Greek life parties are one of the main ways in which students at US colleges engage in party culture, with large fraternity house basements providing ample opportunity for drinking below the age of 21. It’s therefore not unreasonable to suggest that Greek life has played a notable role in spreading COVID-19 throughout the pandemic, particularly on college campuses and particularly with the mass return of students to campus in the US. COVID-19 cases on college campuses during the 2020-2021 academic year were largely sourced from the unmasked and not socially distanced gatherings by Greek life members, including events organized and publicized by the Greek Letter Organizations (GLOs). Although – according to a former-McGill Greek life member – the commitment and pressure to be social in this capacity is less applicable to Canadian GLOs, multiple University of British Columbia (UBC) frat parties have violated public health regulations. 

“Just as roads are built for types of vehicles, pathways are built for types of students. The party pathway is provisioned to support the affluent and socially oriented… built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other.”

Such a socially-oriented conception of the “college experience,” according to sociological researchers Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, is exemplative of what they call “the party pathway.” Their book, Paying for the Party, examines how colleges maintain inequality, based on their research of an unnamed university in the Midwestern United States (MU, Midwestern University). They find that the “college experience” is not universal, but socially classed, coining the term “pathway” to describe “when the university structures the interests of a constituency into its organizational edifice.”

Armstrong and Hamilton describe the unnerving centrality of frat parties, mixers, and the expansive calendar of Greek events to be exemplary of the “party pathway.” Many students in this pathway have familial wealth and are able to pay full university tuition without aid. Majors characterized by “a heavy focus on appearance, personality and charm” are provisioned  by the university to enable  the party scene. They allow a student to be relatively successful post-grad, despite spending proportionality more time socializing than studying. Armstrong and Hamilton look at  why a student would prefer the notoriously cockroach-spawned, no-AC, hair-stuck-in-communal-shower-drain party dorm compared to a dormitory with more resources, explaining that these dorms are desirable because they have a reputation for being social hubs, “havens for people with similar backgrounds, interests, and orientations toward college.” Part of the party dorm’s desirability stems from a student’s desire to experience “true college life,” a notion that often correlates with affluence and what they call “the socialite experience” of college. 

The first fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa, was founded in 1776 at William and Mary College, and excluded anyone who was not white, cisgender, and wealthy. PW GLOs grew in popularity in response to increasing university diversity, and thus for the purpose of exclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality. It was not until 2013 that the last sorority formally desegregated. These exclusive GLOs mean that only certain demographics are granted access to the connections provided by a membership, connections in “high places” that are often already provisioned by white generational wealth.  This perpetuates a cycle which guards access to power, from homogenous university-level pledge picking to Supreme Court nominations based on frat-sorority siblinghood nepotism.  

Lawrence Ross, historian and member of the first historically Black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, writes that “Greek organizations resisted class and race diversity. Frats were a way for white upper-class men to separate themselves from an increasingly diverse student population” in his book Blackballed: the Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses. Ross writes of the Divine Nine, nine historically Black GLOs made to socially and academically support Black students, and help them succeed after college through an alumni network. 

However, statistical evidence shows that participation in Greek Life by white and Black students is not reflective of student body demographics in most US and Canadian universities. Such disproportionate participation suggests that PW Greek Life is unwelcoming to BIPOC students, and that the rush process is explicitly or implicitly discriminatory against BIPOC students who rush. Recruitment is subjective, partial, and is supposedly conducted based on personality. But one sorority girl at MU admitted, “sororities have the reputation of selecting on the basis of attractiveness.” A largely homogenous selection of those who are afforded pretty privilege, inextricably linked to white privilege. Brianna (she/they), a member of a sorority at McGill, conversely described that what drew them to their sorority was the chapter’s diversity: “No two people look the same or are from the same place, have the same life experiences, but you can tell that they were all really united in their common values.”

“Greek organizations resisted class and race diversity. Frats were a way for white upper-class men to separate themselves from an increasingly diverse student population.”

BIPOC students within GLOs at Vanderbilt, UPenn, Columbia University, Whitman College, to name a few, have written of their experiences of being tokenized within their respective GLO in university publications. A common thread between their stories is that they are aware of, sometimes explicitly told of, their token status but nonetheless choose to participate, as they believe the benefits of Greek Life ultimately outweigh the institution’s racist history and microaggressions one would experience – benefits such as the professional network it allows one to make. Brianna, while acknowledging “access issues” to membership, namely economic, described sorority involvement to be a “super valuable networking opportunity.” The Abolish Greek Life movement describes Greek life as a “pipeline to power:” 85 per cent of Supreme Court Justices since 1910, 63 per cent of all U.S. presidential cabinet members since 1900, and, historically, 76 per cent of U.S. Senators, 85 per cent of Fortune 500 executives are fraternity men. 

Social GLOs, gendered according to the binary and allowed to exercise gender-based exclusion, are places of gender expression and performance. That is not to say all trans students are barred from or have negative experience in GLOs. Brianna, a non-binary member of a McGill sorority, believes sororities to be spaces of anti-patriarchal gender expression.

“I’m someone who’s lived my life as a woman, and I’m a comfortable femme identifier to a degree. […] I think for lack of better terms, […] we need spaces for women. I do not feel the same way about fraternities. I think those are bad. I think they’re bad because affluent men do not need a space, whereas women and non-men, gender diverse people do need a space.”

Brianna, McGill sorority member

Armstrong and Hamilton describe the frat house and frat party as spaces of toxic and competitive masculinity, measured by excessive drinking and relations with women.  In a 2015 qualitative study titled “Gay and Greek: The Deployment of Gender by Gay Men in Fraternity and Sorority Life,” Anthony Clemons observed that “there are strict rules of hegemonic masculinity embedded in fraternity life where members value heterosexuality” which “leads gay men in fraternities to conceal behavior socially labeled as “gay” and therefore non-masculine.” Homophobia within Greek Life manifests itself through microaggressions, slurs, and compulsory heterosexuality. A 2019 study, based on the assumption that “fraternity culture perpetuates traditional masculinity ideologies,” was inconclusive in its findings about whether the fraternity selected for such men, or whether the members were socialized to perform in a toxic masculine way due to the fraternity environment. 

In an MU article published in 2010, a fraternity member spoke of “the trusty 1-10 system for rating girls.” A rating of a nine, for example,  “will get you mad points out the wazoo […] raise your self-esteem, popularity, and other girls will suddenly find you more attractive.” According to Armstrong and Hamilton, such a rating system is exemplary of “how men and women gain rank in peer cultures: Both derive status via the type of erotic attention that they can attract. The more attractive, desirable, popular they are considered by their opposite-sex peers, the more likely they are to have a power position – and vice versa.” Social capital is derived through how attractive a sorority member is to the male gaze. After all, fraternities hold the parties as there are rules in place barring sororities from keeping alcohol in their houses; “because men were often the party hosts and women the guests, men dictated who got into the party, what their guests wore, and even how much they drank.” Frats’ social power coupled with their atmosphere of rape culture, contributes to the increased likelihood of sexual violence to occur within the frat house. The monopoly that fraternities have on campus party culture, especially in the US, make them an unavoidable place for women who want to engage in larger social or drinking events. 

The first Canadian GLO, Zeta Psi, was founded in 1879 at the University of Toronto and opened a chapter at McGill University in 1883. UBC, with ten fraternities, eight sororities and thousands of students involved, houses the largest Greek system in Canada — numbers that reach nowhere near Greek life participation at US universities. At the University of Alabama, over 10,000 students, 34 per cent of the student body, are part of the Greek life community. There are reasons as to why the Greek life system is a much more prominent part of college life in the U.S as compared to Canada. For one, McGill University and University of Toronto admin do not recognize fraternities and sororities as official campus groups; Queen’s University has had an explicit ban on GLOs since 1993, and UBC students claim that admin keeps them at “arm’s reach.” Alexander Panetta of CTV attributes the higher prevalence of Greek life in the US than in Canada to the higher drinking age and to more students studying away from home: “Ronald Reagan signed into law the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, making it harder for anyone under 21 to score booze in a commercial establishment. It just so happened that campus clubs were sitting on a few billion dollars’ worth of private property, accumulated since the early 19th century – frat houses. These houses have provided a sanctuary for insobriety in a way Canadian kids might not appreciate,” and are able to dominate the social scene.

Internal initiatives within GLOs do exist to address sexual violence and their historically discriminatory practices and outcomes. Brianna spoke on the several systems their sorority has in place to reform issues that have historically been a problem within GLOs: the position of VP inclusivity and accessibility at Greek Week, a Vice President and director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at their chapter that “work on facilitating workshops and opening discussions […] to increase accessibility in Greek Life,” a mental health chair, removing legacies, and the “inter-Greek letter council which is working on combatting sexual violence within sororities and fraternities at McGill specifically,” an informal IRP (Involvement Restriction Policy) and a “list of standards that fraternities and sororities need to abide by, predominantly focusing on sexual violence, and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.” Brianna described McGill chapters with a “soft power” of blacklisting a chapter that has been involved with a violation of these standards. Blacklisting means “not to interact or mix’’ with the violating chapter “until the issue with the member had been resolved.” GLOs “are not recognized by SSMU [or McGill], which means that we cannot get access to the IRP,” Brianna said, “and if something happens to a sorority or fraternity member, whether it be on campus or in a sorority house or in the McGill community, we cannot report it through McGill, so I would like to say that McGill kinda screwed us over in that regard, but we’ve taken matter into our own hands.” This blacklist initiative, after fizzling out, is coming back this year so there has not yet been an “opportunity to implement it” – “we have some of the fraternities,” but “not all of them,” “on board and actively participating in working on this initiative.” 

Those in support of abolition say that reform is not enough. The Abolish Greek Life movement took root in the summer of 2020, championed by former sorority and fraternity members, college students, alumni, and activists who believe that the oppressive, exclusionary, and often violent system of PW Greek Life cannot be reformed, and should instead be banned to create more inclusive and equitable campuses. With branches at 52 US universities, their work largely consists of “uplifting the voices of students harmed and victimized by fraternity and sorority life” through social media, and helping current fraternity and sorority members deactivate from their chapters. Abolition, however, is difficult and perhaps “isn’t possible, at least in the near future, because of the way it’s so ingrained within our school culture and student organizations,” Mississippi chapter member Taylor said, in a 2020 interview with Vox. 

“The Greek system is in the financial interests of a university, and although this is less of the case at McGill or in Canada considering the proportionally lower GLO membership, the vested wealth of GLOs cannot be ignored.”

“Many of these fraternities and sororities have been on campuses for decades, and that’s led them to accumulate a strong alumni network that can be tapped as donors,” said Noah Drezner, a professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University who researches alumni giving, “Greek alumni are disproportionately represented on trustee boards and in administrative positions.” The Greek system is in the financial interests of a university, and although this is less of the case at McGill or in Canada considering the proportionally lower GLO membership, the vested wealth of GLOs cannot be ignored. 

Greek Life has been embedded into pop culture and into a collective conception of the “college experience” – to separate Greek life from the university experience is difficult and another obstacle to abolition.The structure and bureaucracy of Greek Life, a unified front across US and Canadian universities through the North-American Interfraternity Conference and National Panhellenic Conference, make it difficult to dismantle; it is highly structured and hierarchical. However, this should not prevent us from seeking out the ways we can reduce the harms perpetuated by Greek life, whether it be a call for total PW Greek abolition, abolition of PW frats, or further reform efforts.

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Faculty of Law

The U.S. Air Force sends its lawyers to obtain graduate degrees at the L’Institut d’analyse stratégique et d’innovation, where they produce scholarship that advances American strategic objectives with respect to space warfare. Graduates of L’Institute go on to work for various military organizations. In 2008, Boeing established a fellowship program here with a $500,000 gift to the Institute.

– Demilitarize McGill

Leacock Building

The Leacock building is home to many departments, including the political science department. Along with Université de Montréal, the department hosts The Centre for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS), a research institute that according to Demilitarize McGill, is partly funded by the Canadian military. The Leacock building has also been the site of several protests including students against the closure of the Architecture Café, and also against the war in Iraq. Also worth mentioning: Stephen Leacock, the man the building is named after, was a bit of a bigot, to say the least. If you want to know more about Mr. Leacock, check out this week’s Commentary section.

– files from Demilitarize McGill

First Peoples’ House

Despite McGill being founded on stolen Native land, the First Peoples’ House did not come into existence until 1998. Though currently temporarily on University as its usual location undergoes construction to become more accessible, the First Peoples’ House is permanently located at 3505 Peel. In an article in the McGill Reporter, Tracy Diabo, the coordinator for McGill’s First Peoples’ House, described the need for the house as a resource on campus.” If you’re the only Aboriginal student in a class of 400, it’s not only intimidating, there is a real sense of loneliness.” The First Peoples’ House is a resource for Indigenous students on campus to find support and resources.

James McGill Statue

The founder of this university and a renowned businessman, James McGill was also recorded to have purchased and sold slaves. From the middle of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century, slavery was common in Montreal and pre-Confederate Canada. Newspapers like the Montreal Gazette actually facilitated and advertised the exchange of black slaves. Perhaps the reason this history is less known is because there was no law condoning slavery – this meant there was no need to officially abolish slavery either. Slavery in Quebec wasn’t about economic necessity; it was a form of public extravagance, which conferred prestige. There were also a great number of slaves in Quebec who were Indigenous.

This colonial legacy has lived on at McGill – does anyone remember in 2008, when former McGill Chancellor Dick Pound called Indigenous people savages?

There is some small progress at McGill with the launch of the new Indigenous Studies minor; however, there is still a long way to go toward decolonizing campus.

– Files from Lindsay Nixon of the Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit Harm Reduction Coalition, and Aaron Lakoff

Hochelaga Rock

Located by the Roddick Gates, this rock is meant to commemorate the Iroquois settlement that McGill is established on today. According to McGill’s First Peoples’ House, back in 1860 when what is known as Maisonneueve was undergoing construction, workers found traces of human and animal remains, as well as old household items, which were eventually distinguished as belonging to a Hochelaga Iroquoian village from 1535.

James Administration Building

James Administration Building: In 1988, a three-day occupation of the VP research’s office ended with McGill introducing minimal ethical standards for military-funded research. Following a policy review, despite calls for stricter standards, these regulations were removed in 2009. Although Principal Suzanne Fortier has expressed interest in examining the ethical questions surrounding research and recently convened a policy review committee, the University has yet to support ending any of the military research taking place on campus.

MacDonald Building

The Shockwave Physics Group (SWPG) works closely with Canadian military researchers on topics related to thermobaric bombs, which create an explosion, killing people by asphyxiation and the pressure of a shock wave. They were used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, and most recently by the Syrian regime. Scientific reports for the U.S. military have specifically cited SWPG research as aiding in the development of more lethal thermobaric weapons. A more recent research project at the SWPG is concerned with air-breathing propulsion, with applications to hypersonic missiles and jets. Demilitarize McGill carried out a blockade of the SWPG lab complex, shutting down work for over four hours, on February 25.

– Demilitarize McGill

The Architecture Café

The Architecture Café, formerly located in the Macdonald-Harrington building, was one of the last student-run food providers on campus. It closed in 2010 amidst an uproar from students. Since then, there has been a big push to open a student-run cafe. Does the food counter on the third floor of SSMU count as a student space? Some remain to be convinced.

McConnell Engineering Building

This building is home to the Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM), which conducts research for military and law enforcement. The purposes are ongoing at the CIM, in areas that include automated surveillance and artificial perception. According to Demilitarize McGill, from 1999 to at least 2010, the CIM was the site of missile guidance and target-tracking research in collaboration with Lockheed Martin (a technology company), the Canadian military, and Israel.

– Demilitarize McGill

Milton-Parc

More commonly – and problematically – known as ‘the ghetto’ by McGill students, this Montreal neighbourhood has never been a homogenous pool of McGill-bubble students and sororities. In fact, Milton-Parc has had a long and arduous history. Post-WWII, the community mostly consisted of bourgeois estate owners, who later moved to Westmount or Outremont. As buildings became run down, the neighbourhood came under the sights of developers, who began developing the area under the guise of ‘urban renewal’ or ‘slum clearance.’ Such development projects included the La Cité high rises, which were intended to be three times bigger than what is seen today. The residents of the community, organized under the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee, resisted such projects with door-to-door outreach, petitions, and even direct action occupations. Eventually, the development project ran out of money, and residents were able to convince the federal government to buy the undeveloped lots. Co-op houses were built in their place, creating the largest co-op community in North America.

– Files from Aaron Lakoff

Parc Oxygène

Just off Hutchison Street, this green space was under threat of condominium development for years. Local residents and community members resisted development for years; however, the park was destroyed this summer after condominium construction was approved.

– Files from Aaron Lakoff

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From this world of unimaginative greetings and predictable questions emerges Restaurant Boustan, a fine establishment serving Lebanese cuisine, but located west of campus. For such an establishment, ordering is the only thinkable option, and so, the quality of the ordering experience becomes of paramount importance.

The first point of contact with Boustan is through its menu, which is conveniently located online, on the restaurant’s website. The offerings of the menu are organized into columns, with prices next to them. This is a logical way of organizing menu items as it allows the potential customer to identify how much each food item costs. For example, the customer can easily deduce that a shish taouk trio is $6.90. Sometimes, the menu items are accompanied by photos. One assumes these photos correspond to the menu items; this is also a rational design choice, as it allows the customer to visualize their options. Furthermore, the items are separated into various subsections, like Appetizers and Couscous. This allows the customer to target specific types of food or plan a multi-course meal. However, the lack of inclusion of tax and tip – a fact this reporter discovered at a late stage in the ordering game, upon payment at time of delivery – is a massive oversight and seriously jeopardizes the success of this menu.

The Boustan website promises a unique experience through the use of the internet as a means of communicating desired menu items. When one attempts to select this option, however, they are greeted only with a message, bolded and italicized, in large yellow font, informing them that the option is “coming soon.” Alas, one is only left the meager option of communication by phone.

The phone call to Boustan is just what you’d expect, if you expect to talk to someone on the phone who takes your order for food and then tells someone else so that they can bring you the food. For a phone call, the relatively clear connection and question about your location make it a reasonable way to order food with the expectation that you’ll receive it. The whole exchange takes about two minutes, making it just about the same as any other ordering experience you’ll ever have. The lack of uniqueness in the telephonic interaction is slightly off-putting, but one can perhaps find it in themselves to appreciate at least the efficiency of the whole thing.

Some time later, a phone call will emerge from the ether, contacting the customer at the specified phone number, alerting them to the arrival of their food. The wait totalled around 45 minutes, though this is understandable, as the restaurant is located on Crescent, which is farther than say, if it were located just across Sherbrooke. The food is warm upon arrival, which is a good indication that it was “made-to-order.”

From beginning to end, the ordering experience offered by Boustan is slightly above mediocre, but fails to dazzle. While the potential for future internet-mediated ordering is intriguing, at present the clarity and logical organization of the menu can only go so far to bring this establishment’s quality of phone interaction above average.

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I have been a practicing Christian for all of my adult life. I am often asked why I believe; there is no straightforward answer I can give. It is not just a mental knowledge, or a spiritual awareness. I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

 * * *

My parents became Christians in their late teens and early twenties and were, for a time, distanced from their families for their seemingly strange beliefs. I, however, have always known who God was and that Jesus died on a cross for the sins of the world. I also grew up in a culture where this was common knowledge. When my family and I moved from England to Texas, we also moved into a very Christian environment, where almost everyone went to church at least on Christmas and Easter. My childhood was full of vacation Bible schools, seven-foot papier-maché rocks representing Jesus’ tomb, Veggie Tales, and Bible verse raps. During that time, I came to understand how just and loving this God was that my pastors kept talking about, and believed in his existence. I was baptized when I was twelve and from there began to study the Bible to understand what being a Christian really meant.

My view of Christianity, however, drastically changed when I entered the ninth grade. High school is a big transition for anyone. Entering high school, I became more self-conscious and hyper-aware of the actions of those around me. I began to see Christianity – and the Bible – as a set of rules preventing me from having fun. I wanted freedom, and so I searched for it. I thought I found freedom in the flickering light of a cigarette, or the green-tinted eyes of a grade 11 guy, or the white lie I told my parents when they asked where I was going that night. If freedom was in these things, I thought, then why did I feel in myself more of a void than I had before?

These feelings I had been grappling with all came to a head when I went to the hospital for drinking nine times the legal limit of alcohol. I had been hanging out with a group of my friends and with an older guy, whom I had a crush on. Perhaps to impress him, or perhaps because I had no idea how alcohol worked, I ended up drinking far more than I should have. I remember waking up in my bed in mismatched pajamas and having to peel the electrode pads off of my chest. I had no idea what had happened until my parents filled me in, and it dawned on me what rebelling against my faith had led to. I hadn’t found freedom; I had merely replaced God with a different master: man. Or, well, high school boys.

A few months after the electropads my dad was offered a job in Canada, and we left the Lone Star State for Oakville, Ontario. Ontario was far different from the snug Christian environment I had just come from. Outside my church congregation, none of my friends were Christians, so all of my beliefs and the actions that reflected those beliefs were fairly alien to them. I remember my friend asking me one day, in all seriousness, if I was a lesbian. She could not understand why I didn’t date guys, and so she immediately presumed that I wasn’t attracted to them. These types of instances helped me evaluate the reasons behind my actions. While those experiences ultimately strengthened my faith, I felt isolated from those around me. I also discovered a need to constantly work at ‘being good.’ I followed the commandments: honoured my parents, tried not to lie, attempted to love those around me, but I failed time and time again. I placed an immense amount of pressure on myself to be perfect, forgetting that I was not and could never be.

* * *

The transition from Ontario to Quebec, the suburbs to the city, home to residence was difficult. While Oakville was not full of Christians, Montreal, I found, had even less. Even though Quebec is a province of cathedrals, only 2 per cent of Montrealers profess to having a personal relationship with Jesus (Catholics are excluded from this study, considering they do not personally connect with Jesus, nor share the gospel with other denominations). Despite the province’s strong Catholic history, many families do not fit the nuclear mould. Quebec has the highest percentage of common-law partnerships and the second highest percentage of same-sex relationships in Canada. Living in this city, full of its own political self-expression and ideals, had a profound effect on me.

While wrestling with what I believed, I lacked the guidance of fellow believers. Even though I did not have many Christian friends in Oakville, I had had supportive Christian parents. Amidst my friends’ hurtful words and my own insecurities, my parents had always encouraged me to be true to myself and to love those around me even when I felt like I couldn’t anymore. It was around this time that I met a few people from a Fish Frosh event that attended Providence church. Through them, I started attending a bible study after feeling more of a desire for spiritual connection. At Providence, I entered a small – the group consisted of around forty people – yet mighty community of other like-minded believers who showed me more love than I thought was possible outside of a biological family.

There, I met friends like Francesca Mitchell and Stephanie Adjemian. Like me, Francesca was hesitant about her beliefs. “If I’m honest, coming to university as a Christian was a bit of a challenge at first,” Francesca told me. “I was anxious to make a good impression on my flatmates, so I ended up partying pretty hard, and I had to work hard to ensure that God didn’t become an afterthought. Truth be told, I wasn’t always successful.” Like it was for me, the so-called freedom Francesca sought only led to dissatisfaction. Referring to the process of finding community in the church, Francesca said: “For someone like me, who doesn’t come from a Christian family background, [it] has really been amazing.”

Before leaving for university, I remember earnestly praying that God would provide me with Christian friends who would encourage me in my faith. At the beginning of university, however, I did not have that physical support system. Uncertain of who I was or who I wanted to be, I signed up for both Arts Frosh and Fish Frosh, the 115-person Christian frosh at McGill, in an attempt to try it all. My Frosh week involved more pub-crawls, power hours, and hitchhiking rides from strangers claiming to be the owners of 747 (in hindsight, not my brightest idea), than Fish Frosh activities. Stephanie was also attempting to figure out her own belief system during Frosh as well. “In university, I was away from the church I grew up in, and I was no longer living with my parents. I felt a responsibility to figure out the particulars of how I believe what I believe and underwent a pretty radical transformation in the way I think, theologically speaking,” she says.

In those first couple of years, I finally realized just how ‘bad’ I was. I often hear people say, “Well, I’m no Hitler, so I don’t see how I could possibly go to hell,” as an excuse for their actions. We often socially compare ourselves to feel better and ignore the vileness within. I had been particularly guilty of that: believing that because I had not killed someone, or robbed someone, I was a good person. On examination of my heart and my mind, I found that I was not as nice as I would have liked to believe. I was proud, unloving, and selfish, and, even worse, at least to me, I could do nothing to change it. I recognized at that moment a need for a saviour. I rediscovered what it meant to have a Heavenly Father. I could finally put my trust and hope in someone who loved me unconditionally and perfectly. The rules that had once felt like prison bars became gifts of guidance given by one who cared for me better than anyone else. When I recognized the bad in me, I could see so much clearer the good that is God.

* * *

The belief that Christians are naturally good people, or that all Christians judge others, is a false yet permeating belief in society. I see this misconception in the Quinn Fabrays, Ned Flanders, and Hilary Fayes of modern media.  This ‘holier than thou’ attitude, however, goes against everything that Jesus said and did while on earth. Jesus did not come to earth on thundering clouds and take up residence in an ivory tower. He was brought into this world by a teenage girl, engaged to a carpenter, in a barn. He was laid in an animal trough and swaddled in ragged cloth. His birth was indicative of the life that he was to lead, one of humility and servitude. He ate with the prostitutes and tax collectors and mingled with the blind, lame, and lepers. He was despised by those he tried to love. His most humble act came, however, when he was publically nailed to a cross at the request of those he was dying for. Naked and starved, he cried out: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” In that moment, Jesus atoned for all my badness: my pride, ambition, selfishness, conceit, hate, and reconciled man to God. Blameless as he was, Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice for all of our sins.

I am a Christian. I’m also a sister, a Victorian novel enthusiast, and a clean roommate. I’m also a control-freak, bad at keeping in touch, and guard my feelings for fear of getting hurt. I’m just like you.

I look at my friend as we sit in a hotel in Rome and say, “I’m not good, but God, He’s great.”

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” –Romans 3:23-24

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I am a 22-year-old virgin.

Penetration has always been pretty excruciating for me. Whether tampons, fingers, or penises, I tend to be wary of anyone (or thing) inside me. I have only been with men, and of those men, I have tried having sex with two. I describe my experiences with those two men as attempts. They were never able to penetrate – endeavouring to get inside me for only a few short moments before retreating, glancing at me like they had shattered my sexual facade, realizing the utterly breakable virgin which lay beneath.

Recently – with three years of sexual exploits in Montreal under my proverbial belt – this has become less excruciating and more nerve-wracking. I have yet to master the art of the ‘virginity discussion’ and while I don’t feel the need to talk about it with all of my sexual partners, I do consider its admission to be central to my own enjoyment of sexual encounters. I feel more confident expressing my needs after I’ve voiced the reality of my…well…relatively narrow vaginal canal.

The start of this discussion is often the same: a dark room, a bed of messy sheets, and two people undressing one another. It is in this moment of kissing and fumbling that I usually decide whether to state “I’m not going to have sex with you” or “I’m not going to have sex with you…because I’ve never slept with anyone.” I have learned to be stern and straight with both statements; I have no interest in ambiguity. In a society in which sexual refusal can be flirtatious and silence misconstrued as consent, my vocality is my security.

Still, a deep anxiety roots itself within my chest before these conversations. I haven’t reached a point at which I can boldly state that I am a virgin without a cascade of justifications. I usually stick to, “No, but seriously, I swear it’s not like I’m a religious zealot or anything” and “I guess I’ve just dated shitty dudes.” Mainly, I try to express the fact that I have waited (and am waiting) to be with someone I trust. To be clear, I am not waiting for a bed of roses, nor a soulmate. I am, however, waiting to be with someone with whom I can discuss sex (or my lack thereof) openly and honestly. While I don’t question my decision to keep most Ps out of my V, I nonetheless sense that these justifications are necessary – for myself, partners, and friends. Although reactions to the news vary, responses from guys (especially those interested in pursuing a more long-term hookup) generally range from neutrality to negativity. Furthermore, I find that my explanations usually fall within three realms: the realm of my sexual identity, my feminist identity, and my hazy identity as a twenty-something.

 * * *

Following the initial – and incredibly unoriginal – question of “why?” I usually confront three follow-ups: why play into a false notion of virginity? How can you be so sexual if you’re a virgin? And, in so many words, are you damaged goods?

Of those three questions, a critique of virginity is the only conversation I find worthwhile. In any discussion of ‘virginity,’ a consideration of vocabulary is central. The North American notion of virginity is steeped in racialized, classed, and heteronormative assumptions, and to ignore these would be irresponsible as a self-proclaimed feminist and, more importantly, as a critically-thinking human being.

Stereotypical images of virgins get recycled throughout our media; I would argue, though, that few virgins manage to fulfill them. These images include not only an intact hymen but also a sense of sexual innocence and virtue (traits, I might add, that seem more politically powerful for the patriarchy than for virgins themselves). This imposed fragility eclipses the wide-ranging reality of virgins. Since arriving in Montreal, I’ve met countless women who break the virgin mould. Some of us are waiting for marriage and some of us are waiting for someone to bother putting sheets on their bare mattress; some of us have never been kissed and some of us regularly bring partners home; some of us have had penetrative sex but still choose to self-identify as virgins. And yet, we only have this one word – a word that has been raked over and imbued with meaning and politically mobilized – with which to describe ourselves. The idea of virginity and its accompanying expectations has become yet another site for the control of female sexuality and, when discussing it, I am reminded of the fact that this word utterly fails to speak to my experiences.

Nevertheless, I use the word virgin. More than anything, I use it for its ease; I use it because blurting out, “I’m a sexually active woman who has had a couple penises kind-of-inside-her-but-not-really so please be aware of my needs” is an awkward sentence, and would delve into a conversation that I’m not always interested in having with casual partners. Basically, I use the word virgin with partners to describe my own needs. For me, my virginity – whether a construct or not – means that putting a penis inside me is going to be difficult. It means I need someone who will be careful and understanding. I know a lot of women who do not identify as virgins who still require that from their sexual partners. But for me, there can be a lot of comfort in playing into this trope when I renegotiate those meanings for my own experience.

Problematizing the notion of virginity, however, is rarely a question I face in the bedroom; more often than not, my sexual subjectivity is questioned. Picture this: I am on my 16th-floor balcony with a guy – a very handsome guy who studies music and tells funny jokes and is a truly charming human being. We spent the evening in general revelry, dancing and imbibing and, later in the evening, kissing in a corner of the bar. Before heading home, I made it clear that I didn’t want to have sex, and out on the porch I decided to tell him the whole truth (and nothing but the truth…so help me God).

His response to my declaration – like countless others before him – was, “But you’re so…sexual.”

In my experience, this is the most frustrating  (yet amusing) response. I am, in fact, a woman who holds her sexual subjectivity to be central to her identity. For my music man, it was confusing that I could have possibly cultivated such sexual understanding and – even more surprising – that I was so comfortable expressing that sexuality.

I do my best to be aware of my sexual needs, to be open to new sexual encounters, and to put myself in situations in which I feel happy, sexy, and safe. Still, I often confront a narrow image of virginity – one in which virgins are angelic and uninformed – which stands in direct contrast to my identity as an outspoken sexual subject. Does being a virgin make me less of a sexual subject? And does feeling like a sexy lady make me a bad virgin?

At times, I feel trapped in a strange space in between. It can make me feel uncomfortable, insecure, or even angry with myself (which, inevitably, leads to my feeling angry with the social constructs that made me uncomfortable/insecure/angry in the first place).

There is a sense of shame deeply ingrained in virgins, especially those of us over the ‘appropriate’ age of virgindom. It is not that my friends and partners’ issues make me reconsider my decision to have not had sex up until this point; it is more that I feel like I deserve to be an oddity – like maybe I should feel more inclined to question myself. I feel trapped within a strange Foucauldian cycle in which I must constantly talk about not-wanting-to-talk-about my dirty little secret. I’m not sure whether to desperately search for a means of liberation from this cycle, or whether it’s a meaningful space within which to dwell.

* * *

Fast forward two years from the music man and I am once again standing on my balcony. I have a new haircut and a new man with me. This time he is a chef and has just made a crude joke about a blow job.

He is expecting one because I am a virgin and I am feeling angry because that is unacceptable. This sense of entitlement – derived from my virginity – is weird and something I’ve encountered often. Some guys, not often as explicit as my chef friend, expect a consolation prize for the lack of penetrative sex. If I don’t mention my virginity, I’m usually regarded as a tease – so sexual and yet not willing to ‘go all the way.’ These are my least favourite kinds of sexual encounters and, needless to say, I kicked out my chef friend (as I do with any man who treats me this way).

Friends and partners try to make sense of my decisions by positioning me within a set of acceptable tropes that, when considered together, are pretty ludicrous. Being a virgin is complicated and awkward and strange and sometimes it really does make me feel like damaged goods. Rationally, I identify that much of this discomfort comes from the problematic images of female sexuality that I confront throughout society. To repeat the oft-mentioned and nevertheless well-founded argument, we  consider women as existing at two ends of the spectrum. If a woman isn’t having all the sex all the time, she’s probably having none of the sex(ual encounters) none of the time. Furthermore, if a woman isn’t out and proud about whatever sexual decisions she’s making, then she is probably working through some serious sexual issues.

The radical feminist within me feels the need to constantly debunk whatever title it is that I am expected to embody in any given moment. All I know is that these typecasting experiences make me feel worn out. I am tired of feeling obligated to explain that yes, I just want to trust my first penetrative partner and that no, I do not know why I haven’t met someone like that yet. Instead, I’d like to hold a sign that reads:

If I’m okay with my sexual history, why does everyone else seem so preoccupied with it? And why (why, why, why) does it feel like my virginity keeps sabotaging potential relationships?

* * *

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m writing this three days, seven bottles of wine, and countless self-deprecating jokes out of a two-month (non)relationship. As it was a (non)relationship, my previous partner was not my boyfriend; we did not discuss exclusivity nor did we exchange anything but meaningful “I really like you”s. We did, however, kiss each other in front of our friends; we celebrated my mother’s birthday on a double-date with her boyfriend; he slept in my childhood bed with me; and we discussed – honestly and candidly – my insecurities about being a “virgin.”

As such, I’m feeling pretty blindsided, pretty dispirited, and pretty full of rage – depending on the moment you catch me and the amount of liquor I’ve consumed. For us, sex became elided with relationships, which became elided with cold feet and a surprise break-up.

To avoid diving off the deep end into a pool of bitter diatribes, I will stay concise. I cared a lot for him. It was a mixture of both trust and timing that kept me from sleeping with him. I needed to trust that he would still be around two imaginary weeks from now – inviting me to shows and drinking beer on my couch. But he won’t be. He ended our (non)relationship because “sex means different things to us.” And, admittedly, it does. While a sense of pride makes me want to indignantly argue that he stop assuming what sex means to me, I was pretty forthcoming on the subject. I do feel indignant, however, that he did not communicate honestly with me prior to ending things. His quiet brooding on the subject of my sexuality makes me really hesitant to be quite so straightforward next time.

So, in launching into the future of Montreal dating, what do I do? If I keep scaring everyone off with my ‘virginity,’ how will I get to a point at which I trust someone enough to sleep with them? Do I heed my own advice and stop talking about it? Keep it quiet until I’ve ensnared someone using my virginal wiles?

As indicated by my choice to publish a Daily article about my sex life, I clearly don’t intend to follow those paths. It was a strange series of events that led to this ‘coming out’ article, and it has been a thought-provoking process. Why don’t I stop talking about my virginity and just go have some casual sex? And moreover, why would I write this if I want all of you to stop talking about my virginity?

I guess, though, that this question of why is exactly what’s been plaguing me. Why am I so sexual and why am I virgin and why do I feel the need to write about it? I think, oddly enough, that my response to all of these questions is the same: because in this moment, it feels right, it feels exhilarating, and it feels true. As my sexuality continues to evolve, so too will these answers. I hope that this piece can become situated within a broader discussion that questions not why I am a virgin, but rather, why everyone else cares.

The post The 22-year-old virgin appeared first on The McGill Daily.

When I visited McGill Student Health Services a year ago to inquire about oral contraceptives, unsure whether they would be right for me, I encountered no resistance or cautions from physician and director of the Health Centre, Dr. Pierre-Paul Tellier. Perfunctory questions were asked and a prescription was written; a sample was pulled from a drawer and the little rows of pink and white pills stared up at me. After the procedure was explained to me (take one every day, at approximately the same time, and so on) I finally worked up the pluck to voice my concerns. Was Yaz – the brand of pill I had been prescribed – not in the news for increasing the risk of blood clots? How would this affect me? Was my doctor sure that this was the right choice?

The answers from Dr. Tellier were brief: He mentioned that yes, Yaz was in the news, but the media can hype things up; the risk of clots might be increased, but by such a small percentage that it was essentially negligible. Yaz is a low-dose pill, and he assured me that it was best for me. There was no discussion of a change of prescription; there was no allusion to other oral contraceptives being available.

I left the office, my worries hardly alleviated, the samples in my pocket.

In the end, I left the prescription unfilled, and instead went looking for answers about how these prescriptions end up in the hands of students, and how paying our student fees leaves us with only one option.

* * *

Student Health Services certainly hopes to be more than just a producer of medical notes and prescriptions; their mandate lists four objectives that fit into the framework of providing “comprehensive health care to students in an academic setting.” These objectives include “[providing] preventative and curative health care by caregivers that are sensitive to [the student] health group,” “[providing] health education and promotion,” “[providing] training in the field of student health for health care professionals,” and “[gaining] knowledge of [the student] population by fostering research.”

Student health clinics like McGill’s have an incredible reach. In 2011, of McGill’s total enrollment of 37,835, there were 15,999 visitations to the centre. As long as students have paid the student services fee, they have access to Student Health Services. The fact that university health clinics serve such a large and, for the most part, age-specific population not only makes it difficult for students to secure appointments, but also makes the centres themselves an ideal target for companies that have a financial interest in the health needs of the young adult demographic.

* * *

Pharmaceutical giants, such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and GlaxoSmithKline exist to research, develop, produce, and then market medicines and vaccines. When it comes time to sell their products, these corporations rely almost exclusively on pharmaceutical sales representatives, colloquially known as drug reps, to get the job done. Drug reps have gotten a lot of press in the past few years, resulting in a new public awareness of how the reps operate.

The primary difference between drug reps and most other salespeople is this: they woo the doctors, not the patients. In other words, drug companies and drug reps don’t have to sell their product to the individual who will be consuming, so much as they have to sell it to the individual advocating its use. In order to win new customers and reward the loyal, drug reps are known to lavish health care providers with gifts and rewards. In his 2006 article for the Atlantic, Carl Elliot wrote that he had heard “reps talk about scoring sports tickets for their favourite doctors, buying televisions for waiting rooms, and arranging junkets to tropical resorts.”

Because patients respect and trust their advocators – their physicians – these physicians are the only ones that need to be convinced about the quality of a certain medication. In a university setting, this means convincing only a few physicians, instead of thousands of students. The imbalance of power in this relationship can be dangerous. Physicians control knowledge – they can prescribe one medication without relaying other options, or restrict a patient’s understanding of their own condition in order to make one medication appear better than others. Add in an economic incentive to push one drug over another, and the risk of physicians abusing the trust of their patients increases exponentially.

* * *

The uproar over fraudulent and unethical practices in the pharmaceutical sales industry has led to increased regulations, in an attempt to protect healthcare professionals (and by extension, their patients) from unethical external influence. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) updated their existing Code on Interactions With Healthcare Professionals in January 2009, “to reinforce [their] intention that [their] interactions with healthcare professionals are professional exchanges designed to benefit patients and to enhance the practice of medicine,” according to the website. Changes to this code include prohibiting drug reps from providing restaurant meals to physicians, though “occasional meals in healthcare professionals’ offices in conjunction with informational presentations” are still permitted.

There have also been shifts in some physicians’ attitudes towards drug reps. In August, the Pharma Letter, an online news source focused on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, wrote that oncologists (medical professionals who work with cancer patients) were “reducing the number of times they [would] see [pharmaceutical sales reps].” Of twenty common medical specialties measured in the spring 2012 AccessMonitor sales and marketing report, 61 per cent of US oncologists had placed restrictions on drug rep visits, making oncology the most restrictive specialty by far. Other areas of medicine, including primary care, were less restrictive.

In Canada, the total number of drug reps, and the amount of money spent on drug marketing, is lower than in the U.S., though still substantial. A 2004 McGill Journal of Medicine article by Joseph Barfett et al estimated that drug companies spend $1.7 billion a year in Canada to promote their products, compared to $21 billion in the United States. In addition, a 2010 Health Council of Canada Report titled “Decisions, Decisions” estimated that there are 6,000 drug firm reps pitching to physicians across Canada.

But for all their ubiquity and effort, do pharmaceutical reps truly influence the medicine that is practiced by physicians? “Decisions, Decisions” seemed to think so, pointing to pharmaceutical sales reps and unfamiliarity with new technologies as the main reasons for improper administration of prescription drugs. The report noted an 80 per cent increase in prescriptions filled in the past decade.

* * *

University student health centres claim to be tough on drug reps. Dr. Tellier, stated in an email to The Daily that a pharmaceutical sales representative was allowed to speak with physicians twice, in both instances to educate the centre’s staff about a “product of importance to the student population.”  Reception of the sales representative is, as in private practice, the choice of the physician. “There are some physicians who will never see pharmaceutical reps and we respect that decision,” said Tellier.

Tellier also explained that relevance to the student population is a factor when deciding whether or not to grant drug reps an audience with physicians, explaining that “a sales rep who tries to detail an antihypertensive or cardiac medication, both of which do not apply to the great majority of our population, [is] banned.” When what the drug reps are offering aligns with the needs of the health centre, however, the centre is more willing to accept the representative’s offer. Tellier stated that the most commonly prescribed medications in his work at the McGill Health Services include “contraceptive pills…medication to treat yeast infections in women, and oral antibiotics.” Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that “the representatives [they] most often see are those who offer birth control pills, and vaccines.”

Tellier conceded that “all companies approach [Student Health Services,]” and Dr. Robert Franck, director of McGill Mental Health Services, stated that “no one company predominates,” adding that “reps are usually interested in promoting newer (and usually much more expensive) versions of medications.”

Yet not all Canadian university health centre’s function like McGill’s. At one university health centre in Ontario, where more than 21,000 students were seen last year, most physicians do not see drug reps by choice. The representative of this health centre requested that I keep the university anonymous, so as to prevent information from being obtained by interested pharmaceutical companies. Clearly, interest in university health clinics runs high.

After a few phone calls with various pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer Canada was the only one to eventually respond by email. Julie-Catherine Racine, a senior manager in Corporate Communications at Pfizer Canada, stated, “As a healthcare company we want to ensure physicians can make the best decisions for their patients, therefore we provide medical information and support to all clinics, including university health clinics.” Racine’s answer was the only comment I received from any of the companies contacted.

* * *

University health centres may profess to be free of drug reps’ influence, appearing to avoid them whenever possible, but the most indispensible tool in the drug reps’ arsenal – the drug sample – lives on in university physicians’ desk drawers and cupboards. Franck stated, “Pharmaceutical sales reps will leave samples from time to time,” and added, however, that they “usually do not use them except in cases of financial need.” Tellier also told The Daily that samples at McGill Student Health Services came from clearing excess stock and direct purchases, in addition to pharmaceutical representatives. As for the aforementioned anonymous university health centre, a representative stated that “[they] do not have a great deal of sample medications in [the] clinic.” However, the few that are available are, naturally, “provided by the pharmaceutical industry.”

Why are samples so important? In the case of oral contraceptives, at the very least, Tellier concedes that he prescribes the medication that is provided as a sample. “I use a sample to teach the patient how to take her pill – this changes according to the packaging – and then I will usually prescribe that medication.” Indeed, a 2008 study by Sufrin and Ross, titled “Pharmaceutical industry marketing: understanding its impact on women’s health” found that physicians with access to free samples were more likely to prescribe brand name medication.

But keeping corporate interests at bay is not sufficient to ensure effective and unbiased prescribing practices. All of the student health centre representatives I spoke to seemed to agree on one thing: that compliance on the part of the patient was necessary in the process of successfully introducing and prescribing a new medication. To that end, each of them stressed that they did not have preferred medications, for the most part, and would be willing to provide a suitable alternative should the patient express doubts about the primary medication chosen. This, of course, is good medical practice. However, this was not my personal experience. When my concerns should have been responded to properly, I still left compliant, samples in hand.

* * *

While it appears that doctors in university health clinics attempt to keep their prescribing practices independent from the pharmaceutical companies that solicit them, those practices are evidently still far from ideal. Perhaps it is difficult to offer one brand of medication when another brand’s sample is sitting right there, available for immediate demonstration and use.

Of course, all medications have side effects, and the choice of the media to fixate on a single brand’s detriments certainly does not make other brands safer – either in general or for the patient in question. But even given the possible risks associated with all prescriptions, patients should have the ability to choose the risks they find most acceptable.

The student population’s health and well-being should not be tied to commercial and financial corporate interests, and as physicians, the doctors in these health centres are the gatekeepers – the only gatekeepers – that can prevent this from happening. But simply shutting out drug reps is not the only step in giving the right prescriptions and in providing proper healthcare. Students certainly have a part to play – they should take control over their health and question the medications they are prescribed – but physicians are ultimately the ones with the power to listen, to consider, and to justify their patient’s trust.

The post A spoonful of dismissal helps the medicine go down appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Deep breath – push. Doors drag open to a sterile stretching hallway, patched up elevator panels. My stomach drops with the upward pull. Rigid titles spell out Dr. Med. Phys. and a block-lettered command to S.V.P-sanitize-your-dirty-grubby-hands. Sitting on melted plastic chairs, transfixed by speckled tiles and inhaling recycled air, while information, name, DOB, address are regurgitated like peanuts out of a dispenser. Finally, a pallid, blank face says without looking up: “sit down, you’ll be called when we’re ready for you.”

The discomfort of the waiting room complements the intrusive pap test I’m about to be subjected to, as well as the brick wall I’m about to hit when I reveal that yes, I had sex without a condom, but it‘s not like I was the given the choice, if-you-see-what-I-mean. Though Quebec may have a far more accessible healthcare system than most of the world, it’s easy to get lost in the grid-like world of mega-hospitals, to become faceless among the masses, to risk turning healing into a one-dimensional standard procedure.

A year earlier, at the age of 17, I luckily found myself in a far more hospitable space. In this case, the door to the waiting lounge was kept wide open, and a breeze played with a dream-catcher hanging on the window. There were 15 of us waiting, sometimes dipping out into the late afternoon light to grab a lemonade and pass the time, each thinking we would probably be called last. I was at Head and Hands, a community-oriented physical and mental health centre, dedicated mostly to youth.

I was there to get tested, standard procedure. Except that at that point I had never been tested before, so I didn’t exactly know what standard procedure was. It was six or so months after I had been sexually assaulted, in the midst of my “black-out phase,” where I don’t remember thinking or speaking about my experiences. I only discussed what happened in the event of the extreme but repressed panic I felt while having somewhat safe, albeit drunk, and “casual” sex with a couple of friends. In order to cope and just be “normal,” I had somehow found a way to erase my first sexual experience from most of my day-to-day consciousness.

Head and Hands aims to provide non-judgemental, holistic, preventative, and educational support. They offer everything from legal advice, to emergency food security for those in need, to sexual education. When you walk into a Head and Hands drop-in period, you are given a card with a famous activist’s name, and they call out your new pseudonym when your turn to see a physician is up.

I was flipping through some zines when I was finally called, definitely in the third tier of patients. The assessment health worker, who was young and casually dressed, called me into a room that looked more like my parents’ living room than medical purgatory. We chatted for a few minutes, then she began asking me questions like: “When were you last tested?”– never have been. “When was the last time you had your period?” – three weeks ago. “Is your period regular?”– not always. So far, fairly easy to answer, not stuff I would consider too personal. “Are you on birth control?”– no. “Have you ever had unprotected sex?”– no. No, wait  – back up, hold on, fuck. I felt like someone had wrapped their hands around my lungs and my brain had just short-circuited. I had just blatantly lied to myself and this woman, and had wholeheartedly believed every word. She looked concerned and leaned forward in her chair toward me. I opened my mouth with the intention of speaking, tried starting the sentence from different angles, but it was no use. Finally, somewhat brokenly, it came out that the first time I had had sex was unprotected, except I was never given the choice whether to be safe or not. In fact, everything about it had felt unsafe.

I didn’t know what to expect from this stranger. After it happened, I didn’t go to the hospital to get a rape kit like you’re supposed to, nor had I reported my assault to the police. I didn’t know the words to explain what had happened to me. I had never had sex before, so what could I compare it to? I didn’t even consider taking the morning-after pill because, well, I just couldn’t think it through that far. I braced myself for a lecture on “responsibility.”

In that little living room at Head and Hands, I was not made to feel like an idiot, a liar, or a slut. She assured me she believed me, and that rape happens so much more often than I would think. During moments where I struggled with words, she was patient. When I had a question, she took her time to answer. She gently told me about the support services that Head and Hands could provide, just for my information, for when I felt ready, whenever that may be. I didn‘t feel like I was being lectured, or that I had to prove anything. Most importantly, I felt safe.

* * *

A negative experience at a clinic – a regular check up, or test – can set a survivor far back in their journey toward healing. After surviving assault, you want to feel like a person, not like a problem, a nuisance to your doctor, or something to be purified. At Head and Hands, Andrea*, who is trained in intervention and support work, is usually the first in contact with a call-in or drop-in. “We try to be empowering to youth, and support them in figuring out what will be best for that individual, to help them find the resources they need,” she told me in an interview. Unlike this method, the more mainstream response to sexual assault, which may include prescriptions for anti-depressants and a set therapeutic period.

Head and Hands offers a more holistic approach to healing. “We don’t try to deal with a singular issue, we try to deal with a whole person. We work around people’s schedules or commitments, such as being young parents or responsible siblings… people’s realities.” Besides being free, Head and Hands does not put any limitations on the time it may take for a survivor to heal.

One of the services they often refer people to is the Sexual Assault Centre of the McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS). Here, survivors and their allies can find support groups and attend educational workshops.  The two local organizations follow a non-judgemental and “non-directional” mandate, in which they let the survivor set the terms of their own healing rather than directing them in any way. For groups like them, all survivors’ experiences are different and each person has the capacity to make meaningful decisions for themselves. Before I went to Head and Hands and met people like Andrea, I didn’t have the confidence to choose my own path. My healing only began when I was given the space to determine what my own journey would entail, because I was treated, in Andrea’s words, like “an expert on [my] own needs.”

After having reached out to others about my experience, I started to hear stories about the traumatic results of directive, rather than holistic, approaches. Last year, at the height of finals, feeling depressed, confused, and overwhelmed, Michelle* decided to seek help at McGill Mental Health. As a survivor of sexual assault, she was hoping to find support and compassion, but told me that her experience was discouraging. “I tried to explain to [the psychiatrist] what I was going through, hoping for a referral or some course of action as to how I could go about starting to heal. I immediately felt like I was judged with suspicion, that she didn’t fully believe my experiences. I remember her offering to prescribe an anti-depressant after five minutes.”

The issue with institutional practices, such as McGill Mental Health’s, is the emphasis on biochemical approaches to mental health. As a survivor of sexual assault, you don’t want to feel like you’re just naturally fucked up, or that it’s your own fault you don’t feel okay, as if there was no perpetrator involved. Although prescription drugs do help some people, Michelle didn’t feel it addressed her situation. “I would have preferred a more open environment focused on experiences and a sense of validation.” What separates Head and Hands from larger institutions is its ability to offer personalized support, along with prescription medication and other more traditional approaches.

SACOMSS and Head and Hands also have a strong understanding of anti-oppression, and their training enables them to work with the entirety of somebody’s situation. Both features set these organizations apart from conventional medical establishments. For example, SACOMSS is pro-survivor, pro-feminist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-classist, queer-positive, and trans-positive. Even if you’re not a student at McGill, their services are open to anyone who feels like they have been effected by sexual assault, whether through their own experience or through someone they know. Large-scale, clinical institutions sacrifice an in-depth understanding of structural violence to keep the flow of patients moving quickly. “There are a lot of assumptions about who is sexually assaulted, and what sexual assault is,” said Andrea. “That comes back to issues of societal perceptions and structural imbalances.”

* * *

Months later, after slowly beginning to process what had happened to me, and hesitantly sharing with others, I began to think of ways I could start to actively heal outside of conversations. I wanted to help something come alive, to use my hands, to feel useful. I needed something life-affirming to counteract the destructiveness of abuse. When I felt myself deflating, and when I felt my life spinning away from me, I needed to feel close to growth to remind myself of the power of positive energy. I kept craving walks in the forest, tranquil and still, where my feet, used to the hard cement of the city, would bounce softly off of moss, rocks, and tree trunks. I have a garden in my home, and I almost intuitively gravitated toward it. I started slowly – weeding, creating space for new buds to breathe. As I moved on to planting new bulbs and vegetable seeds, I began to feel more relaxed, productive, and revived.

As it turns out, gardening is not such a bizarre hobby to turn to for survivors of emotional and physical violence. Like Head and Hands, horticulture therapy orients itself around holistic healing, and there has been significant success in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, social and domestic violence, isolation, childhood trauma, and even war-related trauma issues. As I was researching horticulture therapy, I kept noticing the analogies made between natural growth and human growth, like the cycles and interconnectedness of life. In partnership with the earth and imbued with ecological responsibility, I felt empowered and connected, a feeling so different from the violence, oppression, and domination that I associated with my worst memories. While I’m lucky to live at home and have a garden to myself, more and more urban gardens are sprouting all over Montreal. Santropol Roulant has rooftop gardens open to volunteers, or alternatively, there are local community plots in many neighbourhoods.

* * *

I had expected to be whisked off and out of the way as soon as I told the truth, but the Head and Hands nurse surprised me and took the time to listen. She told me not to apologize, she waited for me to mop up my face. When I was given a card with the name of a counsellor I could call, I was encouraged to take my time and call only when I felt ready. At this point in my journey, I wasn’t able to articulate my rape. Having someone who I considered a professional treat me like a person, however, was precisely what I needed.

You don’t necessarily need to be raped to feel as though your body is under attack. Some days we can ignore it, some days we can forget it, some days we may feel crippled by it, some days we can transform it. Alongside gardening, writing about my experiences has also been an invaluable part of my journey towards body positivity and self-love. Without the validation and community I found at Head and Hands, I may never have been able to open myself up and express how I felt. Everyone deserves the freedom and space to discover their own avenue toward healing. There may be no universal cure out there, but there are safe spaces we can turn to, and alternative, creative methods of healing that can rekindle our sense of personal possibility, keep our bodies vigorous, and keep our hearts in bloom.

*Names have been changed. 

Excerpts from theis feature were origionally published in the author’s zine. If you would like a copy, email claudia.alexander@mail.mcgill.

The post Healing, holistically appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The tension at the border between the United States and Mexico can best be described as an escalation.  The budget of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – which includes several sub-divisions such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol – has grown from $31.2 billion in 2003 to $50.5 billion in 2009. Since 2005 alone, the number of ICE agents has increased sixfold. Out of Washington and on the desert ground, these numbers manifest themselves in the number of green-striped Border Patrol SUV cruisers, surveillance helicopters, soaring Air Force drones, walls, fences, and agents.

And for those on the other side? There has been an unprecedented increase in jail and detention facilities for apprehended migrants, and deaths. However you quantify “it,” there’s more of “it” now than there has ever been. While all these escalations are interconnected, it’s the last one that brought me to Arivaca.

For two weeks in June this past summer, I volunteered for Tucson-based No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes, a non-profit organization which strives to offer humanitarian aid to migrants who endure severe dehydration and hunger hiking through the desert. On our “water drops,” we strategically place gallons of water and food packets throughout the Sonoran desert, while carefully documenting specific areas that migrants pass through.

Even now, weeks later, I find myself thinking about the term “low-intensity war zone,” as a No More Deaths organizer referred to it on our first day of orientation. It is a provocative phrase, yet unfortunately apt at describing the reality of between 300 and 400 migrant deaths on the border each year. In the area where I worked with No More Deaths, works in, the average is one death every other day.

 ***

After a day of water drops, we came upon two women emerging from the desert near camp. One woman was in her thirties and the other was a good amount younger, maybe in her early twenties or even late teens. They were both in terrible shape. Dehydrated, exhausted, confused, and scared. I internally panicked, as one does the first few times they come across people in the desert – be it migrants, ranchers, Border Patrol, or other government agents.

No More Deaths volunteers have been brought to court for crossing the delicate line between attempting to provide help for people in emergency medical situations and aiding a person’s illegal entry into the United States. In all cases, No More Deaths has won. However, the Border Patrol monitors all emergency phone calls, and agents often show up when they suspect the emergency call involves an undocumented migrant. Undocumented persons are taken into the Border Patrol’s custody immediately, where their medical treatment is at the Patrol’s discretion.

Seemingly out of embarrassment, the young woman did not immediately tell anyone that she was pregnant. She later told us she had not felt the baby kick in 48 hours. The two women had only found each other coincidentally. They were not traveling with the same group. Abandoned by their “coyote” – often a lower-level member of a drug cartel who guides migrants from Mexico to the U.S. – because they could not keep up with the pace of their respective groups, they were left to die. Dehydration and hunger aside, women face even greater danger, considering “as many as 70 per cent of women crossing the border face sexual assault,” according to journalist Tim Vanderpool of the Tuscon Weekly.  Long-term No More Deaths volunteers give similar estimates based on conversations with migrants in the desert, and those recently deported from migrant resource centers in the Mexican border towns of Nogales and Agua Prieta.

After an arduous three-week process in which I attempted to interview a Tucson sector Border Patrol agent, I finally received an email statement from Agent Brent Cagen after it had been cleared with the agency’s branch chief of external communications. When asked about the Border Patrol’s response to medical emergencies and sexual assault, he replied, “All individuals apprehended by the Tucson Sector Border Patrol are evaluated at the time of apprehension.  Tucson Sector has more than 200 Border Patrol agents certified as emergency medical technicians and all agents are trained as first responders to render aid to anyone in need of medical assistance. Agents in the field take all necessary precautions and make the proper notifications for anyone requesting and/or requiring medical treatment.”

Like many of their answers, the response seemed dry and devoid of any human compassion, while almost completely skirting around certain issues. Extensive and systemic abuse of migrants by Border Patrol has been documented in No More Deaths’ “Culture of Cruelty” report, which was published last year. Compared to the photos I had seen of the broken knee of a migrant who had been refused medical attention, and other countless examples of untreated physical impairment in “Culture of Cruelty,” the Border Patrol’s words felt hollow.

 ***

Everyone who makes the journey through the Sonoran desert, which covers most of the border between Mexico and the states of Arizona and and California, suffers somewhere on the spectrum of dehydration. The body needs a gallon of water a day at the absolute minimum to avoid dehydration, but often more because of the physical and emotional exertion that crossing through the border entails. The journey through the desert can take three to five days, or even several more as the Border Patrol utilizes tactics to separate travelers and push them to the more dangerous edges of the desert.

Besides increased surveillance at the least rugged points of entry, helicopters “dust” migrants. By attempting to land close to a group of migrants, the helicopter’s propellers lift the desert sand off the ground, and often dogs are sent chasing after the disoriented and scattering migrants. As a tactic of border enforcement, it’s neither a good deterrent nor helpful at bringing migrants into custody. As a means of making the border more dangerous – and migrants more prone to isolation and death – it is highly successful.

Furthermore, a gallon of water is very heavy. It is nearly impossible to carry enough water to even maintain a semblance of hydration, let alone the amount of food needed. No More Deaths focuses on leaving water, food packs, buckets of blankets and socks in highly trafficked areas for migrants. We write messages and draw hearts on the water jugs to demonstrate that they are not traps. We try to humanize a dehumanizing experience. Empty jugs let us know that the migrants are receiving our aid, and they always express gratitude when we run into them. Abandoned clothes, backpacks, and food wrappers are simple signs of life in the beautiful but miserable Sonoran desert.

Yet, the cynic in me just had to ask: “Does the border patrol ever dump our water or use it?” One of the facilitator’s responded bluntly: Yes, they do. In fact, long-term volunteers have told me that their water has been getting slashed for years, but that last summer was potentially the worst since the organization’s start in 2004. They commented that about half of all water left last summer was getting slashed, and at some drop points, all of it. When asked what the Border Patrol’s relationship was with humanitarian aid groups prior to incidents of water slashing, Cagen responded, “The Tucson sector appreciates the additional eyes and ears that humanitarian groups provide for our operations. Unfortunately, too often, smugglers will disregard the safety and security of those they are guiding and use the water stations for their own consumptions.”

Yet their response evades explanation of the slashed jugs No More Deaths continuously find. We keep extensive and detailed logs of each stop, each day. The logs enable us to know how much water is “moving,” so we know how much to leave next time, which is usually two or three days later. It is unlikely that the coyotes drink all the water, considering we leave anywhere between four gallons and twenty-gallons or sometimes more at each spot. The second reason such logs are kept is to document Border Patrol abuse. Every interaction with Border Patrol is logged, including, when possible, video, audio, and photos.

 ***

To understand the current status of the U.S./ Mexico border today, one must look back to the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. The former legally freed the movement of capital from the burdens of borders, while the latter severely restricted the legal movement of people between these same borders. Poverty increased drastically in Mexico because large American agriculture firms could sell at much lower prices, driving millions of Mexican farmers off their land and into the hands of those same American farms.  With this surge of migration, border enforcement increased significantly and strategically shifted migrants to the most dangerous parts of the border, As a result, border-related deaths increased as well, with nine reported deaths in 1990 to over 300 a year for the past five years. All the while, apprehensions (arrests) have dramatically decreased every year since 2007. This means that the ratio of deaths to apprehensions has actually increased, so while less people are captured crossing the border, more of them are dying.

At No More Deaths, we are primarily concerned with migrants while they are in the desert, and their subsequent court cases are not directly part of our work. However, we discuss, and lay witness to, the life of migrants outside the desert. Since 2001, the number of immigration prosecutions has tripled. More migrants than ever are being put through the criminal justice system. In fact, there have been over one million deportations – averaging 40,000 a year – during the first three years of Barack Obama’s term, which is more deportations than George W. Bush oversaw during the entire eight years he was in office.

This massive spike in prosecutions is neither nameless nor without a financial incentive.  Created under George Bush’s Department of Homeland Security, Operation Streamline is highly profitable for those in the business of immigration and criminal detention and imprisonment. It removes discretion from prosecutors for cases involving undocumented migrants, the vast majority for illegal entry or low-level offenses such as traffic violations. This means nearly all those who are apprehended are brought through the criminal justice system and charged with either first time unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, or repeated unauthorized entry, or a felony.

 ***

On my last day with No More Deaths, a long-time volunteer and a few first-time volunteers, including myself, went to the courthouse in Tucson. Every week day at 1:30 p.m., up to seventy undocumented migrants plead guiltyto either illegal entry, or illegal re-entry (the most commonly filed federal charge), and then are sent to jail for between thirty and 180 days. We walk through metal detectors, up an elevator, and then wait outside the courtroom until the doors open and they let us in.

All the migrants wear the same clothes they were wearing when they were apprehended. They also wear handcuffs, ankle cuffs, and earphones that translate the court proceedings from English into Spanish. The judge calls up the first group of six defendants, as all migrants in Tucson are charged in groups of six (or up to eighty at a time in Del Rio, Texas). Each of the six defendants has a lawyer that stands with them. Each lawyer in Tucson, as a part of Operation Streamline, can only represent six defendants a day. This is not the case outside of Tucson, where there are much looser restrictions. The migrants meet with their lawyer for the first time for about a half hour before the trial begins, wherein the lawyer must explain to them what they are being charged with. The lawyers advise migrants to take the plea offered by the United States government whereby the felony charge is dropped for re-entry and instead they plea guilty to the misdemeanor charge of illegal entry. Simply put: less jail time.

Although Spanish translations are available, many of the defendants only speak indigenous languages that are not accommodated by the legal system. I watched a man from Guatemala, who spoke neither English nor Spanish, nod his head when asked questions until it became apparent to the judge that he did not understand what he was being asked. The lawyer pulled him aside, found the means to communicate that he should say “si” and the judge was satisfied this constituted adequate comprehension on part of the defendant. The six defendants in each group were all asked the same questions at the same time, which was found to be unconstitutional in Arizona. However, the Constitution tends to slip when “it’s been a long week,” as a frustrated public defender said with a sigh.

This process repeats itself a few more times, and after about 45 minutes (some judges in Operation Streamline pride themselves in how quickly they can bring court proceedings to an end) the trial is over.

All of the migrants that day came from immigration detention facilities, half of which are owned by private prison corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. After their sentencing, they are then sent to prisons, an increasing number of which are run by said corporations. Since 1999, migrants have been targeted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a body to which prison corporations contribute large sums. While I don’t have the ability to draw a direct correlation between prisons companies and ALEC, it certainly seems suspicious. After this legally sanctioned spectacle, I left the courthouse perhaps never having felt more furious and hopeless. Operation Streamline seems like an unstoppable force, running on racial hostility and private prison profits.

 ***

There is no white-savior mentality at the No More Deaths camp in Arivaca. Everyone there knows that hiking through the desert and leaving water on the most heavily trafficked migrant trails is not directly addressing the systemic issues that cause these border deaths. It does seek, with much success, to address the most immediate needs of the migrants.

The volunteers and migrants, when possible, talk. Sometimes we talk about how the slashing of water by Border Patrol is most certainly responsible for the devastation for dehydrated migrants who come across them, and death for those who needed them. We often talk about strategies, from immediate harm reduction to long-term systemic change. Matthew Johnson, a long-time volunteer for No More Deaths, recently told me in an email that “there are all kinds of policy changes that, if implemented, could vastly improve the situation,” such as putting an end to Operation Streamline and immigration detention, and legislating the “full regularization of status for those living in the U.S. without documentation.” However, he concedes that “certain sectors of the economic elite” profit from this system of prevention, detention, incarceration, and deportation. For Johnson, the key is “growing community power and strategizing creatively so that we might one day tip the scales in favor of those of us who believe in humanity over profit.”

I met a few migrants that I think about quite often. One in particular told me about his wife and daughter, and how much he missed them. His story is not unlike many others I have heard before. He spent many years living the U.S., went back home to visit his sick mother and is now returning to the U.S. Others have said they  hardly know anyone in their home country, and deportation would make them a total stranger. He asked what Montreal was like and if I thought he could get a job there. I think about him a lot – what I would do if I saw him and how afraid I am for him and the millions of others living without documentation. Despite their fear of deportation and the vitriolic and hateful rhetoric of both the powerful and the weak in North America, many of the migrants I interacted with spoke with courage and humility. The world migrants face is hostile and violent, and it is painful to see it legislated, enforced, prosecuted and pushed into the invisible terrain of the Sonoran desert, where millions have passed and thousands have died.

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Today, many journalists, doctors, and the general public see the Allan Memorial Institute in Royal Victoria Hospital as the cradle of modern torture, a cradle built and rocked by Scottish-born Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. To the patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, our university was the site of months of seemingly unending torture disguised as medical experimentation –– an experimentation that destroyed their lives and changed the course of psychological torture forever.

Cameron’s experiments, known as MK-ULTRA subproject 68, were partially funded by the CIA and the Canadian government, and are widely known for their use of LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines on patients. In the media, they were known as the “mind control” studies done at McGill and were reported as a brainwashing conspiracy from the CIA and the Canadian government. For journalists, the story was a goldmine. LSD use in a CIA experiment was an angle no sensationalist media could reject, especially in the anti-drug frenzy of the 1960s. However, these studies were much more complex than a Timothy Leary scare in la belle ville.

At its worst, the prolonged periods of sensory deprivation and induced sleep used in the experiments left many patients in a child-like mental state, even years after the experiments were finalized. Even today, remnants of Cameron’s experiments at the Allan Memorial appear in torture methods at places like Guantanamo Bay.

A Tale of Two Doctors

This story begins on June 1, 1951 at a secret meeting in the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Sherbrooke. The purpose of the meeting was to launch a joint American-British-Canadian effort led by the CIA to fund studies on sensory deprivation. In attendance was Dr. Donald Hebb, then director of psychology at McGill University, who received a grant of $10,000 to study sensory deprivation. It would be fifteen years after this meeting at the Ritz that Cameron would disastrously pick up where Hebb left off.

Dr. Hebb paid a group of his own psychology students to remain isolated in a room, deprived of all senses, for an entire day. In an attempt to determine a link between sensory deprivation and the vulnerability of cognitive ability, Hebb also played recordings of voices expressing creationist or generally anti-scientific sentiments – clearly, ideas psychology students would oppose. However, the prolonged period of sensory deprivation made the students overly susceptible to sensory stimulation. Students suddenly became very tolerant of the ideas that they had readily dismissed before. As a history professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy described in his book, A Question of Torture, that during Hebb’s own experiments “the subject’s very identity had begun to disintegrate.” One can only fathom the cognitive effects of Hebb’s work.

Yet, Hebb was more Dr. Jekyll than Mr. Hyde. According to McCoy’s research, Hebb was described as a gifted man whose ingenuity revolutionized psychology as a science; in fact, seven years after the publication of this research, McGill University and the American Psychological Association nominated him for a Nobel Prize.

Unknowingly, Hebb reached conclusions that would set the agenda for CIA investigation on emerging techniques of psychological torture and interrogation. Five years later, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, this story’s Mr. Hyde, entered, with an unstoppable will to finish what Hebb had started.

When Cameron started his research, he was the head of the Allan Memorial, which at the time was McGill’s psychiatric treatment facility. Although they were separate legal entities, the Royal Victoria Hospital and McGill were unequivocally bound through their medical professionals. Cameron received a salary from McGill but was medically responsible to the hospital. Besides his work on campus, he was a world-renowned professor and a leading figure in the psychological sciences, serving as president of multiple psychiatric associations.

It was determination and ambition that made Cameron a world-renowned psychiatrist. During his most controversial experiments, he strove to break barriers in the understanding of mental illness, but at the expense of his patients’ well-being. In a report to the Canadian government in the mid 1980s, sources reveal that Cameron was “ruthless, determined, aggressive, and domineering … He seemed not to have the ability to deeply empathize with their [patients] problems or their situation.”

When the whistle blew on Allan Memorial, Cameron’s stern portrait turned into the  evil stare of a “mad scientist,” as media reports explained the nature of his research.

MK-ULTRA Subproject 68 

Cameron’s research was based on the ideas of “re-patterning” and “re-mothering” the human mind. He believed that mental illness was a consequence of an individual having learned “incorrect” ways of responding to the world. These “learned responses” created “brain pathways” that led to repetitive abnormal behaviour.

Dr. Cameron wanted to de-pattern patients’ minds with the application of highly disruptive electroshock twice a day, as opposed to the norm of three times a week. According to him, this would break all incorrect brain pathways, thus de-patterning the mind. Some call it brainwashing; Cameron called it re-patterning.

He held the view that mental illness was also a result of poor mothering. Thus the de-patterning processes rendered the patient’s mind in a child-like state and through re-patterning the patient could be “re-mothered.”

With this framework in mind, Dr. Cameron set out to prove his theory using questionable methods on unwitting patients.

Step 1: To prepare them for the de-patterning treatment, patients would be put into a state of prolonged sleep for about ten days using various drugs, after which they experienced an invasive electroshock therapy that lasted for about 15 days. But patients were not always prepared for re-patterning and sometimes Cameron used extreme forms of sensory deprivation as well.

Cameron described the experience: “there is not only a loss of the space-time image but a loss of all feeling that should be present…in more advanced forms [the patient] may be unable to walk without support, to feed himself, and he may show double incontinence.”

Step 2: Following the preparation period and the de-patterning came the process of “psychic driving” or re-patterning, in which Cameron would play messages on tape recorders to his patients. He alternated negative messages about the patients’ lives and personalities with positive ones; these messages could be repeated up to half a million times.

Kubark, or how the CIA learned to torture

The experiments done at McGill were part of the larger MK-ULTRA project led by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA. In 1963, the year in which MK-ULTRA ended, the CIA compiled all the research into a torture manual called the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Handbook. Yes, a “torture manual” that would eventually define the agency’s interrogation methods and training programs throughout the developing world.

The Kubark, which is nowadays readily available, cites the experiments conducted at McGill as one of the main sources of its techniques for sensory deprivation. The document presents some eerie conclusions. An excerpt from the instructions to CIA interrogators reads, “Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light, which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, et cetera,” In essence, the psychological paradigm taken by the CIA would not have been possible without Hebb and Cameron’s research on sensory deprivation and psychic driving.

With names like MK-ULTRA and Kubark, these experiments sound like they are out of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Hebb and Cameron’s work feel so far removed from modern North American life. However, there is strong indication these methods have been used in the United States of America. Following 9/11, the war on terror and the generalized fearmongering that ensued, the Bush administration changed the rules of the game out of concern for homeland security. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved special practices that included the “use of isolation facility for up to thirty days.” All of a sudden, the U.S. allowed the use of torture methods developed just up University.

Lawsuits

Only decades later, in the 1980s, did past victims speak about their experiences, and by the nineties, the lawsuits began to pile up. In response, the Canadian government launched “The Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” which provided $100,000 to each of the former patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron. The compensation came from a recommendation by lawyer George Cooper, in which he clarified that the Canadian government did not have a legal responsibility for what happened, but a moral responsibility.

A week ago, I met with Alan Stein, a Montreal lawyer who has handled some of the most notable cases of Dr. Cameron’s patients against the Allan Memorial and the Canadian government.

Stein is an affable and zealous man whose passion for the practice of law became evident after few minutes of meeting him. Sitting at a big table, in what perhaps was the office boardroom, Stein showed me his signed copy of prominent Canadian author Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. On the cover she had scribbled, “To the lawyer who had the guts to take on the shock doctors and win.” Stein’s cases have set important precedents for former patients of Dr. Cameron trying to receive compensation. He has been one of the most important figures in offering Cameron’s victims some peace of mind. To this day, Stein receives calls and emails from people seeking compensation.

Curiously enough, Stein is also a man in full dedication to his work, in the same vein as Hebb and Cameron but with different results. As he recited by memory the many MK-ULTRA cases he has handled and talked about each of them as if they were still happening, I came to notice a connection between these three men. Hebb, Cameron, and Stein, in their respective eras, had the same relentless determination to their occupation. However, what set them apart so vastly was their morals and in a sense, their ability (or inability) to empathize with other individuals.

Legacy for McGill University

When the news broke of the true nature of Cameron’s research, McGill University and Allan Memorial were the names on everyone’s lips. A respected educational and research institution had hosted some truly macabre events and shaped the course of torture methods for many years to come.

As Abraham Fuks, Research Integrity Officer and former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, explained to me in an email, the ethical framework for research has undergone vast changes in the past half a century. Since the seventies and early eighties, Canada and McGill have a regulatory framework for the ethical conduct of research with various mechanisms to ensure its implementation. New rules, stricter journals, and peer reviews are set to uphold medical standards.

Cameron’s research at the Allan Memorial could not be possibly carried out today. With hindsight, it is easy to condemn Cameron, Hebb, and possibly every person associated with the MK-ULTRA project. Although some of these men deserve condemnation, it is important to recognize our own privileged position: A position with more information and a different set of values in which judging the past almost happens by default.

But the legacy lives on, and what Cameron did fifty years ago will always be part of our collective consciousness and identity. Unmistakably, reviewing dark stages of our history exposes the volatility and fragility of the research conducted  not only at McGill, but at all universities. This story highlights the importance of criticism on all types of research done at this institution, be it military, pharmaceutical, or medical: every piece of research will impact lives and perhaps change the course of humanity.

It’s likely that 50 years from now, a bigheaded student journalist with the gift of hindsight will denounce a McGill research project that is currently underway. On that day, we will be accountable for letting it happen.

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Like any middle-class kid with two working parents, I attended a series of day camps and then graduated to those hardcore, month-long stints at overnight camps. One of the latter was cut tragically short by a regrettable tumble, resulting in a broken tibia and thigh-high purple cast. With exceptions such as these, I relatively enjoyed my time at camp. However, I wish to tell you  about the unwritten narrative of camp: the trials and tribulations of being a 20-something camp counsellor in Montreal. A day-camp counsellor, at a very expensive day-camp.

In a sudden fit of independence, I opted to stay in the city and try to get a summer job instead of returning to the comforts of home and scooping ice cream in Toronto. Trolling through the McGill career planning website yielded few results beyond postings for teaching English in Korea or agricultural surveying in nowheresville, Quebec.

One day, however, I stumbled across a posting for a counsellor position at a day camp in Cote-des-Neiges, a neighborhood I knew very little about. But I didn’t care – the thought of spending eight weeks sunning myself and flirting with male counselors was incredibly appealing. Within weeks, I was called for an interview. After carefully assembling what I deemed to be both a child-appropriate and professional outfit, and lying about my bilingualism, the director offered me the job. His final question: “What age group would you like to work with?” Considering that my athletic skill level is equivalent to that of a five-year-old, I answered accordingly.

Finals come and go. I buy a new pair of running shoes. Day One at Camp. After a brief and insufficient rundown of the camp’s policy from the diva-esque manager of the toddler section, it was time to meet the campers.

The poorly executed themed days and the overly-sexed staff nights are hardly interesting compared to the antics of the campers I came to know this summer, and more importantly, their parents. It is hard to remember exactly what it was like to be five years old. What motivated you to do the things you did? In my “bunk,” there were the usual suspects, those rambunctious, energetic boys who don’t respond well to purely female authority. But there were a few kids in particular who really brought something unique to the table.

One boy, let’s call him The Aggressor, actually got kicked out of camp because he displayed such a sense of ferocity and – let’s just call a spade a spade – gross misconduct. You might be wondering, what could a five-year-old do that was that bad? Firstly, he performed what we could only call a non-sexual, non-consensual golden shower. He relieved himself in a YOP  bottle during lunch hour then proceeded to sprinkle it over his peers. How would someone even think of this? It was so deliberate, so much more premeditated than simply peeing on the kids he didn’t like. This incident was paired with The Aggressor breaking another kid’s nose with a well-aimed roundhouse kick.

Events like these were interspersed with the usual volley of uncontrollable bowel movements. Needless to say, I learned the phrase “Il y a du brun dans mes pantalons” the hard way. No story is ever really good without at least one reference to fecal matter, but let’s get back to the kids.

One day, I sat The Aggressor down after a particularly violent display of martial arts and asked him why he hit the other kids so much. From what I could piece together from my dicey French, I came to understand that this five-year-old boy was claiming that his father encouraged him to always retaliate, to never let anyone have the last punch (or roundhouse kick, for that matter). I have no idea if this was true, but honesty from children reads as clearly and faithfully as the dictionary. I learned I would have to watch the parents as closely as their kids.

In every group, classroom or bunk, there is always THAT kid. You know, the one who is always the center of attention, the proverbial Bart Simpson. The kids love ’em and the adults hate ’em. My Bart Simpson was always picked up by a nanny, leaving me to wonder about his life once Mary Poppins had gone home. One Friday, Bart was getting picked up early for a weekend vacay in the Berkshires, so we got to meet the folks. Enter Dad: purple shirt, overly tan skin, and overly oiled hair. In terms of stature and demeanor, he was very Danny DeVito meets Napoleon. He strutted over through the sea of parents, eyes never leaving his Blackberry, and waved away my attempts to get his signature on the mandatory sign out sheet; “Don’t worry, they know me here.” Suddenly, it all made sense. The iPhone little Bart “accidentally” brought to camp, the sense of entitlement this kid displayed, came directly from Daddy. This epiphany however, did nothing to lessen my hatred for the little Bart (or was it Brat)?

Here, another poignant example of the childishness of parents: This kid arrived late on the first day, flanked by a bickering Mom and Dad. The mother took me aside to explain how her son had gone through a traumatic experience in the pool and that I should, under no circumstances, force him to swim. Moments later, his father took me aside to explain that I should force his son to swim in order to help him conquer his phobia. His mother then called a second sidebar to press her previous point and whisper confidentially, “As you have probably noticed, my husband and I are divorced.” Duh, thanks lady. The kid in question was as disinterested, uninvolved, and as apathetic as a five-year-old could be. When his mother came to pick him up, she would wax poetic about what a good little tennis player her son was, then flip the switch and berate me about how her husband had signed their kid up for five weeks of camp instead of spending time with him. When his father picked him up, he would tell me how much fun his son was having, then grill me like porterhouse steak about his progress in swim and “ockey.” The father registered his son at the camp with one surname and when the mother would call in to leave a memo, he suddenly had two.

In the weeks that passed, there were countless other instances where parents unconsciously, yet aggressively, inserted themselves into the lives of their children. One little girl came running up to me in tears sobbing about how another boy had told her his dad would put her dad in jail. Another boy revealed that he much preferred to stay at his father’s house because he had a bigger TV and more movies. It soon became a game for my co-counsellor and I to guess which mothers had boob jobs. (The trick, in case you were wondering, was to observe whether they perked to attention without the help of a bra.)

After days spent searching for lost underwear, and nights spent complaining to my friends, I had to ask myself: why do I even care about this? Every morning, my co-counsellor and I would sit on the metro, trying to convince ourselves that this was just a job, and that we shouldn’t let it infringe on our personal lives. It was a futile fight. Why did I find it necessary to tell and re-tell to anyone who would listen about the antics of these kids and their parents? Because, whether I liked it or not, I was invested. I ridiculed the parents so much because I was horrified at the way that these kids, at only five years of age, had started to turn into their spandex-clad, peroxided mothers, or their suit-wearing, Blackberry-wielding fathers. By observing the direct correlations between child and parent, I became acutely aware about how much power figures of authority exercise over children, and it bothered me.

There is an immutable difference between those who work at day camps and those who work at sleepaway camps. The latter can brag about wilderness fare, fire-making, taxidermy, or whatever you do out there, but day camp counsellor have an even harder job. I was privy to some of the most intimate and difficult relationships in children’s lives: the ones they share with their parents. It was a tricky balance of power for us, who had the kids all day, and the parents, who have them in the seemingly fleeting hours in between. Perhaps those repeat offender day camp counsellor are actually the truest counsellors of them all.

After all was said and done, the dodgeballs deflated and placed on the shelf, one of my superiors asked if I would return to work at camp next summer. I could only smile sheepishly. “I think I’ll head back to Toronto. I really miss my mom.”

The post Kids will be kids (and parents, too) appeared first on The McGill Daily.

At about 11 a.m., the train arrived at the U.S. border and made a routine stop. A team of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers boarded the train and advanced through each car, questioning passengers. Pascal had made this trip countless times before, so when a customs officer approached him, he didn’t give it a second thought.

But Pascal had never met Officer Tulip.

After looking over Pascal’s U.S. passport and customs declaration, Officer Tulip asked two simple questions: Where do you live, and why?

Pascal answered that he lived in Canada. He lived in Canada because that’s where he was pursuing a PhD in Islamic Studies.

Next, she asked him where he had traveled in the previous year, and he answered Jordan and Lebanon. He showed her his French passport (he’s a dual citizen) with the “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” stamp, and the Lebanese stamp with the little cedar tree on top.

That didn’t help. Officer Tulip immediately told him to grab his things and follow her to the train’s cafe car. Pascal gathered his luggage, but Officer Tulip carried the bag containing his laptop. At the time, he thought she was just being helpful.

In the cafe car, they were joined by five or six more CBP officers. Pascal sat across from Officer Tulip as she took out his laptop, turned it on, and asked him to enter his password, which he did.

As she scrolled through the contents of his computer, Pascal could only see her reaction. Officer Tulip signaled to her colleagues and pointed at something on the screen. She then turned to Pascal and demanded an explanation.

Pascal was now surrounded by half a dozen suspicious American border police, staring at photos – on his laptop – of Hamas and Hezbollah rallies.

Where had he gotten “this stuff,” Officer Tulip asked. Pascal explained that his PhD research is on the Shiites of modern Lebanon. This was not, in her books, a good answer. Finally, the officers told Pascal that he would have to leave the train with them.

“Take me off the train, I’ll walk back to Montreal,” Pascal offered. Given what he would go through in the next few hours, Pascal might well have preferred the walk.

Instead, he was frisked, with particular vigor around his genitals. Then he was handcuffed. Pascal winced.

As they led him off the train, the officers draped a coat over his bound wrists. They claimed it was to spare him the embarrassment of a perp walk. But as Pascal walked past the train’s windows, he tried to show the passengers that he was cuffed. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he wanted witnesses.

Pascal was then loaded into the back of a van. Oddly, as one of the officers tried to close the van’s side door, it fell clean off. It could have been a moment of levity in a grim situation. But Pascal didn’t dare laugh.

The Detention Cell

When they arrived at the Champlain Port of Entry, Pascal was put in a five-by-ten foot cell with cinder block walls and a steel-reinforced door. He was told to wait. He stayed in the cell for about an hour. Officers came in at random intervals to ask him questions.

“I thought I was going to throw up,” he said. “I thought I was going to be sent to Guantanamo Bay.”

Pascal was then removed from the cell and brought to an interrogation room, complete with florescent lighting and a two-way mirror. He sat across from two CBP officers – Officer Tulip and a man named Officer Sweet – while another officer sat at the end of the table, seemingly in case Pascal got violent.

“They thought I was straight-up dangerous,” Pascal said.

Then the real interrogation began, an hour and a half of intensive questioning. Where was he born? Where were his parents born? What religion was he raised with? Had he ever been to a rally in the Middle East? Had he heard any anti-American statements in the Middle East? Had he ever seen an American flag burned? Had he ever been to a mosque? But the questions always came back to the same point – why Islamic Studies?

“I want to be an academic – this is just what I happen to be an academic in,” Pascal told them.

His answers seemed to fall on deaf ears. The interrogation continued. It was the same questions, over and over. They were looking for him to make a mistake.

They soon fell into a good-cop, bad-cop routine.

“He thought I was cool,” Pascal said of Officer Sweet. Officer Tulip, on the other hand, “thought I was the most evil person. She thought I was a movie villain or something.”

They claimed Pascal’s dual citizenship made him untraceable. They suggested he was attractive “to both sides.” Pascal was baffled. Both sides of what?

Finally, after about three hours in detention, he was released. But there was a catch – the CBP was keeping his laptop and hard drive.

Pascal was enraged. While he had been waiting in the cell, Pascal had given some thought to what he would say to the officers once he was free. Now, with his anger compounded by the loss of his computer, Pascal delivered a blistering speech, directed at his arch-nemesis, Officer Tulip.

“I ripped into her,” he said. “She just stood there, [then] walked away.”

When an FBI agent came up to him and attempted to apologize, Pascal stopped him mid-sentence. “I don’t want to hear your apology,” he told the agent.

Before he left, he was given his camera and his two cell phones. There was a scratch on the back of one of the phones, as if someone had tried to open it.

Taking Legal Action

After being released from detention, Pascal hitched a ride on the next bus with an open seat that came through the checkpoint. He arrived in New York at midnight. That night, he had trouble sleeping, as he would have for the next week or so.

The next morning, he sat down and wrote eleven single-spaced pages detailing exactly what had happened to him. The day after that, he began making phone calls to state senators and advocacy organizations in the hope of finding someone who would help him. Lots of them were interested in his case, including Anthony Weiner, the former New York Congressman.

Finally, Pascal settled on the ACLU. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the oldest and largest civil liberties organization in the United States. Free speech cases are its bread and butter. And they told Pascal that his right to free speech, protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, had been violated.

Two days after his first phone call with the ACLU, Pascal was in downtown Manhattan, sitting in a meeting with a team of lawyers. The first thing they did was to write a letter to the CBP demanding that they return Pascal’s laptop. The day after the letter was sent, Pascal got a call from the CBP asking him where they should overnight his belongings.

But at this point, the damage was done. When the laptop arrived in the mail, the seam between the keyboard and the outer case that led to the internal hard drive appeared to have widened. The warranty seal on his external hard drive had been broken open, too. The government had already searched, and, they later conceded, made copies of Pascal’s electronic life.

Pascal and the ACLU were incensed. His laptop contained intimate personal information: chat logs with his girlfriend, university transcripts, his tax returns.

The problem was, everything Homeland Security had done was completely by the book.

The Policy

In August 2009, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a policy that allows for the search and seizure of electronic devices at the border without reasonable suspicion. Under the policy, the DHS can detain any electronic device indefinitely, and copy and share the information it contains. Between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, more than 6,500 people had their electronic devices searched at U.S. border stops.

It was under this policy that Pascal’s laptop and hard drive were searched and detained.

Upon the enactment of the policy, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that, “keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States. The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers, while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”

The policy makes a point of specifying that, “at no point during a border search of electronic devices is it necessary to ask the traveler for consent to search.”

This struck the ACLU as deeply unconstitutional. So they and Pascal decided to sue Janet Napolitano, Director of Homeland Security, to challenge the constitutionality of the policy.

In September 2010, they filed their “complaint” against Napolitano, the legal document that kicks off a lawsuit. The ACLU argued that the DHS policy violates the First and Fourth Amendments, which guarantee free speech and protection against unreasonable search and seizure respectively.

The U.S. government tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that while Pascal’s story was true, the government’s actions had not broken any laws.

On the question of the Fourth Amendment, the government effectively said that just about any kind of search is legal at the border, in the name of national sovereignty.

“Searches made at the border, pursuant to the long standing right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border,” the government wrote in its Motion to Dismiss, the legal maneuver for getting a case thrown out.

With regard to the First Amendment, the Motion to Dismiss stated that, “an otherwise valid search under the Fourth Amendment, does not violate the First Amendment rights of an individual – even a completely innocent individual – simply because the search uncovers expressive material.”

In other words, a border search is a border search is a border search.

And it’s true that all travelers are subject to a routine search at the border, whether or not there’s suspicion of wrongdoing.

But while the U.S. government argues that the search of laptops should be considered a part of these routine searches, the ACLU says these searches are more invasive and therefore must be held to a higher standard.

“It is different to go through someone’s shoes and contact solution, than to go through all the documents on their computer,” said Catherine Crump, one of Pascal’s ACLU lawyers.

Last July, Pascal and his ACLU lawyers went to a courtroom in Brooklyn to argue against throwing out their case. The judge has still not come to a decision.

Meanwhile, the DHS policy remains on the books. Laptops and cell phones continue to be detained and searched without reasonable suspicion at the U.S. border.

Pascal, for his part, hasn’t had a normal border-crossing since that May 1 morning. “Now, every time I cross the border, I get harassed,” he said.

In December 2010, he was crossing the border with his father. The border guards began interrogating him in unusual ways. “They refused to believe my dad was my dad,” he said. “If you saw my dad, you could not believe we were not related.”

The guards then searched the car top to bottom, and made the Abidors wait at the checkpoint for two hours.

“This is about lowering the threshold of what is acceptable to us,” Pascal said of his treatment at the hands of the CBP. “You can’t have rights and then selectively apply them.”

The post Why you shouldn’t tell American border guards you’re in Islamic Studies appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Robert Lindblad is not a conventional career man. For one thing, he doesn’t carry a business card, despite having worked the same job for over twenty years. He used to busk on Montreal street corners but he gave that up to focus on more lucrative pursuits. Some days, when he needs extra cash to pay his phone bill, he’ll go around knocking on strangers’ doors, trying to sell a five-dollar CD of instrumental music he recorded. (He calls it a mix of New Age and techno and has submitted it to the Junos this year. To me, it sounds like the music that plays in planetariums while solar systems project onto the ceiling, or the soundtrack of a sperm whale’s life played in slow motion.)

It was during one of these entrepreneurial jaunts that I met him. He didn’t have to knock; I was on the way out of my Plateau apartment and opened the door to find him standing directly in front of me. He was holding the CD out like he knew I was coming, though that might just be retrospective conjecture on my part.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed. After apologizing quickly, Lindblad began his pitch. Looking back, I probably couldn’t have been less prepared for what he was about to say.

Lindblad is not physically imposing: he’s short, probably about five-foot-four, and smiles at strangers. He has been semi-paralyzed since being hit by a car in 1969, which gives him a limp and curved back. His introduction was so casual that I had to ask him to repeat it. For a second time, he said, “I’m a psychic who finds missing children.”

Later, after having heard him say it ten or so times, I realized that the phrase was an important signifier for Lindblad. It has been his means of self-identification since he was struck by a strange epiphany more than two decades ago. He repeats it almost compulsively as he tells stories about himself. Those stories are full of holes, elisions, and likely exaggerations – they’re self-mythology. But they have an internal, narrative logic, too. The gospel according to Lindblad.

***

Linblad says he’s not sure if he was born a psychic. He grew up in Dorval, a small city on the island of Montreal, in the sixties. His childhood was pretty typical – his mother was a hospital receptionist and his father was a computer scientist who worked, he recalls, “on those big, big computers” that looked like HAL’s motherboard in 2001: A Space Odyssey but were cutting edge back then. He also had two siblings.

He claims that in the years before his car accident he was a petulant kid, whose youthful vigour occasionally degenerated into violence. His close friend Gilbert Girio is more blunt: “He told me the kids thought he was an asshole.” Once, when he was in kindergarten, he says he threw a desk at a teacher who had dared to keep him in detention after class.

Then, one day, when Lindblad was seven, two kids beckoned him to cross Cardinal Ave. in Dorval to see a bunch of tadpoles swimming in a ditch. As he ran across the road, he was struck by a speeding car. The car dragged him a dozen feet before launching his small body through the air. He landed in the ditch on the other side of the road, next to the tadpoles.

“I was in a coma for a month and dead for one minute,” Lindblad recalls. He says his mother stayed by his side throughout that long month, singing to him day and night. The doctors thought he might not make it.

“I woke up to nurses in miniskirts,” he says. “That was so great. You know you want to live when you wake up to that. Remember, that was the sixties.”

He remembers one of the nurses giving him the Meet the Monkees EP and a Flinstones record. And he remembers a feeling of change coming over him – the crisis fading and the epiphany setting in. He was only a boy, but he had almost died, and he never wanted to hurt anyone again.

Pacifism has no place in an elementary school playground. The fists and insults of the less enlightened kids stung just as much. As he recalls in his online Psychic Autobiography he remained resolute even as several assailants beat him at once. He claims he cried only because the idea of “punching them out” was so upsetting.

This was the first of several crises that threatened to derail Lindblad’s life, which were each followed and redeemed by life-changing epiphanies.

***

After graduating from St. Thomas High School, Lindblad moved to Pierrefonds, a borough on the northwest tip of the island, where crisis found him again. He says that one afternoon in 1982, almost a decade before he became aware of his psychic power, he was troubled by spontaneous visions of green flames. That night his apartment complex burned to the ground.

As Lindblad recalls, he woke up in the middle of the night to discover that the empty apartment across from his was on fire. He ran through the halls waking people up and getting them out of the building. Later, he stood outside and watched helplessly as flames consumed the complex – the water in the hydrants was frozen solid.

Lindblad told Girio about incidents like these in which he experienced preternatural visions that seemed to foreshadow the future with strange accuracy. Girio, who already had an interest in “that esoteric stuff,” eventually decided that Lindblad would make a good dowser.

Dowsing is a form of divination (from the Latin divinare: “to foresee, to be inspired by god”) that involves the use of a stick or pendulum to read energy or radiation emanating from people, places, and inanimate objects. It’s a particularly popular brand of pseudoscience, or “woo-woo,” to use the terminology of prominent skeptic and author James Randi. Randi’s foundation, the JREF, is currently offering US$1 million to anyone who can show “under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” So far, no one has walked away with the money.

The history of dowsing and its siblings is full of charismatic cranks. A practitioner of “radionics” named Dr. Albert Abrams claimed that he could use a machine he invented called The Dynomizer to cure any disease with a drop of a patient’s blood. A British antiquarian named T.C. Lethbridge maintained that he used a pendulum to discover three massive ancient chalk engravings on the side of some hills near Cambridge, England. One of them, a human-looking figure, looks like it’s been defiled by an English schoolboy: the chalk outline depicts a giant curve-tipped erection and two perfectly round chalk testicles.

Girio had been experimenting with these techniques himself with little success. Lindblad, on the other hand, was a natural. The first night he experimented with dowsing, nine years after his apartment had burned to the ground, he says he used a pendulum to find quarters Girio had hidden under books while he was out of the room. They did this over and over again until four or five in the morning. “The chances of him finding something like that was [sic] just astronomical,” Girio reflects. “It started to become pretty obvious that this was something that seemed to transcend space, at least.”

Girio still occasionally calls Lindblad to ask him help find things he’s lost around his house. He says Lindblad isn’t always right about these things, but his opinion is “worthwhile.”

Back in 1991, on that fateful night when Lindblad found coins for hours on end, he had another epiphany. This one would change his life for good. It would be more useful to him than the Political Science B.A. he earned from Concordia that same year. The thought came to him automatically: “I’ve got to find missing children.”

***

Lindblad has been running Child Search, his own not-for-profit business, ever since. He says he solved a triple murder in Vancouver on his first day on the job. That, he claims, was the first of over 2000 missing children cases he’s solved, many of which involved kidnapping, torture, sexual assault, and murder. He approaches these abject cases as more than the collection of menial tasks that make up other jobs; they constitute the bulk – even the meaning – of his life.

On a typical day, Lindblad will sit down in front of a computer for ten hours, often more, and often well into the night, googling Amber Alerts for recently abducted children. When he finds a worthwhile case (the criteria are pretty broad – missing child? Check. Somewhere on Earth? Check.), he says he channels his psychic visions to locate the missing child. The routine is only broken by eating, sleeping, making music, and spending time with his girlfriend. Occasionally he takes the night off and goes to Foufounes Électrique, which he calls “the Foufe.”

His visions, as he describes them, are not spontaneous – he consciously channels them through feats of concentration, occasionally with the help of a pendulum, map, or a photo of the missing person. When the visions come, he says he has a bird’s eye view of the crime, the scene, and the perpetrator or the victim. (“It’s like you’re on top looking down at a movie.”) Apparently, he can learn various facts about the crime in an instant – from a victim’s location to a killer’s age, eye colour, and weight.

When he’s collected this information, he calls the police. In 1998, he was interviewed on the Québecois news show Journalistes Enquêtères, after he told two parents where to find the body of their son, who had been missing for over a month. During the case, twenty psychics contacted the parents with information about the boy, Samuel Maynard. Each of the psychics claimed to have “seen” him in a variety of places (in a truck…or an invisible clay house…or somewhere in Ontario). Lindblad was the only one to say the boy had drowned in the Rivière Sauvage in Lambton, QC. An article in the Journal de Montréal the next day reported that Maynard’s body was found three kilometers from the spot Lindblad had described.

***

Apart from the Maynard case, Lindblad makes it difficult to check many of his stories, most of which lack basic details. He was evasive when I asked him about ongoing cases, citing his desire not to upset the parents of missing children. He didn’t want me to watch him work because, he said, he only gives information to families and the police. He often tells stories of past cases almost verbatim off of his online autobiography. The words sound scripted and have none of the nonchalance that Lindblad exudes when he’s not talking about work.

Generally, when he recalls past cases he doesn’t give specific names of people or places, and his memory is vague. He also says he worries that if he gives information that’s too specific, or divulges the name of a criminal, he might be putting his own safety at risk.

The whole thing just doesn’t pass the most basic smell test. To see if my instincts were right, I called the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM). Sergeant Ian Lafrenière, one of their press flacks, told me that the police don’t elicit help from psychics. If they receive information from a psychic, they’ll look into it, but it’s usually a waste of time. When I asked him if this information ever helped with investigations, he took a contemplative pause. Maybe, for a split-second, he was imagining a world where policing could be that easy — another pleasant delusion. But then he sighed and said, “Honestly, no.”

***

It’s hard to deny (no matter how hard you try – and I have tried, hard) that Lindblad’s self-image is nothing more than the construction of a compulsively self-deluding man.

Of course, there’s another moral dimension to what Lindblad does. He doesn’t just mislead himself; he misleads others, too. He tells vulnerable parents who have lost children that by some supernatural revelation he knows where their son or daughter is. That he’s convinced it’s true makes it hard to accuse him of bad faith, but the morbid facts stick to your throat if you think about them for too long.

And yet, despite everything, I find it hard to condemn Lindblad. Maybe it’s how familiar his self-invention feels. I recently watched a 1973 interview with Marlon Brando on The Dick Cavett Show. There’s a great moment in the interview when Brando, himself an infamous self-deluder, begins to preach the merits of acting to Cavett: “We wouldn’t survive a second if we weren’t able to act. Acting is a survival mechanism. It’s a social unguent, a lubricant. People lie constantly, every day.”

Cavett is perturbed by the conflation of daily performance and acting, but Brando’s point (if we don’t lie, we die) is salient. We all have to tell ourselves little lies in order to deal with the absurdity, monotony, horror, or meaninglessness of life. I’m still not entirely convinced that I won’t grow up to be a professional basketball player and poet who bridges the gap between thug lyricist and literati. Like I said, we all choose our own imaginative ways to be deluded. Sometimes our imaginations need to go a bit further, usually when life’s horror or absurdity is a bit stronger, a bit more relentless. Sometimes inordinate dedication to a massive delusion – no matter its implications – is the only way to keep going.

In 2005, Lindblad had a curious, brief burst of international celebrity, when he flew to Japan to appear on the television show S.O.S. The episode is blessedly preserved on YouTube. It begins with an excited Japanese voiceover yelling about “Robotu Lindoblatto,” like he’s the latest must-have Japanese super-product that could be yours for four easy payments. Then a square image of Lindblad floats over a starry outer-space background, before shattering into a dozen fragments as he jams his dowsing staff through it. “In Japan,” he told me, “they said I’m the fastest, best, and coolest psychic on earth.”

Later in the show, Linblad is shown with his back to a table with a map on it, his dowsing staff pointing up to better channel his powers. A dramatic action-movie song reaches its climax, and he whips around and stabs a point on the map. There are supposedly missing people there – they’re pictured elsewhere on the screen. In the top left corner, there suddenly appears a yellow phone number for viewers to call.

In an earlier version of this article it was incorrectly stated that Robert Lindblad was once a black belt in karate. It was also incorrectly stated that psychics other than Lindblad predicted that Samuel Maynard, a missing child, had died. Further, in the final paragraph, the photos referred to as “black and white” were in fact in colour. The Daily regrets the errors.

The post The Visions of Robert Lindblad appeared first on The McGill Daily.

***

I found out about the death of my grandfather at the library. I cried for a couple of minutes with Olivia, my girlfriend, and then quickly hopped a bus home to be with my father. For as long as I’ve known him (in any sort of adult way), the prospect of death has haunted him. My mom was out of town visiting her own dad, and the thought of my father being alone with his pain was torturous. “I’ve been dreading this day for years,” he told me. “Every time the phone rang, I was sure it was someone calling to tell me he had died”. In the end, he was told by email.

Ned was born in New Roads, Louisiana in 1920. A Cajun boy, his first language was French, and he loved to practice what he remembered on us “Cuh-naydians” when we met. His life was blessed by the fulfillment of many dreams. He saw an airshow at the age of five and immediately knew he wanted to be a pilot. Sure enough, he went on to complete Civilian Pilot Training at Louisiana State University in 1939, flying until his retirement in the late sixties. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War by the age of 33, and was awarded the Bronze Star for valour.

He loved women, many women, and, with his Brando looks and pilot’s wings, many women loved him back. After WWII, when he was still in his twenties, he met my grandmother, Frances Allen, in her home state of North Carolina. Over their 66 years of marriage, the two built a life together across America, from Alaska to the Panama Canal Zone, carried by Ned’s piloting career. His charm would get him in trouble along the way. He was not always faithful to my grandmother, though he and Nana stuck it out until his death. On my last trip down, I was touched by the ritual rhythm of their relationship; how even the furniture becomes invested with it: there is something sacred about a bed that has been shared for so long. As I sat between their two withered frames, Ned said to me, “I found her in Charlotte,” his eyes settling on his wife.

This gentler mode was rare for my grandfather. He was a hard man, and had a hard relationship with his son. In one of my father’s earliest memories, Ned had just returned from the Korean War. It had been years since Dad had seen him, so at night he crawled up to his father’s bed to get a good look. Ned woke up, startled, and instinctively reached down at his hip. It was only later that my father realized he was searching for a pistol. At the age of four, my father was told that he would no longer be hugging or kissing his daddy. It was now proper to shake hands. He laughs now when he talks about it, but this harsh upbringing left him ill-equipped for any other reaction: men flew planes, men joined the army, men hit their children. They did not cry.

My father turned his back on many of these roles, draft-dodging during the Vietnam War in the seventies and becoming a writer. The tears, however, still would not come, could not come. I lived my whole life without ever seeing him cry, and began to fear the very possibility of it happening (as I’m sure he did). A tall, barrel-chested, gruff man, my father’s tears represented for me the masculine apotheosis spinning off its axis into an unknown and terrifying space of emotional intimacy.

And yet it was his father who finally taught him to weep. We used to have family reunions, every year for 17 straight years. On the final day of a recent reunion, my grandparents were loaded into the van to go back to Florida. We weren’t sure we’d see them alive again. As everyone scurried for their luggage, my father slowly approached Ned. He embraced him, kissed him on the cheek, and, weeping softly, quickly turned away, still ashamed of his tears.

Papa mellowed out as he got older, but, as the firstborn son, my dad never much saw this side of Ned. Ned’s death was peculiarly hard on my dad, then, because it put a seal on a relationship for which there had never been much of an opening, and could have no closure. My father mourned his father like a stillborn child: the tears were for possibilities foreclosed, for a relationship, and a love, that died after a long, intimate gestation, but never quite drew breath.

***

The last years of Papa’s life were spent in a boredom unique to physical men whose vitality is borne steadily away by age. I remember sitting with him in his 90th year, on a North Carolina porch, looking out on the ocean. He in a wheelchair, me in a rocker. A former pilot, he loved to watch the birds. “Showoffs,” he said with admiration. We watched them fly in silence for a minute or so. “You know,” he told me, “I’ve been alive for ninety years. That’s a long time.” “I know,” I said loudly – he never wore his hearing aid. A pelican dove into the water. He broke the silence again. “I’m anxious to see what’s on the other side.”

Who was he? Who was he to me? He was the man who not only could fix cars, but loved fixing them. My mom still remembers how he and my grandmother would drive up from Florida to visit us in Quebec. He would spend most of the time under his car, or our car, or any car that needed work (or not). This obsession with the way things work never left, and, well into his old age, he would take apart his VCR and study the circuit boards like a fortune-teller’s tealeaves. Cars were his true love, though, and buying a new car to drive was a constant topic of his conversation during his senility.

He was a joker, and laughed at everything, even his own death. It was part of his stoicism. He turned pain into laughter, and thus made it distant, manageable. Once, I was helping him down a set of stairs, and his legs and arms quaked as he struggled with his walker. As I held him by his shoulders, he turned his head around and said, “Normally, of course, I just slide down the banister.” You had to laugh. Even though humour was a means of distancing himself, it also made him closer to us – jokes were the terms of engagement that made the relationship possible for him. Otherwise, what else was there to say?

He was a man of anger, of vitality, untethered even by gravity, burning like an engine of one of his beloved planes. As a grandchild I was spared this intensity, but I came to know it in the character of my father. I remember Dad coming home with a present for my sister that was flecked with his blood. He had gotten into a fistfight when he went too far into a crosswalk at a light and a frustrated pedestrian kicked his car. Dad would literally experience blinding rages, getting so mad he’d temporarily lose his vision. He’d sit quietly in his chair while my Mom brooded over “that Farr temper,” and I knew Ned was somewhere in her mind.

But, as all these notions failed to complete a coherent picture, they faded away, and I saw that I was not really left with a person to mourn, but with a field of straw men who fended off any real sense I might have had of the man.

***

We grieve the living as much as the dead. We arrived in Florida a few days before the funeral to spend time with my grandmother in the memory care unit of her nursing home. Nana has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last few years. Her ability to recognize us varied day by day. Once, she saw my father and called him by name. “Tom!” she cried out with surprise. At another time, all she could manage was: “I know you… I know you,” in her gentle North Carolina accent, before bursting into tears with confusion. She had shrunk considerably in her old age, her small face outlining her electric blue eyes. They searched our faces for scraps of recollection, often coming up short. When I held her small frame, she was like a delicate, injured bird.

I sang for her as I had so many times before, and, though she couldn’t remember my name, she remembered the harmonies for “Amazing Grace”. As she closed her eyes and sang, I imagined her traveling back to the Baptist church of her childhood. She often spoke of her siblings as though they were there with her, though most of them had been dead for years.

It seemed to soothe her to live in the past; the present was a burden impossible to bear. Ned was her life, and his absence bewildered her. She does not know where her husband is. To tell her every day, as we would have had to, was unthinkable. Sometimes she seemed to know. In the courtyard of the nursing home with my mother, she wept and wept. Through her delirium, one lucid agony kept resurfacing: “It’s so hard without him here,” she said, clinging to my mother’s arms. It was decided that Nana would not attend the funeral. She had a first husband who was killed in the Second World War. As Ned’s funeral would be military – in accordance with his wishes – and given her fluid sense of time, we thought it wouldn’t be right to plunge Nana into the potential trauma of reliving both deaths.

On our last visit we wheeled her back out into the common room, where her fellow patients were watching TV in silence. We all kissed her, drifting from the room and from her mind as we walked away. Between my grandmother and grandfather on that trip, hers was by far the hardest goodbye. As I write this, she has been transferred to hospice care and can barely eat. She will probably not survive the month.

***

The whole family arrived at the compound at 11:30 a.m. – the service was held shortly thereafter. A folded American flag was presented to my father, Ned’s next-of-kin, and an honour guard fired three volleys over our heads. Stoic, detached: the ceremony fit the man.

The priest, my mother’s brother and a friend of the Farrs, delivered a short sermon. “We always say, ‘I’m dying to tell you something’,” he said. “And indeed we are, in this fleeting existence… I would ask you to consider what it was that Ned was dying to tell us throughout his life.” I don’t think I’ll ever know. Ned played his hand pretty close to his chest. We knew he loved us, but we didn’t know how. My father stood up to read the Psalm. The sky was a scintillating, empty blue; a hawk circled overhead, showboating. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away,” he read.

As I wept, as hard as anyone at the service, I wondered why. Of course, Ned had obvious virtues: his physical courage, his work ethic, his ultimate, if oblique, love of family, all of which I construed as what it meant to be a man. But there was an underside to these virtues: his terrible anger, his casual infidelity. And, in the end, all these qualities amounted to a man I hardly knew.

Was I really weeping for Ned? Or for the unready hearts he left in his wake? Or for the truth that it is only by the sacrifice of death that we can know, without a doubt, that we lead good lives? Or for the inevitable dull thud when our stories are over and the book is shut? Probably I wept for all of it. Death is a force that draws pain toward it, like a black hole.

In a flash, I saw myself move three steps and thirty years forward, into the place of my father at the podium, and he, beyond. Then another three and thirty and –

“Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.”

The post Children of men appeared first on The McGill Daily.

And though you might miss them amidst the artistic fireworks, most afternoons there are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of men lining up outside. These men are homeless, and they are waiting to claim a bed for the night inside the graffitied walls, under the cross-adorned roof.

The Mission is the largest private homeless shelter in Canada and the largest male shelter – public or private – in Quebec. Its main building on Clark, the Webster Pavilion, houses up to 319 men. Here, they are offered emergency shelter, free meals, showers, clothing, and counselling on a first-come, first-serve basis. Webster Pavilion also offers transition services, where men get to work one-on-one with counsellors, who focus on helping the men get jobs and become self-sufficient.

I arrived there on a recent Thursday afternoon, just as a line was beginning to form outside.

Inside, I met Michelle Meurnier, communications director for the Mission. A young and animated Montreal native, she’s a walking cache of information about Old Brewery Mission and its clientele. (Mission staff invariably call the homeless men using their services “clients.”)

Meurnier starts walking me through the building. The second floor houses the beds, showers, and washrooms for men using emergency services. It’s bright, with vibrant green walls. Two large, airy rooms contain long rows of bunk beds, like in a youth hostel. Meurnier tells me that the linens get changed every other day, and that every client must shower before going to bed. While they’re welcome to stay as many nights as they like – hypothetically, anyone could stay at the shelter for years on end without joining a transition program – there’s no guarantee that a client will have the same bed for more than a couple nights. This, Meurnier said, is to make sure clients don’t become “too comfortable.”

Since the main shelter is only available at night, the rooms were empty, with the exception of one man, who was lying on a bottom corner bunk. His leg was in a cast.

“We make exceptions for the sick,” Meurnier whispered to me, anxious not to disturb the lone man.

I know the rules are intended for the benefit of the homeless, and may well be beneficial. But it must be strange, I think, for grown men to take instructions from a staff of professionals, to be told when to wash and in which beds they may sleep.

***

At this point I was hoping that my tour of the shelter would be short, so that I could join the clients in the cafeteria for dinner. Michelle told me that I would probably not get the opportunity to speak to anyone.

I was also disappointed to hear I would not be able to see Webster’s third and fourth floors, which act as temporary homes for those using the transition programs. Meurnier told me that she doesn’t like to “show off” the clients and the shelter, because “it becomes like a zoo.”

She’s right about this. They have enough to contend with without me sticking my tape recorder in their faces. I came here because Montreal’s homeless are too often ignored. Now I was being careful not to stare.

Still, when we came back downstairs, I asked Meurnier once more if I could speak to a client. I was there to report, after all. And so she returned a moment later with a thin, stern-looking man wearing an apron. He introduced himself as Derek, although I had earlier heard a staff member call him “Patrovksy.” Later on, after he had became more comfortable speaking to me, he told me that everyone at the shelter calls him “Patrovsky” because no one can pronounce his name, and “Patrovsky” is the Polish equivalent of the English surname Smith. He reached into his chest pocket for his wallet, and placed his ID card on the table in front of me, pointing at his name in the bottom-left corner.

“Say it how it’s written,” he told me. I tried, but immediately butchered the Polish, so gave up and resorted to calling him Derek. I laughed, and I saw, for the first time, a smile creep on to his face.

Derek came to Montreal from Poland over twenty years ago. He did not share many details about his personal story, but I could sense some lingering resentment over how he has been treated in the past.

“Nobody likes the homeless, so they push them away,” he told me.

Derek is in the first step of Old Brewery Mission’s transition program. Although this is his second try with the program, he assured me he is serious this time around about making a change. He didn’t specify what he meant by this. He said that he wasn’t ready before, and that he needed to prepare himself mentally before returning to Webster.

“So far it works very well,” Derek said of the program.

Now he volunteers in the cafeteria. Because he’s not a “troublemaker,” he told me, he’s well-liked by the staff.

***

After speaking with Derek, I saw the cafeteria was beginning to fill up. At each place-setting was a large mug – Meurnier later told me coffee is served in abundance at the shelter. Some alcoholic clients, she said, use it as a replacement for alcohol. Strangely enough, there was also a package of individually wrapped caramels at each place.

(Most of the food served by the Mission is donated. In fact, half its funding comes from private donors, while the other half comes from the three branches of government – and this portion must be put toward emergency services.)

I followed Meurnier to a table at the far end of the cafeteria, where an older, white-haired man named Yvon was seated, working on a large plate of pasta. Yvon and Meurnier chatted for a few moments in French while I stood by, understanding little. Yvon finally looked at me, smiled, and offered me a caramel.

He didn’t seem to speak English, but Meurnier later told me about him. Like many others, Yvon lost his job before coming to live at the Webster Pavilion. He went straight into a transition program, and is now on the wait list for one of the thirty apartments available at the Marcelle and Jean Coutu Pavilion, located just around the corner from Webster. During the day, he likes to help out with small tasks at the Mission’s administrative office around the corner on St. Antoine.

Graduating from one of the Mission’s transition programs isn’t a guarantee of success. Meurnier told me about Mike, whose path to homelessness also began with a lost job. He had worked at a bank branch. As an Anglophone, he didn’t have much luck finding another job in Montreal, so, after losing his home, he uprooted his wife and children and moved to Toronto. There, he began to develop signs of depression and started drinking. Not long afterward, his wife left him, and his children, now grown up, moved back to Montreal. He came to Old Brewery, and immediately began a transition program.

“Now it’s the mystery of what happens next,” Meurnier said. She hasn’t heard from Mike in two months.

***

Despite what they have in common, Meurnier stressed that the shelter’s clientele is diverse, complex. While the economy and job loss are often factors, Meurnier recited a grim list of causes for homelessness: divorce, tragedy, addiction, mental illness. (The latter is particularly acute among women – 70 per cent of the Mission’s female clients, whom they serve at locations around the city, have been diagnosed with mental illness, compared to 40 per cent of male clients).

I asked Robert Lavigne, chief of emergency services at Webster, what they were doing for homeless men with addictions. I had recently read about 1811 Eastlake, a unique housing project in Seattle that allows homeless, chronic alcoholics to continue drinking in their apartments. According to a recent study on the effectiveness of the program, published in the American Journal of Public Health, residents of Eastlake consumed significantly less alcohol per day than they had on the street. Research has shown that the program also costs less money for taxpayers.

Lavigne was skeptical about how it would work at Old Brewery Mission shelters:

“We have programs for people to take their lives back in their hands [and] I think it would be a bit contradictory if we allow individuals to come into the same house and consume alcohol – even pot – when we have other people in the same building trying to rid themselves of the addiction problem.”

“In the future it’s obvious we’re going to be discussing these issues,” he continued, “but at the moment…we’re not going to open up that door yet.”

With or without addiction, the bitter Montreal winters make everyday an uphill battle for those living on the streets. Some spend more time in the malls, in the metro, or near big building vents that push out warm air. Others will eat sugar to keep their energy up. Old Brewery Mission gives out winter clothing starting December 1, unless a snow storm hits beforehand. Lavigne told me that these garments are especially “hard to replenish each year.”

“We don’t run out, because we do such a good job begging to the public,” he said. A tin-eared remark, given where we were.

When I left Webster almost an hour later, clients were still trickling through the doorways to claim whatever was left of dinner. Soon, those that were not using the mission’s transition services would have to leave. They would either come back later in the evening to claim a bed on the second floor, or find a place to sleep elsewhere: at another shelter, in a nook at Champs de Mars Metro, or hidden under a bundle of old blankets on a street corner.

“You never know exactly what they’re doing, where they are,” Meurnier said.

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