Guest Blog: A Mother’s Plea to Canadian Researchers

By Kathleen Mochnacki

Surveys to obtain information from family caregivers of those with severe mental illnesses can provide an opportunity to get genuinely useful information about significant problems that family caregivers encounter in trying to get appropriate help for their family members or themselves

Such surveys need to recognize how the lack of appropriate mental health services affects our loved ones, how unrealistic mental health legislation affects whether our family members gets treatment or not and the attitudinal barriers that can prevent needed communication between mental health professionals and family caregivers.

Family caregivers of those with severe mental illnesses are a unique community who have experienced first hand what it is like to live under the same roof as a family member with a severe mental illness. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center has said that the only people that know about psychosis are the person with the psychotic illness or a person who lives under the same roof. He had a sister who had schizophrenia. Sadly, when mental health services are planned, we are not consulted and costly mistakes are made.

Not much attention is given to the fact that many homeless people have untreated mental illness. Currently, York Region has engaged York University to conduct research in York Region Ontario. The goal of this research is to include the engagement of community residents/groups, faith-based organizations, service providers, and government representatives to identify important and feasible strategies to support mental well-being of residents in York Region.

My son lives in one of the areas selected for this research. This area includes a drop in for homeless people with mental illness, an encampment, transitional housing for homeless youth, both supportive and supported housing for people with a mental illness, and not for profit and co-operative housing. Drug activity is rampant. Many drug users have untreated severe mental illness. Reliable witnesses have observed people walking around in full psychosis. The local bank locks its doors at night to prevent homeless youth from sleeping in the area where bank machines are.

Yet there is not a word of this reality in the draft of the project which was presented on February 28th. I did bring this to the attention of the researcher who did listen. I also expressed my fervent wish that there be effective communication between our hospitals and community agencies when discharging patients with severe mental illnesses so that there is a smoother transition when people are discharged to community agencies. Family caregivers often have to straddle the divide between hospital and community waiting for the community agency to do an assessment on their recently discharged family member. I was grateful to the researcher for her gracious attention to my input and pray that that my observations will be included in the final draft.

I am not alone in my observations. Marilyn Baker, a mother of a son with schizophrenia, experienced the horror of her son being discharged in the middle of the night during freezing weather from a Toronto Hospital. She states: “This was when I learned that our mental healthcare system is a cruel joke – a patchwork quilt of people not talking to other people”. She exclaims: “No one is ever charged with negligence or failing to provide the necessities of life. These are just the mentally ill. They do not count”. (Readers are invited to read Marilyn’s blog which appeared earlier in this space).

Susan Inman, author and mother of a daughter with schizophrenia, suggested the following questions for future surveys in the hopes that the answers would support the need for systemic changes:

• Would improved public mental illness literacy campaigns have helped you better manage your family members emerging severe mental illness? Would these kinds of campaigns help you now in interactions with a wide variety of people?
• To what degree were various clinicians helpful when you reached out for help?
• Were some interactions with professionals more harmful than helpful – if so, in what ways?
• What kinds of gaps in services do you see?
• Did your family member have adequate psycho-education about their illness? If not, did this lack of information impact their ability to accept, adjust to and learn to better manage their illness?
• Did your family member receive any messages within the delivery of mental health services that undermined their belief in the value of medically based treatments? What were these messages and how were they delivered?
• Do you know that the current national curriculum on training peer support workers doesn’t include any information about disorders like schizophrenia?
• Do you think that knowledge about this disorder would help peer workers provide better help?
• Did you know that the current training emphasizes that people must also choose if they want any treatment in order to “recover”?
• Do you think that differently trained peer workers could help people come to a better understanding of involuntary treatment they may have received?
• Discuss your experience with peer workers.
• How helpful were any system-supplied family support workers with whom you had contact?
• Have you been concerned about the trend to combine programs and supported living for people with just a severe mental illness with those who are struggling with a concurrent disorder?
• Have you been in contact with service providers who didn’t seem to have an adequate knowledge base about schizophrenia?
• Did your service providers educate you or your family member about common cognitive losses associated with schizophrenia?

Susan also mentions the important evidence supporting the use of trained family care givers who deliver psycho-education to families in the NAMI created Family to Family programs in reducing relapses and in improving families well-being.

Family caregivers need to take part in research design to really capture the reality of the world that we live in. If we were to be involved in creating questions that would reflect the gaps in the system, then it may help bring around much needed changes that would really help our loved ones with serious mental Illnesses. It would be wonderful if Academia could make use of our expertise. If they did, we would have a mental health system that would be more efficient in helping our family members.

Attacking Cultural Events – Further Growth of Anti-Semitism

By Marvin Ross

The Playhouse Cinema in Hamilton Ontario is the latest organization to punish Jews because of Pro-Hamas demonstrations against the war in the Middle East and it is discriminatory and despicable. The Hamilton Jewish Federation had arranged to hold its Jewish Film Festival in April at the Playhouse back in December according to the cinema. On March 19, the cinema cancelled the event via e-mail to its subscribers. Their reason:

“After receiving numerous security and safety related emails, phone calls, and social media messages, the Playhouse Cinema reached a difficult decision to postpone the Hamilton Jewish Federation’s venue rental. On Saturday, March 16, our decision to postpone this venue rental was reached amid security and safety concerns at this particularly sensitive time. “

I grew up at a time when discrimination was common in this country. Jewish doctors could not get accreditation at hospitals which is why the Mt Sinai exists. There were quotas on how many Jews and other minorities could get accepted into certain university faculties, resorts discriminated, and, in Hamilton, Jews could not buy a house in the Westdale district of that city.

I’ve been proud that we advanced beyond that bigotry and have become a mostly multi-cultural open and accepting society. Until now. Imagine trying to go to your place of worship as is happening in Vaughan and finding it surrounded by screaming demonstrators (many masked) shouting Intifada and “From the River to the Sea” and blocking entrances. Then, according to reports, following worshippers home while the police look on and do nothing.

At least Mayor Del Duca of Vaughan is bringing in legislation to prevent gatherings at religious sites in his town.

The decision by the Playhouse is just the latest in a string of discriminatory actions against Jewish citizens. Aurel Braun, a University of Toronto professor of politics and international relations said that this is “an act against the Jewish community”. Hamiltonian, Victoria Mancinelli writing in the Toronto Sun, said the cancellation of a Jewish Film Festival is a cancellation of the Jewish people. She added that it is “a targeted campaign of harassment and intimidation met with irresponsible silence by our elected representatives and other equity groups.”

Meanwhile, most of the voluntary staff at a small literary magazine, Guernica, quit because the editor published an essay by an Israeli translator. The essay was pulled from the magazine but is still archived if anyone wishes to read it.

The Jewish American rapper, Matisyahu, had two shows cancelled for fear of protests and a walkout by theatre staff. Two Jewish Canadian artists, the Likht Ensemble, lost gigs because of October 7 and two Jewish festivals that normally get government grants were refused this year. In Victoria, the Belfry Theatre cancelled a production of a play called the Runner for safety reasons. The play deals with an Israeli emergency responder who makes a snap decision to give medical treatment to an Arab girl instead of a member of the Israel Defense Forces.  That play was also cancelled in Vancouver when the Push Festival consulted with a Palestinian artist in London.

Palestinians have fared no better. The Forward, a New York City Jewish newspaper founded in Yiddish in 1897, put forth a long list of cultural events that have been cancelled around the world involving both Jewish and Palestinian artists. The paper cited PEN America, a nonprofit promoting free expression, stating that “the voices of writers and others should not be stilled or silenced.” 

We cannot let this war, started by Hamas with the murder and rape of innocent victims, lead to a resurgence of a highly discriminating state that Canada was in the not too distant past. Sadly, our elected officials in Ottawa made a total spectacle of themselves debating a meaningless motion by the NDP calling for a total ceasefire and a recognition of a Palestinian State. The NDP ignored that what most call for is a negotiated two state solution that guarantees Israel’s existence. Hamas and the other Islamists want to see the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews (per the Hamas charter). Some of the NDP went so far as to wear keffiyeh, a scarf popularized as a symbol of armed Palestinian resistance. This is in violation of House of Commons rules against wearing symbols in what is supposed to be a neutral space. They should have been but were not sanctioned.

Heather Mackenzie, who introduced the motion, quoted the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer who was killed in the Israeli bombing saying  ‘If I must die, you must live to tell my story.’ She ignored his twitter reply about a report of a baby being found baked to death in an oven on October 7 of “with or without baking powder”. One commentary on the debate referred to it as a circus and pointed out that the mover of the motion actually claimed that “Hamas is a terrorist organization and it is not the government of Gaza”. It is a terror group and it is the government of Gaza. She got 50% of it right at least.

Sadly, in war, innocent people die. It is regrettable but unavoidable although we have no way of knowing what the real death rate is. How many of the dead are Hamas fighters is ignored. Still, many quote what Hamas claims as gospel. According to Abraham Wyner, a Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, “The numbers are not real”. His explanation is detailed and I recommend that people read his analysis.

As columnist Warren Kinsella wrote, during World War Two, we did not take the casualty figures put out by the German Doctors’ League, so why should we accept the figures put out by a health agency run by a terrorist organization.

We need to protect our public gatherings from the violence of demonstrators and we need our political leaders and the public to oppose racism wherever it occurs, and against all groups. If we continue to ignore it, we will be back to the intolerant society that we once were. We will be back to the “None is Too Many” position of accepting refugees fleeing Hitler and the St Paddy’s Day Parade will be cancelled again. It was banned for 100 years in Toronto because of fighting between Catholics and Protestants in a city run by the Loyal Orange Order.

Senator Katie Britt, Just an Old-Fashioned Politician

By Dr David Laing Dawson

I think we have always expected our politicians to lie, but usually through exaggeration, omission, avoidance, associations that suggest causation, and feigned emotion. And that’s what Katie Britt did in her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

She feigned outrage and fear and sorrow in a rather burlesque fashion. She omitted dates and times and geography in her stories, and managed, in the sequence of her telling, to create false associations. But she didn’t fully confabulate, invent and deceive.

Which is where I’m going with this thought.

I don’t remember our politicians, at least those in our democracies, confabulating, plain lying, as much as they do today. And getting away with it. And maybe, like many things happening today, the cause lies within our digital technologies, our internet, our social media.

When Joseph Goebbels said that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth, he and Adolf were performing within a fascist state, with the absence of a free press and fact checkers. No one else was getting equal airtime.

But now, even within a functioning democracy, with a free press and fact checkers, his words have become prophetic. For a lie, a big outrageous lie, can be repeated endlessly, and heard by all. It can be presented with outrage, with pomp, with music, and comforting or disturbing visuals. It can be podcast, re-posted, re-tweeted, and it can even be monetized.

So now some politicians are no longer bothering with omission, exaggeration, and mere association. They simply and boldly invent, lie, and confabulate, over and over.

And though, to quote another politician, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”, Donald Trump doesn’t need all of the people, only sufficient electoral college votes to give him a win.

The only answer to this, that I can think of, is that for democracies to survive, we need our education systems to keep pace with digital technology. And I don’t mean we all need to learn about and fully understand this technology, I mean we need a larger percentage of our populations fully educated, educated in critical thinking, history, governance, geography, biology, public health, and science. Otherwise they will be misled by the fictions concocted by autocrats and tyrants, psychopaths and zealots.

You Did Good, Joe

By Dr David Laing Dawson

As a Canadian I have always been moderately interested in American politics and presidential elections. And the other night I watched and listened to Joe Biden’s state of the union address.

And when President Biden did really well, in content and delivery, emphasizing strongly, ad- libbing seamlessly, responding to the moment – I felt surprisingly relieved.

And my sense of relief told me something:

I have been more afraid of a Trump victory than I let myself realize.

There have been other times when the American choice of president has been important for the future of the world, but never to this extent. Never has the contrast been so great.

If Al Gore had defeated George W. Bush, maybe we would be further ahead combating climate change and maybe we could have avoided the Iraq war, but this time the future of western democracy is at stake.

And so I felt greatly relieved when President Biden rose to the occasion.

The fear had been, of course, that his age and his lingering stutter would cause him to make a mush of his words, prevent him from sounding strong and fit. And that any mistake, any false step, would be played over and over again until November.

Which brings me to the topic of age:

Yes he is slow and careful in his movements. His joints are stiff and arthritic, his cartilage in ruin. He must walk more carefully, and hold onto the railing going up and down stairs.

But his brain is aging well.

We peak with some mental skills in our late teens and early 20’s, and then with some others we peak in our mid-life. Learning a language or a musical instrument, grasping complex equations – these become more difficult. With normal aging some memory retrieval problems increase – but this may be partly a problem of having to sift through increasing numbers of memories and events before finding the right name or place or time.

But then a few mental abilities increase with age, improve, get better. These can include empathy, judgement, perspective and wisdom. And our ability to understand and interpret contextual information and non-verbal communication improves throughout our lives.

Having a president who must walk slowly and carefully, who’s stutter sometimes makes him fumble his g’s, k’s, and t’s, but who is knowledgeable, kind, compassionate, thoughtful, and sane is so much safer than the orange buffoon, felon, and would-be tyrant.

Stay tuned on Monday for an analysis of Kaitie Britt’s response to Joe.

Trump, Putin, Maduro and Hitler Looked in a Mirror

By Dr. David Laing Dawson

Author of Two Years of Trump on the Psychiatrist’s Couch

I have not written about Donald J. Trump for at least six years.

I had hoped he would fade from my consciousness. But here we are in deja vu all over again, and this time, he constitutes a much bigger threat.

As many have pointed out, during his first term in office his autocratic impulses were kept in check by his own lack of knowledge, some of the people around him, and most (but not all) American institutions. This time will be different.

There is a flaw in our democratic processes. We would be safe and well served with presidents and prime ministers who are simply reasonably intelligent, well educated, well meaning, hard working, mentally balanced, decent people. Emphasis on the word “decent”. But we are drawn to kings, orators, hucksters, potentates, showmen and charlatans. Our mental/psychological evolution has not kept pace with our social evolution.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear a politician say, “I don’t know the answer to that. But if elected I will surround myself with the best experts in the field and take their advice.”

I am writing of Trump again because I happened to watch an old Presidential press conference from the COVID years. The medical and science experts address the press, and Trump winds up the conference with more than a few words. And he tells us that he has come up with two new ways of combating COVID that the scientists had not thought of, but promise to look into.

These are: Shining very powerful, maybe infrared, light, into the body, through the skin “or by some other means” and by injecting disinfectant directly into the body. He turns to one of the experts off camera and says, “And you’re going to look into it, right?”

This revealed that Donald Trump has the biomedical understanding of a 10 year old. But it also told us something else:

That morning Donald J. Trump looked in the mirror and saw the President of the United States of America, a pretty big honour and accomplishment. But it wasn’t enough. It still didn’t fill the hole, still didn’t salve the pain, still didn’t overcome the fear. He had to one-up the medical scientists.

Vladimir Putin looks in the mirror each morning and sees the undisputed ruler of Russia, and one of the richest men in the world, but it is not enough. He must reclaim Chechnya, then Georgia, then the Crimea, and now Ukraine.

Nicolas Maduro looks in the mirror and sees the undisputed ruler of Venezuela, but it is not enough.

Adolf Hitler looked in the mirror and saw the undisputed leader of Germany, but it was not enough.

Would that, if re-elected, Donald J. Trump will look in the mirror and see the President of the United States of America, elected a second time, and think that is enough – I shall do a good job these four years, and leave the USA and the world in a better place, and be remembered fondly.

But it will not be enough. For men like Donald J. Trump it is never enough.

Gaza and Vietnam – A Tale of Two Protests

By Marvin Ross

In my last post, I talked about the growing anti-semitism arising from the Israeli response to the violation of the cease fire by Hamas against Israel and the atrocities committed by Hamas against women, children and the elderly. Or maybe the anti-semitism was hidden and this enabled it to come out of the closet but I added a brief comparison of the current protests to those of the Vietnam war.

That struck a chord with Dr Dawson whose history includes demonstrating in Vancouver while I participated in Toronto. He reminded me that our chant in those days was “hey, hey LBJ. How many kids did you kill today”. In Toronto, we usually assembled at the Ontario Legislature and then marched down University Ave on the sidewalk to the US Consulate farther south. We did not pause at the Mt Sinai Hospital or the Toronto General Hospital or the Sick Kids Hospital and scream and shout at them and climb the facade as the Pro-Palestinians did.

We were focused on the US Consulate and it did, at times, become unruly but the police kept everyone in check and, when necessary in their eyes anyway, arrests were made.

The chants used in the ’60s were not violent whereas “intifada” means intense protest usually in the form of violent terrorism according to Google. From the river to the sea according to the Hamas charter  calls for the dismantling of Israel, and a call for the removal or extermination of the Jewish population of the region. A recent survey of Arab citizens of Israel found that 56% do not believe that the Hamas attack reflects their beliefs and 86% of them are volunteering their support for Israel.

In the ’60s we did not attack places of worship, American businesses, Canadian politicians or private citizens as is being done today. Jewish institutions in Montreal had to get an injunction to prevent protesters from harassing them, invitees to the banquet for the Italian Prime Minister in Toronto were assaulted. Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufactures Association told the Toronto Star that one person in his party was hit in the face.

The Star also reported that “International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen attempted to enter the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) through the main entrance, but protesters blocked his path and followed him for two blocks flanked by police officers as he tried to enter a more secure location.”

Before Christmas, Palestinian supporters disrupted shoppers at the Eaton Centre Mall in Toronto on numerous occasions gathering in front of certain chain stores expressing their loud displeasure at the business.

Lawyer and columnist, Warren Kinsella, who has written about the far right and anti-semitism in Canada reported that a group called Health Care Workers for Palestine, are circulating a petition to try to change the definition of anti-semitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. The definition states “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Kinsella reports that One Jewish doctor, who fears retribution and asks that his name not be used, says: “The Health Care Workers Alliance for Palestine (have been) harassing an array of Jewish Mount Sinai physicians online. They and their collaborators are trying to tell the hospitals what counts as anti-Semitism, including by trying to bully them into denying obvious anti-Semitism.”

This is the secret petition revealed by Kinsella with 142 signatures on it. Would it not be more logical to condemn anti-semitism rather than trying to water down the definition?

And it gets worse. A Jewish cabinet minister in British Columbia was forced to resign her post because she commented that before the founding of Israel (which was created by the United Nations), the land was pretty much barren and desolate. She has now resigned from the NDP because she is upset with what she sees as anti-semitism within the party.

What we are seeing as a reaction to this war is the slippage from legitimate anti-war and political protest into racial bigotry and anti-semitism. I support the right of everyone to protest ( as I have myself in the past) what they consider to be an injustice but it needs to be kept at that. I am not a supporter of Netanyahu or his government and their settlements in the West Bank and if anyone wants to protest Israel’s response to the Hamas attack then do so. Israeli government offices are fair game for peaceful protests.

The aim of protests are two-fold. The first is to express your displeasure at what someone or some state is doing. The second is to convince others of the justness of your cause. All the Palestinian protesters are doing is annoying people. They accomplish nothing but disruption.

All reasonable people are concerned for the innocent Palestinian victims of this war but most of us are also concerned for the Uyghurs and other groups being held in “concentration camps” in China. It is estimated that 1.8 million of these Muslims are being held. Then there are the Rohyngya Muslims being persecuted in Myanmar. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is estimated to have killed more than 300,000 of his own people putting down the Arab Spring since 2011 while about 14 million have fled their homes. And we can’t forget the genocide taking place in Darfur.

How many of the Pro Palestinian protesters are concerned with those tragedies? How many of them are concerned for the hostages still being held by Hamas?

When A Linkedin Computer Decides on a Complaint of Anti-Semitism

By Marvin Ross

Since October 7, we have been faced with an unprecedented level of anti-semitism which continues to grow. The left and the young seem to have forgotten what precipitated Israel’s attack on Hamas and blame Israel and most Jews. Israel is not waging war on Muslims but on the terror group Hamas based in Gaza, the West Bank, Qatar and supported by Iran.

I don’t wish to get into an historical and political discussion with this post but to concentrate instead on reactions. The latest odious anti-semitic insult was graffiti placed on a Toronto bus stop. Someone had written “no service for Jew bastards”. The photo of that was tweeted out on X by Michael Geist, a law professor in Ottawa. His words accompanying that picture were:

“I used to think of these as black and white images telling a story of my grandparents that I thought was a horror in the past. To see this appearing in colour today on the streets of Toronto – the city where I was born and raised – shakes me to my core.”

His tweet and the picture were part of an article in the National Post about the shameful actions of the Toronto Police Service for allowing Pro-Hamas protesters to prevent Prime Minister Trudeau and the visiting Italian Prime Minister from attending a banquet in her honour at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Video of that event showed police on horseback sitting and watching. In my personal history of picketing the US Consulate on University Ave against the War in Viet Nam, the police were not passive. Having a police horse moving sideways towards a crowd is very effective.

The next day, the protesters went to visit a large synagogue in Vaughan north of Toronto. One of the women protesters assaulted a cop but after the crowd of Hamas types starting yelling to let her go, York Regional Police did just that. Watch the video. That was just the most recent assault on the Jewish community which has involved invading Jewish neighbourhoods, vandalizing a book chain owned by Jews and even attacking the Mt Sinai Hospital to name just a few. In that incident, a female doctor’s car was surrounded by angry crowds and she was trapped until rescued.

Those of us who are appalled by the Hamas attack, rapes and murder of women, children and the elderly on October 7 do not attack Muslim businesses or demonstrate and terrorize Muslim places of worship. If these protestors are not happy with Israel’s response, let them protest at the Israeli consulates and embassies. That’s where they should be. Torching a Jewish deli as they did in Toronto makes no sense even if they did not like the pastrami.

When I was growing up in Toronto, there were areas that Jews did not go to and beaches we were not welcome at. There were quotas on how many Jews could get acceptance to university faculties like medicine and dentistry, and earlier the Mt Sinai Hospital came into existence because Jewish doctors were not allowed privileges at most hospitals. With time and advocacy, we became a tolerate and multiculturally diverse society but it seems we are losing that.

I was so outraged by this particular bit of anti-semitic graffiti at a bus stop that I posted it on Linkedin with “Graffiti on a Toronto bus stop reported on X by Ottawa law professor Michael Geist. Shades of Germany in the 30’s”

Within less that half an hour, I received a note from Linkedin that they removed my post as it was fomenting hate. I appealed and I just as quickly lost.

Who was my hate directed against? The moron who wrote the graffiti or Germans in the 1930’s?

I suspect the Linkedin decision was made by a bot which just goes to prove the old joke about computers from many years ago that seems to be still valid. In that anecdote, a computer was programmed to translate from English to Russian. What was fed in was “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. What came out in Russian was “the wine is good but the meat is off”.

How stupid can we get?

March of Progress or Pendulum

By Dr David Laing Dawson

As the year 2000 approached I thought there might be a backlash. The turn of the century felt like a symbolic tipping point as technology and science dramatically expanded, as global warming developed, as satellites multiplied and space junk accumulated, as the evidence for evolution grew. We were now using tools few understood; science fiction was becoming fact; creationism was looking sillier; we were getting our heads around a Big Bang beginning, four dimensions, string theory, genetics, instant communication. AI was just around the corner. We were all now living with, and accepting, the anxiety of not really understanding, not really understanding consciousness, the universe, life itself, the future. It didn’t really help to shift God from a humanoid in the sky to “part of everything”, to pantheism with a sprinkling of TAO.

In the most happy and successful countries more and more people were calling themselves agnostic or atheist (56 percent in The Netherlands). They looked at evidence; they accepted mystery; they accepted the limits of human understanding; they accepted their own agency, and chance; they did not need fairy tales. They understood that our future, and the future of our children and grandchildren, lay in the hands of good democratic governance, our collective agency and purpose, and good will. Not in thoughts and prayers. And the internet, connecting us, sharing knowledge, could be a good thing.

There will be a backlash I thought.

But of course I could not know how that backlash would occur, what form it would take. I thought maybe it would take the form of a resurgence of small orthodox religious groups in the countryside, preachers and their communities clinging to the Quran and the Bible. Maybe people putting aside the silliness of Genesis, but buying into some form of Creationism.

The clash came abruptly in the Moslem world. Enlightenment had spread through many Arab countries by 2010. But then the backlash was swift and certain and the Arab Spring ended in violence. The Imams and autocrats took over. Free speech, and evidence-based scientific thought was crushed, along with women’s rights.

But surely in Western Europe and North America our democracies, our separation of church and state, our constitutions, our good education systems, our advanced sciences, our well established human and women’s rights – surely they would prevent the sort of backlash that occurred in the Moslem world. Women’s rights would prevail. Our belief in science, in evidence, in democracy, would prevail, with a few backwoods exceptions.

But it seems the internet can disseminate lies, fairy tales, flat earth and conspiracy theories as quickly as it can spread science and truth. Quicker actually. Much quicker.

Maybe we are mostly safe here in Canada, and the resurgence of primitive thinking will only occur in the small towns of Saskatchewan, Alberta and New Brunswick.

But in the USA, men in positions of power are forgetting their constitution, forgetting the very important separation of church and state, ignoring science, enlightenment, education, ignoring democracy, ignoring “by the people and for the people”, forgetting our history. With their Christian Nationalism, “Seven Mountain Mandate”, and general ignorance, they are trying to reverse 200 years of progress. They are in danger of not only losing their democracy with Donald Trump, but of making Margaret Atwood, and The Handmaid’s Tale, prophetic.

Donald Trump is the useful idiot for Christian Nationalists, and they are his useful idiots.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/alabama-supreme-court-justice-cites-scripture-nearly-two-dozen-times-in-ruling-on-embryos-204960325977

Monty Python was prophetic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk