasonable limit and remember that it is possible to “reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars.” If we don’t, we value something above humanity in this world right now, which is all we ever have. Tomorrow doesn’t exist and Camus reminds us that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” Forgetting this is how rebellion turns in to revolution, and how the rebel finds himself playing the roles he originally opposed.

Far too often, rebellion turns in to revolution and the extreme affirmation of life becomes secondary to an idea, bringing nihilism and tyranny. The problem with revolution is that it substitutes the present for the future. While it is not traditional eschatology—in the goal being the end of history—it is still similar. The value of the future outweighs the present. It changes the “’We are’ to the ‘We Shall Be,’” rejecting the real for the ideal, and denies the world in exchange for a promise. Camus is right in saying that “instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.” The spirit of existential philosophy is to finally discuss man as he truly is. To not to get lost in nostalgia for what he might have once been, or what he might someday become, but to say yes to the world as it is and no to injustice within it. But, it is hard to believe that you wouldn’t change things for the better when the problems of your day seem so painfully obvious.

Consumer lifestyles and unrestrained corporate control is destroying the natural world. The spirit of rebellion, and potential revolution, is taking form in environmental activism today.

Derrick Jensen’s book, End Game , lays out today’s problems in a way that draws parallels to The Rebel. He introduces the reader to twenty premises that describes the world. For example, premise three is the kind of idea that is absolutely true but our culture as a whole seems to deny, “Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.” He explains the illusion of rich and poor as an accepted hierarchy of violence. He points to the problem of viewing people and the world as commodities, and then he questions the popular loyalty to pacifism. He attacks the most common arguments—such as the fear of frightening fence sitters away from your cause—and makes a moral call for radical action. He is similar to Camus in his desire to talk about the world as it is. He wants to get rid of any illusions, any hope that technology will save us, or any belief that corporate and political powers will just do the right thing if we write enough letters. He sides with the beauty of the world, but builds his argument on one subtle, but extremely important flaw.

Premise six:

“Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.”

It seems likely that he is right, but we can never be certain. Assuming that we know what will come is substituting the now for the future. It is putting an idea above reality, and it is the exact point where rebellion dies. It is through this idea that human sacrifices can be discussed. Innocent lives, like those affected by destroying dams – which he devotes four chapters in Volume II: Resistance – is not acceptable. Even without questioning the actual efficiency of these types of actions, we now know that we can never accept human suffering in the name of what’s to come.

Environmental activism is based on preserving the world so that the next generations can enjoy it. While it may seem like it is putting nature first, it is really humanity and the joy we obtain from natural beauty and usefulness that is important. We lose our point of departure when we forget this. We do desperately have to protect the planet, but like any kind of rational freedom—there is a limit. Our reason to protect nature disappears when we allow people to suffer for it. We are dealing with irrationality and nihilism anytime that history trumps humanity.

I know of another modern form of our faith in history. It is far less threatening but still potentially dangerous. The argument is that nothing matters so we should try to act in the best way possible. It is a positive form of nihilism.

It says that the concept of good and bad are relative and that both are a choice, so you might as well feel good by doing whatever you deem to be good. It may be appealing and honorable, but it ignores reality. It says that you can’t really determine if the holocaust was evil. That given the options, perhaps it resulted in the least amount of suffering possible—an even larger catastrophe might have been avoided while we were occupied with World War II. The point is that we don’t know, which is also its flaw. We do know that human suffering is wrong and trying to question it with a larger context is the same eschatological logic that we know is dangerous and invalid. We can only know right now, and we can only judge the past as it was imbedded in that time. Perhaps humanity would have been wiped out had we never known the Nazis, but as Camus put it, “history may perhaps have and end; but our task is […] to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true.”

Camus ends The Rebel by writing, “the only original rule of today [is] to learn to live and to die, and in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.” We can never pretend we know what will come or assume we can judge who should live and who should die. We may not know a lot, but some things are certain. We can’t afford to allow injustice and murder to undermine the limits within which we can live a satisfying life and continuously try to build a just, and realistic, society.

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