I will remember

 

Clockwise from top left: My father David Paterson; my aunt Joan Hepburn, solo and with her mates; my grandmother's brother Jack Feica; my uncle George Chow and wife Fan from a newspaper clipping after George's dramatic escape from a Japanese internment camp; my uncle Bill Chow; my uncle Pete Chow; and my grandmother's brother Tom Feica.

***

The benefit of being one of the people in your big extended family who hoards photos is that when struck by the thought of whether you could pull together a quick photo collage for Remembrance Day of relatives who served our country, there they all are.

This little collection certainly doesn't represent all of my relatives who have served, just the ones I have photos for. But even this handful reminds me of their bravery and commitment to a better world, putting their lives on the line for democracy and freedom. 

For my mom's brothers in particular, serving in the Second World War couldn't have been an easy choice, what with Canada still rejecting Chinese-Canadians until things got so desperate that they had to shift racist policies. My mom and her siblings were mixed race - Romanian and Chinese - but that was not enough to shield them from brutally racist times. Chinese-Canadians didn't get the vote until after the war, and even then it was a fight.

A person can get weighed down by the headlines of today, when it feels like we spend far more time warring with our fellow citizens and savaging the political leaders of the day than we do standing up for what's good and right about Canada. 

I am awed by my relatives' belief in this country as worthy enough to lay their lives down for. May we come together for the good fight again now that the enemy most capable of wreaking havoc is the contentious issues that divide us. 

Falling B grades signal community decline

Few things visualize the impact of the pandemic and the sad slide of social wellness in Greater Victoria quite so pointedly as the 2022 Vital Signs survey results.

Take a look at these charts highlighting findings from the Victoria Foundation report. 

What caught my eye was the one that compared 10 years of survey data where participants grade a dozen "key areas" that together make up a healthy community - things like belonging, arts and culture, the economy, health and wellness, standard of living, etc.

Straight As are a lot to ask for, but a B grade ought to be achievable for a Canadian city of privilege and wealth in 2022. Respondents are asked to give a B grade if they think a particular key area is good but could use some improvement. In years past, a majority of Greater Victorians responding to the survey ranked most of the key areas at B or higher.

But that was before. Vital Signs 2022 compared B grades across 10 years' worth of surveys, and what is revealed is a community that fell hard in the pandemic and has yet to find its way back out. Scores for every one of the 12 indicators fell significantly in 2020, and most are still falling. 

Sure, we're talking a global pandemic. Excuse us if we're not back to normal yet. But take a moment to mull over that decade of numbers and you'll notice how little improvement we were seeing in any of them since well before the pandemic got us. We've been "good but needs improvement" for years on key measures of community wellness, and now we're not even achieving that. 

If you've lived in Greater Victoria for any length of time, your own eyes have probably been telling you that for some time now. Mine certainly have. It's disturbing to see that housing has consistently scored poorly at least back to 2013, and yet each new year comes and goes in worsening crisis.

So yeah, could be it's the pandemic messing with our community wellness and things will be good again soon. Or not.

I pulled out five key areas to highlight in this graph below. They've seen the most dramatic decline, and yet are such necessary components of a healthy community. Belonging, getting started in the community, health and wellness, housing, safety - those are the foundations of a good life. These falling indicators are telling us that all is decidedly not well. 

What can be done? A lot. But how it will get done is the burning question. On housing, I hear the same conversations now that were going on 15 years ago. They are getting us nowhere, even while the tents and the chaos and the poisoned people and the abandoned grocery carts keep piling up along Pandora Avenue.

We are paralyzed by political cycles, shifting priorities, clashes in opinion and perspective, and a general feeling that "somebody ought to do something about that" without anyone actually thinking it's them. 

These are the crises of our times. If we are unable to figure out how to take action collectively across long-term, difficult issues that are really going to hurt to fix, our problems can only deepen. How many bad things in your own life have ever gotten better because you ignored them?

Yes, our region is a beautiful place and life is pretty good for most of us. But it's quite awful for others of us, and it's getting worse. We either get on that for real or it gets worse for everyone.

Blog site, awaken!

I'm emerging from almost five years of largely ignoring this 15-year-old blog of mine with a plan to get back to more writing. Here's a photo of me and my partner on a bit of a crazy horseback trek this past summer, just to put me back in the minds of those who once read me.

I like writing about things that catch my attention with some element of weirdness, wrongness, out of syncness, or some other quality that can be broadly summed up as "Things that make you go, 'Hmm.'" 

I am not a funny writer, so don't expect that. I did write one piece 10 years ago when we were living and working in Honduras that I continue to find quite amusing, but that's pretty much it. I am also not a muser about things in the 'hood, people I know, foods I like/hate, or all that softish lifestyle stuff. 

(An exception might be some unexpected opportunity to share eye makeup tips for aging women, because that is a long-standing interest of mine and I have exactly one friend who I can talk to about that. I wish I could write about my low-histamine diet as a wonder cure for my allergies, too, but I've already seen just how glazed people's eyes get when I try bring that subject up.)

I expect to be writing a lot about sex work and that we're way past time to decriminalize it in Canada. That issue is my No. 1 hobby horse. 

To that end, here are a couple of pieces I wrote recently for the blog of a long-time friend who runs an escort agency here in Victoria, BC. These take a look at two men with significant disabilities who hire sex workers when their fixed incomes allow for a bit of a treat. Find Frankie's story here, and Vinnie's story here. 

Other hobby horses include climate change, the very obvious decay in BC's ability to support all the citizens who need help, and various hypocrisies that emerge in the headlines from time to time and drive a right-thinking person mad. 

I do a little amateur video work on occasion because I find it an intriguing story-telling medium; to that end, I grabbed some charts from the BC Centre for Disease Control report on the impact of BC's poison drug supply and made up this little two-minute video, astounding for what it reveals about just how profoundly we are failing on this issue. 

So sometimes I'll mix some of that issue in here, because the fact that 10,000 British Columbians have died since 2015 from taking poisoned drugs is pretty freaking astounding. I'm still waiting to read The Story that answers how the hell we got to this point and why we can't seem to fix it, so maybe I'll just go see what I can find out.

This is not my first rodeo with a blog, and I go into my site's revival with low expectations of  readers, who will be scarce and likely still strangely obsessed with a long-ago post I did saying I didn't like David Suzuki much, which has inexplicably been read by more than 22,000 people. 

As for those who leave comments on my posts, they will mostly be spambots inserting links advertising Mumbai escorts and treks in Nepal. 

Occasionally a real person will post a genuine comment, and some of them will say something really trollish and horrible. But I've been out there as a writer in the public eye since 1982 and have skin of a rhino after all the terrible things said to me over the years. (OK, I admit that I'm still stung by the random dude who saw me doing a newspaper promo on TV way back when while I was at the Victoria Times Colonist and called up to tell me I looked like "a blowsy biker chick.")

There's something to be said for just having a place where your thoughts can be thrown out into the world - a place that I can rely on as well to help me rediscover some past insight I remember having rather than realize that I put it on Facebook instead and it's now lost to time.

 And so, dear blog, I bring you back to life. Let's go see where a closer look might lead us.