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Hi Ed, Keith, Ray,
Visiting the Northern Saskatchewan account kept taking me back to one point
you had mentioned about government support being just enough to get by. Not to
reopen the basic income arguments, but I think it does become apparent that
especially in these remote communities, a better income would alleviate a
great deal of stress. Not unlike financial assistance would deter a high
percentage of youngsters from becoming dependent upon prescription drugs.
In the long run, it would save governments enormous amounts of money and many,
many lives. Of course this does not provide people with something meaningful to
do. In isolated communities, as you have illustrated, Ed, the traditional ways
of working have all but been replaced with empty jobs for polluting
industries who are unlikely to hire locals for the reasons you stated, but
this is not anything close to really trying to help people regain
self-respect or sense of community. A return to the old ways would never work,
but a return to sanity on the part of government certainly would.Children need
community centres and recreational facilities, schooling that offers more than
the three R's and R.C. religion, computers, theatres, dance, music and art.
They need guidance from leaders who have successfully inspired others to break
the cycle, and they require the financial backing to be able to move forward or
out, if that is their wish. Stagnation is, as you said, also due to bureaucrats
trying to hang on to their jobs, and never coming up with healing solutions. It
may be too late for many adults, but children will always choose to learn, and
N.A. governments have only applied the same old short-term solutions here only
to perpetuate hopelessness.
Viva La Renaissance!
Natalia
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2004 9:27
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: Beads for
Manhattan (shortened)
Ed,
At 19:01 04/01/2004 -0500, you
wrote:
Sorry
Keith, I don't think we're talking about the same kind of thing. You are
talking about communities in transition, that need to make adjustments to
change and make them in a variety of ways, some healthy, others not.
I suppose I was. In England during the 19th century
groups of young people would move together out of their villages in the
countryside and into the cities for factory work. Almost whole hamlets would
do so in the case of Japan during the industrialisation during the Meiji
Restoration from about 1870 onwards. Much the same sort of thing applied to
Gujurati (Indian) workers who came to Coventry for factory jobs in the 1960s.
Over a period of years whole (fishing) villages would have moved. So it was
these sorts of community adjustments I was thinking of, not of the left-behind
communities that you write about below.
I'm
talking about communities that have been left behind in the process of
change, communities where a lot of things have happened but nothing further
really does - stuck communities where people are losers, but that's OK
because it's not your fault. Someone else has done that to you - government
I guess, or whatever. I describe my impressions of some communities in
northern Saskatchewan on my website at : http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/north_saskatchewan.htm .
Do take a look. I haven't looked at it for a
couple of years but, to my surprise on revisiting it, I still think it says
something.
Absolutely fascinating!
-- though depressing, of course. You did a superb job reporting there! Much
enjoyed it.
I can't possibly say anything constructive about the
"communities" you describe (which are only communities now in terms of head
counts and language). They have so totally lost their former role that there
is no "glue" to hold them together -- except fear perhaps, and a lack of
training and experience for the wider world.
I would seem that, on the
whole, the Canadian government have tried to do the decent thing with respect
to the Indian tribes, but hasn't been able to give them the community glue
that they had before. I couldn't help thinking that the places you described
-- and their total dependency of government funding -- sound so very similar
to some inner-city boroughs in London and the large cities and also the
council housing estates on the outskirts. Total desolation and hopelessness --
family violence, incest, vandalism of "community" projects, etc,
etc.
It seems to me that welfare -- by itself -- doesn't work. It might
even make the situation worse. It is nothing to do with money. One can live
quite comfortably on welfare payments -- but not within council housing estate
environments, or the Indian communities you've described. Having said that,
I've still no solutions.
Just two more brief comments. I'd written a
day or two ago that homo sapiens is a patristic species. It 's the young women
who tend to leave their home communities, not the apparently macho young men*.
Two of your comments bear this out from La Roche and Black Lake
respectively:
<<<<
In the new circumstances
of life in town, kids are caught in the middle of all of this. Boys will want
to identify with the father, though this is difficult because the father often
has no real role and because of what the fathers do to their mothers.
Daughters, on the other hand, are likely to identify with their mothers,
especially if some of the violent and abusive behavior that has become
associated with town life is directed toward them. Daughters more often than
sons complete highschool and go outside to learn, probably encouraged by
mothers who want to see them break out of the cycle of submission and abuse,
and not have to depend on the men who perpetuate it.
>>>>
<<<<
She mentioned that young people who had dropped out of
school had in many cases gone back for upgrading. More women tended to do this
than men.
>>>>
*In that posting I should have mentioned
the experience of Prof Black in Glasgow. He spent a couple of years with a
gang for his PhD thesis. They ran a big protection racket on all the shops in
the area, but had never stirred from the area. The River Clyde was only a mile
away and only one of the gang had ever seen it! There were no girls, though.
They had all left the area for jobs (and presumably husbands) in central
Glasgow and elsewhere.
Keith
Keith
Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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