My 9/11 Awakening to America's Moral Crisis: Diary and Letters - Chile: 11 September 1973 Military Coup (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781515243182)

I was born and raised on the farm in the region of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. My hard working French Canadian parents had little formal education: Dad had only one year of schooling and Mom had not completed grade school. Pursuing an ideal that was very powerful at the time-becoming a priest and missionnary-I spent eight years in the seminary. After leaving the seminary, I taught philosophy, did volunteer work for the solidarity NGO, CUSO, and then left for Chile to pursue my studies on developing country issues. The experience of the Chilean coup d'État of September 11, 1973 plunged me into a profound, life-altering personal crisis. I discovered that the United States, a country whose presidents constantly repeat that their nation is the best in the world readily uses economic sabotage, propaganda, assasination and torture to defend its interests. I discovered that the Canadian Ambassador, Andrew Ross, while openly welcoming the military takeover, was accepting only a dozen of the thousands of Chileans who, desperately trying to escape imprisonment, torture and possibly death, were knocking on his door. I discovered that the Catholic Church, which I had always identified with a universal love that prioritized the marginalized, was clearly siding in Chile with the military by accepting, a mere one week after the coup d'état, to pray with the military junta in a ceremony that was being broadcast on TV throughout the country. After returning to Montreal I published "Chili: le coup divin", a scathing criticism of the complicity of the Chilean Catholic Church in the military coup and participated in a very intense speaking tour. Convinced that one must first understand the world in order to change it, I then pursued my study of developing country issues, focussing on that area which I felt I knew less about: economics. As I had a growing family and needed to earn a living, I accepted, before writing my master's thesis, a job teaching economics at the college level, a career that I ended up pursueing until my retirement. Not surprisingly, how and what I taught in economics was deeply affected by my experience in Chile. Students, I felt, must experience reality in order to understand it. To this end, I created, with colleagues at Dawson College, the North South Studies profile which included a one-month field trip to Nicaragua. Founded in 1993, this profile still exists and, after my retirement in 2011, I am still collaborating with it on a volunteer basis.