If I could draw people – if I could draw anything at all, for that matter – I think I’d create a pair of comic-strip characters who I’d name Ebb and Flo. Modelled both pictorially and editorially after Herman, by the late Jim Unger, Ebb and Flo would editorialize current affairs by imagining the effects of the world on the couple as representatives of the hapless and hopeless among us.
Ebb and Flo would allow me to characterize our world in subtle ways. They’d enable me to explore the murky depths of our 21st-century human condition. Obviously, Flo would be the sensible, stable partner to Ebb’s masculine misadventures.
Take as a sample subject the ironies that sometimes emerges through the urban-rural divide – especially the ways that divide reveals itself through political dynamics. Make no mistake, there is an urban-rural divide, and it gets studied a lot – including by me in another life – and is often referred to as centre-periphery dialectics.[1]
While this realm of study doesn’t have a whole lot to do with my characters, Ebb and Flo, it does have a great deal to do with the ebb and flow of culture. Attitudes, ideas, social mores and education differ between urban and rural sensibilities, and the ways of the world in general.
I’ve long been fascinated by an idea that Western civilization in North America – both urban and rural – tends to emulate the tides. Supposedly, Europeans (and their influences) encroached on the Americas from east to west – though I often wish we would consider the possibility that “civilization” (as we are indoctrinated to call it) actually developed west to east. To that way of thinking, migrant ancients from what we know as the Americas resettled and developed Eurasia. Maybe the ancients we have come to know as indigenous to the Americas were first, people who in their wisdom declined to migrate across the Atlantic, in favour of the natural riches they already enjoyed here, preserving their traditional ways to great satisfaction, advantage and longevity. In that imaginable scenario they were later (re)colonized when their now “civilized” descendants ran out of room and resources and sought to reclaim the motherlands – to reclaim their indigenous inheritance of resources.
If archaeologist Paulette Steeves[2] is right, and indigenous peoples have called this continent home for as long as 120,000 years, is it not possible that civilization as we know it began right here? A human tide that ebbed and flowed. Just a thought.
But that thought is not the topic of this essay but the notion of tidal and human ebb and flow is (the topic).
Accepting the recorded history of North America, we see that the newcomers (Europeans) arrived on the eastern seaboard and as we increasingly (and greedily) sought more room and resources we flowed gradually westward like an incoming human tide.
The first wave or waves populated and exploited the most desirable lands of this frontier according to the mode of transportation available at the time. So, starting at the waters’ edge, each successive human wave accessed and exploited prime lands and locales. They (we) occupied those prime lands and waters to their limits, and migrants pushed a little farther westward. Flow, settle, exploit, repeat.
Each wave increased the wealth of those who were first; they became centres of wealth and power – the front tier of development. Those who followed had no choice but to exploit the next tier, sometimes referred to as the back tier. With each wave, and with each advance and innovation of transportation and communication, successive waves pushed farther and farther westward until barred from further exploitation by the Pacific Ocean.
Now what? The edge of the continent could not stem the continuous flow of westward migration of those who followed from the east. While picturing this flow, consider the western spread of daylight and warmth with the globe’s rotation, as though preceding migrant peoples and prosperity westward.
Continuing with the metaphor of the tides, imagine for a moment what happens when a pan of water sets up a wave motion. When a wave has gone as far as it can go it flows back. So do we humans, which must be very confusing to wildlife that in their state of nature endure encroachment and all the destructive forces that go with it, followed by a period of calm as people get settled, and then … we’re ba-ack!
During the recent (2019-20223) COVID-19 pandemic (or is that panic?) many areas in the east saw a large wave of people return from the west, an influx (maybe that’s re-flux) of people seeking to get out of the path of each wave of illness. (Maybe that’s where the word pathogen comes from.) So, thousands of urbanites wishing to reduce their exposure flowed rurally, from centre to periphery. The efficiencies and wealth found at the centre suddenly became less desirable and the sometimes bucolic peripheral countryside became desirable. People and wealth flowed back like the water in the pan.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, the backflow didn’t last for a lot of the panicked pandemic migrants. Initially caught up in the attraction of calmer waters, a great many urbanites couldn’t anchor, and they drifted back to more familiar (more urban) territory. Accustomed to pace and quantity, like so many others, urban escapees couldn’t handle the peace and quiet. In their wake, like so much flotsam and jetsam, we rural dwellers are left shaking our collective heads in disbelief and wonder. Among the things that have bobbed to the surfaced after the flood is our taxes. Property taxes are pegged to real estate value – perceived value, that is – not to the services those taxes pay for. Inflated demand, inflated prices, inflated taxes. But that’s another day’s rant.
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Instead, I want to focus just on the idea that there is an ebb and flow to a great many things. That doesn’t mean we should favour nihilism – the “what will be will be” or “what goes around comes around” philosophies of life – because each rise and fall is just a little changed. We must consider that. Each arc of even the most balanced of pendulums must decay ever-so-slightly, if imperceptibly.
Have you taken note of recent local vs global rebellions taking place in some popular European tourist sunspots (pun intended)? Fed up with waiting in long lines to pay high prices for local service, small “gangs” of “locals” have taken to disgorging tourists from outdoor cafés and bars by shooting at them with squirt guns![3] (Is it bad that I found this to be rather funny?)
Frustratingly, as much as we know from previous swings of the pendulum – we don’t always heed the fact that “we’ve been here before.”
Take conflict, for example – perhaps as a prime example. With all that history teaches us, how can we not have learned that aggression comes back to bite? Given what we know of multi-generational trauma, how can we not have learned how to avoid war? How can anyone ignore the fact that every bullet fired ricochets – albeit metaphorically – and injures the aggressor?
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At the apex of each swing of the pendulum, the tide turns. History repeats itself. When Franz Kafka was asked about the seeming hopelessness of his vision for the world, he said: “Oh, there is hope, an infinite amount of hope, just not for us.”[4]
It doesn’t do anyone any good to perpetuate conflict. Advance, defend, repeat. We have but a moment, a split second, to alter that course, to set in motion a revised trajectory. In Canada we are learning. Through our actions (and inactions) with respect to Indigenous rights, mental well-being, human health, our changing climate, etc., etc., the pendulum pauses, if only for a moment.
What I really want to get to is the spiralling decay of global relations, the inability of our salaried leaders to cope with the apex of the pendulum of their powers, and therefore engage, like adolescents, in risky behaviour. Beware the pendulum, it swings for thee.
How can the leaders and commanders on all sides of conflict not comprehend that every bullet, every injury, every death comes back to haunt us. I say ‘us’ because in sometimes roundabout ways, all have had a role to play in this. Each time we pull the trigger, each trauma inflicted on another contributes to trauma that will fester and foster retaliation. Even if the immediate cause is long forgotten, the id does not forget. Remember the adage, “the sins of the fathers who hate.”[5]
Every terror-stricken or orphaned child is a ticking timebomb – on all sides. If, as I suggest, every belligerent act is predictably met with defensiveness manifest in aggression, if that is inevitable, should our leaders not be choosing a different path? To my mind, every bullet fired is fired against the gunman and against one’s own. As oft quoted editorial artist Walt Kelly said through his Pogo comic strip, “I have seen the enemy, he is us.”
Masquerading as civilized, cultures will forever be on the defensive, dooming this and future generations to be forever looking over their shoulders, forever suspicious of anyone and everyone. And I repeat, this applies to all the parties. The pendulum tolls “for thee.”[6]
Do aggressors think they can defy the laws of physics by turning back the clock? Like the pendulum, history doesn’t repeat itself precisely. Beware the folly of pretending it does. The circumstances surrounding contemporary conflicts are different, but at least one common outcome is assured: years of trauma that will surface time and time again, causing more death and destruction without end, amen.
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What of my characters, Ebb and Flo? It’s true that they are still in development, I still have to find an artist to take up the cause, but everyone is so darned busy trying to just stay afloat. We just have to wait our turn, we three, and hope that the pendulum keeps on swinging and that the powers that be can catch it at the right moment and give us some hope. Everything flows and nothing abides.”[7]
=30=
[1] The rural-urban divide is sometimes debated as dialectic – a method of determining the interrelationship of ideals in “light of a single principle” (e.g., black and white). By making logical and methodological comparisons we can fairly examine two sides of a story or theory. William, R. 1983. Keywords (Oxford University Press).
[2] Steeves, Paulette, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (University of Nebraska Press/Algoma University, CBC Ideas, January 13, 2022.) Link to story.
[3] “Barcelona anti-tourism protesters fire water pistols at visitors” (CNN Travel July 9, 2024). Link to story.
[4] Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. With a forward by David Cronenberg (WW Norton 2014).
[5] I am not a believer and therefore do not subscribe to the notion that the bible is anything more than literate wisdoms, but Deuteronomy 5:9 reads: “punish the children, the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren for the sins of their fathers who hate.”
[6] “…it tolls for thee” John Donne (1572-1631), English poet. The tolling of church bells, which signified the death of another human life, is a toll for each of us, as we are all bound to the same fates.
[7] Heraclitus, ca. 6th C, BC.
