Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

This fall, Newfoundland and Labrador will begin vaccinating all girls in Grade 6 to protect against a virus that causes cervical cancer. HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) infects half of all sexually active women in North America - the more partners, the greater the infection rate. The more partners, the more likely you are to go through the trials of cancer, abortions, and STDs.

Should we not teach sexual restraint instead? Tell girls, early, about male sexual pressure and give them support? Give young girls a chance to say no; to maintain their sexual integrity, and to not be used by forgettable, regrettable, males?

There should also be a class for boys. If they don’t know respect, they should know date rape laws.

But why should young girls have the bar lowered in terms of behavior? Should we not, instead, have the bar raised and expect them to make the right choices? Right now, around many jurisdictions anyway, we are giving young girls the opposite message - that they will be promiscuous; that they will make the wrong choices and that they will get disease.

Should there not, as well, be a cost or a consequence to promiscuity? Should they be shown abortion videos too? Why not?

Human beings are motivated by the path of least resistance and to a feel-good “party” mentality - especially in this culture. People do not drink and drive and smoke today as much because of awareness of consequence. It is the downside that deters, that creates restraint from impulse actions and bad choices.

The fact is that there is no “get out of jail free card” when it comes to promiscuity. According to the female sex researchers with whom I have spoken, women are not like men; every time a girl has sex with someone who doesn’t care or who is using her, a little bit of her soul dies.

Men, young men especially, must learn consequences too.

Unfortunately, women and young girls have a bigger cross to bear and are the ones who suffer most.

Rear Admiral P. Dean Mcfadden joined me on air this morning with Commander Mike Considine. At issue were Natal day celebrations in Halifax and the Navy’s more proactive interface with the public and also the news story of the day concerning Halifax peace activists protesting nuclear armed ships in Maritime harbours; the elephant in the room always is the media’s relationship with the military and its role.

Basically, the media’s response is divided into two camps: first, those that are circumspect about budgets and the application of force and squeamishness about combat ops; second, those in the media who are cheerleaders.

While I will always question policy, and our assumptions for policy, I will never prevaricate; the military has been screwed over on budgets and it has been repeatedly starved. Which raises the question: who really cares about our military?

In the 1990s the Liberal Party and the Conservatives and the government-of-the-day betrayed Canadian soldiers who served in Bosnia when a firefight broke out with Croatians in the Medak pocket. No one wanted to hear about blue helmets killing murderous Croatians. But there it was, all covered up by Ottawa. Soldiers returned home from combat with the shock of seeing rape and internecine tribal and religious warfare to a country that did not give them post traumatic stress help. Many of those same soldiers who fought there are today destroyed human beings: homeless, health problems, unemployable. Carol Off wrote about it in her book, Ghosts of The Medak Pocket. I interviewed her. While she’s a big lefty in the political and social arenas alike, she was horrified by how Canada turned its collective back. The horrific Medak pocket vets scenario became our version of the Vietnam vets, and sadly it was a story ignored — one too few Canadians are attuned too, to this very day.

“Never abandon your own.” The motto seemed good on a public relations front, but our government never seemed to practice what they preached.

But Canada’s betrayal of the military goes further than that. It is also cultural: the NDP would like to see our forces, and I say this hyperbolically, in Girl Guide uniforms — care bears. And this is not reality. There’s no place for cookies on the war lines.

We are a defacto American protectorate; before that we were a British protectorate. But America’s power is eroding in the world; America, both economically and militarily, is in contraction mode. So how will Canada respond?

The Japanese are rearming against China.

India is arming.

Iran is going for nukes; Saudi Arabia is nervous. There are security competitions brewing in all hot spots. We have Russians planting flags in our arctic today. Simply put, it is a different world now. The free ride is over for Canadian taxpayers when it comes to defense. One of my favorite professors of international relations, John Mersheimer, at the University of Chicago, points out that a multi-polar world is infinitely more dangerous than what was the bi-polar world of the Cold war.

Admiral McFadden, genial, tough, a Canadian patriarch if ever there was one, articulated his vision of a more open debate about defense in our society, and the role of the media. The truest measure of his soldiering was the honest revelation that Rear Admiral Mcfadden would rather have you vote for the Green Party than none at all; he is not afraid of the process. He is prepared to die for it.

However misguided or undermining civilian policies may sometimes appear, past or present, the Admiral is humble, ultimately, and acquiesces to public discourse and democratic process. Civilian control, no matter how hair-pulling, is what our society is about.

Think about what those poor U.S. Generals had to endure under Sec. Defense Rumsfeld. Finally, the Joint Chiefs told him to go to hell – and let the President know.

While this country does not have the same acrimony over civilian oversight (Powell and the rest were/are always more reluctant to send the boys in to harm’s way than their civilian overlords), we sometimes come close through emotional abandonment.

Dr. Michael Lennox is an affable intellectual that approaches life with an absorbed, and absorbing, intensity. For Michael Lennox it is always about consciousness and the journey of discovery. He is both kind and sharing and doesn’t bullshit you. He was on the air with me today from Los Angeles.

What does he do? He is a dream analyst. Sound weird to you? Think again.

Most people approach life with a low level of self examination. Only during apparent crisis do most people stop and question how they think, why they feel the way they do, and how they talk to themselves. You see, there is always something locked away that hurts us or drives us crazy. Yes there are those of us who are more emotionally dead and just don’t feel much, sometimes that is a defense, and sometimes it is just a plain lack of emotional range. But most people want to know, how do I really feel about this or that? Of what am I really afraid?

Northrop Frye, the great Canuck who developed the genre of literary criticism with his ground breaking academic work, The Anatomy of Criticism, was a great thinker. Frye viewed the world through broad based conceptual patterns that encompassed archetypes and codes: cultural and spiritual and imaginative shorthand from The Bible to William Blake. That is what archetypes and symbols are: a distillation of a thing or an idea in shorthand; but archetypes and codes just don’t represent things, they imbue them with more meaning, like the shorthand of poetry; an archetype is also an inherited idea that lies within the unconscious self.

Psychologist Carl Jung believed that we are all related in a collective unconscious. We all dream the same things in the same way: the sensation of falling for example. As a human species, we are all related in terms of our thoughts and experiences and the way we emotionally respond and process them.

As a dream analyst, Michael Lennox knows this. He also has great intuition. He is one of those givers who can drill down to talk to you about intimate stuff with understanding and a lack of condemnation, not a lack of judgment. We can judge, just not condemn.

The phone lines were flooded and he took each call and analyzed the things/event/symbols in the dreams and let each of them know what was going on in their head. The callers responded with openness and a sense of wonder at the simplicity of our complexities and the overarching fear of loveless ness and goal of love.

Dr. Lennox causes me to believe that there is magic of some kind; unknown forces; something sublime; the soul.