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Rachelle: You’re still mad about losing at Ms. Monopoly, aren’t you?

Rachelle: A resignation is a loss.

Rachelle: Yes, it is.

Rachelle: I know.

Rachelle: It was clear you were thrown off your game when you weren’t allowed to use your special dice or your customized Hat marker.

Rachelle: You didn’t quit because it was unfair.

Rachelle: You quit because you knew you had no hope of winning.

Rachelle: Yes. Times change.

Rachelle: That was the POINT of the game.

Rachelle: It was designed as a twist on the original, inverting the societal hierarchy we labour under, giving women $240 every time they pass Go, while men only get $200.

Rachelle: I have no idea what Jordan Peterson would say about that.

Rachelle: Who is he, anyway?

Rachelle: Boy, that’s an awful lot of links to YouTube videos.

Rachelle: Okay, okay, okay.

Rachelle: I’ve heard enough.

Rachelle: Fine. Equal opportunity and equity are different things.

Rachelle: So that’s the reason you quit Ms. Monopoly just when you were about to lose?

Rachelle: Okay. Resigned.

Rachelle: Principles.

Rachelle: Oh yes, we certainly do need more community leaders like you, Pickle!

Rachelle: Quitting a board game with friends and running off to “catalogue your comics” was indeed a brave and principled stance!

Rachelle: You bring honour into our home with your actions!

Rachelle: No, that’s not right.

Rachelle: You do not support our family by scavenging the garbage cans of Toronto for comics and then never bothering to resell the soggy, disgusting ones you retrieve.

Rachelle: You know it makes the neighbours very uncomfortable to see you doing that, don’t you?

Rachelle: Pickle, they have no idea what you’re looking for.

Rachelle: They’ve started to leave their empty wine bottles in front of our apartment.

Rachelle: I can’t believe you didn’t notice.

Rachelle: On Monday there must have 30 of them!

Rachelle: No.

Rachelle: That bottle increase had nothing to do with the film festival, and everything to do with the neighbours trying to charitably address your disturbing, garbage-picking ways.

Rachelle: Yes, it is nice of them.

Rachelle: Most people are nice, Pickle, it’s true.

Rachelle: I honestly don’t know if Cate Blanchett is nice.

Rachelle: I can’t imagine you having dinner with her.

Rachelle: You’d lose all composure, drop your cutlery, knock over glasses. That sort of thing.

Rachelle: My guess is Jennifer Lawrence is nicer.

Rachelle: I suppose you’re going on another celebrity watch today?

Rachelle: Okay. Just don’t be creepy, and remember to pick-up some coconut water! Must get back to work! xo

It was one of those beautiful summer days, one of the days you wait for, and Jones, like all the children there, was having the time of his life. Running from one attraction to the next, he would fling himself into each discovery with greedy amazement. His joy in his body, and the interaction between it and this emerging world around him, was a visible, glowing thing.

Not far from us was a young boy in a wheelchair. He seemed conspicuously alone as he sat there looking through a mesh screen at all the other children playing inside the Bouncy Castle/Obstacle Course. He was probably around 10, and although he could move his head a little bit, he couldn’t move his arms or legs at all and speech seemed difficult. Sheltered from the sun by the shade cast from the nylon castle, he sat motionless and quiet while all the other children tumbled and spun and screamed.

The Bruno Mars song “Marry You” was playing, and even if you don’t know this song you probably know this song.

It was a hit about ten years ago, and is the sort of infectious, optimistic pop that’s nearly impossible to resist– a welcome trigger for your body and mood, an instinct to movement, really. It’s happy music and it would have been on every party mix made at the time– the song kids would hear in their heads whenever they thought about the person they had a crush on, the song that would surge through them into adventure and love.

And then there was this boy– a spectator, and it was unbearably sad. I went over and stood beside him, and there I saw his two companions, maybe brothers or friends, both lanky boys of 13 or so. They were rolling and leaping through the castle, and when they spilled-out the exit, all hair, shouts and over-sized feet, they immediately ran over and hugged the boy. Excitedly, they shared every detail.

He was so loved, and it seemed right then that there was no boundary between the three of them.

And then the they pushed him off to the next attraction, speeding him over the bumpy, uneven ground like it was some wild game they played, all of them smiling, all of them beautiful and happy beneath the day.

This is a vast question, one that the Globe and Mail is trying to answer by asking some writers their thoughts on the matter. I am flattered to say that I was one of the writers they asked, and this was my response:

*********************************

A real man must have a healthy respect for nature. 

A real man knows that humidity is a festering curse, so if the Humidex rises much above 30, he will stay inside with the AC cranked. He does this because he is smart and powerful and worldly. The real man never retreats, he merely lies in wait until favourable conditions arise. 

A real man is also wary around birds.

He believes flight to be cheating and does not trust cheaters.

If any cheater birds come around a real man’s family, that bird would be a fool. A real man will wave his arms about and shriek, he will do whatever it takes to keep that bird from attacking his family.

Even if his family can be ungrateful and mocking.

That sort of stuff just rolls off a real man’s back.

A real man knows how to build a scarecrow to keep birds off the property he rents, too. If the real man lacks money because of his integrity, because he’s unwilling to be a sheep and get a “job” working for some soulless corporation or media conglomerate, then he will scavenge goods to create his scarecrow, and his scarecrow would be just as good, and a lot more scary, than any fancy, professionally manufactured scarecrow.

A real man is not scared to use coupons.

He is industrious.

And his fearfulness makes him fearless.

And if he cries easily, like when Jon Snow had to kill his red-headed, Wildling girlfriend on GOT, or when a sweet, little gymnast just nails the program she’s worked so hard on, it is only because he feels things so strongly. 

A real man feels it in the gut.

He feels it in the gut hard.

You must understand that.

When at a party and spotting a turntable, the real man knows that it is his duty to assume all DJ responsibilities. He doesn’t shirk from this the way a not-real man might, but he owns the goddamn responsibility. He was born to educate the world by playing the barely recognizable esoterica from his youth. He was born to explain things to people.

And so, the real man won’t be bothered by all the pretty women rolling their eyes and leaving the dance floor. He won’t care that they call him DJ BuzzKill and make fun of his leather bomber jacket. In such a situation, the real man would be crying because the complicated beauty of his music had touched him in a holy way, that is all. 

The real man used to be really good at sports.

It sounds official, like it has a bureaucracy and a headquarters with marble pillars. It sounds like it’s been around longer than you have. Still, when you hear it, you have absolutely no idea what it might mean. It has the effect of sounding like something but conveys no meaning.

Their broad-shouldered leader, Ammon Bundy, exuding the calm and steady manner of a high noon cowboy, announced the name on Fox news.

His heavily armed group, who up until that point had been called patriots, terrorists, activists, militia men and Y’all Qaeda, had taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters in Oregon as a blow against government “tyranny” a few days earlier on January 2nd.

Their storming of the federal building, it should be noted, was clean and lightning-quick; as it being January, the charming, cottage-like structure that gave out free maps during tourist season was entirely abandoned.

Nothing much has happened since their occupation began. Bundy’s men, some of whom who are not camera ready,

have been brandishing copies of the Constitution for the cameras and making YouTube videos from their trucks for their now abandoned families.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbGdMKpHDDE

All over Oregon, wives must have been rolling their eyes, just as they did when these same husbands took off for their annual paintball weekend. It all looked very much like a Fantasy Camp for revolutionaries, and it was clear nobody was taking them seriously.

If any group other than white men had done such a thing, well, it’s reasonable to expect a different response. Imagine what would have happened if a bunch of heavily armed campus radicals took over the headquarters, or to inch closer to armageddon, black protestors or some frustrated Muslims? What would happen then?

We have a pretty good idea, I think.

No matter, what seems to be happening now is that a long-simmering and predictable feud over grazing rights has morphed into a movie-of-the-week. The white guys want the government to hand over land it owns so that they—The People—may use it as they see fit, using it for grazing, mining, logging or opening up paintball camps. As far as I know, the First Nations of America have yet to be consulted.

The Citizens for Constitutional Freedom are not impoverished. They’re not persecuted, marginalized or threatened in any sort of coherent way. Frustrated by their perception of diminishing entitlements, they want to fight back against the forces that impede their ascent, even if they have no idea who or what those forces might be.

They’re easy enough to make fun, these men. Asunder in a rapidly changing and globalized environment, they try to live as heroes in a mythic past, a place where their big sky ambitions could blossom unfettered by government, minorities or environmental regulations. 

It’s sunset in the only America these men have ever wanted to live, and so they tilt toward windmills, deserving of our pity as much as our scorn.

White people don’t like to believe that they practice identity politics. The defining part of being white in America is the assumption that, as a white person, you are a regular, individual human being. Other demographic groups set themselves apart, to pursue their distinctive identities and interests and agendas. Whiteness, to white people, is the American default.

-Tom Scocca

The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can’t go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who’s sniffing cocaine.

-Noam Chomsky

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.

-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

-Audre Lorde

The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you. Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another. And so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything.

-Scott Woods

After this, as a means of contrast, Rachelle and I watched Commander Hadfield’s return to Earth. For those of you who are not Canadian, Commander Chris Hadfield is a Canadian Astronaut who has spent the last 5 months on the International Space Station. It was here, through his use of Twitter– where he accumulated nearly one million followers—that he became something of a folk hero.

Avuncular, proportional and competent, Hadfield seems like a really, really nice guy. A Canadian guy. His moustache is friendly, like the sexually non-threatening moustache of a well-liked high school teacher, and his manner is sincere, thoughtful and fun, but still, you know this guy is operating at a very high level. You want him as your next-door neighbour. He would know what to do when the power went out and you thought you heard something funny in the basement.

Attached to a parachute, the Soyuz space capsule drifted down from space into a field in Kazakhstan like a child’s toy. A bunch of unofficial looking Russians then went over, as if farmers inspecting something that had fallen from the past rather than the future, and pulled the astronauts from the capsule. This was done without the least trace of urgency, like something they were practicing for in their street clothes rather than the main event.

The first out was the Russian and he looked hale, hearty and ready to start tossing a Kettlebell around. The next to follow, the American and Hadfield, looked small, pale and a little worse for the wear, like space travel extracted a physical toll.

They were all put on what looked like unmatched lawn chairs and gave the cameras the thumbs-up. Our CBC commentators were giddy, gushing about how robust and great Hadfield looked. It was surreal, like watching some weird variation of a Soviet propaganda film.

Regardless, what Hadfield did on his mission was utterly wonderful. From his photographs, videos and tweets, he shared with the public a suggestion of what might be considered the divine. The world is stunning in its beauty, and by extension we, all just brief, tiny organic outcroppings of the same living entity, are beautiful, too.

There are many who think that the International Space Station is a huge waste of money, one that doesn’t provide sufficient scientific benefit, but Hadfield, (his Space Oddity video was the most watched on YouTube Monday) showed us that data is perhaps secondary to the opportunity to see ourselves through eyes never imagined.