Fear vs. Spring: In Praise of the Commons

I regularly get furious at the world view implied by our politicians and the media that cover them without asking enough questions, and I've been tempted to blog about it.  Stephen Harper and his Conservatives want us to be frightened, to be convinced that terrorists are a major threat in North America.  In turn, they want pubic policy to be devoted to addressing those threats with equally terrifying legislation like Bill C-51.  They don't want us to ask questions about the missing and murdered Aboriginal women or to consider what we might do about climate change--two much more important issues.  The media frequently and uncritically conspire, repeatedly running stories about three Muslim women who made their way through Turkey to ISIL in Syria, or interviews with neighbours who knew "Jihadi John" when he was a mild-mannered member of their community.   What makes me  most angry is the way fear changes the social contract, making us more distrustful of others, urging us to focus on ourselves and our personal safety rather than the needs of our society, prompting us to adopt what Northrop Frye once called a "garrison mentality" that estranges us from everyone whose values or appearance might be "different."

But my temptation to write an angry, scathing blog has been, thankfully, assuaged by two things.  One is a change in the news cycle that is now dominated by the Duffy trial, by the accord between Ontario and Quebec that created a cap-and-trade system for carbon that involves almost 70% of Canadians, and by the CBC's series on missing and murdered Aboriginal women.  I never thought I would thank Mike Duffy for anything, much less for making me feel as if it was 1973 again and as if my first responsibility when I got home from work at night was to see what new revelations the day's testimony had brought.  But at least we're forced by Duffy's trial to think about our own institutions and their values:  this is something we can change, and for the better.

Spring also dissuaded me from writing a cranky blog.  Or rather, it made wallowing in anger something I had no heart for, beginning on March 16 when I saw three robins in my back yard--the earliest I've ever recorded seeing robins.  Then bit by bit the weather encouraged me to look up from my burrow.  It wasn't a very pretty world I saw, a fact that was made dramatic by the two snow storms we've had since the general thaw:  I would get up in the morning and beauty would be back.  

But when you are as addicted to beauty as I am, you search it out.  Or perhaps one could say that the changing weather--weather that made promises and then took them back before making more extravagant promises--prompted me to keep noticing.  The brilliant literary critic, Peter Brooks, has convinced me that in Europe and North America at least, we tend to pay the most attention to what we can see.  No, that's not quite what he says.  He maintains that a "scopophilic regime" permeates Western thought, from the philosophy of the Greeks to the current moment with all of its YouTube cat videos and photographs of meals we're about to eat.  (Brooks wrote Reading for the Plot well before Facebook and YouTube:  he'd be shocked at how right he was.)  Perhaps that tendency is summed up in the cliche "Seeing is believing."  But last weekend when I was driving south on Pasqua, I heard frogs.  I can't tell you how much I love the sound of frogs in the spring; I can't even explain why I love them so.  I only know that when Bill wants to give me a spring-time treat he doesn't offer ice cream or chocolate, but a ride, often west on Thirteenth, to see if we can't hear some frogs.  We park by the side of the road and I just listen.  If birdsong is the expression of a celestial, airy joy, then the singing of frogs is birdsong's earthy counterpart.  And there's something profoundly earthy about spring.

I have also been listening to the conversations my male and female downy woodpecker have in the back yard.  Then last Friday when I was gardening, I heard the characteristic squeek of a mourning dove in flight, even before its haunting call. As I was cleaning out the front flower beds, I found little unravelling green buds of silvermound and flax just as the mourning dove arrived. So I've been looking more carefully the last week, even getting to the point of thinking that the still subtle landscape was the colour of juncos and sparrows--shades of browns and greys.  Then today the trees suddenly exploded with buds.

Here's the thing about spring.  About weather or sunshine or birdsong or the richer, longer light of April days.  It belongs to us all, to what we call "the commons."  If you want a perfect illustration for this, go into a restaurant or a store on a lovely day and talk to your server or cashier about the weather--weather they're not going to get out into for quite a few hours yet.  They're as blissed as you are.  They're probably blissed, in part, because you are.  Working retail is a slog, but I imagine it's a real slog during the coldest and darkest winter days when we're all cranky.  

Things that belong to the commons, to us all, are the antithesis of the Duffy trial and all the news about terrorist threats.  The pleasure we take in spring doesn't belong to the world of commodities or expense accounts, and it's something we instinctively share with the people around us, not something that divides us, the way fear does.  Weather belongs to us all, reminding us in the way neither politicians nor the news has been (except in the case of B.C., Ontario and Quebec), that it is a shared joy and shared responsibility.