Life stories: 1996

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I eventually was hired by a small engineering firm who engaged in GIS, and was subsequently bought out by a large petroleum software firm, in turn gobbled up by one of the largest: Halliburton. I thus regretfully moved from Calgary after 20 years to Dallas, not an obvious adjustment to one of the consumer capitals in the US deep south (pars of the US southeast with traditions going back to separatism, land ownership and slavery prior to the American Civil War). We found our tribe however, through work and African drumming for me, yoga and dance for Sandra, and re-evaluation counseling plus the Unitarian Church for both of us. Sandra had a non-working US visa so she took a break from ten years work with mental health agencies and an education certificate, took her Texas Mediation Certificate and then we had Petra. We managed to find a natural birthing clinic amid the medical-industrial complex, where insurance virtually governs the delivery and quality of medical treatment - quite an adjustment for us who lived in UK, Australia, France and Canada with universal health care and education.

Quick calculations showed that we paid almost the same amount less in taxes, in US vs. Canada, as we paid more in insurance: this amounts to a bulk transfer of funding medical coverage from the public to the private sector; implications are that governments which answer to the entire electorate will support social programs for a majority of a population, whereas corporations will only look after their own subscribing minorities. Thus emerged gradually what was to me a fundamentally new interpretation of democracy: in the US, relatively little is under federal, state or municipal jurisdiction in health and education; they are largely covered by private insurance and schools, many of which are funded by churches. The implied blurring of state and private (incl. church) realms of responsibility pose quite a challenge in the US, where the first Amendment to their Constitution clearly separates Church and State.

All this set me up quite nicely to keep a sharp eye a country that was to become my home soon after: we listened to alternative radio NPR then KPFT (both were listener-supported until NPR sold out to corporate funding, and surprise! it's incisiveness was washed down soon after), and read World Press Review as well as the local news s.a. Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle. In fact I happen to have lived in Texas over most of Bush Jr.'s governorship: unbeknownst to me at the time, was the fact I'd know more than may about the man to become the President of the USA five years later. My ultimate boss at Halliburton was also Dick Cheney, his role sandwiched then between those of Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr. (remember Desert Storm?), and Vice-president under Bush Jr. I also set up my first website (see here), home to this page not  a decade after the web's invention... but a decade after I set up a pre-web site (see here)!