Luminescence in the Night

Conditional Freedom: Giving up womanhood for motherhood.

2010-03-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

This is a paper that I wrote for school, I've removed most of the citations, because they're a little disruptive for a blog post.

I feel that Western Society constructs motherhood in a way that controls women, and most recently (with the rise of woman's rights movements) we can see how far we've come and how far we have yet to go. When I look at the rights of mothers I see a startling lack, where we can do almost anything we want before we are engaging within motherhood, we are bound on a very short leash as mothers.

There is this idea that giving mothers rights is taking rights away from children, or from fathers. As if human rights and dignity are something that are finite, that only some segments of society can have.

We will never have more rights than we did when we were gestating, for when else will another human being be subjugated, willingly or not for our benefit?

“The men wear white coats, like those worn by doctors or scientists. Doctors and scientists aren't the only ones, there are others, but they must have had a run on them this morning. Each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed: a drawing of a human foetus. They were doctors, then, in the time before, when such things were legal.” Margaret Atwood.

There should be a disclaimer on the cover of Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' for feminist readers advising them to read at their own caution. It brings me to a place where I fear to be inside myself, one of desperation and a constant nagging anxiety, reminding me that there are people out there who have no care for my desires, dreams and goals. To them I can do little for the world save bring a part of its future generations into being. Even now they are there, lingering in my peripheries, I have never seen one face to face, but I know they exist. I see their shadows in legislation, in public attitudes, and on television in the news—especially in programs from the United States. For me, they loom off in the distance, waiting for the perfect moment to snatch who I am away from me, to give me something else in return and tell me I'm not adequate if I don't want it.

I fear pregnancy more than I fear most things, despite the relative ease with which it can be dispatched. I say relative meaning only to describe the availability of the procedure now compared with times past and not the emotional trauma attached to it. No slippery elm bark remedies lie in wait for women in need among the back alleys of our cities now, there are no hospital wards full of women suffering the complications of a home spun abortionist. With our safety assured, we have the mental freedom to consider the other, more emotional aspects of the decision. For most, and for myself, ease is the last adjective to describe the procedure, but strictly regarding the availability, it is easy to get an abortion now. There is a level of indecision that plagues my life with regard to my fallopian tubes and in part I can blame the service of abortion itself (though I fall on my knees and thank it graciously at the same time) for in this I have a Choice. The freedom to choose the terms on which I participate in a process I believe to be constructed to remove my person-hood, to take that road when I have all the resources at my disposal to navigate it in my way, at no one's mercy but my own, is the only reason I hold onto my ability to procreate at all. I look south of the border, to the United States and see my fears confirmed in many ways; I look to our government and see our laws change, mutate and become more like theirs. I see accounting loopholes for big businesses and I see our consensual crimes punished ever more harshly. I see and I wonder when I and my gender are next. This all being contextual, I must explain why I feel my fears are founded, why I fear losing rights, losing my ability to display myself as my whole self rather than only as a mother.

My mother spent a good deal of money and time getting her real estate agent's certification before I was conceived. The day that I was born was the day that another agent made a high priced sale that she had put weeks of work into, they got the commission. I cost my mother more than just stress, pain, and her job, I cost her a lot of money as well. Of course my mother would never tell me this meaning to cause me any angst or guilt, but I have seen her life all my life, and I feel her life would have been considerably better if she had taken an abortion rather than carrying me to term. My mother, after having me, did work, but not as a real estate agent and intermittently at that. She had a long slog of low paying jobs that she was repeatedly fired from due to inconsistent baby sitters, illness in me, and because of the cost of child care was more than it was worth to work a job she hated. After childcare, my mother was taking home very little if anything for her work. Eventually she stopped working. I learned almost all the concepts in my first year sociology class as 'common sense' from my brilliant, creative, artistic mother. When she did return to work she did various jobs, working in a plant nursery paid by the plant she was transplanting, working as an inventory clerk, as a traffic worker for road crews, in a pizza place as a driver first, then a cook... and eventually with my father as a janitor running their own business.

I saw my mother neglect her needs in every way for her family. She didn't take medication for high blood pressure for years because under BC's Fair PharmaCare program, we could not afford the cost of the prescriptions to get past the arbitrary cap set by the government for what we could pay as a family before they would cover our prescriptions. When I was diagnosed with a hyperactive thyroid, we paid for those prescriptions and after the costs of my prescriptions took care of that annual family maximum, my mother would fill her own prescriptions. Eventually my mother's health demanded that she take care of herself and we found the money for her prescriptions the same way we found the money for mine. I watched my mother participate in, be harmed by, and deal with our culture's construction of motherhood my whole life. She took every blow that life gave her as simply the way that life was. That is because my mother is just that way, her approach to life is relentless. It is also an effective tool for avoiding the pitfalls of depression, which plagues many mothers and certainly plagues me.

I view motherhood as a total institution. In Sociology there is a term which describes a total institution as a “type of all-encompassing organization” which “strip[s its participants] of personal identity”. In the narrower definition discussed in the text, the author refers to “asylums, prisons, monasteries,” and “boot camps” and other such physical confinements. Our society, acting as the organization, puts those who are mothers and those who are soon to be mothers under such a total institution in which they are controlled and “made to conform to various forms of stigmatization as mandated by the organization,” mothers, potential or already established are corralled into these forms of control on their “dress, behaviour, communication and types of recognition afforded to [participants].” .

For this analysis I interviewed my mother-in-law, who is an FASD key worker employed by the BC government. I also interviewed a close friend who gave birth to her second child recently.

Q: When you've been pregnant, did complete strangers ever think to lecture you on what was 'healthy' for your baby? If so, how often? Were they ever completely wrong?
A: I didn't actually have complete strangers give me lectures, just dirty looks. With my first pregnancy I was a (just turned) 19 year old skater-punk with fire engine red hair. I found people gave more advice after my children were born, and usually outdated, unhealthy advice at that.

For her first pregnancy, my friend was exhibiting clear violation of some of our society's prescriptive norms relating to motherhood, though at least to look at her from the distance that allows you the advantage of an uncontested dirty look, she fit nicely into the role of an irresponsible woman, and in that sense pregnancy could be viewed as a punishment, something that she had 'gotten herself into'. The community that she lived in was engaging in a negative interaction ritual, in which disapproval is heaped upon the subject who is judged by her master status as a pregnant woman in contradiction with other statuses that may be expressed by the individual: skater-punk, teenager, individualistic. Not all women who are pregnant suffer through these negative interactions, just those that display a contradiction with the terms we generally associate with 'good mothers' and those that could be viewed as vulnerable.
Person-hood is connected heavily with personal space. Our society is one where we don't stand too close together, we don't talk in elevators, but one in which almost any person feels the freedom to place their hand on the belly of a heavily pregnant woman, often without asking. She relates: “With my first pregnancy everybody touched my belly it seemed. My personal space was next to non-existent.” Throughout high school, my best friend was approached multiple times by strangers who wanted to know when her baby was due. She has never been pregnant, but the nature of her body shape gives the impression that she could be. There are three vivid memories for me of being present when an excited stranger started up a conversation with my friend, who has always looked slightly older than she is, and has a definite air of responsibility about her (the reason I presume that there are many young mothers who do not suffer the negative opinions of others). In this, she was both controlled in regard to her weight, for she was forced to tell complete strangers that she was not pregnant, just overweight in an embarrassing and damaging ritual for her, and invaded in regards to her personal space as older women moved into her bubble time and time again. The master status of motherhood removes a woman's ability to present herself the way she wishes to be presented. Impression management is denied to women who may or may not be pregnant because they are unable to present themselves as anything other than a mother or potential mother.

Pregnant women are often treated as if the only thing they are concerned about is their pregnancy, mothers are often treated as if they only things they have to talk about are their children. The moment a woman is visibly pregnant, she is no longer a student, daughter, sister or person of her own, she is a mother or a mother-in-waiting for the total institution of our society's construct placed upon breeding women.

Women are controlled harshly by the communities they live within while pregnant, the community they live in enforces the expectations set upon mothers and mothers-to-be. They are expected to perform, undergo, and subject themselves to anything and everything that a doctor prescribes in the all encompassing quest to reduce the risk of miscarriage and damage to the foetus. This is an admirable cause. With modern medicine at our disposal, we should be preventing as much damage as we can in wanted pregnancies and dispatching those that are not wanted in the safest ways possible as well. However, our procedures have become more invasive with less benefit. Amniocentesis, an amniotic fluid test, can diagnose certain problems a foetus may have early on in pregnancy, but can also cause a pregnancy to spontaneously abort, which could be devastating to some women. Our expected behaviour becomes more constricting with less support. In her 25th week of pregnancy, March 2009, a Florida resident named Samantha Burton was subject to a hospital attempting to confine her to bed rest for the rest of her pregnancy, “When Burton refused to stay, the hospital called the state, which appointed the hospital lawyer to prosecute the case and got an order from the Leon County Court.” It seems easy to paint her into the role of a selfish mother refusing a recommended treatment, and certainly there are those attempting to do just that, but Burton was objecting to being kept away from her two other children until she came to term, three months in the foreseeable future for her, alone in a hospital against her will. Either due to the stress of confinement or because her pregnancy simply wasn't meant to be for her, “Burton miscarried three days later and was discharged.”

There is an extremely grey area regarding recommended medical procedures regarding pregnancy. At what point is an intended procedure too invasive, too controlling, too much to bear? Even asking the question forces other questions like “what wouldn't you do for your child, or another human being then?” and makes me feel like a bad person for thinking about it. And yet, I am a person who submits herself to a round of pokings regularly to give blood, would donate bone marrow to anyone I was a match to and do/would do those things over and over again with pleasure. I am also a person that cannot conceive of a world where I would be forced to do those things, and though there might be some, I believe that the overwhelming majority of people in our society would never endorse forcing anyone to undergo an invasion of any kind for another person. We can exhibit distaste for their refusal, and we can swear that we would behave differently, but most of us would never advocate the use of force or coercion.
Illustrative of this is the case of McFall V. Shrimp (1979), in which “Shrimp's bodily integrity was legally protected to the extent that he was permitted to refuse a procedure (a bone marrow extraction and donation) that could have prevented his cousin's otherwise certain death from aplastic anemia”. Quibbles about the status of living or not in regard to a foetus are irrelevant when court precedent states firmly that established persons are not worth invading someone's bodily integrity, even to save their life. We can encourage someone to give marrow, blood, or submit themselves to bed rest, and we can submit them to scorn and negative sanctions in communal dealings, but we should not be able to force them legally to do these things.

However “a woman whom no court in the country would force to undergo a blood transfusion for a dying relative [has] come to be legally regarded, when pregnant, as a mere life-support system for a fetus.” Women now have more rights and advantages than they did thirty years ago, and thirty years ago they had more rights and advantages than they did sixty years ago. But I view it as a conditional freedom that distracts us from the expectation that we will give this freedom up at some point.

Women who chose not to breed are often pathologized. I have been asked if I “can't” have children when I say I don't want them. The query into the productivity of my reproductive organs comes with a hesitant, apologetic tone, as if I am fragile about the subject. The other assumption that comes after I explain that I simply don't want to engage in motherhood is a blithe assurance that I will change my mind. As I grow older I expect to hear protestations about what my partner wants from our marriage, statements about not knowing what I'm missing, and eventually I do expect to be called 'selfish' if I indeed do not change my mind about not wanting children. If I do change my mind, I can expect other things including being urged to quit whatever career I have worked to have for 5+ years in University and spent thousands of dollars to get a chance at pursuing. If my partner chooses to take paternity leave and become a stay at home father, I can expect to have him held up and glorified for his work in the home, and realistically to still do a fair degree of the housework, because I already have strong feelings of unworthiness for not doing all the housework as it is. With a supportive, feminist partner who does some housework already, I still feel this push towards housewifery. This feeling doesn't come from him, it may have come from my mother, who felt a great deal of stress about the state of her home in the eyes of others, but I believe it comes from the world at large. In situations where the cleanliness of my home has come into question, sadly a frequent question from potential landlords, the question has always been posed to me. If there was a problem with the housework, as with a nosey landlord from in-suite living past, it was not my partner, or even our messy male room mate who was asked about the dishes, the crumbs on the counter or the mess in the fridge. It was always me. The female.

Disregarding the sometimes staunch opposition they often face, or extra work it takes, women can attend university, move into fields we never have before, and we are taken care of by a medical field that no longer believes our uterus will shrivel to a husk if the blood it requires is used by our brains also. Regardless of all of this, mothers, starting with pregnancy, are urged not to work, and sometimes denied work they might need. They are urged to wait to attend school, or if they choose to attend school they must manage to keep up with all their motherly duties while being shamed for putting their children in the care of others, though I would point out quietly that this is more accepted than working during motherhood from all points I can see. I believe that this is more accepted because of the value our society places upon upward mobility. We value striving for things that are 'better' and a mother attending university can escape some of the backlash because she is attempting to better both her own situation and the situation of her child. It strikes me as extreme hypocrisy that a mother can be shamed for wanting to work (especially if she enjoys her work), with the idea of maternal deprivation or other lingering remnants that remain from the time of Dr. Spock and the rise of child development writers.
While women are no longer diagnosed with hysteria and prescribed strict bed-rest, avoiding taxing distractions and mental activity, a pregnant woman can be confined to a hospital bed.

While it is not permissible legally for our restaurants to cut women off alcohol for any reason, “in 1990, a Wyoming woman was charged by police with the crime of drinking while pregnant and prosecuted for felony child abuse.” Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is a bastion of informal control laid upon pregnant women, with many valid reasons. FASD is a disorder that affects children in many ways and we don't know if there is a safe level of alcohol to drink during pregnancy, there is no ethical way to run tests to find out. The safest assumption (and general scientific consensus) is none. It is not in the existence of the disorder, any lack of education about FASD, or any glut of education about FASD; rather, the essence of control in this issue hinges upon the way our society internalizes this issue, the way that we educate about it. There are legions of dedicated, educated people that are attempting to educate properly about FASD in a way that stresses positive encouragement rather than negative sanctions.

Sadly women are seen as those who have sole responsibility to simply avoid alcohol, regardless of what their social lives were like before, and certainly friends, husbands and other family members are not encouraged to give up drinking even only while a pregnant woman is around. Being the only sober person at a party is isolating, lonely and often embarrassing. There would be more benefit from focusing our education on everyone's responsibility in creating an environment where a woman can easily enjoy herself without alcohol, rather than simply expecting her to take yet another isolating blow to her personhood for the sake of her child. Those workers trained for FASD education know this.

“Q: Where does the father and social groups fit in all of this? Are they often targeted by education campaigns as well?
A: Fathers are targeted more now than they used to be – It is becoming more broadly recognized that this is not just a ‘women’s problem’. We have a long way to go still. We have always known that men can help and support women while they are pregnant to cut down or abstain and have a healthier pregnancy. It is helpful to have the more recent research results that, although a father cannot give a child FASD, drinking affects the sperm and thus the unborn child and his/her genetics. When this knowledge becomes more substantiated and wide spread it should help to ‘share’ the responsibility.”

For all the advances in FASD education, “the stigma attached to alcoholism and alcohol consumption during pregnancy may prevent the disclosures needed for confirmation of maternal drinking.” This is a devastating blow to diagnosis “because FASD describes a spectrum of organic brain differences and physical challenges ... that can easily overlap with characteristics from other spectrums (ie. Autism Spectrum Disorder, Neo-natal abstinence syndrome, etc.)” and “Some of the characteristics of FASD look very like other mental health, metabolic, or neurological conditions (ie. Attention Deficit Disorder, Thyroid problems etc.)” Without a confirmation (confession) of maternal drinking during pregnancy, misdiagnoses can happen with startling regularity.

No one wants to admit to drinking while pregnant if they can avoid it, and there are some women who are better equipped to deny the charge than others. Canada's native populations are represented extremely well by diagnoses of FASD, and though this can be good, as FASD diagnoses can result in beneficial environmental modifications, such as working around a disability in school or at home, or can increase an allocation of funding towards families and schools. However,

“It is common to assume that FASD is associated somehow with ethno-cultural background or socio-economic circumstances (ie. More FASD statistics have been gathered in small aboriginal populations, some populations are more visible in their consumption of alcohol, etc.) In reality FASD is no more or less prevalent in any culture or economic status. - Maternal nutrition, stress levels, lifestyle, access to pre-natal and post-natal care etc. can have an impact on susceptibility of the fetus.”

The reality of racism in FASD diagnoses is that in areas where there is a large aboriginal population, can result in an over representation of aboriginal children among those diagnosed with FASD, about “One out of every hundred babies in North America.” The flip side of an over representation of aboriginal children within FASD diagnosis is an under representation of other children, who can be diagnosed very easily with other spectrum disorders such as ADD, ADHD, and Autism. “FASD is the only ‘diagnosis’ ... that describes the cause – Alcohol. Because of this it can generate finger-pointing and shame for birth families and their children who live with FASD.”

Misdiagnoses are not helpful to children that might need specific help for their disorder. Painting FASD as an 'aboriginal problem' isn't helpful for either the aboriginal community or anyone who is trying to work making our society better for those who have FASD and to educate to prevent more cases of FASD.

I view the way our society engages with FASD to be the culmination of our control on women even to the detriment of individuals within the society. We, as a collective society, disregarding for a moment those who are educated specifically in the issue, do not approach this issue in a manner that seeks to actually help in preventing the problem, we approach it in a way that isolates and blames women as the sole provocateurs of the disorder. A woman who drinks while pregnant is demonized and sometimes penalized, but our society takes no action to rearrange itself to make avoiding alcohol during pregnancy not only expected, but easy.
We have freedom until we don't, and then we are bound by a rigid construction that is placed upon us whereby we are expected to give up everything and never complain or wish for more, and if we do wish for something more we are demoralized as 'bad mothers' even if that label surfaces only from within as self shame and blame constrain us. Our society doesn't change when we become pregnant, it goes on the way it always has, except it seems as if we move backward in time towards a place we thought that we were free from. We become women from decades past and we can't even burn our padded breastfeeding specific bras, for any cry for rights of the mother is seen as taking rights away from the child. Any cry against the way we construct motherhood is seen as a cry against motherhood itself and firmly shut down. It is a problem both intricate and delicate and it influences every aspect of life. As children we are born of unequal citizens, the domination of our mothers is our first memory, whether we know it or not.

Bus Mesage #2

2010-03-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

Written on scrap paper torn from my grocery bag in pink marker:

Kitty says: Tomorrow will be better than today. (also a quick drawing of a cat)

Today's Bus Message #1

2010-03-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

I like to write/draw in the dust on my city transit buses, so far it always seems like everyone else likes it too, so I grow bolder. I write backwards now so that the writing can be seen from the inside of the bus.

Today's Bus Message:
3000 reps a day, 7 days a week. Telling us Ending is Better than Mending.

I feel we live in a consumer culture, and having just read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World it horrifies me. I wanted to make it a veritable bus essay but I didn't have time. I don't really like it when the bus drivers catch me red handed. : P

Statement of Intent

2010-03-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

I suppose that I should speak a little bit about what I intend this blog to be. I am not just about one thing. I am about many things, feminism, pro-choice, racial rights, gay and lesbian rights, bisexual rights, transgendered rights, cis-gendered rights, environmentalism, and really a whole host of issues that touch me and make me burn inside.

So, perhaps don't really look for a theme, but do enjoy if you find something that pleases you.

What is a Freedom Fighter?

2010-03-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

This is an article I had posted in my school's news paper recently. There never was any response to it, but I never really cared about getting responses. This is something that is fairly important to me. It was a while ago, before Bill C-15 was passed. It upsets me, but I tried. I phoned and argued with my representatives but it didn't work. The only thing that I can do is say that I tried to the best of my ability.

We who partake in pot are not all cut of the same cloth, growing pot doesn't mean you have a gun in your cabinet, it doesn't mean that you even smoke it. You might be a little old lady with a green thumb trying to pay her mortgage. They're not people going to elementary schools trying to get your kids hooked on pot, they have their clientele already. They don't want shady skeevy people around any more than you (the theoretical reader who may or may not partake in pot) do. We're people down here in the underclass, the lumpenproletariat.

Where do we draw the line between civil disobedience and reckless law breaking. Really, it's a personal line that we find within ourselves, it's what we're comfortable with. To some people, being arrested, dragged out of Clayoquot sound for protesting to try to stop logging is a heroic price well paid, others (possibly those on the other side of the argument there) may not view those protesters so charitably.

What do you do when something that you believe in, that doesn't bring others harm is illegal? Let's bring clarity to this last question. Say you're not allowed to assemble to learn things in a public place lest you be arrested due to the prohibition of idea trafficking. What about banned books? If my favourite political books were banned, I would seek them out even if it took me into dangerous situations that might get me arrested. What would you do if your freedoms were being curtailed? Where do you draw the line at the acceptable amount of ham-handed government interference in the personal rights of others to make their own choices? When does the harm caused by government interference on your behalf exceed the harm you can cause yourself?

To me, being jailed for 6-9 months because I'm growing a pot plant is so much more harm than I could ever do myself by smoking it. Being forced to seek out my pot from a professional drug dealer in a needle ridden back alley, where I cannot be sure of the herbicides/pesticides that may have been sprayed on the drug my lifestyle includes, where my dealer might want me to try something else they're pushing- this is so much more damage than I am willing to stand for. If the people who produce for themselves and sell surplus are chased out of the drug trade, who does that leave to reap the benefits of this widened market?

The choices we make are being interfered with in strange ways. Bill C-15 attacks people who are producing drugs by making prison sentences of a minimum length of time (that vary depending on the drug produced), and making those sentences mandatory. Though there are many reasons that mandatory minimum sentencing is wrong, each deserves its own lengthy article about the damages it might bring.

Specifically, the hand the government is interjecting into my life and the lives of others offends my idea of civil liberties. Bill C-15's attack on pot producers takes the stance that it is permissible to use drugs, but to produce them for yourself is wrong, the reason that I see it this way is because having just one pot plant will land you in jail for 6 months if caught, the length of time you spend in jail extends if you grow pot in a home you do not own, and extends further if you have children. The law penalizes you for not making enough money in your illegal endeavours to own a home. If caught growing pot in a home you own, it will save you two months in jail, while your home will be seized and sold with the proceeds going to further fund the War on Drugs. If you have children that can be damaged by your drug producing ways, you can expect to be separated from your children for an additional three months. Your children will either be with a family member, or if one is not available to take them, the will be thrown into the already overtaxed child services system.

Punishments in our legal system are meant to have some semblance of fit to the crime that has been committed, and in the case of marijuana, the fit has grown so far out of whack that the people who, if given amnesty, would clean up the drug trade are the ones being demonized and persecuted. You cannot stop drug dealers, they will always be there. The only thing that laws can do is make environments in which favour certain kinds of drug dealers. When non-violent, non-proselytizing and above all else, safe dealers are encouraged, drug use becomes safer and the effects of the drug trade become positive. Little old ladies can grow pot and sell it to fund their home improvements, bringing money to their local economy, families can have extra money for Christmas, and no one has to go to a place they don't feel comfortable and consort with people that make them feel unsafe.

Bill C-15 doesn't do this. Bill C-15 takes away our individuality, it makes every person who grows pot into a drug mongering lowlife who would give your children ecstasy and call it candy. It generalizes harm, and views each person who produces drugs under this hyperactive view of wrong being done when it's just not that way. One of these things is not like the others, and it's certainly not the same. The people that will stop producing drugs first are the ones that are hurt most by this Bill, they are the ones that cause the least harm and have the potential to do much good. People who grow pot are vastly in the minority to people who use pot, and they cannot speak up for themselves and say what they can do for their community. And when the good people cannot exist within the drug trade, the drug trade (which will never stop) becomes more dangerous for everyone, users, producers, and law enforcement officers.

Bill C-15 capitalizes on the forced silence of good people within the dug trade and labels them as something they are not. It takes away our ability to change our environment by taking our choice away, it attempts to curtail drug use by cutting the source, but you can't cut this source. You can only change it. If producing drugs becomes too dangerous in Canada and the United States, import will rise. The money that circulates in BC will stop circulating because the small producers won't have that money to spend anymore, grocery stores won't see it, home improvement stores won't see it, it certainly won't make it's way to schools and communities. The money spent on marijuana in BC will leave, and where will we be then?

The people who will suffer because of this Bill are not just the people that will be prosecuted and suffer the damages from legal interference in their lives on their behalf. The people that will suffer because of this bill are the people who will have to make the choice to risk their freedom for their way of life. Its more than just pot. Its security, its having the ability to provide for yourself and for your friends with the surplus. To make some money on the side and be sure that the people you care about don't have to put themselves in dangerous situations or get ripped off. Its the difference between being forced to take an extra job; beyond the one you have already, to feed your family and be unable to be there for your children before or after school. Its the difference between that and being able to provide for your family another way, being able to take pride in your product. Its the difference between having the extra cash to pay for a school trip and not being able to give that experience to your child. Its the difference between paying your mortgage off in thirty-five years or twenty. Its not just pot.

Martin Luther King, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, wrote “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” Bill C-15 degrades us, all of us. From the recreational drug user that thinks they can slide by without paying attention to this law because it doesn't affect them, to the pot grower that wants to stand up and fight this but fears drawing attention to themselves, to the drug free tax payer who's hard earned money funds the prison system that will see the influx of thousands of people innocent of harming others, but guilty in the law regardless.

I cannot stand by and watch this happen without at least speaking. The people that grow pot and the reasons they do it are diverse and plentiful, and they cannot stand up for themselves to let the world know that they aren't evil, because if they did, it would not change how they are treated, it would cost them their freedom. And so they stand silent. You can't just say “I'm a contributing member of the PTA and I also spend harvest season trimming bud with my family.” because after you said that if you weren't arrested, you certainly wouldn't be a member of the PTA anymore at the very least.

How many people over the centuries have been forced to stand silent for fear of losing their jobs, homes or children? How many groups have been marginalized legally because they must keep parts of themselves secret? And how long will it be before we recognize persecution instantly for what it is when it infiltrates our legal system? How familiar must we be with taking the rights of human beings before we open our eyes?

Having the freedom to make our choices and being able to seek our lifestyle in a safe, respectable manner is my fight, I should hope that I can command your respect even though I like to smoke a joint and take pictures of falling leaves every once in a while. I'm more than a drug user, I'm a person.