Death and How To Avoid It - Part Seven by Dave Jaffe

        Part Seven


    There are thousands of diets out there but if you're looking for one way to extend your life the best way is become a vegan. It does seem that vegetarians live longer than those who eat meat, chicken, eggs and butter. By doing this you'll not only help yourself, you'll also help the planet.
     About 20 per cent of global warming comes from raising cattle and other animals. In his book 'Diet For A New America'  one author praised the virtues of vegetarianism and points out  that switching to a plant diet is a very good thing. I am a vegan now and rarely eat any animal food. There are other diets that may lengthen your life but a vegan diet I conclude is one way to avoid an early death.
   This is the last part of my posting 'Death and How To Avoid It'.

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Six by Dave Jaffe

    Part Six


          In part five of this story I told of how I met a rich man who boasted that he got to his present affluent state all on his own. Like many successful people he refused to acknowledge how lucky he'd been.  Suppose now that this man had been born into a First Nation family. Once again he wouldn't be living as long as many Caucasian Canadians do.
    Half of all First Nations children are poor. And many of them as they grow up die long before they turn sixty years old. Attawapiskat is yet another impoverished First Nations reserve in Canada. Its chief once went on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions that many of the reserve's 2,000 people were living in.
     In April 2016, 11 people in Attawapiskat tried to kill themselves. First Nations people, not just women but men too often live in the most deplorable conditions. They huddle together in very crowded houses. Many of them drop out of school before they graduate. Some sniff glue, shoot up heroin, drink themselves to death, and often die violent deaths. Not all First Nations people are poor or violent. Many aboriginal Canadians work hard and do get an education.Yet far too many die at an early age, especially if they're living in isolated communities in Canada's north.
     The cause of their despair is the Caucasian men who flooded into Canada from the 17th century on. They pushed a side the First Nations onto ever shrinking reserves and later herded young natives into terrible residential schools. "When the white man came to Africa," the U.S. writer James Baldwin wrote, "the white man had the Bible and the black man had the land. Soon the white man had the land and the black man had the Bible."
    The same thing happened in Canada to aboriginal groups. One day these people who were the first inhabitants of this country will be full citizens of Canada. Yet that days hasn't so far arrived. Right now a First Nations person is far more likely to die at an earlier age than most other Canadians.
    All the world's people live in a hierarchy. How long you live depends upon where you're lodged in the hierarchy. Many of the 7 billion people who live in this world live on the lower rungs of the ladder. They were just born in the wrong time in the wrong place. So death hovers over them much more closely than those born in a different time and a richer place.
     

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

               Part Five


     Eduardo dos Santos is getting on in years. He's head of Angola, a sizeable African country whose western border hugs a large part of the south west coast of Africa. Angola is yet another African country whose history is full of conflict. Dos Santos's party the MPLA or in English the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power for many years. It took power in 1975 when the MPLA finally threw out the Portuguese colonizers.
     To get in power in Angola,the MPLA had to fight a vicious war against the Portuguese rulers.Then it had to fight off two other mostly black groups. Last it ended up fending off a U.S. backed army that ravaged Angola for at least ten years.  Final death count from all of this conflict? About two million people.
     "Anatomy is destiny," the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud once said. Freud's brand of therapy once was called 'The talking therapy and' is no longer so popular. In any case Freud was wrong about anatomy. Anatomy isn't destiny: Geography is.
.
    If you're born in Angola you're not going to live a long time. You're probably going to die at about the age of 51. The average Angolan in short has a life span of less than two thirds of the average Canadian. Angola's not alone here. Alongside Angola there are 12 other African countries whose citizens don't live much past 50 years either.
      Now Angola shouldn't be poor and if it wasn't,  its citizens would live a lot longer. It's a country chockful of oil, diamonds and other valuable minerals. Its government alas is one of he most corrupt governments on earth. And its rulers who were once gun toting Marxists, are very rich and now support free enterprise to the hilt.
In Luanda, Angola's capital city, millions of people just struggle to survive. Meanwhile Angola's small ruling clique are very rich multi-millionaires. The 21 million people of Angola teach us a valuable lesson: Luck often determines whether we live a long life or don't.
      "I go to where I'm at,  all by myself." one rich man told me at a political meeting. "I worked hard to make my money and no government has the right to take it away from me." Like many other rich and not so rich Canadians, this man ignores how lucky he's been. If he'd have been born a black Angolan, he'd either have been dead by nowor would be eking out a bare existence in some impoverished village or just surviving in an urban slum. Instead he's driving around Vancouver in an expensive Audi. Luck doesn't figure in his calculations. Yet it should.
    
   

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Four by Dave Jaffe

              Part Four


           Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol will lop years off your life. And so does  using certain types of illegal drugs. Marjorie, which is not her real name, was the mother of a heroin addict. "My son caused me many problems," Marjorie told me one day. "He used to steal doctors' prescription pads, hang out with thieves, and was often getting stopped by the police."
     Marjorie lived into her nineties. Her son's still alive too, but he's taking methadone these days and not injecting heroin. Mark, which isn't his real name wasn't as lucky as Marjorie's son. He started injecting heroin in his late teens. He overdosed in his late 20's and  died. Another man told me that he became a killer because of heroin. "I needed money for my drug habit," he told me. "I killed a man to get the money."
    Illegal drugs are very expensive because they're illegal. Once someone gets addicted to heroin or cocaine, they have to find some big money to feed their habit. Many addicted women become street prostitutes which is a very dangerous profession. Serial killer Robert Pickton boasted of killing 60 women. I'd bet that many of these women were cocaine or heroin addicts and sold their bodies on the street.
    Men addicted to heroin or cocaine usually turn to crime too. They steal from stores, try to hold up banks, deal illegal drugs or turn to fraud. All these activities can shorten your life.
     Of course, not all people who try heroin or cocaine get addicted to them. These people may shoot up heroin or snort cocaine once in a while. Yet even here casual use of these drugs can shorten your life. In the first nine months of 2016, close to 450 people died in British Columbia after injecting heroin. Both cocaine and heroin are often laced with fentanyl that can kill a drug user right away.
     One man told me, "Heroin addicts are human beings too. They should not be demonized."  This is true. Still, if you want to keep alive and healthy, it's a good idea to stay away from hard illegal drugs. They're nothing but trouble.
     
    
    

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Three by Dave Jaffe

     Part Three



     He was one of Canada's most famous novelists. And he disliked the man who became one of Quebec's most famous premiers.
     The novelist was Mordecai Richler, a Montrealer born and bred. The man whose policies Richler really disliked was the very short Rene Levesque who was born in Quebec's Gaspe area. A famous journalist, Levesque devoted most of his political career to setting up an independent Quebec. Richler never learned to speak French, disliked Levesque's politics and distrusted his nationalism.
    "From the beginning," Richler wrote, "French Canadian nationalism has been badly tainted by racism."
A secular Jew, Richler pointed out in his book 'O Canada, O Quebec', that many French Canadians loathed Jews in the past and that some French Canadians still do now. Richler saw a direct link between the  anti-Semitic nationalism preached by the early 20th century writer Abbe Lionel Groulx and the sovereigntist nationalism embraced by the Parti Quebecois that Rene Levesque headed up for many years.
     Nor did Richler like Levesque personally. "My enduring feeling about Rene Levesque," Richler wrote, "is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope around my neck, he would have complained how humiliating it was for him to spring the trap door."So Richler didn't like Levesque for pushing Quebec to separate from Canada and Levesque probably didn't like Richler. Yet these two opponents did have two fatal habits in common. They both smoked tobacco and drank alcohol. And because they did this, they both died long before they should have.
    Levesque was born in 1922 and died in 1987. He was only 65 when he passed away and was rarely seen in public without a cigarette in his mouth.  Richler who was born in 1931 died in 2001. He too smoked continously and drank alcohol nearly every day at one of his favourite watering holes in Montreal. Even after he had been operated on for cancer, Richler kept on smoking and inhaling deadly cigarillos. He never stopped drinking alcohol either.
     Both men's lives point out what is now obvious: If you want to live a long life don't smoke or drink. They're both poisonous. Smoking cigarettes lops at least nine years off your life. Every year 19,000 Canadians die from lung cancer and most of these people got this deadly form of cancer from smoking. Also if you smoke cigarettes you're far more likely to get a stroke or be crumpled up by a heart attack.
     Drinking alcohol also cuts years off your life. Every year more than 4,000 Canadians die from alcohol abuse. These alcoholics die in car crashes or in drunken brawls. They're also far more likely to be men than women. Or they pass away from cirrhosis of the liver or other illnesses caused by alcohol. Over 3 million Canadians are risking death by drinking. And close to four and one half million expose themselves to risk when they down  alcohol . Drinking can shorten anyone's life. It's deadly. Then there's other dangerous drugs out there that I'll talk about next time.
     
    

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Two by Dave Jaffe

               Part Two


    Why do women usually outlive men? I can't say for sure. But biology tells us that the female of any species outlives the male.
     In the world of us humans, women in the western world do take better care of themselves than men. They exercise more as any visit to a local aerobics class shows. These classes are jam packed with women. Yet fewer men show up to jump, sweat and strain. Women also watch their weight more than men.
    That doesn't mean that all women are hauling anorectic looking bodies around. Women pile up the kilograms as they age just like men. Yet overall women do try to control their weight more than men do. "My wife's keeping me well fed," a chunky 40's something male told me as he slapped his big stomach. Yet this man's wife was quite thin. She was following a far healthier path than her spouse. For keeping thin does extend your life.
     Women also lead less reckless lives than men. They don't endanger themselves as many men do. "Women don't climb Mount Everest," a male mountain climber told me way back in the 1970's.
 This isn't true to-day. The second wave of feminism came along in the late 1960's and allowed women to do many things like mountain climbing that only men used to do.
      Still even to-day women take less risks than men.A drunken car driver is far more likely to be a man, and usually a young man than a woman. And therefore that male is far more likely to die. Every year more than 2,000 Canadians die in car crashes and here far more men than women end up dead, especially if alcohol's involved.
     Women are also far more likely to end up as criminals especially if the crime is violent. Over 600 Canadians are killed every year by someone else. And the person who's stabbing, shooting or strangling someone else to death is eight times more likely to be a man than a woman."If only women committed crime," one female prison guard told me, "we could close nine out of ten prisons."
      Men far more often than women rob banks, fight in streets or playgrounds, become illegal drug addicts, steal from stores and commit fraud. Surprisingly men are also more likely to become prostitutes than women. Crime by the way is a young man's game and a very dangerous one too. If you want to die young, become a criminal.
      Another plus for women is that when illness strikes them, they're much more likely to go to a doctor than men."I'm not going to run off to see a doctor every time I get a little pain,"my father used to say. He tried to stay away from medical offices. Yet woman aren't like this. They go doctors when they're in pain or feel their body temperatures rise. So here's another reason why women outlive us males.
   Then there's the choices that men and women make as they go through life. We'll look at this in the next part/.

Death and How To Avoid It - by Dave Jaffe -Part One

    Part One


       Canadians don't like to discuss death even though about 250,000 Canadians die every year.
     People laugh when I tell them what I sometimes do. I go into cinema complexes and restaurants. ""Hi my name's Dave," I tell the cashier or food server. "I'm an old man. Do you have any discounts for seniors.?"
      Yet sometimes I foretell my future. "Hi," I say again to someone I just met. "My name's Dave. I'm an old man. I'll be dead in less than ten years and maybe long before that." I don't get many laughs if any from people who hear this.
     Death is after all a serious business. You pass away, you vanish and you become extinct when you die. 50 million people die worldwide every year. Some people want to die. Every year close to 4,000 Canadians kill themselves and some of them are quite young. Yet that number is less than 2 per cent who die annually. Most of us want to stay alive.
     People jog or do other forms of exercise every day to stay alive or live longer. Of course few people roll out of bed every day to exercise and tell themselves, "I'm going to do my daily exercise
to live longer." Yet that in part is what exercise is all about. And if you exercise regularly chances are you will live longer than someone who doesn't.
     Of course there's other ways to live a long life.
     First off, be born a woman and not a man. Women everywhere in the western world live longer than men. In Canada in the year 2000 men had a life expectancy of 77 years. Yet women's life expectancy stood at 82 years or five years longer than a man's. Some women now live into their early 90's. Most men are not so lucky.
     A friend of mine was walking in a park in Victoria in the early 1970's. The second wave of feminism was just getting underway at this time. My friend met a young woman on his stroll through the park. This woman was a strong feminist. "Women are second class citizens in this world," the woman said in effect after she'd started to chat with my friend. "We are paid less than men, face more discrimination, and are treated more violently than men."
     "All these things are wrong," my friend replied. "They should be changed. But I'll tell you one thing: You woman will bury all us men." My friend's reply was spot on. Go to a long term place anywhere in Canada. These places for the aged are chock full of old women. And usually there's no more than half a dozen aging men around. The male husbands of most of these woman died off long ago.
    In the next part of this story we'll look at some of the reasons why women outlive men.