Lamentations

One of the fun things about a blog is that you can occasionally look back at a previous post and consider how the world changed since then. When I last wrote the financial crisis was still in its infancy; since then it's expanded into a deepening economic recession. From China to Europe to North America, there's no end in sight. Maybe the stimulus packages will have some impact; perhaps they won't. Here in Canada we don't have to worry about such things. Our sagacious conservative regime has its head firmly in the sand, its focus squarely upon agitating the opposition parties into a political crisis.

Either way things are bad, trending towards disastrous, and there's no end in sight. Meanwhile, I'm on strike. Yes, strike. Every few years at my university students and staff swap books and classes for rusty barrels. It has resulted in pretty decent contracts when compared with the rest of Canada, though we'll see what we get this time 'round.

Our demands are pretty simple. The union represents both graduate students and contract professors, many of whom must reapply for the same job every term, even if they’ve worked at York University for decades (as some have). Meanwhile, though our graduate student membership has grown by nearly a third since 2001, a shared pot of money has not increased at all. We need that money to fund our research; ultimately we must research to eventually earn jobs. We want our professors to have a little job security, and we want our shared funds to reflect an increase in membership.

In a sane world these issues would have been resolved quietly some months ago. However, university administrations across Ontario are standing firm this year, apparently because of a decrease in endowment funds they gambled on the stock markets. Never mind that endowments are used primarily to award undergraduate scholarships; never mind that our university is currently sitting on $150 million raised through fundraisers to improve the quality of York's education. The union has responded by picketing the seven gates to the university and withdrawing its members' labour, to which the university's senate reacted by closing the entire university. 50,000 undergraduates are out of school; 4000 contract staff and graduate students are out in the cold.

With characteristic slowness, I'm working my way towards the point - or, in this case, the grievance.

Ignorance. We live in a culture where people are so swept up by the minutiae of their daily lives that they won't - or can't - consider larger, more abstract issues. A culture where undergraduate students hate their former teachers for locking them out of their classes because they have absolutely no idea how graduate school works, how contract professors live, or how a university is run. A culture where drivers seeking to cross a picket line would rather attempt to ram through strikers than consider the fellow humanity - and legitimate grievances - of those on the other side of the gate. A culture, more fundamentally, where Canadians reward a blundering, Machiavellian Prime Minister with increased support after his dangerous partisanship derails the government in a time of economic crisis. A culture where the majority of Americans (and Canadians) resist a bailout of "corporate fat cats" because they can't be bothered to learn the fundamentals of how their economy works. A culture and civilization ultimately governed by the few because the many don't deserve democracy.

On that note, it seems grim indeed that the economic and political model increasingly gaining currency around the world is that of China. This, too, is born partially from ignorance: China’s growth rates are absolutely necessary to avoid social chaos, and they are in part a mirage founded upon unsustainable environmental degradation. Still, one worries for the future of a supposedly democratic West where the demos can’t be bothered.