On Civil Disobedience...

Montreal Student Protest

Lots of students filling the streets this week in Montreal to protest tuition hikes. Yes, it's annoying that they are non-violently protesting and blocking streets off...but I can't be mad at them because I know that non-violent civil disobedience is one of the major factors that made Canada what it is today, and although it is a little annoying, I respect the students.

Canada has a long history of non-violent civil disobedience and it's pretty interesting.

History of Canadian Civil Disobedience

This got really big in Canada after World War I, when all the veterans came back bloodied, tired, and broken...to nothing. They were thanked for "Fighting for Freedom" and then forgotten about. Out of the 500,000 (est.) that returned home from WW1 many were disfigured or amputated, and a person with no arms has no chance of finding a job.

"Returning soldiers were angry. They had risked their lives for their country and now were returning to economic chaos. They had great difficulty finding jobs. They sometimes saw them occupied by immigrants. They bristled at annual inflation rates of about forty percent. They heard tales of people who had profited immensely from the war. " 

(http://canadachannel.ca/HCO/index.php/1._Strikes_and_Labour_Disputes_1918-1920)

It's hard to find a job when you have no legs...

People were starting to notice that maybe World War I was more about sending poor people to die off and making rich people more "war-bucks" than it was about "freedom" or some bullshit word...and so they got really really mad.

You can search "Winnipeg General Strike" or "On-to-Ottawa Trek"  for some good examples, or read through the link after the quote mentioned above...but to sum it up, Canadians protested like crazy and won all of the gains we take for granted today. All the social gains we have today were won from the powerful elite class by unions, veterans, and regular folks who practiced civil disobedience in the streets. That is not mentioned very often, in fact, usually when they talk about something we have in Canada they tell us it was given to us from an elite, like a God giving his peons something.

Take medicare for instance, in the interest of the history of medicare, we are told a horribly sappy story about how Tommy Douglas was once treated for free by a doctor and he decided that one day he will give everyone free health care. This is bullshit, Douglas was a crazy Christian preacher who wrote essays in support of eugenics and establishing a "Canadian Master Race." This crazy fool didn't just hand Canadians health care like some sort of God. Real Canadians took to the streets and fought for these gains.

Similarly in the U.S.A. veterans came home to nothing as well, and at some point must have said to themselves "fuck this shit, I went to kill other poor folks over the pond for what? To come home and live in the fucking street? Fuck this."  In 1932, a group of 17,000 veterans (plus their families and supporters, which in turn made the group total about 43,000 people) marched on the White House demanding compensation and a better life. This protest did not sit well with the Americans in power at the time and they ordered the protesters removed, President Herbert Hoover told the guards to use force if necessary and two veterans were shot and killed by police. So basically, two people who went to "die for their country" did indeed die for their country...but in their country and by their country. That's fucked up. (see: "Bonus Army" for details)

Civil Disobedience All-Stars

NVCD Icons of Yesteryear

The two most iconic faces of non-violent civil disobedience are Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

If you are interested in knowing about these two men and their methods please by all means use the power of the internet and research them. Putting their names into a search engine will give you all you need to know about them...also having King's "I Have a Dream" book in your library (either print or digital) is a must have.

(I might fill this blog out more after, but that's the basic reason I'm not gonna hate on the students for blocking off the roads even if it is annoying. It's good to keep pressure on your government.)

Ammendment (May 27, 2012:)

After 100 days of greasy students and crazy cops fooling around in the streets, it might be time to end this silliness.

Think about this...

As more US and UK universities are making their research and curriculum available for widespread free use online (example: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/)...it looks like the whole face of education is changing.

Michael Geist argues that Canada should catch up to the US and UK on this matter: (http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1177735--is-canada-lagging-behind-in-online-education)

For the record, a full year ago I wrote about free internet education in my blog: (https://writingsonsubjects.blogspot.com/2011/05/free-educationget-it-while-it-hot-and.html) 

Online free education is really good, you can pause the lecture (to open a new tab and search for a term you didn't understand), you can rewind it to see a part over again that you didn't quite get. It's so convienient and free.
 
Right now, for instance, I'm watching lectures on computer programming as presented by the notorious mutha fuckin' Paul N. Hilfinger.

(http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,s,All,EE65657BC5C79469)

...and it's FOR FREE! You can do this for any subject! You people are fighting for an ancient educational model that is going extinct fast. It's pointless...

Jackie Robinson

I remember being at school and having to write an essay on the American civil rights movement and wrote my essay on Jackie Robinson instead of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. I got a very poor mark, like a D I think. The teacher said he was not that important a figure in the civil rights movement. I think in his nerdiness he was too far removed from the importance athletics has on a nation. In Malcolm X's book he states that the thing that got him through his prison time was calculating Jackie's batting average on the walls of his cell each day. I don't know why I find this whole situation of Jackie Robinson and baseball's color barrier to be fascinating beyond belief but the fact that the people of my home city have a role to play in this story makes it even more interesting still.

On Malcolm X's stone wall in his jail cell he'd chalk up the stats...one day Jackie may have went 1 for 4, and he chalked up .250, the next game Jackie may have gone 2 for 5 and X scrawled it out and changed the running tally to .333, and so on as the days and games progressed. Why was it so important what Jackie Robinson's batting average was?

Let's put this into the context of the era, in this time pseudo-scientific notions of eugenics (google it) plagued the minds of all nations of the globe. Eugenics made race into a backward science and made an arbitrary hierarchy of who was better than who by what they looked like. For example German eugenics purported that Jews were inferior and exterminated them. American eugenics held that people of darker skin tones were not as intelligent, physically capable, and advanced as those with light skin tones. Sadly, most people thought this way in that time. The U.S. Government set up laws (called Jim Crow laws) outlawing people with darker skin tones from advancing in society, and even weirder crazier things like not using the same fountain as light skinned people. This mental narrow mindedness was even in the heads of the law makers of the country. Obviously this is a problem to say the least, having heads of state who govern in this fashion is unspeakably dangerous.

Luckily science is dogged at all times by a great little thing called proof. Science is also dogged by a great little thing called mathematics. What if on a mass scale with everyone watching, eugenics was put to the test? That is exactly what happened in 1947. America's past time is baseball and the invention of radio and television meant everyone in the nation could listen or watch the test in progress. Jackie was given the chance to display his abilities by Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers and he could single handedly destroy a backward mindset of entire nation if he succeeded.

Let's say Jackie hit .197 and made 10 errors in his first 20 games and was sent down to the minors and never came back. This was a totally possible thing that could have happened in the test. Sadly, this result would have set the civil rights movement back a few decades. The millions of Americans watching this would have had used this data to further convince themselves that eugenics was correct.

Fortunately this was not the case. Jackie Robinson hit .297, with 125 runs scored and lead the leauge in stolen bases in his rookie season of 1947. Two seasons later in 1949 he led the league with a .342 batting average and was awarded the MVP that season. He was the most valuable player to his team and everyone knew it...there was no denying that Jackie was the most valuable human in baseball in 1949, and that is a huge blow to American eugenics and probably convinced millions of narrow minded fellows and ladies that the way they thought was wrong. Jackie through a series of events was given the burden of disproving American eugenics and despite all the death threats, hardships, violence from opposing players...despite everything being stacked against him he managed to gloriously succeed.

I think everyone knows that Jackie was a Montreal Royal (Brooklyn IL league farm club) in 1946 prior to his tenure with the Dodgers. Jackie hit .349 that season and won us the championship. The Montreal fans embraced him and loved him and that makes me proud to tell people that I was born here. When baseball universally retired his number 24 on all teams I went to Olympic Stadium the night Rachel Robinson was there on behalf of her deceased husband and she thanked Montreal on behalf of her husband and it really made me feel connected personally to one of the most significant events in the history of North America and the world.

Written by Deric Brazill