THE SABRA IN KOREA

My first composition professor, a loveable, brilliantly talented, but hopelessly forgetful, previously heavy potsmoking Indiaphile with new music groups named The Salvation Dharma Band, warned me that this would happen. He said it was the way of all composers as they age. As all the great Romantics seasoned their chops as symphonists, their most experimental and exploratory phases gradually lost ground to the cause of more powerfully refined articulation of ideas. Yet again, art provides a metaphor for other areas of life. I think I'm becoming more conservative with age.

I got this letter from home. Halifax's new amalgamated super high-school just got smacked down for trying to outlaw hoodies. You know, those hooded sweatshirts that make a hooded criminal's face harder to see from hallway ceiling vidcams. Here in Korea, kids wear school uniforms and would be properly smacked down for subversive fashion variations. But in my hometown, the issue was safety. But in a typical display of left-wing institutionally corrosive Canadiana, my hometown's biggest education investment - the super highschool - couldn't even withstand this minor libertarian uproar for five minutes. And the Nova Scotia Teachers Union says there is a problem with violence in the schools and anything that can be done should be done.

Fume.

There's a rising resentment against Halifax Police from such unchecked libertarianism, and it's backlashed in a growing lack of vigilance in the law and order of the town I once loved. Swarmings, gang beatings, major rumbles. Not so long ago we used to laugh at weaponless kids trying to act tough by hiding in bushes and jumping out at people but being reduced to begging for money. Don't get me wrong, these were kids with parents and homes to go to for three meals a day, mind you. Boy, you can't laugh at that anymore. Four swarmings of 12 year-olds on isolated adults, just last year alone. Junior's got teeth and he's packing.

I think about these returning deterrents whenever I get a new wave of come-home pressure, and I got a new one after rewatching the movie Munich. The Israeli secret service chief at the end tells his exiled operative, 'you're a sabra. Come home. Your mother is old and your father is sick. ' Holy crap, that's me. I had no idea how Jewish I could feel until I heard that.

This is the push and pull tug that I and some other expatriates have with their Maritime hometowns. A liberation still in denial of itself. It seems I've been constantly leaping out of that neighborhood just for the ground to start sinking back - first daily, to survive to high school in another neighborhood, then semi-permanently with studies abroad, and coming back home and yet not, and now the final exorcism, ideologically, dealing with the last moral imperatives to return. The world's a big place. I don't *really* have to return to enter a job market of 'Johnny where's your homework? Gee I dunno teacher did you look up your ass?' if I don't want to.

Do I want to for the family though? Am I a sabra who really should come back home? Damn it, my father really is sick and my mother really is old.

Shoulda rented another movie.