Home to Korea

Well I'm back in the land of kimchi, soju and blazing fast internet! I've been in Korea almost a week now and already my body is thanking me for it. One solid year of being hot and sweaty is not good for a guy with what more than one Korean has called, "weak skin." Oddly enough because of its white, almost transparency, I've had more than one offer to trade skins made to me by a Korean with blemishless, brown skin that will forever be only a dream to me. I guess it's gotta be a case of the grass always being greener.

At any rate all signs of the rash I got on my weak, white skin while I was sick, sweaty and feverish a month or so ago have finally disappeared. I have slept through the entire night a few times because I didn't wake up sweaty and uncomfortable. It's nice and cool here! My co-favourite season in Korea is spring. It's tied for my fave with fall. I wish every day could be like yesterday. Amber and I went for a walk around the city of Incheon to Inha University where she works and we tried to play tennis but because I didn't think to pack the proper tennis playing footwear, we got booted off the courts and had to settle for playing catch with the baseball. But just being out for a few hours in the sun, moving around, actually exercising without sweating like the pilot from Airplane!, what a pleasure!

Doing something sporty, also a pleasure! The closest I got to that in Indonesia was the weightroom at Gandaria Apartments. But it hasn't been all sleeping and playing. I've put my name in for dozens of part time and full time jobs around here but Korea always has its surprises. They went and made it even more difficult to get a job over here. At least for Canadians. I knew that to get a job here I'd need a criminal record check but what I didn't know is how hard it would be to get one. I remember my last year in Korea all I had to do was get fingerprinted from a local Korean police station on the proper RCMP fingerprint form, which you needed to download and print out from the RCMP website. In fact I didn't even do that. I just got the Korean cops to fingerprint me on one of their forms. Even though it was all in Korean, it was fine. And the cops were friendly and glad to do it for free. After that I had to download the application for the CRC from the RCMP website and fill it out. Then I had to get a certified check. Impossible to do now for me in Korea because you need a bank account and to get one of those you need an alien registration card. To get the ARC I need a job. Can't get a job cuz no CRC and in order to get that I need a certified check, which I can't get because.... Ah, we meet again, Korean Catch 22! No worries, I doubt I'd be able to find a place to get a certified check in Canadian currency anyway. I remember THAT was a real challenge last time I tried.

Back in 2010 I had an alien registration card so I got the check and sent the application. I seem to remember the check being for 130 bucks. That was including faster mail. Only drawback, and the reason I had to leave Korea, was that it took almost 5 months even with the faster mail. It arrived too late to use for my visa application for a job at Dongshin University. So I decided to go back to Canada. It wasn't more than a couple days late otherwise I think I may still be working here in Korea, possibly at Dongshin University. But the hand of Fate would have it otherwise...

So NOW, since September of 2014, Canada has decided to make things easier for people seeking CRC's. Uh-oh. You KNOW what happens when the government does anything "for your convenience." They have now instituted a fingerprint digitizing rule and chosen some RCMP approved companies to do the digitizing. So instead of sending the originals to the RCMP, you send the originals to one of the approved digitizing companies, and give them their fee for the service, OF COURSE. Then they send them to the RCMP. Somehow you pay the RCMP to convert your newly digitized fingerprints into a fingerprint-based criminal record check and mail it back to you. Plus you pay the RCMP their fee for doing that, OF COURSE. THEN, you send the whole works to a friend or family member who has absolutely nothing better to do and would be only too delighted to run in to the one Korean embassy located VERY close to his/her house and get the criminal record check notarized by the Korean consular general she/he finds there. And, OF COURSE, don't forget about his share of the whole scam, I mean process. All in all it's considerably LESS convenient, and let's face it, that's what the government is for, and considerably more expensive. I am probably wrong but "digitizing" just means photocopying, scanning, taking a pic with your smartphone or somehow turning them into a digital picture that can be sent electronically. I'm sure most of us have the technology easily available to do that but when I asked the guy at one of these digitizing places he, of course trying to justify his existence, said, "Oh no, that pixellates them and makes them unusable for the RCMP computer." Is it me? Does this sound like total BULLSHIT to anyone else?

OR, you could get fingerprinted and send the prints along with a filled out RCMP CRC request form to one of these newly formed businesses that do all this for Canadians who are in Korea and finding it impossible to get all this tedius, anal, unnecessary BULL SHEEIT done back in Canada. I found one called "Reliability Screening." It will only cost me 400 dollars to have this done! Yay! And then there is no guarantee that I'll find the job I want in the 6 months that this thing will do me any good. If I don't get a job in 6 months, the CRC becomes unacceptable here in Korea and I have to do this MERDE DE LE VACHE all over again. Even if I find a job at the 5 month and 29 day mark, we go to immigration at the 6 month and one day mark, they will say, "Cannot. Must be less than 6 months old."

But here's the fun part: I've been sending resumes out all over the place to all kinds of jobs. Some that might be wishful thinking but many that I think I'm almost overqualified for. And nothing. Absolutely nothing. I finally got an email from the director of adult studies at YBM, a major private school chain in Korea, a guy named Greg, and he said places get so many resumes nowadays that nobody even looks at your application package unless it has all the required documentation including the CRC that's less than 6 months old. And even THEN you're just in the running, there's no guarantee you'll get anything.

FURTHERMORE, I've had criminal record checks done for every job I've had for the past 20 years in Canada, Japan, and Korea. This last year I've been in Indonesia where it's awfully difficult to commit a crime in Canada. It's the only year of my adult life I haven't documented with multiple official RCMP criminal record checks. In fact, and I have no idea what this means, some of my security guard checks were higher level criminal record checks than the ones done for work in Korea.

All of this means exactly nothing to anyone. People need my money. I can't work anywhere without paying someone for the job. Money trumps reason every time. Why can't we stop being dicks to each other? Why does everything like this require diving into and swimming through olympic sized swimming pools full of BULL SHIT???

Okay, I'll move on. Another thing that sort of surprised me, but not really, was my phone. It's a little, low tech, 2G Nokia. I was pretty sure I'd be able to just buy a new simcard for it here and I'd be reachable by friends or prospective employers. I might even be able to keep the same number. But I went with Amber and with DB, (the two folks who hath fed, clothed and yay they didst giveth unto me succor in my destitution), to several phone shops who all said they don't have 2G simcards. The one at the airport said there are none in the country any more. One place we went to the girl behind the counter instantly started giggling when she saw my trusty, yellow Nokia. I was expecting that, but not expecting the total lack of service for stupidphones. Nothing but smartphones here I guess. But I haven't given up. I know Yongsan electronics market will have something! At least they will if it's like it was when I was last there. Things change. I might not even be able to get a cheap pair of glasses at Nam Dae Moon! I sure hope so cuz the glasses I have, which were bought there for less than 20 bucks frames, lenses and eye exam, are old, worn out and the wrong prescription.

Anyway, I'm headed to Seoul tomorrow and hope to maybe solve some of these problems. I'll visit Heather and Mike and family. Can't wait to meet Iryna and Kelly! Then I'll do a bit of a visit slash job hunt with friends in the area and see if I can't come up with something temporary or even something more long term. I might be able to drop into a hagwon or two and ask them the best way to solve my CRC issues. They might know a few tricks.

John from Wall Street told me that I need to hang in for about two more weeks here and Wall Street will pay my way back to Indonesia and get me set up and working there. But he's been saying that for 3 months. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then I'll have to treat Korea as my new place of residence and keep on trying to get some work here.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Updates will follow as events warrant.

Ward of Wall Street

For any who read my Friday the 13th post from back in February, in it I said that I had signed contracts with Wall Street almost two months ago. So I think it was either late December or early January when I signed on to work at the same place at which I started this Indonesian Odyssey almost a year ago. You see, I have many reasons to like Wall Street. This may sound like overcompensation for misery, but even though they brought me over here under false pretenses; even though they kept from me the fact that I'd be working illegally on a business visa instead of legally working on a proper work visa; even though instead of a year of legal work I only got two months of illegal work from them, I was happy working there and I was impressed with the corporate responsibility the company showed to all the foreigners with business visas they had to let go. I was offered, (and was told that all the other teachers were offered the same), either a job at another Wall Street in another country, or a plane ticket home. I had only just arrived a month before this offer was made so I didn't want to turn around and go back to Canada. And though I contacted several different Wall Streets in other countries, I wanted to stay in Indonesia. Besides, a ticket to Calgary would have cost the company a couple thousand bucks. Why not take a job here and save them some dough? I was offered a job and a proper work visa, (KITAS), by English Today. The owner said I'd have it in a couple of months and then I'd be working legally here. Which is what I came over for.

I worked for several months with English Today and the boss gave me several reasons why he had to postpone the application for my KITAS. Because of this and the nature of the job, too much Jakarta traffic time and not enough teaching time/salary, I phased myself out of the company and started freelancing. As a freelancer I had to be careful of advertising online or posting ads in apartment buildings or places of prominence because either could increase my chances of being caught working without the proper visa, blacklisted so I couldn't work again in Indonesia, and deported or even thrown in jail. Indonesian jail. So I kept my client list small. This kept my profits small, but I was able to pay the bills. Barely.

The signing of the new contracts with Wall Street and the insistence of everyone I talked to there that I would be getting my KITAS soon and working legally again soon was something I didn't hide from my clients. I was honest and told them I could only teach temporarily. I gave them the timetable Wall Street gave to me. For this reason some of my students cancelled when my KITAS was supposed to come in. But it didn't come in and I had to renew my business visa again. Although I was contracted to work at Wall Street, they told me that they don't pay for outbound flights. It's a policy of their's. I found that odd considering every foreigner working here when Wall Street got busted for bringing us over on business visas was offered outbound flights to other Wall Streets in other countries or back to their countries of origin. I also know that during the many years they had practiced this illegal, but very common business tactic over here, it often took more than two months to get workers the proper visas so they paid for visa renewal runs to Singapore, which included the outbound flight to Singapore, not just the flight back. See the business visa lasts for a year, but needs to be renewed every 60 days. NOT every two months, as I learned the hard way.

Anyway, I renewed my visa back in mid February. I had to go into debt to do it, but got 'er done. I was told at the airport immigration gate that that renewal, (my 4th), would be my last. He suspected that I had been working illegally on the wrong visa. Why else would anyone spend that length of time in Indonesia on a business visa. I lied to him and said I had been going to meetings and receiving training. I also had to do things like go for physical check-ups and there had been many delays in the process. For instance my first medical check-up was deemed unsatisfactory so I had to go get another one. I told him what I had been told by Wall Street: that I would definitely receive my KITAS before this new 60-day renewal expired. He reluctantly believed me but told me that it was unlikely that I would be allowed back into the country on anything BUT a KITAS. For instance if, at the end of the new 60 days, (April 18th), I tried to re-enter Indonesia on a tourist or visitor visa, it would be denied. When that happened I would be blacklisted and unable to ever work in Indonesia again. I told him I would get my KITAS soon. So I was allowed back into Indonesia.

For the past almost 60 days I have been VERY anxiously awaiting my KITAS and working very few hours due to more cancellations and the inability to sign new students because I would soon be working for Wall Street and have to cancel our classes. So the money wasn't exactly rolling in. I was generously offered a place to stay by one of my students and that saved my bacon because I couldn't have made rent payments if he hadn't, but it also eliminated another paying client. The maid who cleans three times a week at the apartment where I live is making double what I am right now. Maids here make notoriously low wages. But I kept waiting for Wall Street and trusting that the KITAS would come soon.

I got a text from John, from Wall Street, a little while ago saying, "Good news! We are now in the final stages of your KITAS! It should only be about one more month!" I didn't have a month left on my visa. In fact I think he sent this message to me around the end of March or beginning of April when I had less than 3 weeks left on it. So I sent back a reply asking what we would do if I didn't get the KITAS before my visa ran out. I told John that I didn't have the money for another visa run to Singapore and that I doubted I'd be able to do one. It took several days before I really got a response to this. I guess Wall Street didn't see the urgency. John said they'd look into it and look into paying for another visa run or if that wasn't possible maybe doing something else. Then I waited some more.

I sprinkled a little more urgency into my text messages, emails and phone calls and finally just a few days ago I got an email from John suggesting that our best course of action would be for me to go to another country for a couple three weeks, up to a month until the KITAS was processed. Then Wall Street would pay my way back, sign me up, get me a place and give me start-up allowance like they had last year when I first started working for them. How was I supposed to afford this if I couldn't even afford a visa run?

So I called John up and got a bit MORE forceful with my words. I mentioned that Wall Street had offered me a ticket back to Canada as reparations for what they had done illegally bringing me over here and misleading me into believing I'd be working a year legally when in fact I only worked 2 months illegally. That hasn't changed. I am still here for that reason. Why can't they offer me a similar type of reparation NOW in the form of a ticket to Korea and some money to spend while I'm there for a month. The ticket home would have been at least 2 thousand. I suggested a thousand for the month in Korea. I have to admit, while having this conversation I really wished I had taken that plane ticket, cashed it in and used the money to help me through the very lean ensuing 10 months.

Well John got into the fact that I had taken another job. Yeah, which I said saved Wall Street a couple grand. It didn't remove their ethical responsibility or liability towards me. I was just doing something that would have saved them money is all. So John said he didn't want to play the blame game. I told him that I had interviews and meetings and phone calls with SEVERAL of the businesses over here in Indonesia that I could have worked for and every one of them wanted to just hire me on my business visa. I KNOW it's not really all that unethical or evil or whatever, and if I thought it was I wouldn't be re-applying to Wall Street. But I DO think they still have a responsibility, morally, ethically, logically and legally towards me. I am still, until I get working legally over here, a virtual ward of Wall Street.

So then John mentioned that it would be a hard sell to convince the HR and Finance departments at Wall Street to give me money to go to a country where I have worked and lived for so many years. Pay is better, food is better, technology is incomparably better, weather is better, job is better, so many things are better there and I'm used to them. Not to mention I have lots of friends in Korea. He said Wall Street would worry that I'd just take the money and stay in Korea. He suggested I just borrow from friends. So I said that I had been here less than a year. How many friends of less than a year do YOU have who would hear you ask, "Hey, buddy old pal... Could I borrow a few hundred bucks so that I can leave the country where you are and make it really difficult for you to collect it?" and then start shelling out the money. It'd be a very tough sell to even old friends. But I feel Wall Street should do this for me. Not just because of their corporate responsibility towards me, forget that and let's just think logically. I know when you get a large, segmented business and you try to mix reason and money this is hard to do but let's look at this for a second. Wall Street has already paid a couple hundred bucks for my medical checks and they've paid for the KITAS to get processed. I think that's a thousand or two. Not to mention all the time. If I can't find a loan and Wall Street doesn't pay I can't work. The company will have to hire someone else, maybe bring them over from another country and pay for a new visa and plane ticket. Paying for me to go to Korea for a month will actually SAVE them money!

He didn't think they'd see it that way so I said then how about just LENDING me the money. I'll be working here and they could just take the money out of my paychecks. So finally John agreed to talk to the higher-ups and see if they'd agree to help me out. That was the morning of my birthday. I waited all day on pins and needles for his reply.

My friend, Mr. Yoo, came over to take me out for a Korean feast on my birthday and a few beers. While we were discussing my situation I got the message from John saying that corporate had declined my request. Boy did THAT put a damper on the festivities!

So now I'm shopping around for a ticket to Korea. I found one on Air Asia that's going to be about 400 bucks. Including other travel expenses I need about 500 bucks. If I don't find it I will overstay my visa and forfeit my ability to work in this country. I will also be forced to find the money to allow them to deport me. Wall Street won't even LOAN me the money so that I can avoid this massive disaster and earn them whatever they would make from a year of my teaching. Where the hell did that corporate responsibility go? 10 months ago they were all appologetic offering me jobs and plane tickets and money... now they won't even give me 500 bucks to keep me out of jail. For a crime THEY committed. And this is Indonesian jail we're talking here.

I have friends I can stay with in Korea and borrow money from there. I think I'll be able to extremely reluctantly borrow the money from some friends to pay for the ticket. Believe it or not I STILL think that if Wall Street gets my KITAS and calls me back from Korea I will go because I have signed contracts and I don't break contracts. But MAN am I ever thinking hard about just staying in Korea now! The problem with that is I'm at least a month away from legal work in Korea because I need a criminal record check for that. The only work I could find in Korea for the next month would be illegal and that what I've been trying to avoid for the past year! Again, I can't for the life of me figure out why Wall Street won't help me out here knowing all of this. I'm starting to suspect that maybe THEY don't think my visa will be approved and they just don't have the stones to tell me. This is their amazingly irresponsible way of getting rid of me.

I've contacted the Canadian Embassy here and a couple other organizations that help Canadians overseas but they cannot intervene in issues of immigration, visas, national autonomy and so on and so forth. All they can do is ensure that I'm treated okay while I'm languishing in prison. A couple agencies, however, DID provide a list of lawyers here in Jakarta who deal with matters such as these. If I don't get my KITAS and go back to work for Wall Street, or maybe even if I do, they told me that I have legal recourse. I don't know if it would be worthwhile because it seldom is, but it might be something to look into. The problem I can forsee with THAT course of action would be that I can't afford a lawyer either. And if I could find one to work without pay, any settlement I might be able to get would most likely just be enough to cover his/her salary. This has been my experience with the law in Canada, never mind what might be the case over here! It would probably be handled the way things are handled over here. I'd most likely get hooked up with the law firm of Rush, Rush and Delay.

So that's what's going on now. What would my life, or this blog, be without all my travel drama?

Sometimes I wish you would stop talking about freedom of speech

I get up early around here. Like around 8. To me that's early considering I don't have to get up for anything. I just bounce outta bed like when I was a kid wondering what the world had in store for me. The other day I got up, did some laundry, had some coffee, checked the hockey scores and watched a bit of the Canuck game. I started to get hungry and realized there was nothing in the house. So I decided to go down to Lotte Mart to get some groceries. I didn't realize what time it was. It was only 9:30 and Lotte Mart doesn't open till 10:00.

But I wasn't the only one. There were lots of people waiting outside the rolling, garage-type doors that were still closed. Most of the doors are just like horizontal bars so you can see what is going on inside. I expected to see people stocking shelves or mopping floors or readying the place for the customers. I was amazed by what I saw instead. Easily 100 employees lined up across the entire width of the store from entrance to entrance at the checkout counter floor standing there listening to some young, thin dudes. One was wearing a hip hop style oversized, flat brimmed ball cap, a tight tanktop and some kind of wrist scarf thingy. If he wasn't gay I'm Bill Gates. You know when you hear someone speaking a language and even though you may only understand one of every ten words, you can tell he's gay? There's regional accents, linguistic accents and then there's the gay accent. And intonation and exaggeratedly effeminate gesticulation. Anyway, I really didn't need the last four lines. I could have just said, he, and his cohorts, were aerobics instructors. There they were readying the troops for their morning dancing. A one and a two and a "players gonna play play play play and haters gonna hate hate hate hate, shake it off, I shake it off!" And almost all the hundred or so employees danced right along with these thin but muscly dance leaders. It wouldn't have been such a sight, I don't think, if it weren't for the hijabs. About 2/3 of the female employees were wearing the Lotte uniform and their Muslim headware and they were dancing right along with Taylor Swift and the Lotte wake-up beatboys.

While in Korea and Japan I had seen the morning rituals such as these designed not just to wake up the employees and get the blood flowing in the ones who stayed up too late or might be hungover. It's a sort of company membership exercise in which you can show your loyalty and probably be rewarded for doing so. But never with the hijab. I had heard that music and dancing were frowned upon by the religion of Islam. That they were idle pursuits. But there these gals were not just dancing but mouthing the words to the song as well. Having fun! And I enjoyed watching them.

On a similar note, today while walking home from teaching Ah In and Jooh Ah, I saw something even MORE shocking! I was going up a flight of stairs to get into the mall which my apartment is attached to and coming down the stairs was a young, Muslim chick with what I thought was an ingenius use for her hijab. She had her cell phone tucked into it and was blabbing away to someone totally hands free! Like this:

My point is I like to see people who believe in God. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think even my atheist friends would agree. It's when you get dogmatic leaders who think that any variance, no matter how slight, in the religious routines is deterioration rather than adaptation. Those are the extremist creators. Those are the people who give religions bad names. People change. Times change. Cultures change. EVERYthing changes. Why can't religions change too? Well, they can. Do you know how even MORE messed up our world would be if all religions practiced the laws of their respective churches without ever changing? Here's an example: Football would be a different game. Christians are forbidden from eating or touching the flesh of pigs. Can't touch the pigskin. No post T.D. point to the heavens. Those guys would be playing some other sport. No kneeling in the endzone for a quick prayer after scoring either. No locker room pre-game prayer. No Teebowing! Hockey would be different too. There was a time when a mullet haircut was known as "hockey hair." But Christians are technically not supposed to round off the side growth of their hair. Whatever the heck that means. As I often am, I am reminded of the Simpsons. The episode where Burns hired major league ball players to play in the company softball game vs. Shelbyville. Burns keeps telling Don Mattingly he looks like a hippy and to get rid of his sideburns. Mattingly shaves both sides of his head but it still doesn't satisfy Burns so he kicks him off the team. Remember that one?

At any rate, there are crazy, old laws and rules in practically every religion. I'm glad the Muslims of Indonesia are not all dwelling in the distant past like some extremist would like them to. I'm glad, even though we can't see if they have "hella good hair" under their hijabs, at least those Muslim gals can shake shake shake shake it off, shake it off.

So anyhoo, the doors opened and most of the workers stayed at the front of the aisles. I went in the door by electronics so I had to go all the way across the store to get to the food. EVERY person said, "Salamat pagi," to me! Some bowed extra politely, most smiled. I was saying, "Salamat pagi. Salamat pagi. Good morning. Yeap pagi. Pagi. Pagi. Selamat pagi. Pagi...AAARRGGGHhh!" I just turned down any aisle so I could give these greeters the, ahem, shake. I headed for the beginning of the food. By coincidence, not design, the beer section is at the beginning of the food aisles to that's where I went first. I needed water and beer. But the beer was gone! Water was still there but the beer was gone! So I asked one of the freshly exercised, extraordinarily friendly workers in Indonesian where the beer was. She gave me directions to where I had just come from. I told her in Indonesian that there was no beer there. And, of course, we went to the beer section, which still had no beer and she was as confused as I. So she then said to me that there was no beer. They were fresh out. I had been in the store the day before and there was plenty. I knew they weren't out. She was just not into helping me as much as getting rid of me.

So I started thinking as I thanked her and continued on, that I had heard something about beer being removed from convenience stores like 7-11's and Indomaret and Alphamarts. Maybe this rule was being enforced in Lotte Marts too. But that turned out NOT to be the case. As I searched for a check-out till I saw the beer near the entrance at the spot where the huge line-up for cigarettes was. Indonesians are serious about their smoking. A cigarette company is the richest Indonesian owned company I think. You look around on the streets and you won't look long before you find someone crouched under a tree fiendishly enjoying a smoke. Or some old guys sitting at the table outside 7-11 sucking on some cigs. Their love for alcohol has been slower to develop, however, being unclean in the Muslim religion. But maybe now that it will be more closely associated with cigarettes it might encourage a little extra-religious experimentation. Probably not but maybe.

Anyhoo, where was I going with this? I got my groceries and got some beer and went home. Then I started to think a bit about history. Should we just forget it and move on, remember it and learn from it, or dwell in it? Then I got to thinking about what we have been conditioned by the media to label all willy nilly like, without checking our history, as "terrorism." Should we be calling the people we call terrorists "terrorists?" Or would that change if we threw a little historical perspective into the mix? In fact it's not always "history," I'd say in a lot of cases it's just, "a history," that would change the label somewhat. Maybe to "avengers" or "lynch mobs" or "insurrection squads" or something that still sounds bad but not totally evil. Because, let's face it, if your country was invaded by, let's say Canada, (ha ha), and the Canadians killed your family for no reason other than economics and extraction of natural resources that are the rightful property of the people of your country... then years later, even a generation or two later, you went to Canada, climbed out onto the edge of the CN Tower in Toronto and started throwing handfuls of change, (because you've been in Canada for a week now and you have about three tons of it), which accellerates to massive speeds before hitting innocent Canadians below killing them, would you be called a "terrorist?" You bet your ass you would! By Canadians and Canadian allies. But would you be? Are you committing a completely unprovoked act of violence? Terrorism?

Let me just say, I know you can't kill people that way, it's an old wivestale. It was, what I thought would be a poetic way to kill Canadians. I'd make a bad terrorist, what can I say?

Anyway, first, (and of course by "first" I mean after they killed you), the Canadian authorities and government would find out where you're from. "He's from Lupshevnia? Didn't we kill about a million people there for their shlubodinium deposits? Oh, that's right, 1.5 million. Oh it's coming back to me now. Shlubodinium is highly explosive. We didn't want to risk our expensive machinery and no normal miners would mine the stuff so we forced the Lupshevnians to extract it. The ones we didn't exterminate." Then the damage control begins. "Hello, media? I'll be your best friend if you don't run any references to the Canadian genocide in Lupshevnia for a little while. Oh, all right, I'll give you a million dollars." "Hello, America? I'll be your friend if you help us make an emotional stand against, just a sec... What are we making a stand against? Oh yeah... and emotional rally in support of the railroads of Canada." "No? Oh, all right I'll give you a billion dollars. Great! See you Thursday." "Okay, we'll put the story out that this crazed lunatic, with no provocation or justification, killed Canadians from the CN Tower to protest the CN, (Canadian National), railroad because there were some... what religion was he? Oh yeah... some 7th Day Adventists who worked on the railroad and were mistreated. Then on Thursday we'll get some fellow politicians and pay a handful of local bystanders to have a rally in support of the unification that came through joining the great people of this great country via the construction of the Canadian National Railroad. That oughta do it."

You might think this sort of thing doesn't actually happen, that I'm having a laugh and exaggerating here, but what do we know about the Charlie Hebdo killings? CH was a magazine that printed cartoons and articles mocking the Muslim religion. The "terrorists" were Muslim. Well it must be totally about religion then. Case closed. Religion all on its own is responsible for yet another attrocity in the world. I saw roundtables at the time on the BBC of supposedly smart fellows virtually parrotting this very line of reason. It was momentarily brought up that maybe, just maybe something in French foreign relations and foreign policies might have something to do with this event and the roundtable just said, "Nope. Absolutely impossible. Let's move on." And nobody but me smelled a rat. I was, I admit, wondering if the tragedy could have anything to do with French foreign interests before I saw the roundtable discussion but when these "experts" all agreed French international relations had nothing whatsoever to do with this event, about the only thing they agreed so absolutely about in the whole show, my bullshit metter was red lining.

I made the mistake of bringing it up with some of my atheist friends but was seen as a wet blanket thrown over the roaring fire of anti-religious rhetoric that was gaining ground worldwide at the time. Many people out there wanted religion, or more specifically, Islam, to be the culprit. So much so that it was easy for many important reasons behind the killing of the 17 CH employees to go with the shooters to their graves. There were a couple of things that were mentioned I thought without any of the gravity and "HEY-LISTEN-TO-THIS" that I thought they warranted. The major one was the nationality of the brothers. They were Algerian. At least that's where their parents were from. Look at the history between France and Algeria and you will see terrorism. You will see torture, attrocities, beheadings, attempted genocide, slavery, all of these things we hate committed by the French against the people of Algeria. Why? They just decided to move on into the country and use the land for cotton fields either killing the residents or forcing them to work the fields. This was not a million years ago either! 1830. There are records written by the French generals of the time talking about the only good "Arab," (as they called them), being a dead Arab. One guy said any French soldier who doesn't use the edge of his sword on every filthy Arab he sees will get the flat side of my sword. I'm paraphrasing but something like that. I read about the French trying to force the Muslims to renounce their faith or die. I even saw pictures of French attrocities against the Algerians. THIS, my friends, all done for cotton, the oil of the day, THIS was terrorism. I saw lots of information about how awful the French were to the Algerians during their struggle for independance from the French. I read that the number of people killed was somewhere between 350,000, (a number, not surprisingly, that the French accept as correct), and 1.2 million. Somewhere in between is the probable total but whatever it is, it's a far cry from 17! I read and I wondered... with all those people slaughtered, beheaded, enslaved, tortured, forced to renounce their religion and who knows what else, is it possible for any family from Algeria to have escaped the attrocities of the French altogether? Could any family make the claim that they have no relatives or loved ones that were harmed in any way by the French? I doubted it. Then I thought of the Charlie Hebdo killers. Do you suppose their parents had no stories to tell them about the French attrocities at that time?

I don't think that religion was just incidental and that the CH cartoons had nothing to do with it and that the CH attackers were not wrong for so many reasons for doing what they did, but I re-evaluated the term "terrorist," a little bit. Then I thought about the link to Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen. The fact is this whole thing was reportedly financed by a guy I have written about here before, who was imprisoned for 18 months without a charge, hearing, or any proper due process, radicalized by long-term solitary confinement and after release and involvement with Al-Qaeda in Yemen he was drone bombed again without a charge, a trial or any proof of anything. These are the things that create the mentality in extremist groups, along with personal experiences that are similar, that allow them to do such dispicable acts. The thing about most, "terrorists," is they are killed before the world gets to find out their list of motivations. Not a coincidence, that.

I think history, and past events too recent to be called history yet, should be studied and people should be made aware of the terrorism, the ACTUAL terrorism that has been routinely committed in the past, (and continues in the present), by rich countries against less powerful countries for their natural resources and we need to understand how that translates into the extremist actions that are erroneously called "terrorism." It plays no small part and it would seem almost too obvious to state but if we could put a stop to economic terrorism, which is more wide spread and dangerous than we know, these attrocities committed against rich countries that are immediately labeled as "terrorism" just might come to a stop as well. Too often, I believe, acts of violence are blamed on religion by the people who committed them or people who dislike religion and are readily convinced of its culpability. I'm not saying it never happens. Relax. What I'm saying is I wish we could get at all the causes of what we call "terrorism" nowadays and put a stop to them.

I bring it up because I am still seeing people talking about the Charlie Hebdo incident. Saying how religion is the enemy of freedom of speech. Yes, religion is part of some terrorism. Yes religion can limit freedom of speech. But sometimes I think we should try to concentrate on some of the many issues besides religion and freedom of speech involved in acts of extremism and terrorism around the world. Like shut up about freedom of speech already! We get you! (ar ar)

The Kenyan slaughter of 148 people at Garissa University: Yes, there were people asked if they are Christian and shot because of it so religion is definitely part of it but I really hope the authorities search for all the motivations. Al Shabaab are undoubtedly influenced by recent and historical violence in Somalia and the wide variety of areas the members come from too. Are they motivated solely by religion? Like did all the members find themselves reading the Koran one day then suddenly decide they need to commit extreme acts of violence? It seems to me there might be a step or two in between that turns them into such violent people. But violent people can sometimes be convinced to stop violent behaviour. Even after long traditions of it.

And if you say it could never happen, that people will never forget history, never move on or progress with the times, take a look at the top of this post. It can happen. It happens all the time actually. I think there are some people who just need some very VERY strong encouragement to change. And don't kid yourself, the people motivated by money and greed are the ones who will need the stronger encouregement. You can take THAT to the bank.