What Happened to Treeplanting

It occurs to me that I should perhaps say a little of why I am back in London in late May, rather than August, and what happened to tree planting in North Ontario for the summer, and even why I have been spending my days at the college, for people who might read this blog who don't hear from me in other ways, and would otherwise not know.

To put it shortly, I did go to work for Treeline. I lived and worked just under three weeks in the bush camp and nearby blocks, learning how to plant trees, and doing it. After those three weeks, I still wasn't making more than $28 on most days, and I had to pay camp costs of $25 per day. I was making enough for that, reliably, but not enough to make a significant actual profit.

And I might have stayed anyway, and not minded, because $3 per day is still profit, and I was paying my "rent" and food, and the work was definitely doing some good for my fitness, and the community and the experience were challenging in a way that I knew was doing me good in other ways.

Then someone told me that soon, the camp leader would be asking the foremen to talk to their planters who were still only making $28 on some days and try to push them up to making more quickly, within the coming week or so, or encourage them to leave. It seems there would be some questionable legality to hiring someone who is only making $3 a day to take home. It might have caused trouble with slave labour laws. That made me feel unwelcome. I also didn't think I'd be able to bump my production up enough within a week, but the main thing was that it made me feel unwelcome, like the friendly acceptance I'd been greeted with and shown without fail was conditional, and that made every hardship seem suddenly much, much less worth enduring gracefully. Suddenly, the wonderful thing that gave me the strength to be okay with so many bad things was broken and crippled.

For the next day and a half of work, the only pleasant thought I could hold in my mind was quitting. So I quit. Then I came home.

The coffee shop whose wifi I am using will close soon, so I might write the rest of this tomorrow.

Less Boring

You know...
Let's give this a second, shall we?

You know, yesterday, I saw a bible thumper's recruitment card, and a plastic coin with a bible quote on it, and a pamphlet, all tucked into street posts and such things on my way in to school, and I tore the card in half, and collected the coin and the the pamphlet and put them in the garbage and the recycling bin, respectively. I had read the first side of the card, and half of the second side, and both sides of the coin because the writing was so short it would be hard not to, and the first few pages of the pamphlet, just to give whoever had written it a chance. I don't think I need to say anything about what was written on them, because there was nothing the least bit surprising about any of it, if you have seen such items before.

And I found myself thinking, I admit rather bitterly, that maybe if for once they said something simple instead of trying to play really insultingly obvious manipulative games by trying to dangle mysterious wisdom at you, maybe if they just said, "At 123 Somewhere St, at 6-9 PM on May 29th, we are going to talk about God. All comers welcome, any faith or none." Maybe that would be intriguing. Maybe that would be a good way to actually start a conversation about something interesting and complex like God. It would have gotten MY attention.

I think even people who are not very analytical, in my generation, are dead sick of being patronized to by people who think they are older and wiser, or think they are representing something older and wiser.

I find it disappointing that so few people seem to reach the conclusion that in order to actually catch the interest of people in my generation, even the ones who aren't very analytical, the best strategy would be to look at your intended invitation, and try to see it through someone else's eyes, and try to identify anything that sounded the slightest bit like manipulation or patronizing, and remove it. To try to figure out what you actually wanted from people, and then try to figure out how to ask them for it so frankly and honestly that they would at least be surprised, which makes people THINK, and might even believe it was honest.

And then it occurred to me that while that probably was the best way to start a conversation about God or anything similarly divisive, if you used an honest hook to get people in the door, those people would probably only leave if you started trying to preach to them; if the meeting itself didn't match the frank honesty of the invitation. Then you would have only hurt the chances of the next person who tried to catch those same peoples' attention by being so frank and honest it might surprise them. Because then, they would have already seen that trick before.

So maybe it's for the best that people who don't know how not to patronize in predictable, annoying patterns don't know how not to patronize even for long enough to try to get your attention.

Someone on the internet got my attention today. They posted a chest-high text wall of complete and undisguised gobbledygook as a blog comment in a place that already inspired thought, and that was a surprising, interesting thing to do. It hadn't been removed by the owner of the blog, and that was also surprising and interesting. And the username that posted that comment had an embedded link to somewhere else, somewhere where another message was written, that wasn't gobbledygook, and wasn't obviously manipulative.

So I say to this unknown person: I don't trust you, but you have my attention. What would you like to do with it?