When I started this essay, I didn't plan my conclusion; I knew it would come to me. While I was angry at the surreal, Kafkesque echo chamber some unnamed, unknown, and vindictive administrators had thrown me into because I insulted a man who wanted Israel destroyed, I said I was not bitter; I was just a pursuer of justice.
Really?
When we suffer injustice, we wear it proudly; bitterness does not have the same fashion appeal. But perhaps, as I now rewrite the intro, I was blind to my bitterness; it was a root that ran deep and left its plant well nourished, erect, proud but toxic and undigestable.
I relied on words like those from the former Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper, who said when the principles against your deepest convictions win the day, the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. Peace is the price, and you must lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith. Certainly, this is possible, even today, but pursuing justice does not preclude the growth of bitter roots.
That is my lesson.
I tried convincing myself that all my frustration and angst were related to injustice. I was always prepared to accept that if I had been mousey from the start, I might have satiated the thirst of the anonymous, “Fire him now!” multitudes of digital zealots and silent and anonymous administrators pining for my banishment. Standing up to bullies is never a great job retention strategy; I wouldn't approach the podium at an Olympics dedicated to pragmatic job retention strategies. But I can live with that.
My convictions on the absence of justice but the surfeit of politics at Guelph-Humber remain the same, but my spirit has changed, and such a change was needed.
I have not discovered contrition for my relatively minor comments; I still believe the decision of an institution to accept and pursue a Human Rights Complaint over what was comfortably within the confines of a civilized society’s concept of free speech was unwarranted, especially considering they ignored the complaints of Jewish students who felt afraid of a professor who proudly broadcast antisemitic tropes including a call for the destruction of the inhabitants of Israel, the celebration of Hamas and the Houthis and bitter, obsessive hatred of all things Jewish or Israeli - he used them as synonyms.
The university knew what they were doing. They knew the resultant upheaval of my career, family, and purpose, my sudden extraction from my community, like a primitive Roman banishment, and the loss of many friendships and acquaintanceships would be devastating. They knew their process was their punishment; they knew it was cruel and unwarranted; and now, even in my now non-bitter perspective, just because I have toned down or even turned away from the bitterness doesn’t mean I’ve had to turn off my brain.
The fact remains that after eight months, I still have no clue whether I will ever be allowed to teach again at the University of Guelph-Humber, with the school’s latest gambit being to threaten to call the police when I arrive on campus to try to meet the union, in my quest to try and get some clarity of whether or not the school will honour contracts signed for this fall’s teaching (When someone is utterly unresponsive, when the university and unions were unresponsive to email, and phone calls were too 90s and too pushy, and texting too Gen Z I didn’t think knocking on administration’s door, a place I’d been hundreds of times over the last thirteen years was untoward, and certainly staff I spoke with were quite pleasant. Unfortunately, the next day, their pit bull, a London Lerners lawyer, couriered me a letter ludicrously threatening to sic the police on me even if I just came to my own office to collect my paperwork. Even their policies, which have been ignored from the start, said it was allowed.
I foolishly clung to the hope of being able to speak face to face with a flesh-and-blood human, and somehow, that merited more threats from mysterious lawyers—who, like everyone now, were just digital presences behind laptops as they lounge in their basements, hopefully like me, surrounded by faithful and non-digital dogs.
It’s absurd that it will be nine months of banishment before I can make a defence - in some ad hoc investigation that clings to an almost Nurenburg level of pretence when, in reality, they are amateurs flailing about, unsure how to react to an avowed anti-semite’s overheated response to criticism of his favourite terrorist group.
I am sure that with a bare modicum of human decency, courage and even the tiniest spark of good faith, this entire affair could have been solved without ad hoc bureaucratic panic and procedures; it could have been solved by one man simply having the courage to look in the eyes of another and say, “ I was offended by what you said” and him being willing to talk and not metaphorically lead off howling “Off with his head” with a zeal that hasn’t been heard since the French Revolution.
If you pull the camera far enough away, it is comic how this entire flag of protest has unfurled. Unfortunately, at this time, there is too much exhaustion to discover the humour in it all. When Karl Marx said that “history repeats itself first by tragedy second by farce,” I don’t think he would have considered Paul Finlayson in 2024 even if Karl was gifted with time travel.
Indeed, the fact that someone was allowed, without speaking to me and under cover of a human rights complaint, to accuse me of being a danger to teenagers, of assaulting students, of being racist, of having an irrational fear of his religion and many worse accusations, not to mention outright lies his confederates tossed in (my new conviction that they are now not worthy of repetition) is something I believed was wrong on November 27, 2023, when this began. I have not changed my opinion, I have become more entrenched.
But there has been change, not in circumstances, interpretation, or development of contrition - but in spirit - largely because I finally listened to the counsel of a brother and numerous friends, both Gentile and Jew.
I am not ashamed to change or be wrong. I am not easily persuaded and will only change after thinking things through. I must read and listen; if I am wrong, my perspective will change.
So, the previous paragraphs are a new introduction written after the entire piece was done.
The slimmed-down version of the whole sordid affair?
On Nov. 27, 2023, I was banished, suspended, cut off, demonised and slandered because of a LinkedIN message I had written to a stranger in Pakistan who had called for the destruction of Israel. I had said I stood with Israel, and if you stood with Hamas, you were Nazis.
My heart was broken by the slaughter of peace activists, Filipino nannies and concertgoers at the Nova festival, innocents dancing in their bare feet. I love my children dearly, and I know my daughter, now just 18, would have been there if we had been in Israel; she may have been killed, injured, raped, or kidnapped, and I might have suffered the horror and anguish that families I probably will never meet now suffer.
My spirit may have changed, but my beliefs have not. It was a brutal, unwarranted, medieval, and horrendous slaughter of innocents. There is no excuse.
Many say ignore the banishment issue, stop fighting what you can’t change, and let it ride out. But that would be like someone telling you to put your train atop the hill, stare down the tracks, and just let her rip. And then you should be silent about the broken tracks, non-parallel and obstructed —sorry, but if that is “letting it go,” it’s madness; it’s gaslighting yourself into delusions of due process.
I discovered that we don’t have a justice system in Canada. We have a legal system, and the way the law is written and practised, as told to me by more than one lawyer, are two different things. So since there was no higher court to rule on all the rule-breaking of the university, no appellate court, my lawyer thought I was a nut case to keep pointing out the hundreds of violations of the University of Guelph and Humber College. I probably should have made more effort to move beyond email and understand her perspective.
At one point, I was on morphine recovering from an emergency kidney stone removal; no amount of water and crossed fingers would let this boulder head south down the ureter. It wasn’t going through the fattest ureter in the land. Some of my morphine/ADHD-addled analyses of the broken policies of the university were deleted without being read, which I found offensive.
Again, my bad. I didn’t know that often, lawyering is just a game of exhibitionism like Cobras do when they widen their hood, and that lawyering involves a lot of psychological warfare—especially when operating in a lawless land, which is where you are if a university human rights tribunal charges you.
If you were as foolish as me to buy reams of paper and print out the rules, policies, and procedures, the only benefits would accrue to the toner supply company's shareholders and paper provider. Rules just weren’t followed. I was also wrong to think that information about the case was a prerequisite to making or giving advice; no, I needed to shush and let the lawyers hurl insults at each other.
But after eight months of banishment, I began to want friends and family to stop calling me bitter. My position was that I wasn’t bitter; I was indignant; it was righteous anger, and I was entitled to bitterness even though I wasn’t bitter, just pissed off and easily triggered by discussion of my case.
So, at this point, not bitter, just righteous anger, just tipping the tables and evicting a few goats and money changers - okay, I didn’t rise to that level of delusion, but I was heading there.
It’s funny how we recognize bitterness much better in others than ourselves. After hearing part twelve of a story about a mechanic who couldn’t fix my friend’s truck, I was told that I needed to let my grievances depart, ignore them, not be bitter and shut up about the anguish of being caught up in a Kafkaesque non-process - those types of processes that pretend to be processed but are just ad hoc reactions on nice letterhead, events that occasionally jump in and try and gaslight you because you are failing to tell the fat, naked emperor that he has the finest garments in the land.
Nope, I said, I was not playing that game. Not bitterness, righteous anger.
I convinced myself that when fighting against injustice, one cannot be led to bitterness; protesting against injustice is not bitter, even if your fight lasts a lifetime. I told myself the suffragettes and abolitionists were not bitter, yet they did not “get over it.” But even I couldn’t do more than make that argument in my head; I didn’t need to add grandiosity to bitterness.
The writer of Proverbs said each heart knows its bitterness, and no one else can share its joy. My newfound investigation into bitterness was getting scary. The stuff lingers forever, changes character, and affects many relationships. Suppose it’s really about protesting against injustice in a pure-hearted way, not blighted by bitterness. In that case, the focus should not be on revenge but on justice, and there should be an openness to reconciliation.
Being bitter is being jaded, looking at the world through a distorted lens that skews your reality and leaves your stench on everyone around you - even if you’re pissed off because a system doesn’t even have the integrity to respond to you and say, sorry, it’s all ad hoc here, those files on our website, cut and paste, you’re the first person to read them, you keep talking about policies, and we’ll keep ignoring you. Still, when it comes to such an assessment, you note it and walk away. You don’t let it behave like acid left to burn deeper and deeper.
As a bit of an aside, the digitization of everything, the way that forms and fields are the only way of information conveyance, the way that not responding to an email is the classic passive/aggressive move - it gives multiple options, it can be I didn’t read it, I lost it, I skimmed it and don’t care, I read it and don’t have an answer so not responding is a lot less psychologically oppressive than responding and getting into a dialogue, and probably a few more I missed, - this digitization of relationships - though digitization of communication - is damaging society.
Social media and digitization are the dreamland for the defamer, and digitization and social media in the context of the subjectivity of a human rights tribunal (where the adjudicator doesn’t need evidence; they go with who they like better, or “balance of probabilities”) is Nirvana. You can call some pig farmer in Nebraska a name, and it’s Twitter or X (does anyone call it X without saying “Twitter”); you know nothing will come of it, but in a human rights tribunal, when the staff and senior administration are adding to the slander and libel and pumping it into a closed community, you are in trouble.
Because not everyone is a pig farmer in Nebraska, you sometimes will have to see them again, and you will walk by them and have the uncomfortable feeling or question in your head that goes, “Did they all get told that I was a violent pedophile?” It’s tough; you can’t start conversations with, “Hey, if you heard I was a violent pedo, it was a complete lie,” - a creepy convo starter that doesn’t make you look good. And even if you used it, you can’t know if they believe you; lies are such powerful things, they are sticky, and even if after being thrown at a wall, even if 95% of the sticky defamation dough slides down the wall, you never know what chunks stayed affixed.
And suppose you try to express your frustrations. In that case, we have such a difficult time finding true empathy, the ability to fit in someone else’s shoes, that it will more often than not morph into a bitter ramble, annoying, unsolvable, let-it-go stuff. I’ve been called bitter about something where a true lover of a terrorist organization and his boss (who signed her name to support his defamations) are trying to destroy not only the work I love but also the teaching of the spirit of inquiry, the casual banter, even the enjoyment of hundreds of superficial relationships.
I enjoyed it when I left work at 11:30 PM, saying goodnight to this wonderful Filipino cleaner. I liked talking to the security guard and hearing about the cleaner’s daughter who had become a professor; the community was full of small pleasures; the lady who worked at the cafe who was worried about having to go on EI during semester breaks, talking to the student who would have been drafted into the NHL if not for an injury, I enjoyed this all.
Of course, they were shallow relationships, but they were face-to-face. They were the pleasure of community; I realized that when less than 1% of my community bothered to ask how I was doing after suddenly not being there because the university banished me, reality smacked me about and showed me how shallow and fragile those relationships were. But I nevertheless enjoyed them, and they have been removed. There was shallowness, but it soon mutated into an unwillingness even to try to make any step toward empathy; it is much more comfortable, quicker, and safer to indulge in intentional forgetfulness, to pass those annoying Samaritans, you might get robbed yourselves, and stopping offers you no direct benefit. As Ben Franklin said, “Justice will not be served until those unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
The Buddha is famously supposed to have said bitterness is swallowing poison and waiting for someone else to die. By revisiting my campus on July 22, I was trying to take some control and refusing to play by the rules of this cowardly digital age. I also wanted to make people look me in the eye.
Bitterness is never letting go. I told myself I was hanging on because I still had faith that there might be some goodness, humanity, and decency in that university. So I did my Diogenes quest, and nothing was going on. There are varying degrees of how much people hide behind lawyers or junior administration. If they randomly respond to you by email, it sounds like you told Chat GBT to talk like a lawyer. But you must let it go if they don’t respond.
One lawyer told me that I should trust lawyers like we trust a surgeon, wherein we don’t ask the surgeon the entire play-by-play of our operation. Sorry, that is a poor analogy. Surgeons know that the kidney is in its standard spot, the heart is there, the red stuff is blood, and they go into a well-defined space; sometimes, it is exploratory, but even that is done predictably. Lawyers are not like that; situations are not the same, there is a huge degree of latitude, and the legal situation does not have the dependable layout of the human body; sorry, they need to listen, and if they won’t listen and only want to talk, they are simply blind to their hubris.
What is bitterness? - it is often associated with deep-seated resentment that corrupts the spirit and harms relationships. Bitterness is a liar; it is a seductress; it says your bitterness is not bitterness but a noble quest for justice; keep raging; your quest is noble.
Bitterness is described as having a root. Roots nourish plants and are a nutrition mechanism, but they burrow deep underground, and their underground structure can dwarf what we see above ground.
What is the plant that bitterness nourishes? Can bitter roots provide nutrition for justice? My father was a farmer. Could barley roots be grafted onto wheat plant roots like branches above ground?
No, it can’t happen. Bitter roots grow bitterness. Barley roots grow barley. Wheat roots nourish wheat stalks and seeds.
I may have been a fool.
Is there a central root that splits and nourishes bitterness and a quest for justice? A root that nourishes both field peas and barley? My grandfather homesteaded and failed in his first crack at farming, and he stopped his formal schooling in eighth grade. If I talked about this split root idea to him, he’d ask my dad if that time I almost choked to death on a carrot (pre-Heimlich, my dad held me up my feet and shook me, but the carrot departed) led to oxygen deprivation.
“Bitterness, if you do the Greek word search on it, talks about it staining others around you; it damages them. I am adopted, and I only know of my blood father through family lore. He died in 2003; I don’t think his funeral was well attended. He denied paternity when it came to my twin brother and me but was strangely miffed when my blood mother (dealt with in another Substack on here and in the Globe and Mail) gave us up for adoption.
But as to bitterness, I’m not sure if there is a genetic component, but I was told he cut himself from his entire family and died alone. Did he cut himself off alone due to bitterness?
I was in Arizona, perhaps only miles from where he lived when he was alive (I was there for work) and never met him. This is the stain of bitterness.
I have become bitter and told myself it is only about injustice; it can be both, but they do not follow the same path. No matter what happens, if they fire me tomorrow, I cannot be bitter; it will ruin me, and it might ruin my children; what wrong have they done?
I am not talking about money now. But do my children deserve to have a father obsessed with a single grievance who feels humiliated, angry, and irritable? Guelph-Humber may fire me, but how I handle it is up to me. They cannot ruin my life. But bitterness can.
How do I tell the difference? When is it bitterness? When is it a pursuit of justice? Surely, the heart is deceitful above all things. Bitterness is one of those things you know when you see it, just like Justice Potter famously said as he referred to porn in 1954.
And when figuring out whether it’s pure righteous indigestion or a mix of indignation nestled in a field of bitter weeds, I’d like to tell myself it’s always option two. But why have so many said I must let it go and acknowledge that it is the union and management’s decision? I can only make my case and see what happens.
Perhaps it is like a stench that I have become habituated to and do not smell. I remember when I was 19, I was doing a volunteer year working on a dairy farm in France late at night in a dimly lit area—the farm went back to Roman times, and I think the lighting was original.
I was moving bales, and I felt myself sinking.
I had walked into the bit where the farmer pushed the accumulated cattle urine and feces (I was not allowed to use tractors; I used my back and shovel, with special access to a cart that looked like it did go back to Roman times).
Soon, the shit/pee was up to my shoulder blades; I clutched the edge of the pit and pulled myself out. After that, my jeans were never the same, and the shit-washed effect never became a fashion trend. But by the time I got to the farmhouse, I was used to the smell; even though I stunk, I mean, I was covered in shit. Perhaps bitterness is like that shit.
So, how do I tell the difference?
I believe I had the right to stand with Israel, and I agree with everything I said; on Oct. 7, 2023, over 3,000 Hamas fighters and ordinary Palestinian citizens caught up in their rage, massacred over 1200 innocents. I condemned Hamas, and I still do.
So the difference is not in the message; the difference is spiritual, in my heart and voice.
Righteous anger seeks to bring about change, but when stone-walled does not seek revenge, it forgives. If I am brought back to work, by some miracle, I know I will work with those who never bothered to say a kind word in ten months, even a “Are you okay?” I know that many will have believed lies and not asked me if they were true; I know that when considering some students - or staff - scream “F**** Zionists” in the hallway, I may not be popular, I am a Zionist, and I might even wear my IDF hoodie; it’s warm.
Bitterness would allow me to see everyone as the enemy; righteous anger and the pursuit of justice would wipe the slate clean; it forgives; it seeks discussion and exchange. If I am brought back to teach, I must give it my heart, though sometimes not caring in life rewards people; it provides a pleasant numbness when facing loss. I may be a tad damaged, but I can be restored.
I loved the classroom before and the casual hallway conversations. Students move on and graduate; you will always deal with a new crop.
I know that I am not a racist; I have no phobia of any religion. You can worship turtles if you want but don’t tell me I can’t wear green on Tuesdays. I know that I cannot be reconciled with anyone who denies the right of the Jew to live, the right of Israel to exist; the discussion of Zionism is foolish; Israel is here to stay. Of course, that does not mean blind allegiance to every action of settlers or every move of the government.
I have not been informed enough about Israeli politics to comment on them. I know, though, that I am a friend of the Jews, I will always be their friend, I will always support Israel’s right to exist, and let’s be serious, those savages who burned people alive on October 7 weren’t open to dialogue. They were consumed with bitterness and let their primal rages reign.
Their bitterness is their choice. But I, too, have a choice. And I have made a decision: I must no longer be bitter. It is not right; it will destroy my life and stain all those around me.
I do not want to die like my bitter blood father; I want to live like my adopted father, a Christian man; of course, he was not a perfect man, but he was my real father, a professor who was Hank to all, a man who had as much or more reason for bitterness in his heart after a difficult childhood in the poverty of the Great Depression.
A month or two ago, my wife, son, mother-in-law and I went to hear the story of a Holocaust survivor named Elly Gotz. His story was tragic, but what struck me was the combination of his moral clarity and his utter lack of bitterness. He left me in tears, but it took me a few more months to get his full message.
I don’t know where I will end up; my confusion and shock have not lessened since the day I was hauled into an interrogation room on the fourth floor of my university and thrown off campus, out of my classes, and banished from my community for a social post that the AVP said he hadn’t even read.
I no longer expect or even chase absolute certainty in life events. As Amy Gilbert wrote, I've learned that destiny often looks upon our most strident convictions with amusement or perhaps even pity.
In The Prince, Machiavelli said, “Men generally judge more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Everyone sees what you appear to be; few know what you are.”
So, a quest for understanding is futile. But life events are not everything. I know I must not be bitter.
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