Channelling Snowdrops

A note to readers

Dear Readers,

The snow is falling outside my office window, gathering around the tulips, day lilies, and garlic—all now emerging from a very cold winter. Then there is the flock of gold finches—there must be at least 50 of them—dropping like leaves from the tangled forsythia in search of the black oil sunflower seeds buried in the wet mess. The snow drops—or Galanthus, from the ancient Greek words for milk flower—are drooping but undeterred.

Amid this snowy spectacle, I have started and stopped this note several times. I had set out today to work on, and maybe even have a rough draft of, the last part in the series about Rosalie Bertell, but to no avail. I’m instead compelled to write this more personal note. It’s not really like me to divulge my inner world to the reader, having spent more than two decades being exacting with fact and detail and accuracy. It has turned me into a bit of an obsessive compulsive — not wanting to leave anything out and not wanting to get anything wrong. So, writing from the heart feels on the one hand self-indulgent, and on the other, a bit dangerous even. It’s also very hard to accurately explain these feelings—roilings might be a better word—but I will try.

An experience I’ve been having for several years now is a sense of disorientation. I didn’t, and still don’t, feel that my own core beliefs, principles, or views are all that different from what they’ve always been. Economic justice, protecting our life support systems, the rule of law, civil liberties including our constitutional rights and freedoms—these have always been important to me, and still are.

But around me, things have been shifting, sometimes in unrecognizable ways.

Author and activist, Arundhati Roy puts it in a way that really resonates for me: “It seems like you're trying to find your way out of a forest, but the trees are also walking around, and the mango trees have jackfruit on them and the banana trees are growing pineapples and the coconut trees are growing mangoes, and so there are no coordinates.”

Snowdrops. Photo: Linda Pannozzo

Roy is right — the external coordinates are shifting— but maybe this is telling us something. Maybe this is telling us that we need to shift our focus inward, to remember what’s important, what’s worth putting our energy into, what’s worth saving.

Over the last two decades we’ve seen governments suspend the rule of law, or constitutional rights and freedoms in response to a perceived crisis. A “state of exception,” was invoked for 9/11 and the same happened for the pandemic. I feel it’s happening again now as we teeter on the brink of a third world war.

Things seem very dark, indeed. The erosion, disintegration even, of all these hard-won rights and freedoms, coupled with the growing inequality in society and the polarization, all point to very worrying possibilities. The fissures are everywhere — in families, friendships, communities— exacerbated by toxic social media platforms, as well as governments that seem to be more for divisiveness than against it. With this kind of reinforcement, the fissures are only likely to get more entrenched.

We need to stop and take stock.

Once we lose the true safety and security of our social bonds, we are very vulnerable to external control. We have to resist this. If history can teach us anything it’s that fear, anger, and the promise of security can make us do terrible things to eachother— scapegoating is one of them. What we were goaded into doing to each other during the pandemic, under the guise of safety, proves this.

In his book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening, Rene Girard explains that the practice of scapegoating satisfies “the appetite for violence that awakens in people when anger seizes them and when the true object of their anger is untouchable.”

I’m not going to go into specifics here — my written record since 2020 details much of the irrationality that took hold, and the “collateral” damage that resulted from the public health response. But I will remind readers of two policies that jump out at me as being particularly egregious. First were the vaccine mandates. They were never scientifically justified but resulted in the scapegoating of a segment of the population and the unnecessary breakdown of families and friendships. Second, the policy that it was necessary to let people die alone will always defy both moral and scientific scrutiny.

At some point there needs to be a reckoning and I hope, a reconciliation.

But before that can happen I think there also has to be a realization.

Division must be seen for what it is: a delusion. We are all interconnected, and safeguarding what were always fragile achievements—democracy, the rule of law, and our rights and freedoms—will require a collective effort.

Meanwhile, amid all the turmoil we’re witnessing in the world and the deep sadness I’m feeling, Galanthus is whispering the message that beauty and resilience are still possible amid harsh conditions.

We just need to stay rooted and reach for the light.

[Part 7 of the Rosalie Bertell series will hopefully be ready to post by late next week.]