A Strange Fall, 2020

I posted this in 2020, during what we thought (hoped?) might be both the literal and figurative autumn of Covid. How innocent we were. What really stands out are the similarities to fifty years earlier, in 1970, and fifty years before that, in 1920. The original article (below) still carries interesting historical perspectives, but knowing what we now know about the social, cultural and political effects of the pandemic, it’s almost poignant.

This is one weird fall in one weird year. The fall of fifty years ago, in 1970, was also weird. As was 50 years before that.

Even writing ‘fifty years ago’ is unsettling, because I remember it with crystal clarity. How can things that happened half a century ago still resonate so much?

Fifty years ago this week, I was working in a mine, 4000 feet underground. I was 19 and fresh out of high school, trying to earn enough money for college. The pay wasn’t what you – or anyone else - would call generous: $3.94 an hour. That sounds like something my father would have said when he started a sentence with ‘When I was your age…’.

I didn’t know a lot about the wider world – high school will do that to you – but I knew I had to get out and see some of it. In that wider world, it was a fall of discontent in Canada and the United States. Here at home, we were dealing with the consequences of the murder of a politician in Quebec and the subsequent suppression of civil rights under the War Measures Act (image left). That was driven home on a weekend visit to Ottawa, when I was startled to see an armed soldier in full battle dress standing guard outside the house next door, where a senior politician lived. In the U.S., demonstrations against racism and the war in Vietnam roiled the streets, and the number of dead kept growing.

While that was happening, I was working almost a mile underground, at Copper Cliff North Mine in Sudbury. The work was hot, sometimes interesting, often dangerous. Mucking out a trench one day, I met Art, a young American who had come to Canada to dodge the draft. Two months shy of graduating from the University of Chicago, he had sidetracked his life because he couldn’t abide what was happening in his own country. Earlier in that year so long ago, four university students protesting Vietnam had been shot dead by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio. Two weeks later, two more students were gunned down at Jackson State College in Mississippi during a protest against racism. Fifty eight percent of Americans believed the students got what they deserved – death for demonstrating against racism and a war that no one wanted.

Going to war was a choice I didn’t have to make, and I knew it. I was a white male Canadian living in a comfortable society, in a comfortable country, in a comfortable, middle-class way. Fifty years ago, the ‘white’ part wasn’t even a consideration, because I was unaware of anything inherently advantageous to the way I was brought up. In my high school of 1800 baby-boomer students – Hillcrest High School - there was little ‘diversity’, and little sense of living a privileged life, because, well, you tend to think everyone was living the same circumstances.

The year I spent underground was tough slogging, but fifty years ago, I could make choices for my future. And because of Art, I knew that being a white male Canadian made a lot of difference, because young men my age who lived across the border were being drafted to fight a war they didn’t understand (that is, drafted unless they were a fortunate son with connected parents or bone spurs).

It was a weird fall fifty years ago, but fifty years before that, in 1920, Canada was still dealing with the fallout of a world war - joblessness, collapsing wheat prices, runaway inflation (16.3%), deadly labour strife - and fighting a global pandemic, which sort of sounds familiar. The country moved on from that, as we moved on from the turmoil of 1970, and as eventually we will move on from a truly unsettling 2020. (addendum: and 2021 and into 2022)

Tom New