Michel Warchawski standing in Canada Park near Jerusalem. Photo by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours.

Sitting cross-legged in a circle, a group of about 20 Israeli school children are chatting excitedly under the shade of tall pine trees one sunny afternoon in March. A few meters away, the names of hundreds of Canadians are prominently displayed on row upon row of beige, ceramic plaques. Montreal. Toronto. Winnipeg. Vancouver. Welcome to Canada Park.

The Jewish National Fund of Canada built this vast and sprawling national park, just 30 minutes’ drive from Jerusalem, in the early 1970s. The idyllic setting of the park today, however, belies its bitter origins.

Three Palestinian villages—Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba—once stood on this land, now covered in pine trees and narrow, winding hiking trails. But that history has been largely scrubbed from the landscape and Israeli and Canadian memory.

“It’s either ancient times or Israel. There’s nothing in between,” Israeli activist Michel Warschawski tells me, as he stops the car to read a sign in Hebrew marking the site of a Byzantine-era wine press inside the park.

Warschawski was 17 when he witnessed the forced exodus of Palestinians from the three Palestinian villages in June of 1967, during the Six Days War. Palestinian men, women and children marched quietly up the hillside just past the Jewish kibbutz of Sha’alvim where he lived.

Standing inside Canada Park at the edge of a lush, green field, Warschawski pointed towards the red roofs of Sha’alvim in the distance, just beyond what once was the “no man’s land” between Israeli and Jordanian controlled areas from 1948 and 1967.

We continued along the rocky path in silence, him lost in thought and I busying myself with examining the shrubs, trees and overgrown grass under my feet for anything that would hint at the deep Palestinian roots of the area.

Today, more than 40 years after Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba were demolished, a few olive trees, cactuses, and the crumbling stone foundations of old homes are the only indicators of the area’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Ahmad Abu Ghosh was 14 when Israeli soldiers forced him and his family out of their village of Imwas. The villagers weren’t allowed to take any belongings with them, and were told by the Israeli army to march eastward in the direction of what is now known as the West Bank.

“We walked about 32 kilometers that day from 5 o’clock until 5 o’clock p.m. Then we reached Ramallah,” he said. Without a permit to enter Israel, the last time Abu Ghosh visited his family’s former village was 1991.

I had our conversation in mind as I surveyed the broken stones and collapsed former Palestinian homes, which, despite years of erosion and wear, remain the only witnesses to a planned and systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the land where Canada Park now sits.

“If you lived in some place for 14 years, in the childhood time, you have many memories there. Your house, the trees where you go and the fields where you run or walk,” Abu Ghosh told me. “When you see that everything is destroyed, you have to be shocked. I can’t exactly say how I feel.”

Photo by Lisa Xing

The mermaids of Korea’s Jeju Island are a sight to behold, but not in the way you might think. They don’t have long, flowing locks, nor figures reminiscent of magazine models. They don’t sing Disney ballads. The sound they do make is through whistling—their own method of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide after they surface from the water. Most haenyeo, literally “sea women” in Korean, are grandmothers. They have weathered faces, deep wrinkles, and walk with slow, measured steps. Each morning at dawn, they plunge into the sea to catch clams and other marine life. They dive without much equipment, using only flippers, weighted vests and rubber diving masks. Their method is simple—mark their location in the water with a float, use a weeding hoe for digging up the sea life, and gather their harvest in a net. Some dive as deep as 20 metres, staying under for as long as three minutes without surfacing.

When my friend and I rented mopeds to explore this small island off of Korea’s southern coast, seeing the haenyeo dive was a top priority. After all, the practice helped place local traditions on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2009. We had read about them in our Lonely Planet guides and heard about them through friends. Devastatingly, we both caught a bad case of food poisoning our second evening there, so waking up at the break of dawn was far from feasible. The majority of the trip was spent nursing ourselves back to health and easing stomach cramps, and we gave up hope of actually seeing the haenyeo ourselves.

On our last day on Jeju, we were determined to see more of the island, ill or not. Not up for anything strenuous, we went to spend the afternoon with a picnic near Sunrise Peak, a popular destination on the island’s east coast. Before we even had a chance to spread the picnic blanket, we spied a small figure in the distance walking toward us with what seemed like a net in one hand. Closer and closer she came—until we realized it was one of the haenyeo, standing before us with that day’s catch, still wearing her rubber diving mask. Without a word, she plopped herself down on the beach and motioned for my friend and me to do the same. Because she spoke no English, and our Korean was broken at best, our communication consisted mostly of hand gestures and chuckles. We sat with her for about 10 minutes as she showed us her catch of the day—squid and other sea life she’d scooped up by hand. She spent every morning in the sea—using practices of eras past, armed with just her two calloused hands and an unflinching strength that seems nearly mystical to modern-day generations.

According to the Korea Tourism Organization, there were about 30,000 haenyeo on Jeju Island in the 1950s. By 2002, the number had dropped to 5,600 divers, more than half of whom were at least 60 years old. When this group of women retire, it seems like the legacy of the haenyeo will also vanish into history books, nearly as mythical as mermaids themselves.

Protests outside the British parliament in London. Creative Commons photo by Selena Sheridan.

Almost five months to the day and I’m just now realizing that I didn’t learn my lesson from the G20.

Sure, I found out first had the power and importance of community organization and activism; and I was forced to come to terms with the tragic ease with which our government could abuse our fundamental democratic rights when it suits them.

But neither of those lessons, important though they are, concerned me last Wednesday evening.  As I stood huddled with several thousand other angry, frustrated but mostly just cold students in between two immovable walls of police officers, I wondered how I hadn’t learnt my lesson about kettling the first time.

After being held for hours in the rain at Spadina and Richmond by riot police this summer, I promised I’d never let that happen again. I never wanted to feel so violated and so helpless—as you stand there and stare into the faceless wall of riot police you can’t help but feel impotent, vulnerable and exposed.  And yet, here I was again, hopping from foot to foot to maintain feeling in my toes standing in front of a feeble fire of placards and protest posters trying to fend off the cold London night.

How did it come to this: thousands of students–a large minority of whom were under the age of 16–held for eight hours without food, water or access to washrooms outside the houses of British government on Whitehall?

I suppose it starts with the cuts: devastating austerity measures that will affect every aspect of British life, but will prove particularly ruinous for higher education in the U.K. Under the scheme, government funding for universities will be cut by 40 percent (around £4.3 billion) and will raise the current cap on tuition. For a country that in recent memory offered free university education (universal free higher education was only ended in 1997) the prospect of tripling the fees from roughly £3,000 to more than £9,000 per year has many concerned that the halls of higher education will soon become the domain of the rich exclusively.

But the anger stems from something more emotional then merely the cuts.  Many of the estimated 50,000 students and protesters who walked out of classes and took to the streets across the country recently voted for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democratic party in the last election; he promised, in light of the Tories’ proposed fiscal austerity, to oppose any increases to education fees.  And yet, here we are, not six months later, with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government poised to pass legislation that will gut much of the social service sector and force universities to hike their tuition fees.

It’s understandable, then, why “Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue,” is such a popular chant here, and why central Londoners awoke to find an effigy of Clegg burning Tuesday morning. Students expected this from David Cameron and his Conservatives; from Clegg and the Lib Dems, it feels more like personal betrayal.

This passion, so evident in the November 10th protest that saw “lawless riots”—to quote one sensationalist, though representative, retelling—has traditionally been hard to maintain in British protest movements in recent years.  “Brits just don’t demonstrate,” one protester told me during the march; the only conclusion, he went on, is that “this is something special.”

In a moment of depressing deja vu, I watched as students vented their frustration and anger on a police van left abandoned in the midst of the protest march and recalled how police had similarly left patrol cars on Queen Street this past summer, allegedly for protesters to vandalize.  The three destroyed police cars were used as justification for the authoritarian crackdown the following day in the streets of Toronto; likewise, the vandalized police van became the spurious excuse used for the mass kettling near Parliament Square that I was caught in, along with thousands others.

So there we stood—for hours.

There was something ominous about the entire experience: thousands of people surrounded, towered over by the imposing facades of the buildings of British government and hemmed in by lines of riot-armoured police, yet with plenty of space to move around—the atmosphere ranged from block-party and frenetic to frustrated and lethargic.  As the hours wore on and the cold set in, a few protesters with guitars milled about feebly singing “Give Peace a Chance” but were easily drowned out by the whirl of the helicopters circling overhead, the police sirens’ near constant wailing and, fittingly for London, the reverberating deep bass of the dubstep blaring from the sound system brought for the Carnival of Resistance.  The entire scene was illuminated by sporadic and dying fires of placards, posters and the remnants of a bus-stop lit more for their warmth then their menace (despite what the papers said) and the roving police spotlights.

Eight hours of standing still is a long time—and when your fingers are too cold to play on your smartphone and your mind too numb to do your school readings, you get to talking. The topic du jour was, of course, the cuts and the protests.  Several hours in, the dominant sentiment was frustration bordering on complete exasperation. If the intent of the police kettling had been to intimidate the protesters into silence, it failed; we were given free rein on the street and the non-stop music led to an impromptu dance party. But if they wanted to prove a point about how futile protest can feel in the face of heavy-handed police measures, well, they certainly made an impression.

The question that kept on creeping into the conversation: where was the space for autonomous dissent?

When we were finally let out at 9 pm, eight hours after the kettling began, most were too cold and angry to be anything but amenable.  When the Clash’s “I fought the Law” came on over the speakers, everyone joined in for the chorus, “…and the law won.”  Whether it was intended to be ironic or not, it was fitting.

It was, in short, a low-point.

Many who had been passionate and energetic at the start of the day felt their spirit sapped by the process, and, even more discouraging, many felt despondent about the prospect of an effective protest movement in Britain, myself included.

No matter how special this mass movement is—and you can’t help but marvel at  the sheer size of the country-wide protests—we have to acknowledge the limitations of peaceful protest when the police reaction to the first sign of trouble (graffiti, for instance) is mass kettling. But violent protest doesn’t strike me as being the answer either. For one, it merely galvanizes people away from the cause and serves to justify more repressive police tactics (many see the election of Rob Ford as Toronto mayor, complete with his promise for 100 new police officers, as a knee-jerk reaction to the “mayhem” during the G20).

But if you’ll excuse my use of a tired adage: the night is darkest right before the dawn.

The following day, still numbed and disheartened from the kettling, I joined the student occupation already in progress on my campus at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I admit, I initially opposed the occupation and voted against it in the emergency general meeting on the cuts; I felt like it would channel student anger at the wrong target: our school administration as opposed to the government. But sitting with students and staff members in the reclaimed space–open to anyone who wanted to join and used as a lecture space, music venue, forum for discussion, or simply a place to hang out—showed the dynamism of the student movement and wiped away the ennui I’d felt the day before.

The students’ demands are straightforward: financial transparency in the school’s decision-making; a commitment not to raise tuition fees; and a statement opposing the proposed cuts. If these demands seem overambitious (the school is, after all, at the mercy of the government if they do decide to go through with the cuts) their protest techniques are equally enterprising.  They propose more creative responses: instead of one protest of 5,000 people, which will inevitably be kettled, violent or not, they organize 500 people in 10 separate marches—”flash mob” protests that garner positive media attention. And they’eve built international solidarity networks with students facing similar cuts in other countries such as France, Spain and Italy.

Most of all, British students talk of retaking the means of their own presentation outside of the parameters of the police/media stranglehold on their image.

The school administration served the occupying students with an injunction last Thursday, making their presence in the building illegal as of 7 pm.  I was there as the clock ticked down and more students, staff and supporters kept pouring into the room in solidarity.  As the clock neared 7 and the threat of arrest became ever more real, we voted on defying the High Court Injunction and maintaining the occupation.

Every protest movement has its song: the anti-war movement of the 1960s had countless anthems from Bob Dylan, Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” became an anthem for the women’s liberation movement and the G20 in Toronto this past summer had “O Canada.”  In a poetic turn of events, as the clock struck 7 and the occupation became illegal, students in occupation echoed those kettled the day before and began singing The Clash’s song once more, with fittingly altered lyrics: “I fought the law AND I WON” resounded through the hall.

It may seem merely symbolic; but the student movement is alive and well in London.

[Editor’s note: Back in May, we ran another postcard from Washington, D.C., sent to us by Travis Boisvenue, who went to interview Tea Party supporters. Eve Tobolka made the trek this time to witness the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear.]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Glenn Beck was at Saturday’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Or at least if felt like he was. In August, the Fox News conservative commentator led a big religious themed rally aptly named “Restoring Honor,” where thousands flooded the Lincoln Memorial to hear Beck demonize socialism and preach ultraconservative ideals. It was obvious that not only was he being heard, but that people were listening and supporting.

Last weekend, Comedy Central satirists Stephen Colbert and John Stewart held a rally of their own, Stewart and sanity vs. Colbert and fear. The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was like a big politically themed Halloween party, and everyone got the message. However, the target wasn’t a political party nor was there mention to support any one in particular. It was “the country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator,” said Stewart, “did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.”

When Stewart said this at the end of the rally and on a more serious note, I couldn’t hear him. Well over 200,000 people showed up and only 1/3 could hear and see the show in its entirety. Sure, I would have loved not having to whisper to my neighbour for additional commentary to avoid being politely (and understandably) shushed, but it didn’t bother me, or the people further back. Rallygoers seemed to understand that just being there en masse showed the rest of the country and the world that there could be other voices than those who support Beck. “Your presence is what I wanted,” Stewart stated simply. The rally would be judged by its “size and colour.”

Today, Americans are voting in their midterm elections, and after this weekend, there’s slightly more hope that people are looking beyond Fox News sensationalism. Maybe.

Photo Gallery

All photos by Eve Tobolka

Bassam and Zahra's studio in Damascus.

In one room of their tiny apartment in a suburb of Damascus, Iraqi artists Bassam and Zahra have set up their studio. It has all the necessary trappings scattered around in a colourful mess: sketches, wooden easels, tubes of pigment, paint brushes soaking in plastic buckets filled with water.

Some of Bassam and Zahra’s finished paintings decorate their apartment walls, some are for sale at a Greekowned gallery in Souq Al-Hamadiyye, and some are for sale at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The couple are refugees who fled to Syria to escape the war in Iraq. They scrape together a living by selling their paintings to tourists. It’s much cheaper to live in Damascus than it is in Baghdad, but even so, they can’t get by without occasional gifts from relatives to make ends meet.

When the war broke out in Iraq in 2003 and work was hard to come by, Bassam began painting portraits for American soldiers. After his neighbourhood was occupied by the Mahdi Army, a Shia militia, he quickly became a suspect. A friend of Bassam’s who ran a bootleg liquor store was killed. After his death, Bassam says life in Baghdad became “like being in a movie, no life and no feeling.” Terrified of the violence, Zahra did not set foot outside of their home for three months.

Paint brushes in Bassam and Zahra's Damascus studio.

As the situation in Baghdad deteriorated, educated, middle-class individuals and students—Zahra’s father, now 75, graduated from Oxford University and was a successful engineer; Bassam’s mother was an accountant—were in danger, either of kidnapping for ransom or of being perceived as collaborating with the American military. So, in 2006, like many other Iraqis, Bassam and Zahra made the difficult decision to leave their families and escape across the border to Syria. Bassam describes a huge sense of relief when they passed into Syrian territory, like he could finally breathe again.

Neither of them have been back to Baghdad since 2006— nor do they want to return. The couple says life before the war was like being “choked.” Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime was oppressive, but stable. Today, sectarian violence is rampant, and neither Zahra nor Bassam believes the situation in Baghdad will improve any time soon.

Some of Bassam's comics.

As refugees in Damascus, they live in perpetual fear of being kicked out of the country and having to return to Iraq. Both of them continue to harbour the dreams they shared when they met at art college: Bassam hopes to have an exhibition of his paintings and perfect his work as a comic artist; Zahra, who laughs easily and is seldom seen out of her Converse sneakers, smiles at the thought of having children. But both are too worried about deportation to consider a family right now.

A phone call from the UNHCR with the promise of resettlement to a Western country is their best chance at finding a normal, stable life. However, they have no illusions that it will happen soon—Syria is home to an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees just like them.

The winner of the "Miss Talavera Bruce" women's prison pageant.

Rio de Janeiro has a murder rate as high as a war zone—millions of impoverished people here resort to crime for survival. A kid from the favelas of Rio has limited career options: kidnapper, cocaine trafficker, gang leader, robber, or hit man. For many, prison is safer than the streets, and comes with more reliable food and shelter.

Carnaval is one of the hardest times of year for imprisoned Brazilians, as their fellow free citizens pour into the streets in a sea of colourful celebration. In February 2009, I traveled to the notorious Bangu Prison Complex in Rio to photograph the women who live there. I wanted to see how prisoners celebrate such an important national holiday behind bars.

When I entered the prison for the first time, I was shocked to see bright pink, blue, and yellow paint on the main corridors of the jail. I felt I was shopping for candy, not walking inside a building containing some of the city’s most dangerous criminals. Prisoners walked freely in the courtyard and garden, picking up leaves, changing garbage bags, working. Everyone was smiling. It all felt a little too happy—considering that the women I met were imprisoned for smuggling, armed robbery, even murder.

I made a friend inside, Michelle, from Amsterdam, caught at the Rio airport smuggling cocaine. She had learned Portuguese during her difficult first incarcerated year, and became my translator and guide to the inner workings of Bangu. Outwardly, the women I talked to and photographed were cheerful, smiling, glad to have the small luxuries I snuck in for them—chocolate, phone cards for their illicit cell phones, or the plastic Carnaval crowns that people wear during the five-day holiday. But the stories they told while I took their portraits betrayed their sadness and loneliness inside the massive prison.

The prisoners I met are young women who were never given the chance to grow, or who grew up too old, too quickly. Born into poverty and with few options, they had fallen into desperate circumstances. One inmate, Sylvia, told me she especially misses giving Carnaval party tours to tourists, now that she’s in jail for armed robbery. When she was young, she got a phone call from her father who said he was going to beat up her mother. When she was in her teens, her father tried to kill her mother. From that point on, she decided she would never again rely on a man for support. That is what led her to armed robbery. After spending months in jail she, like many other prisoners, has turned to the comfort of God and religion for guidance and understanding. But, like many others, when she is released, the chances are high that she will be back within a matter of months.

Gallery

“I’m Canadian.”

This became my opening for every interview at the tax day Tea Party rally at the Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC.

It seemed like the best way to distance myself from the camera crews and journalists who were swarming the interesting or outrageous among the two-to-three thousand ralliers.

“I’m Canadian and I just want to know what’s happening today,” I would explain. And It was true. I went to the rally because I really don’t understand what’s happening in the United States today. I read blogs, watch the news, and catch Daily Show highlights like anyone else, but it doesn’t capture the sometimes hopeful, sometimes intimidating, always ethereal sense of change happening in America.

I went to the Tea Party not to judge anyone or enforce misconceptions, but to try to figure out what is mobilizing people from across the country to take part in an undeniably influential grassroots movement.

What I learned first was that most of these people were skeptical of the media. They eyed me, recorder and camera in hand, with suspicion. Those who were talkative often used the interview as a platform to expose whatever bias they thought I had.

Those who were interested in talking talked a lot. Tom, for example, approached me and the people I was with seemingly out of the blue, and took a great interest in whether or not we were Jewish.

Once Rick and Sharon started talking, they had a lot to say. They commandeered the interview to interrogate me about the quality of Canadian health care.

Carolyn and Ryan, two of the few students at the rally, seemed reasonable, even if our politics don’t match up. And like the few young people I spoke with, stressed that there were a lot of young people present

Another important lesson I learned was that the “Fair Tax” movement is not the same as “Tea Party” movement. Fair Tax might organize Tea Party events, but, as Jabari explained, the two aren’t synonymous.

I tried to be as non-judgmental as possible and to allow the interviewees to speak for themselves. The question I most wanted an answer to was, “why are you here?” Here are some of their answers:

Caroline

Caroline from Arlington, Virginia

What brings you out here today?

I’m a conservative. I once was a Democrat, but the Democratic party was once conservative, too. It was once pro-life. And then I was a Reagan Democrat for years, and worked for Pat Buchanan–he’s a great conservative. I believe in following the constitution; small government; and right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–life number one. That is our most troubling issue. Three thousand, one hundred children will be killed today by abortion. Today. More than died on 9/11, died of abortion in the United States. That is such a huge problem. And the Democratic party is supporting it. It’s disgraceful. So that’s my number-one issue.

And I also believe in subsidiarity, distributes, small government. If it can be done in the family, it should be done in the family. If it can be done in the county level or the city level, do it there. If it needs to go to the state–and some things do–there. And the federal government is supposed to have a military to defend us, and not a whole heck-of-a-lot more. And we’ve just gone farther, and farther, and farther, and of course we have this terrific debt. And I’m upset that George Bush was involved in spending more money than he should have, although he has so much in the plus column. So supportive of the pro-life community. So you see how I got where I am.

And you look around here and you see authentic people. You see hand-made signs that tear your heart out. And you look at the protestors [that protest the Tea Party supporters] going by, I see them–I pray at Planned Parenthood five days a week–I see them at Capital Hill demonstrating. But they have signs that somebody handed them, and then they all leave at the same time because they’re all told to go. Their bosses told them to go, “You must go to the demonstration.”

Did anybody tell these people to go? No. This is not an engineered crowd. And a lot of us are saying, “Where do we meet? Is it 11? Is it six?” We’re trying to find out where to go, when.

Where do you get that kind of information?

Well, I got some in the Washington Times yesterday. And then on Fox news this morning they talked about [it].

It’s so authentic. It’s so real. It’s so American. These people here. [A man walks by, one of the many vendors selling flags an buttons, Caroline points at him] Now, he’s selling flags. He’s in business. He’s a small business man, God love him. So he’s here trying to earn money today, and that’s good. That’s good. That’s good. We love that!

We’re authentic. We’re for real.

Do you agree with everything the tea party believes in?

We don’t have a list of things we believe in. There is no membership card, there are no dues. It’s just people getting together. If I came down here and I saw something and I heard something I don’t like, I’d just leave. You look around and people are saying, “God bless you, I love you. What’s your first name? Where are you from?”

This is authentic. These are real people. They’re precious! And you’re precious. And I love you, and God loves you […] look around. Look around. This didn’t happen by a big bang or by accident. There was a cause, that always was, and always will be. And most of us call that cause God, call it whatever you like. But it’s… It’s… God. God love you, sweetheart.

Jabari and Marilyn

Jabari Zakiya, Washington, DC
Marilyn Rickert, Oak Forest, IL

A lot of people are talking about “authentic Americans” here today. Do you think the people here are “authentic Americans”?

Marilyn: Yeah, we’re all volunteers, we all pay our own way, nobody gets a salary, we have basically a nation-wide grassroots organization and there is maybe a handful of people that actually collect any kind of a salary at all.

Jabari: Well, you have to define. If authentic means “real”, then yeah, they’re real, but there is all levels of real. I mean, I don’t consider myself a tea party person, but there are elements of their concerns I agree with. I don’t agree with 100% of the political stuff. But one of the things that makes America America is that we can have all kinds of diversity in thought, but we can come together around a lot of common interests. I mean, the most right-wing person and I can cheer for the same sports teams, you know? And in the same way, that’s what our movement is about. We have a lot of different people from a lot of different movements with a lot of different ideologies, but we all agree on the fair tax. Even the tea party people that don’t agree 100% that the fair tax is the way, we’re trying to convince them that the reform is the fair tax.

Carolyn and Ryan

Carolyn Bolls from Washington, DC and Ryan Gilroy

Why are you here today?

Carolyn: Well, basically we’re sick of our government spending our money. We’re spending more to save more, that doesn’t make sense to us. We’re protesting this big government control of our country. We don’t want to end up with the government controlling every sector of our lives. It’s not just about taxes, it’s about government control of our personal lives.

Ryan: We’re tired of watching government spend, spend, spend. Honestly, both parties are spending so much money, they don’t realize that they’re stealing jobs away, they’re stealing our generation’s wealth. They’re robbing Peter, who isn’t even born yet, to pay Paul now.

Do you think anything like that was happening with the last generation?

Carolyn: I think it’s cyclical. I mean, we have elections, that’s why we have a democratic republic, we will be able to voice our opinions on November 2nd. That’s when we get to change, and I hope that’s the change that our country needs.

Ryan: It seems like we need it more than ever. The Republicans had control from 2000-2006 with a Republican congress, a Republican senate, and a Republican President. You figure taxes would go down. But no, it got ratcheted up even higher. That’s the problem: people want to be in power, so they try to get votes. They pass projects and say, “Hey look! If you help me get my vote, I’ll get your vote.”

Carolyn: Even with the last administration, with the George Bush administration, he spent–you know, No Child Left Behind, you had all these federal programs, the bailouts towards the end of his term as President. I don’t support that either. You know, I call myself a Republican, but I’m a Conservative first, and Conservative also insures fiscal responsibility.

Ryan: And also, you realize Medicare Part D is the tip of the iceberg. Then you got Obama and healthcare, which is putting another thing on top of another thing, and realizing […] it’s bi-partisan. Most people would hate to say, “oh, it’s the Democrats”. No, it’s both parties [that] like to spend a lot.

Are you proud to be representing young people with your politics? Do you think there should be more young people here today?

Ryan: I think there’s a lot of young people here. Look around you. there’s plenty of young people behind you. I think it’s a good mixture of everything, young, old, everything in between.

Carolyn: I agree, but I think those that care the most are the ones who are paying taxes, and so that will generally attract an older population. I’m definitely proud to be here. My generation has to stand up and speak for ourselves otherwise we’ll be in debt for the rest of our lives, and for the lives our children, and children after that.

Tom

Tom Wallin from Springfield, Illinois.

What religion are you?

I was baptized Anglican.

I’m just curious. I thought you might have been Jewish, and if you were I was wondering: do you support Obama or the people here?

Well, I can’t vote here—

I mean, but who would you support?

I don’t know, I don’t have all the information. I don’t live here.

Do you have a point of view on this event today?

I’m here because I’m asking people about their points of view.

Well I want to know who you are first, because you might distort what I have to say. I rode here 800 miles on my motorcycle to be part of it.

What kind of motorcycle?

A Yamaha FJR 1300. Yup.

Very nice.

It is. I hit a construction barrel coming in the other day, and it went off my bike like a ping pong, or a bowling pin.

Holy cow. So why are you here today?

I’m here because I think the government is out of control. I think it’s taking our tax money. And I think a lot of the stuff it’s doing is unconstitutional. I think they are ruining our medical system by changing something that was probably the best. [In the] the country there’s just a small number of people that needed to be insured. And they didn’t do things that would really cut costs.

I think president Bush–I love president Bush for many things that he did–but he was trying to befriend liberals, and he spent way too much money, and I think that made his government a toss up on whether he should go on Mount Rushmore or not. I think what he did to fight enemies of ours country, I think he should be respected like a Mr. Rushmore president. I mean, for eight years he fought against people trying to make him look bad. From the very, very beginning, the people that were trying to take over tried to make him look bad. And he didn’t have the courage to say “no” to the big spenders. But I think he’s a good, honest man, and I loved him for what he was, and I think the people who say he was dumb were just absolutely wrong. He was a very smart man. He’s countrified a little bit like I am, but that doesn’t mean he was dumb, that means that he didn’t appear to people like we used to establish-mentize.

What would you say to someone who wants to understand what’s happening in America right now?

It’s kind of like if you want to ask a motorcycle rider why he likes to ride a motorcycle. If you have to ask, you won’t figure it out.

I mean, this is the greatest country on Earth, and what they’re doing is just going to take it away. You know, you how to ruin a great country? You spend it to death. You know, people like Saul Alinsky, people that Obama likes to quote, all of his crowd, I mean–look at his friends. I don’t know who these young men were that were with you, but they were nice respectful guys. I don’t know what they do in their personal lives, but if they were anything like Obama’s friends, you would run for the hills, buddy. You would run for the hills, because his friends are evil. Reverend Knight, I mean, there’s the catholic priest…

What did you think of us when you saw us? You seemed really eager to talk to us.

I wanted to talk to you because, I wanted to ask—and I love Jews, Jewish country, Israel, I just totally respect [Benjamin] Netanyahu and everything he stands for—I wanted to ask you a question: how could you support Obama if you were Jewish? Because, 95% of American jews support Obama, and that’s one of the greatest things I don’t understand about this country.

Richard and Sharon

Richard and Sharon from Michigan

Richard: Do you like your healthcare up there? Have you ever used it?

Yeah.

Richard: Have you ever used it?

Yeah, of course. I mean, I’ve never had trouble with it. I’ve never been seriously ill, so I’m very thankful for that.

Richard: Well that’s a good thing.

We were in England in October. I came down with a kidney infection. And I got into their health system. And if Canadian health system is anything like English, you don’t want it.

I went into the emergency room, and the guy says, “oh I got some drugs that will do away with this.” Because we wrote on the little slip that I was passing blood in my urine. [He] never checked me one bit. Just read that little note that I wrote, or she wrote, on my admit.

Sharon: Didn’t check his vitals.

Richard: And he went to get the drugs and he came back and said, “It’s going to be a couple of minutes.” I said, “Well what about my fever?” And he says, “I’ll go see about the drugs.” Then he came back, to check my [temperature].

As soon as he checked that, he said, “Oh everything changed.” And they put me in the hospital. But he was going to let me go home, with a 100, 102 temperature without giving me anything for it.

Sharon: And he was supposed to be drinking water. They told him he was supposed to drink a whole lot of water while he was there. And the nurses would say they’d bring it when he’d ask them, and they never brought it. I’d have to go get it for him. That’s our only experience with government health care. That’s why we’re not happy.

Is that the reason you guys are here today?

Sharon: Well, we don’t like the spending.

Richard: We’re from Michigan. We don’t like the spending. We’re both—I’m retired, she never worked—

Sharon: [laughs] Well, thank you!

Richard: —well, outside, you know.

We have two kids. No grandkids. And we sit here, thankful, that we don’t have grandkids. Because of the debt that we’re putting onto our grandkids.

Do you think previous generations have left that kind of legacy?

Sharon: I think each generation has done better for a while now.

Richard: I think that after the war, we had such a baby boom that we could take care of our folks. But there’s too many of us now to put that debt onto our kids, you know? This year there’s less money coming in for social security than going out.

Do you think this will change things? The people here today?

Richard: Let’s hope.

Sharon: Well I think you gotta speak up and try. That’s why we’re here.

Richard: You got to try to stop it. I mean, look how much the government spent this year already, and last year.

Sharon: We’ve written to our congressman and the like. You know, doing what you can. There’s only so much you can do.

Has any other issue brought you to rally like this?

Sharon: a lot of the people here, it’s the same thing. They haven’t done this kind of thing before.

Richard: Back years ago we was too busy making a living. You know, going to work five, six days a week. Didn’t have time to do this kind of stuff.

Sharon: This is the fifth one we’ve been to. We went to two in Jackson, two in Lansing, and this one.

Where do you get information about the rallies?

Sharon: They have some information online. A lot of it is from there. TV.

What kind of TV do you watch? Which networks?

Richard: We watch Fox, because the other ones are so biased. I mean, we watch the other ones, I mean, I have CNN, and MSNBC. I look at all them, but they don’t bring up–like Brian Williams, you know, on NBC. He don’t bring up the tea parties. He just shows you what they want you to see.

Fox, you get mad at Fox because they don’t–they might spend too much time saying how great something is, but you don’t think it’s worth a damn. But they’re the best of the networks.

What would you say to someone who doesn’t understand this and just wants to know more?

Richard: I guess they could sit at the Ambassador bridge and watch the ambulance coming from over there to bring people to the hospital over here. They say there’s 40 to 60 ambulances bringing people from Canada over to here, because the health care is better here than there, you know.

Pronoblem

Pronoblem, from another dimension.

Why are you here?

That’s a pretty deep question, man.

Yeah, it is pretty deep. What do you think?

I don’t know. I try to do good, raise good kids. Be fair and honest.

What do you represent?

When people asked me that before, you know what I told them?

No, what did you say?

That I was Canadian.

Why did you come out here today?

I heard there was some good Ethiopian food in town.

What does your button say?

I bought that here.

Do you believe in the message?

Oh, no. not really. What does it say?

It says “Welcome to Obamunism”.

Okay, so that means Obama has a philosophy.

I guess that’s not too hard to believe. Is this an average day for you?

Actually, yeah.

With files from Ryan Briggs

Prada Marfa, one of Marfa, Texas' notable artworks. Marfa became a modern art destination when Donald Judd opened a museum there in the 1970s.

When you drive into Marfa, Texas, from El Paso the first thing you come across is a tiny Prada store. No one works there and no one shops there—it’s a sculpture, built in situ by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset. Marfa, current population 2,121, became an unlikely modern art destination when the famous minimalist Donald Judd opened a permanent museum here in the ’70s.

I came to Marfa not for its art, but for its light. I’m interested in how we see light, how we think about light, and how light behaves. I’ve been working on a collection of poems that use light as their material, and that concentrate on proportion and balance.

About 15 kilometres outside Marfa there is a viewing station where, at night, light behaves in ways that can’t be explained. During the day, this field is flat and the grass is dried yellow. There is so much sky out here you don’t notice anything else.

But at night, balls of light come into this field. They split, hover, move backwards, flash. For decades, locals and tourists have come out here to look and to guess at what these lights are. Some believe this is what happens to lightning after it hits the ground. Others believe it is swamp gas or cars from a nearby highway. The lights look like circles. They flash for a few seconds, or bounce lightly off of each other, or hover by themselves. They pop up nearby or they get close together and split. I don’t know what this is and can’t reason this not-knowing with some theory or study. Were they fireflies? No. They seemed too big and too bright to be fireflies. Was it someone with a flashlight? There was one hovering close but no human figure near it. Was it light from a house far in the distance? Silly—a house wouldn’t move around like that. And the clusters? Are they from an airport? No. Airplanes don’t fly that close together and they don’t move backwards.

None of these things could explain what was out here. I turned to look at the other side of the viewing station. Here. This is light I know. The thing I felt most moved by. Brief flashes of thunder and stars sprinkled across a big dark beautiful wide sky. At first I could only see a few stars, but I kept looking, and in that looking tinier ones made themselves visible between the ones already there. After a while, the stars started to look like tiny needle pins that floated into the night sky, poking holes. Then they started to look like shards of the sun, if the sun could break and had broken into little pieces. The stars. I know what those are. A thin piece of light scrawled across the sky. Lightning. I know what that is too.

[Writer Laura Trethewey recently travelled across Canada by train, and sent us five postcards on the way, from B.C. to Northern Ontario. The “Prairie Postcard Project” chronicles that leg of her trip and the people she met along the way. Visit her blog for the whole story. Click the postcard images to enlarge.]

Dearest This,

Racing out of Northern Ontario, Dan is calling out upcoming sites for the packed passenger train: “tunnel coming up, followed by a lake on the left…” Everyone waits, camera ready, but when the tunnel or the lake takes too long to appear, Dan loses his audience, despite his “Waits,” or “Here it comes!”

“How many times have you taken this train?” I ask. About 10, he says. Dan, around 65 years old, is the youngest of a gang of train writers and enthusiasts. He’s self-published a few books already and says he needs to put out more as his colleagues keep dying. “People think Canada’s story is boring. If they only knew,” he chuckles.

When our conversation lapses into silence, Dan fills the holes with information on the numbered signs or style of railway station that whip by outside. He seems impressed, almost gleeful, that I know Grand Trunk Railway once ran through Stratford. “Really, not a lot of people know that anymore,” he says wistfully.

Laura T.

Protesters demonstrating Canada's tar sands development outside the Canadian High Commission in London. Photo by Zoe Cormier.

I was pretty sure I knew what the Canadian flag, held upside down, was supposed to represent. But I had to ask anyway.

Last Monday afternoon, standing outside the Houses of Parliament in London in Parliament square, I held my cell phone aloft with a hundred other protesters, taking part in a “climate flash mob,” a seemingly spontaneous but pre-arranged protest against the British government’s inaction on climate change. Everyone was there to flood MPs with phone calls demanding a fair and effective treaty at Copenhagen this December.

Nearby a man stood, holding an upside-down Canadian flag.

“Sorry to bother you—but why are you holding the Canadian flag upside down?” I asked, a little timidly (I figured with my accent he might clock my Canuck identity and tell me off).

“Flying a flag upside down is the internationally recognized symbol of distress,” he answered. “We are facing a climate emergency—and there is no better symbol for that than the nation of Canada.”

Given that Canada has higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions than any other G8 nation, and was branded the “Colossal Fossil” at climate talks in Poznan, Poland, last year for blocking efforts to arrive at an effective treaty on climate change, I couldn’t argue with him.

In fact, I wasn’t even surprised to see him. Three weeks ago I witnessed a throng of hundreds of Brits march to our High Commission near Trafalgar Square singing “Blame Canada” and denouncing our ever-expanding tar sand operations.

There wasn’t a single defence I could muster—nor could I even be bothered to try.

It’s not often you can find it embarrassing to be Canadian—especially living in England. Jokes about bad teeth, wimpy winters and rampant alcoholism aside, Canadians can easily find wedges to prise apart the British pride: their public education is so patchy and frequently so dismal that fully a fifth of ten year old boys cannot count to ten; the National Health Service has such long wait times than even the leaders of the most left-wing parties send their own kids through the private system (I myself have found OHIP to be far more speedy and responsive in the time I’ve lived here); the racist British National Party has grown so much in popularity in the past few years that they now boast a seat in the European Parliament; and of course, there’s the undeniable, irrepresible and incredibly reprehensible classism that still pervades every pore of British society and that irks every inch of my egalitarian Canadian sensibility.

So like all Canadians, I revel in poking fun at the Brits and pointing out their strange laws and habits wherever possible: “Why does the subway close at 11:30?” “Does that man have to smoke crack directly next to me on the bus?” “You wouldn’t be so short if you didn’t all start smoking at 10 years old.” And I’m not alone. You won’t find an Aussie, Kiwi or Canuck in the country who doesn’t constantly delight in poking fun at the British temperment.

And when it comes to matters of ecology, Canadians, with our undeniable and irrepressible tendency to smugness, feel innately from a very young age that we are the world’s pre-eminent environmental stewards: wholesome, rosy-cheeked hewers of wood and drawers of water. But national narratives are just that: ideas, legends, and myths.

Because when it comes to our actual environmental track record, Canada has no reason for even a smidge of smug patriotism. We lead the developed world in greenhouse gas emissions and have been a consistent impediment to international climate change negotiations. Even China is willing to make more of a verbal pledge to change its ways than we are (even if the gesture is merely symbolic, at least they’ve made it). We not only supplied the uranium dropped on Japan more than 60 years ago; today we still lead the world in uranium production. We are one of the worst culprits when it comes to overfishing: we drained the Atlantic of cod, then blamed the Spanish and the seals. Now we’re doing the same to our west coast salmon, and we can’t even be bothered to call off the hunt on the grizzlies we’re starving.

And now, most embarrassingly, we boast what is rightfully being called “the most destructive project on earth,” the infamous tar sands.

If you take a hard look at the worst ecological offences we have committed, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Canada actually has one of the worst environmental track records of any nation. It’s embarrassing.

And when you also take a hard look at how we have treated indigenous and aboriginal groups, our history becomes even more flinch-worthy. Thanks to legal loopholes that leave legal liability for “Indian Affairs” in legal limbo—split between federal and provincial jurisdiction—First Nations reserves have always been more likely to be polluted with radioactive waste from uranium mines, toxic runoff from tar sands operations, and hormone-mimicking gases from petrochemical smokestacks.

Our historical track record, is at the very best, embarrassing. When you throw in our ongoing peddling of asbestos to developing nations and our refusal to allow it to be added to a UN-sanctioned list of toxic substances, our report card is downright humiliating.

The reason is simple: it’s not that Canadians are inherently more wasteful, lazy, or irresponsible than the people of any other nation. But we have behaved in such a wasteful, lazy and irresponsible fashion because we have been gifted with such an enormous, resource-rich landscape—our good fortune has made it incredibly easy to be wasteful, lazy, and irresponsibly profligate consumers of energy. Taking the path of least resistance has never been easier for any group of people, in all the world’s history.

And what is most infuriating is that it is precisely this reputation, of being exemplary in environmental and human rights matters, that allows us to be exactly the opposite. Ignorant of the true nature of our behaviour on the world stage, we have failed to hold our government (and ourselves) to account and to demand better. And because of our (increasingly false) reputation, the rest of the world has failed to hold us to account too.

That is starting to change. The protests in London this September are just the beginning. Environmental campaigners here have pledged to launch a long-term, media-savvy, and vociferous campaign to make the British public aware of what is going on in the tar sands, and to do their part to put and end to the involvement of Britsh banks and extraction companies there. The Canadian flag will continue to hang upside down, the High Commission will continue to be blockaded by indignant protesters, and our national identity will continued to become synonymous with “the most environmentally destructive operation” and “the dirtiest oil” on earth. The campaign will undoubtedly spread to the continent, and the rest of the world.

There is a way to prevent this, though: we can head them off at the pass. We can clean up our act as quickly as we can, cut our carbon emissions, increase our energy efficiency, and move on a large scale to renewable energy (which makes just as much economic sense as environmental sense: the tar sands won’t last forever).

And with all the resources, energy and wealth at our disposal, and with such a diverse, well-educated and (in many respects) liberal, tolerant and politically enlightened population, we actually have a greater capacity than any other nation to invest in a massive conversion to a sustainable and clean economy.

We have every reason to do so—and absolutely no excuse not to.

Zoe Cormier is a freelance environmental reporter from Toronto now based in London, England, and the former author of The Green Report: a regular column on environmental affairs in the Globe and Mail. Her first-person account of her evolution as an environmental correspondent, published in This Magazine in 2008 will be featured in a textbook for children forthcoming in 2010.