miseri

So I've gone and done it. I've cancelled my registration for Bouchercon 2025 and the hotel booking that went with it. The original plan was to meet a friend, Neal, in Thunder Bay and then to drive to New Orleans, so there's no flight to the US to cancel; there is, however, a train trip to Sioux Lookout, apparently the closest stop to Thunder Bay. That's still a thing. The new plan is to meet Neal as planned, and then to maybe bum around Ontario for the two weeks we'd planned to spend on this road trip to Bouchercon and back.

At least next year Bouchercon will be in Canada.

Aside from everything the political pundits have been saying, I think there are three things we can all take away from the chaos going on down south:

1. Politics is hard, y'all. You can't just throw some unqualified, uneducated dweeb into the highest positions of government and expect them to succeed with nothing more than common sense, heart, and "fresh eyes". (Or one out of the three, anyway.) That trope of the naive underdog succeeding over the jaded elite is a fairy tale.
2. The border/immigrant situation before now was actually no big deal. If it were actually the issue some people describe, then taking a tougher stand would mean detaining actual criminals, not detaining innocent tourists; and (assuming this wasn't the goal all along) they wouldn't have to expand their scope to legal immigrants just to say they caught more furriners.
3. The US government was actually already pretty damn lean and efficient. Everything they've cut or tried to cut has turned out to be vital to the functioning of the system and to the welfare of the people. Which means there's actually been hardly any waste at all.

I immigrated from Singapore to Canada when I was 17.

I went back to Singapore when I was 18 to do the two years of military service required of me as a male Singapore citizen. People thought I was nuts. I'd managed to get myself out of the country at the crucial moment of my life, so why not lie low in Canada until I got my Canadian citizenship, then renounce my Singapore citizenship and never put on combat boots?

I have in fact renounced my Singapore citizenship in favour of Canadian citizenship in the years since. So what was the point of my National Service? Hard to say, except for this: I am proud to say that I did not dodge the draft even when it would have been not just easy, but easIER, for me. I've paid my dues.

So I respect people who step up and honour their social contracts. I respect the sacrifices made by the military.

I have never forgiven That Man for skipping out on an event intended to honour the fallen of his own nation, at the 100th anniversary of the Armistice. Because it was "raining". Hello, these people lived in mud for a year because your leaders told them to; you can stand a bit of wet in your hair. Plus, you're in a position to commandeer a fleet of taxis, so don't tell me there weren't options.

(Sure, he went to the thing the next day, the one that everyone else was at — but, y'know, that's the point: everyone else was there and everyone was watching. What are you when no one is looking?)

There is, I think, a popular version of the "fish out of water" trope, in which a fool is forced to deal with a situation he understands nothing about; and because he's looking at things with a wide open mind, with no preconceptions to restrict him, he succeeds better than the experts, with strategies none of them could ever have envisioned. I recall that when I played 7th Sea, there was an NPC who owed his naval success to never having been a naval officer before his surprise appointment — so he employed land tactics instead, and won the battle. I myself once started to write a story about a young fisherman who accidentally won a full scholarship to a famous art school when the lobster trap he left in a judging hall was mistaken for an artistic entry. I never finished that story, because it demanded a good deal more cynicism about art than I possessed, and I didn't know where it was going after that premise.

There is a tiny bit of truth to that trope. When I tried fencing with the SCA, I was told that newbies were actually the most dangerous fencers, because they were the most unpredictable. They try things that more experienced fencers don't do and therefore don't expect. But here's the thing: there is a reason that more experienced fencers don't do that, just as there's a reason land-based tactics aren't generally used in naval combat. They rely on being unexpected — once they're expected, they become far less effective than the tried-and-true.

A long time ago, I asked my priest about the (pre-tribulation) rapture, since this was never part of my catechism as a good(ish) Catholic boy. "Oh no," he said, "we don't believe in that. It implies that there is a group of people who are somehow special and treated differently. No, when the end times come, we will all suffer together with everyone else."

I don't remember the exact wording of the middle bit, but I think that's a fair approximation of what he meant: that we're all in this together, and God doesn't play favourites. (There's a whole other related discussion about what it means to be holy, but that's not what we're talking about here.)

Anyway, if you've been paying attention to the commentary going around on social media, there's been a lot of talk about "people not realising that their faces would get eaten by leopards when they voted for the 'leopards eating faces' party". Essentially, that people have been wishing Bad Things upon their neighbours, unaware that said Bad Things would also descend upon these people themselves. And it occurs to me that, maybe, this is a subtle byproduct of the "rapture" mentality — that Bad Things may happen to people in the Out group, but certainly not to people in the In group. "The leopards won't eat my face because such fates are for the great unwashed masses and I am not one of Them."

I've never been a friend to the whole pre-tribulation rapture concept, ever since that moment with my priest, and I think that's a big part of it. There's something ... smug and prideful, I think, about the idea that if one is a Christian, one is going to be spared a thing meant to ravage all of humanity, including one's friends and neighbours. It feels a bit like wishing evil upon others simply for existing outside your tribe, which is different from the idea of justice dispensed for wrongdoing; and in this difference, it is opposed to the message that you should "love thy neighbour".

We will suffer together with everyone else. We're not special.

And when we plot the fates of our communities, we'd do well to remember that we too are part of the same communities, and not definitively saved by our professed allegiances.