A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I remember a time when I thought that online comment sections under news stories would encourage the sharing of fascinating insights and common wisdom, and that social media would be such a force for good in bringing us together in community around the world. Who WAS that stupid woman? She’s long gone now, though I do miss her optimism. She didn’t yet know that human beings are really quite awful and unstable when grouped by the millions into dangerous tribes brimming with hate and given free licence to say the most awful things about each other. I’ve done a lot of reading over the years to try to understand human beings. It has given me more understanding at a scholarly level, I suppose, but I’m still pretty baffled overall. We are wild animals dressed up in the thinnest veneers of civility. We achieve greatness, then we tear it all down. The blame for our increasingly outrageous ways gets apportioned depending on your tribe, of course. It’s the alt-right. It’s the woke. It’s the tran...

I spent a bit of time on “the block” this past weekend, that stretch of Pandora Avenue that is currently one of the city’s most visible hot spots of social crisis. I hope the city’s big plan works out well for all concerned, and sign me up for helping. But after three decades of watching so many variations of Victoria councils trying to get a handle on this issue, it's obvious that we'll just be moving street problems into someone else's neighbourhood unless we grasp what really creates these hot spots.  There's a tough little core of maybe 70-100 people at any given point in time in our region who are youngish, hardy, and deep in a late-stage struggle with whatever substance has got them, generally with mental and physical illnesses taking an additional toll. Their chaotic and unpredictable lives place them far outside the many rules, online forms, waiting periods, and service restrictions they face when trying to get help. Like anyone, they need to get their needs met...

Once upon a time, I got captivated by the story of Derik Lord, whose absolute denial of having anything to do with the brutal murder of two women in Tsawwassen in 1990 went against all the evidence - and most especially, the evidence provided by his teenage companion on that terrible night, David Muir, in his own confession. That's the kind of thing that always pulls me in for a closer look. The double murder of Sharon Huenemann and her mother Doris Leatherbarrow in a quiet Tsawwassen neighbourhood would have been sensational all on its own, but the fact that Sharon's teenage son Darren had actually hired two of his friends to kill them so he could inherit a large sum of money and one of them was now claiming to have been home in his North Saanich basement the whole time - well, that just took things to a whole new level.  I wasn't the reporter who covered the boys' trials in 1992. But after several years of reading about Derik Lord's obsessed parents in the news, p...

I had a DNA surprise about eight months ago.  I'd done the test, my second, only because I wanted to have my DNA results on the same platform as all my family research, and wasn't expecting any surprises.  But there was a big surprise. My dad wasn't my biological father.  Since then, I've had many, many conversations with friends and acquaintances about that discombobulating discovery.  People have different reactions to my news, maybe because it's being filtered through their own memories of this thing we call Dad, and how they feel about the dad they got. Some have asked how I felt about discovering that my mother had not been "faithful."  Neither of those things mattered to me personally.  My dad was my Dad, no thoughts otherwise. He was a dad of his times, and yes, I had a period of being angry with him in my reflective 50s for never showing up to any of my piano recitals. But he was unwaveringly on my side through each one of my painful life cycles, f...

Virtually every day, I go out on a dog walk and start putting together the start of a blog post in my head. But I never get them written. It’s not so much writer’s block getting in my way as a feeling of pointlessness. My schtick is persuasive writing, which I had the great pleasure of doing for almost a decade in Victoria’s daily newspaper as a columnist and editorial writer back before I gave it all up for a chance to get closer to the action on social-justice issues. Now I do communications work and lots of writing for non-profits with noble visions of a better world, because I want to be doing that, too. The draw of persuasive writing as a tool for social change, however, is the presumption that there are people out there open to being persuaded. It’s a means of bringing important things to people’s attention and maybe shifting their thinking a little. It did used to feel like that was possible in years past. Yes, people who hated what I had to say would phone (and later email) fro...

"Don't talk about Trump/guns/abortion/covid/climate change," friends and family variously cautioned me as I prepared for a three-week road trip in the US last month. No worries. I rarely talk about those things even with people I know well. I love a great conversation about big issues when the time and the scene is right, but I'm also just fine with talking about what kind of bird that is over there, or what the price of gas was in the last town each of us passed through.  The 22-day trip through five states was such a welcome reminder for me that Americans are still good people, their country is freaking gorgeous, and the US is exceptional for road-tripping. I was glad for the chance to have mundane little conversations with random fellow campers and service people along my route about our lives at that moment, with no straying into anyone's beliefs on this or that polarizing issue.  The world has had to talk so much about big, heavy issues for the last three yea...

  This is me, age 66. The rock star Madonna is two years younger than me, and I am stunned to realize after her appearance at the Grammys on the weekend that I now prefer my face to hers, so altered has hers become from years of cosmetic surgery and treatments. This face of mine has been creamed, scrubbed, exfoliated, masked and otherwise fussed over for a very long time. I am as disappointed as any person who comprehends the social capital of physical attractiveness to be experiencing the unwanted changes that aging brings.  But having watched one beautiful celebrity after another succumb to the disaster of costly and invasive "anti-aging" procedures, I concluded many years ago that I will never do anything beyond the superficial to try to appear younger.  It's not out of any noble belief in being my "natural self." As you can see from my photo, my hair is coloured, and I am pretty sure it will be until the day I die. I wear eye makeup and have since age 12, an...

It's hard to talk about Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.  I fully believe that the right thing is happening to her as she is held up to the searing light that the CBC's Geoff Leo has shone on her fictions. Pretending to be someone you're not feels especially egregious when high-privilege people fake low-privilege backgrounds.  I am completely on the side of the betrayed Indigenous women who have had to experience a champion from within turning out to be nothing of the sort. All the worse that Turpel-Lafond purported to speak for them, and to have walked that same difficult road to success that Indigenous people so routinely have had to walk. But it's still hard to watch. For a settler like me, it's also hard to talk about with my settler acquaintances. I can feel the grand discomfort we feel at watching a person whose past work we still admire experiencing a profound public shaming.  We engage on the subject ever so carefully, tip-toeing around the astonishing betrayal a...

Francesco Villi was an angry man who settled his differences violently . The fights he got into with his Toronto strata council were obviously like fire to the powder keg for a man like him.  And then last Sunday he just knocked on their condo doors and shot three of them dead, along with two of their spouses. What an awful, crazy thing.  Whenever these kinds of unthinkable events happen, it seems a natural instinct to question what could have been done differently.  Why wasn't something done about Villi back when he was an abusive husband and father? Shouldn't somebody have done something about his mental health? Shouldn't somebody have stopped him from getting a gun? Could anything have been done to divert the rage he felt toward the strata council? Valid questions. Unfortunately, the shoulda/woulda/coulda questions don't mean much once the horrible deed is done and five innocent people are dead.  Short of a government initiative to attach a good Samaritan to watch...

Up until getting caught this week flying into a tiny Indigenous community in the Yukon to fake his way into an early COVID-19 vaccine, Rod Baker was primarily known for being a very, very wealthy Vancouver man presiding over a casino empire.  What was going through his head when he chartered a plane into a hamlet of fewer than 100 people and made up a pack of lies so that he and his wife Ekaterina could jump the queue for their vaccinations? We may never know. Baker appears to have kept a low profile before the Beaver Creek scandal, and is certainly keeping one now.  But poking around in the information that is available on Baker is intriguing, if only to gain a little more understanding of the kind of guy who launches quite an elaborate plot to get himself into a vaccine lineup intended for vulnerable Indigenous elders.  Baker was president and CEO of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation up until his abrupt resignation this week after the Beaver Creek story hit the he...

The tragic suicide by car of a 24-year-old on the Pat Bay Highway on Sunday takes me back to another similar suicide back in 2000 that I wrote about for the Times Colonist.  There's a whole other set of victims when people kill themselves in the manner that these two young men did, 19 years apart. Whoever is in the vehicle when a person randomly picks a moment to step into the road and be killed is almost certainly going to be haunted forever by that stranger's decision. Here's my column on Ian Davidson's suicide on the Malahat in 2000, and a wish that ICBC does not play rough with the people involved in Sunday's tragedy like it did with the Coopsie family 19 years ago.  *** Jody Paterson column in TC, January 2000 Davidson settled on death a long time ago. The only question was who would be the killer. It turned out to be the Coopsie family, picked randomly from among the many travellers making their way north on the Malahat on that sunny af...

I'm seeing a pattern in my social media spaces right now, where I post some article or opinion piece on climate change and a climate-change denier emerges to comment in that way that the deniers always comment - which is to say, via distraction. It's a technique that people used regularly to try to shut me down back when I was writing newspaper columns and they didn't like what I was saying.  Men and women tend to use the strategy differently in my experience - a man typically diverts by repeatedly asking questions that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, while women will go to an emotional argument that is hot-potato-personal, like the weeping women who called me up after I questioned soaring Caesarean-section rates in Greater Victoria demanding to know if I was suggesting that their babies should have died. It can be surprisingly effective as a tool to completely divert an issue into an irrelevant and useless direction that ultimately ends with the respectiv...

Graphic credit: Cakeburger.com I'm in a heated Facebook exchange at this very moment with one of those people who don't want to be thought of as a climate-change denier, choosing to position themselves instead as brave challengers of fear-mongering and political correctness. Oh, please. Anyway, I've just been thinking that I'm now writing mini-blogs via my Facebook messages rather than here on my actual blog. While part of me likes the transitory nature of social media, it does make me worry that much of my writing these days is like so much dust in the wind blowing across a social media platform that I'm not even sure I like anymore. So I'm going to glue that Facebook exchange right here, for posterity. Also because I want to make climate change my No. 1 topic for 2019. What other issue possibly matters more than saving the planet from human-caused emissions so that future generations have a healthy, happy place to live that isn't tearing itself apa...

Just be glad you don't live in Kolonnawa, Sri Lanka, where 800 tonnes of garbage is added to this dump every day.  I'm reposting a 2002 story of mine on recycling here, and never mind that I quietly roll my eyes at my many photographer friends who trot out their old photos as "new" and repost them on Instagram. But here's the thing: it's such an interesting subject, what we do with our garbage, and perhaps even more relevant in 2018 than it was 16 years ago when I wrote this for the Times Colonist. The subject of garbage was on my mind this week after I posted this story  from the Guardian on Britain's rather appalling habits around its own waste; the country is still exporting plastic waste to countries that appear to be dumping it willy-nilly, and it hasn't yet even got a deposit program for its beverage containers. The story prompted a lot of waste-related thoughts from my Facebook community, and curiosity about what was the latest on what ...