Saturday 12 May 2012

I’ve changed my mind, sort of…

I know that I have not delved into my own back yard very much despite the war-zone the media has bombarded me with in recent months. I have been slow to chose an angle which I could truly support in the Government vs Student clash that has been paraded about like a ratings show pony, with one side’s vandalism, transportation/transit disruptions, and displays of public nudity, and the other side’s brutality, plastic bullets, tear gas, and heavy-handed arrests. In some part this has only been for my belief that there has to be more to this than simple tuition hikes, because in all seriousness, these protests have already cost more in added police presence than the tuition hikes would have earned the universities over several decades.

Make no mistakes about it, I know that police are generally the driving force who turn a peaceful march into a violent protest. I’ve witnessed it in person while almost getting mowed down by police in full riot gear for simply standing on a street corner. They’d decided that the direction I was going in was the wrong one even if that was where my car happened to be parked, and I was to be herded like cattle away from where I was actually trying to be, which was also away from where all the tear gas clouds had formed. I had been calmly attempting to go home up to that point, I had not broken any laws at all, and now I was being forcibly backed into a corner. Were there shady and criminal elements there? Surely there could have been, but I had nothing to do with that so why me? I did manage to duck down an alley, then walk in an unusual spiral adding 15 blocks to the walk to my car which had been a short 3 blocks away. But I was no longer calm. I did not sleep that night, I couldn’t even lay still in bed I was so agitated. Riot police had so completely changed my mental state that I was ready to wander out into the night and find a police car to hurl bricks at. I decided that was the worst idea I’d ever had, and I put on a movie instead.

So, I am not on the side of law enforcement when the video footage of Victoriaville is played back on every channel. And I know I am not on the side of a government who’s decided 10 years in prison for wearing a mask sounds fair. Election Fraud is only 5 years, Laurent Roussel got 4 years for uttering threats, pointing a firearm, assault causing bodily harm, dangerous driving causing bodily harm, and hit and run causing bodily harm. Obviously, wearing a mask is a much more heinous crime than trying to kill someone with a car… How could I ever have thought otherwise? Heck, Rousssel’s longest punishment is that he is not allowed to own a gun for 10 years, which, on it’s own merit, makes absolutely no sense; why should anyone convicted of attempted murder ever be allowed to own a gun again? OK, I’m meandering off topic.

Back to the students. Their plight has also not had much resonance with me for the fact that it seemed too small an issue to be that upset. It also becomes difficult to sympathise with a group of people who have the lowest tuition costs on the continent while I get taxed the highest rates on the continent, because I am what may once have been termed the middle-class… I have watched my own tax burden increase, in part, to pay the difference of their tuition. Being on their side, would appear to mean being against my own, wouldn’t it?

Apparently, it doesn’t mean that at all. Again, it all roots back to the long corrupt system which protects the right to be super-wealthy above any other right or privilege; the rights of corporations to squeeze every drop of blood from the stone we live on without any obligation to preserve any for the future; the right of ownership of all who have little by those who have all.

The intel hub article I have linked to demonstrates that this is more bold-faced fascism in which a small circle of high-powered super-wealthy CEO’s, think tanks, banks, insurance companies, investment brokers, real-estate moguls, and those who hob-knob with royalty and governments (both local and foreign) are trying to take back that small slice of the pie they feel they were too gracious to have given to us in the first place… Yes, the cake is a lie, and we’re fresh out of pie too.

The student’s plight is the plight of anyone not born into privilege and wealth because the side opposing the students are the very same people who can’t understand why we still are allowed to go home to our families between our sentences in the salt mines. They’ve given us crumbs, and we ungratefully refuse to allow them to own us, how dare we…

However, I still believe the students should stop protesting the rate hikes. They should take an ultimate u-turn, in fact. This education system, does not teach nor educate anybody in any of the most crucial issues we face today. It only serves their interests to guide our intellectual individuality into a ‘school of thought’. It trains the square pegs to fit into the round holes provided to them and like it. Don’t question it. Obey it and love it because you were fed into either side of the fence never once examining the situation nor pondering the fact that there was never a fence to begin with. The Beatles had it so right in one single line of lyrics: “I am he as you are me, and they are we, and we are all together”. Decades have gone by and I’ve simply thought it a catchy opening line in a song, but it’s so much more than that, isn’t it?

Not only have we been conned through generations into the mind-trap that only with a good education can we ever amount to anything though watching a college drop-out rise to the position of richest man on the planet. But they’ve turned the table on the con to the point that now that you owe them a generation or two of blood for being trained to think as they want you to and they’ve also got you asking ‘do you want fries with that?’.

An about-face is in order for the student protests. Change the signs to read ‘please triple tuition weekly for the next 10 years’, change symbol to a green square, and swap the nudity for a barrel or a cardboard box. Make sure you only break laws which make little sense; everybody wear a mask, but not those ‘mark of a bandit’ bandanas, wear those foolish eye masks with a handle like at the costume balls of debutantes. Mock them. Ensure that they know that WE know what’s really going on here.

Let the media know that this is not even about money, do not allow them to snip you're camera time into a 'money' or 'tuition' issue. Chose your words wisely: 'control', 'fascism', 'slavery', 'ownership', 'corruption', and 'greed' are the issues here, not 'tuition'.

The members of the board(s) of directors of these educational institutions and lobbyist think tanks could, should they ever be inclined to learn the definition of philanthropy, pool their combined money into making education free to both students and tax payers for decades. It won't ever happen, so don't hold your breath. But, that is the true enemy we face, not the owned politicians bred and groomed to be the public face of these demons.

Let them crush their control system with their own greed (because they’ll do it with, or without our permission), and let that be a lesson in economics to the world. Drop out and stop thinking what you’re told to think, grow a pair and an opinion of your own choosing. How can they enslave students with debt if there are no students? How can they indoctrinate mindless drooling zombies if they run out of willing volunteers? Learn useful survival skills rather than forwarding their agendas.

Maybe they’ll back off, maybe they won’t… If they don’t, you will find you are in the company of many others from the health care sector (who will be the next target), to unionized workers all over the province (who’ve already been a deer in the headlights for several decades), and eventually everybody with a mortgage or other outstanding debt to the financial services monopoly (as the housing bubble should collapse soon enough). In very a short time, everybody is going to be pissed off at the same people, even if it is for different reasons.

-DIrtyKID©

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