The 80’s Part I: Cancer, AIDS and Cupcakes

I’m not really going to write about cupcakes. Sorry. Just thought the title could use a little sprucing up. This entry is going to be huge downer.

Cupcakes!

I am, however, going to write about Terry Fox. And later on, AIDS. I’m writing about Fox because he was pretty awesome and we’ve (I’ve) been neglecting poor ol’ Canada in my posts. I’ll be writing about AIDS because when deciding what to include in these little lessons, one of the things I look for are total game-changers; things that forever changed our culture in ways we couldn’t even begin to measure or understand for years to come. But first; Mr. Fox.

You guys probably know a few of the basics about Terry Fox, so I’ll do what I can to put him in his proper, historical context. For starters, he’d be turning 54 this summer if cancer hadn’t taken him. That makes him a Canadian Baby Boomer. Almost. Our baby boom came a bit later than the American’s, so by those numbers, Fox just qualifies.

The story goes that when he was still basically a kid studying kinesiology at Simon Fraser (to become a gym teacher: irony!) he was diagnosed with cancer in his knee and had to have his leg amputated. He recovered remarkably quickly and was playing golf with his dad a few months after the surgery.

Because he was so impressed with the diagnostic methods that caught his cancer and the treatment he received, he decided it would be worthwhile to contribute somehow to further cancer research. Hence; The Marathon of Hope. Despite the loss of his leg, he planned to run across Canada, rasing money for cancer research as he went. The plan was to start in St. John’s, Newfoundland and finish up in Victoria, British Columbia.

He started the trek on April 12th, 1980. Things were pretty rough to start with. April is still early spring and Fox was hit with freezing rain and at least one snowstorm before the weather softened up for him. He was also disappointed at the poor turnouts he was getting along the way.

But as the Marathon went on, he started gathering more momentum and support. He was drawing crowds of thousands by the time he made it to Ottawa and Toronto. Sadly, he didn’t make it too much farther than that.

Just outside of Thunder Bay, he had to stop because of a persistent pain in his chest. It turned out that his cancer had returned and spread to his lungs. Of course, the Marathon ended there after having raised about 1.7 million dollars.

Subsequent fundraising efforts like telethons, however, continued to raise money throughout the following year, reaching a total of 23 million.

Terry Fox died about a year after he started his Marathon on June 28, 1981.

Cancer, as tragic as it is, has one good thing going for it: there is no social stigma attached to it. I mean, yeah, if someone smoked two packs a day for thirty years and then gets lung cancer, a few people might whisper amongst themselves that they brought it on themselves. But cancer has never really drawn the kind of stigma that AIDS has. And there are historical reasons for that.

Time to back up and make sure we all know what we’re talking about. AIDS, if you don’t already know, is written all in caps like that not because we’re shouting it, but because it stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. And AIDS in turn is caused by HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). Here’s the interesting thing about HIV and AIDS: not a single person has ever dies directly from either of them. What does happen is you get infected with HIV which effectively destroys your body’s immune system. It’s at this point that you officially have AIDS. And what that means is your body has no way to fight off all the thousands of little bugs and whatnot you’re bombarded with every day.

I caught a cold last week. I took a day off work to try to rest and get better. It worked pretty well. If I had AIDS on the other hand, I’d be dead. The cold would have killed me. Total drag.

Back to stigma. When someone gets cancer, it’s unlikely that anyone will think it’s because there’s something wrong with them as a person. Cancer just happens, right? Sure, there are things we can do to increase or decrease the odds a bit, but it seems to strike anyone it wants (totally anthropomorphizing here: cancer doesn’t want anything). AIDS, on the other hand, well, that’s a different story.

The first North American case of AIDS was officially diagnosed in 1981. But it wasn’t called that then. Because it was first identified in a very small population of gay men, the media started calling it GRID; Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. It only took about a year before doctors realized this was not in any way restricted to the gay community, but it was too late. Despite its official name now being AIDS, the disease would always, among some <ahem> less educated individuals be known as “that there gay plague.”

And that thing about it coming from a monkey? Yeah, that’s true. But not in the way you think it is. So stop thinking that.

A bunch of very smart doctors and scientists have figured out that somewhere in the Congo (Africa), through the practice of hunting primates for sport, meat and souvenir export, SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) mutated and made the jump to people. It was carried through immigration to Haiti to North America over the next couple of decades. And like all good pandemics, once it took hold, it was almost impossible to contain and/or wipe out.

Which is where we’re at now. More or less. There is no vaccine and there is no cure. We’ve got some pretty good medications that can halt the progress of HIV before it becomes AIDS, but even at that, a person’s life span will be pretty dramatically shortened because of how harsh the drugs themselves are on a person’s system.

AIDS, and I remember this becoming a thing, made us terrified of blood. It effectively created, or at least strengthened, a new social taboo against exposure to any kind of bodily fluids. Before AIDS, it was a big thing for kids to become “blood brothers.” Each kid would make a little cut on one finger, or maybe their palm and the two kids would hold the open wounds together. Therefore, swapping blood and bonding beyond just mere friendship. Not many people do that anymore.

And here’s the really evil part: because of how it’s spread: unprotected sex and needle-sharing mainly, it’s too easy to point to a really vulnerable population and say they deserved it. For example: if you live in a part of the world that is so poor you don’t have access to basic medical supplies, condoms might be hard to come by. You know, like huge parts of Africa. This a gives a horrendously racist person the opportunity to believe that Africans are somehow more promiscuous than whites.

Ugh. I don’t even like writing that, but it’s important to at least try and understand the logic of a delusional mind.

Or, through no fault of your own, you never managed to finish high school and/or get your life sorted out so find yourself more or less living on the street, using your body as currency and numbing the pain of that through chronic heroin use. This might give someone an excuse to point to young people and say they have no self-control, no character.

Believe it or not, there are plenty of people out there who are so lacking in compassion that they will say something ridiculous like these people somehow deserve what they got because of their wicked ways. You don’t get that so much with cancer.

Sorry. Got a little preachy there at the end. I can’t help it when I see people beating up on other, more vulnerable people.

The 70’s Part II: The Dark Side of Hippies

Oh, we’re not done with the hippies yet. As we’ve seen, people can exhibit some pretty extreme and unusual behaviour when faced with extreme and unusual circumstances. And some folks are just nuts. Like Jim Jones. But we’ll get to him later.

First: context. In the United States, the civil rights movement was still right in people’s’ rearview mirror. This is hard to believe now, but especially in the deep south, lots of people still weren’t used to seeing African-Americans integrated into their everyday life.

Also, we’re still deep in the middle of the cold war. Paranoia and fear of the communist threat was still running extremely high.

But what’s this got to do with hippies, right? At Woodstock, we saw the best of them. A bit grimy, but really pretty good. Polite, peaceful, happy. No problem. They also largely believed in embracing people’s’ differences (like ethnicity / skin colour) and sharing with one another (you know, communal type stuff). Hippies were into doing things like going off to live on communally owned farms and living off the land. You know, tree-hugging and whatnot. But that was all pretty small-scale and harmless. The authorities took very little notice.

Now we get to Jim Jones. In the fifties, he established a kind of non-theistic (no gods involved) organization called the People’s Temple that preached integrationism (racial mixing) and socialism. It also wasn’t keen on most religions. He was following a traditional communist line that it was the “opiate of the people.” When this movement stated gaining momentum, you can see how the mainstream culture might have reacted badly to it.

Things very quickly got too hot for Jones in Indiana (a very “bible belt” traditional-type state…am I using too many parentheses this post?). He moved his operation to California in the sixties where he thought people might be a bit more accepting of his ideas. He was right for a while, but eventually felt the need to move his flock out of the U.S. altogether.

After looking around for a bit, he settled on the South American country of Guyana. It had a few things going for it. For starters, it had a weak extradition policy with America. That meant the American authorities would have a hard time dragging Jones back should they get a mind to. Guyana was also pretty small and poor. Most people were trying to leave the country, so Jones didn’t have a really hard time convincing their government to let him import hundreds of people, supplies, weapons, pretty much whatever he wanted if it meant he brought cash with him as well. For these reasons it was here that he established The People’s Temple Agricultural Project, or as it is more commonly known, Jonestown.

After the large commune was established, Jones clamped down his control. Residents on the commune worked six days a week for about twelve hours a day, and that was when they weren’t studying socialist materials. Jones had loudspeakers installed throughout the grounds so residents could hear his rambling monologues all day, no matter where they were. He mainly talked about America’s imperialist capitalism and praised North Korea, China and Russia for their struggles.

Despite the armed guards, the beatings that were used for punishment for any number of minor infractions and the extremely poor diet, no member of the People’s Temple ever told any official investigator they were being held against their will. Because of this, there was little the authorities could do.

But it doesn’t take much for something like this to suddenly go very, very badly. For starters, Jones’ health was deteriorating quickly. Also, families of some of the Temple members were getting, understandibly, concerned.

It was when a U.S. congressman, Leo Ryan, tried to visit the compound that things went from bad to way worse in a matter of hours. The day after Ryan’s visit, a number of Jones’ cultists tried to leave with the congressman when he returned to Georgetown. About ten of Jones’ loyalists caught up with the group at the airstrip and gunned them down.

Jones knew the end was near. Previous to all this, he had been preparing his population for just such a set of circumstances. So just like they rehearsed, over nine hundred people lined up to receive a small cup of red Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. They all drank and they all died. Except Jones. He was found later with a close-range gunshot wound to the head. It’s not clear if he did it himself or had someone do it for him, but hey, dead is dead I suppose.

So that’s what can happen when society gets all freaked out and paranoid; it opens the way for a psychopath to swoop in and give people what they think they want.

Yup. Like Hitler.

I’m not going to editorialize any more than that. We can spend some time tomorrow discussing how or why nine-hundred people would willingly follow someone who is so clearly deranged, and we may or may not come to any understanding of it. The important thing is to try. That, more than anything, is what will protect you from being one of the next nine-hundred.

And Kool-Aid ain’t always actually Kool-Aid. If you know what I mean.

The 70’s Part I: Finally!

The year is 1975. It is a quiet evening. A young married couple leave their car and approach the Ottawa Civic hospital. She’s holding her belly and he’s guiding her by the elbow. And I, well, let me put it this way; I was ready to get out and start doin’ some damage.

Funny story about me: I was born folded in half. Dislocated both my hips. That’s right; the first thing I did in this world was moon it. Spent the next six months in leg braces, but it was totally worth it. That’s just how I roll.

Too much information? Tough! You can’t un-read that. Ha!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Despite the fact that we’re firmly on my turf now, I don’t actually remember much from that decade. I mean, I was only five by the time the whole thing was over. I’ll still be relying pretty heavily on other sources to tell me what happened.

There were some pretty momentous changes going on in the world. In the late seventies, Iran would go to war with Iraq. There was an energy crisis. People started getting into this whole “environmentalism” idea. Microsoft was founded. “Star Wars” premiered. VCR’s and floppy disks are introduced. Abortion is legalized in the U.S. and, in an interesting twist, the first “test-tube baby” is born.

As you can see, the level of technology is starting to catch up with what we’ve got today. None of this stuff is anywhere near as advanced as what we’ve got, but the foundations are there. Technology is funny that way. Much like populations, once they start or grow or advance, the rate quickly becomes exponential.

I won’t be putting a lot of factual detail in this particular post, because that’s what you guys are going to seek out in class. I will say this though: we’re finally turning our sights on Canada.

I love my country. I really do. It’s a wonderful place. Mainly because of how peaceful it usually is. Usually.

But in the 70’s we had: a major terrorist crisis involving a high-level kidnapping and murder; a fifty-two year old prime minister marries a twenty-two year old woman; the greatest international hockey victory of all time; the tallest free-standing structure in the world is built; the death penalty is abolished; a nuclear powered satellite crashes within our borders; and…well yeah, Star Wars!

So strap on your research face, ’cause y’all is gonna do some learnin’.

 

The 60’s Part II: Abstinence, Sobriety and Wholesome Entertainment

Nah, just kidding. It’s all sex, drugs and rock n’ roll today, kids. I will be bringing samples of only one of those to class. Guess which one.

Let’s do a little math. Baby Boom, right? Started around 1945, after the war ended. Let’s say it was in full swing by the late fourties / early fifties. So what we’ve got in the fifties is a massive number of kids growing up in the suburbs.

The suburbs, in case you didn’t know, are neighbourhoods that kind of circle the city centers. Cities are by definition built to hold a lot of people in a relatively small space. And there was enough space within the cities for quite a long time. The end of the war changed that. There were thousands upon thousands of soldiers returning home and they wanted to start families. But let’s consider what exactly they’re returning home from: the horrors of WWII. They didn’t want to just start families; they wanted to start families in safe, clean, predictable, peaceful communities. Witness the birth of the suburb. Row upon row of neat, identical houses.

I do loves me a nice bit of historical irony. You remember what fascism is based on? Unity, right? These men came back from a bitter, six-year struggle against fascist regimes, only to crave the comfort and stability that only conformity can bring. “Weird” behaviour simply was not tolerated. Everyone dressed the same, ate the same food, drove the same cars, had the same haircuts, listened to the same music. Which worked for a little while.

Then those adorable little tots from the fifties turned into…

…duh-duh-duuuuuh…

teenagers!

And everything went to hell. Well, I’m sure the teenagers didn’t think so. Think for a second about how hard you would rebel if you grow up under the thumb of the kind of hyper-conformity that was expected in the 1950’s.

Here’s where the Beatles are going to help us out a bit. The Beatles are many things to many people, but basically, they were a British pop-rock quartet who were active mainly between the years of 1960 and 1970. How perfect is that? They so beautifully illustrate the rapid evolution of early rock music to the trippier stuff of the hippies that I can’t help but just hold up pictures of them and go; look: here’s rock in the fifties and early sixties, and here it is ten years later.

Have you ever seen a hippier bunch of hippies? I bet they aren’t even wearing shoes.

The point is that all these millions of Baby Boomers are growing up at the same time and becoming teenagers a the same time and because of their sheer numbers are completely transforming popular culture very, very quickly and dramatically.

I mean, look at these guys! That first picture is pretty typical of “rock” groups of the late fifties. They wore matching outfits. With ties. And let’s not forget that that was considered the devil’s music by the establishment. Then in ten short years it turns into, well, that.

Old people were losing their minds and were convinced that everything they’d fought for was being thrown out the window by these ungrateful freaks.

The ungrateful freaks, in the meantime, were quick to point out that they were free to be freaks because the older people had been nice enough to go beat Hitler and his fascists.

Irony. It’ll get you every time.

There’s the rock and roll. And I did promise you sex and drugs as well. Historically speaking, of course.

The sex part is all thanks to a tiny pill. Before the sixties, contraceptives were fairly difficult to get ahold of. Not impossible, just impractical. Starting in the sixties, on the other hand, the birth control pill was available to any woman who could make it in to see her doctor and was no more inconvenient than remembering to take it every day. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. What this meant was that teenagers, in all their rebellious glory, could now have consequence-free sex. Remember, this is before AIDS. Worst that could happen was some kind of non-fatal, probably curable STI like syphilis or gonorrhea. And so we have the Sexual Revolution. Lots of people having sex who are neither married, nor plan to have children right away.

Again; the old people are losing their minds.

And then there’s the drugs. There’s not really much to say about that except that it was simply a part of this youth culture to embrace various kinds of drugs as a way of, in Timothy Leary’s famous words, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” It was a way for the entire “counter-culture” to distance themselves from what they saw as  a broken establishment. They very much didn’t want to have anything to do with the rigid conformity that was imposed by the veterans returning from the war. They were taking drugs with a socio-political purpose. Also, I suspect they just wanted to get high.

In 1969, the whole thing culminated very symbolically in upstate New York at a three-day music festival called Woodstock. It’s probably safe to say that nowhere else since or before has there been a more concentrated dose of sex, drugs and rock and roll. ‘Cause soon after that would come the 70’s. And that means disco. Yikes.

The 60’s Part I: May You Live in Interesting Times

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am having an increasingly difficult time deciding what to include in our little trip through the past hundred years. Now that we’ve gotten to the 1960’s, here’s the list possible topics I started with: the Berlin Wall being built; the Soviets put a man in space; the Cuban missile crisis; Marilyn Monroe dies; John F. Kennedy is assassinated; Martin Luther King jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream Speech”; the civil rights act is passed in the United States; “Beatlemania” hits the U.S.; Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison in South Africa; the U.S. sends troops to Vietnam; “Star Trek” premiers; the first heart transplant is performed; the first Super Bowl is held (the associated snacks leading to many more transplants being needed); Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated; the first man walks on the moon; Woodstock is held in upstate New York; and finally, “Sesame Street” premiers.

Yeah, you go ahead and try to decide what’s most important out of that mess. So here’s what we’ll do: we’ll turn to our categories to make sure we get a nice, comprehensive spread of topics. Technological, cultural, economic and military.

To keep some semblance of structure, I’ll do two per day and we’ll have “covered” the sixties in two days.

Having said all that, today’s two topics will be the Berlin Wall (economic) and the Space Race (technology).

We’ll start with the Berlin Wall because there is no better symbol for the way in which the world was divided in the decades following the Second World War. The Communists were in the East, led by The Soviet Union and the Capitalists were in the West, led by The United States of America.

I know I’ve already explained the difference between the two in class, but it might be worthwhile to take a step back and make sure we understand exactly why these two camps hated and feared each other so very badly. I’ll to be both brief and simple.

Mainly, the idea behind capitalism is that any individual is allowed to make as much money as they possibly can. It is, in fact, The American Dream; the idea that you can come from nothing, start a company and make billions, no matter who you are.

With communism, the opposite is true. The government owns all the wealth-producing industry of the country. In that sense, everyone works for the government and is paid by the government. The authorities see to it that everyone gets a more or less equal share of the available wealth. In theory, there are no billionaires and there are no poor people.

That’s the basics. What makes this slightly more complicated is that no country has ever been purely communist or capitalist. Even in a capitalist country like America or Canada, we collect taxes. That means that the government is at least partially taking the wealth you’ve earned and redistributing it, communist style, in the form of health care, roads, schools, sewers, libraries, etc. And in Communist countries, no one has ever really been able to achieve that perfect sharing of wealth that looks so nice in theory.

This begs the question: why can’t they all just leave each other alone? Why all the animosity? Even though they seem like they’re just different ideas on how to run a country, there’s so much more running under the surface. To begin with, any time you have two “sides” to anything, there’s some basic sociology that comes into to play. One side has to “win”. It’s got to be better, bigger, stronger, whatever. I mean, it is still all men in charge at this point. Do you really think it won’t degenerate into a giant peeing contest?

Also, the communists perceive the capitalists as being a bunch of crooked, fat-cat billionaires living unfairly off the backs of the poor working folk. They’re not entirely wrong about that. The capitalists see the communists as a bunch of freedom-hating dictators bent on taking all their hard-earned stuff away. That might be fair too. When we get into more current politics, you’ll see how these (now very old) rivalries are still very much alive and well.

Right. Where were we? Oh yeah; the Berlin Wall. Like I said; there is no better symbol for the division between the Eastern Bloc (group of communist countries in Eastern Europe) and Western Europe because, well, it was an actual barrier separating the two sides. There was this thing called the “Iron Curtain” that was a kind of symbolic information barrier that kept anyone in the West from knowing what was going on in the East, but there was no actual iron curtain. That would be silly.

A big wall though, that’s what you need to keep your people from mixing. After World War II, Germany was divided between leaders who thought they should side with the Soviet communists and those who felt the capitalist Westerners were the ones to follow. There was so much emigration (mainly from East to West) that starting in 1961 the East Germans built a wall across the country to try to stop this. And it worked. It’s called the Berlin Wall because it happened to run right through the city of Berlin, but the barrier itself, in the form of barbed wire, mine fields and armed checkpoints ran the length of the entire country.

But why the need? Why were so many Eastern Europeans so keen to go West? During the 50’s, Western Germany was under the influence of capitalist powers and saw an enormous amount of economic growth. Their standard of living was steadily increasing. More food; better housing; more popular, American influenced culture and so on. In the East, however, Stalin was still in charge. Stalin was not a fun guy. Bit of a control freak. He had a group of countries under his control that we call The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). I don’t know if he was completely power mad and full of crap of if he was really convinced that this was the way to go, but he sold the East Germans, and everyone else under his influence on the idea that they could build an enormous, united republic based on the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin (a.k.a.Marxism, a.k.a. communism).

The trouble is that for this to work, an individual person needs to give up an enormous amount of their personal freedom. At least if we’re trying out communism Stalin style. You need to work where you’re  told and live where you’re told. And for that to work, the government is going to have to control the media as well because you can’t have your people looking over the fence at the great time the folks over there are having, or they won’t want to do as they’re told. The result of all this is a pretty joyless, bleak culture. The West was looking pretty damn good.

Eventually, if you want to lead like Stalin did and keep your people under tight control, you’re going to have to build a great, big wall.

Phew! Nearly 1200 words and I haven’t even gotten to the Space Race.

It was exactly what it sounds like; a race to get into space. Like a peeing contest but with rockets.

With the nuclear age upon us, and East and West trying like to hell to prove who was “better”, the world turned its attention to the final frontier. So to speak. Both the Americans and Russians felt that it would prove their superiority once and for all if they could get to space and, I dunno, float around for a bit I guess. I suppose the ultimate goal was to explore, discover and possibly find valuable natural resources, but it was mainly about who had the biggest rockets. Paging Dr. Freud.

Here’s a pretty handy link for more detail on the space race: http://www.thespacerace.com/timeline/, but I’ll sum up the highlights for you.

Basically, the Russians beat the Americans to nearly every significant “first.” Life in the Eastern Bloc may have been bleak and joyless, but man could they get things done. For example, they were the first to get a satellite in space. In 1957 they launched a tiny satellite, not a whole lot bigger than a basketball, called Sputnik into orbit. The Americans get Explorer One into orbit in 1958. Score one for the Ruskies.

In early 1959, the Russians launch Luna 1. It’s the first man-made object to orbit the sun. Later that year they launch Luna 2. It’s the first object to “impact” the moon.

I love that that’s the goal here. To hit the moon with something. Like a kid playing with a really big slingshot.

On April 12th, 1961, the Russians put Yuri Gagarin in space. The first man in space.

Shortly before that, John F. Kennedy had become president of the United States. About a month after Gagarin orbits the Earth, Kennedy addresses congress (like their parliament) and challenges them to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. They manage to do it by July 20th, 1969. Not cutting it too close. The Russians have never bothered to make the trip. Thank goodness for them, because it’s about the only thing they beat the Russians to.

There are a fair number of people who believe the lunar landing is a big hoax. That is was faked because they couldn’t really do it, but were so desperate to beat the Soviets they just faked it instead.

Last thing: rockets are great for getting into space. They also happen to be really effective nuclear warhead delivery systems. So just like making cylinders for steam engines led to making better gun barrels that were in turn used in WWI, rocket technology that was apparently being developed for space travel could really easily be applied to nuking each other. And so the cycle continues…

 

Some Clarification. And Made Up History.

A while ago I promised a few words on how the notebooks will be evaluated. Here they are:

The notebooks represent ten percent of your mark for this unit. If all you’re after is seven to eight of those percents (percent? ugh…too sick to care) then all you have to do is have a complete notebook. That means you’ve written down more or less everything I put on the board, along with a few little textbook activities.

The nines and tens will be reserved for the people who have done more. Maybe you’ve written down things I actually said, but never wrote on the board. Maybe you’ve jotted down a few questions or insights of your own. Maybe you’ve written down a few points from this blog or items from your own research on any given topic. That’s what I call going above and beyond and that’s what level 4’s are meant to represent.

Now, a few words on the final project. I think I’ve made my instructions clear, but perhaps an example will be helpful. For my example, I’ll be using the decade immediately preceding the oeuvre of your assignment. Also, I will completely invent all the facts therein. Remember; the way you deliver this information is entirely up to you.

1900~1910

1. Cultural: Pointy shoes imbued with opium become all the rage in France. This is historically significant because it was only the wealthier class who were able to afford such an indulgent fashion statement and so it was they who dropped dead in great numbers due to massive overdoses. This paved the way for a newly emerging middle class of wealthy merchants. This could be seen as an economic movement, but seeing as it was caused by a clothing fashion, I have chosen to put it in the cultural category.

2. Technology: The mass immigration of various Eastern Europeans prompts the invention of the “Rapid-ink,” or “Rapink” as it came to be known. As part of their processing, immigrants were quickly tattooed (using the Rapink) with the name of their country of origin across the back of their neck in an effort to keep, for example, the Polish separated from the Ukrainians. This is a superb example of discrimination, foreshadowing such things as Apartheid and The Holocaust.

3. Economic: An unintended side-effect of this tattooing practice was to give these groups of immigrants an inflated sense of solidarity, thus hastening a unionizing process amongst the larger work forces. This led to a temporary dip in productivity, in turn causing a measurable dip in North America’s gross domestic product, foreshadowing the Stock Market crash of 1929.

4. Military: There are some indications that in 1908, dolphins were being trained to carry torpedoes to enemy warships. Most major navies were experimenting with this practice, but it was quickly abandoned when the dolphins realized the suicidal nature of their mission and revolted, destroying many of their own ships.

5. Wild Card (spelunking): In 1905, spelunking becomes all the rage in the Middle-East. An unheard of period of peace ensues as thousands suit up to explore the region’s thousands of caves. Eventually, of course, they run out of caves and get back to the business of fighting bitterly over bits of desert. And now caves too.

6. Wild Card (industry): King Industries popularizes the Widget, revolutionizing the, um, world of…errrrr…widgets. It is suspected that King himself stole the design from his main competitor, Andrew J. Kerr-Wilson who would later, ironically, become known as The Widget King. This embittered King so severely it led to his permanent institutionalization.

So that’s how it’s done. Six things. Four categories. Ten decades. It took me about half an hour to do that and I had to make it all up. You get to use actual stuff out of books. So it should be easier. Let me know if you still have any questions.

The 50’s Part I: Everything Is Awesome Again!

It is getting harder and harder to know where to being with these blogs. It’s not as though history gets less complex as time goes on. If anything, complications create further, more entangled complications and it becomes increasingly difficult to give you guys the basic “need-to-knows.” But I’ll try anyway.

Today, I’ll try to connect up the first half of the 20th century with the second half. In other words, in the continuum of these past hundred years, the fifties are a logical halfway point. We can discuss the events of the fifties as being the result of what happened before and what those events caused to happen later. Quick example: the end of WWII directly caused a “baby boom.” Then the baby boomers themselves caused both the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution. Never thought you would see war and sex so closely connected, didja?

Let’s back up and make sure we all understand what’s meant by a baby boom. It’s almost exactly what it sounds like. I say “almost” because as far as I know, no babies were actually blown up during this period. What did happen was a massive jump in birth rates following WWII. This happened for a couple of reasons. Reason number one was that soldiers were returning from oversees and getting down to the business of starting a family. Bow-chick-a-wow-wow.

Also, a lot of people had been waiting for more favourable economic conditions before they brought kids into the world. Remember, the world was still recovering from a massive depression. The second world war got people back to work, got industry moving again and virtually ended that depression. More money means more people starting their families. More chick-a-wow.

Time to learn a new word: demographic. A demographic is an identifiable portion of a population. Examples are: women; men; women over fifty; men under 25; families with three children or less; pet owners; people with incomes over $100,000; jugglers who own more than two pairs of red shoes who do their grocery shopping on Tuesdays, but only if it’s sunny. That first group is very large. About half of all people. That last one is very small. It’s just Gary.

Because that first demographic is very large, they get a lot of attention. A lot of that attention is from marketers. Certain television shows appeal more to women, so you will see more advertisements for eyeliner and floor cleaner during them. If you’re watching UFC, you’ll see more ads for big trucks. This is not sexist; merely an observation.

Poor Gary has no advertising targeted him. But he’s probably happier that way.

The Baby Boomers (so big they even get capitalized) were, and still are an enormous demographic. Think about it: they were all babies at the same time. For a few years the stroller and baby food industries did very well. They were all kids at the same time. Hula-hoops were huge. And yes, they were all <gasp> teenagers at the same time. Those were dark, dark times.

So that’s what the Baby Boomers are. A really big demographic that will go on to drive every major social, political and economic trend until, well, they’re still kind of doing that. But we’re going to put them on a shelf for a bit and come back to them in the sixties when they really get up to some shenanigans.

I want to move on to the Korean War. Or “police action.” Or “military mobilization.” Whatever you want to call it, lots of people were trying to kill each one another with guns and bombs and whatnot. Sounds like a war to me.

What it actually was, was a “proxy war.” Doing something by proxy means you have some kind of interest in the outcome of a situation, but you’re letting someone else do the actual work. For example, if you can’t get to a polling station on election day, you can have someone vote by proxy for you.

The Korean conflict appeared on the surface to be a civil war between The Republic of Korea (south) and The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (north). However, supporting the capitalist south was the United States and supporting the communist north was China and the Soviet Union. To stretch the metaphor a bit, the Cold War had symptoms. Get it? Cold? Symptoms? Yeesh, tough crowd.

The capitalist States and the communist Soviets weren’t really prepared to get into an all-out war with each other, but they were willing to throw their support behind other countries who were fighting for similar interests. We’ll be talking a bit about Vietnam next week. It was pretty much this exact situation all over again, but in a different, tiny Asian country. But with more napalm.

The end of that little story is North Korea and South Korea are still separated to this day. They’re divided neatly in the middle with a “demilitarized” zone acting as a buffer between the two. And unless you’re living under a rock, you’re at least somewhat aware that tensions have been getting even higher over there because of the suspicions we have regarding North Korea developing nuclear weapons of their own. Yikes.

Now come back to North America for a bit. We need to talk about African Americans.

Or “black” people as they are often called. Are we okay with that? Hard to tell sometimes.

African American is actually pretty accurate in this case. During the height of the slave trade, so many Africans were brought over to the United States, it forever changed their overall demographic. I mean, it’s not as though they all got shipped back as soon as slavery was abolished. So they’re immigrants too, just not in the way the Europeans were. Even after slavery was outlawed after the United States’ Civil War, it’s not as though racism just evaporated. In fact, there were still plenty of segregation laws; rules stating that blacks and whites couldn’t mix in schools, restaurants or even on public transportation.

Enter Rosa Parks. In Alabama, 1955, Parks was going home after a long day at work. She caught her usual bus and sat, as was the law, in the “colored” section. After a few stops, the “white” section filled up so the bus driver came back and moved the colored sign to behind where Parks was sitting and asked her and three others near her to move. The three other black people moved, but she refused. The driver called the police, she was arrested and spent the night in jail. This event is regarded as the beginning of the civil rights movement in the United States.

Neat story, right? It’s also an opportunity for me teach you something about civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is when you deliberately break the law because you feel it is unjust. It’s important to note both the “civil” and “disobedient” parts though. If you plan on going and breaking some rules because you think they’re unfair or are somehow violating your basic rights, you had better do it in a civilized way. If you get all aggressive and/or abusive, your message will be totally eclipsed by your behaviour and you’ll be perceived as nothing more than a jerk who doesn’t feel like cooperating.

Rosa Parks went to jail very politely.

The 40’s Part II: The End Was Only the Beginning

We’re not all speaking German, so I guess we must have won the war. Evil had been defeated, the monsters were dead (mostly) and the world could breathe a big sigh of relief. For a minute or two, anyway.

We’ll get into more detail about the so-called Cold War in later lessons but for now, understand this: WWII was absolutely devastating for the countries who were directly involved. Going into the conflict, Great Britain and Germany were the world’s two greatest industrial/economic powers. Beating each other to a pulp changed all that. But because the United States and the Soviet Union were geographically pretty far from most of the action, they wound up emerging as the new superpowers. Unfortunately, each of them had their own political / economic ideology; each incompatible with the other.

Big words. I know.

What it means is they had different ideas about how things should be done. And because they were on opposite sides of the world and came from different cultures, the usual mistrust and outright hostilities followed. Which wouldn’t be such a big deal if both sides didn’t have nuclear weapons and itchy trigger fingers. That’s why the period from 1945 all the way to 1991 is known as The Cold War. If it had been a “hot” war, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But I digress.

I want to do the same thing here that I did when we discussed the 10’s. Other things were happening besides the war. I mean, it was over halfway through the decade. So what then? It turns out, quite a lot actually.

To put a framework on it, I’ll describe a couple of events in a kind of “isn’t it weird that these apparently opposing things should happen at around the same time” sort of structure.

Let’s start with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But first you need to know a little bit about what The Holy Bible is. I know you think you know but there’s a lot of misinformation floating around out there about what it really is. To begin with; it’s a lot of books in one. Saying The Holy Bible is one book is like saying Africa is one country. In fact, it’s a collection of all sorts of different kinds of texts, written aver a period of centuries by a variety of people. To understand what the Dead Sea Scrolls are, you have to know the big division inThe Holy Bible is between the Old and New Testament. The Old Testament is a series of Hebraic (Jewish) writings on which the Jewish religion is based. Islam and Christianity both base a lot of what they’re about on the texts of the Old Testament, though they all have their own way of interpreting a lot of what’s in there. The other half is the New Testament. That’s all the Jesus stuff and what he said. So; Old Testament is the pre-Jesus stuff that all three major world religions are based on and the New Testament is what Christianity, specifically, is based on. Clear?

Now back to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Consider for a moment that billions of people who identify as being a member of one of the Big Three: Islam, Christianity and Judaism hold up the Old Testament as being the bedrock foundation of their faith. Problem is, it’s a really, really old book that has been translated and retranslated so many times over the thousands of years it’s existed that we often question what it may have originally said.

In 1947, in a series of caves that were found on the shores of the Dead Sea, a series of 947 scrolls containing Biblical and para-biblical documents were found. The cool thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they’re nearly two thousand years old. As in; from around the time of Christ himself. And they’re written in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. It’s like we’ve been working from a copy of a copy of a copy for centuries and all of a sudden someone finds an original that validates what we’d hoped was an accurate translation. And it does. It’s been called the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century. Like Indiana Jones finding the Lost Ark of the Covenant but for real.

So there’s our hugely significant religious discovery. Now for our big scientific theory…

But first, to keep things parallel with our religious discovery, I need to make sure you understand what exactly a scientific theory is, just like I gave you a brief run-down of the structure of The Holy Bible. A scientific theory is meant to explain why a bunch of observed phenomena are what they are. It needs to fit. Ideally, it will also accurately predict what will happen in the future, given certain circumstances. For example: Newton and his theory of gravity. He sees an apple fall (probably a made-up story, btw) and he formulates a theory about how matter attracts other matter. His theory predicts that if he throws a ball in the air, it will come back down. If it doesn’t, he needs to revise the theory.

There were a series of observations in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s we were having a hard time explaining. Telescopes were getting a lot better and some astronomers were using them along with some other instruments to measure “red shift” in celestial bodies like nebulae and stars. A red shift means they’re moving away from us. It’s the same kind of thing that causes a car horn to sound higher in pitch when it’s approaching and lower when it’s moving away. Turned out that everything we looked at was moving away from us. Huh. Well that’s weird.

After a lot of people made a lot of observations and did a lot of impressively advanced math, a man named Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic Priest inferred the expansion of the universe. It follows that if the universe is expanding in all directions, then it must be expanding from a single point. If we reverse time back to that point, we can guess that the whole thing started with a “Big Bang.”

Let’s be clear and simple: the theory is that about 14 billion years ago, there was a singularity (a point in space of infinite density). Something happened to cause that point to expanded rapidly (explode). The contents of the explosion was all the existing energy, matter and space in the universe. Space? How could there be no space? Yeah, I know. It’s messed up. Not only did the whole thing erupt into being 14 billion years ago, but we’re still expanding.

Incidentally, this theory has two competing predictions for what will happen next: 1. The whole thing continues to expand until it cools to absolute zero, there is no longer any energy anywhere and everything is therefore dead or 2. gravity starts to pull all the stuff back together into what will eventually be a “Big Crunch.” Relax; neither of these things will happen for another several billion years. So keep brushing your teeth and doing your homework.

As limited as the theory is, it is an alternative explanation of the origins of the universe. Alternative to the Biblical story of Genesis that is. So just like Darwin suggested humans descended from lower primates, Lemaître put forward a scientific explanation for, well, everything.

So there you have it: two major discoveries. One for religion and one for science. Apparent opposites, yet bothresulting from the human drive to figure out where we came from and/or why we’re here.

1940’s Part I: Another Damn War

Just like I had to cheat with the thirties by going back to 1929 so I could explain the stock market crash, I’m going to have to back things up to 1939 to start a world war.

All the way up through the 20’s and 30’s, there was a growing fascist movement in several countries around the world. It took hold most prominently, however, in Italy and Germany. Perhaps because they were most vulnerable. Germany, especially, was double-hit: first by the sanctions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, crippling their economy, then by the economic depression that swept the world following the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929. During the depression, about one in three people in North America were out of work. That’s pretty bad. In Germany it was close to twice that many. The German people were desperate, hungry, demoralized and afraid.

To quote Yoda, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

Suffering, by the way, is a thing to be avoided. We have it pretty cushy here and now. We don’t really know what suffering is, so it’s hard for us to empathize with people who have truly suffered. But take my word for it; a person who deliberately causes the suffering of another person has done about the worst thing a person can do.

Sorry. Got a bit preachy there. I’ll usually try to avoid doing that.

Talking about suffering; WWII was about as bad as it’s ever gotten. We’ve had plenty of conflicts since then with all kinds of suffering associated with them, but the Second World War was, and still is, the biggest of them all.

The need-to-knows: it was another “total war.” And even more so than the first one. More countries were involved and they were all contributing massive amounts of man power and industry to the effort. Also, the body count is way higher than before. Frankly, we had just gotten better at killing each other over the last twenty-some years. In WWI we saw about nine million casualties. WWII had an estimated sixty million dead. Many of them civilians.

Sixty million. Let’s take a perspective break. Canada currently has about thirty million people living in it. So WWII killed all of us. Twice.

It would be nice if we could neatly categorize all the countries involved into “good guys” and “bad guys” but sadly, things are never really that simple. Let’s try anyway.

Adolf Hitler. Supreme leader of Germany. Bent on world domination and the enslavement and/or extermination of anyone he saw as being of an “inferior” race. Okay fine. Pretty much all evil.

Benito Mussolini. Italian dictator since 1922. Also a fascist. Openly allied with Hitler. Also pretty evil. Like, cartoony evil. Mussolini’s people publicly hung him eventually. That’s how much they loved the guy.

Joseph Stalin. Autocratic (dictator) leader of the Soviet Union (Russia) from 1922 to 1953. Had a great mustache. Ruled The Soviet Union with an iron fist, causing the death and suffering of millions of his own citizens all in the name of creating a strong nation. Sounds pretty fascist, but technically Stalin was a communist. I imagine Hitler approved of Stalin’s style, if not his politics. Going into WWII, Germany and Russia signed a “non-aggression” pact. They weren’t exactly allies, but they wouldn’t attack each other either. It only took until 1941 before Russia was grabbing up too much territory for Hitler’s taste, so Germany invaded Russia. Really stupid move, by the way. Despite the fact that the United States and The Soviet Union would battle it out in the Cold War for the next half-century, they became unlikely allies in the last years of WWII. To sum up: Stalin=evil, but fought on “our” side for a while because Hitler was even eviler.

Very briefly, on “our” side: Winston Churchill was the British Prime Minister, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the President of the United States and our guy, William Lyon Mackenzie King led us through the war. You should visit his estate in the Gatineau hills in the fall. It’s breathtaking.

I mentioned it was hugely stupid of Germany to invade Russia. I say that because a lot of military historians see that decision as the beginning of the end for the German war effort. They had actually been doing really well for the first couple years of the war. They had subdued or conquered most of continental Europe by 1941 and no one seemed able to stop them. It was only when they overextended themselves that things started to fall apart.

From about 1941 through to ’43 they stopped advancing. Although, to be fair, they starting running out of places to advance to. But as many of us know thanks to “Saving Private Ryan”, in 1944 Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy (France) and started pushing the Germans back. A despairing Hitler commits suicide in a bunker i \n 1945. The Germans surrender soon after.

But the Americans weren’t done blowing things up yet. Despite the war being for all intents and purposes over, the United States dropped two atomic (nuclear) bombs on Japan. Payback, more or less, for the attack carried out by Japanese forces on the American military base at Pearl Harbour. But we’ll save our chat about nuclear capabilities until next time.

Nazis Are Jerks

Today, kids: fascism (pronounced fash-ism). Fascism is a kind of hyper-nationalism. The idea is that a strong leader emerges who has a plan to get your country on track. Maybe you need to bounce back after a major military defeat or pull yourself out of an economic depression. Or both. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The key to fascism is unity. And I don’t mean a kind of “let’s all co-operate and share ’cause it’s nice” kind of unity. It’s more like a “we are all of one mind and if you do anything that will keep us from reaching our goals, we will murder you and your entire family” kind of vibe.

Hence: Nazis are jerks.

In the twenties and thirties, so basically the years following World War One, a couple of fascist leaders started making some moves. First was Benito Mussolini in Italy. Remember, Italy had been on the losing side of alliances in the war, so didn’t come away from the whole affair looking very good. Joseph Stalin was making some pretty brutal changes in Russia, but he was a communist, so we’ll save him for later. Soon after them came an ambitious young Austrian who had a plan for Germany’s comeback. His name was Adolf Hitler.

I often have a hard time deciding where to draw my lines when I’m writing these. This one is no exception. It’s really easyto slip into a lengthy diatribe on Hitler’s Germany, Nazis, the Holocaust. There’s a lot to be said, but most of it can wait.

For now, let’s be satisfied with knowing that when times get hard, people can get very fearful and aggressive. Thanks to the collapse of the stock market, living wasn’t easy in the 1930’s. Widespread poverty and desperation created the perfect conditions for a guy like Hitler to swoop in and say, “Hey, follow me. I’ll get this country back on its feet.” Only he said it in German. And much more eloquently. Say what you will about the guy, but he knew how to deliver a speech.

So I’ll stop here. It’s a pretty short one, but this kind of thing really needs to be discussed in person. See you in class.