yesterday,  a friend of mine who visits a lot of schools in the Toronto area told me about some of her observations of varying conditions in education here.  she described the conditions of public schools in some pretty terrible terms, like feeling that she couldn't put her hands on the cafeteria tables, or being revolted by the smells that surrounded her.  then by contrast, she described a private school that she had visited where the facilities were housed in an office tower, lunches were served to students, a salad bar was available and classrooms overlooked a picturesque ravine.  i  don't think that there is a better indicator of how society is doing than the way that it treats its children – all of them.  from her account, it seems clear that the disparities that define the world of adults are well-represented in the world of children.

that would have been almost enough for its own blog entry, except that last night was also an  OOTC night for me.  it has been rather cold and very snowy lately in the typically warm city of Toronto and i was certain the inhospitality of the climate would be reflected in the attitudes of our guests and i was right.  we in canada take it for granted that people are, for the most part, good and cooperative and work towards an abstract communal betterment.  so it surprises us and it surprises me when i have to deal with people who don’t share that constructive attitude.  almost every pernicious instinct i’ve ever encountered in my long life found expression in the microcosm of my couple of hours of volunteering at the shelter, and coupled with the stress i’ve been having at work, i found that i was losing my “cool”.

there’s something very very wrong with the way that our world seems to be evolving.  i’m complicit in this evolution on many levels.  i like my iPods and my lovely cats so i give opportunities for enterprising californians and cat food producers to exploit cheap labour, harvest the planet’s resources, and subjugate entire supply chains in search of higher profit margins so that shareholders will hold onto their hopefully appreciating stocks, all the while creating billions of dollars of value for CEOs and depreciating the average joe to the point of utter expendability.  choices like my decision to get an iPod Touch software upgrade or a recirculating water fountain for my stubborn ginger-cat create the very conditions that allow my homeless associates to remain hopeless and optionless.

but i don’t have a viable, credible alternative.  the brake lines have been cut on my convertible and i’m careening down a treacherously curvy mountainside road in the dark of night.  or so it seems on some days.  i do what i can by easing off the gas, pumping the brake, chatting with a person with no hope and no ambition, but i can’t really change the inevitable outcome.

changing the world is so very very difficult.  changing the world one person at a time (i.e. starting with yourself) is so tediously unsatisfying and seemingly ineffectual.  perhaps this is why i idolize a fictitious character with incomparable superhuman capabilities.  until something as paradigm-changing as the arrival of a benevolent kryptonian humanitarian, or a resurgence of the passion that led to the french revolution, arises i guess i have to be satisfied with taking care of my unbelievably small patch of this large world that we all inhabit.  but i’m not going to be happy about it.  and i’m going to resent those who send their children to schools with salad bars, while there are so many who have to go to homeless shelters for their sustenance.

- g

song of the day for regretting those socioeconomic boundaries: low life, sting (sorry - you're going to have to figure out how this one goes on your own)