The Dutch names for the two above named refuseniks are Kiewit and Griet, respectively, which names I found in my second hand bilingual dictionary, bought in Victoria at the urgings of my friend Tom.

At the time I did not think I needed such a dictionary, but I was wrong as could be; it has stood me in good stead ever since. Proof of this is the above reported English language bird names, which my underestimated dictionary delivered, well beyond my expectations! So, thanks Tom for this very useful hint.

Yesterday I filed my taxes early at 2:30pm, instead of just before 5-pm! The latter is the last pickup of the day and constituted the filing deadline! I had to pay a little, but the tax centre people always recalculate my efforts and that usually benefits me.

I kind of like do my own tax calculations in a circumspect way. It reminds me of filing one for the first or maybe the second time, which then made me feel like becoming a full-fledged member of the Canadian nation, by this act of reporting my taxes!

The tax avoiders seem to have a notion that the community - within which they build and maintain their wealth - is stealing from them when they pay taxes. If true, such an attitude indicates asocial value sets or even hints at predatory and/ or parasitic behaviour, not some thing approved of by society, but it is quite common in nature.

I call this kind of behaviour ‘contrarian’ and it has other instances in the rise of computer hacking and virus attacks. No body asked for these, but we humans just came up with these pests, so to speak.

The act like the antagonist, who keeps the plot going in a play! The evolutionary counter force against which the struggle and development take place. It is that much maligned evil, which maybe more necessary than we think. After all good and evil are of our own construction in our world today, with taught and necessary supplements from the past.

I have a further thought on the Myanmar Buddhist taxi driver, who felt threatened by the presence of Muslims in that society. I want to conduct a little thought experiment or spin a narrative. Let’s suppose we send a pollster to Myanmar to answer the question: ‘Is the Myanmar society Buddhist?’ Our agent returns and reports that of the people interviewed nineteen out of twenty or better, answered that they were Buddhist.

This would be the result, since only about four percent are Muslim and assuming that few people are secular. Such a percentage outcome is considered quite convincing in the world of statistics as I learned in my ‘Stats’ lectures in college.

Yet the interviewed taxi driver felt threatened. My first reaction was that this is because Buddhism tends to be inward looking and has few effective ways of dealing with other convictions. This thought I left for what it was, because it is a blaming mechanism, which even if true in part, cannot move us beyond that conclusion.

I continued by reminding myself that other beliefs also feel threatened in our world. Examples are the Fundamentalist from 1920 in the West, the present day antagonism against new comers in the EU and the reaction against secularism in the Middle East. Combining these made me realise that this notion of ‘feeling threatened’ may very well be a natural counter reaction to the process of globalisation, to which all of us are subject.

This conclusion finds confirmation in the fact that people in North America also, feel threatened by influences from beyond ‘the black waters’ as the Brahmins of India say that in their society! The late General de Gaulle of France in around 1967 - the “Vive le Quebec libre” incident in Canada - made a remark in this regard, that has stuck with me. ‘People feel lost without an identity in our globalising world’ was his observation and that has been a functional concept for me over the years.

To combine my various notions from above, we could say that each identity defining tradition, such as Buddhism, has to find ways of accommodating other identities and learn to live with them. The Buddhist may indeed be a bit inward bound, but that can very well be ameliorated. Grounds for that are to be found in the spread of this faith throughout the Western world.

Considering these facts, the problem may just be that members in some societies live in a world that insulated and protective of their own values and now need to interface with unwelcome unknowns. But these are the type of processes that we are able to guide and facilitate. Modern social sciences have enough tools in the tool kit to be able to assist in such processes of transition.

Every single society, with its traditions and value frame works needs to make adjustments, some of which are unwelcome. The solution begins by recognising that this is the overall process in which we all are engaged. Instead of fighting for relative advantage and defending our turf, we would save a lot of money and prevent much suffering, if and when we take charge of this change process in a deliberate, conscious and ethical manner.
<10:32~ with editing.