Kicking someone when they are down does not necessarily arise from evil or selfish intentions.  In fact, it may arise from very good, nay altruistic, intentions.  Normally people are so full of themselves that it is next to impossible to arouse them out of their dogmatic slumber by a well-intentioned kick, that is, criticism of even the most constructive kind, the kind that tries to help the other person help themselves.  If, on the other hand, the person is already down from having received a kick from someone else, this may be the best time to state or reiterate the constructive criticism, because the person is “prone” to accept, at such a juncture, that he or she is less than perfect.  If, for instance, someone has been chastised at some public forum, this may be the best time to get through to the person with oft-reiterated criticism, and to have a realistic hope that the person would agree to fundamental reforms that would have been considered out of the question before.

The fact that by choice or necessity people sometimes give up their citizenship does not mean that they give up their nationality.  This is why a multicultural society like Canada can really only survive if it is willing to implement a quite radical form of multiculturalism.  Especially for a first-generation immigrant, the culture of the old country, its poetry, literature, and generally its ways of being are integral elements of his or her identity.  To ask this person to give all this up is akin to asking someone to not be who he or she is.  Of course, the supposedly insurmountable objection that is always made is that a country can only have one culture, one way of being, and one nationality.  In other words, encouraging different cultures to express these differences will only increase the alienation and segregation of different cultural and ethnic groups in the country.  The reality, however, is that this alienation is an existing fact, and not something that multiculturalism has created.  Canadians reject “foreigners,” whether or not these “foreigners” adopt Canadian ways.  So things cannot get worse than they already are.  Multiculturalism has not created the problem.  It can, however, be a step towards its solution.  Education is the solution.  It should aim to increase people’s appreciation of different cultures, of multi-cultures, and ways of being.  This can be a solution both for the social problem, as well as for the individual problem of the immigrant individual who is forced by the current circumstances to suppress his or her identity.

What the experience of first-generation immigrants is most similar to is the experience of early Canadians and some of the pioneers.  What?  How can there be much similarity between the experience of those hardy self-reliant individuals and that of the supposedly soft, subsidy-dependent immigrant?  Immigrants, when they first arrive, mostly have to put up with apartment-living for many years, even if, as is mostly the case, they are from a middle class and relatively well-to-do background.  This is similar to the pioneer building a primitive shack that serves to keep out (some of) the elements, until many years later, when he can perhaps build himself something better.  Like the immigrant who, many years later, and at the expense of much risk and sacrifice, builds or buys himself a home.  The pioneer’s life consists of a constant battle against a hostile environment that has no place in it for him.  The first-generation immigrant’s life much the same.

There is a perception that children are more violent than they used to be.  One way in which this is expressed is that children are not really the innocent little creatures they used to be.  This notion, however, is not a new one.  Its older form was the idea that to realize that children are not really innocent is to look at their cruelty to each other.  But all this is a case of category error.  When we say children are innocent, we are not making an ethical statement, or a moral statement about their having good or evil actions in their past.  We are merely saying that they have very little experience of the world and its ways.  Of course the problem is connected with the superimposition of the labels or concepts of good and evil onto our actions.  Instead of calling actions what they are, for example, antisocial, etc., and dealing with the question of how to improve or encourage them, we abdicate our own responsibility to deal with them, by abandoning them to labels such as blessed or villainous.

There is a sense of eternity about books, works of art, and generally all human achievements.  Or perhaps a consolation.  One tells oneself: surely if human beings can create such works, their lives must mean something?  Surely it can’t be the case that they just live a few decades and turn into nothing and that’s that?  Perhaps this is more of a consolation than a fact.  The consolation is that even if we are in fact highly ephemeral beings, we at least have the power to expand and extend the width of our live indefinitely.  The obverse interpretation perhaps takes two forms: Camus’ defiance of meaninglessness, and Dylan Thomas’s “Rage against the dying of the light!”  Think of Proust, dying at 51…

Looking at old buildings in the Rococo style, one sometimes get the feeling that their ornamentation is somehow inauthentic, that it has been put there to give the eye something to play with.  One purpose of 20^th century architects may have been to introduce more honesty into architecture.  A wall becomes just the wall.  A window becomes just a window.  But don’t we need the deception?  Don’t we need an architect that makes a building disguise its function, and pretend to be a work of art?

Windex has a new product that has a “potpourri” smell.  It used to be that Windex smelled of what it is, that is an NH3, and potpourri smell of what it is, that is, pleasant flowers and plants.  Windex smelled of something inherently undesirable and unpleasant, which is what it is; we use it because its evil nature has the accidental characteristic of producing some good – cleansing.  Potpourri smelled of something inherently pleasant, which is what it is.  But now something inherently evil has a pleasant smell!