In the late 1950s my medical career and my literary life began to merge in pleasing ways -- pleasing to me as a writer, pleasing to readers who fed back to me the fact that the stuff I wrote was easy and even enjoyable to read and was educationally useful. I began to feel that I was doing what I was meant to do with my life. I consciously set about sharpening the skills I was developing. Medical journals were not only hospitable to the stuff I was writing; their editors began to ask me to pass judgement on other people's articles: I became a peer reviewer. That further transformed my life, bringing me into closer contact with the complex problems of scientific editing. I had a mission in life. I began mobilizing my professional expertise and my literary skills to the same worthwhile end.
The next step plunged me into the wonderful world of editing. At the University of Edinburgh, two senior staff members, Reg Pasmore, a physiologist, and Jim Robson, an internal medicine specialist, invited me to edit the 'community medicine' section of the massive multi-volume Companion to Medical Studies they were compiling. This covered everything a medical student needed to know: the basic preclinical subjects, anatomy, biochemistry and physiology, the bridging disciplines, pathology, microbiology, immunology, pharmacology, the clinical sciences, medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, psychiatry, and my specialty, community medicine, or public health. At first I innocently thought my task as a medical editor was to improve the prose in the texts that authors sent to the textbook I was editing: to tighten, clarify the language. I was taken gently in hand by the two editors in chief, who explained my role and responsibilities to me.
'Literary' editing was part of the task but it mattered less than factual correctness. First and foremost, was the text scientifically accurate, truthful, valid? Scientific writing covers a wide spectrum. Almost all scientific writers aim to present the truth as they understand it. They may grasp only part of the truth, may use inappropriate statistical tests to demonstrate that their findings are true, or - rarely - may seek to deliberately deceive readers. The most important quality required of a good editor is possession of a built-in crap-detector. At the far extreme of bad medical science writing is scientific fraud. It is rare but its impact can be devastating because it can do great harm. A scoundrel fabricated false evidence purporting to show that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine caused autism. His motive was that he had a financial interest in a company that made a competing vaccine. The fraud was soon exposed, but many otherwise intelligent young parents continue to resist getting their infants immunized against measles, mumps and rubella, and often by extension other preventable infectious diseases because publication of the fraudulent paper in a prestigious medical journal left a permanent memory stain on the vitally important public health procedure of immunizing infants against infectious diseases. Gross fabrication and deliberate fraud are rare but minor examples are common. That is why possession of an effective crap-detector is such an important quality of all editors of scientific books and journals. I'll say more about this in a future post.
Other skills are required when editing scientific books. How and where does the text I am editing fit into the big picture, the entire discipline? Is it concordant or discordant with other parts of the book, other aspects of the body of knowledge in that domain? Are all chapters at the same intellectual and professional level? (Once I had the troublesome task of telling an eminent specialist that his contribution might have been OK in the New York Times Sunday magazine but was below the level required by advanced postgraduates aiming to enter that specialty). Other things editors must detect include plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, i.e. publishing the same chapter in two or more different books. Rather often I sought second and third opinions, inviting other experts to review the MSS submitted by the expert who'd been invited to write the chapter. This is part of the peer review process which is so valued by scientific editors. I discovered that I had a talent for medical editing.
A problem arises in domains of biomedical science where uncertainty persists, for instance about which theory of causation best fits the facts, for example in coronary heart disease; or which treatment regimen is the most likely to control a potentially lethal disease such as breast cancer. In those situations the best approach is to present summaries of each point of view - with supporting factual evidence of course. Pasmore and Robson were fortunate to have in Edinburgh an eminent authority on radiotherapy and an eminent breast surgeon: they were able to offer chapters by both in the Companion to Medical Studies, and leave it to readers to decide. I learnt a great deal from Reg Pasmore and Jim Robson about the art and expertise of editing. The search committee seeking an editor in chief for the massive US reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine evidently had me in the cross-hairs and might have consulted with Reg Pasmore or Jim Robson. Perhaps that's why I, a non-American, was invited to be editor in chief of this fat volume now eponymously known as 'Maxcy-Rosenau-Last' Public Health and Preventive Medicine.
My successful completion of that task established my reputation, and led to other editing tasks, some even more challenging. I edited the Canadian Journal of Public Health for 11 years, Annals of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada for 9 years, networked with editors of other medical journals and learnt a great deal about the unique problems they faced. I got deeply immersed in compiling and editing technical dictionaries, starting with the Dictionary of Epidemiology, which was in many ways the most enjoyable professional work I ever took on. I was co-editor of several other technical reference books, ranging from Stedman's Medical Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of American English, to several encyclopedias, notably the MacMillan Encyclopedia of Public Health. All these tasks, some of them pretty large, occupied the first 12-15 years after I officially retired from the active staff of the University of Ottawa. I am among the most fortunate of people, to have had the opportunity to do such enjoyable and worthwhile jobs over such a long period of my professional life.
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Beatrice and Sidney
I picked up A Victorian Courtship by Jeanne MacKenzie (Oxford: OUP 1979) in the early 1980s, in Oxford after OUP published the first edition of the Dictionary of Epidemiology or in London. I forget which. It vanished in my bookshelves which have an uncanny ability to conceal as well as to reveal books. Happily it survived the ruthless pruning that accompanied our move from a house to an apartment. Its spine caught my eye last week. I opened and began to read it. It's a slim little book, about the courtship of Beatrice Potter, youngest of 9 daughters of a prosperous North Country industrialist, and Sidney Webb, the little Cockney who wooed and won her. They were a power couple I'd love to have known, left of centre intellectual movers and shakers. They founded the London School of Economics and the weekly New Statesman, and were prominent Fabian socialists. Beatrice and Sidney Webb were married for more than 50 years and accomplished an enormous amount of good in Britain and the world. They and their work deserve to be better known by all of us. This book helps to make them better known.
I've often wished for time travel so I could converse with many people I'd love to have known but couldn't because they lived before my time. Mary Wollstonecroft, for instance, and Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's lives overlapped with mine, so it would have been possible in theory for me to have met them, if I'd gone to London a few years sooner, and moved in the same circles. (Beatrice lived 1858-1943 and Sidney 1859-1947). But I didn't go to London for the first time until 1951, and didn't enter that magical circle of left-wing intellectuals until 1961. Perhaps it bends truth a little to say I 'entered' that magical circle: I was always on the fringe, and the circle had fragmented by the early 1960s. But I knew well, and networked with some of the surviving members throughout the 1960s, first in London then in the second half of the 1960s from my base at the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. My mentor Jerry Morris was a disciple of the Webbs, and his friend Richard Titmuss at the London School of Economics was their principal apostle. I sat at Titmuss's feet too, and learnt much from him, notably how to reinforce and apply in my own professional life, his (and my) values of equity, altruism and social justice. These were the Webb's values too, of course. I did my best to pass on these values in all my contacts with students, in many of my published papers and in Public Health and Human Ecology, and even managed to smuggle hints into some entries in the Dictionary of Public Health.
Like most young women of her time, Beatrice Potter had no formal education, but was self-taught. Long before the concept was 'invented' as an exciting innovation in medical education, she was applying problem based learning in her work as a rent collector in tenements owned by her family in the slums of East End London. She taught herself sociology, applying the concepts and theories of Herbert Spencer. She worked with Charles and Mary Booth on their monumental study of work and poverty, teaching herself more social science as well as economics and statistics. Sidney Webb too was largely self-taught. When these two scholars met - two student researchers attempting to figure out how society and communities worked, how and why some were 'healthy' and functioned smoothly and successfully while others did not - it was a true marriage of two first class minds in search of solutions to oppressive problems that hampered progress towards a more ideal civilization in late Victorian and Edwardian England.
Beatrice was able to deploy some of her family wealth pursuing research aimed at diagnosing the ills of that society, and poured more of that wealth into the research and educational institution that became the London School of Economics. This occupies a huddle of buildings near the junction of Kingsway, Aldwych and the Fleet Street end of the Strand. (Whenever I was in London in the 1960s, 70s and 80s I used to beat a path to the LSE, specifically to the Economist Book Shop whence I usually staggered away, my briefcase bulging and weighed down with exciting treasure obtainable nowhere else).
Sidney Webb's wooing and winning of Beatrice Potter depended on his letters to her. In those times before telephones became ubiquitous, generations before email, the internet, Facebook and the other fast-track features of life in the early 21st century, communication between two young people who were attracted to each other relied heavily on letters. They weren't all that young, moreover: Beatrice was well into her 30s and Sidney a few months younger. It took a while for them to overcome the constraints of their times, and their letters seem stiff and formal, compared for instance to those between Wendy and me. Nevertheless few exchanges are as captivating as the letters back and forth between Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, judging by the samples in this small book.
Beatrice had at least one really kooky idea (two, if you count the infatuation she shared with Sidney for Soviet Russian communism as practised by Stalin). She believed that women should adopt cigarette smoking as a sign of their equality with men: "Let men beware of the smoking woman. I would urge earnestly on the defenders of Man's supremacy to fight the female use of tobacco with more sternness and vigour than they have deployed in the female use of the vote. It is a far more fatal power. It is the wand with which the possible women of the future will open the hidden stores of knowledge of men and things and learn to govern them. Then will women become the leading doctors, barristers and scientists. And a female Gladstone may lurk in the dim vistas of the future." It's happening and gaining momentum - although she would have deplored Maggie Thatcher and her policies even more than I do!
There's much more I could say about this fascinating couple, especially about Beatrice. I haven't even mentioned her emotional relationship with the powerful statesman Joseph Chamberlain. The Webbs richly merit a biopic. I hope someone at the BBC or elsewhere sees this post and seizes the suggestion.
 |
| Beatrice Potter (1892) shortly before her marriage to Sidney Webb |
 |
| Sidney and Beatrice Webb en route to the Soviet Union, 1932 |
I've often wished for time travel so I could converse with many people I'd love to have known but couldn't because they lived before my time. Mary Wollstonecroft, for instance, and Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. Sidney and Beatrice Webb's lives overlapped with mine, so it would have been possible in theory for me to have met them, if I'd gone to London a few years sooner, and moved in the same circles. (Beatrice lived 1858-1943 and Sidney 1859-1947). But I didn't go to London for the first time until 1951, and didn't enter that magical circle of left-wing intellectuals until 1961. Perhaps it bends truth a little to say I 'entered' that magical circle: I was always on the fringe, and the circle had fragmented by the early 1960s. But I knew well, and networked with some of the surviving members throughout the 1960s, first in London then in the second half of the 1960s from my base at the Usher Institute of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh. My mentor Jerry Morris was a disciple of the Webbs, and his friend Richard Titmuss at the London School of Economics was their principal apostle. I sat at Titmuss's feet too, and learnt much from him, notably how to reinforce and apply in my own professional life, his (and my) values of equity, altruism and social justice. These were the Webb's values too, of course. I did my best to pass on these values in all my contacts with students, in many of my published papers and in Public Health and Human Ecology, and even managed to smuggle hints into some entries in the Dictionary of Public Health.
Like most young women of her time, Beatrice Potter had no formal education, but was self-taught. Long before the concept was 'invented' as an exciting innovation in medical education, she was applying problem based learning in her work as a rent collector in tenements owned by her family in the slums of East End London. She taught herself sociology, applying the concepts and theories of Herbert Spencer. She worked with Charles and Mary Booth on their monumental study of work and poverty, teaching herself more social science as well as economics and statistics. Sidney Webb too was largely self-taught. When these two scholars met - two student researchers attempting to figure out how society and communities worked, how and why some were 'healthy' and functioned smoothly and successfully while others did not - it was a true marriage of two first class minds in search of solutions to oppressive problems that hampered progress towards a more ideal civilization in late Victorian and Edwardian England.
Beatrice was able to deploy some of her family wealth pursuing research aimed at diagnosing the ills of that society, and poured more of that wealth into the research and educational institution that became the London School of Economics. This occupies a huddle of buildings near the junction of Kingsway, Aldwych and the Fleet Street end of the Strand. (Whenever I was in London in the 1960s, 70s and 80s I used to beat a path to the LSE, specifically to the Economist Book Shop whence I usually staggered away, my briefcase bulging and weighed down with exciting treasure obtainable nowhere else).
Sidney Webb's wooing and winning of Beatrice Potter depended on his letters to her. In those times before telephones became ubiquitous, generations before email, the internet, Facebook and the other fast-track features of life in the early 21st century, communication between two young people who were attracted to each other relied heavily on letters. They weren't all that young, moreover: Beatrice was well into her 30s and Sidney a few months younger. It took a while for them to overcome the constraints of their times, and their letters seem stiff and formal, compared for instance to those between Wendy and me. Nevertheless few exchanges are as captivating as the letters back and forth between Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, judging by the samples in this small book.
Beatrice had at least one really kooky idea (two, if you count the infatuation she shared with Sidney for Soviet Russian communism as practised by Stalin). She believed that women should adopt cigarette smoking as a sign of their equality with men: "Let men beware of the smoking woman. I would urge earnestly on the defenders of Man's supremacy to fight the female use of tobacco with more sternness and vigour than they have deployed in the female use of the vote. It is a far more fatal power. It is the wand with which the possible women of the future will open the hidden stores of knowledge of men and things and learn to govern them. Then will women become the leading doctors, barristers and scientists. And a female Gladstone may lurk in the dim vistas of the future." It's happening and gaining momentum - although she would have deplored Maggie Thatcher and her policies even more than I do!
There's much more I could say about this fascinating couple, especially about Beatrice. I haven't even mentioned her emotional relationship with the powerful statesman Joseph Chamberlain. The Webbs richly merit a biopic. I hope someone at the BBC or elsewhere sees this post and seizes the suggestion.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Equality and equity
As an Australian with Y chromosomes I was born a male chauvinist and remained true to the associated beliefs and values through my school and university years. I believed that males were inherently superior to females in all respects. It was a belief that seemed as immutable as belief in the law of gravity.
Imperceptibly this belief began to be eroded, at first so subtly, so insidiously that I can't date the onset of doubts about the natural superiority of males. In retrospect I think the first onset of doubts may have arisen when I began seeing sick people. One would have to be as thick as two planks to fail to notice that women and girls withstood suffering and sickness, chronic unremitting pain, devastating loss, with courage, phlegmatic calm, philosophical insight, a sense of humour and constructive foresight, rarely equalled by their male consorts. Reluctantly also I had to concede that there were women who could out-perform me on every criterion it's possible to measure. Being married to Wendy played an important role in the slow and steady process of conversion, or enlightenment. I owe to Wendy the erosion and ultimate obliteration of my sense of the natural superiority of males (and the sense of entitlement that accompanied it).
Ultimately hard facts that came to light when I was doing research for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education in the early 1960s impelled my conversion from male chauvinist to card-carrying feminist. I "came out," so to say, and I had facts and figures to back me up. These were published in one of the papers that summarized the results of meticulous research projects I did with help from Gillian Stanley and others. (Stanley GR, Last JM, "Careers of Young Medical Women." Brit J Med Educ, 1968, 2:204-209, and Appendix 19, Report of Royal Commission on Medical Education. Cmnd 3569; London: HMSO, 1968, pp 320-396).
Conditions have been improving for the female half of the human race since long before the 1960s, although obviously there is a long way to go before we achieve genuine equity between the sexes in all the nations and cultures of the world. Karen Trollope Kumar and I summarized some persistent appalling facts in a background paper for a WHO conference on "Women, Health and the Environment" in Bangkok in 1997. By then it was possible to use official demographic statistics from very large populations in both India and China to reveal the devastating distortion of the naturally occurring sex ratio of male:female births by the selective abortion of female foetuses. That distortion has led to large cohorts of men who have no marital partner, with consequent insoluble social problems.
All of this bad news has been put in a more cheerful, more positive and hopeful perspective by the enlightened actions of Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau. He has selected a cabinet with equal numbers of women and men. (When asked "Why?" he had a simple conversation-stopping answer: "It's 2015!") Today I watched the swearing-in ceremony and was enormously impressed by the range, depth, and diversity of experience of the new cabinet. Collectively they have tremendous potential. If they fulfill only half their promises, it will be a spectacular success. I know and have worked with one member of the new cabinet, Kirsty Duncan PhD, and have great respect for her expertise and ability; she and I were in the vanguard of scientists studying the causes and effects of climate change in the 1980s. She and Catherine McKenna, my local member, new minister for environment and climate change, are safe hands and minds to manage this urgent problem.
Imperceptibly this belief began to be eroded, at first so subtly, so insidiously that I can't date the onset of doubts about the natural superiority of males. In retrospect I think the first onset of doubts may have arisen when I began seeing sick people. One would have to be as thick as two planks to fail to notice that women and girls withstood suffering and sickness, chronic unremitting pain, devastating loss, with courage, phlegmatic calm, philosophical insight, a sense of humour and constructive foresight, rarely equalled by their male consorts. Reluctantly also I had to concede that there were women who could out-perform me on every criterion it's possible to measure. Being married to Wendy played an important role in the slow and steady process of conversion, or enlightenment. I owe to Wendy the erosion and ultimate obliteration of my sense of the natural superiority of males (and the sense of entitlement that accompanied it).
Ultimately hard facts that came to light when I was doing research for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education in the early 1960s impelled my conversion from male chauvinist to card-carrying feminist. I "came out," so to say, and I had facts and figures to back me up. These were published in one of the papers that summarized the results of meticulous research projects I did with help from Gillian Stanley and others. (Stanley GR, Last JM, "Careers of Young Medical Women." Brit J Med Educ, 1968, 2:204-209, and Appendix 19, Report of Royal Commission on Medical Education. Cmnd 3569; London: HMSO, 1968, pp 320-396).
Conditions have been improving for the female half of the human race since long before the 1960s, although obviously there is a long way to go before we achieve genuine equity between the sexes in all the nations and cultures of the world. Karen Trollope Kumar and I summarized some persistent appalling facts in a background paper for a WHO conference on "Women, Health and the Environment" in Bangkok in 1997. By then it was possible to use official demographic statistics from very large populations in both India and China to reveal the devastating distortion of the naturally occurring sex ratio of male:female births by the selective abortion of female foetuses. That distortion has led to large cohorts of men who have no marital partner, with consequent insoluble social problems.
All of this bad news has been put in a more cheerful, more positive and hopeful perspective by the enlightened actions of Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau. He has selected a cabinet with equal numbers of women and men. (When asked "Why?" he had a simple conversation-stopping answer: "It's 2015!") Today I watched the swearing-in ceremony and was enormously impressed by the range, depth, and diversity of experience of the new cabinet. Collectively they have tremendous potential. If they fulfill only half their promises, it will be a spectacular success. I know and have worked with one member of the new cabinet, Kirsty Duncan PhD, and have great respect for her expertise and ability; she and I were in the vanguard of scientists studying the causes and effects of climate change in the 1980s. She and Catherine McKenna, my local member, new minister for environment and climate change, are safe hands and minds to manage this urgent problem.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Sunshine in Canada (A VERY POLITICAL POST)
WARNING: A VERY "POLITICAL" POST!
It's too soon to rejoice, and the Liberal Party has a history of failure to fulfill election promises. Nonetheless I feel cautiously optimistic. The Harper government's objective was never clearly defined but seems to have been to cut costs by reducing taxes and the size and influence of the national government. The Treasury Board tightly controlled the flow of money so funds allocated remained unspent. Military Service pensions and benefits were not delivered, nor were allocations to First Nations, enabling the government to boast that they had balanced the budget. If funds voted by their own government had been disbursed they would have had a deficit of several billion dollars. They governed with a unique combination of paranoid fear, austerity, and deceit. They did terrible damage to Canada's international reputation and standing among the enlightened nations. For these reasons and others set out below I believe the Harper government was the worst for 100 years. It's good to be finished with them.
In February of 2015 I compiled a list of reasons why I would never support the Harper government, and strongly believed that no enlightened intelligent person would. Here are my reasons:
Refugees are viewed as potential or even actual terrorists. If possible, keep them all out "None is too many" which was the prewar government policy towards Jews fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany, is the covert policy of the Harper conservatives.
During the election campaign, Harper and his crony Jason Kenney added a further reason. A woman, just one of two women in the past decade, wanted to wear her niqab (face veil) during her citizenship ceremony. Harper declared that he would prevent this, if necessary by special legislation. If an ordinary Canadian had made such a statement, couched in language that was an implicit incitement to violence, there would be a strong case for prosecution under legislation against racist hate speech. That the prime minister of Canada should say such a thing, not once as a slip of the tongue but repeatedly, in my view disqualifies him from holding any public office.
It's too soon to rejoice, and the Liberal Party has a history of failure to fulfill election promises. Nonetheless I feel cautiously optimistic. The Harper government's objective was never clearly defined but seems to have been to cut costs by reducing taxes and the size and influence of the national government. The Treasury Board tightly controlled the flow of money so funds allocated remained unspent. Military Service pensions and benefits were not delivered, nor were allocations to First Nations, enabling the government to boast that they had balanced the budget. If funds voted by their own government had been disbursed they would have had a deficit of several billion dollars. They governed with a unique combination of paranoid fear, austerity, and deceit. They did terrible damage to Canada's international reputation and standing among the enlightened nations. For these reasons and others set out below I believe the Harper government was the worst for 100 years. It's good to be finished with them.
In February of 2015 I compiled a list of reasons why I would never support the Harper government, and strongly believed that no enlightened intelligent person would. Here are my reasons:
Why I don't
support the Harper conservatives (Compiled February 2015)
1. Ideology, not evidence, determines
political decisions; strong anti-science bias
The Conservative Party of Canada is one of the most scientifically ignorant,
politically inept sets of political leaders on earth. They are worse than
ignorant. They are willfully obscurantist, hostile to science, blindly
blundering about, rejecting evidence in favour of their narrow ideology. They have abdicated from international discussions of the most urgent policy issue confronting humanity, the critically urgent problem of climate change and what to do about it.
2. Lack of vision
The Harper Conservatives have an
extraordinarily narrow vision of Canada. Indeed they are without
vision. Stephen Harper sees Canada as an
‘energy superpower’ but only considers petroleum fuel as the source of this
energy. Moreover, the fuel is very ‘dirty’- bitumen or tar that requires
costly, energy-intensive refining. Further, while he seeks to maximize
consumption and combustion of oil, Harper has no time or patience with conservation
of energy. He has even less time for sustainable energy, for solar, tidal and
wind power. This directly contradicts traditional conservative philosophy.
3. Profligacy
Among the gifts left to Harper by
the previous Liberal government, along with a large fiscal surplus, was a
program of subsidies for enhancing energy efficiency by improved home
insulation. Among the first act of the Harper Conservatives was to cancel this
program.
4. Fiscal irresponsibility
Another immediate act was
irresponsible tax cuts that eliminated the healthy surplus inherited from the previous government. These tax cuts were, of course,
very popular with the most short-sighted portion of the electorate. These were
truly acts of a visionless government, that called to my mind the
biblical saying, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
5. Governs on ‘divide and rule’ principle
Nations run best on collaborative
teamwork. The concept of collaboration is alien to the Harper government which functions on a ‘divide and rule’ principle, setting one ethnic
or interest group against another. There are many examples of this obtuse
behavior. One that is more harmful than most is Harper’s refusal to attend
meetings of first ministers of the provinces and territories.
6. Partisan policy in Israel-Palestine dispute
For many years before the Harper
government came into office, Canada had a high international reputation based
on its record of impartiality and altruism, particularly in the
Israel-Palestine dispute. The Harper government has destroyed this reputation.
It has sided unequivocally with Israel, boasting that it is Israel’s best
friend, needlessly making an enemy of Islam.
7. View populace solely as taxpayers
The Harper government sees the
people of Canada first and foremost as taxpayers. Newborn babies, indigent
single mothers, old people dying of cancer or dementia are not primarily taxpayers,
although they have well defined needs for health and social care. Every Harper
government action boasts of an accompanying reduced tax burden. You get what
you pay for. I don’t mind paying more for better quality, for example of CBC
radio and high quality postal services.
8. Hostile to women’s reproductive rights
The Harper government is
unfriendly, to say the least, towards women’s reproductive rights. Some years
ago they denied charitable status to the International Planned Parenthood
Federation, Family Planning Canada, and several similar NGOs. They withheld approval for the so-called ‘abortion pill’ for over 2 years, longer than any other
drug ever submitted for approval in Canada, longer than any other nation.
9. Mean-spirited and vindictive
The Harper government is mean-spirited
and vindictive, for instance targeting altruistic non-governmental
organizations that promote concern for the environment. These are seen as
enemies, presumably because they disapprove of government policies that are
very destructive of environments. These have been subjected to costly and
needless audits by Canada Revenue Agency.
10. Attacks on Parliamentary Budget Office and Elections Canada
The Harper government’s way of
doing politics relies on hatred and contempt for political adversaries. These
adversaries include the permanent civil service. Civil servants are regarded and portrayed not merely as enemies of the CPC, but
enemies of Canada – a complete distortion of reality. They have adopted the
same attitude to impartial agencies such as the Parliamentary Budget Office and
Elections Canada. The aim seems to be to
emasculate or neutralize democratic infrastructure that threatens them by
telling the unvarnished truth.
11. Hypocrisy and empty gestures
Examples of this include Harper’s very public ‘apology’ for the atrocities committed during the residential schools fiasco. It was an empty gesture because nothing whatever was done to follow up and make amends for the parlous plight of First Nations people: no move to ameliorate the plight of people on reservations where living conditions are deplorable, outright refusal to establish an inquiry into the root causes of conditions that have led to over 1200 missing and murdered women and girls.
12. Use of omnibus bills rather than parliamentary debate
The Harper government repeatedly
bypasses democratic debate by using ‘omnibus budget bills’ as a way to change
laws without submitting these laws to formal parliamentary debate.
13. Lemming-like rush towards extinction (opposite of
sustainability)
The actions of the Harper
government take all life in Canada towards extinction. I wouldn't mind in the
least if the Harper government became extinct. But it makes me angry to think
of them carrying bright children with them to extinction, children who
manifestly could run Canada and the world a great deal better than they have.
In the interests of life in Canada and life on earth, we must get rid of
this bunch of scientific ignoramuses who have been mismanaging our lovely part
of the habitable world for far too long.
14. Narrow, ideologically based economic policy
Economic policies are very narrow,
based on resource extraction rather than sustainable diversification. In early
2015 we see the adverse consequences as oil prices collapse.
Economic policies are ideologically
based, as in dismantling of National Wheat Board, which ensured stability of
income for farmers. Taxation relies on 'boutique' tax cuts for targeted segments of the population.
15. Mediaeval approach to crime and punishment
Crime must be punished. That's far more important than preventing crime. More and bigger prisons, harsh sentences, are the solution. If they could get away with it, they would restore the death penalty.
16. Miserable mean-spirited management of refugee resettlement
(because they are Muslim?)
A few additional reasons to reject Harper and all he stands for:
Our flag: Not
even $50K for 50th anniversary paid for from Museums’ budget, versus
$400K for War of 1812 when Canada didn’t even exist
False and
misleading erection of phantom ‘terrorist’ enemies – stoking fires of ‘national
paranoia’
Delay, delay,
delay help for distressed Muslims (e.g. Syrian refugees, Al Jazeera journalist)
During the election campaign, Harper and his crony Jason Kenney added a further reason. A woman, just one of two women in the past decade, wanted to wear her niqab (face veil) during her citizenship ceremony. Harper declared that he would prevent this, if necessary by special legislation. If an ordinary Canadian had made such a statement, couched in language that was an implicit incitement to violence, there would be a strong case for prosecution under legislation against racist hate speech. That the prime minister of Canada should say such a thing, not once as a slip of the tongue but repeatedly, in my view disqualifies him from holding any public office.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Why and what we write
We write because we have something to say, something to sing, a poem, a story, an item of news, a mathematical formula with predictive power, a theory of how the universe works, that we want to share with others. We feel an irresistible compulsion to share our thoughts, our ideas, with other people.
By 'we' I mean all humans, everyone, but especially those of us who believe we have something worthwhile, important, beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, that we are impelled to share with others. 'Others' vary in number from our nearest and dearest to all of humankind.
We began doing this before writing was invented. Balladeers, story-tellers, wandering minstrels, tribal elders and sooth-sayers were talking to the rest of their tribe or clan millennia ago, singing songs, telling stories, relaying the history of their people. Homer, the blind poet, sang the story of the siege of Troy which probably mixed a historical record of real events that happened to real people with the magic and myths of interventions by the gods. The Iliad, Homer's tale of the siege of Troy, of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen and Paris, Priam, Hector, Odysseus, the rest of the heroic band of Greeks and Trojans and the Olympian gods and goddesses, dates back, we believe, to long before those who told the tale had written records. It was passed on orally, perhaps for centuries before it was written down, and preserved in perpetuity as one of the greatest of all timeless classics.
I discovered that I had worthwhile things to say to my professional peers and students aspiring to join our ranks, possessed the ability to express these in language others enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing them down. I could summarize and condense complex concepts into simple generalizable principles. In 1977 I started work as editor in chief of a massive comprehensive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine. When it was published in 1980, that book had 1926 pages, plus 25 pages of 'front matter' - title page, table of contents, preface, list of contributors and their affiliations. The book attracted praise from many quarters. The praise I appreciated most was for the introductory chapter in which I pulled it all together, summarized the complex and occasionally confusing 'big picture' in an overview devoid of technical jargon, 6 pages a grade school child could understand, about the scope, aims, methods and scientific basis of public health. Here is a sample:
"The ways to preserve and improve health are discussed at length in later chapters. In summary, the methods are to keep the environment safe, to enhance immunity to infections, to behave healthfully, to eat wisely and well, to have well-born children, and to care prudently for the sick."
Whether I'm writing about tangible things or abstract concepts it's important that I, the writer, and all my readers, give the same meaning to every word in the text. There is no place for Humpty-Dumpty in my kind of writing. Remember what Humpty-Dumpty said to Alice: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." That's not to say I reject ambiguity always and forever. Even in the Dictionary of Epidemiology - a dictionary, forsooth - my editorial team and I felt obliged to leave a little wiggle room, a little uncertainty, or two alternative meanings, for an occasional technical term. We also had to recognize that the same technical word or phrase could occasionally mean something entirely different in two (or more) unrelated scientific domains in which its use had evolved independently. But that's a rather arcane discussion for another time and place, not for this post on this blog.
In this post I'm discussing my own writing, and it would be easy to get carried away, to run on for far longer than the most patient reader would wish. Time to quit while I'm ahead.
By 'we' I mean all humans, everyone, but especially those of us who believe we have something worthwhile, important, beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, that we are impelled to share with others. 'Others' vary in number from our nearest and dearest to all of humankind.
We began doing this before writing was invented. Balladeers, story-tellers, wandering minstrels, tribal elders and sooth-sayers were talking to the rest of their tribe or clan millennia ago, singing songs, telling stories, relaying the history of their people. Homer, the blind poet, sang the story of the siege of Troy which probably mixed a historical record of real events that happened to real people with the magic and myths of interventions by the gods. The Iliad, Homer's tale of the siege of Troy, of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen and Paris, Priam, Hector, Odysseus, the rest of the heroic band of Greeks and Trojans and the Olympian gods and goddesses, dates back, we believe, to long before those who told the tale had written records. It was passed on orally, perhaps for centuries before it was written down, and preserved in perpetuity as one of the greatest of all timeless classics.
I discovered that I had worthwhile things to say to my professional peers and students aspiring to join our ranks, possessed the ability to express these in language others enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing them down. I could summarize and condense complex concepts into simple generalizable principles. In 1977 I started work as editor in chief of a massive comprehensive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine. When it was published in 1980, that book had 1926 pages, plus 25 pages of 'front matter' - title page, table of contents, preface, list of contributors and their affiliations. The book attracted praise from many quarters. The praise I appreciated most was for the introductory chapter in which I pulled it all together, summarized the complex and occasionally confusing 'big picture' in an overview devoid of technical jargon, 6 pages a grade school child could understand, about the scope, aims, methods and scientific basis of public health. Here is a sample:
"The ways to preserve and improve health are discussed at length in later chapters. In summary, the methods are to keep the environment safe, to enhance immunity to infections, to behave healthfully, to eat wisely and well, to have well-born children, and to care prudently for the sick."
Whether I'm writing about tangible things or abstract concepts it's important that I, the writer, and all my readers, give the same meaning to every word in the text. There is no place for Humpty-Dumpty in my kind of writing. Remember what Humpty-Dumpty said to Alice: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." That's not to say I reject ambiguity always and forever. Even in the Dictionary of Epidemiology - a dictionary, forsooth - my editorial team and I felt obliged to leave a little wiggle room, a little uncertainty, or two alternative meanings, for an occasional technical term. We also had to recognize that the same technical word or phrase could occasionally mean something entirely different in two (or more) unrelated scientific domains in which its use had evolved independently. But that's a rather arcane discussion for another time and place, not for this post on this blog.
In this post I'm discussing my own writing, and it would be easy to get carried away, to run on for far longer than the most patient reader would wish. Time to quit while I'm ahead.
Friday, October 16, 2015
Why I write
George Orwell's essay Why I Write was published in an obscure, short-lived English literary magazine in 1947. It was reprinted in (I think) an Australian literary magazine a year or so later, and that's where I must have read it. It made me think for the first time about why I had this odd compulsion to arrange my thoughts in what seemed to be an orderly manner, and set them down on paper. I remember trying to set down my reasons why I wrote. I wish I still had the two or three badly typed pages I managed to produce as my answer when I was in my early 20s, but like nearly everything I wrote in those days, it hasn't survived.
Orwell spent a few pages describing how he wrote, and on what topics - fact, political polemics, infrequently fiction, though later works, his two most famous, most timeless books, Animal Farm and 1984, are classified as fiction. He seems to have found it difficult to address the question in the title of his essay, because he flits around it like a bee buzzing from flower to flower and his reasons are sometimes buried almost shamefacedly in paragraphs about something else. At one point in the essay he tries to compile a list of reasons: egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; to store facts for posterity; political purpose. But he gets distracted, and this essay, which could have been a valuable contribution to literary scholarship, is in the end a rather frustrating, rather inchoate, rather annoying and disappointing mess. I suppose that's one reason I tried to write my own essay on the matter in 1948 or thereabouts. Other collections of essays that I formerly possessed, by E M Forster, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, half a dozen other 'public intellectuals' of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, are long gone, not part of my shrunken downsized library, so I can't check; but I don't recall any other writers or thinkers who addressed the question, and stated their reasons for writing.
My reasons then included desire to clarify complex concepts and ideas, to explain, perhaps to simplify these concepts and ideas by expressing them in my own words, and not insignificantly, the pleasure I got from writing. These reasons are implicit, sometimes explicit, in much of my professional writing. Among my books, I've edited a massive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine, compiled and edited technical dictionaries of epidemiology and of public health, and co-edited an encyclopedia of public health and a 'Companion' to Medicine in the 'Companion' series published by Oxford University Press. I wrote large parts of all these books, even the encyclopedia, to which I contributed more than my fair share. Working on all of these and other books and articles, and writing editorials for journals I edited, gave me immense pleasure, partly because of collegial relationships with other editors and authors, but mainly because it was such a pleasure to do all that writing. I've always been chuffed to get feedback from readers who say it's a pleasure to read what I've written, more enjoyable than many other textbooks and works of reference because I wrote with a lively style that kept readers awake.
Until recently I've always been able to find exactly the right word, the appropriate phrase, the rounding off paragraph to sum it all up. Alas, as I enter my 90th year I find all this no longer falls trippingly off my tongue, it's no longer there at the surface of my mind, waiting to be plucked and used to the best purpose. Now I must often search, sometimes in vain, for the needed words and phrases. These, no doubt, are signs of declining intellectual vitality that I must accept and make the best of, smiling bravely through unshed tears as I lament the ravages of time. No, correction: I don't lament them at all, I acknowledge and accept them, thankful to be here still after all these years and insightful enough to recognize my limitations.
And I can add another reason to my list of reasons Why I write: It's the perfect therapy.
Orwell spent a few pages describing how he wrote, and on what topics - fact, political polemics, infrequently fiction, though later works, his two most famous, most timeless books, Animal Farm and 1984, are classified as fiction. He seems to have found it difficult to address the question in the title of his essay, because he flits around it like a bee buzzing from flower to flower and his reasons are sometimes buried almost shamefacedly in paragraphs about something else. At one point in the essay he tries to compile a list of reasons: egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; to store facts for posterity; political purpose. But he gets distracted, and this essay, which could have been a valuable contribution to literary scholarship, is in the end a rather frustrating, rather inchoate, rather annoying and disappointing mess. I suppose that's one reason I tried to write my own essay on the matter in 1948 or thereabouts. Other collections of essays that I formerly possessed, by E M Forster, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, half a dozen other 'public intellectuals' of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, are long gone, not part of my shrunken downsized library, so I can't check; but I don't recall any other writers or thinkers who addressed the question, and stated their reasons for writing.
My reasons then included desire to clarify complex concepts and ideas, to explain, perhaps to simplify these concepts and ideas by expressing them in my own words, and not insignificantly, the pleasure I got from writing. These reasons are implicit, sometimes explicit, in much of my professional writing. Among my books, I've edited a massive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine, compiled and edited technical dictionaries of epidemiology and of public health, and co-edited an encyclopedia of public health and a 'Companion' to Medicine in the 'Companion' series published by Oxford University Press. I wrote large parts of all these books, even the encyclopedia, to which I contributed more than my fair share. Working on all of these and other books and articles, and writing editorials for journals I edited, gave me immense pleasure, partly because of collegial relationships with other editors and authors, but mainly because it was such a pleasure to do all that writing. I've always been chuffed to get feedback from readers who say it's a pleasure to read what I've written, more enjoyable than many other textbooks and works of reference because I wrote with a lively style that kept readers awake.
Until recently I've always been able to find exactly the right word, the appropriate phrase, the rounding off paragraph to sum it all up. Alas, as I enter my 90th year I find all this no longer falls trippingly off my tongue, it's no longer there at the surface of my mind, waiting to be plucked and used to the best purpose. Now I must often search, sometimes in vain, for the needed words and phrases. These, no doubt, are signs of declining intellectual vitality that I must accept and make the best of, smiling bravely through unshed tears as I lament the ravages of time. No, correction: I don't lament them at all, I acknowledge and accept them, thankful to be here still after all these years and insightful enough to recognize my limitations.
And I can add another reason to my list of reasons Why I write: It's the perfect therapy.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
What would you do?
A devoted couple in their early to middle 80s confronted a crisis of accumulating health problems. I'd known that elderly couple almost all my life. He was my favourite cousin, about 5 years younger than I; and I'd known her for more than 70 years. They'd had a marvellous life. Thanks to lucky real estate deals and other sensible investments they were very wealthy. They could afford to pay for all the domestic help and personal nursing care they needed. In their early to middle 80s, they were as in love as they had been when they married more than 60 years ago. They looked back on full lives that had been enormously pleasurable. One of the highlights of their lives had been a three-year yachting cruise around the world, during which their daughter had paired off with a man from Chile, a nephew of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. One of their sons had fallen for a French girl, married her, and settled in France. Their other son wasn't quite so fortunate: he'd been caught with marijuana in Greece, and despite high-priced legal counsel with good arguments, he'd spent several months in the slammer in Corfu. That was one of the few clouds on their horizon,apart from the fact that two of their three children settled far away on other sides of the world after they married.
Now things were going wrong. He had become forgetful and unable to care for himself as dementia held him in its increasingly relentless and clammy grip. She'd fallen victim to mesothelioma, an intractable malignancy caused by exposure many years earlier to trace amounts of asbestos, the amount that might be shed by a fraying insulated oven mitt or a barbecue apron. Mesothelioma can't be treated. The malignancy hits the lining of the lungs, sometimes the lining of the gut; but it can't be cut out, can't be treated with radiation or chemotherapy. Their daughter's marriage had broken down so she had come home from Chile to live near her parents in Queensland in a prosperous suburb of Brisbane. As the mesothelioma advanced and her vitality wilted away, and her husband became increasingly dependent, forgetful and childlike, she and I exchanged several emails. She didn't confide her intentions to me, but I can vividly imagine the thoughts she must have had as she considered their options. I was saddened but not surprised when my brother phoned me with the news that they had taken their lives. They used exhaust fumes from their car engine, so the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. My brother, a devout Christian and a retired physician, expressed disapproval of their decision - her decision I suppose - to end their lives together in this way. He'd have preferred the option of palliative care for her, and longterm care for him - care in uncomprehending solitude without his loving wife beside him, because her prognosis was for a rather brief and painful terminal illness, whereas he might have lived for 10 more years. Years ago Wendy and I talked about several scenarios for the end of our lives. One scenario resembled the reality of the fate that befell my cousin and his wife, and they took - or she took - the same decision we'd have opted for in those circumstances. I wholeheartedly support their decision to die together. I picture them in their car, locked together in a final loving embrace: they were an amorous couple who had no inhibitions about expressing their love for each other when in the company of another loving couple like Wendy and me.
They had enough free will and autonomy to decide their own fate, just as Wendy and I would have when we were still together side by side, and I retain, should circumstances arise to justify it. They and I would strongly support physician assisted suicide. Our Supreme Court has decreed that this ought to be the law of the land. It will be, if the next government of Canada is sensibly chosen in the imminent elections. If circumstances arise in my life to make continuing existence unbearable, it would be comforting to know that this option would be available. I wonder how readers of this blog would decide should they face a situation like that of my cousin David and his wife Judy. Would they opt for Judy's action? Or would they be in favour of my brother Peter's solution? It's an important question that merits debate by all thoughtful people in a society where the fate that overtook my cousin David and his wife Judy occurs increasingly often. In any event, David and Judy live on with a fondly affectionate place in my memories. (The photo shows Judy, Wendy and David at Gordonbrook sheep and cattle station in northern New South Wales, near Grafton, in 1987).
Now things were going wrong. He had become forgetful and unable to care for himself as dementia held him in its increasingly relentless and clammy grip. She'd fallen victim to mesothelioma, an intractable malignancy caused by exposure many years earlier to trace amounts of asbestos, the amount that might be shed by a fraying insulated oven mitt or a barbecue apron. Mesothelioma can't be treated. The malignancy hits the lining of the lungs, sometimes the lining of the gut; but it can't be cut out, can't be treated with radiation or chemotherapy. Their daughter's marriage had broken down so she had come home from Chile to live near her parents in Queensland in a prosperous suburb of Brisbane. As the mesothelioma advanced and her vitality wilted away, and her husband became increasingly dependent, forgetful and childlike, she and I exchanged several emails. She didn't confide her intentions to me, but I can vividly imagine the thoughts she must have had as she considered their options. I was saddened but not surprised when my brother phoned me with the news that they had taken their lives. They used exhaust fumes from their car engine, so the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. My brother, a devout Christian and a retired physician, expressed disapproval of their decision - her decision I suppose - to end their lives together in this way. He'd have preferred the option of palliative care for her, and longterm care for him - care in uncomprehending solitude without his loving wife beside him, because her prognosis was for a rather brief and painful terminal illness, whereas he might have lived for 10 more years. Years ago Wendy and I talked about several scenarios for the end of our lives. One scenario resembled the reality of the fate that befell my cousin and his wife, and they took - or she took - the same decision we'd have opted for in those circumstances. I wholeheartedly support their decision to die together. I picture them in their car, locked together in a final loving embrace: they were an amorous couple who had no inhibitions about expressing their love for each other when in the company of another loving couple like Wendy and me.
They had enough free will and autonomy to decide their own fate, just as Wendy and I would have when we were still together side by side, and I retain, should circumstances arise to justify it. They and I would strongly support physician assisted suicide. Our Supreme Court has decreed that this ought to be the law of the land. It will be, if the next government of Canada is sensibly chosen in the imminent elections. If circumstances arise in my life to make continuing existence unbearable, it would be comforting to know that this option would be available. I wonder how readers of this blog would decide should they face a situation like that of my cousin David and his wife Judy. Would they opt for Judy's action? Or would they be in favour of my brother Peter's solution? It's an important question that merits debate by all thoughtful people in a society where the fate that overtook my cousin David and his wife Judy occurs increasingly often. In any event, David and Judy live on with a fondly affectionate place in my memories. (The photo shows Judy, Wendy and David at Gordonbrook sheep and cattle station in northern New South Wales, near Grafton, in 1987).
 |
| Judy, Wendy and David, Gordonbrook, near Grafton, NSW, 1987 |
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Values
For many years I discussed values with groups of medical students, occasionally with others such as nursing students, two or three mind-blowing times with combined groups of medical and nursing students. Naturally those discussions focused on health-related values - cleanliness, personal hygiene, fastidious food-handling, consideration of the needs of others where tobacco smoking, noisy behaviour, socially disruptive conduct were concerned. We also talked about fundamental values associated with family formation, cohesiveness and dissolution, which have obvious implications for health. I reported to students my own experience of growing up in a broken home, reared by a divorced mother in an era when divorce was rare and stigmatizing, in contrast to the present time in which separation and divorce are commonplace and socially acceptable. We talked too about Canadian values, respect for human rights and dignity, tolerance, acceptance of social and cultural diversity. I passionately believe in all the rights embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UN Charter) and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. When I was younger and stronger I would have been prepared to fight to defend these rights. I've supported Amnesty International financially for more than 40 years and rely on this organization and others like it to fight for me now.
I was appalled and disgusted with the blatantly cynical conduct of prime minister Harper, whose fondness for divisive political tactics has reached a new low in exploiting the worst of xenophobic - Islamophobic - impulses with regard to wearing the niqab. A woman - just one woman - wants to wear a niqab when she takes the oath of Canadian citizenship. She will, of course, have removed the niqab and duly identified herself to requisite officials before the citizenship ceremony. I believe she has the same rights as all other Canadians to dress in a manner she finds culturally comfortable during this rite of passage. To deny her this right is to deny everything Canada stands for. It would be the ultimate denial of Canadian values. It is typical of Stephen Harper - a divide and rule leader - that he would inflame this and make this one woman's wish into an election issue that over-rides all other issues in importance. It speaks volumes about the emotion-driven thought processes of many people than opinion polls reveal the influence this otherwise irrelevant episode seems to be having on voting intentions. I weep for Canada if this becomes the deciding issue in the election.
I was appalled and disgusted with the blatantly cynical conduct of prime minister Harper, whose fondness for divisive political tactics has reached a new low in exploiting the worst of xenophobic - Islamophobic - impulses with regard to wearing the niqab. A woman - just one woman - wants to wear a niqab when she takes the oath of Canadian citizenship. She will, of course, have removed the niqab and duly identified herself to requisite officials before the citizenship ceremony. I believe she has the same rights as all other Canadians to dress in a manner she finds culturally comfortable during this rite of passage. To deny her this right is to deny everything Canada stands for. It would be the ultimate denial of Canadian values. It is typical of Stephen Harper - a divide and rule leader - that he would inflame this and make this one woman's wish into an election issue that over-rides all other issues in importance. It speaks volumes about the emotion-driven thought processes of many people than opinion polls reveal the influence this otherwise irrelevant episode seems to be having on voting intentions. I weep for Canada if this becomes the deciding issue in the election.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
What it feels like to be a migrant
I've never been a refugee but I've met many. Charles 'Newman' (a self-conferred surname) crept out the back door of his Budapest apartment in 1956 as the secret police were breaking in the front door, with barely enough time to grab his wallet and passport. He'd been in Australia about 4 years when I met him, was still traumatized by the collapse of his comfortable world when the Soviet army moved into Hungary to 'save' it (it was never clear from what). A Vietnamese couple who looked so fragile a puff of wind would blow them away were tougher than the steel cables supporting the Lion's Gate bridge, below which I met them and heard their harrowing story of piracy, rape, being stripped of all they possessed, and worst of all, the pettifoggery of bureaucracy that impeded their resettlement and led them onward from Los Angeles to Vancouver. I empathize strongly with them and many others I've been privileged and honoured to know, but I can't share their experiences.
But I know what it feels like to be a migrant. I've migrated intercontinentally, from one culture to another, three times, uprooting from a neighbourhood friendship network and culture to begin life anew in a strange new world with unfamiliar culture and customs, bringing my willing supportive Wendy and three rather unwilling little children with me.
Our first migration in January-February 1964, from Sydney, Australia to Burlington, Vermont, USA was a comfortable 7-week affair, a luxurious sea voyage across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, then up the Eastern seaboard of USA. Our first impression of the USA was a vista of miles of squalid shanty-town slums where underclass blacks lived, as our ship crept up river to a berth within walking range of gracious antebellum homes and lovely downtown Charleston, South Carolina. It was a different planet from our first sight of those miles of shantytown slums. Another first impression was gunshops with displays of ugly automatic pistols and rifles with magazines holding enough bullets to shred the first unlucky deer, wild pig, or newspaper delivery boy to cross the path of a proud owner of such lethal weapons. A newspaper delivery boy was slaughtered by mistake in exactly this way soon after our landfall in the USA. An Op-Ed comment in the Burlington Free Press after that commonplace tragedy twisted facts and distorted logic to imply that getting shot and killed was the boy's own fault.
Before we left Sydney on that migration from Australia to the USA, I had begun to study socio-demographic and psychological factors associated with migration, so I had some insight into what was happening to me and my family. I knew an essential determinant of successful migration is a slowly acquired sense of belonging to the migrant's host country. On our very first day in the USA impressions began to accumulate, a little more on the negative than the positive side of the ledger. Reasons not to identify with, not to seek a sense of belonging to American culture, grew more numerous in the months that followed.
Throughout our 14 months in Burlington, Vermont in 1964-65, Wendy and I tried hard to acquire the sense of belonging that we knew was an essential prerequisite to successful assimilation. I was very fortunate: Kerr White, my host, mentor, guide on the path to assimilation, gave me many opportunities to travel. I went to New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, Chicago and sundry other centres of scholarly life. At weekends and on a short late summer holiday we explored Vermont and the neighbouring states. Wendy and I found much to admire and like about life in the lovely little university city of Burlington, Vermont. But we also found aspects of the American way of life that felt alien - that inhibited us from acquiring a sense of belonging.
We were disgusted by the profligacy and waste, appalled by casual acceptance of corruption as an integral component of politics, horrified and alarmed by the gun culture, apprehensive about the rising tide of strident militarism all around us. The war was heating up in Vietnam in 1964, and universally there was total misunderstanding of what that war was really about: Americans saw it not as the struggle for national liberation from colonial rule that it really was, but as a conflict between good capitalism and evil communism.
I'd been reading the New Yorker avidly for about 15 years, but apart from that we searched in vain for local, regional and national evidence of the sort of cultural richness and historical traditions that permeate the lives of people in Britain or France or Italy. It was difficult to detect evidence that the values of Mark Twain, Louisa May Allcott, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, or a dozen other American writers I admired and loved, had penetrated the souls of any of the Americans we met, nice though they all were. The overriding impression was of a shallow, superficial culture hardly deserving to be called a culture - certainly not a culture to which we wanted to belong.
Wendy and I felt that we were saved from a fate worse than death when Stuart Morrison invited me to join his team at the Usher Institute of Public Health in the University of Edinburgh. The salary was 40% below what I'd been offered to accompany Kerr White to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene in Baltimore; even so it took no more than a nanosecond to decide between the two invitations. I achieved brief fame as an example of 'reverse brain drain' - even a short paragraph in the Lancet.
The process of migrating from New England to Scotland lasted overnight, a red-eye flight from Montreal to Prestwick, and an hour on the train to Waverley Station in Edinburgh. Wendy and I thought our adjustment to life in Scotland would be equally brief. She'd lived in Edinburgh before, for 2-3 years; I'd lived there for about 5 months. I was disconcerted to find that it took 2 years or more to acquire a sense of belonging. Probably this was because I'd lived in London for 4-5 years and had acquired aspects of Englishness that were subtly different from Scottishness. It was easier and faster for Wendy, perhaps partly because of a little Scots blood in her veins. But it happened: our whole family acquired not so much a veneer as a sturdy sub-surface layer of Scottishness, strongly reinforced in our children by lovely lilting Edinburgh accents. (To my sorrow they lost these accents within weeks of settling in Ottawa, but Rebecca assures me she can retrieve hers if the need arises).
After 5 years we all felt Scottish and would happily have spent the rest of our lives there. Several factors impelled us to move again. After 5 years I'd become professionally well known. I began to get invitations to attractive professorial positions elsewhere in the UK, in Canada, USA. None from Australia, alas, and I was turned down for two positions I applied for in my homeland: both went to men who were well-connected rather than well qualified. I couldn't refuse an invitation from Harvard, however, despite misgivings about the politics of a cross appointment between the medical school and the school of public health, doubts about returning to a country and culture we'd found flawed, and painfully long commutes I'd be forced to make. After provisionally accepting the position at Harvard, I flew to Ottawa, arriving late on a balmy summer afternoon. I walked up to Parliament Hill, then around the Canal to somewhere in the Glebe where as dusk gathered, Mums and Dads sat on their front steps sipping wine while their kids played street hockey. I had an epiphany: this was the place to raise our kids, not some distant outer suburb of greater Boston with all the turbulence and racial tensions that afflicted the USA in the late 1960s!
The decision to leave Edinburgh, which we had come to love, and where we felt that we truly belonged, and move to yet another new country and culture was agonizing and drawn out over as many weeks as we could delay saying yea or nay. When we finally made up our minds it was after prolonged consideration of many pros and cons. Better chances for our children to get a good start in life was of over-riding importance.
We found to our surprise and delight that adjustment to Canadian life and culture was easy, fast and painless (but not to the climate! That's a whole other story). The policy and reality of multiculturalism smoothed the way: newcomers to Canada are accepted for who they are. Nobody tried to change us, to force us into a mould that would have us conform, become like everyone else. Canada's not like that! It draws its greatest strength from its pervasive diversity. Now after 46 years here I feel deep-rooted; and if my ancestors are all in another country, that just makes me more Canadian, not less, like close to a third of all of us who live in Canada. The sense of belonging took hold soon after we arrived in Ottawa, and has grown stronger, richer, deeper with each passing year.
But I know what it feels like to be a migrant. I've migrated intercontinentally, from one culture to another, three times, uprooting from a neighbourhood friendship network and culture to begin life anew in a strange new world with unfamiliar culture and customs, bringing my willing supportive Wendy and three rather unwilling little children with me.
Our first migration in January-February 1964, from Sydney, Australia to Burlington, Vermont, USA was a comfortable 7-week affair, a luxurious sea voyage across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, then up the Eastern seaboard of USA. Our first impression of the USA was a vista of miles of squalid shanty-town slums where underclass blacks lived, as our ship crept up river to a berth within walking range of gracious antebellum homes and lovely downtown Charleston, South Carolina. It was a different planet from our first sight of those miles of shantytown slums. Another first impression was gunshops with displays of ugly automatic pistols and rifles with magazines holding enough bullets to shred the first unlucky deer, wild pig, or newspaper delivery boy to cross the path of a proud owner of such lethal weapons. A newspaper delivery boy was slaughtered by mistake in exactly this way soon after our landfall in the USA. An Op-Ed comment in the Burlington Free Press after that commonplace tragedy twisted facts and distorted logic to imply that getting shot and killed was the boy's own fault.
Before we left Sydney on that migration from Australia to the USA, I had begun to study socio-demographic and psychological factors associated with migration, so I had some insight into what was happening to me and my family. I knew an essential determinant of successful migration is a slowly acquired sense of belonging to the migrant's host country. On our very first day in the USA impressions began to accumulate, a little more on the negative than the positive side of the ledger. Reasons not to identify with, not to seek a sense of belonging to American culture, grew more numerous in the months that followed.
Throughout our 14 months in Burlington, Vermont in 1964-65, Wendy and I tried hard to acquire the sense of belonging that we knew was an essential prerequisite to successful assimilation. I was very fortunate: Kerr White, my host, mentor, guide on the path to assimilation, gave me many opportunities to travel. I went to New York, Washington, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chapel Hill, Ann Arbor, Chicago and sundry other centres of scholarly life. At weekends and on a short late summer holiday we explored Vermont and the neighbouring states. Wendy and I found much to admire and like about life in the lovely little university city of Burlington, Vermont. But we also found aspects of the American way of life that felt alien - that inhibited us from acquiring a sense of belonging.
We were disgusted by the profligacy and waste, appalled by casual acceptance of corruption as an integral component of politics, horrified and alarmed by the gun culture, apprehensive about the rising tide of strident militarism all around us. The war was heating up in Vietnam in 1964, and universally there was total misunderstanding of what that war was really about: Americans saw it not as the struggle for national liberation from colonial rule that it really was, but as a conflict between good capitalism and evil communism.
I'd been reading the New Yorker avidly for about 15 years, but apart from that we searched in vain for local, regional and national evidence of the sort of cultural richness and historical traditions that permeate the lives of people in Britain or France or Italy. It was difficult to detect evidence that the values of Mark Twain, Louisa May Allcott, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, or a dozen other American writers I admired and loved, had penetrated the souls of any of the Americans we met, nice though they all were. The overriding impression was of a shallow, superficial culture hardly deserving to be called a culture - certainly not a culture to which we wanted to belong.
Wendy and I felt that we were saved from a fate worse than death when Stuart Morrison invited me to join his team at the Usher Institute of Public Health in the University of Edinburgh. The salary was 40% below what I'd been offered to accompany Kerr White to the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene in Baltimore; even so it took no more than a nanosecond to decide between the two invitations. I achieved brief fame as an example of 'reverse brain drain' - even a short paragraph in the Lancet.
The process of migrating from New England to Scotland lasted overnight, a red-eye flight from Montreal to Prestwick, and an hour on the train to Waverley Station in Edinburgh. Wendy and I thought our adjustment to life in Scotland would be equally brief. She'd lived in Edinburgh before, for 2-3 years; I'd lived there for about 5 months. I was disconcerted to find that it took 2 years or more to acquire a sense of belonging. Probably this was because I'd lived in London for 4-5 years and had acquired aspects of Englishness that were subtly different from Scottishness. It was easier and faster for Wendy, perhaps partly because of a little Scots blood in her veins. But it happened: our whole family acquired not so much a veneer as a sturdy sub-surface layer of Scottishness, strongly reinforced in our children by lovely lilting Edinburgh accents. (To my sorrow they lost these accents within weeks of settling in Ottawa, but Rebecca assures me she can retrieve hers if the need arises).
After 5 years we all felt Scottish and would happily have spent the rest of our lives there. Several factors impelled us to move again. After 5 years I'd become professionally well known. I began to get invitations to attractive professorial positions elsewhere in the UK, in Canada, USA. None from Australia, alas, and I was turned down for two positions I applied for in my homeland: both went to men who were well-connected rather than well qualified. I couldn't refuse an invitation from Harvard, however, despite misgivings about the politics of a cross appointment between the medical school and the school of public health, doubts about returning to a country and culture we'd found flawed, and painfully long commutes I'd be forced to make. After provisionally accepting the position at Harvard, I flew to Ottawa, arriving late on a balmy summer afternoon. I walked up to Parliament Hill, then around the Canal to somewhere in the Glebe where as dusk gathered, Mums and Dads sat on their front steps sipping wine while their kids played street hockey. I had an epiphany: this was the place to raise our kids, not some distant outer suburb of greater Boston with all the turbulence and racial tensions that afflicted the USA in the late 1960s!
The decision to leave Edinburgh, which we had come to love, and where we felt that we truly belonged, and move to yet another new country and culture was agonizing and drawn out over as many weeks as we could delay saying yea or nay. When we finally made up our minds it was after prolonged consideration of many pros and cons. Better chances for our children to get a good start in life was of over-riding importance.
We found to our surprise and delight that adjustment to Canadian life and culture was easy, fast and painless (but not to the climate! That's a whole other story). The policy and reality of multiculturalism smoothed the way: newcomers to Canada are accepted for who they are. Nobody tried to change us, to force us into a mould that would have us conform, become like everyone else. Canada's not like that! It draws its greatest strength from its pervasive diversity. Now after 46 years here I feel deep-rooted; and if my ancestors are all in another country, that just makes me more Canadian, not less, like close to a third of all of us who live in Canada. The sense of belonging took hold soon after we arrived in Ottawa, and has grown stronger, richer, deeper with each passing year.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Entering my 90th year
Any honest old wrinkly will admit that despite the sense of accomplishment in surviving this long, its annoying limitations, disabilities, aches and pains, et cetera, make old age a mixed blessing. As I've said before and will doubtless say again - old people being by nature repetitious - being alive at 89 is infinitely preferable to being dead, no matter how tiresome the accompanying ailments of old age may be. I continue to get great pleasure from just being alive. This year I've had an unusually large number of greetings and good wishes on this, my 89th birthday. I treasure them all. I was especially chuffed to receive greetings from my very good friend and colleague for 40 years, Rama Nair. As I said to him in a Facebook message, I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in having brought him to Ottawa, recruited him to our medical school, and watched with approval as he and his lovely wife Sarala put down roots and established a dynasty here. They are a vibrant local symbol of the success of Canada's policy of multiculturalism, the mosaic of cultures that have joined forces here to form a beautiful pattern. There's a good deal of merging and mingling at the margins, but the mosaic is still a mosaic, a model to the rest of the world in how cultures can live together side by side in friendship and harmony. It's a better model and more durable too, than the American (and Australian) policy of assimilation - the melting pot, in which every immigrant becomes an American (or an Australian). When Wendy and I were weighing the pros and cons of staying in the USA or moving on to Scotland, the melting-pot metaphor was firmly in the 'con' column. Later, when we left Scotland and came to Canada, the metaphor of the mosaic was a powerful encouragement to stay here and become part of the mosaic.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Migrations - Some official statistics
The Harper government is so secretive with facts that might prove politically awkward or embarrassing if disclosed, that we must turn to official UN agencies to find the truth.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is a useful source. I learnt from IOM that I am one of 21 thousand Australians who has migrated to Canada. Almost 11 thousand have migrated to Canada from New Zealand, Wendy's homeland. According to IOM, as of 30 June 2015, i.e. in the first six months of 2015, Italy, including Sicily and the tiny island of Lampadusa, had received 114 thousand migrants who have arrived by sea across the Mediterranean; several thousand died trying, mostly by drowning, some asphyxiated after being locked in confined spaces, e.g. refrigerated trucks, sealed ships' holds. The land route into western Europe runs through Greece and the Balkans. More than 235 thousand migrants used the land route through Greece in the first six months of 2015. Greece's task has not been made easier by the German bankers who demand repayment in full of loans to Greece.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is another useful resource. I've been observing UNHCR's work and using their statistics for many years (I've contributed to UNHCR as a charitable cause for more than 30 years). One UNHCR statistic I've often quoted is the rapidly rising number of environmental refugees. The number rose from 5 million to 47 million between 2005 and 2010; it has risen more sharply since 2010. Late in 2015 there are more than 60 million refugees but I can't find a table that dissects them into refugees from conflict, habitat loss, etc. The appalling carnage of the Syrian civil war was sparked initially by habitat loss after an unprecedented prolonged drought attributable to climate change. This led directly to a rural-to-urban migration of about 1.5 million Syrian farm families whose formerly fertile land had turned to desert.
The present Canadian government has been obstructive and secretive, delaying action on specific requests from families and church-based groups, refusing to disclose the actual numbers, releasing figures that are misleading, inconsistent or both. Harper boasts that no country is doing as much as Canada, a blatant falsehood. A spokesman for one of the charitable organizations said that as far as he could determine, fewer than 500 claims for refugee status are being processed (painfully slowly) and the number actually brought to Canada under direct government sponsorship or in process of being brought here, is 59. Germany has received over 100,000 refugees from Iraq and Syria, and Sweden, with a population of less than a quarter of Canada's, has taken in 60,000. When our present political leaders lie to us so shamefully I wonder why they expect us to vote them back into office. The Harper government's contribution to the Middle East crisis is 6 fighter-bombers and a campaign of obstruction and lies. Recent news also included information that a Canadian air strike earlier this year led to a record number of civilian deaths. The actions of the Harper government contrast very sharply with the response of Joe Clark's PC Government to the refugee crisis of the 'Boat People' after the fall (or liberation) of Vietnam. Some 60,000 or more were brought to Canada in the space of a few weeks.
Why do people migrate? Stated at the most simplistic, they are either pulled or pushed. The incentive to leave a familiar homeland, to uproot, is absence of opportunities for advancement, promotion, or even survival in the homeland. Habitat loss is becoming a 'push' factor in a world of rising sea levels, desertification, shrinking resources. This set of problems often leads to social unrest, political instability, persecution of minorities. The dustbowl years of the 1930s caused habitat loss in some marginal agricultural regions of USA, leading to some population redistribution. I think we are beginning to see evidence of another trend, a larger region of habitat loss, drought in California which shows signs of a longterm or permanent climatic shift. By the middle decades of the 21st century the south-west corner of USA will probably be unable to sustain even half its current population. California is richer in all resources needed for prosperity except the one essential ingredient, fresh water for drinking and irrigation. Perhaps desalination technology will develop in time to replace depleted freshwater. If it doesn't, millions will be forced to emigrate from California as it transforms into a waterless desert.
Viewed as a biological phenomenon, the turbulent movement of people around the world, often accompanied by violence and armed conflict, is a collective response to the need for resources essential for survival. Currently humanity is living in ecological deficit. Every year the deficit between numbers of people and available resources of drinking water and food grows larger. Many of the world's most intractable conflicts are ultimately attributable to this deficit. The relentlessly increasing size of this deficit is a reliable predictor of future unrest and conflict.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is a useful source. I learnt from IOM that I am one of 21 thousand Australians who has migrated to Canada. Almost 11 thousand have migrated to Canada from New Zealand, Wendy's homeland. According to IOM, as of 30 June 2015, i.e. in the first six months of 2015, Italy, including Sicily and the tiny island of Lampadusa, had received 114 thousand migrants who have arrived by sea across the Mediterranean; several thousand died trying, mostly by drowning, some asphyxiated after being locked in confined spaces, e.g. refrigerated trucks, sealed ships' holds. The land route into western Europe runs through Greece and the Balkans. More than 235 thousand migrants used the land route through Greece in the first six months of 2015. Greece's task has not been made easier by the German bankers who demand repayment in full of loans to Greece.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is another useful resource. I've been observing UNHCR's work and using their statistics for many years (I've contributed to UNHCR as a charitable cause for more than 30 years). One UNHCR statistic I've often quoted is the rapidly rising number of environmental refugees. The number rose from 5 million to 47 million between 2005 and 2010; it has risen more sharply since 2010. Late in 2015 there are more than 60 million refugees but I can't find a table that dissects them into refugees from conflict, habitat loss, etc. The appalling carnage of the Syrian civil war was sparked initially by habitat loss after an unprecedented prolonged drought attributable to climate change. This led directly to a rural-to-urban migration of about 1.5 million Syrian farm families whose formerly fertile land had turned to desert.
The present Canadian government has been obstructive and secretive, delaying action on specific requests from families and church-based groups, refusing to disclose the actual numbers, releasing figures that are misleading, inconsistent or both. Harper boasts that no country is doing as much as Canada, a blatant falsehood. A spokesman for one of the charitable organizations said that as far as he could determine, fewer than 500 claims for refugee status are being processed (painfully slowly) and the number actually brought to Canada under direct government sponsorship or in process of being brought here, is 59. Germany has received over 100,000 refugees from Iraq and Syria, and Sweden, with a population of less than a quarter of Canada's, has taken in 60,000. When our present political leaders lie to us so shamefully I wonder why they expect us to vote them back into office. The Harper government's contribution to the Middle East crisis is 6 fighter-bombers and a campaign of obstruction and lies. Recent news also included information that a Canadian air strike earlier this year led to a record number of civilian deaths. The actions of the Harper government contrast very sharply with the response of Joe Clark's PC Government to the refugee crisis of the 'Boat People' after the fall (or liberation) of Vietnam. Some 60,000 or more were brought to Canada in the space of a few weeks.
Why do people migrate? Stated at the most simplistic, they are either pulled or pushed. The incentive to leave a familiar homeland, to uproot, is absence of opportunities for advancement, promotion, or even survival in the homeland. Habitat loss is becoming a 'push' factor in a world of rising sea levels, desertification, shrinking resources. This set of problems often leads to social unrest, political instability, persecution of minorities. The dustbowl years of the 1930s caused habitat loss in some marginal agricultural regions of USA, leading to some population redistribution. I think we are beginning to see evidence of another trend, a larger region of habitat loss, drought in California which shows signs of a longterm or permanent climatic shift. By the middle decades of the 21st century the south-west corner of USA will probably be unable to sustain even half its current population. California is richer in all resources needed for prosperity except the one essential ingredient, fresh water for drinking and irrigation. Perhaps desalination technology will develop in time to replace depleted freshwater. If it doesn't, millions will be forced to emigrate from California as it transforms into a waterless desert.
Viewed as a biological phenomenon, the turbulent movement of people around the world, often accompanied by violence and armed conflict, is a collective response to the need for resources essential for survival. Currently humanity is living in ecological deficit. Every year the deficit between numbers of people and available resources of drinking water and food grows larger. Many of the world's most intractable conflicts are ultimately attributable to this deficit. The relentlessly increasing size of this deficit is a reliable predictor of future unrest and conflict.
Monday, September 14, 2015
A sociobiological perspective on migrations
The terms used to describe migrants can reveal much about those who use the terms. In the early 1930s, the period of my earliest conscious memories, cartoons in the gutter press in Australia conveyed frightening images of sinister slant-eyed men, the mythical 'Yellow Peril' who threatened to overwhelm the sturdy but sparsely distributed blue-eyed, fair-complexioned Australians of British stock who were sprinkled across the south-east corner of the desert continent with denser clusters in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and other cities on that long coast facing the South-West Pacific Ocean. The journalists and the owners of the gutter press were deliberately vague about the nationality of those they described as the yellow peril. Were they Chinese? Japanese? Burmese? Indonesian? (Not this: In the 1930s Indonesia didn't exist: it emerged in 1947, the outcome of a colonial war of liberation of the Dutch East Indies that was watched nervously by press, politicians and the public in Australia).
There were massive and often bloodstained regional population realignments in and after wars of liberation from colonial status, for instance after the partition of British colonial India into India and Pakistan. A consequence of the liberation wars in south and south-east Asia were large migrations into Western Europe: Dutch-speaking Indonesians into Holland, French-speaking Vietnamese into France, English-speaking Indians and Pakistanis into Britain. In 1961-62 I walked every day across the north-east corner of what had previously been Cockney east end City of London with a long history of receiving migrants -- Huguenots, Jewish refugees from Russia and the Baltic States, more Jews escaping from Hitler, then the influx I observed from East Pakistan, which 10 years later became Bangladesh. I suggested to Jerry Morris that the Social Medicine Research Unit should keep an eye on the population redistribution going on around Brick Lane which was becoming a little enclave of East Pakistan. But I couldn't articulate a relevant research question clearly enough, though doubtless there were some well within the scope of one of the MRC Research Units. Walking past Brick Lane one day in the winter of 1961-62 I first heard the pejorative term 'Paki' applied venomously to these slender and beautiful sari-clad young women from the deltas of the Ganges and the Bramaputra Rivers. Not long after then there were race riots in Bradford and other cities in the north of England, sparked partly by insulting language used to describe immigrants from South Asia.
In Australia in the 1950s,the acronym DP (displaced persons) was applied blanket fashion to all immigrants, even those like our friends Dodie and Harald Ziemer who paid their own way to Australia. Sometimes it stigmatized, like the current Oz term 'asylum seekers' - implying that they are somehow inferior, but really just the 21st century way to express xenophobia I don't think we are as bigoted in Canada but I haven't seen an opinion survey and it's hard to read the tea leaves.
The Canadian policy and practice of multiculturalism were powerful attractions to Wendy and me, and we saw many examples of the successful application of multiculturalism. I saw it close-up in the successive 'families' of 84 medical students who passed through my first-year class every year. They were truly rainbow classes in which all variations of skin pigmentation, hair texture, and on special occasions, ethnic costumes, were displayed. I was privileged to have many contact hours exposure to those first year students, watched as they bonded into a single large 'family' and observed assortative mating occurring, often across ethnic and cultural 'boundaries' that these nubile youngsters ignored. I've stayed in contact with enough of these ethnically diverse couples to observe some flourish and others fail for reasons tht had nothing to do with their diversity. At longer range I've observed Canadian multiculturalism being nurtured at grade school level, at the French Immersion First Avenue School at the other end of the block I live on. In the playground the little children play and lark about - in English, spoken with widely diverse accents - with complete disregard for irrelevancies like skin pigmentation and hair texture.
Canada, this easy-going tolerant multicultural nation could very easily absorb tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. All that stands in the way is the bigotry and intolerance of our current government. I hope they are resoundingly swept from office next month!
There were massive and often bloodstained regional population realignments in and after wars of liberation from colonial status, for instance after the partition of British colonial India into India and Pakistan. A consequence of the liberation wars in south and south-east Asia were large migrations into Western Europe: Dutch-speaking Indonesians into Holland, French-speaking Vietnamese into France, English-speaking Indians and Pakistanis into Britain. In 1961-62 I walked every day across the north-east corner of what had previously been Cockney east end City of London with a long history of receiving migrants -- Huguenots, Jewish refugees from Russia and the Baltic States, more Jews escaping from Hitler, then the influx I observed from East Pakistan, which 10 years later became Bangladesh. I suggested to Jerry Morris that the Social Medicine Research Unit should keep an eye on the population redistribution going on around Brick Lane which was becoming a little enclave of East Pakistan. But I couldn't articulate a relevant research question clearly enough, though doubtless there were some well within the scope of one of the MRC Research Units. Walking past Brick Lane one day in the winter of 1961-62 I first heard the pejorative term 'Paki' applied venomously to these slender and beautiful sari-clad young women from the deltas of the Ganges and the Bramaputra Rivers. Not long after then there were race riots in Bradford and other cities in the north of England, sparked partly by insulting language used to describe immigrants from South Asia.
In Australia in the 1950s,the acronym DP (displaced persons) was applied blanket fashion to all immigrants, even those like our friends Dodie and Harald Ziemer who paid their own way to Australia. Sometimes it stigmatized, like the current Oz term 'asylum seekers' - implying that they are somehow inferior, but really just the 21st century way to express xenophobia I don't think we are as bigoted in Canada but I haven't seen an opinion survey and it's hard to read the tea leaves.
The Canadian policy and practice of multiculturalism were powerful attractions to Wendy and me, and we saw many examples of the successful application of multiculturalism. I saw it close-up in the successive 'families' of 84 medical students who passed through my first-year class every year. They were truly rainbow classes in which all variations of skin pigmentation, hair texture, and on special occasions, ethnic costumes, were displayed. I was privileged to have many contact hours exposure to those first year students, watched as they bonded into a single large 'family' and observed assortative mating occurring, often across ethnic and cultural 'boundaries' that these nubile youngsters ignored. I've stayed in contact with enough of these ethnically diverse couples to observe some flourish and others fail for reasons tht had nothing to do with their diversity. At longer range I've observed Canadian multiculturalism being nurtured at grade school level, at the French Immersion First Avenue School at the other end of the block I live on. In the playground the little children play and lark about - in English, spoken with widely diverse accents - with complete disregard for irrelevancies like skin pigmentation and hair texture.
Canada, this easy-going tolerant multicultural nation could very easily absorb tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. All that stands in the way is the bigotry and intolerance of our current government. I hope they are resoundingly swept from office next month!
Monday, September 7, 2015
Migrations, 2: Syria: Dissolution and Diaspora
The nearest I got to Syria was in 1998, a car trip from Beirut almost to the Beckaar Valley in Eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria, haven of Hezbollah and a target for random aerial attacks by the Israeli air force. We wanted to see the ancient ruins, the remains of temples dating back 3 thousand years or more.We had a vaguely defined plan to continue across the border to Damascus, where I had a friend, Ibrahim Abdelnour, one of my correspondents who helped to compile the Dictionary of Epidemiology, an authority on the epidemiology of malaria. Everything seemed aligned in our favour as we left Beirut on a heavily overcast morning but halfway to the Beckaar Valley the clouds blew away, leaving all on the ground in sparkling sunshine, perfect targets for the Israeli air force. We had a phone call from our minders in Beirut: Do not proceed; turn back. Two years later I met my Syrian friend at the IEA Congress in Los Angeles, but it wasn't the same as a meeting in Damascus would have been. He was an urbane scholar who loved his ancient city and had been eagerly looking forward to showing it to me. I've flown over Damascus a few times, en route to or from Kuwait. From the air it looks a fascinating city. I wish I'd been able to stroll its twisting lanes, browse its souk, see its mosques, meet more of its scholars than that witty old man, Ibrahim Abdelnour and one of his bright young proteges.
After almost 5 years of vicious warfare among a confusing array of adversaries, Syria has disintegrated. Late in 2015 this once cohesive nation, a regional power that the IDF took very seriously, is in an advanced stage of dissolution. More than 11 million Syrians are homeless refugees. Until very recently they were prosperous, well educated, secure in homes where the same families had lived for generations. That drowned toddler whose body at the edge of the sea on a Turkish beach appeared in newspaper photos all over the world, was from such a family. The fanatics of the Islamic State have moved in, taken over large swaths of the country, diligently obliterating ancient artifacts to conform with the perverse brand of Islam propagated by their mentors in Saudi Arabia.
Germany, to its credit, has welcomed the mass of refugees who have escaped, has promised homes for 800,000. Typically, Harper's government has been evasive, misleading and inconsistent. If they have their druthers, they'll adopt the same policy as the xenophobic Canadian government of the 1930s, for whom "None is too many" was the watchword. I think Germany is getting an excellent bargain by opening its doors and its homes to 800,000 or more Syrian refugees. Would that Canada was led by a similar wise and farsighted statesman! Instead we have a rigid, narrow-minded rightwing Islamophobe ideologue who lacks vision and imagination, can't visualize how immensely such an influx of well educated, highly motivated young people would benefit Canada. Either the NDP, or even the Liberal Party if it could be trusted to honour its promises, would be a paradigm shift and a vast improvement over this visionless conservative government.
After almost 5 years of vicious warfare among a confusing array of adversaries, Syria has disintegrated. Late in 2015 this once cohesive nation, a regional power that the IDF took very seriously, is in an advanced stage of dissolution. More than 11 million Syrians are homeless refugees. Until very recently they were prosperous, well educated, secure in homes where the same families had lived for generations. That drowned toddler whose body at the edge of the sea on a Turkish beach appeared in newspaper photos all over the world, was from such a family. The fanatics of the Islamic State have moved in, taken over large swaths of the country, diligently obliterating ancient artifacts to conform with the perverse brand of Islam propagated by their mentors in Saudi Arabia.
Germany, to its credit, has welcomed the mass of refugees who have escaped, has promised homes for 800,000. Typically, Harper's government has been evasive, misleading and inconsistent. If they have their druthers, they'll adopt the same policy as the xenophobic Canadian government of the 1930s, for whom "None is too many" was the watchword. I think Germany is getting an excellent bargain by opening its doors and its homes to 800,000 or more Syrian refugees. Would that Canada was led by a similar wise and farsighted statesman! Instead we have a rigid, narrow-minded rightwing Islamophobe ideologue who lacks vision and imagination, can't visualize how immensely such an influx of well educated, highly motivated young people would benefit Canada. Either the NDP, or even the Liberal Party if it could be trusted to honour its promises, would be a paradigm shift and a vast improvement over this visionless conservative government.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Migrations
In 1954-59 I had a front-line perspective of migrants entering and settling in Adelaide. Some assimilated and others became hyphenated Australians, adjusting while preserving their original ethnic and cultural identity. I saw the impact of migration on the health of migrants and occasionally, subtle effects of migrants on the health of those who were already there. My first 'scientific' article in the Medical Journal of Australia (1960) was an anecdotal description of a few health problems associated with migration. It was neither epidemiology nor social demography but since 1960, my interest in the application of social demography and epidemiology to studies of migration and my grasp of the issues, have grown considerably. Several of my published papers focus on social demography, e.g. on the migrations out of the UK of British-trained medical doctors in and before the late 1960s, and into the UK after 1945 of doctors and nurses trained in South Asia, Africa and the West Indies.
In the second half of the 1950s my family doctor role meant close contact with individuals and families. I brushed up the German I'd learnt at school, and took Italian lessons for a couple of years - a delightful experience - so I could speak in their own language with immigrants in these large linguistic groups. I never really mastered either language but the fact that I tried, that I reached out a helping hand in this way, made me warmly welcome in immigrants' homes, more so than any of my colleagues, none of whom made comparable efforts. Two of my colleagues were covertly xenophobic. I began as a salaried assistant in that 10-doctor group practice, the lowest man on the totem pole, doing all the scut work nobody else wanted, including all the out of hours calls to see sick immigrants in the hostel where thousands stayed when they first arrived. In that way I met several families who not only became my loyal patients, but in a few instances, notably Dodie and Harald Ziemer, became personal friends. Dodie and Harald became among our closest friends in Australia: we stayed with them when we returned on several visits after we left Australia, and they stayed with us when they made a world tour after Harald retired from his post as registrar of the Lutheran boys' college in Melbourne.
I've long been interested in the social demography of the great migrations of recorded history, especially those of the past few hundred years: the European migrations into the Americas and Australasia, the transportation of some 20-30 million black African slaves into South, Central and North America, and the rearrangement of populations according to ethnic and cultural characteristics as colonialism ended, and rearrangement of borders and populations in Europe after the 1939-45 World War. Some mass migrations have been peaceful and orderly; others have not.
The great migration of 2015 is chaotic and bloody. For 5 years Syria has been engulfed in a catastrophic war in which at least 3 major factions and several lesser groups have been slaughtering each other with unprecedented ferocity. At least 11 million Syrians have been displaced and the entire nation has been laid waste. Syria is at the epicentre of a massive migration of Syrians into Turkey, Lebanon and further afield, across the Mediterranean by sea mainly via Libya, and by land via Turkey, Greece and Serbia, entering the European Union in Hungary, whence the preferred destinations are Germany and Scandinavia. Today Hungarian security staff blocked the tsunami of refugees that previously had flowed unobstructed beyond Hungary into western Europe. Germany has taken tens of thousands of refugees. Britain has taken a few hundred. Canada undertook to accept 10,000, but the Harper government has done its utmost to obstruct the flow. It's very difficult to get facts from the Harper government. Harper says Canada has accepted 11,000 Syrian refugees. The xenophobic minister in charge of the file says 1100. A United Church spokesman responsible for placing Syrian refugees who manage to get to Canada knows of 29 families, just over 100 people. That's better than Australia which intercepts 'asylum seekers' and incarcerates them in off-shore concentration camps. Among the reasons I hope to see Harper consigned to the dustbin of history after the next election is that whoever follows him will assuredly adopt a more humane and compassionate refugee policy.
Syria's descent into the barbarism of its civil war was precipitated by unrest that followed several years of failed harvests: climate change was at the root of it. It's a chilling thought that climate related collapse of social order and the flight of multitudes of refugees is certain to become quite commonplace in the near future. What will be the next hot spot? North China? The American Midwest? Southern California? Eastern Europe and Ukraine? We live in interesting times...
In the second half of the 1950s my family doctor role meant close contact with individuals and families. I brushed up the German I'd learnt at school, and took Italian lessons for a couple of years - a delightful experience - so I could speak in their own language with immigrants in these large linguistic groups. I never really mastered either language but the fact that I tried, that I reached out a helping hand in this way, made me warmly welcome in immigrants' homes, more so than any of my colleagues, none of whom made comparable efforts. Two of my colleagues were covertly xenophobic. I began as a salaried assistant in that 10-doctor group practice, the lowest man on the totem pole, doing all the scut work nobody else wanted, including all the out of hours calls to see sick immigrants in the hostel where thousands stayed when they first arrived. In that way I met several families who not only became my loyal patients, but in a few instances, notably Dodie and Harald Ziemer, became personal friends. Dodie and Harald became among our closest friends in Australia: we stayed with them when we returned on several visits after we left Australia, and they stayed with us when they made a world tour after Harald retired from his post as registrar of the Lutheran boys' college in Melbourne.
I've long been interested in the social demography of the great migrations of recorded history, especially those of the past few hundred years: the European migrations into the Americas and Australasia, the transportation of some 20-30 million black African slaves into South, Central and North America, and the rearrangement of populations according to ethnic and cultural characteristics as colonialism ended, and rearrangement of borders and populations in Europe after the 1939-45 World War. Some mass migrations have been peaceful and orderly; others have not.
The great migration of 2015 is chaotic and bloody. For 5 years Syria has been engulfed in a catastrophic war in which at least 3 major factions and several lesser groups have been slaughtering each other with unprecedented ferocity. At least 11 million Syrians have been displaced and the entire nation has been laid waste. Syria is at the epicentre of a massive migration of Syrians into Turkey, Lebanon and further afield, across the Mediterranean by sea mainly via Libya, and by land via Turkey, Greece and Serbia, entering the European Union in Hungary, whence the preferred destinations are Germany and Scandinavia. Today Hungarian security staff blocked the tsunami of refugees that previously had flowed unobstructed beyond Hungary into western Europe. Germany has taken tens of thousands of refugees. Britain has taken a few hundred. Canada undertook to accept 10,000, but the Harper government has done its utmost to obstruct the flow. It's very difficult to get facts from the Harper government. Harper says Canada has accepted 11,000 Syrian refugees. The xenophobic minister in charge of the file says 1100. A United Church spokesman responsible for placing Syrian refugees who manage to get to Canada knows of 29 families, just over 100 people. That's better than Australia which intercepts 'asylum seekers' and incarcerates them in off-shore concentration camps. Among the reasons I hope to see Harper consigned to the dustbin of history after the next election is that whoever follows him will assuredly adopt a more humane and compassionate refugee policy.
 |
| One Syrian who didn't make it: drowned child on a Mediterranean beach |
Syria's descent into the barbarism of its civil war was precipitated by unrest that followed several years of failed harvests: climate change was at the root of it. It's a chilling thought that climate related collapse of social order and the flight of multitudes of refugees is certain to become quite commonplace in the near future. What will be the next hot spot? North China? The American Midwest? Southern California? Eastern Europe and Ukraine? We live in interesting times...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)